LABOR, ECONOMY & THE CLIMATE - page 39

The UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced Monday that greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere continued their “relentless rise” in 2014, suggesting that the fight against climate change will require far more than just the rejection of a pipeline. Atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas, reached a new high last year of 397.7 parts per million, the data showed. The organization also reported that global CO2 averages recorded in the spring of 2015 “crossed the symbolically significant” 400-ppm barrier. “We will… Keep Reading

UPDATE: Mizzou president Tim Wolfe announced his resignation, shortly after this article was published. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said she supports students and faculty at the University of Missouri who this week are staging walkouts to protest the school’s handling of numerous allegations of racial abuse. McCaskill said Monday that she is “proud of the young people on this campus have decided they’re going to make a stand.” “It’s not their perception. There is systemic racism,” she said on CNN. “This administration has not prioritized some… Keep Reading

Three Senators are adding their names to the list of lawmakers seeking to block the sale of public land in Arizona to an offshore mining company, saying that the transaction infringes upon American Indians’ rights. The legislation, introduced by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), would repeal a provision jammed into last year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that green-lighted the purchase of portions of the Tonto National Forest Lands and Oak Flat for the purpose of building a foreign block… Keep Reading

The White House released the full text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal on Thursday, and it was immediately followed by shade cast from the President’s own party. In the earliest reaction to the release of the pact, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) took to social media with the hashtag #TPPWorseThanWeThought. “#TPP e-commerce chapter undermines consumer #privacy for sensitive personal data (health, financial, and more),” she tweeted Thursday morning. Now that all 30 chapters and 2,000 pages of the deal are out in the open,… Keep Reading

Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen said Wednesday that it was “very challenging” to implement a Dodd-Frank rule that regulators were ordered to formulate to stop the encouragement of risky behavior through pay incentives. Yellen noted that multiple agencies have been “involved in trying to come up with this,” and said other actions taken by the Fed have stopped destabilizing activity. She was asked about the lack of rule-making during a House Financial Services Committee hearing by Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.) in an exchange that got… Keep Reading

Eight liberal senators asked the Obama administration to exact a higher cost on coal producers leasing mining rights on federal lands. The lawmakers appealed to Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell to tweak policies to better account for the impact of coal production on the United States. “Until the market price for coal reflects its true cost to society, taxpayers will continue to bear the costs of more extreme weather, collapsed ecosystems, stranded infrastructure, increased incidences of heart and lung disease, and other effects of… Keep Reading