Trump's Clean Power Plan Repeal is Shameful. But it Won't Stop Renewable Energy or Local Climate Action.

Statement by Mike Tidwell, Executive Director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, in response to the Trump Administration’s repeal of the Clean Power Plan:

The decision of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to repeal the Clean Power Plan is another shocking move by the Trump Administration to deny climate change at the expense of residents across the Maryland, Virginia and DC region. Just after our country’s most devastating hurricane season tore through national shores, the last thing we need is to incentivize dirty climate-warming coal. Today’s decision further highlights the need of states like Maryland, Virginia and DC to push harder for clean energy while moving away from dirty fossil fuels. Pruitt’s EPA can’t stop the incredible growth of renewable energy or the rising grassroots resistance to Trump’s dirty energy agenda. Local- and state-based action has never been more important.

 
CONTACT:
Denise Robbins, Communications Director, 608-620-8819, denise@chesapeakeclimate.org
Mike Tidwell, Executive Director, 240-460-5838, mtidwell@chesapeakeclimate.org

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Photo at the top from Flickr user Becker1999

Hypocrisy: McAuliffe’s Climate “Alliance” Means Nothing If He Supports Fracked-Gas Pipelines

Statement from Mike Tidwell, executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, on VA Gov. McAuliffe joining the U.S. Climate Alliance:

“Governor Terry McAuliffe announced today that he has committed the Commonwealth to an ‘alliance’ with 12 other states to move forward on the principles of the Paris Climate Agreement in the wake of President Trump’s withdrawal from the accord. However, Gov. McAuliffe’s announcement will forever ring hollow as long as he continues to support Trump’s plans to build two massive fracked-gas pipelines through Virginia and to drill for oil off of Virginia’s fragile coastline. The Governor’s commitment to fracking and offshore oil will — if realized — cause Virginia to dramatically INCREASE greenhouse gas emissions in coming years, a total violation of the principles of the Paris Agreement. It is, frankly, hypocrisy for the Governor to support both Paris and violent drilling for oil and gas in and across the state. The best thing Gov. McAuliffe could do to support Paris and oppose Trump is to drop his tragic support for offshore oil drilling and for the Mountain Valley and Atlantic Coast Pipelines for fracked gas.”


CONTACT:
Denise Robbins, Communications Director; denise@chesapeakeclimate.org; 240-396-2022
Mike Tidwell, Executive Director; mtidwell@chesapeakeclimate.org; 240-460-583

Photo at the top from Flickr user Edward Kimmel with a Creative Commons license. 

Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC Will Defy President Trump on Climate Policy

Statement from Mike Tidwell, director, Chesapeake Climate Action Network, on Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement:

THE BAD NEWS: President Trump today sealed his reputation as an economic and environmental wrecking ball with few rivals in US history. Locally, his decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement threatens to reduce jobs and shrink our regional economy. It would do so by embracing fracking and a dying coal industry over the jobs-creating markets for wind and solar power. Trump has endangered our coastal military bases in Virginia with more sea-level rise. He has endangered DC citizens with more life-threatening urban heat waves. He has endangered Maryland agriculture with more erratic weather that harms everything from fruit trees to livestock.

THE GOOD NEWS: President Trump CANNOT stop the growing local movement toward clean energy or the broader international effort to stabilize our global climate. Locally, states are moving faster toward clean energy than ever before because of Trump’s criminal rejection of climate science and sound policy. Virginia has just announced the state’s first-ever carbon cap on power plant pollution. DC is moving toward a citywide carbon fee that creatively cuts pollution while boosting individual incomes. And Maryland has just banned fracking while approving the country’s largest offshore wind farm. This robust state action cannot and will not be slowed by Trump’s federal rejection of climate truth and economic sanity. The citizens of Maryland, Virginia, and DC should rest assured that our states – along with progressive states across the country – will continue to grow our economies with clean energy while fulfilling our historic collective duty to help solve the climate crisis for our children and the rest of the world.

