Climate Action Alliance of the Valley News Roundup: Jan. 24
Published Sunday, Jan. 24, 2021, 2:35 pm
Join AFP s 100,000+ followers on Facebook
Purchase a subscription to AFP | Subscribe to AFP podcasts on iTunes
News, press releases, letters to the editor: augustafreepress2@gmail.com
Front Page » Government/Politics » Climate Action Alliance of the Valley News Roundup: Jan. 24
Climate Action Alliance of the Valley produces The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News. Excerpts from a recent Roundup follow; full Roundup is here.
Politics and Policy
President Joe Biden returned the US to the Paris Climate Agreement (PCA), ordering federal agencies to review climate and environmental policies enacted during the Trump years and, if possible, quickly reverse them. (Free article is here.) He revoked the Keystone XL oil pipeline construction permit, prompting indigenous leaders to call for the Dakota Access Pipeline shut down. The new administration also reestablished an
Print
This is the Jan. 21, 2021, edition of Boiling Point, a weekly newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
The last story I wrote before Donald Trump was elected president, four years and two months ago, was about the Obama administration’s claim that it had approved 60 renewable energy projects on public lands, capable of powering up to 5 million homes. I scrutinized those numbers, finding they dramatically overestimated the outgoing president’s accomplishments.
When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton a few days after the story published, I started to wonder if I had wasted my time.
The Atlantic
Demonstrations across the country after the Capitol riot were small, but more violence may soon come.
Stephanie Keith / Getty
This weekend, every mayor of an American state capital was trying to answer the same question:
How do I keep my city safe? Steven Reed in Montgomery, Alabama, and Frank Scott, in Little Rock, Arkansas, increased police patrols. In Richmond, Mayor Levar Stoney declared a state of emergency. Governors in Virginia, Michigan, and Wisconsin placed the National Guard on standby. The FBI had warned that armed protests would take place in all 50 state capitals in the lead-up to President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration tomorrow, and everyone I spoke with worried that if they weren’t prepared, their city could be home to the next riot.
While house sitting for a friend in Cleveland Park, I was thrilled to find I seemingly didn’t need a residential permit to park due to Mayor Bowser’s Phase Two Reopening Plan. Bowser’s plan suspended rush hour parking restrictions as well as fines for emergency no parking violations, expired District license plates and inspection stickers, expired residential parking permits, and expired meters. (A call with an operator at the Department of Public Works clarified that safety violations and blocking private property still can be ticketed; individuals can still receive tickets for blocking bus stops, fire hydrants, and handicap parking).
This chart shows the states where hospitalizations hit at least 300 people per million in at least two nonconsecutive weeks, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project at
The Atlantic. This level of hospitalization is a good measure of the pandemic’s local severity, both because it captures serious cases that aren’t limited to deaths and because hospitalization data are reliable over short time frames (unlike data for cases and deaths, which can be delayed by weekends and holidays). This cutoff, 300 per million, is somewhat arbitrary, but it captures the states that have generally suffered the most during the pandemic.