FIRST LOOK(S):

Join America Is All In at noon Eastern TODAY to discuss next steps on climate and recovery following last week's announcement of a national emissions reduction target. Featuring Gina McCarthy, Brenda Mallory, Rep. Kathy Castor, Gov. Jay Inslee, Mike Bloomberg, and more. Register HERE.

Be sure to check out the Denier Roundup (below, or click the 'view in browser' link above) for an appropriately childish summary of claims the end of beef is nigh.

80% CES By 2030, Supported By Biden, Achievable With Extant Tech At No New Cost: The White House is pushing congressional Democrats to enact a Clean Electricity Standard that would require the U.S. grid to get 80% of its power from emissions-free sources by 2030, Reuters reports. The 80% by 2030 requirement could be achieved with already existing technology and — in every region — without additional cost to ratepayers because of the recent dramatic reductions in battery costs, according to new modeling and analysis from the University of California-Berkeley, Energy Innovation, and GridLab. The requirement would be an interim milepost on the way to President Biden's stated goal of achieving a net-zero grid by 2035 and could be passed without GOP support through the Senate's budget reconciliation process. Reuters' reporting comes as more than 150 national and local environmental groups called on the administration to require an 80% CES for 2030 with 100% by 2035. Earlier this month, 13 major electricity utilities publicly supported using a CES to cut power sector emissions by 80% below 2005 levels by 2030. “Our goal is to enact this into law,” deputy White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi told Reuters. “We are calling our shot and we are going in that direction.” (Reuters; Groups: Axios)

EPA To Restore California Car Pollution Safeguards Authority: EPA will restore California's authority to set stronger car and truck pollution standards, the agency announced Monday. The move will undo what Administrator Michael Regan described as a "legally dubious … attack on the public's health and wellbeing" by the Trump administration in 2019. EPA's announcement came days after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration withdrew its own part of the interconnected rules, which were implemented by the Trump administration and had blocked California from setting stronger pollution safeguards and fuel efficiency requirements. California's rules have an outsized impact on reducing climate pollution from the transportation sector, the country's largest source of climate pollution, because thirteen states plus D.C. have adopted its standards — collectively representing more than one-third of the U.S. auto market. Advocates praised the announcement and renewed calls for accelerated pollution reductions. EPA will hold a virtual public hearing on June 2, and the public comment period will run until July 6. (Washington Post $, LA Times $, San Francisco Chronicle, Desert Sun, Mercury News, E&E $, Reuters, NBC, Bloomberg $, The Hill, Axios, The Verge, Politico Pro $, Detroit News, S&P Global; Advocates: E&E $)

DOJ Launches Investigation Of Louisville Police Dept.: The U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday it is launching a civil investigation of the Louisville Metro Police Department, more than a year after three white LMPD officers shot and killed Breonna Taylor after breaking into her apartment with a no-knock warrant while she slept. Police fired 32 bullets at Taylor, a Black 26-year-old emergency medical technician and nursing student, and her boyfriend, six of which hit Taylor. “I can’t wait for the world to see [the] Louisville Police Department for what it really is,” Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, tweeted after the announcement. The "pattern or practice" investigation will seek to determine whether the LMPD engaged in systemic abuses and unlawful tactics with little accountability and marks the opening of the second such investigation in just five days, following DOJ's opening of a similar investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department. The City of Louisville agreed to pay Taylor's family a $12 million settlement, but none of the officers have been charged in her death. One of the officers, however, has been charged for firing shots that entered a neighboring apartment. Taylor's killing fueled the massive racial justice protests ignited by the murder of George Floyd about two months later. The DOJ investigation also comes as Washington Post reporting shows how police groups and politicians frequently undermine civilian review boards' ability to assess police actions, ensure accountability, and implement changes. (The Grio, The Root, NewsOne, Washington Post $, AP, New York Times $, NPR, CNN, NBC, USA Today; Civilian review boards: Washington Post $)

