FIRST LOOK(S):

U.S. Climate Action Week will take place this week as a platform for side events, discussions and key moments alongside President Biden's Leaders Climate Summit. Learn more and view the schedule HERE.

EVs 100% Of New Car Sales By 2035 Possible — Report: By 2035, every new car and truck sold in the U.S. could be an EV, a new report says. Accelerations in technology and especially battery affordability, paired with new policy, mean the dramatic transition would save American drivers $2.7 trillion by 2050, an average savings of $1,000 per household per year. The ramp up in EV production would also create 2 million new jobs by 2035. Battery prices have fallen 74% since 2014, and their unexpectedly rapid fall is a key driver of the cost savings. EVs are far simpler mechanically, and more efficient, than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, which translates to reduced climate pollution and lower costs for consumers. Strengthened vehicle efficiency standards and investment in fast charging infrastructure are needed to accelerate the transition, which would prevent 150,000 premature deaths and save $1.3 trillion in health environmental costs by 2050. (The Guardian, Fast Company, E&E $, Morning Consult, Canary Media)

Brenda Mallory Confirmed To Head CEQ: Brenda Mallory, an environmental lawyer and longtime environmental justice advocate, will head the White House Council on Environmental Quality after the Senate voted to confirm her nomination Wednesday. Mallory is the first Black person to serve as CEQ chair, where she will coordinate energy and environmental policy and enforcement, as well as the approval of major infrastructure projects including oil pipelines. Mallory served as CEQ's general counsel during the Obama administration before a stint as regulatory policy director at the Southern Environmental Law Center. "CEQ will help our nation rise to the environmental challenges of our time, from climate change and the nature crisis to the environmental injustices that have plagued our country for too long,” Mallory said in a statement. (Reuters, New York Times $, E&E $, The Hill)

Climate Threatens French Wine Crop: French winemakers are facing devastating grape loss from the worst frost in decades, preceded by unusually warm temperatures, highlighting the dangers to the sector posed by climate change. "An important share of the harvest has been lost. It's too early to give a percentage estimate, but in any case it's a tragedy for the winegrowers who have been hit," said Christophe Chateau, director of communications at the Bordeaux Wine Council, told CNN. Climate change, caused by the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, has pushed winegrowing seasons earlier, putting crops at higher risk of cold — and wildfires supercharged by climate change also threaten American vignerons and farmworkers as well. “I think it’s good for people to understand that this is nature, climate change is real, and to be conscious of the effort that goes into making wine and the heartbreak that is the loss of a crop,” Jeremy Seysses of Domaine Dujac in Burgundy’s Côte de Nuits told Wine Enthusiast. (CNN, Wine Enthusiast, France24, Eater)

(ENVIRONMENTAL) RACISM: Let’s not forget what the DAPL case is really about (Atmos), ‘back on the job’: Kenosha, Wisconsin, officer who shot Jacob Blake seven times, leaving him paralyzed, has returned to duty (Atlanta Black Star, NewsOne), Kim Potter arrested, charged with manslaughter of Daunte Wright: what we know about cop who confused gun for taser (NewsOne, The Grio, The Root, Blavity, BBC, New York Times $, USA Today, NBC), a world of equal weight: how an Aboriginal family’s battle with fossil fuels started with a walk (Grist)

CORONAVIRUS: 'In the end, everything is about equity': how experts say the pandemic could invigorate climate change action (CNN), the pandemic remade every corner of society. Now it's the climate's turn (TIME)

COP26: ‘Let’s make it count’: world leaders, royalty and environmentalists gear up for major climate summit COP26 (CNBC), Britain wants in-person 'COP26' climate change summit this year (Reuters)

CLIMATE LITIGATION: Biden is following in Trump’s footsteps when it comes to climate lawsuits (Earther)

IMPACTS' IMPACTS: A tale of two climate migrants (PBS, The Nation, and Nexus Media News)

INCENTIVES: Oil firm bosses’ pay ‘incentivises them to undermine climate action’ (The Guardian)

AGENCIES: The Environmental Protection Agency is cleaning up its image (The Verge), in the climate change fight, the Interior Department becomes a battlefield (Washington Post $), The EPA is asking a Virgin Islands refinery for information on its spattering of neighbors with oil (InsideClimate News)

FED: Powell defends Fed’s consideration of climate change risks (AP)

THE HILL: Republican infrastructure counteroffer likely smaller and funded by user fees (Politico Pro $, Washington Post $), Dems want Biden to scrap rule delaying [fuel efficiency] penalty hike (E&E $)

SENATE: [Maxine Waters] throws cold water on FEMA flood plan (E&E $), Senate Democrats plan to advance [water] infrastructure bill to gauge bipartisan support (Reuters, Politico Pro $), historic duo [Schatz and Murkowski] puts climate on Indian Affairs agenda (E&E $), oil, utility execs lobby senators on carbon fee (E&E $)