CONTACT:
Denise Robbins; Communications Director; denise@chesapeakeclimate.org; 240-396-2022
Mike Tidwell, Executive Director; mtidwell@chesapeakeclimate.org; 240-460-5838.

Action in Trump's America: Why I March

The following is a guest post from Elisabeth Hoffman of Howard County Climate Action.
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Turns out the chief benefit from Donald Trump’s election lies in the backlash.  
Progress on immigration, environmental justice, women’s rights, #BlackLivesMatter, and health care are at risk. On climate change, in particular, we have shifted from barely addressing the unfolding catastrophe to baldly denying it even exists.  
Yet Marylanders, after six years of trying and against all odds, just passed a ban on fracking. It passed with bipartisan support, along with the Republican governor’s backing, after a massive showing of grassroots resistance to this destructive drilling process. 
In Trump’s America, more long-shot victories like Maryland’s fracking ban are sure to come. Why? Because around the country, mass protests and local actions have become the norm. State attorneys general are challenging the Trump administration, and state lawmakers are passing local protections – such as funding for Planned Parenthood. Communities are not watching idly as hopes for a better future are threatened with every executive order, regressive piece of legislation, and crack-of-dawn tweet.
This resistance began in the disoriented days after No. 45 was elected. Then, the day after Trump took the oath, millions protested around the world in the Women’s March. In D.C. alone, the crowd was three times the size of that on Inauguration Day. After Trump issued his first immigration ban, thousands showed up at airports, cities and towns in protest. Voters are confronting lawmakers at town halls. So deluded and unhinged is this administration, even scientists have had to leave the lab and take to the streets to call for facts instead of alt-facts.  
The push for Maryland’s fracking ban coincided with Trump’s first flailing missteps. Stunned yet determined, a broad coalition of Maryland homeowners, tourism businesses, students, faith leaders, farmers and civic-minded residents demanded protection from an industry that violates regulations, preys on low-income communities, and buys its way out of every lawsuit. This grassroots movement of residents – from Friendsville to Lusby, Bel Air to Frederick, Baltimore to Columbia – signed petitions, mailed postcards, made calls and paid visits to state legislators. They implored town, city and county councils to endorse a ban. They spoke out in congregations and at public hearings. They marched through the streets of small towns and in Annapolis. 
I was among 13 people, mostly faith leaders and Western Marylanders, arrested on March 16 at the State House in Annapolis to proclaim that our movement would not compromise the safety of our homes, our water and our climate. We would settle for nothing less than a ban. The day after our arrests, the tide shifted: Gov. Larry Hogan threw his support to the fracking ban, and in a matter of weeks the ban was in place.
With that same moral outrage, we head for the People’s Climate March on Saturday, April 29.
People are rising up against a president who has delivered the Environmental Protection Agency to a climate-denier known mostly as a serial plaintiff against the agency. They are standing firm against a president who has handed over foreign policy to the former head of Exxon Mobil, a company being sued for misleading the public and lawmakers for decades about climate change. Virginians will attest to coastal flooding. Baltimore residents will say no to their children’s asthma and choking pollution. From Standing Rock to Lancaster, Pa., from the Gulf Coast to the Potomac, communities will rise to protect their water and land and themselves from oil and gas pipelines, from fracked-gas power plants, from fracked-gas export factories.  
We are in a race against rising seas, soaring temperatures, deadly droughts, fiercer storms, spreading diseases, forced migrations, dying oceans, and widening wealth gaps. Last week, levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere topped 410 parts per million, way beyond the levels that allowed human civilizations to take hold. In 1958, when record-keeping started at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, the level was 280 ppm.  
The hours that I spent in an Anne Arundel County jail cell, with its peeling paint and one small window in the heavy door, seem an apt metaphor for our nation’s limited and tired vision in the face of humanity’s greatest challenge. We must rush toward the world outside the cramped cell of our fossil-fueled world. That the current administration is running equally fast to slam the door spurs us to fight even harder. 
Our uprising must and will be loud and persistent. In Trump’s version of America, the measure of our relief will be the extent of our enduring resistance.  
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