Iceberg the size of Delaware on track to slam into South Atlantic island
CHLOE ATKINS
DECEMBER 10, 2020, 8:04 PM
The world’s largest iceberg is closing in on a South Atlantic island and has the potential to cause major damage to wildlife if it becomes grounded near the island.
The “A68a” iceberg — which NASA estimates to be roughly the size of Delaware — broke off from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica in 2017. Currently, it is making its way through the Southern Antarctic Front towards the island of South Georgia, according to the Government of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.
The islands, roughly the size of Rhode Island, are a U.K. overseas territory about 800 miles southeast of the Falkland Islands. While there are scientific research bases located on the islands, it is an inhospitable environment and there are no permanent residents.
Satellite Imagery of Iceberg A-68A near South Georgia Island (Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2020 / Gallo Images via Getty Images)
Government officials have been tracking the 4,200-square-km iceberg closely with the help of the British Royal Air Force, who conducted a reconnaissance mission over the iceberg capturing photos and videos of the large mass.
“The sheer size of the A68a iceberg means it is impossible to capture its entirety in one single shot,” British officials said in a statement.
As of now, the iceberg is just 150 kilometers from the territory, according to BBC News. If it does collide with South Georgia Island scientists warn that it could threaten the wildlife ecosystem and animals’ access to food. A large number of whales, seals, and penguins feed off the coast of South Georgia.
“Ecosystems can and will bounce back of course, but there’s a danger here that if this iceberg gets stuck, it could be there for 10 years. An iceberg has massive implications for where land-based predators might be able to forage,” said Professor Geraint Tarling, an ecologist at the British Antarctic Survey.
Biden picks former EPA chief Gina McCarthy as White House climate czar
McCarthy heads the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has sued the Trump administration more than 100 times
By Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis
Dec. 16, 2020 at 2:13 a.m. GMT+1
President-elect Joe Biden has tapped Gina McCarthy, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama and now leads a major advocacy group, to coordinate the new administration’s domestic climate agenda from a senior perch at the White House.
Three individuals familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the decision had not been publicly announced, confirmed that the final decision had been made to tap McCarthy for the post.
McCarthy is president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has sued the Trump administration more than 100 times, successfully overturning its attempts to delay energy efficiency rules and protections for threatened species.
McCarthy, 66, who spearheaded the Obama administration’s efforts to curb greenhouse gases from power plants and vehicles, will be responsible for implementing Biden’s plan to weave climate policy throughout the federal government as the first-ever “national climate adviser.”
Gina McCarthy during an interview at her office in the William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building in Washington, D.C., in 2015 when she was serving as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. (Joshua Yospyn for The Washington Post)
She will head the White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy. Ali Zaidi, 33, New York’s deputy secretary for energy and environment, will be her deputy.
She will be the domestic counterpart to John F. Kerry, the former secretary of state and senator whom Biden has named special presidential envoy to manage the U.S. role in global climate action.
McCarthy will oversee a broad interagency effort to leverage the federal government’s powers to cut greenhouse gas emissions. While traditional players such as EPA and the Interior and Energy departments will regulate climate pollutants directly, departments including Treasury, Transportation and Agriculture will also use policy to try to tackle climate change.
McCarthy is popular among Democrats. But she has tangled repeatedly with Republicans, and her signature effort at EPA, the Clean Power Plan, was blocked in court and later reversed by Trump officials.
According to an individual familiar with the transition’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in advance of a formal announcement, Biden selected her because she is “one of the nation’s most trusted and accomplished voices on environmental issues” who not only spearheaded the Obama administration’s most significant climate policies but worked “to safeguard vulnerable communities from chemical hazards.
“So she will be ready on Day One,” this person said.
McCarthy joined the faculty of Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health after leaving the government in January 2017, and became president of NRDC just over a year ago.
Both environmental justice organizations and more establishment green groups have endorsed McCarthy and Zaidi, a Pakistani immigrant who served as a senior Obama budget official and warned about the risks taxpayers faced from climate change.
The Sunrise Movement, which along with other progressive groups has lobbied Biden to create an “Office of Climate Mobilization” within the White House, had supported both McCarthy and Zaidi for the top position.