(ENVIRONMENTAL) RACISM: 72% of people don’t have access to the resources they need (Earther)

COP26: For a new global climate deal, all eyes are on COP26 (Bloomberg $)

CORONAVIRUS: Pandemic lockdowns cut pollution, slowing snowmelt in south Asia (New York Times $)

A LOAD OF BULL: Fresh off election falsehoods, Republicans serve up a whopper about Biden (Washington Post $), Joe Biden is not coming for your poorly cooked hamburger (Earther), Biden isn’t banning meat, USDA chief says (Politico), Biden’s climate change plan may not nix cheeseburgers, but science says beef should be on the chopping block (Washington Post $)

IMPACTS' IMPACTS: Immobility: The neglected flipside of the climate displacement crisis (The New Humanitarian)

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT: Students designed a net-zero solar home in one of Colorado’s coldest mountain towns that could help a housing crisis (The Colorado Sun)

MATH: The giant accounting problem that could hamper the world’s push to cut emissions (Washington Post $), why it’s so hard to compare countries’ climate goals (Bloomberg $)

AGENCIES: Backlash hits FEMA plan to make states pay for disasters (E&E $), DOE loan office can build 'bridge to bankability' for clean energy projects (Politico Pro $), Granholm sets targets for renewable hydrogen, EV batteries (E&E $), Granholm: U.S. can meet climate target without Congress, but infrastructure bill would help (Politico Pro $), Michael Regan back on the Hill for high-profile hearings (E&E $)

THE HILL: House, Senate committees take up innovation debate (E&E $)

HOUSE: Hearing to address wildfire risk, climate change nexus (E&E $)

SENATE: Apples to apples, the Senate GOP infrastructure proposal is smaller than it appears (Washington Post $), Democrats poised to kill Trump methane rule rollback (E&E $), hearings to review energy tax breaks, climate bank bill (E&E $), Senate committee to pick apart Biden's leasing pause (E&E $)

WHITE HOUSE: Biden to deliver Hill speech as infrastructure talks pick up (E&E $), Biden lays foundation for energy overhaul (E&E $), Biden plan for cleaner power system faces daunting obstacles (AP), Biden’s quiet plan to prepare the U.S. for the health impacts of climate change (Grist), White House targets $38B to aid coal sector transition, but it's likely not enough, analysts say (Utility Dive)

AMERICAN JOBS PLAN: A new program like FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps could help the nation fight climate change and transition to renewable energy (InsideClimate News)

NOMINEES & CONFIRMATIONS: Biden science pick faces tough confirmation hearing (E&E $), Biden's Indian Affairs nominee [Bryan Newland] listens hard (E&E $), Biden's NOAA pick wants to quell 'surge in pseudoscience' (E&E $), Interior deputy pick Beaudreau in hot seat this week (E&E $), Senate to vote on McCabe to be EPA deputy Tuesday (Politico Pro $)

CLIMATE DIPLOMACY: Can the U.S. win back its climate credibility? (New York Times/The Daily $)

SCOTUS: Supreme Court wants Biden's thoughts on 'staggering' VW liability case (Politico Pro $), 5 things to know about [today]'s biofuels showdown (E&E $)

CITIES AND STATES: Cities need housing. Parking requirements make it harder. (Bloomberg $), Critics say PNM, Avangrid merger could hurt ratepayers, environment (New Mexico Political Report), underfunded public transit systems face ongoing challenges in Ohio (Energy News Network)

CALIFORNIA: California's dilemma: How to control skyrocketing electric rates while building the grid of the future (Utility Dive), CAISO adopts summer reliability measures to avoid repeat of 2020 blackouts (Utility Dive)

IMPACTS: Wells dry up, crops imperiled, workers in limbo as California drought grips San Joaquin Valley (LA Times $), French vineyards devastated by April frost that followed unusually warm March (Washington Post $)

