Politics and American Democracy – Page 271

2022 Ford F-150 Lightning revealed with 300-mile range, priced from $53K

autoblog

2022 Ford F-150 Lightning revealed with 300-mile range, priced from $53K

Joe Lorio May 19, 2021

The much-anticipated battery-powered 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning pickup has finally made its debut, a moment that feels like a sea change in the U.S. auto industry. The F-Series pickup has for years been America’s bestselling passenger vehicle, and Ford’s decision to offer it as an electric vehicle sends the message with a bullhorn: The EV’s moment is upon us.

Now that the truck has been unveiled — officially, that is; we saw it demurely hanging out in the background during President Joe Biden’s speech yesterday pushing his plan for EVs in America — we can get a sense of how Ford’s big pickup will work as an EV.

The truck will come in a single body configuration: SuperCrew four-door with a 5.5-foot bed (the F-150‘s most popular configuration). The three Lightning trim levels are also from the heart of the lineup: XLT, Lariat, and Platinum — although there’s also “a commercial-oriented entry model.”

Ford will offer standard-range and extended-range battery packs, with the extended-range pack optional on the two lower trims and included on the Platinum. The truck comes standard with a dual-motor powertrain and four-wheel drive. The standard-range version makes 426 horsepower, while the extended-range model boasts 563 hp; both have 775 pound-feet of torque. For the larger-battery version, Ford estimates a 0–60 time in the mid-4-second range.

Ford is estimating 230 miles of range for the base battery pack and 300 miles for the extended-range version (although it appears the Platinum trim will come in slightly lower). There are multiple options for recharging, as outlined below:

The 32-amp mobile charger is standard, and the 48-amp unit is optional. The 80-amp unit is included in trucks with the extended-range battery pack, which also comes standard with a dual onboard charger for faster recharging. Some sample recharge times (standard-range battery /extended-range battery) are:

15%-80% using a 150-kW Level 3 fast charger: 44/41 minutes
15%-100% using the 80-amp Ford Charge Station Pro: 10/8 hours
15%-100% using the standard 32-amp/240V mobile charger: 14/19 hours

Ford is partnering with Sunrun for in-home charger installations, while on the road, Ford is part of the EV America network.

Ford heavily emphasizes the electric pickup’s utility as a power source, which could be a key aspect of its appeal for those who might not be swayed by the green argument. The base truck will offer 2.4 kW of output available via eight 120-volt AC outlets sprinkled throughout the cab, bed, and front trunk. Upper trims (and the XLT, optionally) can crank out 9.6 kilowatts of power and adds two more 120-volt outlets plus a 240-volt outlet in the bed. Ford boasts that a connected truck with the 9.6-kilowatt system, working through the 80-amp Ford Charge Station Pro and home-integration system, can supply an average house for three days during a power outage. And it would do so automatically, with the system switching back to charging once grid power is restored.

In more traditional measures of pickup utility, the F-150 Lightning with standard-range battery has a maximum tow rating of 7,000 pounds; with the extended-range battery, it’s 10,000 pounds. Payload capacity is 2,000 pounds with the standard-range battery and 1,800 with the heavier extended-range unit. (Note that Ford characterizes the range, towing and payload figures as “targeted.”) The standard front trunk under the power-operated hood measures 14.1 cubic feet and can be hosed out.

Ford says the Lightning rides on a new frame, and the chassis ditches the standard F-150’s live rear axle for an independent suspension. Exterior dimensions are not much different than the current truck, though, with the wheelbase 0.1-inch longer, overall length greater by 1 inch, width up by 0.1 inch, and cab height taller by 1.7 inches. Interior space is unchanged. Ground clearance at 8.9 inches is half-an-inch less than the standard 4×4.

The Lightning will offer a 12-inch digital instrument cluster, and upper trims get a 15.5-inch touchscreen running Ford’s latest SYNC 4A operating system. Ford’s BlueCruise hands-free highway-driving feature will be offered, part of a Co-Pilot360 option package. A new Pro Trailer Hitch Assist automatically steers, brakes, and accelerates when hitching up a trailer. A phone-as-key feature also makes its first F-150 appearance here. The F-150’s recently introduced onboard-scale feature, which can measure the weight of items in the truck bed, gets an EV twist here, as the truck can adjust the predicted range based on the weight of the current payload. Ford also promises the ability to provide over-the-air software updates (as on the current Mustang Mach-E).

Prices start at $52,974 for the XLT — you can find the trim breakdown here — with the commercial model (details and specs of which are still to come) at $39,974, and that’s before federal and any state tax credits. Ford says the Lightning effectively will be at cost parity with comparably equipped gasoline models. Here’s how you can reserve one.

Production is set to start at Ford’s Rouge River complex in Spring 2022. But Ford is happy to take some of your money now: a $100 deposit reserves your very own F-150 Lightning.

GOP resistance may be slowing Florida vaccine campaign. ‘We have to take this seriously’

Miami Herald

GOP resistance may be slowing Florida vaccine campaign. ‘We have to take this seriously’

Lautaro Grinspan, Ben Conarck May 18, 2021

During a late April meeting of the Republican Party of Miami-Dade County, it dawned on party member Gustavo Garagorry, 54, that his stance in favor of COVID-19 vaccines was far from unanimous.

“At that meeting there were lots of people against the vaccine,” he said. “They were saying, ‘First, I’m not going to wear a mask. And I’m not getting vaccinated, either. It doesn’t do any good.’ ”

Garagorry described his reaction that day as one of dismay rather than surprise. As president of the Venezuelan American Republican Club of Miami-Dade, the Doral resident is active in local Republican circles. For weeks, he’d noticed firsthand how misinformation about the vaccine was taking hold among many fellow conservatives.

“There’s a certain group of people that has bought into all the conspiracy theories. They say they’re injecting nanochips in people, that people are getting sterilized [because of the vaccine],” neither of which is true.

“I think they’re completely wrong, and I believe we have to take this seriously,” Garagorry said.

“There’s pretty significant resistance to getting vaccinated, especially on the Republican side. It’s crazy. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and I’m still seeing it.”

Garagorry’s observations on the ground in Miami track with the findings of poll after poll conducted at the national level this spring, which show Republican voters are significantly less likely to seek the shot than Democrats and Independents, a trend that could complicate the campaign to reach herd immunity in the United States.