HOUSE: [House Natural Resources Committee] hearing sees tribal wishes clash with resource needs (E&E $), sweeping House PFAS crackdown bill returns (E&E $)

WHITE HOUSE: Biden to mark 100 days with joint session speech (E&E $), Biden's infrastructure plan goes big on EVs, but his first budget starts small, analysts say (Utility Dive), from defeat to the White House for young climate advisers (E&E $), Biden environmental justice pledge seen as a moving target (Bloomberg Law)

NDC: Cutting emissions 50% would put US Paris target on par with EU: report (Reuters), White House considers doubling Obama-era carbon reduction targets: BNEF (Utility Dive)

CLIMATE SUMMIT: US seeks to polish tarnished reputation with new climate change pledges ahead of Earth Day (Reuters), Biden struggles to draw new climate pledges from foreign governments ahead of summit (Politico Pro $), White House says climate summit isn't for deal-making (E&E $)

AMERICAN JOBS PLAN: Granholm eyes filibuster-proof clean electricity standard (E&E $)

NOMINEES & CONFIRMATIONS: Biden to pick conservationist [Tracy] Stone-Manning to lead BLM (Politico Pro $, The Hill), Biden taps water equity advocate [Radhika Fox] to lead EPA water office (Politico Pro $), Gensler confirmed as top Wall Street cop, bringing new era of tough scrutiny (Politico, CNBC, Washington Post $, Wall Street Journal $, MarketWatch), Biden taps former Sandia lab head [Jill Hruby] to lead nuclear weapons agency (Politico Pro $)

CLIMATE DIPLOMACY: John Kerry and China's long road ahead on climate (Axios, AP), forthcoming Russia sanctions won't include Nord Stream 2 (Politico), 6 questions looming over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline (Politico Pro $)

CITIES AND STATES: Can the mayoral candidates bring a sea change to NYC’s climate resilience fight? (The City), North Dakota ponies up another $435M for Fargo flood project (E&E $), Vermont’s largest city on track to hit ‘net zero’ by 2030 (AP)

CALIFORNIA: California power regulators cast doubt on utility’s plans (AP), fracking ban fails to advance in California Legislature (AP)

TEXAS: Texas nearly went dark because officials misjudged weather (Bloomberg $, E&E $)

CALIFORNIA AND TEXAS: Following California and Texas blackouts, experts see potential for energy storage and better grid planning (Utility Dive)

IMPACTS: 76 percent of the Western US is in a drought. That likely means another bad wildfire season. (Vox), 'chaotic' monsoons threaten India's farmers without climate action (Thomson Reuters Foundation), epic drought means water crisis on Oregon-California border (AP), report claiming global temperature rise will top 1.5C by 2030s divides scientists (The Guardian), researchers examine how world-apart ice sheets influence each other (Yale Climate Connections), Tropical Storm Surigae to intensify into powerful Pacific typhoon, brush past Philippines (Washington Post $)

WILDFIRES: Dry conditions triple number of fires sparked in Oregon (AP), Wisconsin poised for devastating wildfire season as hundreds of blazes rage (The Guardian, The Hill, WPR)

SUPER POLLUTANTS: Health systems urged to develop green cure for fast-rising emissions (Thomson Reuters Foundation), an unusual coalition of environmental and industry groups is calling on the EPA to quickly phase out super-polluting refrigerants (InsideClimate News)

RENEWABLES: Projections for electricity emissions underestimated the pace of power transition (Axios, E&E $, Earther), Chevron makes historic investment in offshore wind (E&E $), marine tech 'the missing link' for 100% clean power — report (E&E $)

PIPELINES: Enbridge’s Great Lakes pipeline is ‘nonnegotiable’ for Canada (Bloomberg $)

HYDROGEN: Energy firm outlines plans for major hydrogen project that will use UK’s largest electrolyzer (CNBC)

UTILITIES: US utilities want protection from Biden's tight timeline in clean energy mandate (Reuters)

GRID: Biden rushes to protect power grid as hacking threats grow (Bloomberg $, E&E $)

EVs: Auto dealer sees Clean Cars as great first step for electric vehicles in Virginia (Energy News Network)

NFTs: In Coinbase’s rise, a reminder: cryptocurrencies use lots of energy (New York Times $)

FINANCE: Global regulators to refine climate fallout on banks (Reuters)

RICH GUYS: Tech billionaires are obsessed with climate change — but some question if they’re focusing on the right areas (CNBC), who is the man Jeff Bezos chose to spend $10 billion as head of his Earth Fund? (Thomson Reuters Foundation)

WILDLIFE: Wildlife is in peril, but that doesn’t mean conservation has failed (Vox)

