Spotlight on green news & views: Cutting the federal renewables budget; Antarctica heating up

This is the 499th edition of the Spotlight on Green News & Views (previously known as the Green Diary Rescue) usually appears twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Here is the May 13 Green Spotlight. More than 26,910 environmentally oriented stories have been rescued to appear in this series since 2006. Inclusion of a story in the Spotlight does not necessarily indicate my agreement with or endorsement of it.

OUTSTANDING GREEN STORIES

ClimateDenierRoundup writes—What’s it Mean to be Virtue Signalling? Probably Means You Aren’t Awful: “We can’t even keep up with all the scandals coming out of the Trump administration right now, so we’re going to take this time to discuss a phrase that you may have been trolled with: virtue signalling. It’s the idea of ‘you talk the talk but don’t walk the walk’ rebooted for the alt right and others who need to disguise their trolling as intelligent discourse. The climate debate is increasingly seeing accusations of virtue signalling. Last year, an Investor’s Business Daily editorial decried Leonardo DiCaprio’s climate change speech at the UN as empty virtue signalling, rather than an example of putting star power to good use. In a similar vein, the Paris Agreement, according to deniers, isn’t a laudable effort to get almost 200 different nations on the same page on the need to reduce emissions, but instead is just a virtue-signalling farce. (If it’s such a farce, why all the pressure for Trump to leave?)This rhetorical tool allows the user to write off any argument or action to solve a problem as meaningless virtue signalling. WUWT labels most climate action and policies as meaningless virtue-signalling, from fossil fuel divestment to energy efficient light bulbs.”

Food and Water Watch writes—Why Public Control of Infrastructure Matters: (By Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director, Food & Water Watch; and Donald Cohen, Executive Director of In the Public Interest.) We’ve all heard the statistics about our nation’s crumbling infrastructure and agree it needs to be fixed—the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates we need to invest $4 trillion in our infrastructure across the country. But what’s still up for debate is how improvements will be financed and who will be in control—the public, or corporations and big banks? It’s an important distinction—privatized infrastructure projects have a troubling track record. [...] But there are alternatives to privatization. The American public is willing to pay for improvements to make their communities stronger and safer. Last November, voters approved hundreds of local and state bond measures to bolster public schools, transit and water systems. Residents of California’s Alameda County approved $580 million in municipal bonds to provide affordable housing. A large majority of Los Angeles voters approved a permanent sales tax increase to fund a major public transit expansion.”