RENEWABLES: Could the world ever run entirely on renewable energy? (Earther), Samsung unit considers developing $673 mln solar plants in Texas -documents (Reuters)

BATTERIES: The hidden science making batteries better, cheaper and everywhere (Bloomberg $)

OIL & GAS: Exxon faces ‘existential’ risk over fossil fuel focus, activist investor warns (FT $, Bloomberg $), gas prospects lose steam as renewables gather pace (FT $), LNG industry rebounds from pandemic, but faces long-term challenges (Houston Chronicle), taking stock of Big Oil's pandemic recovery (Axios)

PIPELINES: Granholm enters Line 3 debate with call for 'clean' pipelines (E&E $), Federal ruling rekindles fight over Dakota Access shutdown (E&E $), frustrated Canada presses White House to keep Great Lakes oil pipeline open (Reuters)

HYDROGEN: Europe debuts hydrogen passenger trains in zero-carbon push (Bloomberg $)

UTILITIES: BP applies to set up U.S. retail power business: filing (Reuters, FT $), Texas storm cost NextEera $180 million in uncollected revenue (Bloomberg $)

(ALLEGED) UTILITY CORRUPTION: FirstEnergy in talks on deferred prosecution agreement (AP)

WATER: Dams being removed on Klamath River (CBS), Snake River is most endangered in the country: Inside the fight to save it (ABC), states face quagmire in wake of Trump [WOTUS] rule (E&E $)

EVs: Harley unleashes the silent e-hogs (Bloomberg $), what to expect from Tesla's earnings report (Axios)

AGRICULTURE: How Nebraska farmer Russ Finch grows citrus year-round using geothermal energy (Yale Climate Connections)

BUSINESS: Dow CEO wants clearer government guidance: green summit update (Bloomberg $)

CARBON PRICING: Carbon price is missing from Biden’s overhaul of climate policy (FT $)

CARBON CAPTURE: Carbon capture eyes renewed backing despite past failures (FT $)

FINANCE: Australian pension fund association raises bar for companies on climate change (Reuters), Blackrock’s Fink, buoyed by record inflows, vows ‘loud’ activism (Bloomberg $)

INTERNATIONAL: Batteries charge up Australia’s efforts to shift away from coal (FT $), China power emissions must fall 66% in decade to hit Paris goal (Bloomberg $), EU weighs making transport, building sectors pay for CO2 emissions (Reuters), from coal and steel to carbon-free and digital: the EU reaches turning point (Reuters), Germany, China to increase cooperation on climate change (AP), low-income countries play carbon leapfrog in green energy shift (FT $), China says coal will play less-dominant energy role (AP)

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Facebook now has to ask permission to track your iPhone. Here’s how to stop it. (Washington Post $)

• There’s no green new deal without police abolition (Atmos, Rhiana Gunn-Wright interview)
• Time to reinstate our strongest tool against climate change (The Hill, Ramón Cruz op-ed)
• Joe Biden isn’t coming for your meat. but Republicans want you to become a cannibal. (Chicago Tribune, Rex Huppke column)
• Fox News’s latest straw man is made of red meat (Washington Post, Philip Bump analysis $)
• Joe Biden isn’t going to steal your hamburger — but there’s a reason people want you to think that (The Independent, Jamie Henn op-ed)
• Biden’s fictional war on meat is a real problem (Bloomberg, Jonathan Bernstein op-ed $)
• Beer, Brussels Sprouts, Bernie Madoff and Today’s G.O.P. (New York Times, Paul Krugman column $)
• Beyond solar and wind: 10 steps to meet President Biden's clean electricity target (Utility Dive, Bryce Yonker op-ed)
• Congress must act to solve the methane problem (The Hill, Daphne Wysham and Rob Jackson op-ed)
• Opposition to U.S. mineral mining could derail the green new deal (Forbes, David Blackmon op-ed)
• Biden is right to aim high on climate (Bloomberg, Editorial Board $)
• How to overcome cognitive biases against climate action (The Hill, Howard Kunreuther and Robert Meyer op-ed)

Childish GOP Fearmongers Over Imaginary Biden Meat Grab Then Melts Down After Nickelodeon’s Environmental Racism PSA

After a fairly disheveled week of failing to find an attack on President Biden’s infrastructure/jobs/climate plan that would stick, eventually climate deniers/the GOP (but we repeat ourselves) stumbled upon a line that seemed to resonate: Biden’s coming for your red meat! 

Now, before you go running to grab one last meatball, rest assured that as multiple different fact-check responses have pointed out recently, there’s literally nothing in President Biden’s plan that suggests he’s going to be calling the kitchen gestapo to force-feed you gazpacho. Even the Daily Caller fact-checked it, even FoxNews ran a correction, and Biden’s USDA Chief has since confirmed it: “There is no effort designed to limit people’s intake of beef coming out of President Biden’s White House or USDA. Sometimes in the political world, games get played and issues are injected into the conversation knowing full well that there’s no factual basis.” And after the plan’s release, some advocates were disappointed by how little it does to address agriculture and food system emissions. But that’s certainly not stopping the right from trying to make Americans afraid again! 

The Daily Mail, Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid with a long, ignoble history of running conservative propaganda disguised as news, started it with a listicle of things Biden’s climate agenda might possibly, if enacted, mean for your daily life. In it, they include a study about meat consumption that suggests a safe climate might require something like a 90% reduction in conventionally farmed red meat.

Yet despite the fact that Biden has said literally nothing about reducing meat consumption, former Trump toady Larry Kudlow went on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News to trumpet the claim, while adding a mocking reference to drinking plant-based beer on the 4th of July, which just makes us wonder what red-meat beers Kudlow’s been drinking. (They do seem pretty strong, at least!) 

From there, the piece bounced around the fact-free conservative deniersphere. For example, fresh off her long-haul reading project of all 14 pages of the Green New Deal, Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-nothing better to do), tweeted a picture of Biden having a hamburger and called him “The Hamburglar.”

We wish the childish taunts were the extent of the immaturity, but conservatives are also proving worse behaved than literal children, who probably sat through a recent Nickelodeon PSA with much less screaming and crying than rightwing media. 

Last week the kid’s TV network Nickelodeon did a short “Nick News” segment on environmental racism, and boy did it piss off some racists! The Daily Wire was Big Mad (though probably more because of the implications a generational concern about environmental justice might mean for Ben Shapiro’s fracking-backed blog), and the Washington Examiner turned a bunch of tweets from definitely real people into a story, as did Murdoch’s New York Post, which accurately portrayed the real depth of the conservative thought leadership bench by quoting a tweet from a two-week old account with literally zero followers. 

It also quoted a TownHall (rightwing propaganda site) “editor” reminiscing about the “good ol’ days” of more wholesome programming on Nickelodeon, like “Rockos modern life,” a show so chock full of double-entendres it inspired a whole listicle of the dirty jokes it ran. (And that doesn’t include the whole episode revolving around Rocko’s nudity being turned into an arthouse film, so like the conservative view of American history, even their cartoon history is revisionist!) 

But according to the party that’s totally not racist but always gets really upset when you try and do anything anti-racist, Nickelodeon is bad for telling kids about pollution. And according to the party that insists it’s really very serious about finding common-sense solutions to climate change just so long as they don’t involve reducing emissions (more on that tomorrow!) President Biden’s entirely meat-free climate plan is actually a plan for a proof-of-vaccination-like-“Red Meat Passports.” 

Lacking any credible response to climate change — because that would mean confronting their fossil fuel campaign donors — the GOP’s increasingly desperate attempts to further stall climate policy are just getting … at the risk of insulting children … more and more childish. Even Nickelodeon’s programming is more mature than they are now, and it’s a network for literal children!

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