The prominent environmental policy veteran Carol Browner is joining Lime as an adviser as the dockless bike and scooter company ramps up its focus on sustainability and climate change.
Why it matters: Browner is a well-connected figure in green circles after heading the EPA under President Clinton and serving as the White House "climate czar" under President Obama. She arrives as the industry is making the case for its environmental bona fides and seeking to improve its initially rocky relationships with cities and other layers of government.
The Trump administration again used the UN’s annual climate change conference as a platform for its controversial advocacy for clean fossil fuel and nuclear technology as climate change solutions. Speakers at the Trump administration's event in Katowice argued that future coal plants should be built with advanced clean coal technology from the U.S., which includes carbon capture and storage (CCS).
The big picture: The U.S. has spent $56 billion on fossil fuel research and development from 1948 to 2018, including early support for hydraulic fracturing. The development of affordable clean coal technology could theoretically become another fracking-style game-changer, growing economies while cutting greenhouse emissions and making the U.S. and its European allies less dependent on fossil fuel imports.
In the latest sign of a global oil industry shifting on climate change, ConocoPhillips is now helping fund a multi-million dollar political advocacy campaign that'slobbying Congress for a tax on carbon emissions.
Why it matters: The move aligns the world’s largest independent oil and gas producer with ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest publicly traded oil company, which recently contributed $1 million. Given the industry’s deep-pocketed influence with Republicans, this backing increases the odds Congress could eventually back the controversial policy.
"Corporations are people," said Mitt Romney in 2011, famously, but if they are, they seem to have an impressive degree of impunity.
The big picture: Just like people, corporations display impressive instincts for self-enrichment and self-preservation, even when they're not-for-profits. They're not holding themselves to account, but — unlike real people — no one else seems to be holding them accountable either.
Asked by Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday" whether President Trump would submit to a sit-down interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani responded, "Good luck ... over my dead body."
The big picture: Giuliani's return to the Sunday morning talk shows reflected what appear to be Trump's newest strategies for attempting to manage his escalating legal exposure. Those include painting prosecutors as biased against the president, downplaying issues like "collusion" or campaign finance violations as non-criminal or civil matters, and claiming witnesses like Michael Flynn and Michael Cohen can't be trusted or were coerced into pleading guilty.
California's transit buses are going green, the Associated Press reports, after the California Air Resources Board unanimously decided that all new buses have to be carbon-free by 2029, and that all old buses will be "phased out by 2040."
Details: This is the first mandate of its kind in the U.S., per the AP. 40% of California's greenhouse emissions come from the transportation sector, and the move is meant to "drastically" reduce those emissions in order for the state to meet its climate change goals.
