What's It Worth Day

PRESENTED BY DRAMATIC EYEBROWS

Happy Plastics In Our Brains Day! No, wait, that’s not right…

At 4:15 pm this afternoon, the President Joe Biden for President Campaign is holding an Earth Day Grassroots Call featuring Gina McCarthy, former Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii).

The $7 billion in Solar for All grants for rooftop and residential solar are going live. Solar for All is a program championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that was rolled into the Inflation Reduction Act. Sanders and EPA Administrator Michael Regan announced the program’s launch last June. Now the 60 grantees have been selected, non-profit organizations and state and tribal agencies across the nation.

The Biden administration has launched a new American Climate Corps website, which has hundreds of open job listings (some, like the energy innovator fellowship, with dozens of openings). The jobs range from summer-time trail crews to year-long environmental-justice coordination in urban centers. At current funding levels, the corps may involve up to 20,000 part-time jobs for a few years. By comparison, the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which inspired the Climate Corps, employed three million young men over ten years. “It’s an amazing, historic step,” the Green New Deal Network’s Saul Levin tells Hill Heat about the Climate Corps’ launch. “Let’s think as big as FDR did with the original CCC.” Try harder!

Meanwhile, House Republicans are celebrating Earth Day with a field hearing in Utah, calling for more drilling, mining, and logging of public lands, and the Senate is about to pass $95 billion in military funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Tomorrow, House Republicans hold a field hearing in Texas, calling for more offshore drilling. Frankly, I’m disappointed they didn’t also schedule it for Earth Day. Try harder, bros!

Ohio is on a record pace for tornadoes. Four people have died and 110,000 evacuated from their homes in Guangdong, as days of heavy rain caused massive flooding in China's most populous province. Malians struggle to cope after April began with a deadly heat wave. The entirety of the Indian subcontinent is suffering from a massive series of heatwaves. In Kolkata, TV anchor Lopamudra Sinha fainted on air while reading heatwave updates.

Insurance companies have figured out their solution to fossil-fueled climate disasters like these: abandoning ship. Thomas Clouse reports that insurers are dropping the victims of last year’s mega-wildfires in Washington state, and Lois Parshley describes how Louisiana’s new insurance regulator, former insurance company executive Tim Temple, is encouraging “a slate of new legislation that would weaken residents’ ability to sue insurers over unpaid claims and make it easier for insurers to drop homeowners.”

Justin Mikulka writes how great it is that the Biden administration is considering scrapping its plans to encourage natural gas plants to burn hydrogen.

For the first time in more than 60 years, the Bureau of Land Management will force oil and gas companies to set aside more money to guarantee they plug old wells, preventing them from leaking oil, brine and toxic or climate-warming gases. “But the federal agency’s work falls short of protecting taxpayers from the oil industry’s cleanup costs,” Mark Olalde and Nick Bowlin report.

Amazon’s plastic packaging waste in the United States rose nearly 10 percent to 208 million pounds in 2022, the last year data is available, Oceana researchers found.

Duncan Meisel and Jamie Henn’s Clean Creatives has announced the exciting milestone of 1000 creative, public relations, advertising and marketing agencies pledging to refuse work for the fossil-fuel industry. Duncan writes, “The best way to support this announcement is by sharing on Instagram and LinkedIn, which is where we get most of our growth and engagement in the industry.”

Field Hearing:

• 2 PM: House Natural Resources
  Federal Lands
  Field Hearing on Management of Utah's Public Lands

Climate Action Today:

• 4:15 PM: Biden for President Campaign
  Earth Day Grassroots Call

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@[email protected], @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.

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