By her own account, among those very unlikely to get vaccinated is Miami-based Muñeca Fuentes, who heads the Nicaraguan American Republican Alliance. Although she knows of people who’ve traveled to South Florida from Nicaragua to get the shot, Fuentes says most of her local friends are, like her, choosing against inoculation.

“Progressives talk about ‘my body, my choice’ when it comes to abortion. …My body, my choice,” she said. “I’m not getting vaccinated.”

REPUBLICAN VACCINE HESITANCY, IN DEPTH

Even as vaccines became increasingly available over the course of the year, Republican resistance remained high. Last month, polls released by Monmouth University and Quinnipiac University both found that nearly half of Republican respondents would avoid getting vaccinated if possible.

Per the Kaiser Family Foundation, vaccine enthusiasm rose among Republicans from March to April, but that group continues to be the most resistant, with 1 in 5 (20%) saying they will “definitely not” get vaccinated. By contrast, just 13% of independents and 4% of Democrats expressed similar levels of opposition to the vaccine.

In partnership with the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that partisan vaccine hesitancy extends to the healthcare industry, with 40% of front-line Republican healthcare workers indicating they are not confident in the safety and efficacy of coronavirus vaccines (compared to 28% of Democrats).

Although there are a variety of reasons why people decline to be vaccinated, polls show a correlation between respondents’ political affiliations and their concern level about the pandemic in general. That could impact decision-making when it comes to vaccines. According to the Quinnipiac poll, for instance, 32% of Republicans say they are worried about another surge in COVID-19 cases, compared with 85% of Democrats. Notable gaps in concern level about the coronavirus have been fairly steady since the outbreak of the pandemic.

Republican state Sen. Manny Díaz represents parts of largely conservative Hialeah and chairs the Senate’s health policy committee. Based on conversations with constituents, he says the more significant dividing line for vaccine enthusiasm isn’t partisanship, but age, with older folks showing lesser hesitancy regardless of their politics.

“The interesting part is in my area, those older residents tend to be Republican, very much more so,” he said. And “there was no hesitation.” But Díaz says he’s noticed doubts among younger generations, with politics and “culture” playing a potential role.

“I think when anything’s new there’s some skepticism, and there tends to be more skepticism from those who have a little bit more mistrust in the government, and that tends to be more Republicans than anybody else. I think that’s part of it. I don’t think it’s tinfoil-hat-type stuff,” he said. “The folks that I have been speaking to, it’s a mixed bag. Some want to wait and see if there are any effects. Some are just not interested in the vaccine at all.”

Carl Latkin, a health behaviors researcher and vice chair at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said that younger people are also less likely to get routine medical care, and more likely to get their information from social media.

Latkin faulted poor government messaging on how the vaccines were developed so quickly without cutting corners on safety. Republican leaders did little to bolster it.

Former President Donald Trump offered a “half-hearted at best” endorsement for the vaccines, Latkin said. Prior to that, COVID skepticism from Trump and local conservative leaders almost certainly fueled hesitancy, he added.

“When we had a president that was spreading incorrect and bogus information, that just leads to this whole atmosphere of, ‘Who do you believe? What should I believe?’ ” Latkin said.

Also tempering enthusiasm in his district, Díaz noted, are reports of (rare) adverse reactions, as well as lack of clarity about whether booster shots will be needed and how long immunity from vaccines lasts.

As far as Fuentes is concerned, her principal source of unease is the speed with which the vaccines were developed, and a perception that their long-term effects could be dangerous. (The CDC says long-term health problems are “extremely unlikely.”)

“I’m not going to get the vaccine because I feel it would be very premature. They made it too fast. … We still don’t know the consequences. Five or 10 years could go by before we know the real consequences of the vaccine,” she said. “I’m nobody’s guinea pig.”

Fuentes added that she feels comfortable continuing to take the same set of safety precautions against the coronavirus that she is taking now, including mask-wearing “when needed,” abiding by social distancing guidelines and keeping a bottle of hand sanitizer in her purse.

“I also keep chlorine dioxide at home. Each time I go out and I’m exposed to the public, I come home and I drink 20 drops,” she said. “But honestly I don’t believe in the vaccine.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says chlorine dioxide, an ingredient in disinfectant, can’t treat or prevent COVID-19, and could “pose significant risks to patient health.”

VACCINE MISINFORMATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Likely fueling some conservatives’ vaccine hesitancy in South Florida is the spread of misinformation in Republican-oriented spaces and communities in social media, where conspiracy theories about vaccines abound both in English and Spanish

Screenshot from a pro-Trump group on the messaging platform Telegram.

Last month, using an ominous tone increasingly common during discussions of the vaccine, a group member falsely described the vaccination campaigns as an impending “mass die-off event,” with “millions of people already condemned to a death that will be certain, immutable, and agonizing.” She seemed to be citing a report from the ultraconservative website LifeSiteNews, which was debunked by the website Snopes.com, and which was removed from Facebook earlier this month for violating the platform’s policies regarding COVID-19.

On Facebook, anti-vaccine memes, posts and videos regularly crop up in the feeds of large groups and popular pages like Trump Team 2020 Florida, South Florida For Trump and Miami TRUMP Volunteers.

Juan Fiol, the leader of Miami TRUMP Volunteers, said he has no plans to get vaccinated. Public health experts say people who have previously contracted the virus do not enjoy the same immunity as those protected by the vaccine. But also playing a factor is his belief that a rise in new variants means the vaccine won’t be effective for long, and that getting vaccinated is no carte blanche to go back to normal.

“They tell you, ‘Did you get vaccinated? Well, it doesn’t matter. Wear a mask. You still can’t go out.’ It’s a joke. What more do they want?”

It actually does matter, as the vaccines are protective against existing variants. It is unknown if people will need booster shots in the future.

In a reversal of previous guidelines, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on May 13 that fully vaccinated individuals can go without masks in most cases, even when they are indoors or in large groups.

René Garcia, county commissioner and chairman of the Republican Party of Miami-Dade, says that policy change could be key in swaying current vaccine holdouts like Fiol.

“I believe the best way to move forward is to say, ‘If you’re vaccinated, if you’ve done your part, then you don’t have to keep wearing a mask,’ ” he said. “I tell everyone: ‘I got vaccinated to stop wearing masks.’ I say it jokingly, but I believe it moves people.”

