A high-stakes fight is afoot over the size of President Biden
Right now, hanging in the balance are the livelihoods of over 15 million unemployed workers, the security of communities facing this year’s intensifying droughts and hurricanes, and the health of Black, Indigenous and Latinx families in pollution hotspots who deserve clean air and water.
Compromise is part of political reality. But you cannot negotiate with the physical reality of the climate crisis, the economic reality of mass unemployment and the structural reality of systemic racism. Big crises require big investments.
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Congress and the White House should move beyond Republican leadership’s open obstructionism and deliver an infrastructure package as large as our communities’ needs.
ONLINE EVENT ADVISORY: U S Trade Representative Katherine Tai on Greening U S Trade Policy
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Environmental advocates are hopeful that parts of the White House’s multitrillion-dollar infrastructure package’s sustainability measures can gain traction with lawmakers in Congress despite GOP claims that they fall outside the definition of infrastructure.
Advocates have long called expansion of rail infrastructure a major opportunity to reduce the environmental impact of transportation and improve its sustainability.
Sierra Club legislative director Melinda Pierce told The Hill the organization is particularly pleased with the legislation’s provisions on rail transportation.
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The $2.25 trillion plan includes $85 billion to modernize public transit, including updating and replacing rail cars, station repairs and railway expansion. Another $80 billion would address Amtrak’s repair backlog and increase the cities connected by Amtrak routes along the rail system’s northeastern corridor.
Greening U.S. Trade Policy
On March 17, Ambassador Katherine Tai was confirmed as U.S. Trade Representative by the Senate by a unanimous vote. During the confirmation process, Ambassador Tai emphasized the important role U.S. trade policy can play in protecting the environment and contributing to collective solutions to the climate crisis. U.S. trade agreements, including the recently enacted U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, have sought to advance environmental goals, but there is little question that more can be done to improve the international trade system to account for shared challenges such as climate change, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and overfishing. As world leaders prepare for a major climate summit on April 22, the need for U.S. leadership in creating a sustainable and just global economy is more urgent than ever.
Environmental News For The Week Ending 03 April 2019
This is a collection of interesting news articles about the environment and related topics published last week. This is usually a Tuesday evening regular post at
GEI (but can be posted at other times).
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Note: Because of the high volume of news regarding the coronavirus outbreak, that news has been published separately:
There hasn t been much change in the trajectory of either US Covid metric: new cases continue to increase at a modest pace, while US Covid deaths continue to fall. New cases of Covid confirmed over the week ending April 3rd were 5.9% higher that those confirmed over the week ending March 27th, and 15.9% higher than those of the week ending March 20th, while US Covid deaths during the week ending April 3rd were 12.2% lower than the prior week, and down 74.7% from the peak week in late January.
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