INTERNATIONAL: ‘We cannot drink oil’: campaigners condemn east African pipeline project (The Guardian), Boris Johnson ‘too cosy’ with vested interests to take serious action (The Guardian), Japan set to raise ambition of 2030 climate goal (Climate Home), road to ruin: informal byways sow seeds of destruction in Colombia's Amazon (Reuters), what ‘energy transition’? Global fossil fuel use is accelerating and set to get even worse (CNBC), Brazil seeks $1bn cash upfront for preservation of Amazon (FT $), Brazil must show Amazon protection is working, top donor Norway says (Reuters)

• Cleaner by the mile: Electric trucks can have outsized environmental and health benefits (Utility Dive, David Farnsworth, Camille Kadoch and Nancy Seidman op-ed)
• If California is America's climate leader, we're all in trouble (San Francisco Chronicle, Editorial Board)
• Biden’s climate plan is a risky bet for the planet (Washington Post, Editorial Board $)
• Silver lining to water woes could be farmers putting their lands to new uses besides crops (Fresno Bee, Emmy Cattani and Ann Hayden op-ed)
• Solutions Project CEO talks climate and racial justice (Thomson Reuters Foundation, Gloria Walton interview)
• Slash emissions by 2030? How big goals will help tackle climate change (The Hill, Nate Hultman op-ed)
• Biden’s earth day summit is a crucial opportunity for climate action (Scientific American, Rachel Cleetus and Erika Spanger-Siegfried op-ed)
• ‘It’s a historic moment’ — Pete Buttigieg on EV chargers, lead pipes, and the promise of infrastructure (Grist, Sec. Pete Buttigieg interview)

Latest Hit from Career Liar James O’Keefe Claims CNN’s Going To Focus On Climate Once Covid Is Over. Yay? 

James O’Keefe is a conservative activist who likes to play dress up, pretend to be someone he’s not, and get random people at big organizations to say things he then takes out of context and uses as political propaganda. (He’d describe himself as more of an investigative journalist who, with his Project Veritas organization, performs elaborate stings to reveal liberal bias.)

His major success in doing this was back in 2009; his deceptively edited video got ACORN, a 40-year-old voter registration and low-income community advocacy organization, shut down. Since the resulting lawsuit proved his video was deceptive and he agreed to pay the fired employee $100,000 to settle it, most mainstream media has largely ignored his (illegal) shenanigans. 

The exception has been when his ineptitude warrants mockery, like the time he accidentally stung himself with a seven-minute voicemail left on a target’s answering machine explaining how they’d attempt to sting the George Soros-funded organization. Or that time when he unsuccessfully tried to trick the Washington Post in to a running a false accusation of sexual assualt — in an attempt to discredit the multiple well-corroborated allegations that Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore had pursued sexual relations with underage girls when he was in his 30s — that only served to increase the credibility of the Washington Post's reporting. (In case you were wondering what kind of journalistic ethics O’Keefe might claim to have.) 

For the last few years, to little effect, CNN has been O’Keefe’s biggest target, and his newest video has the climate denial community excited. And although no one with any editorial standards seems to have covered it, the Daily Wire, New York Post and Sinclair Media have.

Supposedly, according to the CNN staffer who may or may not sound like he’s feeling the effects of the alcohol he’s drinking as he’s trying to impress a woman he thinks he’s dating but is actually a Project Veritas employee: CNN is definitely responsible for Trump getting voted out of office, and word has come down from the top that once the public is done with COVID-19, CNN will turn its focus to climate change and they’ll “milk that quite a bit” because it’s “a pandemic-like story that we’ll beat to death, but that one’s got longevity.”  

You can watch it on Twitter if you want to see how snippets of conversation during a half-dozen “dates” can be stitched together, because Twitter apparently has no problem with career liars like O’Keefe spreading their propaganda on the platform.

So we’re conflicted, because we really want this to be true. There are few subjects more deserving of CNN’s massive resources and audience’s attention than the climate crisis, and they have recently announced a climate desk, to build on some other great work they’ve done.

But the fact that it’s being featured in a Project Veritas video means the opposite is likely true, and network head Jeff Zucker still believes as he does in 2014, that people won’t watch climate content, and CNN will continue to only rarely cover this existential threat to people and planet, and adopt Big Oil’s framing when they do...that is, unless there's another missing plane. 

Either way, a word of warning, and let's be honest, we're talking to the bros in our readership right here: As we do come out of social isolation, be careful of attractive people who are inexplicably interested in hearing your nerdy, mediocre self vent and complain about your work at a “liberal” organization in DC or New York. 

This is doubly true if they’re thin on their own life history and personal details, and always happen to have their phone out and inconspicuously pointed in your general direction. 

Oh, and they probably don't like your podcast either.

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