Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:

Politico | Shrinking Colorado River hands Biden his first climate brawl, 5 Feb ELECTION 2024
[...]
The current feud centers on California, a longtime Democratic stronghold, and Arizona, a new[-]found [?] swing state that has proven crucial to the party's control of the White House and Senate.
[...]
Water levels at the system's two main reservoirs are falling so fast, the Interior Department has said that water users must cut consumption by as much as a third of the river's flows or risk a collapse that could cripple their ability to deliver water out of those dams. That would also cut off hydropower production that is crucial to the stability of the Western grid. ... This week, six of the seven states along the river asked the Biden administration to spread the cuts among the Lower Basin's water users. They argued, in effect, that climate change has so fundamentally altered the waterway that the century-old legal system governing who must sacrifice in times of shortage should not be the final word in how those cuts are divvied up.
[...]
The state-level politics, alone, are a disaster for a Democratic administration.
[...]
archived Western US cities to remove decorative grass amid drought, Rio Grande decree to be made public
by Cat on Mon Feb 6th, 2023 at 01:39:22 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Politico.eu.com | From farm to flop? Political risks choke EU's green food plan, 5 Feb
[...]
The Farm to Fork document, entitled an "overview of the politically sensitive topics," was written by the Commission's Directorate General for Agriculture (DG AGRI) to give Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski a state-of-play assessment on 31 green policies that impact food and farming.

The document was considered so sensitive that in a cover note, also seen by POLITICO and written by the DG's top civil servant Wolfgang Burtscher, officials are instructed not to read or carry it in public places, to use encrypted software to save it, and to shred physical copies.
[...]

by Cat on Mon Feb 6th, 2023 at 01:49:44 AM EST
[ Parent ]
The "green food" plan was thrown to the dogs the day they decided to give the Agriculture portfolio to the Polish commissioner. That's EU politics. Love it or leave it.

It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
by eurogreen on Mon Feb 6th, 2023 at 02:11:46 PM EST
[ Parent ]
ars technica | Creation of largest US lithium mine draws closer despite protest over land use, 7 Feb
...On Monday, a US district judge denied the majority of legal challenges raised by environmentalists, ranchers, and indigenous tribes, upholding that the federal government's decision to approve the Thacker Pass mine in 2020 was largely not made in error. However, chief judge Miranda Du did agree with one of the protesters' claims, ordering the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to complete a fresh review to determine if Lithium Americas Corp has the right to deposit waste rock on 1,300 acres of public land that the mining project wants to use as a waste site.

Because this waste site may not contain valuable minerals, there's a possibility that this land may not be validly claimed as a waste site under current US mining laws, Du wrote in the order. A mining law from 1872 requires that mining projects must validate all claims to public lands before gaining federal approval, and that means Lithium Americas must now provide evidence that valuable minerals have been found on the proposed Thacker Pass waste site to resume the project....

archived SIDEBAR subsidy carbon sinks, "more abundant rare-earth elements", zero-emission mining?, #lithium will not #decarbonise in Living In Two Worlds
by Cat on Mon Feb 13th, 2023 at 05:21:50 PM EST
[ Parent ]
US judge won't block huge lithium mine on Nevada-Oregon line
A federal judge has sided again with the Biden administration and a Canadian-based mining company in a high-stakes legal battle with environmentalists and tribal leaders trying to block a huge lithium mine in Nevada near the Oregon line.

[Obama-appontee] U.S. District Judge Miranda Du in Reno denied the opponents' request Friday for an emergency injunction to prohibit work at the largest known lithium deposit in the nation until the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals can hear their latest appeal.
[...]

by Cat on Mon Feb 27th, 2023 at 03:11:34 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Display:

Occasional Series