White House launches a website to help people cope with extreme heat

President Biden’s administration is backing up its funding for heat disaster prevention with a website to keep people informed. Fast Companynotes the White House has launched a Heat.gov website to help the public and authorities understand the dangers of extreme heat and reduce the health risks. The 11-agency collaboration offers maps for current and expected temperature spikes across the US, prevention guidance and data-driven tools.

Among the resources are a CDC-made Heat & Health Tracker that shows both historic and predicted trends. You’ll see how much hotter your area has become over the decades, for instance. Other tools help you understand the effects of extreme heat on vulnerable groups, or aid communities seeking funds for city heat maps. The Biden administration has already been using the data to guide $50 billion in federal spending, White House climate advisor David Hayes said.

The Heat.gov debut comes just as the US (and many other parts of the world) grapples with particularly severe heat waves, and is part of a larger strategy to deal with the realities of climate change. Temperatures are expected to keep climbing, and this could help planners mitigate the dangers. In his most recent initiatives, President Biden sent $2.3 billion to FEMA for climate-related disaster “resilience,” expanded low-income energy help to include efficient air conditioning and proposed wind farms in the Gulf of Mexico.

The website is also consolation of sorts. The Supreme Court recently curbed the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to enforce the Clean Air Act. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin also thwarted efforts to include climate change measures in a federal spending bill. While Heat.gov won’t compensate for those losses, it potentially draws more attention to climate issues.

Climate change has Seville so hot it’s started naming heat waves like hurricanes

The city of Seville is trying something new to raise awareness of climate change and save lives. With oppressive heat waves becoming a fact of life in Europe and other parts of the world, the Spanish metropolis has begun naming them. The first one, Zoe, arrived this week, bringing with it expected daytime highs above 109 degrees Fahrenheit (or 43 degrees Celsius).

As Time points out, there’s no single scientific definition of a heat wave. Most countries use the term to describe periods of temperatures that are higher than the historical and seasonal norms for a particular area. Seville’s new system categorizes those events into three tiers, with names reserved for the most severe ones and an escalating municipal response tied to each level. The city will designate future heat waves in reverse alphabetical order, with Yago, Xenia, Wenceslao and Vega to follow. 

It’s a system akin to ones organizations like the US National Hurricane Center have used for decades to raise awareness of impending tropical storms, tornadoes and hurricanes. The idea is that people are more likely to take a threat seriously and act accordingly when it’s given a name. 

“This new method is intended to build awareness of this deadly impact of climate change and ultimately save lives,” Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, the think tank that helped develop Seville’s system, told Euronews. Naming heat waves could also help some people realize that we’re not dealing with occasional “freak” weather events anymore: they’re the byproduct of a warming planet.

Biden’s latest climate change actions expand offshore wind farms

President Biden is still unveiling measures to combat climate change, and his newest efforts are aimed at preventing environmental crises. The President has outlined a string of executive actions that, notably, include the first "Wind Energy Areas…

Supreme Court ruling guts the EPA’s ability to enforce Clean Air Act

In yet another historic reversal of long standing precedent, the US Supreme Court on Thursday ruled 6 – 3 along ideological lines to severely limit the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency in regulating carbon emissions from power plants, further hamstringing the Biden administration’s ability to combat global warming. 

The case, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 20-1530, centered both on whether the Clean Air Act gives the EPA the power to issue regulations for the power industry and whether Congress must “speak with particular clarity when it authorizes executive agencies to address major political and economic questions,” a theory the court refers to as the “major questions doctrine.”

In short, the court holds that only Congress, not the EPA, has the power to regulate emissions. “Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible solution to the crisis of the day,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme… A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body.”

“Hard on the heels of snatching away fundamental liberties, the right-wing activist court just curtailed vital climate action,” Jason Rylander, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, responded in a press statement Thursday. “It’s a bad decision and an unnecessary one, but the EPA can still limit greenhouse gases at the source under Section 111 and more broadly through other Clean Air Act provisions. In the wake of this ruling, EPA must use its remaining authority to the fullest.”

The EPA case grew out of the Trump administration’s efforts to relax carbon emission regulations from power plants, what it called the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, arguing that the Clean Air Act limited the EPA’s authority to enact measures “that can be put into operation at a building, structure, facility or installation.” A divided three-judge appeals court struck down the rule on Trump’s last full day as president, noting that it was based on a “fundamental misconstruction” of the CAA and gleaned only through a “tortured series of misreadings.” 

Had it gone into effect, the Affordable Clean Energy Rule would have replaced the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan of 2015, which would have forced the energy industry further away from coal power. The CPP never went into effect as the Supreme Court also blocked that in 2016, deciding that individual states didn’t have to adhere to the rule until the EPA fielded a litany of frivolous lawsuits from conservative states and the coal industry (the single-circle Venn diagram of which being West Virginia).   

“The E.P.A. has ample discretion in carrying out its mandate,” the appeals court stated. “But it may not shirk its responsibility by imagining new limitations that the plain language of the statute does not clearly require.”   

This decision doesn’t just impact the EPA’s ability to do its job, from limiting emissions from specific power plants to operating the existing cap-and-trade carbon offset policy, it also hints at what other regressive steps the court’s conservative majority may be planning to take. During the pandemic, the court already blocked eviction moratoriums enacted by the CDC and told OSHA that it couldn’t mandate vaccination requirements for large companies. More recently, the court declared states incapable of regulating their own gun laws but absolutely good-to-go on regulating women’s bodily autonomy, gutted our Miranda Rights, and further stripped Native American tribes of their sovereignty.  

“Today, the court strips the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the power Congress gave it to respond to the most pressing environmental challenge of our time,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the minority. Kagan was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent.