Coming up this Friday, in the Rose Garden, President Biden is to sign an executive order that will direct every federal government agency to incorporate environmental justice into its mission.
Climate advocates and environmental leaders have been encouraged and invited to come and join the signing ceremony today. Biden is said to reaffirm his commitment to helping fight climate change and correct environmental harms that have been made.
Such as the February derailment of a freight train in East Palestine, Ohio, that caused a devastating, harmful, and dangerous chemical spill.
On Thursday, April 20th, 2023, Biden pledged 1 billion to help other nations worldwide fight climate change and 500 million dollars to help curb deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.
Let me break it down for those of you readers unaware of what is happening in the Amazon rainforest. In the first half of 2022, deforestation was 3x higher than in the first half of 2017. Deforestation has been increasing every year with no sign of slowing down. Fires spread, taking parts of the forest every summer and killing what is left of the Amazon.
South America’s Amazon is nearly a third of all tropical rainforests left on Earth. Home to 10% of the wildlife species we know of and many of which we don’t. 76 Billion tonnes of carbon is stored in the Amazon rainforest, and the trees that call Amazon home release 20 billion tonnes of water into the atmosphere daily, playing a vital role in global carbon and water cycles, not to mention all the medicine and resources local communities use daily.
Jair Bolaonaro stated that the Amazon rainforest was “open for business,” meaning it threatened to disappear with huge-scale farming, ranching, urban development, unsustainable logging, and mining. Jair Bolaonaro’s term ended in December 2022, and now Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is the new president of Brazil, promising the people of Brazil that he will end this illegal deforestation that has been going on for too long. Without the Amazon, we lose our fight against climate change. With Biden’s pledge of 500 million and a new leader, hopefully, we can restore or at least stop the Amazon rainforest from taking any more pain, as it has already endured enough.
Biden stated, “The United States is taking bold action to put our energy sector on a path toward net zero emissions by no later than 2050.”
A White House official said, “The executive order will direct agencies to address gaps in science and data to better understand and prevent the cumulative impacts of pollution on people’s health. It will create a new Office of Environmental Justice in the White House to coordinate all environmental justice efforts across the federal government. And it will require agencies to notify nearby communities in the event of a release of toxic substances from a federal facility.“
