Obama’s EPA Spent $1.5 Million So Employees Could Hurt Air Quality Driving To Work

Pollution of environment by combustible gas of a car (Shutterstock/ssuaphotos)

Former President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) paid $1.5 million for employee parking spaces, many of which went to the highly-paid upper management or were unused, a government watchdog reported Wednesday.

The EPA spent $840,000 subsidizing parking spaces and another $690,000 on empty spaces, the agency’s inspector general (IG) found. Meanwhile, federal law has sought to discourage employees from driving to work without carpooling over the past 30 years and agencies have promoted using public transportation and telework, which improves air quality.

One executive order “touts federal air quality goals” and “the EPA was using valuable resources to subsidize employee parking when the funds could be put to better use in mission-critical programs,” the report said.

IG spokeswoman Tia Elbaum added in a podcast: “Obviously the EPA has an expert interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That comes into play here.”

The General Services Administration “cited greenhouse gas emissions as a justification for eliminating its own free parking program for employees back in 2013,” Cathy Allen, an auditor with the IG, said in the podcast. “GSA wanted to encourage the use of public transportation and mobile work arrangements in order to reduce traffic congestion and its own carbon footprint.”

Only the Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, Ga., EPA offices subsidize parking and only for some employees, according to Allen. Washington employees were given $129.55 monthly subsidies if they had a disability, if they worked unusual hours or if they carpooled with at least three people.

More than half of the subsidized parking spaces were given to upper managers, “who are already among the EPA’s highest paid employees,” Allen said.

Additionally, one-fifth of the carpools counted children to meet the three-person requirement, according to the IG. In some cases, an EPA employee may have driven his two children to receive the subsidy.

The EPA, under current Administrator Scott Pruitt, agreed to stop subsidizing parking for headquarters employees and instead offered parking spaces for the full $293.45 monthly price. Atlanta already discontinued providing parking subsidies for carpools, but kept one space for a disabled employee.

Ref.: http://dailycaller.com/2017/11/08/obamas-epa-spent-1-5-million-so-employees-could-hurt-air-quality-driving-to-work/

………………….

Blaming city dwellers for buying things outside the city limits, because, climate

From the POTSDAM INSTITUTE FOR CLIMATE IMPACT RESEARCH (PIK) and the “buying from Amazon.com causes climate change” department comes this pointless paper that basically says people in cities should get their stuff at the corner store, and walk, [rather ] than relying on goods that require transport. Meanwhile the authors are oblivious to their own unnecessary carbon footprint created by COP23 to announce this paper, where they could have used teleconferencing instead.

Cities can cut greenhouse gas emissions far beyond their urban borders

Greenhouse gas emissions caused by urban households’ purchases of goods and services from beyond city limits are much bigger than previously thought. These upstream emissions may occur anywhere in the world and are roughly equal in size to the total emissions originating from a city’s own territory, a new study shows. This is not bad news but in fact offers local policy-makers more leverage to tackle climate change, the authors argue in view of the UN climate summit COP23 that just started. They calculated the first internationally comparable greenhouse gas footprints for four cities from developed and developing countries: Berlin, New York, Mexico City, and Delhi. Contrary to common beliefs, not consumer goods like computers or sneakers that people buy are most relevant, but housing and transport – sectors that cities can substantially govern.

“It turns out that the same activities that cause most local emissions of urban households – housing and transport – are also responsible for the majority of upstream emissions elsewhere along the supply chain,” says lead-author Peter-Paul Pichler from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “People often think that mayors cannot do much about climate change since their power is restricted to city limits, but their actions can have far-reaching impacts. The planned emission reductions presented so far by national governments at the UN summit are clearly insufficient to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, the target agreed by 190 countries, therefore additional efforts are needed.”

Housing and transport cause most city emissions, locally but also upstream

Cement and steel used for buildings take a huge amount of energy – typically from fossil fuels – to be produced, for instance. If a city instead chooses to foster low carbon construction materials this can drastically reduce its indirect CO2 emissions. Even things that cities are already doing can affect far-away emissions. Raising insulation standards for buildings for example certainly slashes local emissions by reducing heating fuel demand. Yet it can also turn down the need for electric cooling in summer which reduces power generation and hence greenhouse gas emissions in some power plant beyond city borders.

In transport, expanding public facilities can minimize local emissions from car traffic. This reduces the number of cars that need to be built somewhere else, using loads of energy. So this is a win-win. But, again, more can be done. Cities can decide from which sources they procure the power needed to run, for instance, their subway trains or electric buses. By choosing energy from solar or wind, city governments could in fact close down far-away coal-fired power plants.

Comparison of New York, Berlin, Mexico City, Delhi – applicable to cities across the world

Interestingly, while the greenhouse gas footprint in the four cities that the scientists scrutinized range from 1.9 (Delhi) to 10.6 tons (New York) of CO2 equivalent per person and year, the proportions of local to upstream household emissions as well as the relative climate relevance of housing and transport turn out to be roughly the same. The international reach of upstream emissions is vast but varies. In terms of emissions, Berlin’s global hinterland is largest, with more than half of its upstream emissions occurring outside of Germany, mostly in Russia, China and across the European Union. But also around 20% of Mexico City’s considerably smaller upstream emissions occur outside Mexico, mainly in the US and China.

“Measuring indirect emissions of urban populations so far has often been considered to be unfeasible, at least in a way that makes it possible to compare different cities,” says Helga Weisz, senior author of the study and a research domain co-chair at PIK. “We show that it is possible, but you have to invest the effort to actually do it.”

Her team analyzed huge amounts of existing data on economic input and output of different regions and successfully combined these with data on emission intensity of production in a lot of different sectors. The methodology that the scientists put together is in principle applicable in any place, enabling more effective collaboration between cities to reduce greenhouse gas emission footprints.

“The power of cities, open interconnected systems of great density, to tackle climate change even in times of uncertainty on the national and international level has been underestimated by both many local decision-makers and most of the international community,” says Weisz. “Cities must be encouraged and enabled to focus on their full emission spectrum – local and upstream – as they continue to develop their climate mitigation plans.”

###

Article: Peter-Paul Pichler, Timm Zwickel, Abel Chavez, Tino Kretschmer, Jessica Seddon, Helga Weisz (2017): Reducing Urban Greenhouse Gas Footprints. Scientific Reports [DOI 10.1038/s41598-017-15303-x]

Weblink to article: http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-15303-x

Ref.: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/11/07/blaming-city-dwellers-for-buying-things-outside-the-city-limits-because-climate/

Support

Newscats – on Patreon or Payoneer ID: 55968469

Cherry May Timbol – Independent Reporter
Contact Cherry at: cherrymtimbol@newscats.org or timbolcherrymay@gmail.com
Support Cherry May directly at: https://www.patreon.com/cherrymtimbol

Ad

Why do CO2 lag behind temperature?

71% of the earth is covered by ocean, water is a 1000 times denser than air and the mass of the oceans are 360 times that of the atmosphere, small temperature changes in the oceans doesn’t only modulate air temperature, but it also affect the CO2 level according to Henry’s Law.

The reason it is called “Law” is because it has been “proven”!

“.. scientific laws describe phenomena that the scientific community has found to be provably true ..”

That means, the graph proves CO2 do not control temperature, that again proves (Man Made) Global Warming, now called “Climate Change” due to lack of … Warming is – again – debunked!