Written by rjs, MarketWatch 666
This is a collection of interesting news articles about the environment and related topics published last week. This is usually a Tuesday evening regular post at GEI (but can be posted at other times).
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Here’s How Bad Antibiotic Resistance Has Gotten Over the Past 20 Years -Over the past decade, antibiotic resistance has emerged as one of the greatest public health threats. Antibiotics have been used to prevent and treat bacterial infections since the 1940s when doctors first discovered the powerful drugs could save people’s lives.But in recent decades overuse and misuse has resulted in infectious bacteria becoming resistant to these common drugs. Today, researchers have more details on just how severe antibiotic resistance has become and found evidence that we’ve reached a frightening new milestone.New research published in the journal [http://%20https//aac.asm.org/content/aac/early/2019/10/01/AAC.01637-19.full.pdf?ijkey=.kQmOSUjlIfZA&keytype=ref&siteid=asmjournals&_ga=2.222823711.502867457.1571672876-268124401.1528995690]Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy today discovered that resistance to one of the last resort drugs used to treat extremely drug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa can develop a lot more quickly than we originally thought.A patient infected with Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeruginosa) – a bacteria that can cause a range of infections, including urinary tract infections, bone and joint infections, and respiratory infections – developed resistance to the antibiotic ceftolozane-tazobactam in just 22 days.This discovery follows another European study, which found that resistance to antibiotics commonly used to treat a range of stomach infections has nearly doubled in 20 years In fact, resistance to commonly used antibiotics – such as clarithromycin – is increasing at 1 percent each year, according to those findings, which researchers presented Monday at UEG Week Barcelona 2019.
Scientists ‘may have crossed ethical line’ in growing human brains – Neuroscientists may have crossed an “ethical rubicon” by growing lumps of human brain in the lab, and in some cases transplanting the tissue into animals, researchers warn. The creation of mini-brains or brain “organoids” has become one of the hottest fields in modern neuroscience. The blobs of tissue are made from stem cells and, while they are only the size of a pea, some have developed spontaneous brain waves, similar to those seen in premature babies. Many scientists believe that organoids have the potential to transform medicine by allowing them to probe the living brain like never before. But the work is controversial because it is unclear where it may cross the line into human experimentation. “If there’s even a possibility of the organoid being sentient, we could be crossing that line,” said Elan Ohayon, the director of the Green Neuroscience Laboratory in San Diego, California. “We don’t want people doing research where there is potential for something to suffer.” Because of the manifest difficulties in studying live human brains, organoids are considered a landmark development. They have been used to investigate schizophrenia and autism, and why some babies develop small brains when they are infected with Zika virus in the womb. But Ohayon and his colleagues argue that checks must be in place to ensure that brain organoids do not experience suffering. “We’re already seeing activity in organoids that is reminiscent of biological activity in developing animals,” Ohayon said. In one recent study, researchers at Harvard showed that brain organoids develop a rich diversity of tissues, from cerebral cortex neurons to retinal cells. Organoids grown for eight months developed their own neuronal networks that sparked with activity and responded when light was shone on them. Ohayon wants funding agencies to freeze all research that aims to put human brain organoids into animals, along with other work where there is an reasonable chance of organoids becoming sentient.
Chemicals in consumer products during early pregnancy related to lower IQ – Exposure during the first trimester of pregnancy to mixtures of suspected endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in consumer products is related to lower IQ in children by age 7, according to a study by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Karlstad University, Sweden, published inEnvironment International in October. This study is among the first to look at prenatal suspected endocrine-disrupting chemical mixtures in relation to neurodevelopment. Scientists measured 26 chemicals in the blood and urine of 718 mothers during the first trimester of their pregnancies in the study of Swedish mothers and children, known as SELMA. These chemicals included bisphenol A (BPA), which is found in plastic food and drink containers, as well as pesticides, phthalates, and other chemicals found in consumer products. Some of the 26 are known to disrupt endocrine (hormone) activity in humans; others have been shown to do so only in animals, or are suspected of endocrine disruption because they share chemical features with known disruptors. Researchers later followed up with the children at age 7 and found that those whose mothers had higher levels of the chemicals in their system during pregnancy had lower IQ scores–particularly boys, whose scores were lower by two points. Within the mixture, bisphenol F (BPF), a BPA-replacement compound, made the highest contribution to lowering children’s IQ, suggesting that BPF is not any safer for children than BPA. The study found that other chemicals of concern in the mixture were the pesticide chloropyrifos; polyfluoroalkyl substances, which are found in cleaning products; triclosan, a chemical found in antibacterial soaps; and phthalates, which are found in soft polyvinyl chloride plastics and cosmetics. Many of the chemicals only stay in the body a short time, meaning that even a short-term exposure may be detrimental, so researchers believe this indicates that preventing exposures to pregnant women or women trying to become pregnant is critical to preventing neurological harm to children.
Johnson & Johnson Recalls 33,000 Baby Powder Bottles After FDA Finds Asbestos — Pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson recalled 33,000 bottles of baby powder on Friday after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found trace amounts of asbestos in one of its bottles.While the recall pertains to a single lot of baby powder, it is unwelcome news for the company, which faces thousands of lawsuits claiming that its talc-based baby powder caused cancer, as CBS News reported.Anyone with a bottle of Johnson’s Baby Powder from lot #22318RB, should not use it and can contact the company for a refund, according to CNNThis is the first time that Johnson & Johnson has needed to recall its baby powder over asbestos concerns. Even though the company reported nearly $82 billion in sales last year, and its products line store shelves and pharmacy counters with brands like Tylenol and Band-Aid, it is facing over 100,000 lawsuits questioning the safety of its products, according to the New York Times. More than 15,000 of those are from litigants who say baby powder and other talc-based products caused them to develop cancer. Several plaintiffs suffer from mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer that is the hallmarks of asbestos exposure, according to the New York Times.”I understand today’s recall may be concerning to all those individuals who may have used the affected lot of baby powder,” Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Ned Sharpless said in a statement on Friday, as CNN reported. “I want to assure everyone that the agency takes these concerns seriously and that we are committed to our mandate of protecting the public health.”
Scores more heart attacks and strokes on high pollution days – Scores of children and adults are being rushed to hospital for emergency treatment on days of high pollution in cities across England, figures show.Each year emergency services see more than 120 additional cardiac arrests, more than 230 additional strokes and nearly 200 more people with asthma requiring hospital treatment on days of high pollution compared with the average on days of lower pollution.The data, to be published in full next month, shows the extra strain that poor air quality is putting on already stretched NHS emergency resources.Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, said: “These new figures show air pollution is now causing thousands of strokes, cardiac arrests and asthma attacks, so it’s clear that the climate emergency is in fact also a health emergency. Since these avoidable deaths are happening now, not in 2025 or 2050, together we need to act now.” Previous studies have found spikes in hospital admissions and GP visits on days of high pollution, but the new data gives precise numbers for nine English cities and shows a clear relationship between heart attacks, strokes and respiratory illnesses and dirty air.The researchers defined high pollution days by dividing the year in two based on levels of pollution and comparing the number of cases of the relevant illness in the higher pollution half of the year with the number of similar cases on each day in the lower half.The data, collated by King’s College London (KCL), covers London, where there are 338 more emergencies a year on higher pollution days compared with low pollution days, Birmingham (65 a year), Bristol (22), Derby (16), Liverpool (28), Manchester (34), Nottingham (19), Oxford (10) and Southampton (16). Much of the recent research on air pollution has focused on the lifelong effects of chronic exposure, including cognitive decline, stunted growth in children and premature death. However, it can also bring on serious illness more immediately. Jenny Bates, an air pollution campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “Many people may not realise how dangerous air pollution at high levels can be, and that it can trigger heart attacks, strokes and asthma attacks as well as having long-term health effects. These figures will be a wake-up call for city leaders to take the strongest possible action.”
More Heart Attacks and Strokes on High Pollution Days in England, Research Finds — On days where air pollution is higher, hundreds of people across nine major cities in England are suffering from more potentially fatal cardiac arrests or heading to the hospital for strokes or severe asthma attacks, according to new research from King’s College in London. “Many people may not realize how dangerous air pollution at high levels can be, and that it can trigger heart attacks, strokes and asthma attacks as well as having long-term health effects. These figures will be a wake-up call for city leaders to take the strongest possible action,” Jenny Bates, an air pollution campaigner at the environmental organization Friends of the Earth, told The Guardian. To come to their findings, researchers used air quality data from regulatory monitoring networks in Europe. Across England, higher pollution days saw 124 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, 231 hospitalizations for stroke, 193 children and adults hospitalized for asthma. The study authors note that while pollution is associated with early death, this measurement can seem like an abstract concept too far off into the future. That is why analyzing the impacts of pollution exposure on everyday life is essential to understanding its health implications. “London’s lethal air is a public health crisis – it leads to thousands of premature deaths in the capital every year, as well as stunting the development of young lungs and increasing cases of respiratory illness,” said Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London. “Since these avoidable deaths are happening now – not in 2025 or 2050 – together we need to act now. For the NHS that is going to mean further comprehensive action building on the reduction of our carbon footprint of one fifth in the past decade. So our NHS energy use, supply chain, building adaptations and our transport will all need to change substantially,” In addition to the short-term risks associated with exposure to air pollution, the BBC reports that sufferers may also experience stunted lung growth, lung cancer and low birth weight. The newly released data is part of a subset of material that will be published in an upcoming report in November ahead of next month’s International Clean Air Summit.
U.S. Air Pollution Is Getting Worse Under Trump, New Study Finds -Tweeting that the U.S. has the cleanest air in the world does not make it so. Not only do we rank 10th, but anew study says that after steady improvement during the Obama-era, air pollution has gotten worse while Donald Trump has been president. The report issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that fine particle air pollution, known as PM2.5, dropped by 24.2 percent from 2009 to 2016. However, in the following two years, it increased an average of 5.5 percent each year. PM2.5 is particularly concerning because its microscopic size means it can easily enter the respiratory tract and be absorbed into the blood stream.”The health implications of this increase in PM2.5 between 2016 and 2018 are significant,” the study’s abstract says. “The increase was associated with 9,700 additional premature deaths in 2018. At conventional valuations, these deaths represent damages of $89 billion.” The trend toward cleaner air that has now been reversed has several causes, including deregulation of industry, loosening of the Clean Air Act and an increase in wildfires. The growth of the U.S. economy coupled with looser regulations has led to an increase in diesel powered trucks and other polluting-emitting vehicles on the roads, as well as boosted manufacturers’ carbon emissions, Clay and Muller wrote, as CBS News reported.”The chemical composition of particulates point to increased use of natural gas and to vehicle miles traveled as likely contributors to the increase” in pollution, the economists wrote, as CBS News reported. “We conclude that the effect is due to diesel vehicles as well as some industrial boilers.” Fine particles are worrying since they easily cause lung damage, collect in the brain and send people to the emergency room, as The Washington Post reported. The data shows that airborne particles have an association with dementia and cognitive decline. These effects often occur at levels far below the current regulatory threshold. The increases in particulate matter were particularly high in the west, especially in California. The authors noted that California experienced a large increase in particulate matter since a large segment of the population was exposed to wildfires and vehicular pollution and the state represented “a large share of the increase in premature mortality,” as the non-profit StreetsBlog reported. “Because of these large increases and the large exposed population in California, we find that nearly 43% of the increase in deaths nationally from 2016 to 2018 occurred in California,” the study authors said, as CBS News reported.
Scientists fired by Trump warn particle pollution standards don’t protect people — A group of scientist advisers dismissed by the Trump administration has concluded that national limits on fine particles of air pollution aren’t strong enough to protect people.The expert panel of epidemiologists and toxicologists was disbanded by the Environmental Protection Agency but decided to continue its work anyway.The members are issuing their warnings as US regulators are reconsidering a standard for particulate matter – the inhalable pollution that is 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair. The pollution can include any of hundreds of chemicals and come from power plants, cars, construction sites and fires. It is linked with breathing and heart illnesses and early deaths.“Based on full consideration of the overall body of scientific evidence, we unequivocally find that the current standards for fine particulate matter do not protect public health and must be revised,” said Chris Frey, a scientist from North Carolina State University who chaired the group. “There is no way for EPA to spin this otherwise.” Frey and the other researchers worry the Trump administration may try to ease the pollution restrictions, despite the clarity of the new science. Trump agencies are rolling back The current annual standard for exposure to fine particle pollution is set at 12 micrograms per cubic meter, and the group believes it should be tightened to between eight micrograms and 10 micrograms.The daily standard is 35 micrograms and should be strengthened to between 25 micrograms and 30 micrograms, the scientists said in findings released Tuesday. That would protect some areas of the country where people are exposed to fine particle pollution over short periods of time, for example, from burning wood in homes.
Disbanded Air Pollution Panel Finds EPA Standards Don’t Protect Public Health – Union Of Concerned Scientists – The Independent Particulate Matter Review Panel has released their consensus recommendations to the EPA administrator on the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Particulate Matter. The group of 20 independent experts, that were disbanded by Administrator Wheeler last October and reconvened last week, hosted by the Union of Concerned Scientists, has now made clear that the current particulate pollution standards don’t protect public health and welfare. The Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) – the remaining seven-person committee that is providing science advice to the EPA on the particulate matter standards – meets this week to discuss their recommendations on whether the current standards are adequate. The letter from the Independent Panel will be the elephant in the room. CASAC has already acknowledged that they don’t have the expertise to conduct the review but you know who does? The Independent Panel. The Panel has more than double the experts of CASAC, and importantly, it has multiple experts in each of the necessary scientific disciplines critical to ensure a comprehensive, robust review of the science supporting the standards. As a result, we should watch whether or not CASAC aligns with the panel in their recommendations on the standards. If CASAC doesn’t decide this week to make a similar recommendation as the Independent Panel, they’ll have to explain why they disagreed with a larger, more experienced, and more diverse set of experts on the topic. In any event, the administrator will have access to both CASAC and the Independent Panel’s recommendations when he ultimately makes the decision of where to set particulate pollution standards. The panel’s recommendations should hold the administrator’s feet to the fire. The standards of greatest interest are the primary PM2.5 standards. These are the standards for particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometers (fine particulate matter) that are designed to protect public health. The panel supported the preliminary conclusions of a Draft EPA Policy Assessment that the current standards aren’t requisite to protect public health. The letter cited new and consistent epidemiological findings, supported by human and animal studies and other studies with natural experiments, as providing “clear and compelling scientific evidence” for tighter standards. Since the last particulate matter review, several new large-scale epidemiological studies provide powerful evidence that particulate matter is causing adverse health outcomes (such as early death, heart attacks, and respiratory stress) at locations and during time periods with concentrations at or below the level of the current standards. Given the weight of the evidence from new studies across scientific disciplines and consistent with the decision-making process that EPA and its science advisers have used for many years, the panel recommends a particulate matter standard between 8 µg/m3 and 10 µg/m3 for the annual PM2.5 standard (compared to the current standard of 12 µg/m3) and between 25 µg/m3 and 30 µg/m3 for the 24-hour standard (compared to the current standard of 35 µg/m3) to protect public health. These ranges are tighter than those recommended in EPA’s Draft Policy Assessment.
Newark and New Jersey officials continue to dissemble about statewide lead poisoning crisis – Earlier this month, the results of testing conducted in Newark, New Jersey’s public schools in August 2018 were released, showing that seven schools have lead-contaminated water. These results were released as the result of a public records request by WNYC/Gothamist; the city government of Newark did not post the results on its website, a violation of state rules. Lead is a deadly neurotoxin, which has especially harmful effects on children because it impairs neural development, which may impact learning, delay growth and cause hearing loss. There is no safe level of lead consumption, and the federal standard of 15 parts per billion, which is being used by Newark as a measure of whether water is safe to consume or not, is still a dangerously high amount, according to experts. Just last month, Newark’s Superintendent of Schools, Roger Leon, said in a local radio talk show interview that “we have information that is clearly indicating that the water sources that our students are being provided is safe for them to drink.” Kareem Adeem, the city’s Water Department Director, said in a town hall meeting earlier this month, “The schools [do] independent testing and they post that testing on their website. They don’t have lead in the schools.” This amounts to an admission that, for over a year, testing results showing that lead contamination is possibly poisoning children in their schools were suppressed by city officials. On October 2, Newark’s Democratic mayor Ras Baraka had the gall to defend the city’s management of the ongoing lead crisis, stating, “I will never concede that we allowed people to drink lead coming from the water without telling them.” He was joined on stage by health officials, including State Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Catherine McCabe, who praised Baraka’s response, wishing that other systems were “as responsive” as Newark. If Newark is to be categorized as “responsive” to its water crisis, then this paints a bleak picture for water contamination in the rest of the state and across the US.
A new pesticide is all the buzz – Bees’ fuzzy yellow bodies and hairy legs are custom-built for picking up pollen. Nothing can distribute the yellow powder more efficiently – something farmers that shell out for commercial beehives every growing season know all too well. And starting with this fall’s growing season, bees may be given some cargo to carry on their outbound journey to the blossoms: pesticides. On August 28, the EPA approved the first-ever bee-distributed organic pesticide for the US market – a fungus-fighting powder called Vectorite that contains the spores of a naturally occurring fungus called Clonostachys rosea (CR-7). CR-7 is completely harmless to its host plant and acts as a hostile competitor to other, less innocuous fungi. It has been approved for commercial growers of flowering crops like blueberries, strawberries, almonds, and tomatoes. Before bees buzz off to work, they trundle through a tray of powder placed by the hive exit. Then the bee just needs to do what it does best. Each time the bee lands on a flower, a little bit of the pesticide is knocked loose. Both bumblebees and honeybees are capable of spreading Vectorite up to 400 yards from their hive. Once it’s delivered by the bees, CR-7 quickly embeds itself within the plant, establishing a natural defense system against common fungal diseases including Botrytis cinereal (grey mold) and Sclerotinia sclerotiorum (white mold). If the spores of these or a number of other pathogens land on the plant, CR-7 blocks their development. Since bees are always on the lookout for newly blossomed flowers, they are more likely to deliver the fungicide earlier than traditional periodic spray methods, boosting its effectiveness.
Sorry – organic farming is actually worse for climate change – Organic practices can reduce climate pollution produced directly from farming – which would be fantastic if they didn’t also require more land to produce the same amount of food.Clearing additional grasslands or forests to grow enough food to make up for that difference would release far more greenhouse gas than the practices initially reduce, a new study in Nature Communications finds.Other recent research has also concluded that organic farming produces more climate pollution than conventional practices when the additional land required is taken into account. In the new paper, researchers at the UK’s Cranfield University took a broad look at the question by analyzing what would happen if all of England and Wales shifted entirely to these practices. The good news is it would cut the direct greenhouse-gas emissions from livestock by 5% and from growing crops by 20% per unit of production. The bad news: it would slash yields by around 40%, forcing hungry Britons to import more food from overseas. If half the land used to meet that spike in demand was converted from grasslands, which store carbon in plant tissues, roots, and soil, it would boost overall greenhouse-gas emissions by 21%. Among other things, organic farming avoids the use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically modified organisms, all of which can boost the amount of crops produced per acre. Instead, organic farmers rely on things like animal manure and compost, and practices such as crop rotation, which involves growing different plants throughout the year to improve soil health.
America’s Pile of Uneaten Bacon Is the Biggest in 48 Years -America is sitting on a mountain of uneaten bacon. More than 40 million pounds (18,000 metric tons) of pork bellies, the cut used for bacon making, were sitting in refrigerated warehouses as of Sept. 30, according to U.S. government data released Tuesday. That’s the most for the month since 1971.The overhang came after a build up in the American hog herd. Pork output surged over the summer months and through September, said Dennis Smith, senior account executive at Archer Financial Services Inc. Bellies have seen a magnified inventory increase because demand is mostly domestic, unlike cuts such as ham, for which overseas buying can help reduce reserves.Hog producers started building up their herds in anticipation of more demand for meat imports from China, where African swine fever has killed millions of pigs. The U.S. herd swelled to 77.7 million head. as of Sept. 1, a record for the month and the highest since 1943 considering all periods, the most recent U.S. Department of Agriculture data show. So far, that’s mostly led to an excess for U.S. supplies. But the glut could be short-lived if recent Chinese buying is any indication. Export sales of American pork have soared to weekly records, buoyed by purchases from the Asian country.
Is Eating Meat Worse Than Burning Oil?- Bad news for meat worshipers. Eating healthy isn’t just good for your body–it’s good for the environment, too, according to a series of new studies, suggesting that only vegetarians can save the planet. The fight against climate change is already polarizing enough without adding the meat-plant divide. But new studies insist that what we eat has quite a lot to do with climate change. It’s not just about food security or species extinction, either. Today’s food supply chain creates around 13.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents and 26 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A further 2.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (5 percent) are caused by nonfood agriculture and other drivers of deforestation. A study from 2017 found that if citizens in 28 high-income nations like the United States, Germany, and Japan actually followed the dietary recommendations of their respective governments, greenhouse gases related to the production of the food they eat would fall by 13 percent to 25 percent. But giving up meat is hard to do.According to the not-for-profit environmental research group World Resources Institute, humanity is not on track to meet Mission 2020, the parameters laid out to prevent catastrophic global warming and irreversible environmental damage.With the global population growing from 7 billion in 2010 to a projected ~10 billion in 2050, and income growth across the developing world, overall food demand is set to increase by more than 50 percent. Meanwhile, demand for delicious animal-based foods is set to increase by nearly 70 percent. With agriculture already using almost half of the world’s vegetated land, and agriculture and related land-use change generating one-quarter of our annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, what we eat has, perhaps, growing implications for topsoil, pollution, greenhouse gases, and deforestation.Deleting meat and animal products from the menu might be unthinkable for many people but sparing cows would significantly reduce negative effects on the environment. Meat, sadly enough, are apparently the worst type of food, because of the scale of resources that go into their production. Yes, meat may be a great source of protein, but its production is extremely energy-intensive.
Trump agriculture secretary says during Wisconsin visit that family-run dairy farms may not survive (AP) – President Donald Trump’s agriculture secretary said during a stop in Wisconsin that he doesn’t know if the family dairy farm can survive as the industry moves toward a factory farm model. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue told reporters Tuesday following an appearance at the World Dairy Expo in Madison that it’s getting harder for farmers to get by on milking smaller herds. “In America, the big get bigger and the small go out,” Perdue said. “I don’t think in America we, for any small business, we have a guaranteed income or guaranteed profitability.” Perdue’s visit comes as Wisconsin dairy farmers are wrestling with a host of problems, including declining milk prices, rising suicide rates, the transition to larger farms with hundreds or thousands of animals and Trump’s international trade wars. Wisconsin, which has long touted itself as America’s Dairyland, has lost 551 dairy farms in 2019 after losing 638 in 2018 and 465 in 2017, according to data from the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. The legislature’s finance committee voted unanimously last month to spend an additional $200,000 to help struggling farmers deal with depression and mental-health problems. Jerry Volenec, a fifth generation Wisconsin dairy farmer with 330 cows, left the Perdue event feeling discouraged about his future. “What I heard today from the secretary of agriculture is there’s no place for me,” Volenec told reporters. “Can I get some support from my state and federal government? I feel like we’re a benefit to society.” Getting bigger at the expense of smaller operations like his is “not a good way to go,” said Darin Von Ruden, president of Wisconsin Farmers Union and a third-generation dairy farmer who runs a 50-cow organic farm. “Do we want one corporation owning all the food in our country?” he said to reporters.
American Farming Runs on Exploitation – On Tuesday, Politico published a feature on the Department of Agriculture’s failure to prepare the nation’s farmers for climate change. Of the USDA’s $144 billion budget,Politico reported, just 0.3 percent is dedicated to helping farmers adapt to the increasingly volatile climate conditions.The devastating truth that permeated the piece – that the most powerful government in the world is actively turning a blind eye to those situated on the economic front lines of the encroaching disaster – prompts a number of questions. How has pervasive top-down climate denial persisted in the USDA for this long? Could Democrats in 2020 capitalize on this moment to retake the agriculture vote they so painfully bled over the last half-century? But there are other urgent questions one could also ask about modern American agriculture. While Politico’s piece offered an insightful analysis of the future of farmers, it focused on business owners. The viewpoint was that of the employers charged with balancing and capitalizing on their annual budgets, who are now worried because their politicians of choice continue to refuse to take proactive measures. As is typical in mainstream coverage of agriculture, there was not a single line about the effects on the workers and laborers that fill the fields, or how climate change will affect the places they hail from. As farming in the U.S. continues its decades-long descent into an industrialized system rife with inequality, Americans are still focusing on the American farmer of old. Here’s another question one could ask: When are conversations about American farming going to start worrying about the exploitative house of cards the entire agricultural industry currently teeters on?
House Unanimously Approves ‘Watershed’ Bill Making Animal Cruelty a Federal Crime – Republican and Democratic lawmakers have found something they can agree on: The U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill Tuesday to make animal cruelty a federal felony, CNN reported.Most animal cruelty laws in the U.S. are currently state laws, The New York Times explained. Federal laws only prohibit animal fighting and the creation and selling of videos depicting animal cruelty, according to CNN. But the Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act, or PACT Act, would criminalize the crushing, burning, drowning, suffocating, impaling or sexual abuse of animals at the federal level. Perpetrators could face felony convictions, fines and prison terms of up to seven years.The bill was introduced by a pair of aisle-crossing Florida Congressmen in January: Democrat Ted Deutch and Republican Vern Buchanan, CBS News reported.”Today’s vote is a significant milestone in the bipartisan quest to end animal abuse and protect our pets,” Deutch said in a written statement reported by CBS News. “This bill sends a clear message that our society does not accept cruelty against animals. We’ve received support from so many Americans from across the country and across the political spectrum. Animal rights activists have stood up for living things that do not have a voice.” Animal welfare groups celebrated the bill’s passage. “The watershed vote takes us one step closer to a federal anti-cruelty statute that would allow the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies to arrest and prosecute those who commit such unspeakable crimes against innocent animals,” Humane Society Legislative Fund President Sara Amundson and Humane Society Chief Executive Kitty Block wrote in a joint statement.
Chicago Ranked Most Rat-Infested City In America For Fifth Consecutive Time – Chicago is ‘officially’ the “Rattiest City” in the U.S., according to pest control service Orkin. For the fifth consecutive time, the pest control services provider places the Windy City at the top of its most rat-infested cities, with New York and Los Angeles taking second and third place, and San Francisco-Oakland, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia rounding out the top five Rattiest Cities. (see list of top 50 cities) The metro regions were ranked by the number of new rodent treatments performed from September 2018-2019.“Beyond structural damage, there are multiple health issues associated with rodents including food poisoning, rat-bite fever, hantavirus and even the bubonic plague. Rodents can easily spread diseases in a home or commercial site in a short period of time,” Chelle Hartzer, an Orkin entomologist added. Orkin isn’t the first to notice the city’s rodent problem, either. Last year, Chicago was dubbed the “rat capital of the U.S.” by apartment search service RentHop. It reportedly received more rat complaints than any other city last year – nearly 51,000 total. According to RentHop’s analysis, New York City came in second place, followed by Washington, D.C. and Boston.
Owl killings spur moral questions about human intervention (AP) – As he stood amid the thick old-growth forests in the coastal range of Oregon, Dave Wiens was nervous. Before he trained to shoot his first barred owl, he had never fired a gun. He eyed the big female owl, her feathers streaked brown and white, perched on a branch at just the right distance. Then he squeezed the trigger and the owl fell to the forest floor, adding to a running tally of more than 2,400 barred owls killed so far in a controversial experiment by the U.S. government to test whether the northern spotted owl’s rapid decline in the Pacific Northwest can be stopped by killing its aggressive East Coast cousin. “It’s a little distasteful, I think, to go out killing owls to save another owl species,” said Wiens, a biologist who still views each shooting as “gut-wrenching” as the first. “Nonetheless, I also feel like from a conservation standpoint, our back was up against the wall. We knew that barred owls were outcompeting spotted owls and their populations were going haywire.” The federal government has been trying for decades to save the northern spotted owl, a native bird that sparked an intense battle over logging across Washington, Oregon and California decades ago. After the owl was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1990, earning it a cover on Time Magazine, federal officials halted logging on millions of acres of old-growth forests on federal lands to protect the bird’s habitat. But the birds’ population continued to decline.Meanwhile, researchers, including Wiens, began documenting another threat – larger, more aggressive barred owls competing with spotted owls for food and space and displacing them in some areas.In almost all ways, the barred owl is the spotted owl’s worst enemy: They reproduce more often, have more babies per year and eat the same prey, like squirrels and wood rats. And they now outnumber spotted owls in many areas of the native bird’s historic range.
55 Elephants Have Died in 2 Months From Unprecedented Zimbabwe Drought, Wildlife Agency Says – The unprecedented drought that has caused a water crisis in Zimbabwe has now claimed the life of at least 55 elephants since September, according to a wildlife spokesman, as CNN reported. The deaths occurred in Zimbabwe’s largest national park, Hwange National Park, a game park. Some died while searching for water, others by residents of nearby communities where the elephants strayed in search of food, said Tinashe Farawo, spokesman for Zimbabwe’s Parks and Wild Life Management Authority said, asCNN reported. The game reserve has the country’s largest population of elephants with nearly 50,000. Investigations showed that at least 55 died from food and water shortages in the park, according to Reuters. Several of the deceased elephants were found within 50 meters of water pans, which suggests that traveled long distances and died just before reaching the water, according to the BBC. “The problem is real, the situation is dire,” said Farawo, as the AP reported. Farawo said that the park, which does not receive funding from the government, has been trying to drill watering holes, but it has run out of money to continue, as the BBC reported.The BBC also reported that the water shortage is not the only problem. The park has too many elephants, which has caused fierce competition for limited resources, massive destruction to the park’s vegetation and forced many elephants to stray into nearby communities. Officials say that elephants have killed more than 200 people in the last five years and 22 local villagers this year.”Hwange was meant for 15,000 elephants but at the moment we are talking of more than 50,000,” Farawo said, as the AFP reported.Hwange’s overpopulation problem stands in stark contrast to the rest of Africa where the ivory trade has decimated the number of elephants on the continent. Africa’s elephant numbers have fallen from near 415,000 to 111,000 in just the past decade, according to according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), as the AFP reported. Farawo said an elephant mauled a man to death after the villager tried to chase the animal, which stepped into his garden to drink water. “That’s why we are saying allow us to trade in these animals, and we can raise funds for their security and food. But the so-called conservationists condemn us,” said Farawo as CNN reported. However, that often shadowy practice, received criticism from wildlife experts who say young elephants have been torn from their families, traumatized and sent to unsuitable Chinese zoos, as the BBC reported.Critics have blamed the government for exacerbating the water crisis in the park. “The government has over the years been allowing mines to develop in Hwange and that’s reducing grazing land, and those operations have impact on water. Even polluting the water. So the government is squarely to blame for all this,”
Study Reveals 30% of All Species Swap for Other Species Every 10 Years – Life is reshuffling itself at an unsettling clip across Earth’s surface and in its oceans, a new study has found. The research, published Oct. 18 in the journal Science, drills into data from 239 studies that looked at changes in biodiversity over time. It reveals that almost 30 percent of all species are being swapped out for other species every 10 years. The sweeping hemorrhage of species across the planet continues to rattle scientists and conservationists. A recent report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services revealed that a million species or more could go extinct.But squaring that global trend with what’s happening at local levels has been difficult. At this level, research shows that the sheer number of species in many spots are holding steady or even going up. That’s led some scientists to believe that species richness, an oft-used measure of biodiversity that tabulates the number of species living in a given area, provides an incomplete understanding of how life on Earth is changing. “It is increasingly recognized that species richness alone cannot fully describe how biodiversity is changing,” Shane Blowes, the paper’s co-lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research in Halle-Jena-Leipzig, said in an email. “Species richness will continue to play an important role in our understanding of taxonomic diversity, but a more complete, nuanced picture of biodiversity change emerges when it is combined with other metrics.”
Ghost forests are visceral examples of the advance of climate change – As Matt Kirwan walks through Maryland’s Blackwater National Refuge, his rubber boots begin to squish. With each step the land beneath him turns from dry ground to increasingly soggy mud. The trees around him go from tall and full of leaves or needles to short, bare and pale white. Partway out, ankle deep in water, Kirwan stops. “At this point we’ve transitioned from being in the forest, to actually being in a full-fledged marsh,” explains the Virginia Institute of Marine Science ecologist. “This ground is now too salty and too wet to support living trees.”Kirwan is standing in the midst of what is known as a “ghost forest.” These swaths of dead, white, trees are created when salty water moves into forested areas, first slowing, and eventually halting, the growth of new trees. That means that when old trees die, there aren’t replacements. The first descriptions of ghost forests date back to about 1910. The phenomenon can now be seen all along the Atlantic seaboard of North America, from Louisiana up to southern Canada.Kirwan likens ghost forests to other drastic markers of environmental change. Similar to how a receding glacier leaves signs of where ice used to be, ghost forests represent where dry land used to be. “You can touch it and see it,” he says. “It’s just as real as a melting glacier.” And, according to Kirwan’s latest research, ghost forests are forming faster than ever. Rates of forest retreat, he found, are an average of about three times higher than before the Industrial Revolution – when human activity started generating the vast amounts of greenhouse-gas emissions that scientists link with the current climate crisis. One of the primary mechanisms for ghost-forest creation is sea-level rise, says Keryn Gedan, a professor at George Washington University in D.C., and Kirwan’s co-author on a recent article about the phenomena in the journalNature Climate Change. Higher waters reduce the elevation between land and sea, making it easier for salt-water to seep in to shoreline soils. And, trees, she says, “don’t like salt,” which ultimately leads to ghost-forests.
Amazon rainforest ‘close to irreversible tipping point’ – Soaring deforestation coupled with the destructive policies of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, could push the Amazon rainforest dangerously to an irreversible “tipping point” within two years, a prominent economist has said.After this point the rainforest would stop producing enough rain to sustain itself and start slowly degrading into a drier savannah, releasing billions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, which would exacerbate global heating and disrupt weather across South America. The warning came in a policy brief published this week by Monica de Bolle, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC. The report sparked controversy among climate scientists. Some believe the tipping point is still 15 to 20 years away, while others say the warning accurately reflects the danger that Bolsonaro and global heating pose to the Amazon’s survival. “It’s a stock, so like any stock you run it down, run it down – then suddenly you don’t have any more of it,” said de Bolle, whose brief also recommended solutions to the current crisis.Bolsonaro has vowed to develop the Amazon, and his government plans toallow mining on protected indigenous reserves. Amazon farmers support his attacks on environmental protection agencies. His business-friendly environment minister, Ricardo Salles, has met loggers and wildcat miners, while deforestation and Amazon fires have soared since he assumed office in January.The policy brief noted that Brazil’s space research institute, INPE, reported that deforestation in August was 222% higher than in August 2018. Maintaining the current rate of increase INPE reported between January and August this year would bring the Amazon “dangerously close to the estimated tipping point as soon as 2021 … beyond which the rainforest can no longer generate enough rain to sustain itself”, de Bolle wrote. De Bolle is also head of the Latin American studies programme at Johns Hopkins University and last month addressed a US Congress committee on preserving the Amazon. She called her prediction a “provocation”.“If Bolsonaro is serious about developing the Amazon without paying any attention to sustainability or maintaining the forest’s standing, these rates would happen within his mandate,” she said.
How the Trump admin plans to fast-track Tongass logging – The Trump administration’s proposal to ease logging restrictions in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest would use a fast-track process to make thousands of acres of old-growth forest newly available for clear-cutting. That approach would declare 165,000 acres of old-growth forest, as well as 20,000 acres of young growth, suitable for timber through an “administrative change” that provides limited opportunity for public comment. The Forest Service included the process in a proposed rule exempting the 16.9-million-acre Tongass from the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. Opponents from conservation and environmental groups say it raises questions about the legality of the proposal. But proponents of opening the Tongass to more timber production say the Forest Service is just reversing an earlier administrative move that went with the roadless rule. Removing the roadless rule, by extension, suggests areas previously considered unsuitable for timber should be dubbed suitable again, they said. Any timber harvest project would still go through the usual case-by-case Forest Service process, which includes environmental reviews and opportunities for public opinion. According to the roadless proposal, the Tongass forest supervisor would be directed to make an administrative change converting the “unsuitable” acres to “suitable” if they were made off-limits solely because of the roadless rule. That provision was also included in other roadless-rule alternatives the Forest Service considered.
Trump Admin Moves to End Protections for Endangered Fish Threatened by California’s Water Wars – The Trump administration is rolling back protections for endangered California fish species, a move long sought by a group of wealthy farmers that Interior Secretary David Bernhardt continued to lobby for months before he began working for the administration, The New York Times reported Tuesday. The new policy, released early this week by the Commerce and Interior Departments, would allow more water to be pumped from the San Francisco Bay Delta to irrigate farms. Scientists in the past have found this would harm the delta smelt and West Coast salmon species that swim in the delta, as well as the killer whales that feed on them. But the new “biological opinion” ruled that the fish would not be harmed by diverting more water to agriculture.”The servile Interior Department has hijacked and subverted the scientific process,” Noah Oppenheim, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, said in a statement reported by NPR. Bernhardt lobbied on behalf of Westlands Water District, a group representing around 1,000 large farmers in Central California, from 2011 to 2016, including pressing Congress to weaken Endangered Species Actprotections for the delta smelt, according to The New York Times. Four months after he was confirmed as Deputy Interior Secretary, he phoned the Interior official in charge of delta smelt protections and asked him to conduct a new biological opinion.President Donald Trump also signed a memo in 2018 asking for protections to be rolled back, The Los Angeles Times reported. But in July of 2019, scientists with the National Marine Fisheries Service found that pumping more water to farms would put endangered winter-run Chinook salmon, threatened spring-run Chinook salmon, threatened Central Valley Steelhead and endangered Southern Resident killer whales at risk for extinction.Instead of heeding this warning, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Pacific Southwest regional director Paul Souza, who was coordinating the reviews of salmon and smelt protections, discarded the document and put a new team together to write a new report. Two documents released this week then found that the increased pumping would not harm the salmon or the delta smelt.
FPL customers could be stuck paying $274 million for Hurricane Dorian – Florida Power & Light Co. could file for recovery of about $274 million in its expenses for restoring power related to early September’s Hurricane Dorian, which threatened South Florida over Labor Day weekend.How much of that customers could have to pay on their monthly electric bills was unclear Tuesday, as FPL didn’t respond to questions about the estimated surcharge. “This seems like an extraordinary amount when the hurricane did not even hit Florida,” said J.R. Kelly, Florida’s Public Counsel, the state’s consumer watchdog who has challenged FPL on storm recovery expenses in the past. Kelly noted that FPL hasn’t yet filed the storm expenses with the Florida Public Service Commission for review.Rebecca Kujawa, chief financial officer of FPL’s parent company NextEra Energy, noted on Tuesday’s third-quarter earnings conference call that FPL is authorized to recover storm restoration costs on an interim basis from customers through a surcharge. She said FPL was still in the accounting p rocess, but the current estimate was $274 million.
California governor vetos recycled content mandate –Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed AB 792, citing concerns about administrative burden for state regulators and a lack of accountability for plastics manufacturers.“While I support strong minimum recycled content standards, late amendments to this bill would result in a costly, burdensome process that undermines the worthy intent of this legislation,” Newsom wrote in aOct. 12 veto message. Newsom pledged to revisit the concept as part of broader changes to the struggling California Beverage Container Recycling Program. He did sign AB 54, a law intended to provide short-term relief to participating recyclers. This concludes an especially busy legislative session for California recycling issues. Dive Brief:
- The Circular Economy and Pollution Reduction Act (SB 54/AB 1080) never made it to a vote before California’s state legislature concluded its 2019 session early Saturday morning. The bills would have required manufacturers to reduce waste from single-use packaging by 75%, and also required such packaging to be recyclable or compostable, by 2030.
- Ongoing opposition by trade associations representing the manufacturing and materials sector were among the roadblocks, perCalMatters and the Los Angeles Times. Lead sponsors Sen. Ben Allen and Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez are expected to revive the legislation in January 2020.
- Lawmakers did send at least one high-profile recycling bill (AB 792, sponsored by Assemblyman Phil Ting) to Gov. Gavin Newsom before adjourning. If signed into law, this will require beverage containers to be made with 50% recycled content by 2030.
Coca-Cola Named Most Polluting Brand in Plastic Waste Audit – The Intercept – COCA-COLA WAS found for the second year in a row to be the most polluting brand in a global audit of plastic trash conducted by the Break Free From Plastic global movement. The giant soda company was responsible for more plastic litter than the next top three polluters combined.More than 72,000 volunteers fanned out onto beaches, paddled along waterways, and walked along streets near their offices and homes picking up plastic bottles, cups, wrappers, bags, and scraps for the one-day cleanup in September that was the basis for the audit. Sorting through the mounds of garbage, they found that the plastic represented 50 different types and could be traced back to almost 8,000 brands. Coke was responsible for 11,732 pieces of plastic litter found in 37 countries on four continents. After Coca-Cola, the next biggest contributors to the plastic pollution in the audit were Nestle, PepsiCo, Mondelez International – purveyor of snack brands like Oreo, Ritz, Nabisco, and Nutter Butter – and Unilever. More than half of the plastic had eroded to the point where it was impossible to discern who had produced it.Coke was the top source of plastic in Africa and Europe and the second largest source in Asia and South America. In North America, the company responsible for the most plastic found in the cleanups was Nestle, followed by the Solo Cup Company, owned by the Dart Container corporation, and Starbucks. Coca-Cola ranked fifth among the companies responsible for plastic waste in North America.Coca-Cola responded to questions about the brand audit with an emailed statement: “Any time our packaging ends up in our oceans – or anywhere that it doesn’t belong – is unacceptable to us. In partnership with others, we are working to address this critical global issue, both to help turn off the tap in terms of plastic waste entering our oceans and to help clean up the existing pollution.”
Leaked Audio Reveals How Coca-Cola Undermines Plastic Recycling Efforts – Intercept – FOR DECADES, COCA-COLA has burnished its public image as an environmentally caring company with donations to recycling nonprofits. Meanwhile, as one of the world’s most polluting brands, Coke has quietly fought efforts to hold the company accountable for plastic waste. Audio from a meeting of recycling leaders obtained by The Intercept reveals how the soda giant’s “green” philanthropy helped squelch what could have been an important tool in fighting the plastic crisis – and shines a light on the behind-the-scenes tactics beverage and plastics companies have quietly used for decades to evade responsibility for their waste. The meeting of the coalition group known as Atlanta Recycles took place in January at the Center for Hard to Recycle Materials in Atlanta’s south side. Among the topics on the agenda for the recycling experts was a grant coming to Atlanta as part of a multimillion-dollar campaign Coke was launching “to boost recycling rates and help inspire a grassroots movement.” But it quickly became clear that one possible avenue for boosting recycling rates – a bottle bill – was off the table. If they were truly interested in increasing the recycling rate, a bottle bill or container deposit law, which requires beverage companies to tack a charge onto the price of their drink to be refunded after it’s returned, would be well worth looking at. People are far more likely to return their bottles if there’s a financial incentive. States with bottle bills recycle about 60 percent of their bottles and cans, as opposed to 24 percent in other states. And states that have bottle bills also have an average of 40 percent less beverage container litter on their coasts, according to a 2018 study of the U.S. and Australia published in the journal Marine Policy.
PG&E, under siege after mass power shut-offs, stands its ground – PG&E Corp. admits it made big mistakes while cutting power to parts of more than 30 counties across California this month. But the perennially embattled San Francisco company does not regret shutting off hundreds of thousands of customer accounts. In fact, despite deepening public resentment and mounting scrutiny from politicians and regulators, PG&E has remained firm in its conviction that its most extreme wildfire-prevention measure to date was necessary.PG&E acknowledges that it communicated badly, most critically when its main website kept crashing, leaving customers scrambling for information about how they would be affected. The company has pledged to make a range of improvements to its power shut-off program, which is designed to prevent the kind of fires PG&E equipment started in 2017 and 2018.
PG&E says more potential power cuts could hit about 209,000 customers (Reuters) – PG&E Corp said on Monday about 209,000 customers could be hit by potential power cutoffs this week, less than two weeks after its most recent unprecedented shut-offs hit more than 730,000 homes and workplaces in northern California.The bankrupt Californian power producer said the latest cuts were intended to avoid its equipment sparking wildfires in hot weather.“This afternoon, the company began its 48-hour advance notifications to customers that it may be proactively turning power off for safety and conducting a Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) on late Wednesday evening,” it said.The power cutoffs may affect 15 California counties and are likely to be much smaller in scope than the Oct. 9-12 PSPS event, the company said.It activated its emergency operations on Sunday night because of a possible strong and dry offshore wind.The primary phase of weather risk was expected to last about 18 to 24 hours from Wednesday evening through the middle of Thursday, PG&E had said on Sunday.The company’s handling of recent power outages has been criticized for being too widespread, with insufficient communication with customers.The outages are the latest in a string of events for which PG&E has been widely criticized. The utility filed for bankruptcy in January, citing potential civil liabilities in excess of $30 billion from major wildfires linked to its transmission wires and other equipment.
Three men at PG&E decide when Californians go dark to stop fires – Since an unprecedented blackout plunged millions of Californians into darkness last week, residents and state officials have questioned how utility giant PG&E Corp. came to the decision to cut the lights. Now they have some answers. In a report filed with California utility regulators on Thursday, the San Francisco-based company said three vice presidents are responsible for deciding whether the power goes out to keep electrical lines from igniting blazes: Michael Lewis, senior vice president of electric operations; Sumeet Singh, vice president of asset and risk management; and Ahmad Ababneh, vice president of electric operations on major projects and programs. Two more vice presidents will join the bunch in 2020. PG&E said the utility has already provided the factors these officials take into account in deciding. In a September 2018 document, the company said it uses national fire danger ratings, National Weather Service warnings, humidity levels, temperature, terrain and local climate to weigh shutoffs. The utility said at the time that it expected to cut service once or twice a year. So far in 2019, it has shut power at least thrice. PG&E has been taking more extreme measures to keep its lines from sparking blazes since a series of catastrophic wildfires in 2017 and 2018 saddled the company with an estimated $30 billion in liabilities and forced it into bankruptcy. Last week’s blackout — the largest one the utility has ever orchestrated — has drawn outrage from politicians who said the outage was too extensive and that the company did a poor job of communicating it to customers. “There are crucial lessons to learn from this event, and we are committed to learning and doing a better job across the board,” PG&E Chief Executive Officer Bill Johnson said in a letter accompanying the report. PG&E also said in the filing that the company’s board of directors doesn’t directly influence shutoff decisions. But it noted that a board committee oversees the company’s wildfire safety plan — which includes shutoffs.
‘There are lives at stake’: PG&E criticized over blackouts to prevent California wildfires – California’s largest utility is under severe scrutiny by state regulators and customers overs its rolling blackouts that have left millions of people without power. Just two weeks after a massive power shut-off that the company acknowledged it mishandled, Pacific Gas & Electric announced on Wednesday that it will cut electricity to 179,000 customers in California in the face of a new wildfire threat. Southern California Edison, the state’s second-largest investor-owned utility, also warned on Wednesday of power outages to 308,000 customers. Utility equipment has been blamed in the last several years for some of California’s most destructive wildfires, and now the companies are using rolling blackouts to protect dry landscapes from power lines that could overheat and spark deadly fires. But the preemptive outages, or Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS), have come under deep criticism by those who argue that the blackouts threaten lives and local response efforts to fire emergencies, and shift responsibility away from PG&E. “This is a utility owned by shareholders that is shifting risk from its own corporate entity to the public,” said Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and founder of the Pacific Institute in Berkeley, California. “It’s shifting risk to individual homes and businesses that lose power and then can’t operate,” he said. “Are we now living in a society where fundamental basic services are cut off regularly to protect corporate interests? They can’t impose this burden on people.” The company says that customers can now expect rolling power outages for another 10 years as it upgrades its electrical systems in response to more extreme weather conditions in California, which are driven in part by climate change. PG&E has defended the outages as critical for the safety of its customers, but apologized for its handling of the blackout on Oct. 9-12, which shut off electricity for millions of people, some without warning.
PG&E Would Be Bought And Converted To Public-Owned Utility Under California Mayor’s Plan – San Jose, California is proposing that PG&E should be bought and converted into the country’s largest customer-owned utility amid mass-blackouts and heightened tempers over their role in the state’s wildfires, according to the Wall Street Journal. San Jose is the third largest city in California and PG&E’s largest customer. According to the Journal, Mayor Sam Liccardo hopes in the coming weeks to convince other cities to join the buyout proposal, which would change the utility’s investor-owned status to a nonprofit electric-and-gas cooperative. The buyout proposal amounts to a revolt by some of PG&E’s roughly 16 million customers as the company struggles to keep the lights on and provide basic services while preventing its aging electric equipment from sparking wildfires.San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said in an interview that the time has come for the people dependent on PG&E for essential services to propose a new direction. A cooperative, he said, would create a utility better able to meet customers’ needs because it would be owned by customers – and answerable to them. –Wall Street Journal In other words, Liccardo thinks a coalition of California officials can do it better. “This is a crisis begging for a better solution than what PG&E customers see being considered today,” Liccardo told the Journal, saying of the recent Venezuela-tier power shut-offs, “I’ve seen better organized riots.”
Over 1 Million Californians May Be Affected By Imminent Fire-Prevention Blackout – Californians will once again get to ‘enjoy’ a pre-industrial lifestyle this week as state utilities gear up for another round of intentional blackouts aimed at reducing the risk of fires, according to Bloomberg, while PG&E claims that over to 1 million residents may be impacted by the shutoffs. On Wednesday, PG&E will begin cutting power to approximately 179,000 California households in 17 fire-prone areas, beginning at 2pm. The outage includes Alpine, Amador, Butte, Calaveras, El Dorado, Kern, Lake, Mendocino, Napa, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, San Mateo Sierra, Sonoma, Tehama and Yuba counties. Every time the wind blows California will become Venezuela – zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 22, 2019Further south, Edison International’s Southern California utility announced that 162,276 customers may be affected by a similar blackout, while Sempra Energy may cut power to 24,000. The potential for an outage comes at a time of year when the landscape is dry and fires spark and spread easily. Northerly winds are expected to pick up Wednesday evening into Thursday morning in the hills of the East Bay and North Bay, delivering critical fire risk. Winds between 35 and 45 mph with some 55 mph gusts in localized areas are forecast for Sonoma and Napa counties. The National Weather Service has a Red Flag Warning in effect for the North Bay mountains, valleys and coast, noon Wednesday through 4 p.m. Thursday; the East Bay mountains and valleys, 3 p.m. Wednesday through 4 p.m. Thursday; and the Santa Cruz Mountains, 7 p.m. Wednesday through 4 p.m. Thursday. – SFgate PG&E had originally planned on cutting power to more than 209,000 households before dialing back the figure. They have provided the following website for those who may be impacted. Hopefully it doesn’t go down this time.
California’s Electric Vehicle Dream Is Turning Into A Nightmare — California might be blazing a trail with getting a large number of electric vehicles on the road, but the only trail California is currently blazing is the wildfire/PG&E fiasco that could once again plunge millions of Californians into the dark in the next wave of blackouts, expected today, the likes of which could sour investor confidence in purchasing a vehicle that relies on sketchy power sources. It’s windy in dry California, and apparently that’s enough to trigger another preemptive blackout for PG&E customers. For starters, PG&E will cut power to 179,000 residents on Wednesday.But it’s not just PG&E. Other utilities, too, such as Edison International and Sempra, are also expected to cut off power to hundreds of thousands of Californians who are in an area that is notoriously dry, with winds expected to combine with those dry conditions to create too much of a fire risk.The result? A blackout akin to the Venezuela 2019 blackouts that kept millions in the dark.The blackouts – which one might expect from a third-world or mismanaged nation such as Venezuela or even Pakistan, which leads the world in the number of annual blackouts – are life and death for some California residents, and the problem isn’t expected to be resolved anytime soon. But it also may mean life and death for California’s plan to encourage residents to adopt EVs. Unlike third-world blackouts, critical California operations such as medical facilities are all equipped with backup generators for times of outage. But residents who rely on electricity to power medical devices are at great risk. And EV owners may find themselves stranded.The PG&E purposeful blackouts are part of a wildfire safety program that the state-mandated after the wine country fires that overtook $9.4 billion in property. As for those electric vehicles that various California state agencies have earmarked $2.46 billion in public funds for – the state might do better to spend that money on some plan to keep the lights on. If that thought is not palatable enough for Californians, the state could earmark those funds as a way to keep those EVs charged.
California’s wildfire blackouts are a mess. Here are 3 key solutions. – Seemingly overnight, California has been forced to confront a grim new reality: Hundreds of thousands of its residents are regularly going to have their power cut off for days at a time so that their electric utilities can avoid starting wildfires.The problem – which I described in detail last week – is intrinsic to what the state is trying to do, namely deliver electricity to millions of residents in often mountainous, forested areas growing hotter and dryer every year. There is probably no way for utilities to do that without starting some fires and/or cutting off the power to avoid them. (Southern California Edison isthinking of cutting off power this week.)But California is doing just about everything to make the problem worse and handle it poorly. There are ways to make the grid less fire-prone, but they are expensive and slow California’s SB 901, passed late last year, requires all state utilities to submit wildfire mitigation plans. The overwhelming focus of those plans is on reducing wildfire risks around existing grid infrastructure. One strategy is grid hardening: replacing old transmission towers and power poles with new, stronger, more fire-resistant ones; replacing worn-out parts; updating power lines withsynchrophasors and other tech that can help grid operators detect and limit faults more quickly; insulating lines; and using remote and drone sensing to identify far-off problems quickly.Alongside grid hardening is fire safety. In 2007, San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) was blamed for wildfires in San Diego County; investigators found it hadn’t done proper vegetation management. It ultimately paid $2.4 billion to settle lawsuits related to those fires. As I explained in the last post, some of the factors that have increased wildfire risk are out of the hands of power utilities. Most notably, the risk is increased when Californians move to fire-prone areas, receive subsidized insurance, settle in communities with insufficient fire readiness and evacuation plans, build houses from materials vulnerable to fire, and surround those houses with flammable shrubs and trees. Most of those choices are now incentivized by state law and regulation; none are particularly discouraged. Unless it wants to become a perpetual rolling disaster, California will eventually have to address all parts of its land-use and housing crisis.
Sonoma County Wildfire Spreads 7,000 Acres in Less Than Five Hours — A fast-spreading wildfire erupted in California‘s Sonoma County Wednesday night, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. It had grown to 7,000 acres as of 2:12 a.m. Thursday, according to the Sonoma Lake Napa Unit of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE). As of Wednesday evening, around 276 people were under a mandatory evacuation order, and around 1,700 people were under an evacuation warning, The Press Democrat reported. “The fire is moving at a dangerous rate,” Geyserville Fire Protection District Capt. Joe Stewart said in a Facebook video reported by the Los Angeles Times. “If you are woken by emergency alerts, please heed those warnings and evacuate.” The so-called Kincade Fire ignited at around 9:30 p.m. near Burned Mountain and Kincade roads, The Mercury News reported. By 12:45 a.m. Thursday, it had spread to 400 acres. As of 2:12 a.m., it was still zero percent contained, according to CAL FIRE. The fire broke out a little more than six hours after utility Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) shut off power to around 27,830 customers in Sonoma County as part of an attempt to prevent its power lines from starting fires, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The Kincade Fire is burning “near the (shut-off) footprint and we are working to gather additional information,” PG&E spokeswoman Karly Hernandez told the San Francisco Chronicle. All told, the utility shut off power to 178,000 customers in 15 counties Wednesday after the National Weather Service (NWS) issued a red-flag warning for the windy, dry conditions that increase fire risk. This is thesecond time this month that PG&E has preemptively shut off power because of red-flag conditions. Those conditions were also expected to make the fire harder to fight. The NWS recorded a gust of 76 miles per hour near the blaze, The Press Democrat reported, and fire crews could not attack the fire from the air because of turbulence.
California Governor Declares Emergency In Counties Hit By Kincade And Tick Wildfires : NPR – California Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency in Sonoma and Los Angeles counties due to two large wildfires. The Kincade fire in the Bay Area has burned nearly 22,000 acres since it started Wednesday night; the Tick fire has burned 4,300 acres northwest of Los Angeles. Both fires were only 5 percent contained as of Friday morning local time, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The Kincade fire isn’t expected to be fully contained until next Thursday. It has already caused the Air Quality Index in San Francisco to shift from “good” to “moderate.” The National Weather Service is warning other Bay Area cities that air quality will continue to drop as smoke continues to move south. The fire has been aided by dry conditions and gusty winds – and firefighters say the narrow roads and steep terrain of northern Sonoma County have impeded their efforts to combat the blaze. The power utility Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. told regulators that part of a transmission tower broke near the area of the Kincade fire shortly before it began. The company shut down power to distribution lines in the area because of potential fire danger posed by those lines. PG&E says weather predictions didn’t reach the level that would have triggered a shutdown of the transmission lines.
Kincade Fire: PG&E transmission tower had broken wire near wildfire – Pacific Gas & Electric, California’s biggest utility, says a broken jumper wire was found on a transmission tower near where the raging Kincade Fire broke out two days ago in northern California. The utility said in a filing with state regulators that it registered an outage at the tower at 9:20 p.m. PT on Wednesday, only seven minutes before the fire erupted near the Sonoma County wine country town of Geyserville. The blaze, only 5% contained on Friday, quickly swelled to 34 square miles, burned 290 buildings and forced the evacuation of 2,000 people. Although PG&E had cut power on some lines in the area Wednesday afternoon because of concern over threatening weather, the utility said had kept the power flowing on that particular stretch of high-voltage transmission lines, which carry electricity from the power plant to various substations, because winds there had not triggered shutdown protocols. The power shutoffs were imposed after PG&E electrical equipment was blamed for several blazes in recent years that killed scores of people and burned thousands of homes.In its filing on the Kincade Fire, PG&E said a worker noted that a CAL FIRE team battling the blaze had taped off the area around one transmission tower. Fire workers directed PG&E to what appeared to be a broken jumper wire on the same tower. A jumper is the wire that carries the electrical current. PG&E CEO Bill Johnson said it was too soon to know if the faulty equipment ignited the fire. He said the tower had been inspected four times in the past two years and appeared to have been in excellent condition.
Biggest PG&E Shutoff Yet May Black Out 2.5 Million Californians – PG&E Corp. is preparing to cut power to an estimated 2.5 million Californians in what would be the state’s largest — and potentially longest — deliberate blackout ever. The bankrupt utility giant is warning the lights may go off in about 850,000 homes and businesses across Northern California — including parts of Oakland, Berkeley and other San Francisco Bay Area cities — as it tries to keep power lines from igniting wildfires during a wind storm. The shutoff would hit almost one-tenth of California’s population and spread to nearly 20% of the utility’s total customers, spanning 36 counties. The city of San Francisco is expected to be spared.Large swaths of Northern California may go dark for days amid strong winds that threaten to knock down power lines and ignite fires. The weekend wind storm “has the potential to be one of the strongest in the last several years,” PG&E meteorologist Scott Strenfel said. “We absolutely must be prepared for it.”It will be the third time this month that PG&E has resorted to mass blackouts to avoid wildfires. The San Francisco-based company has been taking more extreme measures since its equipment sparked blazes in 2017 and 2018, saddling it with an estimated $30 billion in liabilities and forcing it into bankruptcy. The recent widespread shutoffs, however, have led to a debate over how far California is willing to go to prevent fires during windstorms. Despite the power cuts, fires continue to burn.In Southern California, Edison International is warning that it may cut service to more than 132,000 customers. Further south in the San Diego area, Sempra Energy said it’s monitoring weather forecasts. PG&E said it expects to make a final call on the shutoffs at around 8 a.m. local time Saturday and lights would start going out at around 3 p.m. the same day. The blackout would begin in communities near Sacramento and spread within hours. Gusts were forecast to reach 80 miles (130 kilometers) an hour through Monday, meaning much of the region may be powerless for two days, if not longer.
California Blackout: Turning the Lights Off — Yves Smith – The adaptations to the “new normal” of elective and large-scala PG&E blackouts in California has only begun. The utility has warned it may impose its biggest blackout so far over this weekend due to high winds and continued bone-dry conditions. The first blackout hit about 2 million people; the one earlier this week, about 450,000, and this weekend’s could affect as many as the first but be of longer duration. It’s not just PG&E; SoCalEd turned out the lights for about 26,000 customers. NBC reports that a good rule of thumb is that a customer represents about 2.5 people, so call it 65,000. But the PG&E blackouts have been far and away the largest, and the utility has been in its customers’ faces by telling them to expect this sort of thing for as much as a decade. Given how well PG&E is managed, if the execs and shareholders don’t lose their spots in the bankruptcy, expect the “hardening” to take even longer.Hardware stores report that batteries and backup generators are sold out. And the rush to install backup generators is a climate change negative, since most run on diesel fuel.It is hard to see how individuals who rely on equipment, such as the injured or handicapped not being able to use elevators in their buildings, or homeowners with electrical septic tanks, get by. New York City had a dose of that in the aftermath of Sandy in the blackout areas. Some people were bringing food to the elderly and other mobility-restricted individuals. But that sort of ad hoc charity too often has gaps. People would walk uptown to get a coffee and charge their phones. That is going to look like a luxury in a long-lived blackout in California.The Wall Street Journal describes how businesses in blackout area have been hard hit. The ones that suffer the most are small grocers that don’t have generators. And for them, the cost of buying a generator ($100,000) or renting one ($20,000 per day) is prohibitive. Most small businesses are precarious. How long before they start folding? How long before that starts affecting employment, at least in local communities?Governor Gavin Newsom is looking mighty ineffective. Of course, he inherited a mess very long in the making, but he is still nominally the guy in charge. He proposed that PG&E pay small businesses $250 each for the outage. The gesture went over badly since $250 is bupkis compared to the losses. And PG&E gave the passive aggressive blowoff of saying that it appreciated the feedback. And PG&E is seen as positioning itself to oust Newsom.
Unprecedented movement detected on California earthquake fault capable of 8.0 temblor – A major California fault capable of producing a magnitude 8 earthquake has begun moving for the first time on record, a result of this year’s Ridgecrest earthquake sequence destabilizing nearby faults, Caltech scientists say in a new study released in the journal Science on Thursday.In the modern historical record, the 160-mile-long Garlock fault on the northern edge of the Mojave Desert has never been observed to produce either a strong earthquake or even to creep. But new satellite radar images now show that the fault has started to move, causing a bulging of land that can be viewed from space.“This is surprising, because we’ve never seen the Garlock fault do anything. Here, all of a sudden, it changed its behavior,” said the lead author of the study, Zachary Ross, assistant professor of geophysics at Caltech. “We don’t know what it means.” The creeping illustrates how the Ridgecrest quakes – the largest in Southern California in two decades – have destabilized this remote desert region of California between the state’s greatest mountain range, the Sierra Nevada, and its lowest point, Death Valley. It also punctures a persistent myth that circulates in California and beyond – that quakes like the Ridgecrest temblors are somehow a good thing that makes future quakes less likely. In fact, earthquakes make future earthquakes more likely. Most of the time, the follow-up quakes are smaller. But occasionally, they’re bigger.Not only has the Garlock fault begun to creep in one section, but there’s also been a substantial swarm of small earthquakes in another section of the fault, and two additional clusters of earthquakes elsewhere – one south of Owens Lake and the other in the Panamint Valley just west of Death Valley. Whether the destabilization will result in a major quake soon cannot be predicted. large quake on the Garlock fault has the potential to send strong shaking to the San Fernando Valley, Santa Clarita, Lancaster, Palmdale, Ventura, Oxnard, Bakersfield and Kern County, one of the nation’s most productive regions for agriculture and oil. Important military installations could also get strong shaking, such as Edwards Air Force Base, Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake and Fort Irwin National Training Center. The fault is crossed by two of Southern California’s most important supplies of imported water – the California and Los Angeles aqueducts – and critical roads like Interstate 5, state routes 14 and 58 and U.S. 395. A major quake on the Garlock fault could then, in turn, destabilize the San Andreas.
Illegal forest fires send another lethal haze over parts of Indonesia – After three weeks of improved air quality, the thick haze of smoke from deliberately lit forest fires, which began to spread across Indonesia in July, has returned to the province of South Sumatra. On October 14, the haze descended on the provincial capital of Palembang, causing the city’s Air Pollutant Index (API) to soar to an all-time high of 921. The return of the smog forced the closure of Palembang’s airport and most of its schools. The Sumatran provinces of Jambi and Riau continue to be severely affected by the deadly haze. The air quality in Jambi, where the blanket of toxic smoke has taken on an ominous orange glow in the sky, has been described by the Air Quality Monitoring System as “unhealthy” and “hazardous.” Indonesia’s Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) issued a warning on October 15 to Sumatran residents about more smoke on the way from revived forest fires. Spokesman Agus Wibowo said the agency has used weather satellites to detect 1,547 hotspots in a total of six provinces. The fires, intensified by the El Niño weather pattern, have so far destroyed more than 320,000 hectares of forest. The haze began in July this year when vast stretches of land on Sumatra and Borneo islands were burned. By August the haze had spread to Singapore and Malaysia, where the API reading registered in places at 223, or “very unhealthy.” The Malaysian government closed over 400 schools across the country and a heated diplomatic dispute with Indonesia ensued. Over the past two months, the widespread haze has engulfed Brunei, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines. This year’s fires are the worst on Indonesia’s record since the catastrophic haze of 2015. The Southeast Asian haze is a yearly occurrence which has steadily grown in intensity throughout the last two decades. The air pollution crisis is caused every dry season (from July to October) in the region by the industrial-scale slash-and-burn practices of palm oil companies in Indonesia. Every year the fires are lit in the provinces of South Sumatra, Riau, and West Kalimantan, the country’s central locations for palm oil and pulpwood plantations. Companies resort to these land clearing methods as a cheaper and faster alternative to the typical use of heavy construction equipment. Clearing land through the use of machinery and chemicals can cost up to $US200 per hectare, but fire costs only $US5 per hectare. Then, as the clearing takes place on the swampy peat forests of Sumatra and Borneo, the peat soil, which is acidic, deficient in nutrients, and often ridden with plant diseases, has to be made suitable for agriculture. With chemicals and fertilisers, the cost per hectare is $US2,800, but with fire, only $US140. Burned land can also be sold illegally at a higher price.
NOAA: Last Month Tied as Warmest September on Record Globally — In its global State of the Climate report issued Wednesday, NOAA reported that last month was tied with September 2015 as the warmest September on record in data going back to 1880. Other agencies agreed that last month was near the top, although their placements varied slightly. Minor differences in rankings can arise because of how the various agencies handle data-sparse regions such as the Arctic, where few surface weather stations exist.
- – NASA ranked last month as the second warmest September on record, just behind 2016 and ahead of 2015.
- – The Japan Meteorological Agency found last month to be slightly cooler than 2015 and warmer than 2016, making it the second warmest September on record globally.
- – The European Union’s Copernicus EU program placed last month as the warmest September on record in data extending back to 1979.
The bottom line is that last month was among the three warmest Septembers globally in 140 years of recordkeeping. As NOAA pointed out in a news release, “The 10 warmest Septembers have all occurred since 2005, with the last five years (2015-2019) being the five warmest Septembers on record.” Last month’s global warmth is especially noteworthy given the absence of an El Niño event, which normally acts to boost global temperatures by transferring large amounts of heat from ocean to atmosphere. One of the strongest El Niño events ever observed pushed global temperatures to record levels in 2015-16. For the year to date (January-September), NOAA ranks 2019 as the second warmest year on record, behind only the first nine months of 2016 – which, again, were heavily influenced by the intense El Niño of 2015-16. The most likely outcome by year’s end is that 2019 will be the second warmest full year on record, going back to 1880 (see embedded tweet below). The current warmth is right in line with ongoing long-term warming related to human-produced greenhouse gases. According to NOAA, the year-to-date global temperature is 1.69°F (0.94°C) above the 20th-century average of 57.5°F (14.2°C). Global temperatures are now running more than 1°C above the levels observed in preindustrial times of the 19th century – a flashing warning sign, given the IPCC’s special 2018 report on the myriad risks to the stability of global climate and ecosystems if sustained warming exceeds 1.5°C above preindustrial values.
Climate change making stronger El Ninos, study finds – Climate change is making stronger El Ninos, which change weather worldwide and heat up an already warming planet, a new study finds. Scientists examined 33 El Ninos – natural warming of equatorial Pacific that triggers weather extremes across the globe – since 1901. They found since the 1970s, El Ninos have been forming farther to the west in warmer waters, leading to stronger El Ninos in some cases.A powerful El Nino can trigger drought in some places, like Australia and India. And it can cause flooding in other areas like California. The Pacific gets more hurricanes during an El Nino and the Atlantic gets fewer. El Nino makes winters milder and wetter in the United States, which generally benefits from strong El Ninos. They’re devastating elsewhere. The 1997-98 event caused thousands of deaths from severe storms, heat waves, floods and drought, costing between $32 billion and $96 billion, according to a United Nations study . The shift for the origin of El Nino by hundreds of miles from the east of the International Dateline to the west of that point is important because the water to the west is naturally warmer, said study lead author Bin Wang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Hawaii.Before 1978, 12 of the 14 El Ninos formed in the east. After 1978, all 11 were more central or western, according a study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Researchers did not study La Ninas, the cooler flip side to El Nino.
Ocean acidification can cause mass extinctions, fossils reveal –Ocean acidification can cause the mass extinction of marine life, fossil evidence from 66m years ago has revealed.A key impact of today’s climate crisis is that seas are again getting more acidic, as they absorb carbon emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas. Scientists said the latest research is a warning that humanity is risking potential “ecological collapse” in the oceans, which produce half the oxygen we breathe.The researchers analysed small seashells in sediment laid down shortly after a giant meteorite hit the Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs and three-quarters of marine species. Chemical analysis of the shells showed a sharp drop in the pH of the ocean in the century to the millennium after the strike. The researchers found that the pH dropped by 0.25 pH units in the 100-1,000 years after the strike. It is possible that there was an even bigger drop in pH in the decade or two after the strike and the scientists are examining other sediments in even finer detail.Henehan said: “If 0.25 was enough to precipitate a mass extinction, we should be worried.” Researchers estimate that the pH of the ocean will drop by 0.4 pH units by the end of this century if carbon emissions are not stopped, or by 0.15 units if global temperature rise is limited to 2C. Henehan said: “We may think of [acidification] as something to worry about for our grandchildren. But if it truly does get to the same acidification as at the [meteorite strike] boundary, then you are talking about effects that will last for the lifetime of our species. It was hundreds of thousands of years before carbon cycling returned to normal.”
Melting Permafrost Imperils Arctic Residents – Der Spiegel — Kim Holmén reaches the end of the road, gets out of his car and walks the rest of the way. He trudges over rivulets of snowmelt that have turned the earth into mud that sticks to his boots. His companion shoulders a rifle that he’s brought along in case they run into any polar bears. Climate change has deprived the creatures of food, but that’s not what Holmén is most afraid of. He’s the director of the Norwegian Polar Institute on Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean off Norway’s northern coast. The danger Holmén is most concerned about lies directly beneath his feet. Holmén is an eccentric scientist who is deeply concerned about the Arctic climate. “It changes first, the most and the fastest, and that affects the entire world,” he says. Due to global warming, temperatures up here are rising twice as fast as the global average. Since 1971, the average temperature in Svalbard has jumped by 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit). In winter, it’s risen by as much as 7 degrees Celsius. For reference, if winter temperatures in Berlin were to rise that significantly, the German capital wouldn’t be 2 degrees Celsius in January, but 9. In other words, winter would suddenly feel more like spring. Svalbard is a group of rough, lonely islands located about halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, its landscape dominated by rugged mountains and millennia-old glaciers. Fewer than 2,500 people live here. It has a hospital, a science center and a few bars. When Holmén first arrived here some 30 years ago, the ground thawed to a maximum depth of 1 meter in the summer. Now the measurements show thaws of up to 1.7 meters. Similar things are happening in other parts of the Arctic as well.Holmén has studied polar climates his entire life — in Siberia, in Greenland and in far-off Antarctica and is well-versed in the problem presented by the thaw. Twenty-four percent of the land mass in the northern hemisphere has a more or less frozen soil, an area larger than all of Russia. That permafrost stores up to 1.6 billion tons of carbon in the form of dead trees, dead animals or withered grass — about twice as much carbon as is currently found in the atmosphere today. If this soil thaws, this matter will begin to decompose, releasing greenhouse gases. And if that happens on a large scale, climate change will take on a life of its own. The additional gases will accelerate the rise in global temperatures, which will further exacerbate thawing, which will release more gases. Scientists call such processes “feedbacks.” Holmén knows the ground is thawing. What he doesn’t know is whether this phenomenon has already reached its tipping point. There are indications that this could, in fact, be the case.
Soil in the Arctic Is Now Releasing More Carbon Dioxide Than 189 Countries -The Arctic is now releasing more carbon dioxide in the winter than it can absorb in the summer, according to a new report.Now that heat waves are occurring in the winter, and the Arctic is warming three times faster than the global average because of human activity, greenhouse gases that would have normally remained frozen in the ground are being released into the atmosphere, according to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.The study indicates that more than 1.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide are being released from Arctic soil annually because of warming temperatures – but plant growth in the region can only draw around 1.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the soil during warmer months. That means that an additional 600 million tons of CO2 are being released annually, which exceeds the CO2 levels of 189 countries. Globally, countries release around 42 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually, with China, the United States, India, Russia, Japan, and Germany accounting for nearly half of this total. The United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change estimates that no more than 420 billion tons of carbon dioxide can be released into the atmosphere in the years ahead if goals set under the Paris climate agreement are to be achieved. The global pact aims to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, otherwise catastrophic environmental changes could occur.
From Antarctica to the Oceans, Climate Change Damage Is About to Get a Lot Worse, IPCC Warns – As the planet warms, diverse ecosystems – from mountain glaciers to the icy Arctic to the oceans – are already seeing dangerous effects fromclimate change. Future warming will threaten food supplies, force the migration of countless species and dramatically change the icy regions of the world. The changes are coming. How much is up to us, scientists warn in a new report released Wednesday by the United Nations.The changes are happening faster than many scientists expected to see, and they’re often intricately connected, with cascading effects that can ripple through ecosystems.As global temperatures rise, time is running out. The cryosphere – areas of the planet that are frozen – is shrinking as glaciers and sea ice melt, snowpack declines and permafrost thaws. At the same time, oceans have absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat and about a quarter of the carbon dioxide from human activities, leading to greater acidification that harms shellfish and corals and lowers oxygen levels in the water. “The world’s oceans and cryosphere have been taking the heat for climate change for decades,” said Ko Barrett, vice chair of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which produced the report on climate change’s impact on the oceans and cryosphere. “The consequences for nature and humanity are sweeping and severe.”Just how severe the impacts will become – whether sea level rise stops at 1 to 2 feet by 2100 or continues to rise as high as 3.5 feet; whether the planet sees 20 times more marine heat waves or 50 times more – depends on how, and how quickly, humanity responds to the crisis, the report found. The report brought together 104 scientists from 36 countries with a variety of expertise. As they reviewed the existing research, the diverse group found interconnections and a magnitude of change that hadn’t been as clear before.
Scientists Show How Fossil Fuel Industry Deceived the Public About the Climate Crisis — An international group of scientists released a report today detailing how the fossil fuel industry actively campaigned to sow doubt about the climate crisis and what steps need to be taken to undo the damage, as the Los Angeles Times reported. The report may be particularly damaging for oil and gas giant ExxonMobil, which will head to court on Wednesday to defend itself against New York State’s allegations that it defrauded shareholders by downplaying the expected risks of climate change to its business. Scientistd from Harvard, George Mason University and the University of Bristol in the UK collaborated on the paper, America Misled: How the fossil fuel industry deliberately misled Americans about climate change. The researchers looked at more than a decade of peer-reviewed research to reach their findings. They issued the paper to inform policymakers, journalists and the public about “what the fossil fuel industry knew versus what they did, the arguments they used to seed doubt in the public, the techniques they used to create those arguments, and some strategies for combating them,” according to a University of Bristol statement. One of the examples that the study pins on ExxonMobil is a 2004 New York Times advertisement that read like an editorial. In the advertisement, the company used disinformation techniques, including questioning scientific consensus and calling for a “balanced” scientific approach to climate change, which gives undeserved credibility to skeptics of scientific consensus, according to the Los Angeles Times. The paper has five key takeaways, according to its press release:
- 1. Internal corporate documents show that the fossil fuel industry has known about human-caused climate change for decades. Its response was to actively arrange and fund denial and disinformation to suppress action and protect its status quo business operations.
- 2. As the scientific consensus on climate change emerged and strengthened, the industry and its political allies attacked the consensus and exaggerated the uncertainties.
- 3. The fossil fuel industry offered no consistent alternative explanation for why the climate was changing – the goal was merely to undermine support for action.
- 4. The strategy, tactics, infrastructure and rhetorical arguments and techniques used by fossil fuel interests to challenge the scientific evidence of climate change – including cherry picking, fake experts and conspiracy theories – come straight out of the tobacco industry’s playbook for delaying tobacco control.
- 5. Informing the public about how these arguments are deceptive not only begins to correct the misconceptions, but also will make it harder for future campaigns to use these misleading tactics to confuse the public.
ExxonMobil Is Still Bankrolling Climate Science Deniers – ExxonMobil says it believes “the risk of climate change is real,” and it is “committed to being part of the solution.” The largest investor-owned oil company in the world also says it supports a federal carbon tax and the Paris climate agreement.Then why, after all these years, is the company still financing advocacy groups, think tanks, and business associations that reject the reality and seriousness of the climate crisis, as well as members of Congress who deny the science and oppose efforts to rein in carbon emissions? According to the company’s latest grantmaking report, it gave $772,500to 10 such groups in 2018, which does not include its annual dues to trade groups such as the American Petroleum Institute, which opposes a carbon tax. In addition, ExxonMobil continued to promote gridlock directly on Capitol Hill. Two-thirds of the $1.65 million it spent on congressional election campaigns during the 2017-18 election cycle went to climate science deniers. Nearly half of ExxonMobil’s 2018 donations to nonprofit denier groups went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Another 30 percent went to the American Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan Institute, which have been ExxonMobil grantees for 20 years. All told, the company has spent some $37 million since 1998 on a network of denier organizations – a sorry record of support that ranks second only to Charles Koch and his brother, the late David Koch, owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries.
The new science fossil fuel companies fear -Like most analysts, Richard Heede started his work on climate change focused on what individual consumers could do to reduce their emissions. After all, it was the consumer who was “consuming” the product and actually releasing the emissions from the oil, gas or coal. But over time, he recognized there was a flaw in that approach: Individual consumers can make choices only among what’s already on the market – but who decided what was on the market? Other, larger forces had shaped an economy dependent on fossil fuels, he realized – companies who developed the markets for fossil fuels and influenced decisions to build the infrastructure that supported them. He asked himself: Shouldn’t the companies who profited from those decisions play a role in mitigating them? With world governments making little progress toward reducing emissions, perhaps pressuring the companies whose products were causing the harm might have more effect? By 2013, roughly a decade after Heede began his search, he had his answer: Just 90 companies had contributed nearly two-thirds of the world’s industrial emissions. He could even pinpoint the share of those emissions for which companies existing today are responsible. In effect, Heede had established a pillar of a new field of research, now known as attribution science. But it wasn’t just an academic exercise: It’s a weapon that climate campaigners are starting to wield to put fossil fuel companies on the hook for billions of dollars in damages. It’s a kind of end run around a political system they see as forced into gridlock by fossil fuel industry influence.
Supreme Court allows climate case targeting Big Oil to proceed –The city of Baltimore’s lawsuit against a group of 26 major oil companies over their role in climate change will proceed after the Supreme Court rejected the energy giants’ request for a stay on Tuesday. The oil companies had asked for the Supreme Court to intervene after a federal judge ruled that Baltimore’s lawsuit could proceed in state court. The companies had sought to move the litigation to federal court in order to avoid potentially expensive litigation. The group of companies includes BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell. Baltimore sued the energy giants last year, arguing that the companies are responsible for contributing to climate change and that the city is especially vulnerable to the resulting rise in sea level. The companies tried to get the case moved out of Maryland’s state court system and into federal district court. The district court denied the motion and the oil giants appealed to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. Citing multiple similar cases playing out in other states, the energy companies said that without a stay from the Supreme Court, they “would be unable to recover the cost and burdens of duplicative litigation.” The 4th Circuit will hear oral arguments in the appeal in December.
Investors detail Exxon’s misleading climate reports in New York trial – The second day of Exxon’s climate fraud trial kicked off with two witnesses for the attorney general’s office testifying Wednesday that the oil giant has been anything but clear about the way it assesses the risk posed to its business by climate change. Exxon failed to disclose that it used two different numbers to calculate climate risk, according to testimony by Natasha Lamb, director of research and shareholder engagement for Arjuna Capital and Michael Garland, assistant comptroller for corporate governance and responsible investment for the city of New York. Their testimony supports claims made by Attorney General Leticia James, who alleges that Exxon violated theMartin Act, her state’s powerful anti-fraud statute. James alleges Exxon committed fraud, deceiving investors by using one set of numbers to calculate climate risk to shareholders while it used different numbers to privately plan how to invest the company’s own funds. Exxon doesn’t deny it used different numbers, but says it used what it refers to as a proxy cost of carbon assumption to determine future energy demand and a separate number it refers to as a greenhouse gas cost to evaluate investments. It said it considers that normal business practice.The oil giant maintains it has made accurate disclosures about the two numbers to investors and says the AG’s office is “twisting the content of those disclosures” to make it appear as though it misled the public.Lamb and Garland both testified that during meetings held with Exxon between 2013 and 2016, company representatives misled them to believe that the oil giant used only one proxy cost of carbon when assessing how climate change would impact the future of its business. Like other companies, Exxon uses a proxy cost of carbon, or number to represent its best estimate, to determine what the cost of climate change could be in the future. In order to be useful, that number must be consistently applied and communicated to shareholders, something James’ office alleges Exxon failed to do.
Trump’s SEC ‘determined to leave public in the dark’ on climate change, Sierra Club alleges in lawsuit – The Sierra Club has filed a lawsuit challenging the Securities and Exchange Commission for its failure to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and disclose documents regarding what the environmental group called the agency’s “unprecedented rejections, on behalf of corporate polluters, of climate-related shareholder resolutions aimed at reducing harmful pollution, or adopting corporate sustainability and climate goals.” Climate resolutions introduced by shareholders for annual meetings of companies have risen in recent years, but the SEC’s rejection of these proposals using what is called no-action letter relief have also increased under Trump administration. The agency has allowed companies not to hold votes on at least 12 climate-related shareholder resolutions in the last 18 months, including one that, if passed, would have compelled Exxon Mobil to disclose emissions targets in line with the Paris Climate Agreement. Before that, a 2018 shareholder resolution planned at EOG Resources was blocked by company with the SEC’s approval, and the agency saying in its no-action letter that the resolution “seeks to micromanage the Company by probing too deeply into matters of a complex nature which shareholders, as a group, would not be a in a position to make an informed judgment.” The lawsuit states that was the first time the SEC issued a no-action letter on the issue of greenhouse gas emission targets. The details of that claim are important to understand, according to Heidi Welsh, executive director of the Sustainable Investments Institute. Walsh explained that a few earlier proposals that asked for “net-zero” climate goals had been blocked by the SEC on the grounds that they were too specific and would “micromanage” a company and therefore constitute “ordinary business”, which is the most commonly cited reason companies cite and use to block proposals. But Welsh said the EOG proposal was the first to be blocked which asked for greenhouse goals generally. “This proposal or very similar iterations of it had gone to votes more than 100 times previously, earning increasing levels of support from investors. What made the EOG no-action letter notable was that it marked a clear shift in the SEC staff’s interpretation of greenhouse gas goals proposals. The SEC staff now appears to think that if a proposal mentions goals and any sort of timeframe, it is too specific and may be excluded. This is definitely new.”
Dire Climate Change Warning in Report for Pentagon: US Military Could Collapse in 20 Years; Lack of Water, Domestic Disasters, Disease, Mass Migrations as Threats to Operations — Yves Smith – The Pentagon has long been concerned about the threats climate change pose to stability and how it will lead to conflicts due to mass migration and even more intense competition for scarce resources. In the early 2000s, the military warned that climate change could induce large-scale deaths and migrations out of low-lying areas such as Bangladesh due to storms and flooding. A recent look at the dangers climate change poses to US military operations, released over the summer by the Army War College, went virtually unnoticed despite offering “Apocalypse Near” scenarios a mere 20 years out. And it isn’t just that very bad things are in the offing; the report finds that “the Department of Defense (DoD) is precariously unprepared for the national security implications of climate change-induced global security challenges.” We found out about this document only as a result of an article in Vice flagged by resilc. We’ve embedded the document at the end of the post and strongly urge you to read it in full. Or if you want Cliff Notes versions, see The Center for Climate and Security or the Vice piece The report sees the lack of potable water as a serious limitation on US military operations, which it anticipates will be overtaxed due to destabilizing climate-change induced mass migrations abroad, combined with domestic Jackpot-level threats of an overtaxed, decrepit electrical grid; diseases; and drought and potential crop failures. Vice gives a good high-level recap: The report paints a frightening portrait of a country falling apart over the next 20 years due to the impacts of climate change on “natural systems such as oceans, lakes, rivers, ground water, reefs, and forests.” Current infrastructure in the US, the report says, is woefully underprepared: “Most of the critical infrastructures identified by the Department of Homeland Security are not built to withstand these altered conditions.” Some 80 percent of US agricultural exports and 78 percent of imports are water-borne. This means that episodes of flooding due to climate change could leave lasting damage to shipping infrastructure, posing “a major threat to US lives and communities, the US economy and global food security,” the report notes.
We cannot allow FERC to ignore our climate crisis | TheHill – As the agency responsible for permitting interstate natural gas pipelines and electric transmission, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is the gatekeeper of America’s transition to a carbon-free future – a future desperately needed, given the dire warnings the global scientific community has issued concerning climate change. Which is why it is so astonishing that the agency does not even consider the climate impacts of the projects that it approves. Right now, FERC has two unfilled seats, following the passing of former Chairman Kevin McIntyre and the departure of Obama nominee Cheryl LaFleur. But the Trump administration appears determined to transform the historically bipartisan commission into a partisan vehicle to serve the interests of fossil fuel companies. With the nomination of James Danly, FERC will be made up of three Republican appointees and an intentionally empty seat, bucking a decades-long trend of appointing Republican and Democratic commissioners together.Given this partisan reality, it is perhaps no surprise that FERC has begun to refuse to abide by binding judicial decrees requiring the agency to adequately assess the climate impacts of its permitting before approval. It goes without saying that the next FERC commissioner must be someone who will comply with these judicial directives.The courts are very clear. In its 2017 decision, Sierra Club v. FERC (Sabal Trail), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit stated that since downstream emissions are indirect effects of permitting, the commission must assess all reasonably foreseeable emissions and climate impacts resulting from its approval of expanded natural gas pipeline infrastructure. By refusing to review the effects of these emissions, FERC failed to adequately balance “the public benefits against the adverse effects” of natural gas pipelines – effectively putting a finger on the scale in favor of locking America into decades of fossil fuel dependence. Despite this, FERC continues to turn a blind eye to the looming climate crisis. This disregard was on display in recent litigation, dismissed on procedural grounds by the D.C. Circuit, brought about because FERC, in an order on a single project, introduced a sweeping new policy that would no longer evaluate greenhouse gas emissions upstream (that is, methane emissions from increased fracking facilitated by expanded pipeline capacity) or downstream (the combustion of natural gas for electric generation) from pipeline projects. That lawsuit explained thatFERC violated several federal laws by shirking its responsibility to consider emissions facilitated by expanded pipeline capacity during its environmental review, and that the agency decreed that its entire environmental review policy has changed – an action in clear violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires such significant policies to be changed through a transparent notice and comment rulemaking that includes public participation.
A UN Treaty Guarantees Youth Rights Everywhere on Earth – Except the U.S. — Fifteen kids from a dozen countries, including Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, recently brought a formal complaint to the United Nations. They’re arguing that climate change violates children’s rights as guaranteed by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a global agreement. By petitioning the UN on behalf of the world’s children, their action made history. But it’s not the first time that kids have turned to this international accord in pursuit of social change.As I explain in my book The Kids Are in Charge the Convention on the Rights of the Child isn’t just a legal document. It also sends kids an important message: that they matter, that their voices are important and that they deserve to be heard. When countries join this agreement, which took effect in 1990, they pledge to work toward aligning their own laws with its principles.The convention formally recognizes children as people with universal human rights and specific rights because of their age. It reflects a shift away from seeing children entirely as the possessions of their parents to treating them as individuals with equal rights and their own interests.Many countries have taken action to promote children’s rights and well-being based in part on its mandate. For example, South Africa recently became the 57th country to prohibit corporal punishment – any act intended to cause pain or discomfort, such as paddling and spanking – in all settings, including schools and homes.Corporal punishment remains legal in public schools in 19 American states and no state has outlawed the practice for parents.In Ireland, a 2012 constitutional amendment gave kids the right to be heard in custody hearings and other court proceedings. And in Nigeria, the federal government created a children’s parliament and incorporated the perspectives of minors when drafting that country’s Children’s Rights Act.President Bill Clinton signed this convention in 1995. But the U.S. Congress has never ratified this accord. In fact, the U.S. is the only country that has refused to embrace the world’s most-ratified human rights agreement. It has 196 signatories including all of the UN member states except the U.S. plus some UN observers and non-members, such as Palestine, the Holy See and the South Pacific territories of Cook Islands and Niue.
Miami Beach Declares Climate Emergency Inspired by Youth Action – Youth activists rallying in front of Miami Beach’s City Hall successfully campaigned for the coastal city to declare a climate emergency, the Miami Herald reported. The youth activists who demonstrated in front of Miami Beach’s City Hall last month as part of September’s global climate strike handed a climate emergency resolution to Chief Resilience Officer, Susy Torriente. Rather than see the declaration fall into the abyss, Torreinte handed it into the mayor’s office, which led to the resolution being introduced and passed unanimously, according to the Miami Herald. The resolution calls on Miami Beach to push the state and the rest of the country to issue an “emergency mobilization effort to restore a safe climate.” It makes Miami Beach the latest of the 1,143 jurisdictions in 22 countries to declare a climate emergency, including the United Kingdom, New York City, and even Pope Francis. While the climate emergency declaration does not offer specific policies, environmental activists say the language is important. “This is more of a first step and gives us a lot of leverage,” said John Paul Mejia, a 17-year-old Miami Beach Senior High School student and member of several Miami-based climate action groups, to the Miami Herald. “We need to shift the narrative to understand this as a crisis because that’s what it really is.”The city of Miami Beach will send copies of the declaration to the U.S. House of Representatives; the majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell; Florida Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott; all Florida U.S. representatives; Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez and all the commissioners; and every city and town in the county, according to the Miami Herald.
Massachusetts city considers requiring climate warnings on gasoline pumps – The city of Cambridge is aiming to become the first in Massachusetts – and perhaps the country – to require gas pumps to display warning labels describing the contribution fossil fuels make to climate change. The goal is to make consumers confront the impact of their choices, one fill-up at a time. “It’s just a reminder to consumers that small actions have larger consequences,” said Cambridge Vice Mayor Jan Devereux, who introduced the proposal to the City Council. Any such rule, however, is almost sure to attract lawsuits from oil interests citing First Amendment concerns about being forced to express city policy on private property, said Jamie Brooks, campaign manager for Think Beyond the Pump, the U.S.-based affiliate of Our Horizon, a Canadian nonprofit pushing for these warnings. The proposed labels would be akin to the warnings that appear on cigarette packages or wine bottles: They would state facts but let the consumer decide what action to take. Efforts to require these warnings first emerged five years ago in California. In 2014, the city of Berkeley approved plans for the labels; the governments of San Francisco and Santa Monica, as well as Seattle, Washington, also considered the idea.
Shippers shine torch in every corner as pressure to cut CO2 grows – (Reuters) – From higher-quality paint to state-of-the-art propellers: shipping companies are looking in every corner to reduce their carbon footprint as investor and activist pressure increases. The move comes as aviation and shipping firms face demands to slash emissions due to their reliance on oil. The two sectors are expected to account for 40% of global CO2 output by 2050 unless action is taken, the European Environment Agency says. International shipping accounts for 2.2% of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to the International Maritime Organization (IMO), more than aviation’s 2% share. The IMO, a United Nations agency, has said it aims to halve greenhouse gas emissions from 2008 levels by 2050. “Ships are long-life assets, typically up to 25 years, and if the industry is to meet the IMO target … then we need to accelerate the pace of change to greener vessels,” Stephen Fewster, Dutch bank ING’s global head of shipping, told Reuters. A private initiative launched this year also means leading banks will change how they look at financing modern, more fuel-efficient ships at a time when the sector faces a capital shortfall estimated to be at least $20 billion. While questions loom over whether shipping can meet its 2050 target without an overhaul of the types of cleaner fuel available and infrastructure, shipping firms are making individual efforts to change in a shake-up seen costing billions.
U.S. EPA chief hints vehicle CO2 limits will tighten – (Reuters) – The Trump administration’s chief environmental regulator said on Tuesday final U.S. vehicle carbon dioxide standards due out later this year could be more restrictive than current rules enacted by the Obama administration because they will eliminate certain loopholes. “In some of the out years, we’re actually more restrictive on CO2 emissions than the Obama proposal was” because the proposed Trump administration rules will eliminate “off ramps” that make it easier for automakers to comply, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler told reporters after a speech to the Detroit Economic Club. Wheeler said the final proposal will not be look “exactly like” the original one announced in August 2018 to freeze fuel efficiency standards at 2020 levels through 2026. He declined to offer more details. Work is continuing on revisions to the vehicle efficiency and emissions standards, which are overseen by EPA and the Department of Transportation, he said. On a separate point, Wheeler said the EPA is prepared to enact new regulations to curtail smog, and plans to set new standards next year for nitrogen oxide emissions from heavy trucks. The Trump administration is embroiled in a legal battle over automotive tailpipe emissions with the State of California and other states that want to keep Obama administration standards, which call for pushing the average fuel efficiency of new vehicles to 46.7 miles per gallon by 2026.
Air miles should be axed to deter frequent fliers, advises report – Air miles schemes should be axed as they encourage jet-setters to take extra flights in a bid to maintain “privileged traveller status”, according to a report commissioned by the government’s climate change advisers. An “escalating Air Miles Levy” should also be introduced to rein in the number of trips taken by frequent flyers without penalising those taking an annual holiday, with the income raised to be invested into low-carbon aviation technology. The recommendations, contained in a report commissioned by the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), are aimed at restricting the 15% of the UK population it said were responsible for taking 70% of flights.. By comparison, half the country does not fly at all in a given year. “The norm of unlimited flying being acceptable needs to be challenged and, as a very highly polluting luxury, it is suitable to taxation,” the report read. It adds that those who pollute most “could easily afford to pay more”. It is estimated there are hundreds of frequent flyer schemes operating worldwide and so the ban would likely affect millions of customers. “Introducing restrictions to ‘all-you-can-fly’ passes and loyalty schemes which offer air miles would remove incentives to excessive or stimulated flying,” the report states. Another policy suggestion calls on aviation companies to advertise their emissions in an easy-to-understand manner, for example as a proportion of an average annual household’s output, so that customers could make informed decisions. The report, by Dr Richard Carmichael of Imperial College London, goes beyond aviation policies to consider a range of other lifestyle changes the public must make to tackle the climate crisis. These include reduce meat and diary consumption, trading cars for bikes, and swapping gas boilers at home for electric alternatives. Surface transport accounts for the biggest proportion of a household’s carbon footprint at 34%, followed by diet (30%), home heating (21%) and aviation (12%). Regulations should be introduced to require all schools to offer pupils at least one plant-based meal option and food packaging should display a “traffic light” system indicating its carbon footprint. Domestic travel recommendations include dropping prices on intercity rail services to reduce demand for cars and planes, and re-opening disused rail lines. The report also recommends VAT on the installation of insulation and low-carbon heating systems be removed.
Trying to Plant a Trillion Trees Won’t Solve Anything – Only a monster would say no to this pitch: The best way to beat climate change – the warming of Earth caused by gases like carbon dioxide emitted by human industry, leading to rising sea levels, worsening fires and storms, drought, and disease – is simple. Plant a trillion trees. It’d be “one of the most effective carbon drawdowns to date,” said an article on the idea in the journal Science this past summer. And who doesn’t love trees, right? Except the math turned out to be a little shady. Last month a bunch of climate scientists and ecologists piled onto that tree research in the same journal, calling out numerous errors in the first team’s calculations. At about the same time, a whole other bunch of ecologists started pushing back on the agriculture-tech startup Indigo for pitching a similar land-based carbon sequestration strategy, the “Terraton Initiative,” paying farmers to use new methods that could suck down a trillion metric tons (a teraton) of carbon. These goals are critical and the ideals are noble – who doesn’t want to stop climate change? Pretty much everyone except the US government agrees on that. It’s the numbers that are the problem. Take the trees thing. The scientists who proposed it made careful maps of where trees grow today, all over the planet. They had a census of how many were there, combined with satellite data, all used to estimate how many potential trees could grow – and how much carbon those trees would slurp out of the atmosphere, a nontrivial calculation. There’s room for 0.9 billion hectares of new trees, they said – 2.2 billion acres of tree cover, which draws down 205 metric gigatons of carbon, or 225 billion tons in US non-metric. That’s in line with the goal of keeping warming at or below 1.5 degrees, per the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. World: saved! But the team forgot that 55 percent of all historically emitted carbon got absorbed by the oceans, not the land, and so underestimated the total amount of carbon by about one half. They overestimated carbon uptake by trees, and suggested putting trees where they’ve never been, or where they’d actually make the planet hotter (by darkening planetary albedo over icy, more reflective terrain). They didn’t take into account that the ecosystems where they wanted to plant trees already sequestered carbon. And so on. “We’re not talking about small errors here. We’re talking about a huge difference in the total amount of carbon you could sequester,” says Carla Staver, an ecologist at Yale University.
Put a price on carbon and watch emissions fall, BP’s Bob Dudley says – BP chief executive Bob Dudley has called for a “united effort to put a price on carbon,” claiming it would act faster at cutting CO2 emissions than any warning from politicians. Speaking at the One Young World conference in London on Wednesday, Dudley told an audience that “unless you put a price on something,” you can’t control how it’s consumed. “One of the things we talk most about doesn’t have a price,” he said. “There’s got to be a united effort to put a price on carbon, so when you click a switch on the wall for electricity you’re going to pay a higher price.” “Get a price on carbon and boy, the market will respond,” Dudley added. “That’s going to change the (emissions) situation more than 18-month or four-year outlooks from politicians.” The outgoing BP boss noted that while emissions were stagnating in Europe and North America, other parts of the world were falling behind in addressing the climate crisis. “There are big coal-fired power plants opening in other parts of the world and that’s the epicenter of the problem,” he said.According to researchers at the London School of Economics, a carbon price can be implemented in one of two ways. Governments can either add a levy to the distribution, sale or use of fossil fuels based on their carbon content, or use a quota system called cap-and-trade, which sets regional emissions allowances in advance and lets companies bid for “permits to pollute.”
These U.N. Climate Scientists Think They Can Halt Global Warming for $300 Billion. Here’s How – $300 billion. That’s the money needed to stop the rise in greenhouse gases and buy up to 20 years of time to fix global warming, according to United Nations climate scientists. It’s the gross domestic product of Chile, or the world’s military spending every 60 days.The sum is not to fund green technologies or finance a moonshot solution to emissions, but to use simple, age-old practices to lock millions of tons of carbon back into an overlooked and over-exploited resource: the soil.“We have lost the biological function of soils. We have got to reverse that,” said Barron J. Orr, lead scientist for the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. “If we do it, we are turning the land into the big part of the solution for climate change.”Rene Castro Salazar, an assistant director general at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, said that of the 2 billion hectares (almost 5 billion acres) of land around the world that has been degraded by misuse, overgrazing, deforestation and other largely human factors, 900 million hectares could be restored.Returning that land to pasture, food crops or trees would convert enough carbon into biomass to stabilize emissions of CO2, the biggest greenhouse gas, for 15-20 years, giving the world time to adopt carbon-neutral technologies.“With political will and investment of about $300 billion, it is doable,” Castro Salazar said. We would be “using the least-cost options we have, while waiting for the technologies in energy and transportation to mature and be fully available in the market. It will stabilize the atmospheric changes, the fight against climate change, for 15-20 years. We very much need that.” The heart of the idea is to tackle the growing problem of desertification – thedegradation of dry land to the point where it can support little life. At least a third of the world’s land has been degraded to some extent, directly affecting the lives of 2 billion people, said Eduardo Mansur, director of the land and water division at the FAO.
Siouxland ethanol industry reeling from oil refinery exemptions, trade wars – A scheduled maintenance shutdown of the Quad-County Corn Processors plant went on two weeks longer than originally planned during the first half of October. The reason? The margins for operating the corn-based ethanol plant were so tight that it didn’t make financial sense to restart it right away, said Quad-County CEO Delayne Johnson. What’s more, the plant had difficulty getting corn “at a price that makes sense for us to crush at full capacity,” he said. The farmers-owned plant on the outskirts of the small town of Galva is now in the process of rebooting. But some other biofuel plants in corn-rich Northwest Iowa have been less fortunate. In the face of challenging market conditions, two area plants — Siouxland Energy Cooperative in Sioux Center and Plymouth Energy in Merrill, Iowa — have temporarily shut down, while some others have cut production. Johnson said plants are making “smart decisions for their assets” by slashing or idling production. Like their counterparts across the country, ethanol producers throughout Siouxland are feeling the pinch of federal Renewable Fuel Standard waivers to oil refineries and trade policies that critics say have shut them out of international markets. “It’s been a tough 18 months for us,” Johnson said. In some cases, idling a plant is the only option left in a market where supply capacity outstrips demand, a situation ag officials blame largely on the Trump administration’s loose interpretation of the federal Renewable Fuel Standard and on continued trade hostilities with other countries. “The ethanol industry is able to produce about 17 billion gallons of ethanol per year; the domestic market, based on the way the EPA has been wrongly interpreting the Renewable Fuels Standard, is locking the domestic market down to, just a little over 14 billion gallons,” Johnson said. “And the trade tariffs with China and Brazil, at 70 percent and 40 percent, respectively, are locking us out of many of the large export markets. Iowa ethanol production is thought to have been cut by 40 to 50 percent in recent months in response to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency granting “small refinery exemptions” to oil refineries that claim a financial hardship caused by having to comply with the RFS.
Reynolds says Trump’s trying to please both oil and ethanol industries – Bloomberg is reporting the U.S.D.A. warned that the EPA’s draft proposal for how much ethanol and biodiesel is to be blended into fuel next year did not fulfill President Donald Trump’s deal with the biofuels industry, but the White House signed off on the plan anyway. Governor Kim Reynolds told reporters today that she’ll lobby the EPA to change rather than ask Trump to intervene. “I’m going to have to take him at his word. He told us that, you know, we had a deal and so ultimately, that’s part of his cabinet, but we’re also going to continue to put the pressure on EPA because right now they’re the ones doing the rule-making,” Reynolds said. “We’re working with industry and that’s the way that we’ll be able to hold them accountable.” On Monday, President Trump mentioned the biofuels deal during a cabinet meeting, saying “it is going to be terrific for small (oil) refiners.” Reynolds told reporters Trump is trying to please both the oil industry and farmers. “The president is trying to walk a fine line between the small refinery waivers and his commitment to Iowa farmers and to a robust Renewable Fuels Standard,” Reynolds said. “…He made a commitment to both.” Reynolds, though, said the EPA’s draft does not meet the terms of the deal Trump made to ensure the oil industry blends 15 billion gallons of ethanol and biodiesel into motor fuel to make up for the waivers granted over the past two years.
White House sides with EPA over USDA objections on biofuel – Administration officials warned that an Environmental Protection Agency plan for boosting biofuel-blending requirements violated the spirit of a deal brokered by President Donald Trump. The White House blessed it anyway. The back-and-forth is revealed in newly released documents from a White House review of the EPA’s biofuel proposal before it was publicly released Oct. 15. The documents, uploaded to a government regulatory docket late Monday, show the U.S. Department of Agriculture initially warned the plan was inconsistent with an earlier White House promise to ensure “more than 15 billion gallons” of conventional biofuel, such as corn-based ethanol, are required to be blended into the nation’s fuel supply beginning in 2020. The documents shed light on a last-minute fight between the EPA and the USDA that briefly delayed the proposal’s release. Ultimately, the EPA prevailed in the skirmish, and the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs signed off on the agency’s approach. Despite that White House intervention, Republican Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said at a weekly news conference Wednesday she’d continue to push for the rule to be changed and may appear at an Oct. 30 public hearing about the proposal set by the EPA in Ypsilanti, Mich. “We will file written comments and we’re still looking at the schedule to see if we can get there. I think I’ve made it pretty clear to the EPA what the agreement was and that will be reflected in the comments that we submit,” she said. “If I can, I will because I think it’s important. But I think they also understand where I stand on the issue.”
BIOFUELS: Advocates file suit over EPA refinery exemptions — A coalition of biofuel industry groups today challenged EPA’s decision to exempt 31 small refineries from renewable fuel blending requirements.
Chuck Schumer Proposes $454 Billion Plan to Swap Gas Guzzlers for Electric Vehicles – The Senate’s top Democrat, Charles Schumer of New York, proposed on Thursday a $454 billion 10-year plan to boost the sale of electric vehicles and reduce the number of gasoline-powered cars. His plan would offer cash vouchers to entice Americans to trade in their internal combustion engine car for a car that runs on hybrid, electric or hydrogen fuel cells, according to Reuters.Schumer said in a statement that his plan would offer rebates of $3,000 or more to individual buyers, to help transition nearly one-fourth of the U.S. car and light-truck fleet, or 63 million vehicles, to cleaner technology over the next decade, as Reuters reported.In an opinion piece in The New York Times, Schumer touted his plan for “its ability to unite the American environmental movement, the American labor movement and large automakers. It has already earned the support of climate groups like the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the League of Conservation Voters; labor unions like the United Automobile Workers and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers; and car manufacturers like Ford and General Motors.””We need to act urgently and ambitiously, which will require building diverse coalitions of political support,” Schumer said.His plan, if ever enacted, would take a significant chunk of carbon emissions out of the atmosphere. Automobiles are America’s largest producer of planet-warming emissions, according to The New York Times. To reduce vehicular emissions, the U.S. car fleet will need to be overhauled. In the U.S., nearly half of all car sales are SUVs, which over the last decade have emitted more greenhouse gases than planes and ships combined, according to recent research from International Energy Agency (IEA), as CBS News reported.
Surging SUV demand is canceling out the environmental benefit from electric cars – If worldwide demand for SUVs continues to grow at its current pace, the carbon emissions from these larger vehicles will outweigh the benefits from electric vehicles, a new study from the International Energy Agency found. The number of SUVs on the road around the world grew from 35 million in 2010 to over 200 million last year, representing 60% of the increase in the global car fleet over the 8-year period. The surge in popularity is having a big impact on the environment since SUVs are less fuel-efficient than their smaller counterparts. From 2010 – 2018, SUVs were the second-largest contributor to the global increase in carbon emissions behind the power sector, the study found. This places SUVs ahead of trucks and aviation in terms of carbon footprint. The study also found that 100% of the increase in demand for oil for passenger cars was driven by the popularity of larger vehicles. “If consumers’ appetite for SUVs continues to grow at a similar pace seen in the last decade, SUVs would add nearly 2 million barrels a day in global oil demand by 2040, offsetting the savings from nearly 150 million electric cars,” the researchers found. 48% of car sales in the United States last year were SUVs, which was the highest percentage worldwide, but other countries are catching up. Large cars can be seen as a status symbol, and sales are rising in countries like China and India where the middle class is growing. The shift towards bigger, less fuel-efficient cars is somewhat at odds with the auto market generally, where heavy R&D spending is fueling developments in energy-efficient vehicles. Given the advances in electric vehicles, as well as the knowledge that SUVs are less fuel-efficient, the researchers called the growing number of larger cars and the impact on global emissions “nothing short of surprising.”
Smithfield, Dominion Energy double investment in RNG venture – Smithfield Foods, Inc. and Dominion Energy are doubling their investment in renewable natural gas projects across the U.S. to $500 million through 2028. The additional investment will expand their Align Renewable Natural Gas joint venture beyond its initial projects in North Carolina, Virginia and Utah, to pursue new projects across the country, including in Arizona and California. Smithfield Foods and Dominion Energy formed Align RNG in November 2018, committing $250 million over 10 years to capture methane from Smithfield’s company-owned and contract hog farms and convert it into clean RNG. With the additional $250 million investment announced, the companies will produce enough RNG to power more than 70,000 homes and businesses by 2029. Align RNG’s first project in Milford, Utah, will be operational this year and will produce enough RNG to power more than 3,000 local homes and businesses at full capacity. “After researching ways to transform manure into renewable energy for nearly two decades, Smithfield, together with our partners, has developed a proven business model that can be expanded at scale across the country,” says Kenneth M. Sullivan, president and chief executive officer of Smithfield Foods. “Last year, we joined forces with Dominion Energy in a historic initiative to transform the future of sustainable energy and agriculture. This substantial extension of our ‘manure-to-energy’ efforts will help us achieve our ambitious goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 25% by 2025 across our entire supply chain, while creating additional value for local family farmers and providing communities with clean energy.” Methane is produced from a variety of natural sources, including hog manure, food waste and wastewater. When released into the atmosphere, methane emits approximately 25 times more greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. By capturing methane from farms, the development of RNG significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural operations. When fully implemented, the expanded partnership will prevent more than 2.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere, the same as taking more than 500,000 cars off the road or planting more than 40 million new trees.
Manure, trash and wastewater: U.S. utilities get dirty in climate fight – (Reuters) – Joey Airoso has always been proud of his cows, whose milk goes into the butter sold by national dairy company Land O’Lakes. Now he has something new to brag about: the vast amounts of gas produced by his 2,900-head herd is powering truck fleets, homes and factories across the state of California. “It’s pretty incredible if you think about it,” Airoso said during a recent tour of his 1,500-acre (607-hectare) farm, as a stream of watered-down manure flowed from cow sheds into a nearby pit. There the slurry releases methane that is captured and eventually piped into fueling stations and buildings. Airoso is tapping into a growing market among U.S. utilities for so-called renewable natural gas, or biomethane, that is being driven by the fight against climate change. For farmers, it is a way to get ahead of a wave of greenhouse gas regulation and make a bit of cash at the same time. And for utilities that buy or transport the gas, it is a way to respond to the increasing demands of customers and lawmakers to cut their reliance on fossil fuels. Renewable natural gas can come from manure, landfills or wastewater and is interchangeable with gas drilled out of the ground. It cuts greenhouse gas emissions by ensuring significant volumes of methane, that would have been produced anyway, never reach the atmosphere. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide when it escapes into the air unburned. Nationwide, more than a dozen utilities have started developing renewable natural gas production through partnerships with farmers, wastewater treatment plants and landfill operators, while nine have proposed price premiums for customers who choose it as a fuel, according to the American Gas Association. Renewable natural gas is currently between four and seven times more expensive to produce than fossil gas, a gap that its proponents hope will narrow as the fuel becomes more widely used.
Should countries and cities generate energy by burning trash? – Garbage from homes, schools and businesses around the globe amounted to some 2 billion metric tons (2.2 billion tons) in 2016, disproportionately discarded by people in North America, Europe and Central Asia. Some projections say that number will reach 3.4 billion metric tons (3.7 billion tons) in 2050. Meanwhile, global energy demand climbed 2.3% last year, the quickest pace in a decade. In that context, many countries see an alluring solution in technologies that turn trash into fuel. Worldwide, waste-to-energy plants comprise nearly six out of every 10 facilities processing garbage from homes, schools and businesses. Some 44% of the operating and soon-to-be-built facilities that process this stream of trash – called municipal solid waste (MSW) – are incinerators that burn the waste to make energy, according to the most recent United Nations report on the issue, published in 2015. About 11% use a process called gasification, with a much smaller chunk of facilities employing other methods such as pyrolysis and anaerobic digestion. For MSW, incineration is the most common form of waste-to-energy. Unlike old-fashioned incinerators, which simply burned waste to get rid of it, waste-to-energy facilities can produce electricity. Combined heat and power generation plants, more viable in colder climates, can also make heat, which insulated pipes then carry to warm buildings directly. Opponents of incineration argue that it’s far from a benign alternative to landfilling. Some claim that the practice can discourage recycling. The Zero Waste Hierarchy, created by the California-based Zero Waste International Alliance, considers incineration to be “unacceptable.” Other critics say that incinerators spew harmful pollutants including dioxins, furans and heavy metals, a process one observer likened to “creating landfills in the sky.” Modern incinerators can employ filtering and scrubbing technologies to limit pollution, and in the U.S. and Europe, some studies show that strict regulations have cut these pollutants. Regulations – and so emissions – vary from country to country, however. In China, for example, caps on incinerators’ dioxin emissions are similar to European benchmarks, even as fewer guidelinesregulate pollutants like hydrochloric acid and nitrogen oxide, Jiang Jianguo, an expert on waste disposal technology at the Tsinghua University School of Environment, told Yale Environment 360 in 2017. Incinerators also hold the potential to be a source of toxic ash.
Deposed regent accused of Ponzi scheme in Augusta waste-to-energy plan – Investors who sank $4.5 million into a waste-to-energy project in Augusta and $1.5 million in a solar project have filed a federal lawsuit accusing former University System of Georgia Regent Dean Alford of stealing their money in a racketeering scheme they contend is on par with organized crime. The lawsuit filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia – where several of the plaintiffs live – named Alford and his wife, Debbie Dlugolenski Alford, a former CEO of the Georgia Lottery; Allied Energy Services; and Augusta Waste to Energy. Also named are several Allied senior vice presidents, the investment advisers who help Alford pitch his investment plans, and Evans physician Jitendra Gandhi, who allegedly recruited within the plaintiffs’ community to invest in Allied projects. Alford was arrested and charged Oct. 3 with racketeering and criminal attempt to commit theft. He is accused of using fraudulent documents to sell business accounts receivable to a third party, Versant Funding, for $1.8 million. Versant is also named in the civil suit. Alford’s arrest warrant on the criminal charges said he sent Versant fictitious purchase agreements between Allied Energy and the University of Georgia, Georgia Military College, Synovus Financial Services and Inman Solar, a firm he worked with on several Augusta solar projects.
Column: Sustainability the new battleground for aluminium producers – Alcoa has just announced a five-year review of around 4.0 million tonnes of alumina capacity and 1.5 million tonnes of smelter capacity. Assets will be improved, curtailed, closed or sold. It’s not quite an annual event but Alcoa shareholders have been here many times before as the company keeps trying to move down the cost curve in the face of chronically depressed prices. On the London Metal Exchange (LME) three-month aluminium has ground steadily lower over the course of 2019 and at a current $1,720 per tonne is close to the near three-year low of $1,705 recorded earlier this month. This time around, however, Alcoa is throwing an extra ingredient into the cost-cutting mix – sustainability. The company “expects to be the lowest emitter of carbon dioxide among all global aluminum companies”. Going green is the new differentiator in the cut-throat business of making aluminium.
Global energy consumption driven by more electricity in residential, commercial buildings –Energy used in the buildings sector – which includes residential and commercial structures – accounted for 20% of global delivered energy consumption in 2018. In its International Energy Outlook 2019 (IEO2019) Reference case, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that global energy consumption in buildings will grow by 1.3% per year on average from 2018 to 2050. In countries that are not part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (non-OECD countries), EIA projects that energy consumed in buildings will grow by more than 2% per year, or about five times the rate of OECD countries. Electricity – the main energy source for lighting, space cooling, appliances, and equipment – is the fastest-growing energy source in residential and commercial buildings. EIA expects that rising population and standards of living in non-OECD countries will lead to an increase in the demand for electricity-consuming appliances and personal equipment. EIA expects that in the early 2020s, total electricity use in buildings in non-OECD countries will surpass electricity use in OECD countries. By 2050, buildings in non-OECD countries will collectively use about twice as much electricity as buildings in OECD countries. In the IEO2019 Reference case, electricity use by buildings in China is projected to increase more than any other country in absolute terms, but India will experience the fastest growth rate in buildings electricity use from 2018 to 2050. EIA expects that use of electricity by buildings in China will surpass that of the United States by 2030. By 2050, EIA expects China’s buildings will account for more than one-fifth of the electricity consumption in buildings worldwide. As the quality of life in emerging economies improves with urbanization, rising income, and access to electricity, EIA projects that electricity’s share of the total use of energy in buildings will nearly double in non-OECD countries, from 21% in 2018 to 38% in 2050. By contrast, electricity’s share of delivered energy consumption in OECD countries’ buildings will decrease from 24% to 21%.
Renewable capacity set for 50% growth over next few years, IEA says –Renewable power capacity is forecast to increase by 50% between 2019 and 2024, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said Monday.According to its “Renewables 2019″ market report, the increase will amount to 1,200 gigawatts (GW) and be driven by drops in cost and what the IEA described as “concerted government policy efforts.” In 2018, renewable capacity hit just over 2,500 GW. If the IEA’s forecast plays out, it would bring total renewable capacity to approximately 3,700 GW by 2024.Capacity refers to the maximum amount that installations can produce, not what they are currently generating.Solar photovoltaics (PV) are due to make up nearly 60% of the expected rise, with the onshore wind sector accounting for 25% and offshore wind responsible for 4%. Photovoltaic refers to a way of directly converting light from the sun into electricity.The IEA said that distributed solar PV – systems installed on commercial buildings, homes and in industry – would make up nearly half of the increase in the solar PV market.Overall, renewables’ share in worldwide power generation is seen growing from 26% now to 30% in 2024.“Renewables are already the world’s second largest source of electricity, but their deployment still needs to accelerate if we are to achieve long-term climate, air quality and energy access goals,” Fatih Birol, the IEA’s Executive Director, said in a statement issued Monday.
More Than Half of NextEra’s New Solar Projects Include Storage – New renewables projects continued to fuel growth at NextEra Energy in the third quarter of 2019. The company’s pipeline of renewables and storage projects has ballooned past 12 gigawatts, executives said during Tuesday’s earnings call. That capacity is up from 11.7 gigawatts in Q2 in part due to the addition of 747 megawatts of solar and 341 megawatts of storage. So far in 2019, more than half of the solar projects added will be paired with storage “as customers are increasingly interested in a near-firm low-cost renewable product,” CFO Rebecca Kujawa said. NextEra has long been the largest owner of U.S. wind farms, but its solar business has grown rapidly, and according to Wood Mackenzie it is now the world’s largest owner of solar capacity outside China. Meanwhile, NextEra continues to invest in natural gas – on Monday the company announced the signing of an agreement for the 50-mile Lowman pipeline in Alabama and discussed plans to acquire the Meade Pipeline Company. Though the renewable business is growing, Kujawa said the company feels “natural gas will play an important role in the country’s clean energy future.”
- The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Thursday gave its first two approvals to grid operator plans to implement its energy storage order.
- PJM Interconnection will implement most of its plan by Dec. 3, while participating in a separate proceeding to evaluate the fairness of its 10-hour duration requirements for storage to participate in its market. Southwest Power Pool (SPP) will implement its plan in nine months, as FERC regulators approved extra time for the grid operator to implement a new settlement management system.
- While the PJM and SPP plans largely complied with FERC’s Order 841, federal regulators created proceedings under section 206 of the Federal Power Act to address their minimum run-time requirement. In PJM’s 206 proceeding, regulators will investigate whether the 10-hour “run-time rules and procedures are unjust, unreasonable, unduly discriminatory or preferential as applied to capacity storage resources,” according to FERC staff.
FERC found the proposals from SPP and PJM would largely enable energy storage resources to provide their full range of services and be fairly compensated given their unique abilities. But questions remain about potential limits on the ability of storage resources to participate in those markets. Energy storage advocates have long criticized storage duration requirements made by grid operators, saying high-duration requirements were prohibitive of a lot of battery energy storage systems.”ESA is pleased to see FERC open a new proceeding on PJM’s proposed 10-hour duration requirement for qualifying energy storage capacity – which ESA has consistently stated is unjust and unreasonable,” Kelly Speakes-Backman, CEO of the Energy Storage Association, said in a statement. While regulators did not raise concerns with SPP’s minimum run-time requirements, FERC directed SPP and PJM to include such requirements in their tariffs. The market operators will have 45 days from the publication of the draft orders in the Federal Register to submit tariff provisions, as “such requirements affect rates, terms and conditions of service,” FERC staff said during the commission’s open meeting on Thursday.
October: Offshore wind to become a $1 trillion industry – IEA – Offshore wind power will expand impressively over the next two decades, boosting efforts to decarbonise energy systems and reduce air pollution as it becomes a growing part of electricity supply, according to an International Energy Agency report published today.Offshore Wind Outlook 2019 is the most comprehensive global study on the subject to date, combining the latest technology and market developments with a specially commissioned new geospatial analysis that maps out wind speed and quality along hundreds of thousands of kilometres of coastline around the world. The report is an excerpt from the flagship World Energy Outlook 2019, which will be published in full on 13 November.The IEA finds that global offshore wind capacity may increase 15-fold and attract around $1 trillion of cumulative investment by 2040. This is driven by falling costs, supportive government policies and some remarkable technological progress, such as larger turbines and floating foundations. That’s just the start – the IEA report finds that offshore wind technology has the potential to grow far more strongly with stepped-up support from policy makers.Europe has pioneered offshore wind technology, and the region is positioned to be the powerhouse of its future development. Today, offshore wind capacity in the European Union stands at almost 20 gigawatts. Under current policy settings, that is set to rise to nearly 130 gigawatts by 2040. However, if the European Union reaches its carbon-neutrality aims, offshore wind capacity would jump to around 180 gigawatts by 2040 and become the region’s largest single source of electricity.
IEA: Offshore Wind Outlook 2019: World Energy Outlook Special Report – Offshore wind is a rapidly maturing renewable energy technology that is poised to play an important role in future energy systems. In 2018, offshore wind provided a tiny fraction of global electricity supply, but it is set to expand strongly in the coming decades into a $1 trillion business. Turbines are growing in size and in terms of the power capacity they can provide, which in turn is delivering major performance and cost improvements for offshore wind farms.This new World Energy Outlook special report provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the global outlook for offshore wind, its contributions to electricity systems and its role in clean energy transitions. The report is a deep dive into offshore wind, giving a snapshot of where the market, technology and policies stand today – and mapping out how they may develop over the next two decades. It draws on a state-of-the-art geospatial analysis of the world’s offshore wind resources and explores the implications of the technology’s growth for global environmental goals and energy security. See also press release. Read key findings.
Small Adjustments to Wind Turbines Can Reduce Impacts on Birds, New Study Finds – Yale E360 – About 150,000 birds are affected by wind turbines every year in the United States, from collisions with equipment to changes in bird habitats due to wind disturbance, construction, and other factors, according to a recent study published in the journal Energy Science. But simple changes, such as building taller turbines with shorter blades, can help significantly reduce these impacts, the study found. The research analyzed data from 1,670 wind turbines and 86 bird observation routes across 36 states between 2008 to 2014. “We found that there was a negative impact of three birds lost for every turbine within 400 meters of a bird habitat,” Madhu Khanna, professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois and co-author of the new study, said in a statement. “The impact faded away as the distance increased.” Khanna and her colleagues suggested that turbines be placed outside a one-mile buffer zone around high-density bird habitats. Taller turbines with shorter blades also resulted in fewer bird deaths and other negative impacts. “No single technology is such that it is only beneficial and has no negative consequences,” Khanna said. “You can minimize the effect by making the recommended adjustments.” Previous studies have estimated that turbines affect as many as 573,000 birds in the U.S. every year. But the new research, using a larger data set over a longer period of time, resulted in a more conservative estimate of birds affected by wind turbines.
Facebook and Google: Utilities Must Take Lead on Grid Decarbonization – Utilities, not green-minded corporations, need to lead on decarbonizing the grid, said executives at Google and Facebook. Corporate procurement now ranks among the top drivers of large-scale U.S. renewables purchases. But it’s not the long-term answer to clean energy deployment, the technology executives said Thursday, speaking at an event hosted by the American Council on Renewable Energy. They’d rather see large market shifts than an emphasis on voluntary corporate renewables goals. Google and Facebook are currently the nation’s largest corporate buyers of renewable power in 2019 and also rank among the largest in the world. Facebook has announced seven U.S. deals so far in 2019, according to reporting by the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance (REBA), a group that helps companies buy clean energy. In September, Google unveiled plans for 1.6 gigawatts in global renewables procurements – which it claimed was the single-largest corporate renewables purchase ever – plus a $500,000 investment in REBA. But the technology companies admitted those types of commitments aren’t enough to fully decarbonize the grid or to encourage more of their peers to join up with their efforts.
Trump to nominate Dan Brouillette as Energy secretary – POLITICO – President Donald Trump said on Friday he will nominate Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette to replace Rick Perry in the agency’s top job. Brouillette’s appointment follows the same model that put Andrew Wheeler at the helm of the Environmental Protection Agency and David Bernhardt atop the Interior Department: All held the No. 2 positions at their agencies, had years of experience in Washington and advanced with the departures of more flamboyant predecessors. Brouillette, who led policy teams at financial services company USAA and Ford Motor Co., also served on the Louisiana State Mineral and Energy Board and worked as chief of staff for then-Energy and Commerce Chairman Billy Tauzin (R-La.) after a stint at the Energy Department. “There has been a consistent nomination of deputies who are deeply substantive and very well seasoned and respected in the processes of Washington and interagency processes, and lots of skills and awareness on the international scene, and regardless off policy differences,” said Jim Connaughton, who ran the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality under former President George W. Bush and met Brouillette at that time. [That’s] certainly true of David Bernhardt and Andy Wheeler. Dan Brouillette is in that same mold.“ As Perry’s deputy, Brouillette has been one of the administration’s point people in promoting U.S. LNG exports as a way for European countries to reduce their dependence on Russian gas. Brouillette has criticized the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project, and at a gas conference in Germany earlier this year, he referred to reliance on Russian gas as “a strategic liability.”
New Energy Secretary Fits Trend: Cabinet Dominated by Lobbyists – New York Times – President Trump likes to say that people in his political orbit come straight out of central casting, “tough hombres” from far beyond the Capital Beltway ready to roil the swamp.Increasingly, though, his cabinet is full of lobbyists.On Friday came the latest lobbyist elevation. Out went Energy Secretary Rick Perry, the genial former governor of Texas and onetime Dancing with the Stars contestant. In came his deputy, Dan Brouillette, who spent much of his career as a senior vice president of the United Services Automobile Association, a financial services company, and at the Ford Motor Company.Mr. Trump called him “a total professional,” in a staff change by Tweet: “Dan’s experience in the sector is unparalleled,” the president said. The pattern holds throughout the agencies trusted to provide for the common defense, promote clean air and water, care for public lands and waters, and safeguard energy supplies and nuclear weapons. Mr. Trump, who campaigned for president on the oft-repeated pledge to “drain the swamp,” initially favored charismatic former politicians with a flair for the dramatic, like Mr. Perry; or former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, a former member of the Navy SEALs who arrived to work on horseback; his first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, a bellicose Oklahoma attorney general; or his first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, a former Marine Corps general whom Mr. Trump introduced as “Mad Dog.” All are gone, replaced by lobbyists – less camera-ready but more familiar with the inner workings of their agencies, if only because they spent years trying to influence them. “Trump’s rhetoric about draining the swamp, I don’t think anyone really took seriously,” A ProPublica and Columbia Journalism Investigations analysis this week found Mr. Trump brought in 281 former lobbyists since the start of the administration. His cabinet now includes a former coal lobbyist running the Environmental Protection Agency, a former oil and gas lobbyist in charge of the Department of Interior,a top lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon leading the Defense Department – and, if he is confirmed, an automobile lobbyist at the Energy Department.
Inefficient coal plant scheduling cost ratepayers $3.5B from 2015 to 2017, report says –Regulated utilities cost ratepayers over $3.5 billion from 2015 to 2017 through uneconomic coal practices, according to a report released Tuesday from the Sierra Club.Vertically-integrated utilities consistently operated coal units based on their own scheduling rather than relying on market signals to determine when running that plant would be most economic, the report found. The practice, known as self-scheduling, became common when there were fewer cost-effective alternative resources, but now hinders the ability of other resources, wind and solar, to compete in power markets, research has previously found.Without self-scheduling, coal-powered generation would have dropped 10% and the median market price would have risen 30% or $7.70/MWh in the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) from 2015 to 2017, according to modeling scenarios run for the report by Synapse Energy Economics. Money is lost under self-scheduling when market prices drop below the cost of operations – meaning the cost to produce coal power is more expensive than the revenue the generated electricity would make. But self-scheduling is sometimes necessary to minimize the cost of completely powering off a facility.Price fluctuations often happen seasonally. For example, Duke Energy’s Gibson 5 unit in Indiana was operating just below market prices in the latter half of 2016, generating $8.6 million in net energy revenue over that time period. But in January through March as well as in May, market prices dropped below production prices and the unit lost an estimated $5.3 million in net energy revenue over those months, according to the report. For other units, the practice is much more severe. Wisconsin Power and Light’s Edgewater Unit 5 lost $8.3 million in net energy market revenues in 2016, according to the report, after its $26.2/MWh production costs remained above median market prices every month of that year. Wisconsin Power and Light was not immediately able to respond to Utility Dive’s request for comment.
Ky. Utility Regulators Weigh In On Trump Energy Plan At Behest Of Coal Lobby -Coal lobbyists have enlisted the help of Kentucky state utility regulators in asking federal officials to weigh in on a Trump administration plan to bail out coal-fired power plants.The Kentucky Public Service Commission has joined five other states in writing letters to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as part of a campaign orchestrated by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. The letters were first reported by Bloomberg.The Kentucky letter sent last month asks federal authorities to make a decision on the Trump administration’s plan, but doesn’t take a firm stance on the plan itself. A commission spokesman said the timing of the letter may have been influenced by the coal industry lobby, but the content of the letter was drafted in-house.“What that letter simply states is: make a decision because it’s important to have some sort of regulatory certainty,” said Andrew Melnykovych, Kentucky PSC spokesman.Consumer advocates with the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog group, say the letters call the impartiality of regulators into question. They say the letters from state regulators are an effort to pass off the coal industry’s words as the regulators’ own without disclosing where the ideas originated. Letters signed by utility regulators in Montana, Tennessee and Alabama used the exact same language as suggested by the coal lobbying group, according to records obtained by Joe Smyth, a spokesman for the Energy and Policy Institute. Other states, including West Virginia and Wyoming sent similar letters.
Blackjewel Miners Get More Of Their Pay As Labor Dept. Acts Against Bankrupt Company – Coal miners who went without pay when mining company Blackjewel declared bankruptcy this June are one step closer to receiving lost wages. The checks come weeks after some of the miners ended a long-running protest, and months after the federal Department of Labor first intervened to allege the company violated labor laws in the month before it folded. Rumors of a deal circulated early this month, and in consent orders filed in U.S. district courts in Kentucky and Virginia, Blackjewel committed to pay more than $5 million to miners. The bankruptcy drew widespread attention this summer when a group of Blackjewel miners blocked a train full of coal to protest unpaid wages. The protest lasted 59 days and ended after the last remaining miners found work or had to return to other obligations According to a press release from Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, more than 600 coal miners from Kentucky’s Black Mountain and Lone Mountain mines will receive pay following agreements between the coal company and the Department of Labor. “Getting this check, it’s going to pay off some of the bills we owe, and it’s going to get us started when we start driving.”
Coal ash found in mystery dust samples in Anderson County – Testing by the Tennessee Valley Authority and a state regulatory agency reveals at least some of the mystery dust that had been falling from the sky in neighborhoods in Anderson County for weeks in late summer and early fall is a mixture of dirt and small amounts of coal ash. Eight of 13 samples of the mystery dust collected by TVA tested positive for coal ash. One of six samples tested at the behest of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation also tested positive for the toxic substance. An analysis of the report submitted to TDEC by Microtrace, which conducts tests on substances, reveals samples from the dust polluting the air – and winding up on cars, driveways, mailboxes and homes – was mostly sandy soil typical of construction or industrial sites, but also contained small amounts of coal ash. Coal ash is a broad term for the waste products produced by coal-fired power plants. It is a toxic stew of chemicals, heavy metals and radioactive materials that can be hazardous when inhaled or ingested, according to the EPA and TVA’s own internal records. TVA produces 1,500 tons of coal ash daily at its Bull Run Fossil Plant in the Claxton community and stores millions of tons of it – both wet and dry – at the plant. TDEC is tasked with regulating TVA’s handling of coal ash. When dozens of residents within a mile of the plant began in early September to complain of a mysterious dust in the air, TVA denied in a statement to Knox News that Bull Run was the source. But when residents asked TDEC to investigate, the regulatory agency turned to TVA to take samples and test them. Leo York was among the residents who cried foul. TDEC reversed course and took its own samples, including some from his property in mid-September. “They said it would be two weeks (for results),” York told Knox News. “It’s been four.”
Report: Closing Coal Plants Would Save Indiana Customers Money, Reduce Pollution –The faster Indiana can transition from coal to renewable energy sources, the better for Indiana customers. That’s the takeaway from a new report prepared for the 21st Century Energy Policy Development Task Force charged with creating a statewide energy plan. Applied Economics Clinic researcher Bryndis Woods says more than half of Indiana’s coal plants are 40 years old or more and will need expensive repairs in the next 30 years.“Many of these costs of repairs and updates of these coal plants, those get passed through to customers,” she says.Some utilities around the country are replacing coal with natural gas until renewable technologies improve. But the report shows that would cost Indiana customers $12 billion more in the next 30 years than just switching to renewables and it would put out an extra billion tons of carbon dioxide. “Using gas as a transition or a bridge, it doesn’t bear out what the benefit of that would be,” Woods says. Though the report didn’t look into the reliability of renewable energy, she says several utilities – like NIPSCO in northern Indiana – plan to rely on battery storage. AEC’s analysis shows that moving to all renewables in a decade, instead of waiting until 2040, could save Indiana customers up to $10 billion.
The Best Thing About The Death Of Coal — This isn’t another tired story about how kicking the coal habit will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That would be like kicking a dead horse.Instead, there is a massive new benefit to ditching the dirty: Doing so will free up billions of gallons of water.If all coal-fired power plants in the U.S. were converted to natural gas, the annual water savings could reach 12,250 billion gallons, or 260 percent of current annual U.S. industrial water use, according to a new study from Duke University. Arguably, ditching coal could make up for all the water that fracking is sucking down in the shale patch, so it could take the pressure off that controversial method of extracting oil.At the same time, coal can largely blame its own demise on this hydraulic fracking boom that has led to abundant natural gas supplies. Natural gas has surpassed coal as the top power generation source as of 2015.In 2018, natural gas accounted for 35.1 percent of the U.S. electricity generation mix, while coal had a 27.4 percent share.Renewables, especially wind and utility-scale solar, have also gained traction in recent years, grabbing additional share from coal in U.S. electricity generation. If these trends hold until 2030, the U.S. would save some 483 billion cubic meters of water each year by 2030, which may help take some of the heat off of fracking, where water use has soared over the past decade.
We Need a Just Transition – Because We Should Abandon Coal, Not Coal Workers — The coal industry is dying. But we can’t allow the communities that have been dependent on coal to die along with it. Even if clean energy champions, environmentalists, and climate activists weren’t working together to end the burning of coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels would still be on its way out. The free market is seeing to that. As the cost of renewables continues to fall and the production of cheap natural gas continues to rise, coal has lost whatever competitive advantage it once enjoyed over other energy sources. By next year, coal consumption in our country’s power sector is expected to drop to its lowest level since 1978. That would represent a decline of 27 percent since 2016. The nation’s older, smaller coal plants have been disappearing for more than a decade; now, even the newer, larger ones are being retired at a rapid clip. On the one hand, that’s to be celebrated: Every coal-fired power plant that goes offline, be it large or small, means fewer pollutants poisoning our lungs and water and fewer greenhouse gases warming the planet. But on the other hand, there is cause for real concern. Whenever a coal-fired power plant or a coal mine shuts down, jobs are lost and workers, their families, and their entire communities suffer. To address these unfortunate consequences, organizations and governments pushing for a coal phaseout have begun to emphasize the importance of establishing a “just transition” for those who have been, or will be, most affected by these closures. The still-young concept is deliberately amorphous, since each community’s needs will differ from the next. But however the transition manifests, the goal is the same: ensuring that no one gets left behind as we shift from one energy economy to another, and that everybody who wants one has a role to play in what’s to come.
Bob Murray bashes FERC, natural gas at Chatterjee’s forum — – Coal magnate Bob Murray took aim yesterday at the natural gas industry for providing what he said was false hope to evolving energy markets as the nation’s coal-fired power plant fleet continues to shrink.
Ex-coal executive and ex-prisoner Don Blankenship making presidential bid (AP) – Former coal executive and ex-federal prisoner Don Blankenship says he’ll seek the Constitution Party’s presidential nomination next year. West Virginia Constitution Party chairman Jeffrey-Frank Jarrell says Blankenship made the announcement Saturday during the party’s national committee meeting in Pittsburgh. Blankenship finished third in the 2018 Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat held by West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin. Blankenship’s general election bid to run as the Constitution Party’s nominee was then blocked. The secretary of state cited the state’s “sore loser” law prohibiting major-party primary candidates who lose from switching to a minor party. Blankenship is the ex-CEO of Massey Energy, which owned a West Virginia mine where a 2010 explosion killed 29 workers. He spent a year in federal prison for misdemeanor safety violations related to the explosion.
This Governor Still Guides His Billion-Dollar Business Empire, Even Though He Said He Wouldn’t – ProPublica – Last fall, Gov. Jim Justice called reporters to his office in the West Virginia Capitol for a hastily arranged news conference. Sitting behind a table and flanked by GOP lawmakers, the governor touted the latest budget surplus and announced a proposed pay raise for teachers and a plan to fix the state’s underfunded public employee health care plan. But within minutes, he ended the event and dismissed the lawmakers, saying they had pressing state business. “Nobody else? Great,” he said, banging his palms on the desk. “Let’s go.”Justice had somewhere else to be. Across town, one of his energy companies, Bluestone Coal Corp., was due in federal court. The firm had sued a competitor for $80 million after a drilling accident had flooded a mine. And as Bluestone’s owner, Justice was playing a key role in the settlement talks. The parties spent two days negotiating a deal, and he was there when they gathered in a courtroom to present their agreement to the judge.“May I say something?” the governor asked at one point, according to atranscript of the hearing.“Certainly,” U.S. District Judge Thomas E. Johnston responded.Surrounded by nearly two dozen lawyers, the governor proceeded to explain the finer points of the agreement. Justice’s involvement in his company’s legal matters is a far cry from what he pledged more than two and a half years ago when he took office as West Virginia’s governor. Back then, the billionaire promised to put his business empire aside and focus on public service. In an arrangement that echoed that of President Donald Trump, Justice said his adult children, Jay and Jill, would run his family’s coal mines, resorts and farms. But as his courtroom appearance makes clear, Justice remains deeply enmeshed in his businesses. In fact, he has frequently used official public appearances, and the trappings of his office, to promote them.
Firms tied to WV Gov. Justice face $35 million ruling in KY – Companies tied to West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice have been ordered to pay $35 million in damages over a coal deal in Eastern Kentucky that went sour. That amount includes $16.9 million to cover unpaid royalties for not making good on a mining contract, plus interest on that amount since 2012, which would add millions more. It also includes $17 million to punish the companies for abuses such as failing to turn over information as required during the lawsuit. The Justice companies “obstructed the search for truth in this case by withholding information ordered to be produced,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Hanly A. Ingram said in one ruling. U.S. District Judge Gregory F. Van Tatenhove also ordered the Justice companies to pay attorney fees and costs of the companies that won the lawsuit. The attorneys filed a request this week for a total of a little more than $1 million, on top of the judgment for damages that Van Tatenhove issued Sept. 23. The order on damages may not be the final word in the court fight, which has been going on for more than seven years. Attorneys for the Justice companies filed a motion this week asking Van Tatenhove to reconsider how much they’ll have to pay, arguing that the figure for lost royalties was based on an unreliable assessment and that $17 million in punitive damages was excessive. The motion argued that little of the coal at issue could be mined.Richard A. Getty, a Lexington attorney who represents the Justice companies, said they will appeal if the motion for reconsideration is not successful. John A. Lucas of Knoxville and Scott Webster M. Webster of London, attorneys for New London Tobacco Market and Fivemile Energy, have argued in court documents that the appraisal supporting the damage award was sound.
House Bill 6 inadvertently bans coal plant subsidies, groups say – cleveland.com – House Bill 6 has been in the news lately because of its $1 billion bailout for two nuclear plants, but there’s another part of the bill that’s now drawing scrutiny: new ratepayer-funded subsidies for coal-fired power plants in Ohio and Indiana.A number of environmental groups claim that because of the way HB6 was written, the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation – which owns the coal plants – isn’t eligible to get any of the subsidy money that lawmakers intended to give it.Under the new law, starting next January, ratepayers around the state have to chip in up to $1.50 monthly (and up to $1,500 per month for commercial and industrial users) to subsidize OVEC’s Kyger Creek and Clifty Creek coal plants, which often have to sell electricity at a loss since the military uranium enrichment plant they were built to power closed in 2001.But in written comments to the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, the environmental groups point to language in the bill that only allows the subsidies to be set up to cover costs of power agreements “approved by the federal energy regulatory commission.” The FERC, they assert, has never approved any contract associated with OVEC.“Because there are no costs subject to a FERC ‘approved’ contract, the Commission must not accept the Staff’s proposed mechanism which assumes the existence of such costs,” according to the comments submitted by the Ohio Environmental Council, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, and Environmental Law & Policy Center.State Rep. Jamie Callender, the Lake County Republican who sponsored HB6, said Wednesday that he didn’t want to comment on the groups’ argument until the PUCO rules on the matter. But he said that if the PUCO finds a problem, state lawmakers will seek to correct it.
House Bill 6 referendum signatures not filed, leaving its fate to judge – News – The fate of a petition effort to repeal the House Bill 6 bailout of a pair of nuclear power plants rests with a federal judge. Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts announced this afternoon it will not file the referendum petition signatures it has been gathering for weeks amid a hard-fought, multi-million-dollar campaign replete with allegations of dirty tricks.The group, which faced a midnight deadline to submit signatures, is arguing it should be granted more time for its petition drive in a lawsuit filed before U.S. District Court Judge Edmund A. Sargus Jr. The lawsuit contends a state law requiring the attorney general to certify summary language for the petition unconstitutionally consumed 38 of the 90 days it had to gather signatures following the passage of House Bill 6 by the Republican-dominated legislature and its signing by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. A hearing on the motion for a preliminary injunction is scheduled before Sargus on Tuesday afternoon. “Nuclear bailout supporters of House Bill 6 have stooped to unprecedented and deceitful depths to stop Ohioans from exercising their Constitutional rights to put a bailout question on the ballot for voters to decide,” said Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts spokesman Gene Pierce. “The fight to put House Bill 6 on the ballot in 2020 isn’t over yet though,” said Pierce. “Our lawsuit challenging the ‘blackout period’ on petitioning, which consumed 38 of the 90 days we had to collect signatures, remains under review in U.S. District Court.”
Judge denies more time to nuclear referendum effort -A federal judge late Wednesday night refused to grant more time to a petition effort to give Ohio voters a chance to second-guess a new law bailing out two struggling nuclear power plants.That means House Bill 6 will remain in effect to have consumers statewide subsidize the operations of FirstEnergy Solutions’ Davis-Besse plant near Oak Harbor and Perry plant east of Cleveland to the tune of $150 million a year.U.S. District Court Judge Edmund Sargus, Jr. punted the dispute to the Ohio Supreme Court, determining that the challenges to the petition process raised by Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts are state constitutional questions, not federal.He denied the group’s request for a preliminary injunction, finding that it was unlikely to succeed in its argument that the restrictions on the petition process violated its constitutional right of free political speech.The group admitted falling roughly 40,000 signatures short of the initial threshold of 265,774 valid signatures of registered voters required by Monday’s deadline to keep the law from going into effect while it asked voters to repeal it.It claimed state law requiring it to first get the attorney general to sign off on petition summary language to be shown to potential signers created a 38-day “blackout” period when it couldn’t gather any signatures.”At the heart of plaintiffs’ claims is proposition that the Ohio Constitution affords them 90 days to circulate a referendum petition, and that their First Amendment rights are violated by the statute because of the blackout period,” Judge Sargus wrote. “But Ohio courts have not held whether the 90-day period is guaranteed for circulating or whether the required review of the attorney violates the Ohio Constitution. “Moreover, the Ohio Supreme Court could afford plaintiffs the remedy they seek – a stay of H.B. 6 and additional time to circulate their petitions,” he wrote.
Editorial: Utilities’ powerful allies keep Ohio moving backward on energy – The Columbus Dispatch – Ohio has an energy problem, and it stems from the backward approach of those in power at the Statehouse.Lawmakers serve the interests of powerful utilities above those of consumers, the environment and the future. That translates to subsidies for electric companies – out of ratepayers’ pockets – and not just neglect, but outright hostility toward efforts to develop clean and renewable alternatives to coal and gas.The result is electricity bills higher than necessary, carbon emissions higher than necessary and the strangulation of what should be a growing Ohio industry.Recent weeks and months have provided ample and depressing proof of Ohio’s energy folly.Exhibit A is House Bill 6, the new law that will force electricity customers statewide to pay extra on their bills to bail out FirstEnergy Solutions. It will raise more than $1 billion over 10 years – money FirstEnergy says it has to have to keep its two nuclear plants operating.The bill’s worst feature is its wholesale assault on clean energy development. Technically, the nuke plant bailout comes in the form of credits for producing carbon-free energy. But equally carbon-free solar and wind projects, with a few token exceptions, aren’t eligible for the same credits. Moreover, the law actually bails out two coal plants, too. Lawmakers also tucked in language that guts the state’s requirement that utilities increase their use of renewable energy sources. This comes as prospects for wind-energy development in Ohio already were severely stunted by unreasonable windmill-setback requirements, enacted in 2014 by renewable energy foes. More bad news for clean energy came last week when the Ohio Power Siting Board unexpectedly derailed approval of an 80-megawatt solar project proposed for Brown and Clermont counties. The distinct departure from standard practice raised alarm and eyebrows among renewable energy supporters because Public Utilities Commission of Ohio Chairman Sam Randazzo, who also heads the siting board, has had a long career prior to his PUCO appointment advocating for fossil fuel companies and opposing clean energy initiatives. That same PUCO has tended to favor utilities and disfavor clean energy since long before Randazzo’s appointment as chairman earlier this year. In 2017, it allowed Akron-based FirstEnergy to begin collecting $168 million to $204 million per year in extra charges from customers. The Ohio Supreme Court struck down the surcharges earlier this year but allowed FirstEnergy to keep the $400 million-plus it already had collected, without undertaking any distribution-system improvements. As other states embrace the jobs and carbon savings that can come from a clean energy industry, Ohio continues to march backward, propping up bankrupt nuclear plants and dirty coal plants at the expense of a nascent industry with unlimited potential. Voters should demand better.
Glaciers In Antarctica Are Still Releasing Radioactive Element From 1950s Nuclear Weapons Tests -Antarctic ice sheets are still releasing a radioactive element as a result of nuclear weapons tests conducted by the US 70 years ago, according to new research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.Chlorine-36 is a naturally occurring radioactive isotope that can form when argon gas reacts with cosmic rays in the atmosphere. It can also form during nuclear explosions over the ocean when neutrons react with chlorine found in seawater, which can evaporate to the stratosphere, travel around the globe, and ultimately become deposited on Antarctic ice and snow where it can become permanently stored.“There is no more nuclear chlorine-36 in the global atmosphere. That is… why we should observe natural chlorine-36 levels everywhere,” said study author and geoscientist Mélanie Baroni in a statement.The US conducted multiple nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific Ocean in the 1950s and 1960s. In less than 20 years, a total of 19 operational test series were conducted, resulting in more than 230 detonations. Similar findings of chlorine-36 have been found in ice core samples from a US glacier located in the Wind River Mountain Range of Wyoming.
Santee Cooper pays off some debt issued for failed nuclear project – Carolina Print Reprint South Carolina-owned Santee Cooper has paid off $360 million of long-term debt, a move the utility said is designed to stabilize customers’ electricity rates for at least five years. The payment is part of a $925 million, two-year plan to reduce the utility’s debt issued to fund its 45% ownership share in the failed construction of two nuclear reactors at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station near Jenkinsville, South Carolina. The two-year debt reduction plan is part of a business forecast and strategic generation plan Santee Cooper’s board of directors approved in September. The plan calls for introducing greener generating initiatives, such as solar, and closing four coal-fired generating units over four years. Santee Cooper, formally known as the South Carolina Public Service Authority, said it closed on paying off bonds issued in 2009 through 2013, 2015 and 2016, as well as certain mini-bonds on Oct. 16. The deal included $147.67 million of taxable bonds issued in 2016 that were redeemed, according to a notice posted on the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board’s EMMA filing system Oct. 15. The South Carolina Department of Administration approved the redemptions, Bonsall said. The SCDOA is overseeing a confidential competitive procurement process to get bids for the potential sale or management of Santee Cooper, which has been ordered by the Legislature. As part of the process, Santee Cooper will also submit its own reform and restructuring plan to remain a state-owned asset.
NorthStar: Vermont Yankee demolition ahead of schedule – Nine months into the demolition of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, NorthStar CEO Scott State says the project is already about six months ahead of schedule. He said the company has been able to make progress by “doing things differently.” State said the project was divided up into three, two-year segments, and that the company will complete the project ahead of the 2030 deadline easily and on budget. NorthStar’s partner for the first segment of the project, Orano USA, is already cutting up the nuclear reactor’s internals and getting them ready for shipment to another partner’s waste site in western Texas. State said he originally expected the job would be completed by 2026. “I think we’ll be done well before 2026,” he said Thursday during a tour of the Vernon site with reporters, giving an update of the $500-plus million project. “We are months ahead of schedule.”
Peach Bottom nuclear plant has equipment malfunction during refueling In a routine procedure to shut down operations of its Unit 3 reactor for refueling, Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station had an equipment malfunction, triggering an emergency declaration. The type of emergency was classified as an “unusual event,” which is the least severe on the scale set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said Megan Lewatowski, communications manager for the plant. It happened at 12:50 a.m. Monday, Oct. 21, according to a report from the NRC, and operator Exelon went through the protocols of alerting Maryland and Pennsylvania state agencies, local governments and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “While removing Unit 3 from service, a degraded piece of equipment was identified during the shutdown sequence, requiring operators to use an alternate method for shutdown,” a news release from Exelon stated. A manual toggle switch didn’t perform as expected, and operators used a backup push-button system to insert the control rods to shut down the reactor, Lewatowski explained.Those who have been vocal against Peach Bottom getting a second license extension see this as evidence that the plant might have a problem with aging management. Peach Bottom is one of only four plants in the nation planning for a second license extension, which would push operations from 60 to 80 years. “This was their primary safety-related shutdown system that failed to operate as intended,” said Paul Gunther, executive director for anti-nuclear group Beyond Nuclear.When a primary system doesn’t work, it could be indicative of larger concerns, such as inadequate age management or mechanical failure and not something you want to see routinely, Gunther said.
Southwest tribes oppose spent nuclear fuel storage plans (AP) – Native American leaders from New Mexico are opposing plans that call for storing in the desert Southwest tons of spent nuclear fuel from power plants around the U.S.The All Pueblo Council of Governors in a resolution adopted late last week affirmed its commitment to protecting tribal natural and cultural resources.The council – representing 20 sovereign pueblo nations – is worried about risks associated with transporting the waste from dozens of commercial reactors in numerous states to the planned storage facilities in New Mexico and West Texas. Council Chairman E. Paul Torres said in a statement Monday that the projects lack meaningful consultation with tribes and would subject “our communities, environment and sacred sites to unimaginable risk over many decades.”New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, members of the congressional delegation and environmentalists already have come out against the plans, arguing that the state could become a permanent dump for the waste since the federal government has yet to develop any long-term solutions for handling the fuel. About 80,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel generated by commercial reactors is stored around the nation, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. That number will grow as nuclear power plants keep operating.
‘It’s a very big issue’: Kamala Harris says nuclear waste policy demands local input – Local consent and decision-making is critical for successful nuclear waste storage and related policy, according to Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, a California Democrat. “Communities have to be given the power to consent to what they want, meaning communities should have the authority to make the decisions about what happens to their communities,” Harris said, speaking to the Aiken Standard after her Aiken County town hall Saturday night. “And what happens in those communities includes whether or not there’s going to be a nuclear site there.” Harris’ comments line up with the Nuclear Waste Informed Consent Act, which she co-sponsored in April. The bill – introduced by Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Nevada Democrat who objects to Yucca Mountain and has blasted the U.S. Department of Energy for moving weapons-grade plutonium from South Carolina to her state – requires the DOE to secure approval from a state’s governor, local-level governments and nearby tribes before a nuclear waste repository could be constructed. “It’s an issue that is present here, it’s an issue that is present in Nevada, and it’s a real issue for those communities,” Harris said of waste storage, making reference to the Savannah River Site, a 310-square-mile nuclear reserve south of Aiken. Roughly 35 million gallons of nuclear waste is currently stored at the Savannah River Site in aging, underground tanks and is awaiting processing and long-term disposal. Metric tons of plutonium are kept at the site in a retrofitted reactor facility known as K-Area. SRS is under the purview of the Energy Department’s remediation wing, the Office of Environmental Management.
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