“We are very encouraged by the potential of Gina McCarthy to lead a new Office of Climate Mobilization,” said Garrett Blad, a Sunrise spokesman. “McCarthy was among our initial picks for the role because she understands the urgency of the latest science and the need to use every tool available in the executive branch to stop the climate crisis.
The real test, however, of Biden’s commitment to his bold climate plan is if this role has the teeth necessary to be effective.”
Progressive groups sent a memo to Biden calling on him to ensure that the leader of the office would “report directly and have direct access to the President.”
Just last month, McCarthy told The Post that she had not been approached about joining the administration — a sign of how fluid the selection process has been.
“No I have not been, but I’m certainly anxious to do a couple of things from my perch at NRDC, because NRDC I think is seen as a smart and responsible player in these areas,” she said in a Nov. 6 interview. “So we’re going do our job — one is to bring our information to the table in the hopes that the administration will give it due consideration about the path forward on climate change.”
But McCarthy campaigned for the president-elect and has emphasized the need for the federal government to ramp up its effort to curb dangerous warming. A Massachusetts native who served as a state regulator in the Northeast before joining the EPA in 2009, she played a key role in brokering the Paris climate accord in 2015 as well as a separate global agreement a year later to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, which are also warming the planet.
“Joe Biden ran on climate. How great is this?” McCarthy told reporters shortly after the election. “It’ll be time for the White House to finally get back to leading the charge against the central environmental crisis of our time.”
In her Nov. 6 interview, McCarthy emphasized the need to spend future stimulus money on clean energy and infrastructure in disadvantaged neighborhoods. “Every bit of federal dollars and how it’s expended can be managed by the executive branch in a way that will promote clean energy and drive new energy investments,” she added.
Asked about the matter this week, NRDC spokesman Ed Chen said in an email: “We’ve refrained from commenting on nominations and appointments until after they are officially announced, and will continue to do so. Also, Gina’s been clear: she’s dedicated to advancing NRDC’s work.”
Zaidi declined to comment.
Zaidi, who is serving as New York Democratic Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s top climate adviser, helped advise Biden’s campaign on the climate and environmental justice provisions in its “Build Back Better” agenda. Since joining Cuomo’s staff in April, he has focused his work cutting the state’s carbon output and reducing pollution that disproportionately affects communities of color.
Joe Biden’s poised to embed climate change across the federal government
“Gina McCarthy and Ali Zaidi are true climate stars, and we’re thrilled about their new positions leading the charge at the White House on climate solutions, clean energy jobs, and environmental justice starting on day one of the Biden-Harris administration,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president for government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters.
One of the first volunteers in Barack Obama’s New Hampshire office during the 2008 presidential campaign, Zaidi rose through the ranks during the Democrat’s eight years in office. In 2014, he became the associate director for natural resources, energy, and science at the White House Office of Management and Budget, where he oversaw a portfolio of nearly $100 billion in federal programs. He also served as OMB’s lead official in implementing the administration’s climate action plan.
He helped oversee a report OMB released in November 2016 outlining the risks climate change posed to the federal government, including the cost of crop insurance, wildfire suppression, flood and hurricane-related relief and health care. It projected that annual climate-related costs across four of those five programs would total $34 billion to $112 billion by late century, while simultaneously curbing the nation’s economic output by up to 4 percent.
“In short, climate change is already costing taxpayers,” Zaidi wrote in a blog post. “But the costs we are incurring today will be dwarfed by the costs that lie ahead. Without action, taxpayers will face hundreds of billions of dollars in additional costs every year by late in this century as the effects of climate change accelerate.”
Michael Lewis’s 2018 book “The Fifth Risk” highlights the experience of Zaidi, who emigrated to the U.S. at age 5 and was a young Republican, as an example of how the most wonkish jobs in Washington can have an enormous impact on ordinary people. In the book, Zaidi described how the Agriculture Department he helped oversee was “weird” because it encompassed so many things.
“It was weird because so many Americans had no idea how much their lives depended on it,” Lewis wrote. “And it was weird because of the sheer sums of money sloshing around the place, dispensed by government employees no one had ever heard of.”
Now, McCarthy and Zaidi will coordinate policies across the entire U.S. government. In an interview last month, Biden’s campaign policy director Stef Feldman told The Post, “From the very beginning of the campaign, when President-elect Biden rolled out his climate plan, he made it clear he sees this as an all-of-government agenda, domestic, economic, foreign policy.”
Trump has rolled back more than 125 environmental policies. Here’s how.
Under Biden’s plan, Feldman said, the new climate office will “develop an ambitious climate policy and be the place where accountability resides to ensure that climate ambition is built into every agency’s plan. And that they’re executing against what they agree to in the early days of the administration.”
Ken Baer, who served as OMB associate director for Communications and Strategic Planning between 2009 and 2012, gave Zaidi his first government job.
In the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, Baer tasked Zaidi, his executive assistant, with the job of participating in daily calls about the administration’s public messaging.
“I realized in a few weeks that Ali was coordinating the entire communications response for Deepwater Horizon,” he said. “His emotional intelligence and his ability to have people like him helps him lead them to an outcome. He started as executive assistant to an associate director, and at the end [of the administration] he is an associate director himself.”
Darryl Fears contributed to this report.
I am text block. Click edit button to change this text. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
Gina McCarthy
Climate Change Adviser Designate
Acceptance Speech
Mr. President-elect Madam vice president. Thank you so much for this opportunity to serve and to work beside and which this incredibly talented team, you know the issues I have been taking on in this role are very personal to me and they have been for as long as I can remember. As key listeners you would already have guessed then I grew up in and around the city of Boston. My dad was a teacher in the Boston school system for more than 40 years and my mom waitress that local doughnut shops, you know looking back. I guess we were a lower middle-class family, but we did not know it instead of the expensive vacations my sisters and I did our adventuring in our own backyards playing in the woods and around ponds in our hometown. A beach day for my family was a swim in Boston Harbor and at that point in time it meant coming out of the water with oil and other things stuck to our skin. So, we had to dry and clean ourselves all at the same time. Well, that was back in the 60s before the Earth day, but we managed in Boston Harbor today is terrific.
But all I can think of is back when I was in grammar school and the nuns used to jump up and say run close the windows in your classrooms, because when the Rubber Factory across the street started to spew chemical stenches into the air it would come wafting into our classroom, and that’s smell kept us from Recess more days than I or my teacher ever care to remember. So, I figured out early that there was just in intrinsic connection between our environment and our health and that understanding drew me into a very long career of Public Service, which I will never regret in always cherish and I did it because trying to help families and communities just like mine; and those who were facing certainly much steeper and more Insidious legacies of environmental harm. So, they could overcome the challenges that were holding them back.
Environmental Protection is part of my moral fiber. It is what I live for and I’m proud of the progress that we’ve made across the United States and I’m proud of the work that I did for many years at local and state governments as well. as well as the EPA to make sure our air and water look cleaner to make communities safer and more livable and begin to confront the crisis of climate change and I am here today because climate change is not only a threat to the planet.
. It is a threat to our health and our well-being. It’s a threat to people everywhere and the precious natural resources that we depend on. Defeating this threat is the fight of our lifetimes and our success will require the engagement of every Community every sector in our nation and every country in the world, but the opportunities to act on climate change right now fill me with Incredible optimism with hope with energy and excitement. We not only have the responsibility to meet this moment together we have the capacity to meet this moment together. The president-elect is put together the strongest climate plan ever raised to this level of leadership. It rises to the incredible moment of opportunity we have to build back better for our health for jobs and for communities that have been systemically disadvantaged for years. It will be my incredible honor to help turn this plan into Promises Kept by marshalling every part of our government working directly with communities and harnessing the force of Science and the values of environmental justice to build a better future for my two very soon to be three little grandchildren and for generations of Americans to come. So thank you for this opportunity to help put Americans back to work and Innovative good paying clean energy jobs to improve the health of our communities and to help clear the path for people in every home town in America to live brighter cleaner and more vibrant lives. Thank you.