Happy Nice Mall

President Biden has failed to persuade Congress to pass major climate laws in 2021, and it looks like America’s plans to reduce planet-warming pollution may face an even harder road this year.

This is because the President’s top legislative priority, the Rebuilding Better Bill, faces an uncertain future in Congress. Experts say the $555 billion in clean energy tax incentives currently included in the bill will be necessary to meet Biden’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent over 2005 levels this decade.

Democrats have pledged to advance the climate package. However, by-elections make negotiations difficult. If the Republicans, who unanimously oppose the package, gain a majority in one or both houses of Congress in November, any hope of passing the major climate bill will be nearly gone. The Supreme Court could take action this year to curb the government’s power to cut emissions from power plants, removing a potentially powerful regulatory tool.

These challenges will make the next few months critical to the security of the planet, as well as to securing Mr. Biden’s climate legacy, analysts said.

quotation: “If they failed to do that, we failed; The country failed the climate test,” said John Podesta, former senior adviser to President Barack Obama.

From the opinion section

Climate change is already here. Not yet evenly distributed, The Times editorial board writes.

Real life lesson in forest fire control

While I’ve been writing about bushfires and climate change in the West in recent years, I’ve spent some time in burnt forests. They always look the same: dead, blackened trees everywhere, earth covered with a deep layer of ash, nothing alive in sight.

But things were different when I recently visited a Nature Preserve in Oregon that burned in the massive Bootleg fire in July. There were stands that were nearly burned, of course, but in other areas there were far more green, living trees than those that were burned.

Conservation officials are starting the investigation to examine in detail why some areas do better than others. But they’re pretty sure they already know most of the answer. They have been performing thinning and controlled burns in parts of the reserve for nearly two decades as part of a program to better understand how these forest treatments can reduce the intensity of wildfires. And in what has become a real-life experiment, the treated areas largely survived, especially those that were both thinned and burned.

Mine article gives more details. Be sure to check out Chona Kasinger’s drone videos showing the processed and untreated forests side by side. The transition from black to green is amazing.

Why is it important: Global warming is worsening drought and extreme heat, which causes forests to burn more easily.

Coming soon to a single coal stronghold: Plenty of solar power

Given its historical dependence on coal mining, Appalachia may not seem like the most welcoming place for a large green energy farm. But in Martin County, in eastern Kentucky, a big solar project Approved for the top of an abandoned mine.

The developers of the project, which may be the largest coal-to-solar project in the country, have also pledged to hire former coal miners to install it. While the overwhelming majority of jobs will be temporary, developers say there will be other opportunities as more new solar installations arrive in the area.

Several ex-coal miners I met in the high unemployment and poverty-stricken county wholeheartedly supported the new solar farm. They said any investment is good, and a former miner said he loved that it would help fight climate change. You can do read the article here.

quotation: “If I had tried to do this six to 10 years ago, I would have run out of coal fields,” said Adam Edelen, local developer of the solar project.

Science has become so politicized that the descriptors typically used to describe Evangelical Christian and climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe can be paradoxically recorded.

Despite this, Hayhoe, chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy and professor of political science at Texas Tech University, has become a leading voice for climate activism and an advocate for communicating across ideological, political, and theological differences.

“Hope is a bad word for many people now,” Hayhoe told our colleague David Marchese in The New York Times Magazine. “They think hope is false hope; is a wish. But there are things to be done, and we must do them.”

Hayhoe spoke with Marchese about science and faith, the politicization of religion in America, and much more. You can do read their speech here.

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