Category: Legislations_CN Plastics_CN Politics_CN

As international negotiators began hammering out the details of a global plastics treaty last week, legislators in the United States were busy unveiling a domestic policy to address the plastic pollution crisis.

U.S. President Joe Biden's pledges to slash emissions from farming and to end American hunger by 2030 may be harder to realize now that Republicans flipped the House of Representatives with a thin majority.
Biden's Democrats, who retain control of the Senate, will start negotiating in the coming months with Republican House leaders over a massive farm spending bill passed every five years that funds U.S. public food benefits and farm commodity programs.

A split Congress makes it unlikely that Republicans will undo Biden’s climate legislation, but they’re likely to try to slow it. There may also be room for agreement on infrastructure….

Republicans clinched a narrow House majority Wednesday night, and executive agencies are now bracing for a flood of GOP-led oversight inquiries into Biden administration energy and environment decisionmaking.
Republican lawmakers have made clear which policies and people they want investigated. For nearly two years, GOP committee chairs have fired off dozens of letters to agencies seeking information. Republicans will now have subpoena power to demand cooperation.

President Joe Biden signed a bona fide international climate treaty on Wednesday, one that was ratified in the Senate with bipartisan support in a 69-27 vote. Twenty-one Republicans supported ratification in September, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The first two years of the Biden administration have included huge legislative victories: a major bipartisan infrastructure deal, a technology bill, a veterans’ health bill, a gun safety bill, and a package of new investments in climate and health care.

Joe Manchin’s bill to fast-track energy permitting, including the beleaguered Mountain Valley Pipeline was not part of the short-term government funding package passed by the Senate on Tuesday. The bill — crafted by Manchin’s staff in concert with Equitrans Midstream, which owns a 48.1% interest in the pipeline that would transport methane gas from West Virginia into Virginia — faced opposition from some Senate Democrats, including Virginia’s senators (especially Tim Kaine), as well as 72 House Democrats.

What if the Senate passed an international climate treaty—a pact so powerful that it could avert nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit of global warming—and nobody noticed?

Democrats want to include Sen. Joe Manchin’s proposal in legislation to avoid a shutdown. Republicans don’t.

The Senate voted on Wednesday to approve an international climate treaty for the first time in 30 years, agreeing in a rare bipartisan deal to phase out of the use of planet-warming industrial chemicals commonly found in refrigerators and air-conditioners.
By a vote of 69 to 27 the United States joined the 2016 Kigali Amendment, along with 137 other nations that have agreed to sharply reduce the production and use of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs. The chemicals are potent greenhouse gases, warming the planet with 1,000 times the heat-trapping strength of carbon dioxide.