He added: “It needs to be a personal decision. I respect people who decided to get vaccinated and I also respect those who don’t want to get vaccinated, and might be waiting a little bit longer to see the long-term results.”

TAMING VACCINE HESITANCY AMONG REPUBLICANS

To date, about 48% of U.S. adults are fully vaccinated, a far cry from the 80% threshold many scientists say the country needs to reach to achieve herd immunity. To close the gap, it will be important to address concerns among all people, according to a Pew report.

But while many health departments at the local level have taken steps to reach minority communities and other groups disproportionately affected by the pandemic, there have been few if any Republican-specific initiatives to tackle hesitancy.

“I think we need to continue to provide facts,” said Díaz. And “whatever new information we can get for the questions they keep asking.”

Garagorry, leader of the Venezuelan American Republican Club, said it would be helpful for Donald Trump to more forcefully encourage his supporters to seek the shot. The former president got vaccinated shortly before leaving office, but behind closed doors. He was also absent from pro-vaccination spots by the Covid Collaborative project and the Ad Council that featured all other living former presidents.

“If President Trump were the face of a campaign telling people to go out and get the shot because we have a dangerous pandemic in front of us, I believe it would be very effective,” he said.

Latkin, the health behaviors researcher from Johns Hopkins, had his own idea for convincing Trump voters: Vaccine recipients would be entered into a lottery for a golf game with the former president.

But the position of Trump supporters like Fuentes show that may not be enough.

“President Trump may have gotten the vaccine, his entire family may have gotten the vaccine, but Muñeca Fuentes isn’t getting it,” she said.

For now, Garagorry says he will focus on “controlling what [he] can control,” and continue taking precautions for his own health, including mask-wearing.

“This isn’t a game. OK, this may not have killed everyone, but it has killed many people. I’ve lost over 10 friends. Earlier today, a friend of mine died,” he said. “He wasn’t vaccinated.”

Letters to the Editor: Apply the Clean Air Act to animal agriculture to fight climate change

Los Angeles Times

Letters to the Editor: Apply the Clean Air Act to animal agriculture to fight climate change

May 19, 2021

Holstein cows at Riverview Dairy in Pixley, California, on March 12, 2020. The liquid part of their manure is directed into a nearby anaerobic digester, which captures methane that would otherwise be emitted into the atmosphere. — Holstein cows at a dairy farm in Pixley, Calif., in March 2020. (Los Angeles Times)

To the editor: A massive industry with political influence works to preserve profits, knowing the harmful environmental and health impact of their products. Government leadership is channeled by lobbying pressure and campaign contributions, allowing business as usual to continue. (“Why meat and dairy corporations are the Achilles’ heel of Biden’s climate plan,” Opinion, May 16)

Sound familiar? Remember asbestos? Tobacco? Acid rain?

In the case of global warming, there are multiple industry players. In her op-ed article, Viveca Morris speaks of one: animal agriculture. In this case, the tantalizing promise of capturing carbon emissions from animals raised for food works as a smoke screen that obscures the primary problem.

If President Biden is to deliver on his climate pledges, his administration has to address all forms of carbon emissions, including those resulting from the meat and dairy conglomerates. His administration should apply the Clear Air Act to all greenhouse gas sources.

Gary Stewart, Laguna Beach

To the editor: I was disappointed that Morris did not mention the Good Food Institute, which is already working with huge global meat and dairy producers, including Tyson Foods, one of the companies she identified as “climate super-polluters.”

The aim is to produce lab meat and plant-based meats that will be as good or better in both taste and price. It will cut through the binary meat-eater versus vegan argument by simply changing the protein content of everyday products.

While I understand the urgency to address greener protein solutions, identifying Tyson and others as enemies misses the point. If these companies find a viable alternative that enables them to fulfill carbon policy and still make a profit, why wouldn’t they?

Jane Easton, Bristol, United Kingdom

To the editor: Morris’ piece shows exactly why a carbon fee is the best option to lower greenhouse gas pollution.

A carbon fee as proposed in the recently reintroduced HR 2307, the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, does not discriminate. If your industry produces carbon pollution, your industry pays a fee, and the money is distributed to Americans to offset any increased cost of carbon-pollution products.

Therein lies the incentive for industries to develop comparable non-polluting products.

Vicki Di Paolo, Huntington Beach

We loved our pensions. Then our employers took them away. How was that allowed to happen?

The Los Angeles Times

Column: We loved our pensions. Then our employers took them away. How was that allowed to happen?

Nicholas Goldberg May 19, 2021

Traditional pensions gave people a measure of financial security when they retired. <span class="copyright">(John Moore / Getty Images)</span>

Traditional pensions gave people a measure of financial security when they retired. (John Moore / Getty Images)

In a recent column in the New York Times, Paul Krugman argued that if President Biden succeeds in giving Americans affordable childcare, universal pre-K and paid family leave, it will be almost impossible to take them back.

People would never allow such desirable, transformational benefits to be taken away once they had become part of the fabric of our society, he wrote. Officials wouldn’t dare try because the backlash would be too great.

I hope he’s right. But all I could think, as I read along, was, “If that’s the case, where’s my pension?”

I’m talking about the kind of old-fashioned pension that many of our mothers, fathers and grandparents received — a “defined-benefit” pension, which provided employees with a guaranteed lifelong income as they grew old in retirement.

Pensions were part of the “fabric of our society” until they were taken away.

Most government workers still get them. But private sector workers? Fuggedaboutit. Although as many as half of private sector workers were covered by defined-benefit plans in the mid-1980s, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says that by 2019, only 16% of private sector workers had access to them.

I’m not breaking any news here. This is a trend in the wrong direction that’s been underway for more than 30 years. But the story bears repeating because it is both a tragedy and a potential lesson.

The tragedy is obvious. The retirement plans that dominate now — 401(k)s mostly — were designed merely to supplement pensions, but became the go-to alternative instead. They offer no guaranteed income in retirement, but instead put the responsibility for saving and investing entirely on the individual, leaving people more worried about their financial futures — and often rightly so. An estimated third to a half of all Americans, including many who have 401(k)s, have insufficient funds to retire at their current standard of living.

As for the lesson, it’s that, yes, actually they can take stuff away from us, and there won’t necessarily be a backlash. Of course in the case of pensions it was our employers who did away with them, not elected politicians. That makes a big difference. Corporate America simply decided the pension system wasn’t penciling out, and since we don’t get to vote about what our employers do (except with our feet), they got away with it. Government, for its part, did not step forward to rescue us.

I remember how my grandmother took her pension the moment she became eligible for it at age 62 and lived off it in a comfortable-but-not-luxurious manner for 20 years after that.

I was covered by a traditional pension plan too at the very start of my career, but it was quickly frozen. My children? Are you kidding?

Let’s back up for a moment. The first private pension in the country was introduced by American Express for some employees in 1875. From there, the pension system grew and grew, especially after the Second World War.

By the 1970s and 1980s, employees who were covered by pensions could expect a pretty standard package: Benefits became available at age 60 or 65, as long as you’d worked for the company for five or 10 years. The longer you worked, and the more you earned, the higher the pension amount.

Workers knew in advance how much they’d be getting. No doubt they earned a bit less during their careers in return for a lifetime retirement income, but the trade-off was worth it.

I don’t want to suggest that everything was perfect. If people changed jobs, their pensions were not portable. Pension funds could be underfunded; sometimes workers were left in the lurch. The biggest problem was that companies were not required to offer pensions, so only employees of certain companies could participate.

But for decades, the system expanded. In the 1940’s, 4 million people were covered; in 1987, 40 million people were covered.

Why did the system collapse? A million reasons, including the rise of 401(k)s, which allowed employers to shift risks from themselves onto employees. (To be fair, some employees liked the idea of managing their own investments.) The declining strength of unions didn’t help. The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, designed to safeguard set-aside funds, unexpectedly persuaded some companies to stop offering pensions at all.

“We’ve moved backwards,” says Josh Gotbaum, a Brookings scholar whose field is retirement economics. “If you had a pension — and let’s be clear, not everybody did — you knew that when you retired, you’d get a paycheck for your whole life and you’d know how much it would be. Now, you don’t know how much will be there when you retire or how long it will last.”

Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who teaches public policy at UC Berkeley, says that corporate leaders used to feel a duty not just to shareholders but to all stakeholders, including employees. Since the 1980s, the emphasis has shifted to showing “greater and greater profits,” leading CEOs to slash wages and benefits. The move away from defined benefit pensions was part of that.

Pensions as we knew them are unlikely to return. But the fight for retirement security continues. California allows many people whose employers don’t offer 401(k)s to save for retirement through its CalSavers program. There are proposals to dramatically expand Social Security. Some argue for automatic enrollment in 401(k)s, rather than requiring people to “opt-in,” to increase participation.

I’m sure that once benefits are offered by government, it becomes a lot harder to repeal them, as Krugman suggests. But just to be sure, remember the pension lesson: If there are benefits we trust and rely on, we’d be wise to keep a close and protective watch over them so no one takes them away.

Who’s Making — and Funding — the World’s Plastic Trash?

DeSmog

Who’s Making — and Funding — the World’s Plastic Trash?

ExxonMobil, Dow, Barclays, and more top lists in a new report ranking the companies behind the single-use plastic crisis.

By Sharon Kelly May 18, 2021

ExxonMobil is the world’s single largest producer of single-use plastics, according to a new report published today by the Australia-based Minderoo Foundation, one of Asia’s biggest philanthropies.

The Dow Chemical Company ranks second, the report finds, with the Chinese state-owned company Sinopec coming in third. Indorama Ventures — a Thai company that entered the plastics market in 1995 — and Saudi Aramco, owned by the Saudi Arabian government, round out the top five.

Funding for single-use plastic production comes from major banks and from institutional asset managers. The UK-based Barclays and HSBC, and Bank of America are the top three lenders to single-use plastic projects, the new report finds. All three of the most heavily invested asset managers named by the report — Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and Capital Group — are U.S.-based.

“This is the first-time the financial and material flows of single-use plastic production have been mapped globally and traced back to their source,” said Toby Gardner, a Stockholm Environment Institute senior research fellow, who contributed to the report, titled The Plastic Waste Makers Index.

The report is also the first to rank companies by their contributions to the single-use plastic crisis, listing the corporations and other financiers it says are most responsible for plastic pollution — with major implications for climate change.

Graph Credit: The Plastic Waste Makers Index: Revealing the Source of the Single-Use Plastics Crisis, Mindaroo Foundation.

“The trajectories of the climate crisis and the plastic waste crisis are strikingly similar and increasingly intertwined,” Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president, wrote in the report’s foreword. “Tracing the root causes of the plastic waste crisis empowers us to help solve it.”

The world of plastic production is concentrated in fewer hands than the world of plastic packaging, the report’s authors found. The top twenty brands in the plastic packaging world — think Coca Cola or Pepsi, for example — handle about 10 percent of global plastic waste, report author Dominic Charles told DeSmog. In contrast, the top 20 producers of plastic polymers — the building blocks of plastics — handle over half of the waste generated.

“Which I think was really quite staggering,” Charles, director of Finance & Transparency at Minderoo Foundation’s Sea The Future program, told DeSmog. “It means that just a handful of companies really do have the fate of the world’s single-use plastic waste in their hands.”

Meanwhile, the report suggests that public policy responses to the threats posed by plastic pollution have focused further along the supply chain, where things become more fragmented.

“Government policies, where they exist, tend to focus on the vast number of companies that sell finished plastic products,” the report finds. “Relatively little attention has been paid to the smaller number of businesses at the base of the supply chain that make ‘polymers’ — the building blocks of all plastics — almost exclusively from fossil fuels.”

While there are about 300 polymer producers currently operating worldwide, just three companies — ExxonMobil, Dow, and Sinopec — combined are responsible for roughly one out of every six pounds of single-use plastic waste, the report concludes.

In 2019, for example, more than 130 million metric tons of plastic was used just once and then discarded. ExxonMobil, the report concludes, was responsible for creating 5.9 million tons of that single-use plastic waste in 2019, with Dow right behind it, generating 5.6 million tons that year.

Neither ExxonMobil nor Dow responded immediately to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, 20 of the world’s largest banks lent nearly $30 billion that was used for the production of new single-use plastics, the report finds. That funding represents about 60 percent of the commercial finance that funds single-use plastics. An additional $10 billion in investment in new single-use plastics has come from 20 institutional asset managers, like Vanguard and BlackRock.

