Environmental News For The Week Ending 07 December 2019

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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Why It Was Easier to Be Skinny in the 1980s – A 2016 study published in the journal Obesity Research & Clinical Practice found that it’s harder for adults today to maintain the same weight as those 20 to 30 years ago did, even at the same levels of food intake and exercise.The authors examined the dietary data of 36,400 Americans between 1971 and 2008 and the physical activity data of 14,419 people between 1988 and 2006. They grouped the data sets together by the amount of food and activity, age, and BMI. They found a very surprising correlation: A given person, in 2006, eating the same amount of calories, taking in the same quantities of macronutrients like protein and fat, and exercising the same amount as a person of the same age did in 1988 would have a BMI that was about 2.3 points higher. In other words, people today are about 10 percent heavier than people were in the 1980s, even if they follow the exact same diet and exercise plans. In an interview, Kuk proffered three different factors that might be making harder for adults today to stay thin. First, people are exposed to more chemicals that might be weight-gain inducing. Pesticides, flame retardants, and the substances in food packaging might all be altering our hormonal processes and tweaking the way our bodies put on and maintain weight. Second, the use of prescription drugs has risen dramatically since the ‘70s and ‘80s. Prozac, the first blockbuster SSRI, came out in 1988. Antidepressants are now one of the most commonly prescribed drugs in the U.S., and many of them have been linked to weight gain. Finally, Kuk and the other study authors think that the microbiomes of Americans might have somehow changed between the 1980s and now. It’s well known that some types of gut bacteria make a person more prone to weight gain and obesity. Americans are eating more meat than they were a few decades ago, and many animal products are treated with hormones and antibiotics in order to promote growth. All that meat might be changing gut bacteria in ways that are subtle at first but add up over time.

Permanent Hair Dyes and Chemical Straighteners May Be Linked to Breast Cancer, Study Says – Two common beauty products – permanent hair dyes and chemical straighteners – may be associated with an elevated risk for breast cancer, according to a new studypublished in the International Journal of Cancer. Hair dyes have been linked to other cancers before, though the research is inconclusive. Bladder and blood cancers have been examined most closely,according to the American Cancer Society, with the most consistent results pointing to a small increase in bladder cancer risk for salon employees. Meanwhile, most studies to date looking specifically at dye and breast cancer have not found a connection. The picture is similarly unclear for hair straighteners. While a major study using data from the mid-1990s did not find a link between straighteners and breast cancer, other, more recent studies have – and the researchers behind the new paper note that some straightening formulas popularized since the 1990s, namelykeratin treatments, have been found to either contain the carcinogen formaldehyde, or release it during the application process. The new study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, tracked 46,700 U.S. women enrolled in the Sister Study, which recruited breast-cancer-free women whose sisters had been diagnosed with the disease. At enrollment, the women ranged in age from 35 to 74. They answered questions about their health, lifestyle (including hair product use) and demographics at the beginning of the study, and provided researchers with updates over a follow-up period of, on average, eight years. More than half of the women reported use of permanent hair dyes in the year before they joined the study, and about 10% said they had used chemical straighteners. These women, the researchers found, had a greater chance of being among the nearly 2,800 study participants who ended up developing breast cancer – especially if they identified as black. Overall, using permanent dye was associated with a 9% higher risk of developing breast cancer, compared to non-use. But black women who used permanent dye had a 45% higher risk of breast cancer, compared to non-users, and those who used these products every eight weeks or more often had a 60% higher risk.

‘Dark Waters’ Tells the Origin Story of a Public Health Nightmare. We’re Still Living It. – – About a third of the way into the film Dark Waters, Rob Bilott, has pieced together a harrowing story. DuPont has been dumping a chemical called “C8″ into the air and water outside of its plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia, for decades, and withholding information about the dangers it posed to human health. Bilott gets out of bed, boots up a boxy PC from the early 2000s, and begins typing a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency outlining everything he’s gathered about DuPont’s cover-up. That letter became known as “Rob’s Famous Letter” among Bilott’s colleagues, as Nathaniel Rich reported in the New York Times Magazine article that inspired the film. If Bilott had never sent it, the world might still be blind to the dangers of C8 and other per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances known collectively as PFAS – a class of nearly 5,000 substances called “forever chemicals” because of how long they persist. The nickname is hardly an exaggeration. Some of them, like C8, literally never break down in the environment.So what do companies like DuPont use them for? PFAS are great for repelling water and fats, which makes them a miracle coating in a range of products, like non-stick pans, waterproof clothing, and food packaging. The chemicals have only been manufactured since the 1940s, when 3M first licensed them, but in their short tenure on earth, they have spread to every corner of the planet and made their way into the blood of 99 percent of all human beings. Scientists have found a probable link between C8 exposure and high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, testicular cancer, kidney cancer, and pregnancy-induced hypertension. Dark Waters chronicles the true story of Bilott’s nearly 20-year battle to hold DuPont accountable. In the end, the story is triumphant: Bilott exposes the company’s cover-up, wins a class-action lawsuit, orchestrates the first major epidemiological study that links C8 to several diseases and cancers, and makes DuPont pay hundreds of millions of dollars to its victims and their families. The film offers a much-needed dose of hope that there are people out there fighting for a more safe, just, and honest world … and winning! But viewers should know that the battle is far from over. The story told in Dark Waters is really just the first chapter in a public health nightmare that’s continuing to play out all over the country.

House Democrats pull key PFAS provisions from defense bill – House Democrats have dropped their bid to include key provisions regulating PFAS in the annual defense bill, according to two sources familiar with the negotiations – a move that could imperil the bill’s chances in the lower chamber. According to the sources, House Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) have pulled from negotiations the provisions that would force the cleanup of the chemicals PFOA and PFOS under the Superfund law and to regulate them in drinking water. The Superfund provision, in particular, had been a major source of tension as House and Senate negotiators seek to finalize a deal on the defense bill this week. “Republicans have resisted Dem efforts for months to include strong PFAS provisions in the NDAA. This week, Democrats and Republicans were finally close to a good deal on PFAS provisions, but in a rush to quickly pass the NDAA, Chairman Smith – at the behest of Rep. Pallone – unilaterally took PFAS off the negotiating table,” one source said by email. But a congressional aide said the move could imperil the bill’s chances in the House, where 68 members said in October that they would vote against the defense bill if it did not include strong PFAS provisions. “How do House Democrats take a Senate provision and make it worse, not better, when this is an issue that is in pretty much every single member of Congress’ newspaper every single day?” the aide said. The aide said the conference report is in the final stages of completion to reconcile the House- and Senate-passed bills, H.R. 2500 (116) and S. 1790 (116).

Critics say an EPA rule may restrict science used for public health regulations – In science, transparency is typically considered a virtue. But a rule proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, billed as a means to keep environmental regulations rooted in reproducible science, is getting pushback from the scientific community.The proposal, titled “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science,” would require studies that factor into EPA rule-making to be based on publicly available data. Doing so, the agency argues, would ensure that other researchers could access that data and verify the findings of any study. The EPA administrator would be able to handpick allowances for studies whose data cannot be made public. But according to a Nov. 12 EPA news release, “this should be the exception instead of the way of EPA doing business.” That stipulation has some scientists worried that EPA regulations may then be able to ignore relevant evidence from many studies based on private information.Among the critics are editors of six major scientific journals – Science, Nature, Cell, theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PLOS and the Lancet – who voiced their concerns in a statement published online November 26 in Science. “We support open sharing of research data, but we also recognize the validity of scientific studies that, for confidentiality reasons, cannot indiscriminately share absolutely all data,” the authors write. Ignoring pertinent information in creating and updating policies like public health regulations simply because results are based on private data “would be a catastrophe.” The EPA is still hashing out the exact terms of its proposed policy, which was announced in April 2018 and will not be finalized until 2020. Science News spoke with Holden Thorp, editor in chief of the Science journals, and May Berenbaum, editor in chief of theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about the potential effects of the rule.

China gene-edited baby experiment ‘may have created unintended mutations’ – The gene editing performed on Chinese twins to immunise them against HIV may have failed and created unintended mutations, scientists have said after the original research was made public for the first time.Excerpts from the manuscript were released by the MIT Technology Review to show how Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui ignored ethical and scientific norms in creating the twins Lula and Nana, whose birth in late 2018 sent shockwaves through the scientific world.He made expansive claims of a medical breakthrough that could “control the HIV epidemic”, but it was not clear whether it had even been successful in its intended purpose – immunising the babies against the virus – because the team did not in fact reproduce the gene mutation that confers this resistance.A small percentage of people are born with immunity because of a mutation in a gene called CCR5 and it was this gene that He had claimed to have targeted using a powerful editing tool known as Crispr which has revolutionised the field since 2012. Fyodor Urnov, a genome-editing scientist at the University of California, Berkeley told the MIT Technology Review: “The claim they have reproduced the prevalent CCR5 variant is a blatant misrepresentation of the actual data and can only be described by one term: a deliberate falsehood.“The study shows that the research team instead failed to reproduce the prevalent CCR5 variant.”While the team targeted the right gene, they did not replicate the “Delta 32″ variation required, instead creating novel edits whose effects are not clear.Moreover, Crispr remains an imperfect tool because it can lead to unwanted or “off-target” edits, making its use in humans hugely controversial. Here, the researchers claimed to have searched for such effects in the early-stage embryos and found just one – however it would be impossible to carry out a comprehensive search without inspecting each of the embryo’s cells, and thus destroying it.The parents’ lack of access to any kind of fertility treatment might have motivated them to take part in the experiment despite the huge risks to their children, Jeanne O’Brien, a reproductive endocrinologist at Shady Grove Fertility told the MIT Technology Review. The father was HIV positive, which carries a significant social stigma in China and makes it almost impossible to have access to fertility treatment, even though a well-established technique known as “sperm washing” prevents the infection being passed to unborn children.

Samoan Government To Close Its Offices Amid Measles Crisis – The Pacific island nation of Samoa will shut down government services for two days so that civil servants can focus on a nationwide immunization drive as the country struggles to end a measles outbreak that has claimed more than 50 lives, most of them children. Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi announced the closure on Monday, saying the government is relying on “village councils, faith-based organizations, and church leaders, village mayors and government women representatives” to persuade the public to get vaccinated. As a result, he said, all but public utility government services will be shuttered Dec. 5 and 6. More than 3,700 measles cases have been reported since the outbreak began in October, with 198 recorded within a 24-hour period. Fifty-three people have died and of those, 48 are children under 4 years old. Tuilaepa discouraged people from turning to traditional healers for remedies, adding, vaccinations are “the only cure.” The situation in the small country has been compounded by the low measles vaccination rate among its population, which numbers just under 200,000 people. Just 31% of the population had been vaccinated prior to the epidemic, according to the World Health Organization. Immunizations in Samoa plummeted last year after a high-profile scandal in which improperly prepared vaccine caused the deaths of two infants. “As a result of that, the vaccination program was halted while they investigated the cause,” Keni Lesa, editor of the Samoa Observer told NPR. “In the end, two nurses were charged, and they were found guilty of manslaughter,” he said. But despite the convictions, the public remained distrustful of the vaccination, leaving room for the anti-vaccine movement to pick up steam. “They really found a gap there to really hammer home their message. And a lot of parents became scared to take their kids to get vaccinated,” he said.

Samoa: Death toll mounts in devastating measles epidemic – Every day the death toll from measles increases in Samoa, a small Pacific island country with about 200,000 inhabitants. The outbreak began in mid-October. So far 55 people have died – up from 14 on November 17 – the vast majority of them children. As of today, over 3,800 have become sick. Scientists at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, predict that before Christmas the death toll will reach 70 and the number of infected will pass 6,500, more than 3 percent of the population. A tragedy of terrible proportions is unfolding. The government of Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi declared a state of emergency on November 15. Schools, universities, swimming pools and night clubs have been closed and gatherings of children banned. Streets in the capital Apia are largely deserted and many Christmas events have been cancelled. Some families have lost more than one child. The Guardian recently reported that Tu’ivale Luamanuvae Puelua and his wife Fa’aoso have buried three children, all aged under four. Puelua said: “Your mind becomes empty and you are speechless because there are no words on this earth to describe how my wife and I feel having to say goodbye to our children.” The outbreak is a man-made disaster. Measles is a preventable disease, but Samoa’s vaccination rate is extremely low: about 30 to 40 percent among young children according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), down from 84 percent four years ago, which is still too low to prevent an outbreak. Vaccinations plummeted after two babies died in July 2018 from contaminated doses of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. The government responded by suspending all MMR immunisations until April 2019, a period of eight months. This extraordinary delay was nothing less than a criminal act of negligence by the state: it left thousands of infant children unimmunised. The crisis has been compounded by pernicious, unscientific anti-vaccination campaigns emanating from the US, Australia and other countries. The Washington Post noted that anti-vaccine activist “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a nephew of President John F. Kennedy, visited [Samoa] in June” and met with Australian Samoan anti-vaccine activist Taylor Winterstein. Some faith healers and conmen have reportedly sought to profit from Samoa’s epidemic by selling bogus treatments and dissuading people from seeking medical care.

Samoa shuts down in unprecedented battle against measles crisis – Samoa entered a two-day lockdown Thursday to carry out an unprecedented mass vaccination drive aimed at containing a devastating measles epidemic that has killed dozens of children in the Pacific island nation. As the death toll climbed to 62, officials ordered all businesses and non-essential government services to close, shut down inter-island ferries and told people to keep their cars off the roads. Residents were advised to obey a dawn-to-dusk curfew, staying in their homes and displaying a red flag if any occupants were not yet immunised. Hundreds of vaccination teams, including public servants drafted in for the operation, fanned out across the nation of 200,000 in the early hours of the morning. They plan to go door-to-door in villages and towns to administer mandatory vaccinations in red-flagged houses. The markets on Apia’s waterfront, usually packed with tourists buying handicrafts, were silent as stalls stood empty, while there was hardly any traffic in the city centre. “It’s very, very quiet out here. I can just hear a few barking dogs. The streets are empty. There are no cars,” UNICEF’s Pacific islands chief Sheldon Yett told AFP. “People are staying at home waiting for the vaccination campaign. The teams are getting their supplies together and getting ready to go out.” The operation, carried out under emergency powers invoked as the epidemic took hold last month, is a desperate bid to halt measles infection rates that have been inexorably rising since mid-October, with most of the victims young children. “I’ve seen mass mobilisation campaigns before, but not over an entire country like this,” Yett said. “That’s what we’re doing right now. This entire country is being vaccinated.”

Measles Killed More Than 140,000 People in 2018, Mostly Young Children, Despite a Safe Vaccine – Measles infected nearly 10 million people in 2018 and killed more than 140,000, according to new estimatesfrom the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Most of the people who died were children under five years old. The figures come as vaccination rates have stalled in the last ten years. WHO and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimate that 86 percent of children received the first dose of the measles vaccine in 2018 and fewer than 70 percent received the second dose, but WHO says a vaccination rate of 95 percent is necessary to protect communities from disease outbreaks.”The fact that any child dies from a vaccine-preventable disease like measles is frankly an outrage and a collective failure to protect the world’s most vulnerable children,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus said in a press release. “To save lives, we must ensure everyone can benefit from vaccines – which means investing in immunization and quality health care as a right for all.” In poorer countries, vaccination rates are low because of problems with or interruptions in health services,The Guardian explained. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), one of the five countries most affected by measles in 2018, conflict and an inadequate health care system have prevented children from receiving the vaccine. Measles has killed more than 4,500 people in the country this year, claiming a higher death toll than an Ebola outbreak. Along with the DRC, the other most impacted countries were Liberia, Madagascar, Somalia and Ukraine, which together saw almost half of the global measles cases this year.

Doctors treating Ebola flee DR Congo’s east amid deadly violence – The non-profit group Doctors Without Borders (MSF) pulled its foreign staff out of an eastern region of Democratic Republic of Congo after an armed group tried to enter its compound. The group is the latest aid agency to withdraw its staff from the Biakato region, after three health workers treating Ebola were killed in an unclaimed attack last week at an accommodation camp in Biakato Mines in Ituri province. That attack prompted the World Health Organization to withdraw its staff from the area. MSF said that on Tuesday night a group wielding machetes and sticks broke into the Biakato Health Centre, where it operates an Ebola Treatment Centre. There were no casualties and the group did not enter the Ebola facility, it said. A separate group with the same weapons then tried but failed to enter the MSF facility in Biakato Mines. The NGO said they threw stones but did not do any damage. “Due to a deterioration in the security situation, MSF made the difficult decision to withdraw all non-local staff from the Biakato region,” MSF said in a statement. According to local authorities, the attackers from last week’s incident are likely to be members of the Mayi-Mayi armed militia group, which is fighting for a share of the country’s wealth. The DRC is undergoing its 10th Ebola epidemic, which is the second-deadliest on record. An outbreak of the much-feared haemorrhagic virus has killed 2,206 people mainly in North Kivu and neighbouring Ituri, according to the latest official figures. Insecurity has complicated the epidemic from the outset, compounding resistance within communities to preventive measures, care facilities and safe burials. On November 4, the authorities said more than 300 attacks on Ebola health workers had been recorded since the start of the year, leaving six dead and 70 wounded, some of them patients.

Mapping Eastern Europe’s Deadly HIV Problem (infographics) Sunday marks World AIDS Day, which aims to promote awareness of the disease and mourn those who have died from it. The event came into existence in 1988 and it has been widely observed by health officials, governments and non-governmental organizations since then. The good news is that the number of deaths from the HIV/AIDS pandemic has fallen. In 2018, there were 770,000 AIDS-related deaths, down from 1.7 million in 2005. You will find more infographics at Statista. But, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, there is some bad news which needs to be highlighted more frequently: the growing infection rate across Eastern Europe and Russia in particular. You will find more infographics at Statista According to new data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and World Health Organization, there were 71 new HIV diagnoses per 100,000 people in Russia last year. Ukraine came a distant second with 37 while third-placed Belarus had 26. The lowest rates of new diagnoses per 100,000 people were recorded in Bosnia and Herzegovina (0.3), Slovakia (1.3) and Slovenia (1.9).

Deaths from antibiotic drug resistance are at historic highs, aided by Trump’s policies –It’s a pretty standard ritual, especially at this time of year: A cough develops and isn’t going away, a fever spikes a little too high, a scrape begins to ooze a little too much, and before you know it, a provider like me is writing a prescription for an antibiotic. We’re all creatures of habit (patients and docs alike) and we expect antibiotics will work because they generally have in the past. So patients seek them out, and doctors lean on them when they have to. But as with all good things, nothing lasts forever. This decade is ending with a dubious distinction: Deaths from antibiotic drug resistance have now reached an all-time high, with 35,000 people dying in the U.S. each year alone, according to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This spring, the United Nations declared this problem an urgent global crisis in need of immediate action. Antibiotic resistance means that the bacteria that exist all around us, such as E. Coli and MRSA, are mutating in ways that make existing medications like penicillin ineffective. Mutations are changes in the genetic makeup of bacteria, a literal rearrangement of genes to improve the chances that bacteria can survive exposure to an antibiotic. The odds that they develop resistance increase the more antibiotics are used in daily life. It’s like any threat that exists in this world: The more you’re exposed to it, the more you can learn to adapt. Which means the more we receive antibiotics in clinics and hospitals, the more likely we are encouraging the development of resistance. Sadly, there’s little hope of doing better on the national scale needed so long as President Donald Trump remains in office. As dire warnings about bacteria becoming more resistant to antibiotics have reached a fevered pitch, the response of the White House has been utter indifference. In fact, the policy steps that the Trump administration has taken have worsened the problem, including proposing budget cuts to nationwide, hospital-based programs dedicated to the issue and ignoring World Health Organization guidelines on ways to minimize the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a key contributor to this growing epidemic.

Walmart Pork Found To Have “Superbug” Bacteria Resistant To Antibiotics – A new study published by animal-welfare group World Animal Protection has arrived at some stunning findings about pork products begin sold at Walmart. The report, published by FoodDive, found that pork samples purchased from Walmart contained “superbug” antibiotic-resistant bacteria. 80% of samples tested from Mid-Atlantic Walmart stores were resistant to at least one antibiotic. Additionally, 37% of the bacteria in the Walmart samples were resistant to three or more classes of antibiotics. In sum, about 27% of the resistant bacteria found on Walmart’s pork were resistant to classes categorized as Highest Priority Critically Important Antimicrobials by the World Health Organization. 160 samples of pork were tested by researchers at Texas Tech University: 80 were from Walmart and 80 were from a competing national retail chain in the Mid-Atlantic region. The samples were tested in 32 batches for E. coli, salmonella, enterococcus and listeria. Researchers said they found enterococcus in 13 batches, E. coli in 10 batches, salmonella in 6 and listeria in 3 batches. Alesia Soltanpanah, executive director of World Animal Protection U.S., said: “The presence of multidrug-resistant bacteria on pork products illustrates the role the pork supply chain plays in the global health crisis caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The fact that pork from one of the nation’s largest retailers contains bacteria resistant to antibiotics critically important to human health is particularly alarming and should raise concerns.” In addition to Walmart, researchers also tested pork sample from another national retail chain and also found antibiotic-resistant bacteria. However, the second batch tested did not contain two strains of multidrug-resistant bacteria in a single batch (as the Walmart batch did) and none of the samples were resistant to antibiotics considered “critically important to human health”. The report didn’t name the second retailer, but FoodDive speculates that it is Costco, Kroger or Target, based on the report noting that the second retailer has “has committed to strengthen its animal welfare policies for its pork suppliers, including working towards a commitment to complete elimination of gestation crates for breeding sows.”

If Factory Farm Conditions Are Unhealthy for Animals, They’re Bad for People Too – In 2014, the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, commissioned by the UK government and Wellcome Trust, estimated that 700,000 people around the world die each year due to drug-resistant infections. A follow-up report two years later showed no change in this estimate of casualties. Without action, that number could grow to 10 million per year by 2050. A leading cause of antibiotic resistance? The misuse and overuse of antibiotics on factory farms. Flourishing antibiotic resistance is just one of the many public health crises produced by factory farming. Other problems include foodborne illness, flu epidemics, the fallout from poor air and water quality, and chronic disease. All of it can be traced to the current industrial approach to raising animals for food, which puts a premium on “high stocking density,” wherein productivity is measured by how many animals are crammed into a feeding facility. Oversight for the way factory farms operate and manage waste is minimal at best. No federal agency collectsconsistent and reliable information on the number, size and location of large-scale agricultural operations, nor the pollution they’re emitting. There are also no federal laws governing the conditions in which farm animals are raised, and most state anti-cruelty laws do not apply to farm animals. In 2017, nearly 11 million kilograms of antibiotics – including 5.6 million kilograms of medically important antibiotics – were sold in the U.S. for factory-farmed animals. Factory farms use antibiotics to make livestock grow faster and control the spread of disease in cramped and unhealthy living conditions. While antibiotics do kill some bacteria in animals, resistant bacteria can, and often do, survive and multiply, contaminating meat and animal products during slaughter and processing. People can be exposed to antibiotic-resistant bacteria by handling or eating contaminated animal products, coming into contact with contaminated water or touching farm animals, which of course makes a farmworker’s job especially hazardous. Even if you don’t eat much meat or dairy, you’re vulnerable: Resistant pathogens can enter water streams through animal manure and contaminate irrigated produce.

Fire Blight Spreads Northward, Threatening Apple Orchards – Across the country, hundreds of kinds of apples were meticulously developed by orchardists over the last couple of centuries and then, as farms and groves were abandoned and commercial production greatly narrowed the number of varieties for sale, many were forgotten. Some of this horticultural biodiversity, though, has been nurtured by dedicated growers who want to preserve the forgotten flavors and other traits of apples from the past. For example, some of the best apples ever developed for baking pies are no longer grown commercially, experts say, but are still thriving in heirloom orchards. “They are a piece of our history as a variety and part of our cultural identity,” “They are an insurance policy against a catastrophe.” A burgeoning threat is coming for apples, though, both of the historical varieties and the popular ones grown in the orchards today. A disease called fire blight, easily managed for a long time in apple and pear orchards, is becoming more virulent as the climate changes and as growers alter the way the trees are configured to produce higher yields. Some researchers say newer varieties may be more vulnerable, too. It is another example of threats to the nation’s fruit crops, as citrus greening has hammered Florida’s orange groves and a fungus called Tropical Race 4 has devastated the world’s banana plantations. “Commercial apples are getting hit fairly hard by fire blight,” said Kerik D. Cox, a plant pathologist who has studied the disease for a decade at Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences here. “And the intensity of it appears to be new.”The blight – caused by the bacterium Erwinia amylovora – is native to the United States and predates the introduction of apple trees to North America. Apple and pear growers have long managed the disease, by trimming dead branches and in recent decades, spraying antibiotics like Streptomycin. But the blight is becoming resistant to the antibiotics, some say, and has become more aggressive, wiping out hundreds or even thousands of trees in some places.The blight is spreading to places where it had not been seen before, into New York’s Champlain Valley and parts of Maine for example.Tower Hill Botanic Garden was forced in November to raze its orchard of 238 heirloom trees – two each of 119 antique varieties. The orchard is dedicated to apples developed in this country, Europe and elsewhere long ago.One of the varieties, the Roxbury Russet, dates back to the mid-17th century, and is believed to be the oldest apple variety cultivated in the United States.

US may face French fry shortage due to poor potato crop: report -The U.S. may face a French fry shortage due to a poor potato crop caused by cold and wet weather this year, Bloomberg reported Monday. Potato producers told the news outlet that they are attempting to purchase potatoes from across the continent after multiple harvests in Canada and the U.S. were ruined. The potato crop forecast in the U.S. is at the lowest since 2010, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report. Last month, frost hit potato farms across North America, with farmers in Manitoba, North Dakota and Minnesota losing crops. About 18 percent of the potato acreage in Manitoba went unharvested because of the weather, and 6.5 percent of Alberta crops experienced frost damage, according to Bloomberg. Manitoba and Alberta are the second- and third-largest growers in Canada, respectively, and the government is expected to release crop estimates Friday. Canada also is expected to have a higher demand for potatoes because of an increase in fry-processing capacity, which could prompt higher prices and limited potatoes for the U.S., according to Stephen Nicholson, a senior grains and oilseeds analyst at Rabobank.

673 Million People Still Defecate Outdoors (Not Just In San Francisco) – With World Toilet Day having just passed, the United Nations released a report focusing on water, sanitation and hygiene around the world. It has found that approximately 2.2 billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water, 4.2 billion have to go without safe sanitation services and three billion lack basic handwashing facilities. Additionally, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, the report also examined the state of open defecation and progress in eliminating it. As recently as 2015, close to a billion people were still defecating outdoors, resulting in widespread disease and millions of deaths. That drove the UN to call for an end to the practice and some parts of the world have proven hugely successful in eradicating it.In 2000 for example, the rate of open defecation was even worse with 21 percent of the global population – 1.3 billion people – practicing it. The impact of the UN’s call to action has been telling and by 2017, the global share of people practicing open defecation had fallen to just 9 percent – 673 million people.Ethiopia saw the largest fall during that period, -57 percent. Cambodia and India also experienced declines of -53 and -47 percent respectively. The latter has been particularly ambitious in installing proper toilets. Before Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power, just under 40 percent of India’s population had access to a household toilet. He promised to change that and billions of dollars were invested under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (“Clean India”) campaign which kicked off in October 2014. India’s Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation states that toilet coverage today stands at an impressive 99.22 percent.Altogether, 91 countries reduced open defecation by a combined total of 696 million people between 2000 and and 2017 with Central and Southern Asia accounting for three quarters of that figure. The news isn’t positive everywhere though and 39 countries experienced increases during the same period, totaling 49 million people. The majority of that increase occurred in Sub-Sahara Africa which has experienced steady population growth since 2000. That of course means that there’s still a lot of work to do but as India has shown with its toilet building marathon, progress can be rapid.

Nestlé cannot claim bottled water is ‘essential public service’, court rules – Michigan’s second-highest court has dealt a legal blow to Nestlé’s Ice Mountain water brand, ruling that the company’s commercial water-bottling operation is “not an essential public service” or a public water supply. The court of appeals ruling is a victory for Osceola township, a small mid-Michigan town that blocked Nestlé from building a pumping station that doesn’t comply with its zoning laws. But the case could also throw a wrench in Nestlé’s attempts to privatize water around the country. If it is to carry out such plans, then it will need to be legally recognized as a public water source that provides an essential public service. The Michigan environmental attorney Jim Olson, who did not represent Osceola township but has previously battled Nestlé in court, said any claim that the Swiss multinational is a public water utility “is ludicrous”.“What this lays bare is the extent to which private water marketers like Nestlé, and others like them, go [in] their attempts to privatize sovereign public water, public water services, and the land and communities they impact,” Olson said. The ruling, made on Tuesday, could also lead state environmental regulators to reconsider permits that allow Nestlé to pump water in Michigan.The Osceola case stems from Nestle’s attempt to increase the amount of water it pulls from a controversial wellhead in nearby Evart from about 250 gallons per minute to 400 gallons per minute. It needs to build the pump in a children’s campground in Osceola township to transport the increased load via a pipe system.The township in 2017 rejected the plans based on its zoning laws, and Nestlé subsequently sued. A lower court wrote in late 2017 that water was essential for life and bottling water was an “essential public service” that met a demand, which trumped Osceola township’s zoning laws.However, a three-judge panel in the appellate court reversed the decision.The appellate judges acknowledged that water was “essential to life”, but wrote that the context in which water is sold also had to be considered. Marketing bottled water in an area where tap water is available is unessential.“The circuit court’s conclusion that [Nestlé’s] commercial water bottling operation is an ‘essential public service’ is clearly erroneous,” the judges wrote. “Other than in areas with no other source of water, bottled water is not essential.”

Deer found dead in Thailand with over 15 pounds of trash in its stomach, including plastic bags and hand towels -A deer was found dead in a Thai national park with more than 15 pounds of trash in its stomach, according to officials.Some of the items found inside the deer’s intestinal tract included instant noodle flavoring bags, plastic bags, rubber gloves, hand towels, men’s underwear and a straw rope, according to Thailand’s Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation.The deer was found Monday at the Khun Sathan National Park in Nan, news agency AFPreported. When animals eat trash, they often die of starvation because their stomachs are full but they are not receiving any nutrients from its contents. Kriangsak Thanompun, director of the protected region in the Khun Sathan National Park, described the deer’s death as a “tragedy” and called for the use of “nature-friendly products” rather than plastic. “It shows we have to take seriously and reduce… single-use plastic,” he told AFP.

Sperm whale found dead on Scotland beach with 220 pounds of trash in stomach – A sperm whale found stranded on a beach in northeast Scotland had more than 220 pounds of trash in its stomach when it died, according to the organization that found it. The whale was found on Luskentyre beach on Saturday and had been dead for 48 hours by the time workers from the Scottish Marine Animal Strandings Scheme (SMASS) got there.The debris found inside the whale included “a whole range of plastic,” including plastic cups, gloves, packing straps and tubing as well as bundles of rope and sections of netting, Scottish Marine Animal Strandings Scheme said in a Facebook post. The material was packed into the whale’s stomach “in a huge ball” and some of it had likely been ingested some time ago, according SMASS. Overall, the whale was not in poor condition, and it is unclear whether the trash contributed to its death. “This amount of plastic in the stomach is nonetheless horrific, must have compromised digestion, and serves to demonstrate, yet again, the hazards that marine litter and lost or discarded fishing gear can cause to marine life,” the organization said, describing the issue as being caused “by a whole host of human activities.”

Hermit Crabs Are Making Homes in Plastic Litter and It’s Killing Them – Plastic debris washed up on remote islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans has killed hermit crabs, which mistake the plastic for shells, as CNN reported. The researchers visited Cocos (Keeling) Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean that sits west of Christmas Island, and described the tropical paradise as “literally drowning in plastic.” In fact, they found an estimated 414 million pieces of plastic. The researchers also found dead hermit crabs in the bottles and containers that washed ashore, according to The Washington Post. The scientists estimate that 508,000 hermit crabs died mistaking plastic for safety on Cocos (Keeling) Island, while another 61,000 perished the same way 8,000 miles away on Henderson Island in the south Pacific, according to CNN. “When we were surveying debris on the islands, I was struck by how many open plastic containers contained hermit crabs, both dead and alive,” said Jennifer Lavers, a researcher at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, who led the study, in a university statement. The study was published in theJournal of Hazardous Materials. “We decided to do additional surveys across a range of sites of how many containers there were, including how many were open, how many were in a position likely to trap crabs, and how many contained trapped crabs.” Hermit crabs do not have their own shells so they use found, hollow objects for shelter and protection – objects like shells, according to CNN. They spend a large portion of their lives seeking out shells for protection that will fit their growing bodies. The hermit crabs that climb into plastic bottles find the surface too slippery to get traction. Therefore, they cannot climb out of them, according to The Washington Post. “The question was, is Cocos unique, or is this a more widespread problem that could be happening anywhere?” said Lavers to The Washington Post. “That’s what these two islands suggest: A lot of places where you have crabs and debris, this is probably happening.” The washed up plastic creates a cascade of death for the hermit crabs. When one hermit crab dies, it starts a chemical reaction that emits an odor to other crabs signaling that a shell is available. Therefore, a crab that dies sets off a chain-reaction, drawing more and more crabs to the plastic with a scent that increases in strength, according to Alex Bond, a a curator at London’s Natural History Museum who contributed to thestudy, as The Washington Post reported. “It’s not quite a domino effect. It’s almost like an avalanche,”

Polar Bears’ Diet Is 25% Plastic, Russian Scientists Say – Plastic waste makes up one-quarter of polar bears’ diet as climate change pushes them closer to human settlements, Russian scientists have said while warning that the plastic risks killing the animals. Polar bears have been forced to scavenge for food on land as climate change damages their sea-ice habitats. The animals have increasingly come into contact with people, and images of them wandering into cities in Siberia and rummaging through garbage in the Russian Arctic made international headlines this year. This increasing contact allowed scientists to examine the gut and excrement contents of polar bears that eat out of garbage dumps, Ivan Mizin, deputy director of the Russian Arctic national park, told Interfax on Tuesday. “When polar bears visit landfills, up to 25% of their stomach and excrement contents is [made up of] various plastic waste: bags, wrappers, etc.,” Interfax quoted Mizin as saying Tuesday. “Exceeding a certain percentage threshold means that the animals will begin to die,” Mizin warned on the sidelines of a forum on Arctic tourism and marine debris in the northwestern Russian city of Murmansk. Arctic birds and marine mammals were also found to have plastic in their organs, Interfax cited Mizin as saying. Marine debris including plastics – though not as widespread as in the tropics and mid-latitudes – is also a cause of death for marine mammals, he added. He cited an unprecedented 2015 case in which a bowhead whale beached in the Arctic after getting tangled in fishing nets. “This was the first such finding, there’s no documented data of that happening before,” Mizin was quoted as saying.

Reusable plastic shopping bags are actually making the problem worse, not better – Over the past few years, reusable plastic shopping bags began showing up in grocery stores in many parts of the world. They are sturdier than the flimsy plastic bags that have become a symbol of the global movement against disposable plastics, and so can be used many times, lending to their marketing as the ethical choice for the environmentally conscious shopper. But of course, these thicker bags require more plastic to make. That means they could only improve the overall situation if they led to stores handing out overall less plastic, by volume, than they would without them – by, say, replacing thousands of single-use plastic bags a shopper might otherwise use over the years. Because no matter the style of plastic bag, it will still contribute to the global problem of forever-trash entering the environment, and the greenhouse gases associated with manufacturing the bag from fossil fuels in the first place. But it seems they haven’t. A new report from the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and Greenpeace looking at grocery stores in the UK suggests that the plastic “bags for life” utterly failed to do the one thing they were ostensibly meant to. So far in 2019, the top 10 UK grocery stores reported selling 1.5 billion of these bags, which represents approximately 54 “bags for life” per household in the UK.For comparison, the top eight UK grocery retailers – representing over 75% of the market – sold 959 million such bags in 2018. Some supermarket chains have seen particularly big spikes in sales. The frozen-food store Iceland sold 10 times more plastic “bags for life” this year, 34 million, than last. The UK introduced a 5-pence charge for plastic bags in 2015, and the government urged shoppers to instead bring their own reusable “bags for life,” which led to a surge in purchasing of the reusable plastic bags from markets. Overall, those same supermarkets increased the volume of plastic packaging they put out – including the “bags for life” – by 18,739 tons (17,000 metric tons) from 2017 to 2018. “It’s shocking to see that despite unprecedented awareness of the pollution crisis, the amount of single-use plastic used by the UK’s biggest supermarkets has actually increased,” the EIA’s Juliet Phillips told the Guardian. The grocery stores’ plastic-footprint increase was caused in part by the reusable plastic bags. “We have replaced one problem with another,” Fiona Nicholls, a Greenpeace UK campaigner who is one of the report’s authors, told the New York Times. “Bags for life have become bags for a week.” The bags, the report says, should be banned. Instead, customers could bring their own bags to the market. “When we go shopping, we should remember our bags like we remember our phones.”

Environmentalists Demand Stricter Pollution Standards For Plastics Industry – (CN) – Seeking stricter accountability for the plastics industry, more than 350 public interest groups filed a petition with the Environmental Protect Agency Tuesday demanding higher standards and lower emissions for plastics manufacturers.“Plastics production is poisoning our communities, choking our oceans and exacerbating the climate crisis,” said Lauren Packard, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. Packard spoke outside the EPA’s regional office in downtown San Francisco before the group walked inside to deliver a petition signed by 364 conservation and community organizations.The petition asks the EPA to list facilities that produce chemicals used in plastics manufacturing – such as ethylene, propylene, polypropylene – as sources of emissions subject to regulation. That would open the door for the EPA to create new emissions standards for those plants.It also demands such facilities be powered by 100% renewable energy and that new air pollution and technology standards be adopted to reduce the emission of planet-warming gases and air toxins.The EPA has three years to respond to the petition. According to Packard and other advocates, “cheap fracked gas” is driving the push to build more plastic production facilities in the U.S. Oil and natural gas can be refined to create chemicals that serve as the building blocks and ingredients in plastic products. The plastics industry has invested more than $200 billion for 333 new or expanded facilities since 2010, according to the American Chemistry Council, which represents plastics manufacturers. “The glut of fracked gas is fueling a plastics boom at a time when the climate crisis demands that we put an end to fracking and stop overproducing polluting plastics,” Critics say emissions from petrochemical plants and plastic production facilities are most harmful to low-income communities where such facilities are typically located. Filmmaker and plastics expert Stiv Wilson, who joined Packard and others in front of the EPA’s San Francisco office Tuesday, noted that residents of a Houston neighborhood surrounded by chemical plants suffer from higher rates of cancer, asthma and other health problems. The Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental nonprofit, found in 2016 that residents of the Harrisburg-Manchester neighborhood were at least 24 times as likely to develop cancer compared to residents in “the wealthier and predominantly white west Houston communities.”

‘The Best Thing You Can Do Is Not Buy More Stuff,’ Says ‘Secondhand’ Expert – Author Adam Minter remembers two periods of grief after his mother died in 2015: the intense sadness of her death, followed by the challenge of sorting through what he calls “the material legacy of her life.”Over the course of a year, Minter and his sister worked through their mother’s possessions until only her beloved china was left. Neither one of them wanted to take the china – but neither could bear to throw it out. Instead, they decided to donate it.Waiting in the donation line at Goodwill, Minter began wondering what would happen to the dishes: “It occurred to me this is a very interesting subject,” he says. “Nobody really knew what happened beyond the donation door at Goodwill.”Minter had spent nearly two decades reporting on the waste and recycling industries. Now he began looking into the market for secondhand goods, both domestically and in Africa and Asia.”Your average thrift store in the United States only sells about one-third of the stuff that ends up on its shelves,” he says. “The rest of the stuff ends up somewhere else.” Minter visited Goodwill donation centers in the U.S. and watched as employees engaged in a sophisticated sorting and pricing system. He noted that while designer clothes might be set aside as “boutique” items, other products – including heavy wooden furniture and outdated exercise equipment – were often destined for the dump.”A 300-pound oak dining room table … becomes a problem,” he says. “You will see some of this very nice oak furniture, if it can’t be sold, it will end up in the landfill.” Minter’s new book, Secondhand, explores the afterlife of donated clothes and electronics. His previous book, Junkyard Planet, was about the recycling industry.

Victoria Falls dries to a trickle after worst drought in a century — For decades Victoria Falls, where southern Africa’s Zambezi river cascades down 100 metres into a gash in the earth, have drawn millions of holidaymakers to Zimbabwe and Zambia for their stunning views.But the worst drought in a century has slowed the waterfalls to a trickle, fuelling fears that climate change could kill one of the region’s biggest tourist attractions.While they typically slow down during the dry season, officials said this year had brought an unprecedented decline in water levels. “In previous years, when it gets dry, it’s not to this extent,” “This [is] our first experience of seeing it like this. “It affects us because … clients … can see on the internet [that the falls are low] … We don’t have so many tourists.”As world leaders gather in Madrid for the COP25 climate change conference to discuss ways to halt catastrophic warming caused by human-driven greenhouse gas emissions, southern Africa is already suffering some of its worst effects – with taps running dry and about 45 million people in need of food aid amid crop failures. Zimbabwe and Zambia have suffered power cuts as they are heavily reliant on hydropower from plants at the Kariba dam, which is on the Zambezi river upstream of the waterfalls. Stretches of this kilometre-long natural wonder are nothing but dry stone. Water flow is low in others. Data from the Zambezi River Authority shows water flow at its lowest since 1995, and well under the long-term average. The Zambian president, Edgar Lungu, has called it “a stark reminder of what climate change is doing to our environment”. Yet scientists are cautious about categorically blaming climate change. There is always seasonal variation in levels. Harald Kling, a hydrologist at engineering firm Poyry and a Zambezi river expert, said climate science dealt in decades, not particular years, “so it’s sometimes difficult to say this is because of climate change because droughts have always occurred”. “If they become more frequent, then you can start saying: OK, this may be climate change.”

PG&E Had Systemic Problems With Power Line Maintenance, California Probe Finds Investigation by state utilities commission concludes company failed to properly inspect and maintain transmission lines for years. Wall Street Journal. PG&E Corp. failed to adequately inspect and maintain its transmission lines for years before a faulty line started the deadliest fire in California history, a state investigation has found. In a 700-page report detailing the problems that led the Caribou-Palermo transmission line to malfunction on Nov. 8, 2018, sparking the Camp Fire, investigators with the California Public Utilities Commission said they found systemic problems with how the company oversaw the safety of its oldest lines. State fire investigators had previously determined that PG&E equipment started the Camp Fire, which killed 85 people, and the company hasn’t disputed the findings. But the new [700 page] report goes well beyond earlier findings, alleging numerous serious violations of state rules for maintaining electric lines and specific problems with upkeep of the transmission line that started the fire….“The identified shortcomings in PG&E’s inspection and maintenance of the incident tower were not isolated, but rather indicative of an overall pattern of inadequate inspection and maintenance of PG&E’s transmission facilities,” the report by the commission’s safety and enforcement division found… The findings of the utilities commission report could lead California to impose fines and other penalties. It could also influence ongoing investigations by law-enforcement agencies, including the Butte County District Attorney and the California Attorney General, that are deciding whether to file criminal charges against the utility and its executives. It could also become a factor in PG&E’s probation. The company is on federal probation for failure to properly inspect and maintain its gas pipeline system, which led to an explosion in 2010 that killed eight people. The federal judge overseeing PG&E’s probation has indicated that the company has violated the terms of its probation and is weighing further sanctions.

PG&E Agrees to Pay $13.5 Billion in Settlement With Victims of California Wildfires. Pact removes obstacle to utility’s emergence from chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. WSJ – PG&E Corp. has reached a settlement with victims of the wildfires that pushed California’s largest utility into bankruptcy, agreeing to pay them $13.5 billion in damages. The pact removes a significant obstacle to PG&E’s emergence from chapter 11 protection and includes reforms meant to address criticism that the company enriched shareholders while leaving customers exposed to danger from aged, unsafe equipment.

Brazilian President Blames Leonardo DiCaprio For Amazon Fires – While speaking to a gathering of his supporters in Brasilia last week, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro made a bizarre claim about Leonardo DiCaprio. Bolsonaro blamed the actor for the recent Amazon fires, claiming that the DiCaprio paid to have the forest burned down, while offering no evidence to support his allegations. “DiCaprio is a cool guy, isn’t he? Giving money to set the Amazon on fire,” Bolsonaro said. The president was referencing a number of charities that are being investigated by his administration, but there is still no evidence that these organizations had anything to do with the fires. In a statement to the Associated Press on Friday, DiCaprio said that he has not funded any of the groups that are being investigated, but says that they are still worthy of support. “While worthy of support, we did not fund the organizations targeted. The future of these irreplaceable ecosystems is at stake and I am proud to stand with the groups protecting them,” DiCaprio’s statement read. Then on Saturday, DiCaprio made a statement on Instagram saying: “At this time of crisis for the Amazon, I support the people of Brazil working to save their natural and cultural heritage. They are an amazing, moving and humbling example of the commitment and passion needed to save the environment. The future of these irreplaceable ecosystems is at stake and I am proud to stand with the groups protecting them. While worthy of support, we did not fund the organizations targeted. I remain committed to supporting the Brazilian indigenous communities, local governments, scientists, educators and general public who are working tirelessly to secure the Amazon for the future of all Brazilians.”

Amazon fires are causing glaciers in the Andes to melt even faster – Fires occur in the Amazon rainforest every year, but the past 11 months saw the number of fires increase by more than 70% when compared with 2018, indicating a major acceleration in land clearing by the country’s logging and farming industries.The smoke from the fires rose high into the atmosphere and could be seen from space. Some regions of Brazil became covered in thick smoke that closed airports and darkened city skies. As the rainforest burns, it releases enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and larger particles of so-called “black carbon” (smoke and soot); in any given year, the burning of forests and grasslands in South America emits a whopping 800,000 tonnes of black carbon into the atmosphere. Not only does this absurd amount of smoke cause health issues and contribute to global warming but, as a growing number of scientific studies are showing, it also more directly contributes to the melting of glaciers.In a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, a team of researchers has outlined how smoke from fires in the Amazon in 2010 made glaciers in the Andes melt more quickly. When fires in the Amazon emit black carbon during the peak burning season (August to October), winds carry these clouds of smoke to Andean glaciers, which can sit higher than 5,000 metres above sea level. Despite being invisible to the naked eye, black carbon particles affect the ability of the snow to reflect incoming sunlight, a phenomenon known as “albedo”. Similar to how a dark-coloured car will heat up more quickly in direct sunlight when compared with a light-coloured one, glaciers covered by black carbon particles will absorb more heat, and thus melt faster. Crucially, the authors also found that the effect of black carbon depends on the amount of dust covering a glacier – if the amount of dust is higher, then the glacier will already be absorbing most of the heat that might have been absorbed by the black carbon. Land clearing is one of the reasons that dust levels over South America doubled during the 20th century. In South America, glaciers are crucial for water supply – in some towns, including Huaraz in Peru, more than 85% of drinking water comes from glaciers during times of drought. However, these truly vital sources of water are increasingly under threat as the planet feels the effects of global warming. Glaciers in the Andes have been receding rapidly for the last 50 years.

Greenland Ice Sheet Melt Creates Huge Waterfalls, Increasing Concerns About Sea Level Rise — Scientists in the Arctic watched a glacial lake in Greenland turn into a waterfall that drained five million cubic meters of water, or 2,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, in just five hours, worrying scientists that the world’s second largest ice sheet is becoming unstable, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The waterfall that the scientists observed was triggered by cracks in the ice sheet. When those cracks form, massive amounts of lake water falls below the surface to the area beneath the ice. There the meltwater expands the lake by weakening the ice. In the new study, the researchers captured the lake draining when its edge met a fracture in the ice that had formed one year earlier, according to the study. The scientists watched the water plummet more than 3,200 feet to the lowest layers of the glacier where the ice forms on top of bedrock. At the base layer, the water weakens the ice and helps it move out to sea, as The Washington Post reported. The team of scientists, led by researchers from the University of Cambridge in England, captured the drone footage in July 2018. The researchers suggested that what they observed may represent an overlooked issue that is affecting the Greenland ice sheet. “We propose that many lakes thought to drain slowly are, in fact, draining rapidly via hydrofracture. As such, rapid drainage events, and their net impact on ice sheet dynamics, are being notably underestimated,” thestudy reads. This means scientists may need to tweak their computer models to form a more accurate picture of the rate of melting and projections for sea level rise. “We need to gain a more complete picture of these processes so that we can properly predict the impact of climate change on the Greenland Ice Sheet in the 21st century,”

Thinning Ice Around Antarctica Is Weakening Its Ice Sheet – For the first time, scientists have proven that the thinning ice shelves floating around Antarctica are driving ice loss from the interior of the continent as well, according to new research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The weakening of the ice shelf means that more ice is flowing from the interior of the continent into the ocean. The study finds that there is an immediate link between the ebbing thickness of the ice shelves and the acceleration in the glaciers feeding behind them, which spells trouble for sea level rise. The findings upend the notion that there is a delay between the ice shelves melting and the glaciers moving towards the sea, as the BBC reported.In other words, the glaciers will speed up as the floating ice gets weaker, and then they will dump themselves into the ocean.”The response is essentially instantaneous,” said Hilmar Gudmundsson who led the research team from Northumbria University in the UK, to the BBC. “If you thin the ice shelves today, the increase in flow of the ice upstream will increase today – not tomorrow, not in 10 or 100 years from now; it will happen immediately.”The Antarctic Ice Sheet covers about 98 percent of the continent and is Earth’s largest single ice mass. As it loses size, it adds to sea level rise. It has always been held in place by the floating ice shelves encircling Antarctica. However, those ice shelves are starting to thin out either from warming waters or changes in ocean circulation, as Newsweek reported.To examine the effect that the shelf has on the Antarctic Ice Sheet, Gudmundsson and his team of scientists pored over nearly 25 years of satellite data from the 1990s to 2017 and homed in on the point where the land-based ice sheet meets the floating ice shelf, a point known as the “grounding line.”The team then used a state-of-the-art ice-flow model and measurements of changes in the geometry of ice shelves to calculate the changes in grounded ice flow. When the modeled results were compared with those obtained by satellites over the last 25 years, the researchers found what they described as ‘striking and robust’ similarities in the pattern of ice flowing from the ice sheet into the ocean, according to a statement from Northumbria University. The biggest changes were spotted in Western Antarctica, which already makes a significant contribution to sea level rise. With one of the glaciers there, evidence of the changes in the floating shelf and the diminishing ice sheet could be seen 100 miles inland from the grounding line, according to a university statement.

Warming toll: 1 degree hotter, trillions of tons of ice gone – Since leaders first started talking about tackling the problem of climate change, the world has spewed more heat-trapping gases, gotten hotter and suffered hundreds of extreme weather disasters. Fires have burned, ice has melted and seas have grown. The first United Nations diplomatic conference to tackle climate change was in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Here’s what’s happened to Earth since:

• – The carbon dioxide level in the air has jumped from about 358 parts per million to nearly 412, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That’s a 15% rise in 27 years.
• – Emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from fossil fuel and industry jumped from 6.06 billion metric tons of carbon in 1992 to 9.87 billion metric tons in 2017, according to the Global Carbon Project. That’s a 63% increase in 25 years.
• – The global average temperature rose a tad more than a degree Fahrenheit (0.57 degrees Celsius) in 27 years, according to NOAA.
• – Since Jan. 1, 1993, there have been 212 weather disasters that cost the United States at least $1 billion each, when adjusted for inflation. In total, they cost $1.45 trillion and killed more than 10,000 people. That’s an average of 7.8 such disasters per year since 1993, compared with 3.2 per year from 1980 to 1992, according to NOAA.
• – The U.S. Climate Extremes Index has nearly doubled from 1992 to 2018, according to NOAA. The index takes into account far-from-normal temperatures, drought and overall dry spells, abnormal downpours.
• – Nine of the 10 costliest hurricanes to hit the United States when adjusted for inflation have struck since late 1992. The other one, Andrew at No. 6, hit in August 1992, according to NOAA.
• – The number of acres burned by wildfires in the United States has more than doubled from a five-year average of 3.3 million acres in 1992 to 7.6 million acres in 2018.
• – The annual average extent of Arctic sea ice has shrunk from 4.7 million square miles (12.1 million square kilometers) in 1992 to 3.9 million square miles (10.1 million square kilometers) in 2019, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. That’s a 17% decrease.
• – The Greenland ice sheet lost 5.2 trillion tons (4.7 trillion metric tons) of ice from 1993 to 2018, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
• – The Antarctic ice sheet lost 3 trillion tons (2.7 trillion metric tons) of ice from 1992 to 2017, according to a study in the journal Nature.
• – The global sea level has risen on average 2.9 millimeters a year since 1992. That’s a total of 78.3 millimeters, or 3.1 inches, according to NOAA.

As sea engulfs coastline, Indonesians pay high price to shield homes – (Reuters) – Indonesian fisherman Miskan says the once-abundant catches he used to enjoy have been dwindling in recent years on this stretch of the Java Sea. Indonesian fisherman Miskan says the once-abundant catches he used to enjoy have been dwindling in recent years on this stretch of the Java Sea. His meager income is being further strained by having to borrow cash to shore up his home against lapping waves coming further inland on this vulnerable coastline. “If you have a house on land and then work at sea, it’s hard. But now I work at sea and I live at sea,” said Miskan, 44, who uses one name, speaking outside his small home, where a caged songbird hangs from the rafters. His community’s battle against inundation, blamed on both man-made environmental destruction and the impact of climate change, reflects the risks posed to millions of people by a sinking coastline on Indonesia’s most populous island of Java. The flooding in Tambaklorok in Central Java province is now so bad that Miskan uses a window to enter his home since his door is half blocked by dirt piled up to keep out the sea.Miskan had to borrow from neighbors to pay roughly 7.2 million rupiah ($500) to hire workers to truck in earth. Thousands of people in Asia and Europe joined rallies demanding more action on climate change on Friday, aiming to force political leaders to come up with urgent solutions at a United Nations conference that starts on Monday. Indonesia, an archipelago of thousands of islands, has about 81,000 km (50,300 miles) of coastline, making it particularly vulnerable to climate change along with neighbors like the Philippines. It is also home to more than a fifth of the world’s mangrove forests, which naturally help keep out high tidal waters. But for years, coastal communities have chopped down mangrove forests to clear the way for fish and shrimp farms, and for rice paddies.

You just lived through the warmest decade on record – and it’s only going to get hotter – Global warming shows no signs of letting up. The years from 2015 to 2019 and from 2010 to 2019 “are, respectively, almost certain to be the warmest five-year period and decade on record,” the World Meteorological Organization said in a report released Tuesday. “Since the 1980s, each successive decade has been warmer than the last,” the agency said. The year 2019 concludes a decade of exceptional global heat, retreating ice and record sea levels driven by greenhouse gases from human activities, according to the WMO. “If we do not take urgent climate action now, then we are heading for a temperature increase of more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, with ever more harmful impacts on human well-being,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas. “We are nowhere near on track to meet the Paris Agreement target.” Climate change impact: Hot temperatures shorten pregnancies, study suggests Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – the greenhouse gas most responsible for global warming – hit a record level of 407.8 parts per million in 2018 and continued to rise in 2019. Carbon dioxide lasts in the atmosphere for centuries and the ocean for even longer, thus locking in climate change, the WMO said. And 2019 itself is on course to be the second- or third-warmest year on record, with 2016 still holding the all-time temperature record. This year was hotter than average in most parts of the world, including the Arctic. “In contrast a large area of North America has been colder than the recent average,” the WMO said.

Global Warming Prediction Sounds Alarm for Climate Fight – The world’s average temperature is rising faster than previously thought, headed for a gain that may be triple the goal set by almost 200 countries. The findings by the World Meteorologic Organization suggest an increase of 3 degrees to 5 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. It’s another indication of how far off track the planet is in meeting its target to contain global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius since the dawn of the industrial revolution. That was the ambition in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, a level that scientists identify as one where the worst impacts on the environment could be avoided. While a fluctuation of that level hardly registers during the course of a day, when applied to the climate it would mark the biggest shift in temperatures since the last ice age ended some 10,000 years ago. “If we wanted to reach a 1.5 degree increase we would need to bend emissions and at the moment countries haven’t been following on their Paris pledges,” WMO Secretary General Petteri Taalas told reporters in Madrid, where envoys from almost 200 countries were attending a two-week United Nations conference on the issue. A 4-degree gain would trigger vast changes to the environment, according to research by the Pottsdam Institute for Climate Impact and Research and Climate Analytics. Some of those changes include:

• Ice vanishing from both poles.
• Many rainforests turning to desert.
• Rising sea levels flooding into the interior of continents.
• Irreversible loss of diversity among plants and animals.

The WMO report set the stage for this year’s round of climate talks hosted by the United Nations in Madrid. Rising temperatures and greenhouse gas emissions are putting pressure on governments and companies to raise their ambition for cutting back on the fossil fuels that damage the atmosphere.

Global emissions to hit 36.8 billion tonnes, beating last year’s record high Global emissions for 2019 are predicted to hit 36.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂), setting yet another all-time record. This disturbing result means emissions have grown by 62% since international climate negotiations began in 1990 to address the problem.The figures are contained in the Global Carbon Project, which today released its14th Global Carbon Budget. Digging into the numbers, however, reveals a silver lining. While overall carbon emissions continue to rise, the rate of growth is about two-thirds lower than in the previous two years. Driving this slower growth is an extraordinary decline in coal emissions, particularly in the United States and Europe, and growth in renewable energy globally.A less positive component of this emissions slowdown, however, is that a lower global economic growth has contributed to it. Most concerning yet is the very robust and stable upward trends in emissions from oil and natural gas.The burning of coal continues to dominate CO₂ emissions and was responsible for 40% of all fossil fuel emissions in 2018, followed by oil (34%) and natural gas (20%). However, coal emissions reached their highest levels in 2012 and have remained slightly lower since then. Emissions have been declining at an annual average of 0.5% over the past five years to 2018. Coal emissions hit a peak in 2012 and have been declining ever since. Global Carbon Project 2019In 2019, we project a further decline in global coal CO₂ emissions of around 0.9%. This decline is due to large falls of 10% in both the US and the European Union, and weak growth in China (0.8%) and India (2%).The US has announced the closure of more than 500 coal-fired power plants over the past decade, while the UK’s electricity sector has gone from 40% coal-based power in 2012 to 5% in 2018. Whether coal emissions reached a true peak in 2012 or will creep back up will depend largely on the trajectory of coal use in China and India. Despite this uncertainty, the strong upward trend from the past has been broken and is unlikely to return.

We need to halve emissions by 2030. They rose again in 2019. – The world likely needs to halve greenhouse-gas emissions within the next decade to prevent dangerous levels of global warming. Instead, year after year, we’re still pumping out more climate pollution. Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels will rise for the third straight year in 2019, ticking up an estimated 0.6% to a record 37 billion metric tons, according to the closely watched annual report from the Global Carbon Project. Slight declines in the US and European Union were offset by projected increases in China, India, and other parts of the world, where economic growth is fueling rising energy demands. In fact, carbon pollution is likely to climb again in 2020, given expected increases in use of oil and natural gas in emerging economies. “Even with all the attention of the youth movements and growing climate focus around the world, we still haven’t turned the corner to stabilize and bring emissions down,” The conclusions were published in Environmental Research Letters, Earth System Science Data, and Nature Climate Change on Tuesday, underscoring the stakes as delegates from more than 200 nations meet in Madrid this week and next for the 25th UN Climate Change Conference. Unless countries collectively commit to and follow through on much more aggressive action, carbon dioxide levels are likely to continue rising through 2030. Likewise, global temperatures could soar as much as 5 ˚C above pre-industrial levels this century, accelerating the melting of ice sheets, the surge in sea levels and the destruction of coral reefs. This week’s analysis found that China’s carbon dioxide emissions rose an expected 2.6% this year, driven by increases in the use of oil, natural gas, and coal as well as cement production. Moreover, recent reports found that the nation is in the midst of a building boom for coal plants, even as its investments in solar and wind projects have plummeted in recent years. Meanwhile, India’s emissions likely increased 1.8% this year, which would at least mark a sharp decline from the 8% growth the year before. Unfortunately, the nation’s aggressive push to develop giant solar and wind projects has fizzled in recent months, amid growing regulatory uncertainty and financing challenges.

Climate change: From the beginning, models have been remarkably accurate – There are dozens of disciplines and subdisciplines within the broad ambit of climate science, studying everything from ancient geology to the spread of disease. But one discipline in particular is exposed to intense public scrutiny, the subject of long-running political and legal disputes: modeling. As interesting as the details of climate science may be, what society most needs from it is an answer to a simple question: What the hell is going to happen? What are we in for? That’s the question models seek to answer. It turns out that attempting to understand, model, and predict the entire global biophysical/atmospheric system is complicated. It’s especially tricky because there’s no way to run tests. There’s no second Earth to use as an experimental control group. The best scientists can do is use their knowledge of climate history and climate physics to build models of Earth systems and then test the models against future emission scenarios. This reliance on models has always been a bête noire for climate change deniers, who have questioned their accuracy as a way of casting doubt on their dire projections. For years, it has been a running battle between scientists and their critics, with the former rallying to defend one dataset and model after another. Now, for the first time, a group of scientists – Zeke Hausfather of UC Berkeley, Henri Drake and Tristan Abbott of MIT, and Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies – has done a systematic review of climate models, dating back to the late 1970s. Published in Geophysical Research Letters, it tests model performance against a simple metric: how well they predicted global mean surface temperature (GMST) through 2017, when the latest observational data is available.Long story short: “We find that climate models published over the past five decades were generally quite accurate in predicting global warming in the years after publication.”This is contrary to deniers, who claim that models overestimate warming, and contrary to thebizarre op-ed the New York Times ran in November, which claimed that scientists underestimate warming. As it happens, models have roughly hit the mark all along. It’s just, nobody listened. The good news, as the authors say, is that this result “increases our confidence that models are accurately projecting global warming.” The bad news is that the projections from those models are unrelentingly grim, so accuracy isn’t very reassuring. Let’s take a quick look at how the review worked.

Carbon Calculus – IMF – – The scientific consensus is clear: climate change is associated with increasingly frequent and intense natural disasters ranging from droughts and wildfires to hurricanes and coastal flooding. While the extent of the economic damage cannot be known for certain, strong evidence suggests it could be quite severe. The challenge for policymakers will be to decide how much to spend on measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To do that, they must be able to compare the costs of various options, including renewable-energy sources and electric cars. The challenge is taking on increasing urgency in the policy world as climate scientists argue that emission reductions must be rapid and deep, with a goal of reaching net zero by 2050, if not sooner (Millar and others 2017). That goal, which many countries have already embraced, will require a vast transformation of the energy sources used to power the global economy, and it would mean going far beyond business-as-usual technological progress. Indeed, the US Energy Information Administration’s International Energy Outlook 2019 projects that fossil fuels will still generate 57 percent of electricity in 2050. How much would it cost to move beyond business as usual and come within striking distance of net-zero emissions by 2050? To answer this question, it’s important to distinguish between short- and long-term costs. In the short term, there are some inexpensive ways to reduce emissions, but deeper cuts run up against quickly rising costs. However, some activities – especially those involving fledgling low-carbon technologies – that appear expensive in the short term may actually turn out to be low-cost approaches in the long term, because of induced innovation. This insight suggests that the longer-term cost of mitigation may be lower than is widely assumed.

UN chief warns of ‘point of no return’ on climate change – U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Sunday that the world’s efforts to stop climate change have been “utterly inadequate” so far and there is a danger global warming could pass the “point of no return.”Speaking before the start Monday of a two-week international climate conference in Madrid, the U.N. chief said the impact of rising temperatures – including more extreme weather – is already being felt around the world, with dramatic consequences for humans and other species.He noted that the world has the scientific knowledge and the technical means to limit global warming, but “what is lacking is political will.” “The point of no return is no longer over the horizon,” Guterres told reporters in the Spanish capital. “It is in sight and hurtling toward us.”

Decrying ‘Utterly Inadequate’ Efforts to Tackle Climate Crisis, UN Chief Declares ‘Our War Against Nature Must Stop’ –On the eve of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres decried the “utterly inadequate” efforts of governments to curb planet-heating emissions and called for “a clear demonstration of increased ambition and commitment” from world leaders to tackle the crisis. “For many decades the human species has been at war with the planet. And the planet is fighting back,” Guterres told reporters in Madrid Sunday. “We are confronted now with a global climate crisis. The point of no return is no longer over the horizon. It is in sight and hurtling towards us.”“Our war against nature must stop,” he declared. “And we know that that is possible. The scientific community has provided us with the roadmap to achieve this.”Guterres referenced various U.N.-affiliated reports from recent years, including three released in the weeks leading up to COP 25, the climate conference that will begin Monday and run through Dec. 13. The annual Emissions Gap report, published Tuesday by the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP), warned that global temperatures are on track to rise as much as 3.2°C by the end of the century and countries’ commitments under the 2015 Paris agreement – a key focus of the upcoming conference – are insufficient to avert climate catastrophe. The latest Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, published Monday by the World Meteorological Organization, revealed that levels of long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere hit record highs in 2018. The previous week, the UNEP and leading research organizations published The Production Gap, which found that planned levels of fossil fuel production through 2030 are “dangerously out of step” with the Paris accord goals. “According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we must limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, reach carbon neutrality by 2050, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030,” Guterres noted. “The commitments made in Paris would still lead to an increase in temperature above three degrees Celsius. But many countries are not even meeting those commitments.”

Neoliberalism and Climate Change – We are in the midst of a terrifying climate emergency. Whether it’s the record-challenging cold of this week, devastating wildfires, Category 5 hurricanes, flooding on Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester when it’s not raining, the permanent disappearance of glaciers, intensifying drought and climate migration, or the relentless upward march of average temperatures, signs of climate disruption are all around us. This is partly due to the power of neoliberal economics. Naomi Klein has made an interesting observation about the relation between the two, which is that it was bad luck that neoliberalism surged just as we figured out the need to do something about greenhouse gas emissions. In any case, evidence of the ability of a now discredited economic approach (neoliberalism) to hang on long past its sell-by date is all around us. One sign is last year’s Nobel Prize – starting with the exclusion from the prize of Martin Weitzman, whose work on fat tails (i.e., catastrophic climate impacts) was a truly pioneering contribution in a subfield that has lagged far behind on incorporating theoretical innovation from elsewhere in the discipline. The omission of Weitzman contrasts with the awarding of the prize to William Nordhaus. Nordhaus’ work has been central in stalling effective climate progress. His position was epitomized by his Nobel lecture. One of his slides labeled 4° Celsius of warming as “optimal,” rather than the truly devastating increase scientists have determined it will be. The levels of ecosystem and human disruption that will prevail with a 4° increase are massive, and whether humans would even be able to “adapt” to that level of increase is questionable. Furthermore, the likelihood of tipping points that lead the climate system to spiral out of control are much greater with an increase of 4°. Only a truly deranged economic paradigm could label such a pathway as “optimal.” What accounts for such a result? The ostensible rationale for go-slow climate policy is that income today is worth more than income in the future. But aside from the patent immorality of that view, it doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. That’s because growth today is mainly yielding increases in the incomes and wealth of the already wealthy. While the standard models such as Nordhaus’s Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model, don’t incorporate this distortion of the growth process, it is now well-documented that business-as-usual growth is yielding increased concentration of wealth at the very top. So the neoliberal approach to the climate crisis essentially says that we should destroy the planet to further enrich a tiny sliver of humanity that already has an obscene amount of wealth.

Economists and climate change: Building castles in the sky — Economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said that “the only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” Unfortunately, when some economists turn their sights on the economics of climate change, their unreliable methods imperil not just the economic life of humankind but its very existence. I have written previously about this phenomenon in 2007 about how economists underestimate the critical importance of small (by economic value) but critical parts of the economy such as agriculture, forestry, and energy and in 2012 about how unsuited our current infrastructure is to the unfolding climate.The trouble is that against all evidence, some climate economists keep building castles in the sky. Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus is among the most prominent economists working on climate change and its economic effects. In short, Nordhaus, who is mentioned both in my 2007 and 2012 pieces, tells us not to worry too much about climate change. It will be cheaper to adapt to it than to prevent it or slow it down.The problem with Nordhaus’ thinking (and that of many others like him) is that he cannot conceive of abrupt discontinuities in the workings of the planet or the workings of human society. In short, he cannot conceive that climate change could alter our environment so thoroughly and disrupt our agriculture so completely that it would lead to catastrophic results. It is for this failure of imagination that economist Steven Keen recently took Nordhaus to task, showing through a careful critique of Nordhaus’ equations, that even those equations demonstrate catastrophe ahead when provisioned with the proper numbers and understanding. When Keen adds in what we know about tipping points in the climate system, he finds that Nordhaus’ own equations reveal that “[a]t 3 degrees, damages are 8 times as high. At 4 degrees, the ratio doesn’t matter, because the tipping point function says there would be no economy.” What a difference understanding the nonlinearity of the climate system makes! A report in Yale Climate Connections mentions Nordhaus and others whose models seem to predict absurd things. One author calculated that when using Nordhaus’ model, “not until global warming reached 19 degrees C (34 degrees F – a global temperature that is virtually incompatible with life) did the model yield a 50% reduction in economic output.”

UW students plan Friday climate strike, prepare petition for renewable energy demands – Students, faculty and community members at the University of Wisconsin-Madison plan to demand stronger environmental policies with a campus climate strike on a day of global action. Campus Leaders for Energy Action Now and co-sponsors will host a rally at Library Mall at 12 p.m. Friday to demand specific university actions against climate change. Organizers will collect signatures for a clean energy petition, which calls Chancellor Rebecca Blank and the administration to commit to power the university exclusively with renewable energy by 2050 and derive all electrical power from renewable resources by 2030, according to a press release. While CLEAN’s original goal was to transition entirely to renewable energy by 2030, conversations with administrators helped create a standard that is both challenging and realistic, said CLEAN executive board member Cara Nastali. “I’m really excited to see students show up. I hope it’s informational,” Nastali said. “I don’t know that every student knows about where our energy comes from on campus, and I think it’s super important that there’s that knowledge out there.” Colleges and universities are significant energy users and influential institutions in their communities, the petition says, and action at UW-Madison will “set an example for the rest of the nation” to move toward cleaner, renewable energy sources. The petition also asks that the Sustainability Advisory Council open up meetings to increase student involvement and representation, as well as have a concrete action plan to reach these goals by the end of January 2021.

No Plan B for Planet A – Environmentalists and Green New Deal proponents like to say we must take care of the Earth, because “There is no Planet B.” Their Plan A is simple: No fossil fuels. Keep them in the ground. More than a few Democrat presidential aspirants have said they would begin implementing that diktat their very first day in the White House. Ask them for details, and their responses range from evasive to delusional, disingenuous – and outrage that you would dare ask. The truth is, they don’t have a clue. They’ve never really thought about it. It’s never occurred to them that these technologies require raw materials that have to be dug out of the ground, which means mining, which they vigorously oppose (except by dictators in faraway countries)…..Using wind power to replace the 3.9 billion megawatt-hours that Americans consumed in 2018, coal and gas-fired backup power plants, natural gas for home heating, coal and gas for factories, and gasoline for vehicles – while generating enough extra electricity every windy day to charge batteries for just seven straight windless days – would require some 14 million 1.8-MW wind turbines. Those turbines would sprawl across three-fourths of the Lower 48 US states – and require 15 billion tons of steel, concrete and other raw materials. They would wipe out eagles, hawks, bats and other species. Using solar to generate just the 3.9 billion MWh would require completely blanketing an area the size of New Jersey with sunbeam-tracking Nellis Air Force Base panels – if the Sun were shining at high-noon summertime Arizona intensity 24/7/365. (That doesn’t include the extra power demands listed for wind.) Solar uses toxic chemicals during manufacturing and in the panels: lead, cadmium telluride, copper indium selenide, cadmium gallium (di)selenide and many others. They could leach out into soils and waters during thunderstorms, hail storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, and when panels are dismantled and hauled off to landfills or recycling centers. Recycling panels and wind turbines presents major challenges.Their models, reports and headlines bear little or no resemblance to the real world outside our windows – on temperatures,hurricanes, tornadoes, sea levels, crops or polar bears. But the crisis is real, the science is settled, and anyone who disagrees is a denier.So for the moment, Let’s not challenge their climate or fossil fuel ideologies. Let’s just ask: How exactly are you going to make this happen? How will you ensure that your Plan A won’t destroy our economy, jobs and living standards? And your Plan B won’t devastate the only planet we’ve got?

The Case for Carbon Taxes, Part I: Political Subversion – Economists support carbon taxes on efficiency grounds. By putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions, a carbon tax creates a strong incentive for people reduce their carbon footprint. They can do this by switching to clean technologies or simply by reducing their use of fossil fuels – by driving less or turning down the air conditioning, for example. Other policies can also be used to get people to reduce their use of fossil fuels, but carbon taxes allow people to reduce their carbon footprint in the least costly way. Given that decarbonizing the economy will be a large and expensive undertaking, keeping costs as low as possible is clearly important.Economists have made some headway persuading policymakers that carbon taxes should be a central part of any plan to limit global warming, but many people remain quite skeptical. The most important doubts revolve around the political sustainability of carbon taxes. Carbon taxes appear to be politically vulnerable because they directly and visibly lead to higher energy prices, and spending on energy is a major item in the budgets of most families. I will discuss the politics of carbon taxes in two posts. In this post I make a simple political argument for carbon taxes: carbon taxes are clearly constitutional and can function effectively even if most Republicans remain opposed to action on climate change and gain control of the executive branch. In contrast, the main alternatives to carbon taxes, mandates and subsidies, are highly vulnerable to political subversion by Congress and conservative courts and regulators. This point alone is sufficient to justify including a carbon tax in any plan to avoid the worst effects of climate change. In the next post I will argue that carbon taxes with per capita rebates will tend to generate their own support over time as people make investments that only pay off if the tax remains in place. This does not ensure that a carbon tax will be politically sustainable – any ambitious climate policy will remain controversial for years – but it gives policymakers and activists another reason to support carbon taxation.

COP25 climate summit starts as UN chief says the planet faces a ‘point of no-return’ – The COP25 climate summit got underway Monday, with the UN secretary general warning that “the point of no-return is no longer over the horizon.”The summit, which will end on December 13, is taking place in Madrid, Spain. It was originally due to be held in Santiago, Chile, but was moved to Europe after civil unrest in the South American country.In remarks delivered Sunday, Antonio Guterres emphasized that his message was “one of hope, not of despair” but sought to highlight the urgency of the problems faced by the planet. “We simply have to stop digging and drilling and take advantage of the vast possibilities offered by renewable energy and nature-based solutions,” he said.”In the crucial 12 months ahead, it is essential that we secure more ambitious national commitments – particularly from the main emitters – to immediately start reducing greenhouse gas emissions at a pace consistent to reaching carbon neutrality by 2050,” he went on to state.While Guterres stressed the importance of unity and collaboration, ensuring that all countries are on the same page is a huge challenge. China, for instance, is constructing more coal-fired power plants and approving new mines, according to Reuters. The country has built 42.9 gigawatts of new coal-fired power capacity since the beginning of 2018, Reuters said, compared with 35 GW in 2017.As COP25 begins, the shadow of COP21, which took place in Paris in 2015, looms large.As well as a commitment to make sure global warming stayed “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, world leaders at Paris also agreed to “pursue efforts” to limit the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The Paris Agreement suffered a setback on November 4 when the U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, officially announced in a statement that the country had started the process to withdraw. “Per the terms of the Agreement, the United States submitted formal notification of its withdrawal to the United Nations,” he said. “The withdrawal will take effect one year from delivery of the notification.”

Wealthy Countries’ Approach to Climate Change Condemns Hundreds of Millions of People to Suffer -In Madrid, Spain, the 2019 UN Climate Change Conference – known as COP25 – began on December 2. Representatives of the world’s countries gathered to discuss what is decidedly a serious problem for the planet; no one, except dangerous political forces in the neofascist right, denies the reality of climate change. What prevents a transfer from carbon-based fuel to other fuels is not the stubbornness of this or that country. The main problems are three:

1. The right wing that denies climate change;
2. Sections of the energy industry that have a vested interest in the continuation of the use of carbon-based fuels;
3. The refusal by the Western advanced countries to admit both that they have caused the problem and that they should use their vast wealth to finance the transfer from carbon-based fuels to other fuels in countries whose wealth has been siphoned off to the West.

The first two blockages – the right wing and sections of the climate industry – are related, since it is often money from the climate industry (the Koch brothers, for instance) that finances the climate deniers and sows confusion about the immense reality that confronts us. The third blockage is serious, and it has prevented the United Nations process from bearing fruit. At the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, the countries of the world negotiated a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In that document – which was ratified at the General Assembly two years later – the governments agreed to a key principle, namely that the impact of colonialism cannot be divorced from discussions of the climate crisis. “The global nature of climate change,” the parties wrote, “calls for the widest possible cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response, in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities and their social and economic conditions.” The main phrase here to consider is “common but differentiated responsibilities.” This means that the problem of climate change is something that is common to all countries, and that no one is immune to its deleterious impact; at the same time, the responsibility of countries is not identical, and some countries – which benefited for centuries from colonialism and carbon fuel – have a greater responsibility for the transition to a less damaging energy system.

The hidden costs of New England’s demand for Canadian hydropower – –Amid the last 20 years of worsening impacts from climate change, environmentalists in Vermont and New Hampshire have scrambled to nudge state leadership toward ambitious renewable energy goals. And a key component of meeting those goals has been Canadian hydropower, a cost-effective, reliable resource that is often billed as clean, green energy. The New England ISO, which regulates New England’s electricity infrastructure, currently gets 1.4 Terawatt hours of electricity from damming projects from the provinces of Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador, some of which goes to New Hampshire. About a third of Vermont’s energy comes from Canadian hydro plants through the Highgate interconnection. That’s enough to power about 400,000 New England homes. And even with the permitting failure of the proposed Northern Pass project – a 192-mile transmission line across New Hampshire that would have carried hydropower to southern New England – those numbers are expected only to increase. But hundreds of miles to the north, indigenous residents say the “green” power purchased by New Englanders comes at a great cost to native communities’ local environment, livelihoods and their health. “Think about what you’re buying here,” 78-year-old Alex Saunders said in his graveled voice last month, in his living room in Happy Valley-Goose Bay in Labrador. “You’re buying the misery from the local people of northern Canada. That’s not a good thing.” By the 1940s the forces of colonization had a long-established pattern of ripping apart First Nations communities in the region. His mother was orphaned at 6 when the Spanish flu decimated her Inuit village of Okak in 1918, and his father, of Innu and English descent, was orphaned at 7. Thousands of children were separated from their families and forced to attend English-only residential schools, while Inuit and Innu were compelled to trade their independent, nomadic lifestyle for a wage-based economy and living in what Saunders calls “white people houses.” To many Inuit, the damming projects along the Churchill River are just the latest – and in some ways the worst – expression of ongoing colonization of their people.

EPA chief says addressing biofuel industry concerns over blending mandates: source – (Reuters) – U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler told a biofuels company on Thursday that the agency is working to address industry concerns over biofuel blending rules that have sparked outrage across the Farm Belt, according to a source familiar with the matter. Biofuel producers and representatives of corn farmers are unhappy with the EPA’s expanded use of waivers exempting oil refineries from their annual ethanol blending requirements. They say that agency’s efforts to address the issue with proposed tweaks to the 2020 blending requirements are not enough. The EPA plans to send the proposed 2020 blending mandates to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for approval by the end of the week, according to two sources familiar with the matter. It is not clear whether that plan will include any changes since the agency unveiled the proposal in October. The agency has already missed a Nov. 30 deadline to finalize the 2020 blending rules. Wheeler acknowledged in a phone call that the industry wants greater certainty on blending requirements and said the agency was working to address the issue, the source said.

Wood pellets cause more climate pollution than coal when they’re burned. So why does Europe call them ‘carbon neutral’? – In fact, the European Union’s original designation of biomass as “carbon neutral” has little to do with how quickly trees reabsorb pollution released when pellets are burned. Instead, it comes from an inspection of just one side of the climate ledger.It’s a loophole that dates back nearly 30 years, linked to scientists’ understanding of the carbon cycle and how its disturbance has led to the climate crisis. Burning fossil fuels disrupts the “slow” cycle, releasing carbon accumulated in the earth over millions of years. But there is also a “fast” carbon cycle: Over decades rather than millennia, trees and plants grow and store carbon; it’s emitted when these plants decay, burn, or feed animals that respire. The fast cycle is so closely tied to plant life that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels even fluctuate with the seasons, shrinking as plants grow and spiking when they die or go dormant. As countries around the world came together to tackle the problem of climate change in 1990, the United Nations developed a framework for tracking carbon and other planet-warming pollutants in the atmosphere. The accounting system is complex, but essentially focuses on two sides of the ledger: the energy sector, where carbon dioxide is mostly released, and the land use sector, where carbon is stored by trees and other plant life. A scientists’ panel advising the United Nations on the framework made two crucial decisions that inspired the global biomass trade that followed. It chose to track carbon dioxide emissions from bioenergy in the land use sector instead of the energy sector. And it chose to track those emissions by fluctuations in forest cover, not by molecules measured at the biomass smokestack. To comply with the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s first international climate treaty, it set a goal of 20% renewable energy by 2020 and deemed biomass as emissions-free as solar or wind. To meet the energy-focused Kyoto targets, coal-dependent member nations like Britain began offering financial incentives to coal plants to convert to bioenergy. Those inducements spurred a massive pellet industry with southern U.S. forests as its foundation, supplemented by Canada and the Baltics. North Carolina alone has risen to become the single largest exporter of pellets in the world. The flaws in this scheme aren’t hard to spot. Manufacturing wood pellets and shipping them creates carbon pollution; burning them for electricity creates vastly more. While pellet life-cycle emissions are regulated, smokestack emissions, effectively, are not: they’re supposed to be tracked in the land use sector, but that sector is only loosely regulated in the Kyoto Protocol, and the United States and Canada aren’t parties to it.The loophole means that Britain’s Drax, the largest biomass power plant in the world, emits over 8 million tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide that the British government counts as zero and that the United States ignores completely.

Estonia is beginning to see the cost of wood pellets. Is North Carolina next? – Trees loom large in North Carolina lore. “Here’s to the land of the long leaf pine,” begins the state toast, a tribute to the vast savannas that once covered the eastern coastal plain. But since British colonial ships were first bound with tar, North Carolina forests have been as much a source of commerce as of custom. Now, the state is set to become the world’s largest single source of wood pellets, capsules of dried wood that have become a controversial substitute for coal in power plants in Europe and Asia. As scientists say more natural, diverse woodlands are needed to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, North Carolina climate advocates have been pleading with state officials to rein in the industrial biomass industry. Across the Atlantic, the country of Estonia offers a cautionary tale for what could happen if they don’t. Home to the world’s second largest pellet company, the small Baltic nation is converting many of its own storied forests from natural stands to tree farms. Activists say sacred groves and tourist attractions are suffering as a result, and government officials predict the timber plantations will store dramatically less carbon – with costly consequences for the country’s climate targets. The risk in North Carolina is less immediate. The administration of Gov. Roy Cooper has a plan to zero out emissions by 2050, but it doesn’t yet carry the force of law. Still, Estonia’s example is a warning signal to any government serious about keeping temperatures from rising above dangerous levels, advocates say. The message is to curb the growth of the industry and rethink the industry forestry model altogether. Spruce, birch, pine, aspen and oak covered most of Estonia until the advent of agriculture. But as in North Carolina, the pellet trade has also become a key part of the forests products industry. As a result, this country of 1.3 million has rapidly become a top producer of pellets on the continent. Satellite data from the University of Maryland, compiled by the World Resources Institute, shows Estonia lost 15% of its forest cover since 2001, with only a fraction getting replaced with new tree canopy. Data from the Ministry of Environment show more and more land is clear cut or cut to leave only middle-aged trees that can produce seeds. In fact, such “regeneration felling” has more than doubled in the last decade. “One thing that hasn’t gotten that much attention is really the scope of destruction that has already taken place,” said Martin Luiga, international communications coordinator for Estonian Forest Aid, a citizen-driven forest protection group he helped found in 2016.

Wind power supporters argue referendum could kill industry | Toledo Blade – Business and environmental groups told state lawmakers Tuesday that subjecting proposed wind farms to votes of the people would likely kill the industry in Ohio. “House Bill 401 is an alarming proposal that would take away landowners’ rights by subjecting wind energy development to a local vote that could result in the cancellation of a project after the permitting,” said Susan Munroe, economic development director for Chambers for Innovation and Clean Energy and former president of the Van Wert Area Chamber of Commerce. “It pits neighbor against neighbor,” she told the House Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “It’s an attack on landowner property rights. No other development, much less energy resource development, has to endure this type of legislation at the local level.” The bill, sponsored by Rep. Bill Reineke (R., Tiffin), is also opposed by the Ohio Chamber of Commerce. The measure would allow voters living in townships to petition to place a referendum on the ballot to undo wind farm site approvals by the Ohio Power Siting Board. The effort is largely driven by opponents of several large wind farms in varying stages of development, with a total of 189 turbines, on farmland in Seneca, Sandusky, Erie, and Huron counties. Paulding County has four wind farms totaling 182 turbines, a fifth under construction with 31 turbines, and a sixth in development, generating income that Commissioner Roy Klopfenstein said could not be duplicated by other development. A turbine will soon be built on his own property. “It is our opinion that the referendum process in this case is just wrong,” he said. “We as commissioners receive far more calls on livestock operations than wind farms. Are we as a community going to permit other industries to be subject to a ‘do I like my neighbor?’ vote?”

First US steel plants powered by wind, solar, are coming for industry with big carbon footprint – The steel industry has a massive carbon footprint, as much as 6% to 7% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to a Rocky Mountain Institute study. A new Nucor steel microplant in Missouri is trying to put a dent in that number. Nucor’s micromill in Sedalia, Missouri, is set to be the first U.S. steel plant to run on wind energy, according to Evergy. The $250 million plant, which is expected to open by the end of the year, is a partnership between the steel company and local utility Evergy, which will power the plant after a 75 megawatt power purchase agreement between the companies. With sustainability goals becoming increasingly important to companies, plants like this one could be built more frequently, and Evergy senior vice president Chuck Caisley says that the Midwest is in a prime position for more projects like the Nucor plant. “We sit in the Saudi Arabia of wind,” Caisley said. “I think that increasingly there will be sustainability requirements companies will want to meet. In Kansas and midwest Missouri we have great wind to meet current and prospective customers with price competitiveness and sustainability. It reduces our environmental footprint in the area and creates jobs.” The Nucor plant was not initially conceived with a goal of using wind energy, but the Evergy executive said a competitive price ended up attracting the steel-producing company to Missouri over other wind-rich states, like Nebraska and Kansas, who were finalists for the project. Caisley said that the price competitiveness, along with helping Nucor meet sustainability goals, were important to get the project to Missouri. There is a law in the state that lets utilities apply for discounted electric rates for aluminum and steel producers that buy significant amounts of energy.

EPA Watchdog: White House Blocked Part of Truck Pollution Investigation, Caused Lack of Public Information — The Trump administration pushed through an exemption to clean air rules, effectively freeing heavy polluting, super-cargo trucks from following clean air rules. It rushed the rule without conducting a federally mandated study on how it would impact public health, especially children, said the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Inspector General Charles J. Sheehan in a report released yesterday, as the AP reported.The gift to the trucking and fuel industry was one of Scott Pruitt‘s last acts as EPA Administrator before he resigned under a cloud of ethics violations in July 2018. The EPA inspector general not only faulted the EPA for failing to conduct a mandatory study into air pollutionand how it affects children’s health, but also the White House budget office for failing to provide requested information, according to CNN.”The lack of analyses caused the public to not be informed of the proposed rule’s benefits, costs, potential alternatives and impacts on children’s health during the public comment period,” the report reads. “Such actions call into question the quality of EPA rulemaking processes and leave the public and stakeholders without the information necessary to make informed comments on EPA regulatory actions,” the inspector general’s report warned, as the AP reported. The rule in question pertains to “glider trucks,” which are trucks with older engines that do not meet current air pollution rules. Glider trucks are a booming sector of the cargo industry, in which an older diesel engine is refitted with a new big rig body. Emission tests show that glider trucks are far more damaging to people’s health than trucks with newer engines, emitting up to several hundred times the amount of certain pollutions, according to the AP. The New York Times reported that EPA scientists found that these older diesel engines can emit up to 55 times more soot than newer trucks. The rush to pass the Glider Repeal Rule came after Pruitt met with several executives from Fitzgerald Glider Kits, the largest maker of gliders. Following, the executives welcomed Donald Trump to one of their plants during the 2016 campaign, as the AP reported.

Rapid EV adoption brings queues at some EV chargers on Thanksgiving weekend – As expected, throngs of Thanksgiving holiday travelers pushed highways and airports to their limit this weekend. With the ranks of Tesla drivers growing by about 150,000 vehicles in the past year, queues also formed at some of the most popular Supercharger locations. The bad news? A few EV drivers had to wait in queues. The good news? It’s a known and solvable problem – with more chargers and faster-charging rates already under way. A YouTube video from Thanksgiving day showed about 15 Teslas waiting in a queue for vehicles using about a dozen Superchargers in San Luis Obispo, California. In a video from a day earlier, Tesla – anticipating increased traffic ­ – deployed a so-called rollingMegapack with 10 72-kilowatt Superchargers on board.Tesla reportedly said the Megapack carried enough energy to charge about 100 cars. On November 30, the queue in San Luis Obispo was reportedly two hours. But earlier today, a driver tweeted that only one person was in the line in San Luis Obispo. It took more than a century to develop a network of about 120,000 redundant gas stations in the US. The combined system of Tesla and other highway charging stations, built over the past decade, is expected to reach about 4,000 locations in the next couple of years. Fortunately, EV charging stations are commonly networked, providing a way for drivers to know via mobile apps and dashboard indicators if a charging spot is free – or otherwise reroute to an available location. Of course, nearly all EV charging takes place at home. Ultimately, the solution is faster charging and more of it. Tesla is in the process of rolling out V3 versions of Superchargers capable of 250-kilowatt charging. On Tesla’s most efficient vehicles, like the Long Range Model 3, the company says the new Supercharger V3 can add up to 75 miles of range in five minutes. However, the pace of deployment has not been as fast as expected.

Tesla cars built in China have been recommended for government subsidies, report says -China’s industry ministry has put Tesla Model 3 cars that are built inside the country on a list of vehicles recommended for government subsidies, according to a Reuters report on Friday. Reuters, citing a document published by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said the level of subsidy that Tesla would receive was not yet clear. Two types of the Model 3 were on the recommendation list for new energy vehicle subsidies, it said. Tesla shares rose 1.5% in extended hours trade on the back of the news. The Chinese city of Shanghai is home to Tesla’s Gigafactory 3, where groundbreaking on the facility took place in January 2019. In its third-quarter update toward the end of October, Tesla said trial production of the Model 3 in Shanghai had started ahead of schedule. Elon Musk’s firm noted that the Chinese facility was, in terms of capital expenditure per unit of capacity, approximately 65% less expensive to construct than its U.S.-based Model 3 production system. Worldwide electric car sales hit 1.98 million in 2018, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), with global stock reaching 5.12 million. China’s electric car market is the biggest on the planet – a little over 1 million electric cars were sold there last year – the IEA says, with Europe and the U.S. following behind.

GM, Korea’s LG Chem in venture to build factory in Ohio (AP) – General Motors and Korea’s LG Chem have formed a joint venture to build an electric vehicle battery cell factory near Lordstown, Ohio, east of Cleveland. The companies also will work together on battery technology to bring down the cost for future GM electric vehicles. The new plant will create more than 1,100 jobs in the area around Youngstown, Ohio, and the joint venture plans to invest $2.3 billion in the plant and for battery development. GM says it will be among the largest battery factories in the world. They’ll break ground on the new plant sometime next year, but the exact location wasn’t disclosed. The new battery plant comes after GM closed a sprawling small-car assembly plant in Lordstown earlier this year. The battery plant was announced last fall during contract talks with the United Auto Workers union, but it won’t make up for the lost jobs at the small-car plant. The Lordstown factory stopped making cars in March. Just two years ago it employed 4,500 workers on two shifts who made the Chevrolet Cruze compact car. Most of those employees either retired or transferred to other GM factories. GM has been working with LG Chem on electric vehicle batteries since 2009, shortly before the Chevrolet Volt rechargeable gas-electric hybrid went on sale. LG Chem now supplies battery cells for the Chevrolet Bolt fully electric vehicle. The joint venture likely will pay less than the roughly $30 per hour that GM pays unionized assembly plant workers. Barra said the plant will follow GM’s component manufacturing strategy, where workers are paid less than at assembly plants. She said it will have to be cost-competitive.

Battery prices fall nearly 50% in 3 years, spurring more electrification: BNEF – Average market prices for battery packs have plunged from $1,100/kWh in 2010 to $156/kWh in 2019, an 87% fall in real terms, according to a report released Tuesday by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). Prices are projected to fall to around $100/kWh by 2023, driving electrification across the global economy, according to BNEF’s forecast. Customers purchasing batteries at a commercial scale for electric vehicles and energy storage, as well as using high energy density cathodes to store energy more efficiently in battery packs, are all spurring the price decline. BNEF’s latest forecast, from its 2019 Battery Price Survey, is an example of how advancements in battery technology have driven down costs at rates faster than previously predicted. Three years ago, when battery prices were around $300 per kWh, BNEF projected they would fall to $120/kWh by 2030. Now, “the path to achieving $100/kWh by 2024 looks promising, even if there will undoubtedly be hiccups along the way,” BNEF said in a statement. “There is much less certainty on how the industry will reduce prices even further,” from $100/kWh to BNEF’s forecast of around $60/kWh in 2030. Further price reductions are not “impossible,” BNEF said, but will be more complicated because “there are a variety of options and paths that can be taken,” such as standardizing battery pack designs across different EV models or introducing new technologies to improve the batteries themselves, like new cathode materials. The cost of lithium-ion batteries mandates the cost of electric vehicles for consumers and the ability of battery storage projects to compete in electricity markets. As they get cheaper, batteries will be used in more industry sectors. . Earlier this year, Amazon placed an order for 100,000 all-electric delivery vans from Michigan-based start-up manufacturer Rivian. Just this week,Reuters reported that DHL will run pilot programs for its StreetScooter electric delivery vehicles in U.S. cities, starting in 2020. The use of batteries in specific vehicle applications like commercial delivery could lead to more differentiation in battery cells in response to customer demand, with some customers putting greater value on cycle life over price declines, according to BNEF. But low battery prices will still be “the most critical goal” for mass market electric vehicles.

An Introduction to the State of Energy Storage in the U.S. – Energy storage has been used for decades to accommodate fluctuations in electricity demand that baseload power plants – particularly those running on coal and nuclear – cannot ramp up quickly enough to address. Pumped storage is one technology that meets this need, taking water from a lower-elevation reservoir or a flowing water source and pumping it to an upper basin where it becomes a source of supplemental hydropower. Pumped storage plants total 22.9 gigawatts in capacity nationwide – more than any other energy storage resource. Yet most of these plants were built between 1960 and 1990, and no new ones are under development. Far less commonly used are utility-scale flywheel systems, only three of which now operate in the U.S. Flywheels convert electricity to stored kinetic energy that can be released within milliseconds to ensure stable voltage on the grid. They cannot, however, deliver a sustained stream of energy over longer periods – multiple minutes, hours, or days. That constraint, along with the bankruptcy of one industry leader, has slowed flywheel deployment, currently yielding just a few tens of megawatts of storage capacity. Pumping compressed air into underground cavities is another storage technology that has drawn some attention, but only one such facility has been built in the U.S. Molten salt is used as a storage medium for heat captured by sun-tracking mirrors at a small number of concentrating solar power plants in the Southwest. However, both of these storage technologies face high operating costs and technical hurdles that have dimmed their prospects for broader introduction. To meet the storage needs of a renewable energy-reliant grid, nothing compares with the versatility and scalability of electrochemical battery storage. Batteries can play a critical role in maintaining consistent voltage on the grid – a function called frequency regulation. They can also store energy over multiple hours, accommodating the variable flow of electricity from wind farms and solar plants. Several other battery storage technologies are emerging, but lithium ion leads the field. The high-energy density (storage capacity per volume) of lithium ion batteries makes them a great match for portable electronics, which is why they are widely used for mobile phones, laptops, and electric vehicles. Though developed for these smaller applications, lithium ion accounts for more than 80% of utility-scale battery storage.

U.S. solar group says Trump tariffs killing jobs; White House says ‘fake news’ – (Reuters) – The U.S. solar industry warned on Tuesday that the Trump administration’s tariffs on imported panels will cost the United States 62,000 jobs and $19 billion (£14.81 billion) in investment, an estimate the White House dismissed as “fake news”. The industry’s top trade group, the U.S. Solar Industries Association (SEIA), said the lost investment equated to 10.5 gigawatts in missed solar energy installations, enough to power about 1.8 million homes. President Donald Trump imposed the four-year tariff program on imported panels in early 2018, starting at 30% and dropping by five percentage points each year. The SEIA report based its gloomy forecasts on that regime remaining unchanged, saying the industry will create 62,000 fewer jobs than it otherwise would have between 2017 and 2021. That’s more than the 53,000 workers employed in U.S. coal mining, an industry Trump has promised to revive. “Solar was the first industry to be hit with this administration’s tariff policy, and now we’re feeling the impacts that we warned against two years ago,” Abigail Ross Hopper, president of SEIA, said in a statement. The White House slammed the report, which came two days before a scheduled mid-term review by the International Trade Commission that could influence whether President Donald Trump maintains, changes, or cancels the tariff program. Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade and manufacturing advisor, said the report was “classic fake news dressed up in academic mumbo jumbo.” Navarro called SEIA “a loose confederation of Chinese solar companies seeking to destroy American solar manufacturing jobs and U.S. solar installers that want cheap Chinese panels and don’t care how many American jobs are destroyed by China’s heavily subsidized industry.” Trump announced the solar panel import levy in January 2018, his opening salvo in a trade war aimed at helping U.S. manufacturers rebound from years of decline. Solar installers opposed the move because they rely on cheap imported panels to compete with fossil fuels.

How to Stop NJ from Triggering More Carbon Pollution in Other States — A state agency is looking at whether New Jersey by rejoining a regional initiative to clamp down on greenhouse gases from power plants could wind up increasing climate-altering pollution elsewhere. The issue, known as leakage, has been raised previously by environmentalists and energy consultants who questioned whether New Jersey’s proposal to re-enter the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative might increase emissions from states not part of the program. In essence, critics argued the caps set by the Murphy administration on carbon pollution from power plants were at such a level that cheaper and dirtier generating units out of state would run more frequently than expensive and less polluting facilities in New Jersey, leading to more global warming pollution. As a result, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, recognizing that modeling suggests potential leakage, will hold a meeting with stakeholders to determine policy to fix the problem if significant global warming pollution increases. The meeting will be held Dec. 13 at Montclair State University’s Center for Environmental and Life Sciences from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. “It makes sense to do this analysis,’’ . “It is an important issue for states to look at to get a handle on this issue.’’

Massachusetts divestment movement seeks to capitalize on fossil fuels’ decline –An analysis released by Massachusetts climate activists concludes the city of Somerville’s retirement fund lost out on $475,000 when state authorities barred it from removing fossil fuel investments from its portfolio. The report arrives just as the state Legislature is considering a bill that would clear the way for county and municipal pension funds to pull out of fossil fuel stocks. “There is an opportunity cost that has been suffered by Somerville pensioners,” said Colby Cunningham, spokesperson for MassDivest, the organization that completed the analysis. “The fossil fuel industry is in decline – that’s a continuing trend.”The idea of fossil fuel divestment, in which investors pull their money out of any companies in the fossil fuel business, has gained momentum this year. Last month, the European Investment Bank, the lending arm of the European Union, announced its plans to phase out financing for fossil fuels by 2021. Students at colleges and universities across the country are demanding their schools divest their endowments; last week, divestment campaigners from Harvard and Yale stormed the field at the universities’ football game to protest the schools’ continued investments in fossil fuels. More than 1,140 institutions have pledged to remove $11.5 trillion from investments in the fossil fuel sector, according to Fossil Free, a project of climate action group 350.org.

Senate approves successor to Rick Perry as energy secretary(AP) – President Donald Trump’s pick to succeed Rick Perry as energy secretary won easy Senate confirmation Monday, despite a Democratic senator’s objections that the nominee hadn’t fully answered questions related to the Trump impeachment investigation. Several other Democrats joined Republicans in approving Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette’s promotion, 70-15. Confirmation of Brouillette, who’d been responsible for day-to-day operations at the Energy Department for two years under Perry, came a day after Perry’s resignation became effective. Perry has said his departure had nothing to do with his energy work in Ukraine for the Trump administration and that he was focused on longstanding U.S. policy to lessen that country’s dependence on Russia for fuel. A House impeachment panel is scrutinizing Trump’s push for Ukraine to investigate a company employing a son of rival Joe Biden. Perry has refused to testify before the panel. Some other administration officials who have appeared before impeachment investigators described Perry as one of what the Trump White House allegedly called the “three amigos” – administration figures who consulted with Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, one of the main focuses of the impeachment probe, on Ukraine issues. Brouillette, a veteran in state and federal energy regulatory matters, easily won bipartisan support since Trump nominated him Nov. 7. He told a Senate committee hearing last month he knew nothing about any of the Ukraine conversations under scrutiny.

New Energy secretary: Trump has directed agency to find ‘different ways to utilize coal’ –Acting Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette said this week he has received a directive from President Trump to boost the struggling coal industry. “What the president has directed us to do is to look for different ways to utilize coal,” Brouillette told the Washington Examiner in an interview Monday alongside former Energy Secretary Rick Perry. The Senate confirmed Brouillette in a 70-15 vote Monday night. He has yet to be sworn in. Brouillette appears set to follow Perry’s path in looking for ways to bolster an industry that has been losing ground to renewables and natural gas. Renewable energy production in the U.S. surpassed coal-fired generation over the summer for the first time, and coal-fired power plants have been struggling to obtain financial backing. During his confirmation hearing, Brouillette said he was in favor of an “all of the above” energy strategy but cautioned against moving away from fossil fuels that could support baseload power as the renewable energy industry develops more reliable long-term battery storage. In Monday’s interview, Brouillette said the plan isn’t to subsidize coal or reinforce its standing in electricity generation but rather look for other ways to extract value from coal. “There are other uses for this product in the marketplace today,” Brouillette said. “We can make carbon from it, we can extract rare earth metals from it. We can look at the residue, for instance, from coal ash, and pull out critical materials for battery storage. There’s a bright future for coal, we’re just going to continue to develop it as it goes along.”

EPA ignores health benefits of coal rule it plans to weaken: economists – (Reuters) – A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposal to weaken a rule on coal plant pollution fails to consider billions of dollars in health benefits for Americans, economists from universities including Harvard and Yale said on Wednesday. The six economists said the proposal to change the rule on mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants ignores an Obama-era estimate that it would slash U.S. healthcare bills by $33 billion to $90 billion per year. The rule would save billions of dollars in healthcare costs because it requires plants to not only cut emissions of mercury, but also fine particulates that cause heart and lung illnesses, they said. But the Trump administration, which has aimed to slash regulations governing fossil fuel production, last year proposed revising the mercury rule while scrapping its estimate of the cost savings from reductions in emissions of fine particulates. The administration is expected to throw out an Obama administration finding that it is “appropriate and necessary” to regulate power plant emissions when it finalizes the proposal in coming weeks. “Instead of weighing all the costs against all the benefits, the EPA is cherry picking,” said Yale University’s Matthew Kotchen, who released a report on the agency’s proposal with the other economists. “They pulled the biggest public health benefit off the scale.”

McDowell Co. Mine 57 shutdowns temporarily – Due to poor market conditions impacting mining operations across the country, Bluestone was forced to temporarily idle Pay Car 57 Mine in McDowell County. The news of Mine 57 being idled is no surprise to McDowell County native, Doug Christian. “It’s nothing new, you work save a bit of money in the bank then you strike or get laid off, and have to start all over again,” Christian said. “I mean it just happens all the time, it’s normal around here. They go idle, for a while and then they open up again,” Molina Roberts, Executive Director of McDowell County Economic Development Authority added. The Charleston Gazette-Mail obtained violation reports. These documents say that Mine 57, which is owned by Governor Jim Justice’s family is one of three in West Virginia that failed to install life-saving technology that would help prevent miners from being crushed to death by fast-moving machinery in underground coal mines. “It’s scary for one. People don’t realize that you’re inside the earth. Things happen, and we fear for them,” Roberts described.

Lawsuit says UNC power plant is polluting too much. – Two environmental groups claim in a federal lawsuit that UNC-Chapel Hill is spewing too much air pollution from coal-burning boilers in violation of a federal permit. The campus burned too much coal in its boilers and failed to maintain logbooks of required inspections, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club said in their lawsuit. Pollution from the power plant can trigger asthma attacks, decrease lung function and even cause early death, the lawsuit said. UNC-Chapel Hill has a plant with two boilers that burn coal, natural gas, and fuel oil to produce electricity and steam. Former Chancellor Holden Thorpe said in 2010 that the campus would end its use of coal by 2020. The university has applied for a five-year renewal of the air quality permit covering the plant, The News & Observer has reported. The campus set a new goal in 2015 to be “climate neutral” by 2050. In response to emailed questions, UNC-Chapel Hill forwarded a nine-page letter dated Nov. 15 that Jonathan Pruitt, vice chancellor for finance and operations sent to Perrin de Jong, a North Carolina-based lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity. Pruitt said the university strongly disagrees with claims of repeat violations. “There have been a few, isolated instances of record-keeping discrepancies and other minor errors that have been reported as appropriate,” the letter said. Pruitt’s letter says UNC-Chapel Hill needs the electricity and steam the plant produces to fulfill its teaching, research and public service mission.

Dominion outlines progress on coal ash pond closure law (AP) – A company official says Dominion Energy is on track to meet the mandates Virginia lawmakers set out earlier this year for closing its coal ash ponds. Mark Mitchell is the utility’s vice president of generation construction. He told lawmakers on the State Water Commission on Monday the company thinks the law’s timeframe is doable and its recycling mandate is realistic. The law affects 11 ash ponds at four power stations. It requires the company to recycle at least a quarter of the estimated 27.3 million cubic yards of ash. Coal ash is waste left from burning coal to produce electricity. For years, the company argued that leaving it in unlined pits was safe and the best alternative. Mitchell says coal ash cleanup is expected to cost $3 billion.

Coal Ash Is Still Polluting Kentucky’s Green River – Often, pollution is invisible. But at the Green Station Landfill in Webster County, it’s obvious. At times, the coal ash leachate shimmers black like an oil slick. At other times, it oozes chemical green. Sometimes, it stains the soil the color of rusted molasses. And in videos, the coal ash liquids trickle off the landfill like teal glacial waters leaving behind a pale salty residue. This mixture, containing elevated levels of carcinogenic and neurotoxic chemicals, is seeping from the Green Station Landfill into the Green River toward its confluence with the Ohio. Kentucky’s Energy and Environment Cabinet has seen “problems with the site and its management” since 2004, when the state first placed the ash landfill under assessment for polluting groundwater, said John Mura, cabinet spokesman. Inspectors first reported the leachate flowing into the river in the summer of 2017, but it wasn’t until May of this year the Energy and Environment Cabinet presented Big Rivers Electric Corporation with a violation for the pollution. “You know we can’t change the past, but we are confident that there’s a good faith effort being made to fix this problem and right now, that is our biggest concern,” Mura said. And yet, the pollution continues. The site was still leaking as of November, Mura said. Big Rivers declined an interview for this story, but said in a statement that workers have dug trenches to route the pollution to a nearby pond with a “permitted discharge” back into the Green River; a river that local residents say people still occasionally use for catfishing and boating.The Green Station Landfill is one of 37 coal ash waste sites around the Commonwealth that have shown evidence of polluting Kentucky waters, according to Earthjustice reviews of compliance data. The ash leftover from burning coal for electricity has proven itself a persistent environmental challenge across the country. One study found 91 percent of coal-fired power plants with monitoring data are contaminating nearby groundwater with unsafe levels of pollution, according to an Environmental Integrity Project report.

Utilities Running Uneconomic Coal Plants Cost Consumers $3.5 Billion From 2015-2017 -Investors paying attention to energy economics understand coal-fired power is a great way to lose money. Murray Energy’s bankruptcy makes it clear coal can’t compete in the electricity sector, yet coal keeps clinging to life, especially when owned and operated by monopoly utilities.These utilities hold roughly $95 billion in coal power plant debt on their balance sheets, many of which operate within competitive wholesale electricity markets, where decisions on when to run those plants – and pay off their debt – are controlled by an independent market operator. Fast-falling clean energy costs haverendered 74% of U.S. coal plants uneconomic, meaning they recover less and less debt.But regulated monopoly utilities can also recover coal plant costs from customers, subject to regulatory oversight. Recovering those costs depends on justifying the plants’ continued operation. Unfortunately for those utilities, continuing to operate these plants costs customers billions.Last year, UCS senior analyst Joe Daniel outlined how regulated monopoly utilities operating in competitive markets are receiving a “billion-dollar coal bailout” by exploiting competitive markets to run coal-fired power plants even when doing so is uneconomic, i.e. when cheaper power is available from competitors. Transparent competitive wholesale markets allow analysts to identify when these plants are running “out of merit,” meaning their monopoly operators are self-committing them rather than taking dispatch orders from market operators. The deeper analysts dig, the clearer it becomes that utilities are operating these plants at significant losses and sticking customers with the bill.

U.S. coal plant retirements linked to plants with higher operating costs – EIA- Since peaking at nearly 318 gigawatts (GW) in 2011, U.S. coal-fired electric generating capacity declined to 257 GW in 2017 after several coal power plants retired. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) undertook a study with Sargent & Lundy to improve modeling for the Annual Energy Outlook (AEO). The results show the relationship between plant retirements and a plant’s operating and maintenance costs. According to the report, a larger share of plants with higher operating and maintenance costs retired by 2018 than those with relatively low operating and maintenance costs. Sustained relatively low natural gas prices has allowed natural gas-fired generators to become more competitivewith coal-fired units, leading to a general decline in using coal-fired capacity. A decline in use leads to a decline in revenues at a plant, which generally translates to lower operating margins, less ability to cover costs, and in many cases, retiring that capacity.EIA’s analysis did not cover the entire fleet of coal power plants in the United States because not all plants report their variable operating and maintenance costs to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on FERC’sForm 1, Electric Utility Annual Report, which was used as a basis of the study. In 2008, about 55% of the U.S. coal fleet reported Form 1 data.EIA sorted these coal plants into three groups based on their average operating and maintenance costs. The highest cost group operated at costs ranging from $28 per megawatthour (MWh) to $40/MWh, and the lowest cost group operated at $20/MWh to $26/MWh. A middle group operated near the fleet average, ranging from $26/MWh to $28/MWh from 2008 through 2017. In general, the group with the lowest variable operating and maintenance costs tended to run more often, which resulted in higher capacity factors. Capacity factors reflect a power plant’s electricity output as a percentage of its generating capacity. As natural gas prices fell and coal use decreased, capacity factors at coal-fired power plants fell from 75% in 2008 to 54% in 2017. The number of operating coal plants in the highest operating cost group fell by more than the fleet average, from 75% in 2008 to 47% in 2017.

Coal power becoming ‘uninsurable’ as firms refuse cover -The number of insurers withdrawing cover for coal projects more than doubled this year and for the first time US companies have taken action, leaving Lloyd’s of London and Asian insurers as the “last resort” for fossil fuels, according to a new report. The report, which rates the world’s 35 biggest insurers on their actions on fossil fuels, declares that coal – the biggest single contributor to climate change – “is on the way to becoming uninsurable” as most coal projects cannot be financed, built or operated without insurance. Ten firms moved to restrict the insurance cover they offer to companies that build or operate coal power plants in 2019, taking the global total to 17, said the Unfriend Coal campaign, which includes 13 environmental groups such as Greenpeace, Client Earth and Urgewald, a German NGO. The report will be launched at an insurance and climate risk conference in London on Monday, as the UN climate summit gets underway in Madrid. The first insurers to exit coal policies were all European, but since March, two US insurers – Chubb and Axis Capital – and the Australian firms QBE and Suncorp have pledged to stop or restrict insurance for coal projects. At least 35 insurers with combined assets of $8.9tn, equivalent to 37% of the insurance industry’s global assets, have begun pulling out of coal investments. A year ago, 19 insurers holding more than $6tn in assets were divesting from fossil fuels. Peter Bosshard, one of the Unfriend Coal campaign co-ordinators, said: “We hope within two to three years it will be so difficult to obtain insurance that most coal projects won’t be able to go forward. “We’ve seen the acceleration [in firms pulling out of coal] for a good reason – people are freaking out.” As global temperatures climb, hurricanes, wildfires and floods have become more frequent and severe, resulting in higher claims bills for insurers. Lloyd’s, the world’s biggest insurance market, is the only major European firm which continues to insure new coal projects.

In China, coal creeps back in as slowing economy overshadows climate change ambitions – (Reuters) – China is building more coal-fired power plants and approving dozens of new mines, despite assurances from the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter that it was serious about fighting climate change. China’s 2021-2030 policy plans are under close scrutiny as the United Nations climate change conference gets under way in Madrid, especially after a new UN report said the world needs to cut carbon dioxide by 7.6% a year over the decade in order to limit temperature rises. But with the country’s economic growth at its slowest in nearly 30 years, industry data as well as speeches from leaders and industry officials suggest a willingness to lean on coal for power, especially in old mining regions. “We continue to work hard to advance the fight against climate change, but on the other hand, we are indeed facing multiple challenges such as developing the economy, improving the people’s livelihoods, eliminating poverty and controlling pollution,” said Zhao Yingmin, China’s vice environment minister, at a briefing last week. Beijing promised this year to show the “highest possible ambition” when revising its emissions pledges next year, although it did not commit to more stringent binding targets. But it has built 42.9 gigawatts of new coal-fired power capacity since the start of last year, with another 121 GW under construction. That compares with 35 GW of coal-fired power added in 2017 and 38 GW in 2016. Although no net figures are available, regulators also approved 40 new mines with nearly 200 million tonnes of annual capacity in the first three quarters of 2019, compared with 25 million tonnes in all of 2018. Major state-owned utilities want to shed as much of a third of their older and less-efficient coal-fired capacity in an effort to reduce debt, according to a government document seen by Reuters and confirmed by four sources. But even if they go ahead, the cuts will be offset by newer capacity added elsewhere.

Coal Is Dead, But China Is Reviving It — The cheapest of the fossil fuels is still a popular one among smelters and power utilities. Its consumption on a global scale is indeed declining, but this decline only began in the current decade. Recently, a study projected that this year will see a record coal use drop of 3% globally, but the end of coal is still not in sight. “It is clear that the economics of coal production no longer make sense in many parts of the world where it is simply cheaper to generate electricity from natural gas and renewables,” a climate change researcher told the BBC last month. Yet there are many other parts of the world where coal still makes the best economic sense for a variety of reasons, including lack of access to renewable technology and the funds to invest in it. The Belt and Road Initiative is an ambitious international investment program devised by Beijing that involves infrastructure projects worth a total of $12 trillion and spanning as many as 126 countries. Most of these are developing countries and many have yet to join the renewable crusade against climate change. But coal is widely available and cheap, so it will power the industrialization of these countries with China’s financial help.A study by Global Energy Monitor cited by Corporate Knights estimates that the countries covered by the Belt and Road initiative could end up producing 66% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2050. That would increase their current level of accounting for 28% of global CO2 emissions and would cancel out the rest of the world’s efforts in restraining temperature rises to 2 degrees Celsius.But is coal the single culprit for emissions? Hardly. A recent research paper from the Global Carbon Project had disappointing news for the millions of people worried about climate change. This year, the authors warned, our carbon dioxide emissions hit a record high despite everything that is being done to arrest the rise in these emissions.The culprit: natural gas. The data compiled by the GCP researchers revealed that natural gas has replaced coal as the biggest driver of carbon dioxide emissions growth in the last few years. It has also become, because of its abundance and low price, the biggest source of electricity generation in one of the biggest polluters, the United States. “Natural gas may produce fewer carbon emissions than coal, but that just means you cook the planet a bit more slowly,” a research director with the Center for International Climate Researchtold The New York Times. “And that’s before even getting into the worries about methane leaks,” Glen Peters, who helped compile the data for the CGI report, added.

South Korea’s Dust Dilemma Forces Coal Plants Into Hibernation – South Korea plans to halt several coal-fired power plants this winter to try and clear toxic dust that forces residents to wear face masks and confines children indoors. South Korea will shut as many as 15 coal plants and run all others at 80% of capacity for three months from Dec. 1 as part of efforts to cut emissions by 44%, according to a Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy spokesperson. On weekends when outdoor activity is the highest, the government will force plants to reduce run rates even more. This is the first time South Korea is restricting coal in winter after regularly shutting plants in the spring, which is typically the worst time of the year for dust. Air quality has worsened in recent years, and it’s common for Koreans to download apps warning them when smog and dust approach dangerous levels. Some new apartments come equipped with air purifiers and special enclosures before the front door to keep dust out. Indoor playgrounds are gaining popularity as children often can’t play outside. Even with the shutdowns, South Korea’s power grid will have ample spare capacity, the ministry said. The move may boost demand for liquefied natural gas by one or two cargoes a month, although given the supply abundance, it probably won’t have a major impact on prices, said Jeff Moore, a Singapore-based analyst at S&P Global Platts.

Germany Will Close All of Its Nuclear Power Plants, but Needs to Put Its Nuclear Waste Somewhere – All seven of Germany’s nuclear power plants are slated to close by 2022, but questions remain about where the European country can safely bury nearly 28,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste that will stay there for the next million years, as CNN reported. The decision to close the country’s nuclear plants came after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in March 2011. Japan is still struggling to cool and to contain the nuclear waste from the plant, which is part of the reason that Germany is wrestling with the puzzle of where to offload nearly 2,000 containers of nuclear waste, which measures about six Big Bens. The site that Germany chooses for the nuclear waste must be completely impervious to water and safe enough not to leak in the event of an earthquake, as CNN reported. It needs to find a repository that “offers the best possible safety and security for a period of a million years,” said Germany’s Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, according to CNN. Professor Miranda Schreurs, who is part of the team searching for a storage site, called the puzzle a “wicked problem,” and added that the storage site needs to be beyond rock solid. There are remarkable technological challenges in solving the issue, such as transporting the waste, finding a way to encase it, and even letting generations far off in the future know that it is there, according to CNN. “We need to find a way to tell them ‘curiosity is not good here,'” said Schreurs to CNN. She added that the site must be “very, very stable. It can’t have earthquakes, it can’t have any signs of water flow, it can’t be very porous rock.” Ideally, Germany would store the waste in granite, but the country does not have rich deposits of granite, according to India-based Republic World. However, all those problems need to be solved in tandem with a communications challenge – how Germany will convince one of its communities to bury the nuclear waste in its backyard. The challenges for a nuclear graveyard need to be solved by the government’s deadline of 2031 when a final repository for all the nuclear waste must be chosen. The project of transporting and securing the waste will then continue for generations. The storage facility is scheduled to be sealed somewhere between 2130 and 2170, according to CNN.

Nuclear waste in Paducah, Kentucky poses extra threat to region facing historic flooding – Built in a horseshoe bend of the Ohio River, the 750-acre Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant was the last uranium enrichment facility for nuclear fuel and weaponry in the U.S. before it shuttered its 50-year operation in 2013. It turned a solid – uranium – into a gas called uranium hexafluoride, or UF-6, which was then shipped off to facilities like Oak Ridge in Tennessee (infamous for its role in the Manhattan Project). Due to the presence of hazardous and radioactive wastes contaminating soil, groundwater and surface water, the Environmental Protection Agency added the plant to its Superfund National Priorities List in 1994. Bookended by the Tennessee River to the east and the Mississippi River thirty miles to the west, Paducah is the commercial center of western Kentucky. It’s part of the Lewis and Clark Historic Trail, memorialized in larger-than-life murals along the concrete floodgates separating downtown from the wide waterway. Home of the National Quilt Museum and a UNESCO Creative City, Paducah is now a vibrant arts community. For over half a century, the plant was Paducah’s main employer, providing up to 7,000 jobs in a place where nearly a quarter of people now live in poverty. But poor working conditions and unregulated waste disposal also harmed Paducah residents. The legacy of these problems have cost the town and taxpayers. Despite multiple recommendations from a watchdog government agency, the Department of Energy is decades behind schedule on cleanup efforts. Some experts say the federal government doesn’t know the full cost or scope of what cleaning them up will entail, and that becomes more complicated with more frequent extreme weather. It’s a problem Superfund sites – and especially nuclear waste sites – around the country face. Lynn said there’s a lot of secrecy surrounding the cleanup, as well as the health risks that may be associated with it. He’s just one Paducah resident, along with a slew of former workers, who say they’ve been left in the dark about problems with a complex cleanup.

Nuclear Regulators Extend Life of Turkey Point Reactors to 80 Years The Nuclear Regulatory Agency granted two controversial license extensions to Turkey Point’s aging nuclear reactors on Thursday.The 20-year extensions – which extend the life of the reactors to 80 – are the first of their kind in the U.S. The licenses for the 1970s-era reactors overlooking Biscayne Bay were set to expire in 2032 and 2033. Florida Power & Light had planned to replace them with new reactors, but shelved plans after Westinghouse, the company that designed the new reactors, filed for bankruptcy in 2017 amid swelling costs at similar plants in Georgia and South Carolina.Environmentalists, who have challenged the licenses, say they were caught off-guard by Thursday’s approval. Miami Waterkeeper attorney Kelly Cox said the NRC notified them just Wednesday that it needed more time to review the group’s appeal.“We’re going to continue to move forward on the appeal, but having this back door license issued is frustrating,” she said. Miami Waterkeeper and others have asked the agency to hear concerns that FPL used outdated sea rise projections for the low-lying plant.

Supreme Court dismisses power plant lawsuit | Toledo Blade – The Ohio Supreme Court on Wednesday threw out FirstEnergy Solutions’ lawsuit arguing that the recently enacted law bailing out its two nuclear power plants on Lake Erie cannot be subjected to voter referendum. With just four of the seven justices participating, the court said there was no “justiciable controversy” for it to decide. The court issued no opinion. FES had argued that the surcharges imposed on consumers by the law to fuel a $170 million-a-year fund – $150 million for the nuclear plants and $20 million for large-scale solar projects – amount to a tax and, therefore, could not be subjected to a referendum. The law does not call the surcharge a tax, and lawmakers went out of their way during the debate to say that it was not. However, FES had noted that opponents of the law had referred to it as a tax during hearings. “This decision correctly rejects FirstEnergy Solutions’ argument that H.B. 6’s billion-dollar bailout is not subject to referendum, one of many desperate and greedy FES maneuvers trying to deny Ohioans’ right to vote on bad legislation,” said Gene Pierce, spokesman for Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts, the group behind the so-far unsuccessful referendum effort. “The argument was ridiculed from the first time it was aired in public, and this legal proceeding was a waste of the Ohio Supreme Court’s time and taxpayers’ money,” he said. FES, however, saw “victory” in the court’s recognition that the referendum effort is indeed over. “Those opposed to the bill were unable to gather the requisite number of signatures to initiate a referendum, therefore, there is no longer a need for the court to rule on the case,” it said in a statement. “H.B. 6 allows the Davis Besse and Perry nuclear plants to continue providing 90 percent of Ohio’s carbon free power, in addition to substantial employment and economic benefits for the state.”

FirstEnergy Solutions claims victory on nuke bailout referendum, but proponents push forward –Proponents of a referendum to undo Ohio’s new law subsidizing nuclear power plants continue their efforts to legally extend the period to garner signatures to get the measure on the state’s November 2020 ballot, after the state Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a lawsuit brought by FirstEnergy Solutions (FES) opposing the referendum effort. The dismissal is a win, FES said in a statement, because the Supreme Court “recognizes the attempted referendum on HB 6 is over” by calling its complaint “moot.” However, the Court said the pending challenge for the referendum petition is not impacted by the dismissal. Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts had to get at least 265,774 valid signatures (6% of the number of votes cast in the last gubernatorial election) within 90 days of the law’s passage, to get the measure on the November 2020 ballot. The group claimed only 52 days were available for voters to sign because the Attorney General and the Secretary of State took 38 days from the passage of HB 6 to certify the petition.”Those opposed to the bill were unable to gather the requisite number of signatures to initiate a referendum, therefore there is no longer a need for the court to rule on the case,” FES said.Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts sued the Ohio Secretary of State in October, alleging a full 90 days is needed for petition signatures to be collected for a referendum. The group asked the federal court to order the state to give them an additional 38 days to gather the necessary signatures. Other groups supporting the nuclear subsidies, such as Ohioans for Energy Security, filed a brief in the ongoing proceeding to say that the 90-day rule is a deadline that does not guarantee 90 days would be available for signatures. The group asked a federal court to dismiss the referendum effort based on lack of sufficient signatures, which posed the question to the Ohio Supreme Court. Groups opposing HB 6 have also tried to ask state regulators to ensure consumer-funded subsidies don’t reward coal-based generation owned by the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation in addition to FES nuclear plants. The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio rejected this assertion in a Nov. 21 ruling.

Davis-Besse, Perry and Beaver Valley nukes will get operating licenses transferred, NRC says – Operating licenses for the Davis-Besse, Perry, and Beaver Valley 1 and 2 nuclear plants will be transferred to a new company being established to run and maintain the facilities once bankruptcy proceedings for FirstEnergy Solutions is completed, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Tuesday. The new company will be called Energy Harbor Corp., which will wholly own Energy Harbor Nuclear Generation LLC and Energy Harbor Nuclear Corp. The transfer is being made from FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co. and FirstEnergy Nuclear Generation Co., which have been part of FirstEnergy Solutions. Advance approval for the transfer is expected to make the transition smoother. The FirstEnergy companies had requested the transfer as part of the bankruptcy proceedings. The license-transfer also applies to spent fuel storage installation facilities, the NRC said. The commission said the transfer becomes effective upon completion of the bankruptcy and formation of Energy Harbor Corp. “The NRC staff’s review of the license transfer application concluded that Energy Harbor Nuclear Generation LLC is financially qualified to own Beaver Valley, Davis-Besse, and Perry, and that Energy Harbor Nuclear Corp. is financially and technically qualified to operate the plants,” the NRC said. Davis-Besse is in Ottawa County near Oak Harbor, Ohio, along the western Lake Erie shoreline about 30 miles east of downtown Toledo. It is licensed to operate through April 22, 2037. Perry also is along the Lake Erie shoreline, about 35 miles northeast of Cleveland. It is licensed to operate through March 18, 2026. Beaver Valley Unit 1 and Beaver Valley Unit 2 are on a twin-reactor complex northwest of Pittsburgh. They are scheduled to permanently shut down in May 2021 and October 2021, respectively.

Activists denounce ‘zombie’ Bellefonte Nuclear Plant as regulators consider license transfer for new owner to finish facility – A year after the Tennessee Valley Authority tried to terminate the sale of its Bellefonte Nuclear Plant because the buyer didn’t have a nuclear license, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is moving ahead to consider such a license transfer. Former Chattanooga developer Franklin L. Haney, who is trying to become the first individual American to finish and own a commercial nuclear plant, submitted additional information this year in his attempt to gain the first transfer for a construction permit of an unfinished nuclear plant in the United States. Haney’s Nuclear Development LLC won the bidding at a November 2016 auction by TVA of the Bellefonte site with his $111 million bid. But the sale was never completed because TVA claimed Haney had failed to obtain the required permission from federal regulators to transfer the construction permit at Bellefonte.Haney didn’t submit his request for such a license transfer to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission until November 2018 and regulators said the initial request was incomplete and could not be processed. But after TVA tried to scrap the sale of Bellefonte, Haney sued TVA to maintain the sales agreement and a court ruled this spring that the dispute over the plant sale must proceed to trial, which is likely in 2020. While TVA and Haney squabble over the sale of Bellefonte, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is proceeding with reviewing the plans submitted by Nuclear Development LLC, including additional filings this year to supplement what regulators said initially were inadequate reports about the proposed buyers. “The NRC staff will review the transfer application for the existing permits, separately from any potential hearing on the matter,” NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said Tuesday.

Contaminated cylinders found in Richland from Carolina nuclear plant – Two contaminated cylinders were trucked across the country from the Westinghouse nuclear fuel factory in South Carolina after plant workers failed to properly examine the containers for signs of excessive radioactivity, according to a federal agency that oversees the site. Only after the cylinders arrived in Richland, Wash., did workers there discover radiation levels that exceeded federal standards, records show. The contamination showed up on and near valve covers on the outside of the tanks, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Westinghouse was shipping cylinders emptied of material for nuclear fuel fabrication to Framatome ANP on Horn Rapids Road in Richland for cleaning so they could be reused. Framatome services U.S. nuclear facilities across the country. The contaminated cylinders, shipped on a flat bed trailer that took two days to reach Washington, didn’t endanger the public, the NRC says. But the matter was serious enough that the agency issued a violation notice last week. Regulators hit Westinghouse with what is known as a Level 4 violation, which means the misstep doesn’t warrant a fine but is notable, NRC spokesman Roger Hannah said. The NRC violation notice is the latest in a line of troubles the 50-year-old plant has encountered since 2016, when radioactive material accumulated to potentially unsafe levels inside an air pollution control device.

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