“Through our Investment Stewardship program, Vanguard regularly engages with companies on issues that are financially material to their long-term value and sustainability, including climate issues and environmental matters,” Vanguard spokesperson Alyssa Thornton said in an email to DeSmog. “We expect company boards to oversee climate and environmental risks and provide investors with clear disclosures of their risk oversight and decision-making processes. Importantly, we do not dictate company strategy, or operational or financial decisions; rather, we hold company board’s responsible for being aware of such risks and opportunities as part of a foundation for making the most sustainable long-term decisions.”

Barclays did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Virtually all single-use plastic comes from fossil-fuel based feed-stocks, the report adds.

“One of the key findings of the report is that single-use plastics today is 98 percent fossil fuel-based,” Charles told DeSmog. “And that in itself is really, we say, the source of the plastic waste crisis. And that’s because if you’re only making new plastics from new fossil fuels, you’re taking away the commercial incentive, you’re undermining the commercial incentive to collect this plastic and to turn it into recycled plastic products.”

The report grades plastic manufacturers based on their preparation to transition away from fossil fuels and towards recycling — and found that most of the largest producers not only have made very little progress in that direction to date, they haven’t even set targets that would push them towards a “circular” model involving recycling.

“Over 50 of these companies received an ‘E’ grade — the lowest possible — when assessed for circularity, indicating a complete lack of policies, commitments, or targets,” the report found. “A further 26 companies, including ExxonMobil and Taiwan’s Formosa Plastics Corporation, received a ‘D-’ due to their lack of clear targets/timelines.”

In fact, fossil fuel producers appear to be counting on that failure to move towards recycling. “Two of the biggest markets for fossil fuel companies — electricity generation and transportation — are undergoing rapid decarbonization, and it is no coincidence that fossil fuel companies are now scrambling to massively expand their third market — petrochemicals — three-quarters of which is the production of plastic,” Gore wrote. “They see it as a potential life raft to help them stay afloat, and they’re telling investors that there’s lots of money to be made in ramping up the amount of plastic in the world.”

In a statement on the report, the American Chemistry Council pointed to the use of plastics in products like solar panels and wind turbines to highlight the role that plastics — though not single-use plastics — play in renewable energy. “The world needs plastic to live more sustainably, and America’s plastic makers are leading the development of solutions to end plastic waste,” the Council said. “We’re innovating and investing in efforts to create a more circular economy, where used plastics are systematically remanufactured to make new plastics and other products. In the last three years, the private sector has announced $5.5 billion in U.S. investments to dramatically modernize plastics recycling.”

Meanwhile, the plastics industry remains on track to continue rapidly increasing the amount of new plastic it produces each year, meaning more fossil fuel use — even while other industries are seeking to trim or eliminate their reliance on fossil fuels.

“Our numbers suggest a 30 percent increase in capacity compared to 2019,” Charles told DeSmog. “Now that is not out of line with the historical rate of growth, it’s about 5 percent per year. But if we are to see 5 percent growth in fossil fuel-based, that is a real threat towards the growth of circular plastics and recycling. So I think that’s a real cause for concern.”

Marine debris collected on Midway Atoll, Photo Credit: Holly Richards, US Fish and Wildlife Service (CC Public Domain 1.0).

As of 2019, plastic producers had created 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic — and 91 percent of it was never recycled, according to one peer-reviewed study. Even from the start, a NPR and PBS Frontline investigation found, industry insiders were skeptical that recycled plastic could compete against new production, with one industry insider warning in a speech — in 1974 — that “There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis.”

So where does the money for all this come from?

The financing of single-use plastics is complex, involving not only lending and investment by Wall Street fund managers and big banks, but also privately held companies. The report’s list of the top 10 equity owners of polymer producers includes not only state actors and massive asset managers like BlackRock but also private individuals like James Arthur Ratcliffe — co-founder and majority owner of INEOS, a UK-based petrochemical company.

“Transitioning away from the take-make-waste model of single-use plastics will take more than corporate leadership and ‘enlightened’ capital markets: it will require immense political will,” the report says. “This is underscored by the high degree of state ownership in these polymer producers — an estimated 30 percent of the sector, by value, is state-owned, with Saudi Arabia, China, and the United Arab Emirates the top three.”

The report calls not only for more disclosures from companies and financiers about their ties to plastic production, it also calls for global action to respond to the plastic pollution crisis — starting with a focus on the companies most responsible.

“A Montreal Protocol or Paris Agreement-style treaty may be the only way to bring an end to plastic pollution worldwide,” the report says. “The treaty must address the problem at its source, with targets for the phasing out of fossil-fuel-based polymers and encouraging the development of a circular plastics economy.”

That’s in part because the plastic waste crisis and the climate crisis share one other thing in common — their impacts are global in scope.

“The plastification of our oceans and the warming of our planet are amongst the greatest threats humanity and nature have ever confronted,” Dr. Andrew Forrest, chairman and founder of the Minderoo Foundation, said in a statement accompanying the report. “And we must act now.”

Sharon Kelly is an attorney and freelance writer based in Philadelphia. She has reported for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, National Wildlife, Earth Island Journal, and a variety of other publications. Prior to beginning freelance writing, she worked as a law clerk for the ACLU of Delaware.

Twenty firms produce 55% of world’s plastic waste, report reveals

The Guardian – Plastics

Twenty firms produce 55% of world’s plastic waste, report reveals

Plastic Waste Makers index identifies those driving climate crisis with virgin polymer production

Sandra Laville May 17, 2021

A woman collects recyclable plastics washed up on the beach in Bali, Indonesia. Photograph: Agung Parameswara/Getty Images.

Twenty companies are responsible for producing more than half of all the single-use plastic waste in the world, fuelling the climate crisis and creating an environmental catastrophe, new research reveals.

Among the global businesses responsible for 55% of the world’s plastic packaging waste are both state-owned and multinational corporations, including oil and gas giants and chemical companies, according to a comprehensive new analysis.

Quick Guide

The top 20 producers of single use plastic

The Plastic Waste Makers index reveals for the first time the companies who produce the polymers that become throwaway plastic items, from face masks to plastic bags and bottles, which at the end of their short life pollute the oceans or are burned or thrown into landfill.

It also reveals Australia leads a list of countries for generating the most single-use plastic waste on a per capita basis, ahead of the United States, South Korea and Britain.

ExxonMobil is the greatest single-use plastic waste polluter in the world, contributing 5.9m tons to the global waste mountain, concludes the analysis by the Minderoo Foundation of Australia with partners including Wood Mackenzie, the London School of Economics and Stockholm Environment Institute. The largest chemicals company in the world, Dow, which is based in the US, created 5.5m tons of plastic waste, while China’s oil and gas enterprise, Sinopec, created 5.3m tons.

Eleven of the companies are based in Asia, four in Europe, three in North America, one in Latin America, and one in the Middle East. Their plastic production is funded by leading banks, chief among which are Barclays, HSBC, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase.

The enormous plastic waste footprint of the top 20 global companies amounts to more than half of the 130m metric tons of single-use plastic thrown away in 2019, the analysis says.

The analysis provides an unprecedented glimpse into the small number of petrochemicals companies, and their financial backers, which generate almost all single-use plastic waste across the world.

Al Gore, the environmentalist and former US vice-president, said the groundbreaking analysis exposed how fossil fuel companies were rushing to switch to plastic production as two of their main markets – transport and electricity generation – were being decarbonized.

“Since most plastic is made from oil and gas – especially fracked gas – the production and consumption of plastic are becoming a significant driver of the climate crisis,” said Gore.

“Moreover, the plastic waste that results – particularly from single-use plastics – is piling up in landfills, along roadsides, and in rivers that carry vast amounts into the ocean.”

The plastic waste crisis grows every year. In the next five years, global capacity to produce virgin polymers for single-use plastics could grow by more than 30%.

By 2050 plastic is expected to account for 5%-10% of greenhouse gas emissions.

“An environmental catastrophe beckons: much of the resulting single-use plastic waste will end up as pollution in developing countries with poor waste management systems,” the report’s authors said. “The projected rate of growth in the supply of these virgin polymers … will likely keep new, circular models of production and reuse ‘out of the money’ without regulatory stimulus.”

The report said the plastics industry across the world had been allowed to operate with minimal regulation and limited transparency for decades. “These companies are the source of the single-use plastic crisis: their production of new ‘virgin’ polymers from oil, gas and coal feed-stocks perpetuates the take-make-waste dynamic of the plastics economy.”

The report said this undermines the shift to a circular economy, including the production of recycled polymers from plastic waste, reusing plastic and using substitute materials. Just 2% of single-use plastic was made from recycled polymers in 2019.

“Plastic pollution is one of the greatest and most critical threats facing our planet,” said Dr. Andrew Forrest AO, chairman of the Minderoo Foundation. “The current outlook is set to get worse and we simply cannot allow these producers of fossil fuel-derived plastics to continue as they have done without check. With our oceans choking and plastic impacting our health, we need to see firm intervention from producers, governments and the world of finance to break the cycle of inaction.”

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Who’s Making — and Funding — the World’s Plastic Trash?

DeSmog

Who’s Making — and Funding — the World’s Plastic Trash?

ExxonMobil, Dow, Barclays, and more top lists in a new report ranking the companies behind the single-use plastic crisis.

By Sharon Kelly May 18, 2021

Plastic debris on sandy waterfront, Jan. 15, 2014. Credit: Hillary Daniels.

Meanwhile, the report suggests that public policy responses to the threats posed by plastic pollution have focused further along the supply chain, where things become more fragmented.

Neither ExxonMobil nor Dow responded immediately to a request for comment.

Barclays did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Virtually all single-use plastic comes from fossil-fuel based feedstocks, the report adds.

Marine debris collected on Midway Atoll, Photo Credit: Holly Richards, US Fish and Wildlife Service.

So where does the money for all this come from?

That’s in part because the plastic waste crisis and the climate crisis share one other thing in common — their impacts are global in scope.

Arizona’s bonkers election audit sharply divides state Republicans

MSNBC – The MaddowBlog

Arizona’s bonkers election audit sharply divides state Republicans

Republicans at the national level are confronting notable divisions, but GOP divisions in Arizona are considerably worse.

By Steve Benen May 17, 2021

Image: Arizona Recounts 2020 Presidential Election Ballots

Former Secretary of State Ken Bennett, center, works to move ballots from the 2020 general election at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, on May 1, 2021.Courtney Pedroza / Getty Images file

The 2022 election cycle is bound to be an interesting one in the state of Arizona. The Grand Canyon State will host a wide-open gubernatorial race with no clear frontrunner; Sen. Mark Kelly (D) will seek a full term just two years after his special-election victory; and there will likely be other competitive contests and up and down the ballot.

Republicans have reason to feel anxious about their prospects. While Arizona has traditionally been a reliably red state, Democrats have won both of the state’s U.S. Senate seats, and Joe Biden narrowly carried Arizona last fall — becoming only the second Democratic presidential hopeful to win the state in the last seven decades.

All of which suggests Republicans in the state have every incentive to get their act together, broaden their appeal, and settle on a mainstream message and policy agenda. What GOP officials in Arizona are actually doing, however, are tearing each other apart. Politico noted over the weekend:

Republicans in the state are still divided over the results of the last election, months after President Joe Biden was sworn into office. An ongoing and extraordinary audit of the 2020 vote count in the state’s largest county — rooted in conspiracy theories and the false belief that Biden’s election was not legitimate — is deepening the schism six months after the election, with no clear end in sight.

One of the first signs of trouble came last week, when state Sen. Paul Boyer (R), who used to support his party’s truly bonkers election audit, conceded that the process was making Arizona Republicans “look like idiots.” The GOP state legislator added that he didn’t realize how “ridiculous” the review would be.

As the week progressed, Jack Sellers, the Republican chairman of the board of supervisors in Maricopa County — Arizona’s most populous county, whose votes are the target of the GOP audit — described the ongoing process as reaching a “dangerous” stage. Sellers went on to condemn his own party’s “lies and half-truths” about the election results, and said Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based firm Republicans hired to conduct this fiasco, “are in way over their heads.”

Around the same time, Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates, another lifelong Republican, was asked about his party’s ongoing election audit. “My fear is that all of this is further tearing at the foundations of our democracy and tearing at people’s faith in our electoral systems,” he told the New York Times. “If there were fraud going on, if there was systematic corruption going on, I would be the first to speak out against it. But we have looked at this again and again and again with numerous audits here.”

Evidently, a certain former president doesn’t care. In fact, Donald Trump released a bizarre written statement on Saturday, claiming, “The entire Database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been DELETED! This is illegal…. Additionally, seals were broken on the boxes that hold the votes, ballots are missing, and worse.” The former president went on to complain that his allied outlets, including Fox News and Newsmax, aren’t alerting the public to these made-up developments.

In reality, Trump’s claims were deranged, and Stephen Richer, the local Republican official who oversees Maricopa County’s elections department, described the former president’s nonsense as “unhinged.” Richer added, “We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country.”

As last week helped demonstrate, Republicans at the national level are confronting notable divisions of their own. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), for example, was ousted from her GOP leadership post for daring to tell her party inconvenient truths about democracy, and the party was similarly split on whether to see Jan. 6 insurrectionist rioters as harmless and patriotic tourists.

But the divisions among Arizona Republicans are even more stark — and they’re likely to get worse. As the Associated Press reported, “Republican Senate President Karen Fann has demanded the Republican-dominated Maricopa County Board of Supervisors come to the Senate to answer questions raised by the private auditors she has hired.”

The Recycling Industry in America Is Broken

EcoWatch

The Recycling Industry in America Is Broken

By Tiffany Duong April 20, 2021 – Repost

Recycling and general waste plastic wheelie bins awaiting collection for disposal in Newport, Rhode Island. Tim Graham / Getty Images

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. According to The National Museum of American History, this popular slogan, with its iconic three arrows forming a triangle, embodied a national call to action to save the environment in the 1970s. In that same decade, the first Earth Day happened, the EPA was formed and Congress passed the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, encouraging recycling and conservation of resources, Enviro Inc. reported.

According to Forbes, the Three R’s sustainability catch-phrase, and the recycling cause it bolstered, remain synonymous with the U.S. environmental movement itself. There’s only one problem: despite being touted as one of the most important personal actions that individuals can take to help the planet, “recycling” – as currently carried out in the U.S. – doesn’t work and doesn’t help.

Turns out, there is a vast divide between the misleading, popular notion of recycling as a “solution” to the American overconsumption problem and the darker reality of recycling as a failing business model.

The Myth: Recycling Began as a Plastics’ Industry Marketing Tactic

When it was first introduced, recycling likely had altruistic motivations, Forbes reported. However, the system that emerged was never equipped to handle high volumes. Unfortunately, as consumption increased, so too did promotion of recycling as a solution. The system “[gave] manufacturers of disposable items a way to essentially market overconsumption as environmentalism,” Forbes reported. Then and now, “American consumers assuage any guilt they might feel about consuming mass quantities of unnecessary, disposable goods by dutifully tossing those items into their recycling bins and hauling them out to the curb each week.”

Little has changed since that Forbes article, titled “Can Recycling Be Bad For The Environment?,” was published almost a decade ago; increases in recycling have been eclipsed by much higher consumption rates. In fact, consumerism was at an all-time high in January 2020 before the pandemic hit, Trading Economics reported.

But, if the system doesn’t work, why does it continue? Turns out, consumers were misled – by the oil and gas industry. News reports from September 2020 revealed how the plastic industry-funded ads in the 1980s that heralded recycling as a panacea to our growing waste problem. These makers of virgin plastics were the biggest proponents and financial sponsors of plastic recycling programs because they created the illusion of a sustainable, closed-cycle while actually promoting the continued use of raw materials for new single-use plastics.

To the masses, these programs justified overconsumption and eased concerns over trash that could be thrown into recycling bins, Forbes reported. Generations of well-meaning Americans since the 1970’s and ’80’s – believing these communications masterminds – have dutifully used-then-recycled plastics and other materials. They trusted that their discards would be reborn as new goods instead of ending up in oceans and landfills.

The plastics industry went even further, lobbying 40 states to put the recycling triangle symbol on all plastic – even if it wasn’t recyclable, Houston Public Media reported. This bolstered the public image of plastic as a renewable resource, but the cost was clarity about what actually can be recycled. As recent as 2020, a Greenpeace report found that many U.S. products labeled as recyclable could not actually be processed by most domestic material recovery facilities.

The Reality: Most Recyclables Aren’t Being Recycled

The U.S. relies on single-stream recycling systems, in which recyclables of all sorts are placed into the same bin to be sorted and cleaned at recycling facilities. Well-meaning consumers are often over-inclusive, hoping to divert trash from landfills. Unfortunately, the trash often ends up there anyways – with the additional cost of someone at a recycling plant sorting through it.

The single-stream system is easier on consumers, but results in a mixed stream of materials that is easy to contaminate, hard to sort and more expensive to process. There are a variety of items – including dirty pizza boxes, old clothing, hangers, plastic bags, aerosols, batteries and electronics – that, if added to a residential recycling bin, will contaminate the entire batch of recyclables, a Miami recycling center representative told EcoWatch. At that point, it can be too costly and too dangerous for employees to hand-pick out erroneous items. Because these items cannot be processed in the same way as recyclable materials, their inclusion often means the whole batch will fetch a lower price from buyers or must be thrown away.

“Most people have the attitude that if they just put it in the blue bin, it will get taken away and somebody will figure out what to do with it, but putting something in the blue bin and actually recycling it are two very different things,” said David Biderman, CEO and executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America.

Misunderstandings, misinformation and mislabeling aside, the harsh reality was and remains that most plastic can’t and won’t be recycled, reported NPR. For example, the EPA reported that plastic generation in 2018 was 35.7 million tons, accounting for 12.2 percent of municipal solid waste (MSW) that year. Of this total, only three million tons were recycled (an 8.7 percent recycling rate). The vast majority – 27 million tons – ended up in landfills, and the rest was combusted. The environmental agency also estimated that less than 10 percent of plastic thrown in bins in the last 40 years has actually been recycled.

The situation is slightly better for other recyclables, though they make up a smaller percentage of MSW. For example, glass products totaled 12.3 million tons in 2018, or 4.2 percent of the annual MSW generation. Almost 25 percent of glass was recycled, 61.6 percent ended up in landfills and 13.4 percent was combusted.

Post-consumer paper and cardboard for 2018 totaled 67.4 million tons, or 23.1 percent of total MSW generation for the year. The material also had the highest recycling rate of any other material in MSW – 68.2 percent. 25.6 percent of paper ended up in landfills and 6.23 percent was combusted.

According to this EPA data, recyclable plastics, glass and paper accounted for 18.5 percent, 5.2 percent and 11.8 percent of MSW landfilled in 2018, respectively. Those three materials alone comprised 35.5 percent of the total landfilled trash in the U.S. for the year; had they been properly collected, processed and purchased, they theoretically could have been diverted and recycled.

The Reason: Recycling Is Bad Business Around the World

Unfortunately, the EPA data also shows that 2018 was not an anomaly but rather another data point showing how the single-stream system in the U.S. has never been economically viable or feasible on a large scale. To further understand why recycling in America is failing, we need to think of recycled goods as commodities – because that’s what they are.

According to the recycling center representative, municipalities and counties pay for residential and commercial recyclables to be trucked to local and regional recycling plants for processing. Clean batches are sorted and/or compressed into bales of similar plastics, paper, aluminum or glass. The centers sell the cleaned recyclables on the open market to buyers who will process them into recycled materials like plastic pellets or post-consumer paper; these can be turned into new products.

This entire process – the processing and creation of saleable recycled goods – costs money. As with any good, profitability requires selling for a higher price than it costs to make. Contaminated batches are harder to process into new products and therefore fetch a lower price on the market, if they can be sold at all. Currently, U.S. recyclables are no longer profitable, and no one wants to buy them.

China used to buy the majority of the world’s plastics and paper for recycling, The New York Times reported. The U.S. has been the #1 generator of plastic waste in the world for years and used to ship more than half of its total plastic production to China, a November 2020 study found. The research also noted that up to one-fourth of American plastics sent abroad were contaminated or of poor quality, which would make it extremely difficult to recycle anyways.

Starting Jan. 1, 2018, China banned imports of most scrap materials because shipments were too contaminated, The Times reported; the country no longer wanted to be the “world’s garbage dump.”

As a result, the U.S. and other Western nations who had relied on China to offload their recyclables saw a “mounting crisis” of paper and plastic waste building up in ports and recycling facilities, The Times reported.

The Western nations began sending recyclable waste to other Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, India and Malaysia. These countries often lacked the infrastructure to handle recyclables, so a lot of the waste ended up incinerated or landfilled

In response, in 2019, the United Nations passed an amendment to the Basel Convention hoping to protect the poor and developing countries who’d taken up China’s vacated role in the global recycling trade. The amendment ambitiously aimed to clean up the global trade in plastic waste, making it more transparent and better regulated and allowing developing countries to reject contaminated shipments. The U.S. did not ratify the amendment, and new evidence suggests it continues to send illegal and/or contaminated shipments to developing countries.

Domestically, the closing of the Chinese market to U.S. recyclables bankrupted many domestic recycling programs because there was too much supply and no real demand. The smaller Asian countries could not accept nearly as much as China had. Prices of recyclables dropped, and bales of scrap materials were sent to landfills and incinerators when they couldn’t be sold, another Times article reported.

This left waste-management companies around the country with no market for recyclabes, The Atlantic reported. They’ve been forced to go back to cities and municipalities with two choices: pay a lot more to get rid of their recycling or throw it away. The news report noted that most are choosing the latter.

“The economics are challenging,” agreed Nilda Mesa, director of the Urban Sustainability and Equity Planning Program at the Earth Institute’s Center for Sustainable Urban Development. “If there is not a market for the recycled material, then the numbers do not work for these facilities as well as cities, as they need to sell the materials to recoup their costs of collection and transportation, and even then it’s typically only a portion of the costs,” Columbia’s State of the Planet reported.

Tiffany Duong is an avid ocean advocate. She holds degrees from UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and is an Al Gore Climate Reality Leader and student member of The Explorer’s Club.

She spent years as a renewable energy lawyer in L.A. before moving to the Amazon to conduct conservation fieldwork (and revamp her life). She eventually landed in the Florida Keys as a scientific scuba diver and field reporter and writes about the oceans, climate, and the environment from her slice of paradise.

Report: China emissions exceed all developed nations combined

BBC News

Report: China emissions exceed all developed nations combined

May 7, 2021

A security guard stands outside the cooling towers for a coal-powered power plant — China emitted 27% of the world’s greenhouse gases in 2019

China emits more greenhouse gas than the entire developed world combined, a new report has claimed.

The research by Rhodium Group says China emitted 27% of the world’s greenhouse gases in 2019.

The US was the second-largest emitter at 11% while India was third with 6.6% of emissions, the think tank said.

Scientists warn that without an agreement between the US and China it will be hard to avert dangerous climate change.

China’s emissions more than tripled over the previous three decades, the report from the US-based Rhodium Group added.

The Asian giant has the world’s largest population, so its per person emissions are still far behind the US, but the research said those emissions have increased too, tripling over the course of two decades.

China has vowed to reach net-zero emissions by 2060 with a peak no later than 2030.

President Xi Jinping reiterated his pledge at a climate summit organised by US President Joe Biden last month.

“This major strategic decision is made based on our sense of responsibility to build a community with a shared future for mankind and our own need to secure sustainable development,” President Xi said at the time.

However, China is heavily reliant on coal power.

The country is currently running 1,058 coal plants – more than half the world’s capacity.

Under the Paris accord, agreed in 2015, 197 nations pledged to limit global warming to below 2C. However, the world is far from meeting that commitment.

Central to the Paris Agreement are Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). These are targets intended to cut emissions.

NDCs represent the commitments by each country – under the Paris pact – to reduce their own national emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

According to the Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific analysis that tracks government climate action, China’s NDC rating is “highly insufficient” and “are not at all consistent with holding warming to below 2C”.

President Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry travelled to China last month to meet counterparts and discuss how to work together to combat climate change, despite diplomatic tensions between the two countries on a range of other issues.

In a joint statement, the two sides committed to working together and with other countries on tackling climate change including specific action on emissions.

Leaders will come together for COP26 – a crucial climate change summit – in November in Glasgow, UK to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement.