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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Note: Because of the high volume of news regarding the coronavirus outbreak, that news has been published separately:
Two more flu-related deaths bring total to 16 in Cuyahoga County; this flu season worse than last – cleveland.com – The number of flu-related deaths this season, which is considered to be at its peak, has risen by two to 16 in Cuyahoga County. The deaths of a 33-year-old East Cleveland woman and a 79-year-old Lakewood woman were reported during the week ending Feb. 22, health officials said Friday. No further information on the people was released, due to federal privacy laws covering health information. The current flu season in Cuyahoga County is more severe than last year, with nearly double the number of deaths and flu-related hospitalizations. Last year, there were nine deaths and 667 flu-related hospitalizations by this date. Those numbers are much lower than the 1,496 hospitalizations for current flu cases reported so far, according to data compiled by the Cuyahoga County Health Department. “The (hospitalization) numbers are twice as high as last year at this point,” said Richard Stacklin, data analyst for the Cuyahoga County Health Department. The fact that influenza strains A and B both hit hard this season might be the reason for more deaths and hospitalizations, Stacklin said. Strain A and B are both in circulation now, leading to elevated flu activity for the past few weeks, Stacklin said. “Flu is hitting a lot of people, whether they are elderly or younger,” Stacklin said. .
Weekly U.S. Influenza Surveillance Report | CDC – Key indicators that track flu activity remain high but decreased for the second week in a row. Severity indicators (hospitalizations and deaths) remain moderate to low overall, but hospitalization rates differ by age group, with high rates among children and young adults. The percentage of respiratory specimens testing positive for influenza at clinical laboratories decreased from 29.7% last week to 26.4% this week. Numbers of influenza B/Victoria and A(H1N1)pdm09 viruses are approximately equal for the season overall, with continued increases in influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 viruses in recent weeks. Visits to health care providers for influenza-like illness (ILI) decreased from 6.1% last week to 5.5% this week. All regions remain above their baselines. The overall cumulative hospitalization rate for the season increased to 52.7 per 100,000. The percentage of deaths attributed to pneumonia and influenza is 6.9%, below the epidemic threshold of 7.3%. 20 influenza-associated pediatric deaths occurring during the 2019-2020 season were reported this week. The total for the season is 125. Key Points:
- Outpatient ILI and clinical laboratory data remain elevated but decreased for the second week in a row. The percentage of specimens testing positive for both influenza A and influenza B viruses decreased.
- Overall, hospitalization rates remain similar to this time during recent seasons, but rates among school aged children and young adults are higher at this time than in recent seasons and rates among children 0-4 years old are now the highest CDC has on record at this point in the season, surpassing rates reported during the second wave of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.
- Pneumonia and influenza mortality has been low, but 125 influenza-associated deaths in children have been reported so far this season. This number is higher for the same time period than in every season since reporting began in 2004-05, except for the 2009 pandemic.
- CDC estimates that so far this season there have been at least 32 million flu illnesses, 310,000 hospitalizations and 18,000 deaths from flu.
- Interim estimates of 2019-2020 flu vaccine effectiveness were released last week. So far this season, flu vaccines are reducing doctor’s visits for flu illness by 45% overall and 55% in children.
EPA Might Finally Regulate PFAS But the Process Matters – The EPA announced last week that it is issuing a preliminary regulatory determination for public comment to set an enforceable drinking water standard to two of the most common and well-studied PFAS, PFOA and PFOS.This decision is based on three criteria:
- PFOA and PFOS have an adverse effect on public health
- PFOA and PFOS occur in drinking water often enough and at levels of public health concern;
- regulation of PFOA and PFOS is a meaningful opportunity for reducing the health risk to those served by public water systems.
This is a good thing and should have happened sooner, but likely as a result of public pressure and the overwhelming evidence of harms caused by exposure to these chemicals, the EPA is officially embarking upon this long and arduous regulatory process with an uncertain outcome. The process of setting such a standard, known as a Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) is a long one and we know that there are multiple decision points at which political interference, lack of transparency, or a failure to recognize the best available science can undermine such a process. If the EPA successfully sets a standard, it will mean that utilities will be required to monitor drinking water for PFOS and PFOA and use treatment techniques to keep levels below the standard, which will be especially helpful for communities in states that haven’t set their own MCLs. The Safe Drinking Water Act was signed into law by President Ford in 1974 and sets a regulatory process for setting drinking water standards. Then in 1996, Congress issued amendments which created a long list of hurdles that weakened EPA’s ability to set health-protective standards for water contaminants. Some requirements include technology assessments and risk assessments that require the agency to state each significant uncertainty related to public health effects. The amendments also require EPA to conduct a cost benefit analysis, which can weigh into the standard that is selected. In fact, EPA can choose to set a standard that “maximizes health risk reduction benefits at a cost that is justified by the benefits.” As in all environmental and public health policy, it is much harder to quantify benefits to public health than it is to quantify costs to industry which makes this a natural place for industry to fight hard to document potential costs and advocate for a less stringent standard.
To combat citrus greening, farmers are spraying medically important antibiotics on their trees – In Florida, citrus greening has led to a 70 percent drop in citrus production since it arrived 15 years ago. Since 2016, the Environmental Protection Agency has allowed citrus farmers to spray medically important antibiotics on their groves in hopes of reversing the devastating trajectory. But this last-ditch solution has its consequences: It’s expensive, and scientists aren’t sure it works very well, while public health advocates worry it’s hastening the spread of antibiotic resistance. Citrus greening first appeared in China nearly a century ago. In the U.S., the tiny winged Asian citrus psyllid arrived years before the harmful bacteria. The pest was first confirmed in Florida in 1998, and Huanglongbing followed in summer of 2005. Within a few months, the bacteria had spread to four counties. Two years later, it had spread to 30. By 2015, it had hit every citrus-producing county in the state, and today an estimated 90 percent of the state’s citrus trees are infected. It wasn’t long before Florida growers were desperate to try anything to stop citrus greening disease. EPA began allowing Florida growers to spray so-called “emergency applications” of two antibiotics – streptomycin and oxytetracycline – on their citrus crops. Both are considered medically important to humans: They’re used to treat urinary tract infections, syphilis, and tuberculosis. The agency was proposing to allow as much as 650,000 pounds of streptomycin to be sprayed on crops each year. That’s more than 10 times the amount used to treat human diseases. The concern was that the widespread use of antibiotics on crops would select for antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which would then spread throughout the ecosystem. Antibiotic-resistant infections are expected to claim 10 million human livesby the year 2050, and critics worry the spread of so-called “superbugs” will be aided by the extensive use of antibiotics in agriculture. Still, in December 2018, EPA approved the use of oxytetracycline as a routine treatment on citrus groves, meaning the antibiotic could be used without the agency having to issue its emergency exemptions. The New York Timesreported that, in doing so, the agency largely ignored objections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration.
Farm Numbers Show the Smallest Drop in Recent History The U.S. saw a loss of 5,800 farms in 2019 versus 2018, per USDA. But, that’s the smallest decline in recent years. Since 2012, the average year-over-year decline in the number of farms was around 12,000, with the biggest drop being between 2014 and 2015. In 2019 the total number of farms in the U.S. totals 2,023,400. By far, Texas is the winner in farm numbers, with 247,000 farms. The total land in farms, at 897,400,000 acres, decreased 2,100,000 acres from 2018. This slight year-over-year drop is on par with recent years and a sign farmland isn’t vanishing as quickly as some think. The average farm size for 2019 is 444 acres, which is up 1 acre from the previous year. States in the west tend to have the largest average farm sizes.
US fertilizer consumption to rise with acreage – US fertilizer consumption this year will be the highest in over a decade as farmers are set to plant 94mn acres of corn and 85mn acres of soybeans. Nitrogen consumption should be 4pc higher than last year at 8.83mn st N across corn, soybean, wheat and cotton, Argus estimates. Phosphates consumption would rise by 5pc to 4.19mn st P2O5, potash by 6pc to 4.32mn st K2O and sulfur up by 4pc to 392,000st S. In remarks at a conference yesterday, US Department of Agriculture chief economist Robert Johansson said that US corn acreage would rise to 94mn acres – toward the upper end of previous industry estimates – as forward prices and the corn:soybean price ratio are favorable to corn. Last year farmers planted just under 90mn acres of corn as flooding and inclement weather prevented fieldwork. But Johansson also noted that the price ratio was not even, with basis in the Dakotas favoring soybean but eastern Corn Belt and southeast prices favoring corn. Northern Plains markets are a key consumer of urea, while farmers in the eastern Corn Belt use more UAN. Spring wheat planting is likely to be lower than last year’s 12.7mn acres, USDA estimates, as saturated Northern Plains soils will lead farmers to plant alternative crops. Winter wheat plantings are estimated to have shrunk again to 30.8mn acres, still the second-lowest in over 100 years, as planting conditions and switching to cotton reduced Kansas and Oklahoma seedings. Soybean area will climb by 12pc to 85mn acres, though this is more of a return to trend after weather conditions prevented several million acres from being planted last spring. Rice area will climb by 21pc to 3.1mn acres, the highest since 2016, as farmers across the South increase area in response to higher prices. US fertilizer prices sank through the fall of 2019 as poor weather restricted fertilizer applications, limiting wholesale trade as retailers retained high stocks. Spring applications should finish rebalancing the market, if weather and river conditions allow.
Running out of time: East Africa faces new locust threat (Reuters) – Countries in East Africa are racing against time to prevent new swarms of locusts wreaking havoc with crops and livelihoods after the worst infestation in generations.A lack of expertise in controlling the pests is not their only problem: Kenya temporarily ran out of pesticides, Ethiopia needs more planes and Somalia and Yemen, torn by civil war, can’t guarantee exterminators’ safety.Locust swarms have been recorded in the region since biblical times, but unusual weather patterns exacerbated by climate change have created ideal conditions for insect numbers to surge, scientists say.Warmer seas are creating more rain, wakening dormant eggs, and cyclones that disperse the swarms are getting stronger and more frequent.In Ethiopia the locusts have reached the fertile Rift Valley farmland and stripped grazing grounds in Kenya and Somalia. Swarms can travel up to 150 km (93 miles) a day and contain between 40-80 million locusts per square kilometer.If left unchecked, the number of locusts in East Africa could explode 400-fold by June. That would devastate harvests in a region with more than 19 million hungry people, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned.Uganda has deployed the military. Kenya has trained hundreds of youth cadets to spray. Lacking pesticides, some security forces in Somalia have shot anti-aircraft guns at swarms darkening the skies.Everyone is racing the rains expected in March: the next generation of larvae is already wriggling from the ground, just as farmers plant their seeds.“The second wave is coming,” said Cyril Ferrand, FAO’s head of resilience for Eastern Africa. “As crops are planted, locusts will eat everything.” The impact so far on agriculture, which generates about a third of East Africa’s economic output, is unknown, but FAO is using satellite images to assess the damage, he said. This month, Kenya ran out of pesticide for about a week and a half, he said. Farmers watched helplessly as their families’ crops were devoured. In Ethiopia, the government can only afford to rent four planes for aerial spraying, but it needs at least twice that number to contain the outbreak before harvesting begins in March
To stop locust plagues, we must copy locusts – Locusts are vulnerable when they are just eggs in the ground but they are hard to spot. When they hatch into masses of what are called hoppers, they can be dealt with easily. The problem is that such colonies are often in remote areas where there is very little incentive for the host country to deal with them. Soon, they will move on and become someone else’s problem. After hatching, the hopper still cannot fly and remains an essentially solitary creature. It becomes gregarious only after it has fledged, taking to the skies en masse and riding the easterly winds to fresh pastures, just as it has since ancient times. Swarms can vary in size from 1 square kilometer, consisting of about 40 million locusts, to several hundred square kilometers. With each locust consuming roughly its own weight – 2 grams – in fresh food per day, a modest 1-square-kilometer swarm will eat as much in a single day as about six elephants, 20 camels or 35,000 people. A swarm can cover up to 130 kilometers in a day and stay in the air for many days at a time, so the Red Sea – which is barely 300km across at its widest point – presents no barrier. In 1988, one swarm took only 10 days to migrate 5,000km across the Atlantic. If conditions are right, the cycle begins again when the swarm reaches its new destination. The FAO warns of “widespread hatching and band formation” in the coming weeks in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia. At the same time “above-normal breeding continues along both sides of the Red Sea coast” and new swarms are forming in the highlands of Yemen, parts of northwest Pakistan and along the southern coast of Iran. The FAO predicts there will be “an unprecedented threat to food security and livelihoods” in the Horn of Africa by March. Mankind is immeasurably more knowledgeable now than in the days when those first written accounts of the devastating impact of locusts were recorded. So why have we not defeated the desert locust? Killing locusts isn’t difficult. The primary method is to poison them with insecticides, using aircraft, vehicles or even hand-held sprayers. All of this, however, requires funding and cooperation between the countries where locusts breed and the countries where they fly to and cause devastation. According to the FAO, the failure to combat the locust mainly comes down to one reason: mankind’s own inability to “swarm” and – unlike the locust – to act as one in common cause. In other words, beating the desert locust requires humans to do something we are notoriously bad at: transcending petty local differences and working together for the common good.
China’s green zombie fungus could hold key to fighting east Africa’s plague of locusts – Chinese factories are producing thousands of tonnes of a “green zombie fungus” to help fight the swarms of locusts in East Africa. Metarhizium is a genus of fungi with nearly 50 species – some genetically modified – that is used as a biological insecticide because its roots drill through the insects’ hard exoskeleton and gradually poisons them. In China it was named lu jiang jun, which means green zombie fungus, because it gradually turns its victims in a green mossy lump. There are now dozens of factories across the country dedicated to producing its spores and despite the curbs introduced to stop the spread of Covid-19, many of them have resumed operations and are shipping thousands of tonnes to Africa. These factories are set up in a similar way to breweries, growing the spores on rice which is kept in carefully controlled conditions to ensure the correct temperature and humidity. Each plant can produce thousands of tonnes of fungi powder per year, each gram of which contains tens of billions of spores. “I am sending off a truckload right now. Our stock is running out,” said the marketing manager of a production plant in Jiangxi province. “Some customers need it urgently. They need it to kill the locusts.” The need is particularly pressing in East Africa at the moment, where abnormally high levels of rainfall during the dry season allowed hundreds of billions of locusts to hatch in recent months. So far the swarms have devastated crops in countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda and are moving on to neighbouring countries.
Army of 100,000 Chinese ducks on standby to combat locust swarms – A troop of special Chinese ducks is waiting to be deployed to neighbouring Pakistan to fight a swarm of crop-eating pests that threaten regional food security. At least 100,000 ducks are expected to be sent to Pakistan as early as the second half of this year to combat a desert locust outbreak, according to Mr Lu Lizhi, a senior researcher with the Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The ducks are “biological weapons” and can be more effective than pesticide, said Mr Lu, who is in charge of the project in tandem with a university in Pakistan. “One duck is able to eat more than 200 locusts a day,” Mr Lu said in a telephone interview on Thursday (Feb 27), citing results of experiments to test the ducks’ searching and predation capabilities. A trial will start in China’s western region of Xinjiang later this year before the ducks are sent to Pakistan, Mr Lu said. Swarms of desert locusts have been spreading through countries from eastern Africa to South Asia, destroying crops and pastures at a voracious pace. The pest plague, together with unseasonal rain and a scourge of low-quality seeds, has hit major crops in Pakistan’s largest producing regions, weighing on its already fragile economy. And it has also migrated into India.
Trump Jr. granted permit to hunt grizzly bear in Alaska: report – Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest child, has won a permit to hunt a grizzly bear in Alaska, a wildlife conservation official confirmed to Reuters on Friday. Eddie Grasser, who serves as wildlife conservation director for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, told the news agency that Trump Jr. was one of three nonresidents of the state to apply for permits to hunt grizzlies in Seward Peninsula, a northwestern region in the state. There were reportedly 27 spots for such permits designated for nonresidents in that area. Typically, Grasser told the news agency that the state’s Fish and Game department, which disperse hunting permits for various kinds of animals, receives “thousands of applications” for such permits. The permits are usually awarded by random drawings in the state in instances where there are more people applying for hunts than permits available. In those cases, the department says on its website that each person applying for “a hunt is entered into the pool and names are selected randomly (like pulling names out of a hat).” However, over 20 of the grizzly hunting permits that were up for grabs in the Seward Peninsula, which Trump Jr. applied for, have gone unclaimed, according to Reuters. Trump Jr. is required to pay a fee of $1,000 for a nonresident tag in order to proceed with the hunt. He will also be required to pay $160.00 for a nonresident hunting license, according to the office’s website.
2 Bald Eagles Illegally Shot, Killed In Wisconsin -Two bald eagles in two weeks have died after they were illegally shot in Wisconsin.The state Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are investigating the shootings. Marge Gibson, director of the Raptor Education Group Inc. in Antigo, said she couldn’t release many specific details about the shootings because of the ongoing investigation. But she said she picked up one of the eagles on Feb. 17, and admitted another only a few days before that.”This is a bird who was very large and incredibly powerful and very well-conditioned,” Gibson said. “She was not in poor weight or anything like that. This was a bird that was meant to breed this year, and had probably already started that process.”Both of the eagles admitted to the northern Wisconsin bird rehabilitation center have died.Bald eagles are no longer an endangered species, and populations in Wisconsin have surged. But they are still protected by multiple federal laws. Shooting one is a crime punishable with up to one year in prison and a $100,000 fine. It’s also, Gibson said, a senseless and cruel act. “We have seen shootings before,” Gibson said. “It’s just that, the last two years and especially the last year, we’ve seen many of them,” including shootings of eagles, loons and in recent weeks a trumpeter swan was injured when it was run down by snowmobilers in Portage County.
Report: Las Vegas Group Glues Maga Hats on Pigeons – A group sent pigeons into downtown Las Vegas with hair like President Donald Trump and MAGA hats glued onto them in a satirical prank before the Democratic presidential debate, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. The group calls itself “Pigeons, United to Interfere Now,” according to the report, which spells out Putin, the Russian president Democrats accuse Trump of favoring.”The release date was also coordinated to serve as a gesture of support and loyalty to President Trump,” a group member who goes by the name Coo Hand Luke told the Review-Journal.The adhesive used to attach the Make America Great Again hats is women’s eyelash glue, according to the report.”It’s what women use to put around their eyes for eyelash extensions,” Luke told the paper. “The hats usually stay on for a day or two, depending on the bird’s movements. We can also remove them ourselves as they fly back to the coop. They could be gone for a day, two days or a week, but they always come back.”The group says it has cared for the pigeons for months at a nearby coup, feeding, bathing, and nursing them to health.”We wash them with Dove [detergent] and get the grease off that usually accumulates from being underneath cars or near grease traps at restaurants while they’re looking for food,” the group told the Review-Journal. “A lot of the time they are found with stringfoot, and we nurse them back to health. A lot of them are malnourished, and we feed them a variety of seeds.” Stringfoot is an ailment where a pigeon gets its feet tangled. The group desires to make pigeons great again in its Las Vegas-based campaign to bring awareness to the birds.
Call to end logging of ‘protective’ native forests in wake of bushfire crisis – A group of forestry and climate scientists are calling for an immediate and permanent end to the logging of all native forests across Australia as part of a response to climate change and the country’s bushfire crisis. In an open letter, the group said forestry workers involved in logging in native forests should be redeployed to support the management of national parks. A briefing document to back the letter, coordinated by The Australia Institute thinktank, argues logging in wet eucalypt forests promotes more flammable regrowth. Dr Jennifer Sanger, a forest ecologist who is in Canberra today to deliver the letter told Guardian Australia: “As we face this climate crisis, we see our forests are worth far more standing. “We have to start taking this climate emergency more seriously and protective native forests is a simple step we could take and in my mind, a logical call.” Some experts told Guardian Australia they disagreed, saying it could effectively rule out one potential response to managing forests in the face of climate change. Among the signatories to the letter are University of Tasmania’s distinguished conservation ecologist Prof Jamie Kirkpatrick, James Cook University ecologist Prof Bill Laurance, and Prof Tim Flannery, of the University of Melbourne. The letter says: “We write to ask you to respond to the climate, fire, drought and biodiversity loss crises with an immediate nationwide cessation of all native forest logging.” Large old-growth trees are important for capturing and storing carbon, the letter said, adding that native forest logging “is heavily subsidised by our taxes, which can be better spent on fire mitigation”. Government data shows that 5m hectares of native forests are open to logging and that annually, 73,000 hectares are harvested. According to the briefing document, 12% of logs harvested in Australia come from native forests, and an end to native forest logging would directly impact 3,250 workers.
Australia Wildfires Were Far Worse Than Climate Models Predicted – In a post-mortem of the Australian bushfires, which raged for five months, scientists have concluded that their intensity and duration far surpassed what climate models had predicted, according to a study published yesterday in Nature Climate Change.The bushfires were far more catastrophic than any climate crisis models out there, leading the scientists to call the devastation, “a fiery wake-up call for climate science,” as the BBC reported.The study said that the bushfires were “unprecedented” after they burned more than one-fifth of the country’sforests.”This [was] worse than anything our models simulated,” said climate scientist Benjamin Sanderson to theBBC. Sanderson, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, co-wrote the article in Nature Climate Change.In fact, the models were so far off target that not only did they say that fires of such magnitude could not happen this year, but they predicted that fires of this magnitude would not happen before the year 2100, asWired reported.Sanderson and his co-author wrote, “This is perhaps one of the first really big cases where we’ve seen the real world do something before we’ve been able to have the capacity to model it properly. This event was worse than anything in any of the models at any point in this century. Only one of the models toward the end of the century started producing things of this magnitude.”He warned that as the planet warms, “the more likely we are to be taken by surprise,” as Yahoo Newsreported.While climate models to date have been fairly accurate in predicting how much temperatures will rise as greenhouse gases are emitted, modeling fires is extremely complex. Fire threats are determined by many variables that increase risk of fire, fuel it and spread it, including rainfall, wind, land cover and population density, as the BBC reported. “But even if you look at the few models that have fire in them,” Sanderson told BBC News, “none of them simulate anything close to the scale of what happened in Australia.”
PG&E Faces Record Fine of $2.1 Billion for Role in Wildfires California regulators increased penalties against PG&E Corp. to $2.1 billion for violations tied to the catastrophic wildfires ignited by the company’s power lines in 2017 and 2018. The penalty would be the largest ever imposed by the California Public Utilities Commission, the agency said in a statement Thursday. The decision, which becomes final if PG&E agrees to the terms within 20 days, increases a prior penalty settlement by about $462 million. It also would require that any tax savings associated with the payments be applied to the benefit of PG&E customers. Those savings may exceed $500 million. PG&E shares fell 1.8% before the start of regular trading on Wall Street Friday. The company was forced into bankruptcy in January 2019 after its equipment was found to have ignited deadly wildfires in 2017 and 2018, saddling it with an estimated $30 billion in liabilities. PG&E has reached multibillion-dollar settlements with wildfire victims, insurers, public agencies and bond holders as part of its effort to emerge from Chapter 11 by mid-year. PG&E said it was disappointed in the decision to increase the penalty. The utility said it had worked for months with safety staff at the commission and other parties to reach a nearly $1.7 billion deal that would also allow for “additional investments to further strengthen the company’s electric operations,” according to a statement. The state’s revised penalty would bar PG&E from recovering about $1.8 billion in wildfire-related costs from ratepayers, require the company to spend $114 million on system enhancements and corrective actions and pay a $200 million fine to the state’s general fund.
Colombia Is Still the Deadliest Place to Be an Environmental Activist, Report Finds –Colombia was the most dangerous nation in 2019 to be an environmental activist and experts suspect that conditions will only get worse.More than 100 human rights defenders were killed across the Latin country in 2019. Community leaders, teachers and park rangers are among the more than 50 human rights defenders and community leaders additionally killed since the beginning of this year.In October and November, Colombia experienced a large wave of demonstrations following divisive elections and public opposition to large projects that posed threats to the environment. In some instances, these mass protests were met with police brutality and targeted violence against human rights defenders, according to theGlobal Analysis 2019 report published in January 2020 by Irish human rights organization Front Line Defenders. The report details physical assaults, defamation campaigns, digital security threats, judicial harassment and gendered attacks against global activists at the forefront of social change.The Philippines, Honduras, Mexico and Brazil all ranked among the deadliest countries after Colombia,according to NBC. Globally, at least 304 human rights defenders in 31 countries were targeted and killed for their work. Additional findings from the report found that:
- More two-thirds of global killings occurred in Latin America.
- Forty percent of those killed worked on matters surrounding land, indigenous rights, and environmental issues.
- A majority of those killed (85 percent) had previously been threatened.
Human rights defenders were targeted in almost all countries that saw waves of public uprisings and continues to threaten activists. Just last week, a 45-year-old Costa Rican indigenous defender was killed by an armed mob while trying to reclaim ancestral land, according to The Guardian. NPR reports that Mexican officials are still investigating the suspicious murder of two men connected to a butterfly sanctuary found dead earlier this month in Michoacfln. In Indonesia, Mongabay reports that the family of a murdered environmental activist is calling on national authorities to take over the death investigation.
Colorado River flow shrinks from climate crisis, risking ‘severe water shortages’ – The flow of the Colorado River is dwindling due to the impacts of global heating, risking “severe water shortages” for the millions of people who rely upon one of America’s most storied waterways, researchers have found. Increasing periods of drought and rising temperatures have been shrinking the flow of the Colorado in recent years and scientists have now developed a model to better understand how the climate crisis is fundamentally changing the 1,450-mile waterway. The loss of snow in the Colorado River basin due to human-induced global heating has resulted in the river absorbing more of sun’s energy, thereby increasing the amount of water lost in evaporation, the US Geological Survey scientists found. This is because snow and ice reflect sunlight back away from the Earth’s surface, a phenomenon known as the albedo effect. The loss of albedo as snow and ice melt away is reducing the flow of the Colorado by 9.5% for each 1C of warming, according to theresearch published in Science.The world has heated up by about 1C since the pre-industrial era and is on course for an increase of more than 3C by the end of the century unless planet-warming emissions are drastically cut. For the Colorado this scenario means an “increasing risk of severe water shortages”, the study states, with any increase in rainfall not likely to offset the loss in reflective snow.
Climate change is drying up the Colorado River, putting millions at risk of ‘severe water shortages’ — The Colorado River — which provides water to more than 40 million people from Denver to Los Angeles — has seen its flow dwindle by 20 percent compared to the last century, and scientists have found that climate change is mainly to blame. The Colorado River wraps around Horseshoe Bend in Page, Arizona. A new study finds that this vital river is in grave danger due to rising temperatures. The researchers found that more than half of the decline in the river’s flow is connected to increasing temperatures, and as warming continues, they say the risk of “severe water shortages” for the millions that rely on it is expected to grow. For each 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of warming averaged across the river’s basin, the study found that its flow has decreased by nearly 10%. Over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries, the region has already warmed by an average of roughly 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The study also examined the impact that action to curb pollution of heat-trapping gases could have on the river’s water supply. Some decrease in the flow is likely no matter what actions are taken, but without any cuts to emissions, the report says the river’s discharge could shrink by between 19% and 31% by the middle of this century. The study — conducted by US Geological Survey scientists Chris Milly and Krista A. Dunne and published Thursday in the journal Science — adds urgency to efforts to protect one of the country’s most vital rivers. The Colorado River starts high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Wyoming, before snaking its way across the Southwest on its way to the Gulf of California. En route, water is diverted to supply major cities like Denver, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and San Diego, as well as farms in the US and Mexico that grow the vegetables that feed millions around the world. All told, Milly and Dunne say the river supports around $1 trillion of economic activity each year. “Without this river, American cities in the Southwest would dry up and blow away,”
Feds order Santa Clara County’s biggest reservoir to be drained due to earthquake collapse risk – In a dramatic decision that could significantly impact Silicon Valley’s water supply, federal dam regulators have ordered Anderson Reservoir, the largest reservoir in Santa Clara County, to be completely drained starting Oct. 1. The 240-foot earthen dam, built in 1950 and located east of Highway 101 between Morgan Hill and San Jose, poses too great of a risk of collapse during a major earthquake, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates dams, has concluded. “It is unacceptable to maintain the reservoir at an elevation higher than necessary when it can be reduced, thereby decreasing the risk to public safety and the large population downstream of Anderson Dam,” wrote David Capka, director of FERC’s Division of Dam Safety and Inspections, in a letter to the Santa Clara Valley Water District on Thursday. Anderson Reservoir is owned by the Santa Clara Valley Water District, a government agency based in San Jose. When full, it holds 89,278 acre feet of water – more than all other nine dams operated by the Santa Clara Valley Water District combined. In a statement Monday, Norma Camacho, the water district’s CEO, said the impacts of draining the largest reservoir in Santa Clara County will be significant. “With these new requirements, we expect to see an impact to groundwater basins that are replenished with water released from Anderson Reservoir, including South County and southern San Jose,” Camacho said. “Staff is already exploring other sources of water that will have to come from outside of the county. While residents have done an excellent job of conserving water since 2013, another drought during this time frame could require everyone to significantly decrease their water use.” Camacho also said that draining the reservoir starting in seven months is likely to kill wildlife downstream in Coyote Creek, including endangered steelhead trout, amphibians and reptiles. Coyote Creek flows from the dam through downtown San Jose to San Francisco Bay. Complicating the issue, California may be heading into a new drought. On Monday, amid a dry winter, Anderson Reservoir was just 29% full. Nevertheless, the 26,133 acre feet of water stored there is an important part of the South Bay’s water supply – holding enough water for the annual needs of at least 130,000 people, and what the district considers an emergency supply.
Massive Houston water main break floods roadways; water advisories in effect —Massive Houston water main break floods roadways; water advisories in effect – Residents in Houston were being asked to conserve water Thursday after a massive water main break in the area of East Loop 610 around noontime flooded roadways and continued releasing water into the evening. In addition, residents were being asked to boil any water they use prior to drinking, brushing their teeth or washing, Houston’s FOX 26 reported. “This was a major, a major break,” Mayor Sylvester Turner told reporters at a news conference. “As you can see it produced a lot of water and it is still producing a lot of water.” Those with weakened immune systems were asked to be mindful of potentially harmful bacteria in the city’s water supply for the time being, the station reported. Video on social media showed trucks being driven in deep water in an effort to rescue stranded motorists. Water pressure was low in the city as a result of the mishap, but Turner said it “stablized” as crews continued making repairs. The main that busted was 35 years old, the mayor told FOX 26. The break was measured at 96 inches, according to the station. “This is an example of the need for infrastructure improvements, not just in this city but cities across the board,” Turner told reporters. “When you’re dealing with an aging infrastructure, you’re going to have these main-line breaks. And in some cases, they are major arteries and can cause major disruption.”
Eastern Kentucky Has Been Underwater, but You Probably Didn’t Notice –Central Appalachia has experienced catastrophic flooding once again. In the first two weeks of February, more than eight inches of water fell, causing the Cumberland and Kentucky Rivers to reach their highest levels in 40 years. More than 200 homes have been damaged, and nearly 100 more have been devastated. There have been more than 100 high-water rescues. In Whitley County, where I’m from, a 74-year-old man drowned in his car after he tried to drive through high water to get to his job as a security guard at a coal mine. I bet most Americans have no idea this natural disaster has been happening. When trouble comes to rural people – whether they’re in Kentucky, California, Montana, or Michigan – the media mostly shrug. The public as a whole is no better, as people seem to have little sympathy for these rural areas. I’ve been asked “Why do people live there, anyway?” These sentiments aren’t directed only at Appalachia. In 2017 President Donald Trump told unemployed people in rural New York that their best solution would be to move to a city. He gave them his condescending blessing, saying, “I’m going to explain: You can leave.” But people in rural areas value their communities just as much as anyone else. Even after my parents lost nearly everything, they stayed to raise their family in Lily. My parents, and many other people where I am from, say they need night skies undimmed by city lights. They cannot breathe properly in places that lack hills and pastures. Their native topography is in their blood and bones.
With every flood, public anger over the climate crisis is surging, -Sometimes it has felt as if the rain might never stop. These storms have gone beyond the point of simply being storms now, each blurring into the next to create a strangely end-of-days feeling. Everything is freakishly sodden and swollen, and while the rural flood plain on which I live fortunately hasn’t flooded anything like as badly as some, the rivers are rising alarmingly. Yet still the lashing winds and biblical downpours keep coming. Suddenly the 40 Days of Action campaign that Extinction Rebellion (XR) will launch on Ash Wednesday (26 February), encouraging people to reflect on the environmental consequences of their actions in a kind of green Lent, feels ominously well named. This week’s stunt in Cambridge, where XR activists dug up Trinity College’s lawn in symbolic protest at the college’s plans to build on land it owns in rural Suffolk, may be just the beginning. Some ask why these activists aren’t out stacking sandbags for the poor householders of the Wye valley, or canoeing through the streets of Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, highlighting the risks of a climate crisis that can only mean more freak flooding. Yet in some ways that was the point of targeting Trinity in the first place. Of all the Cambridge colleges, it’s the one identified by student journalists – using freedom of information requests – as the biggest investor in fossil fuel companies blamed for aggravating the climate crisis. Activists blockaded a research building run by the oil exploration company Schlumberger as well as making holes in the lawn. The clear aim is to make it toxic for institutions to maintain ties to polluting industries; and what makes universities tempting targets is that they’re already being hammered from inside by students raging against what they see as dirty money. But universities are not alone. This week Amazon chief Jeff Bezos announced he was giving $10bn (£7.7bn) to fight the climate crisis, provoking much the same complaints that greeted BP’s recent vow to gocarbon-neutral by 2050: it’s not enough, it’s too vague, it’s just greenwashing. And yes, obviously Bezos should tackle his own company’s carbon footprint first, not to mention treating staff better andpaying more tax if he has billions to spare. But until governments have the guts to legislate for all of that, then we are where we are, which is in danger of missing a sea change in corporate life.
Rising Tides Will Force Millions of Americans to Move — The Texan city of Houston is about to grow in unexpected ways, thanks to the rising tides. So will Dallas. Real estate agents in Atlanta, Georgia; Denver, Colorado; and Las Vegas, Nevada could expect to do roaring business.The inland counties around Los Angeles, and close to New Orleans in Louisiana, will suddenly get a little more crowded. And from Boston in the north-east to the tip of Florida, Americans will be on the move.That is because an estimated 13 million U.S. citizens could some time in this century become climate refugees, driven from their seaside homes by sea level rise of possibly 1.8 meters (approximately 5.9 feet), according to new research.And they will have to move home in a poorer economic climate, worldwide. If governments and city authorities do not take the right steps, sea level rise could erode 4% of the global annual economy, says a separate study. That is, coast-dwellers could witness not just their towns and even cities washed away: they could see their prosperity go under as well.Californian scientists report in the Public Library of Science journal PLOS One that they used machine learning techniques – in effect, artificial intelligence systems – to calculate what is most likely to happen as U.S. citizens desert Delaware Bay, slip away from the cities of North and South Carolina, and flee Florida in the face of rising sea levels, coastal flooding and increasingly catastrophic windstorms.In the year 2000, a third of all the planet’s urban land was in a zone vulnerable to flood. By 2040, this could rise to 40%. In 2010, in the U.S., more than 120 million citizens – that is nearly 40% of the entire population – lived in coastal counties. By 2020, this proportion could already be higher. And by 2100, at least 13.1 million people could be living on land likely to be inundated if sea levels rise by 1.8 meters. Except that they won’t: they will have already seen the future and moved away from it, to some settlement well away from the rising tides.
NYC Sea Wall Halted After Trump Says it’s ‘Costly, Foolish’ – President Trump has long touted the efficacy of walls, funneling billions of Defense Department dollars to build a wall on the southern border. However, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) released astudy that included plans for a sea wall to protect New Yorkers from sea-level rise and catastrophic storms like Hurricane Sandy, Trump mocked it as ineffective and unsightly. Now, six-weeks after plans for a sea wall drew the President’s derision, the federal government abruptly decided to halt the project, according to The New York Times. The sudden announcement from USACE to indefinitely postpone plans for a sea wall surprised some of its own officials, local politicians and environmental activists, all of whom see a mounting threat to New York City from the climate crisis, as The New York Times reported. The USACE official in charge of the project said it was very unusual to lose funding after more than three years of work on the project and millions of dollars spent. Furthermore, the surprise announcement that USACE did not receive the necessary funds in its raises questions about political interference in its work plan for 2020 raises speculation that the President’s whims led to the shortage of funding. Officials did not say whether or not President Trump’s tweet led to the shortage of funding, as The New York Times reported. Six weeks ago, on Jan. 18, after USACE created five possible proposals to reduce storm flooding during large coastal weather events, President Trump attacked the most expensive plan, which called for a sea barrier with retractable gates that would stretch from New Jersey to Queens. “A massive 200 Billion Dollar Sea Wall, built around New York to protect it from rare storms, is a costly, foolish & environmentally unfriendly idea that, when needed, probably won’t work anyway. It will also look terrible. Sorry, you’ll just have to get your mops & buckets ready!” Trump tweeted. New York was not the only Democratic-leaning area to lose funding for a project that would protect its citizens from floodwaters. Recently, similar projects in Baltimore, Rhode Island, and New Jersey also lost funding. A senior administration official said, “it is required that these studies have a reasonable cost and scope. These particular ones did not,” as The New York Times reported.
Major wind-driven ocean currents shifting toward the poles – Over the past 40 years, the major wind-driven current systems in the ocean have steadily shifted toward the poles, according to new research published in AGU’s journal Geophysical Research Letters.Eight massive wind-driven ocean currents, called ocean gyres, move water around our planet. There are three in the Atlantic Ocean, three in the Pacific Ocean, and one each in the Indian and Antarctic oceans. These rotating current systems largely determine the weather and marine productivity in our planet’s coastal regions.In the new study, experts at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), analyzed long-term global satellite data of ocean surface temperature and sea levels. Both datasets offer insights into the evolution of large-scale surface currents, and indicate that, in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere alike, the borders of the ocean gyres and their boundary currents are moving closer to the poles, at a rate of more than 800 meters (2,600 feet) per year.This displacement of tremendous water masses is chiefly driven by global warming, as calculations using a new climate model confirm. According to the researchers, the consequences of this change can already be felt by human beings and the environment alike. In affected regions, sea levels are rising, indigenous species are migrating, and storms are now following new courses.
Alaska’s Marine Ecosystem Is Changing ‘Decades Too Early’ Due to Climate Crisis – The climate crisis is accelerating the rate of change in Alaska‘s marine ecosystem far faster than scientists had previously thought, causing possibly irreversible changes, according to new research, as Newsweek reported.The new study from the University of Alaska Fairbanks shows that the climate crisis has warmed waters, changing ecosystems and crippling sea ice growth. The researchers told Alaska Public Media that now is the perfect time to study Alaskan waters before warmer temperatures become the new normal. Seth Danielson, one of the researchers on the paper told Alaska Public Media that their team was shocked by the record low sea ice and record high ocean temperatures of the last couple of years. “It was a bit surprising because we felt like it came a couple decades too early,” said Danielson to Alaska Public Media. The study published in the journal Nature Climate Change said that 2017 showed signs of “a sudden and dramatic shift,” according to the International Business Times. This dramatic changes in ocean temperatures will have large impacts on the region, not only to the marine populations, but to the commercial fishing industry and to local populations that rely on subsistence fishing, as the International Business Times reported. While the study focused on 2017, temperatures over the last two years suggest a lasting change is in the works.”Many changes persisted in 2018 and even into 2019, suggesting that 2017 was not a passing oddity of brief consequence to social-ecological systems, but a sign of what is to come,” according to the study, asNewsweek reported.The reduction in sea ice will open up commercial vessel lanes, which could reduce the viability of subsistence fishing, according to Danielson, as Alaska Public Media reported. It also could change the migratory patterns of the whales, walruses, and other species that migrate between the Chukchi and Bering Seas.
Researchers find new reason Arctic is warming so fast –The Arctic has experienced the warming effects of global climate change faster than any other region on the planet. Scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have developed a new theory aided by computer simulations and observations that helps explain why this occurs. A team led by Scripps researcher Emma Beer observed the changes taking place in the Arctic Ocean, which is largely covered by sea ice for most of the year. There, an unusual situation exists where the water is warm at depth and cold near the surface. The deeper waters are fed by the relatively warm Pacific and Atlantic oceans, whereas the near-surface waters are in contact with sea ice and remain close to the freezing point. Heat flows upward from the warmer water to the colder water.The scientists found that the deeper water is getting still warmer as a result of climate change, but the near-surface water below the sea ice remains close to the freezing point. The increasing difference in temperature leads to a greater upward flow of heat. Beer, et al estimate that this phenomenon is responsible for about 20% of the amplification of global warming that occurs in the Arctic.”While previous work has found mechanisms related to the surface and the atmosphere that cause Arctic amplification, our finding is that there is also a fundamental reason why the ocean causes polar amplification when the polar region is covered with sea ice,” Eisenman said of the National Science Foundation-supported study. The results are published in the journalGeophysical Research Letters.
A heat wave melted 20% of an Antarctic island’s snow in only 9 days – A heat wave this month in Antarctica sent temperatures soaring into the mid- to high-60s across northern portions of the normally frigid continent. Surprisingly, the warmth melted about 20% of an Antarctic island’s snow in only nine days, according to newly released images from NASA, leaving behind ponds of melted water where the snow had been. “I haven’t seen melt ponds develop this quickly in Antarctica,” said Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist at Nichols College in Massachusetts, in a statement. “You see these kinds of melt events in Alaska and Greenland, but not usually in Antarctica.” Pelto said that during the heat wave, which peaked from Feb. 6 to 11, snowpack on Eagle Island melted 4 inches. This means that about 20% of seasonal snow in the region melted in this one event on Eagle Island, Pelto said. He added that such rapid melting is caused by sustained high temperatures significantly above freezing. Such persistent warmth was not typical in Antarctica until this century, but it has become more common in recent years, NASA said. The temperature peaked at 64.9 degrees Fahrenheit at Argentina’s Esperanza Baseon Feb. 6, which was Antarctica’s warmest temperature on record. A reading of 69.3 degrees was measured a few days later at a research station on Seymour Island, on Feb. 9, but that reading has not yet been officially verified. This February heatwave was the third major melt event of the 2019-2020 summer, following warm spells in November 2019 and January 2020. “If you think about this one event in February, it isn’t that significant,” said Pelto. “It’s more significant that these events are coming more frequently.” It’s been a busy summer for climate news in the world’s coldest continent. In addition to the record warmth, an iceberg twice the size of Washington, D.C., broke off a glacier there. Also, scientists reported that the continent’s “Doomsday glacier” is melting from below because of unusually warm water.
Carbon Dioxide Levels in the Atmosphere Hit Highest Level in 3 Million Years -According to a recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report, the last time carbon dioxide levels were this high was 3 million years ago “when temperature was 2° – 3°C (3.6° – 5.4°F) higher than during the pre-industrial era, and sea level was 15 – 25 meters (50 – 80 feet) higher than today.”That period, the Pilocene Era, is unrecognizable from today. Giant camels walked around on the ice-free land above the Arctic Circle, as NBC News reported.Earth first passed the 400 million parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere in 2013. Rather than take it as a dire warning, we have become inured to that level of concentration and have seen it rise slightly in subsequent years. In 2018, the concentration was 407.4 parts per million (ppm), according to NOAA. This year, CO2 concentrations are predicted to peak at 417 ppm, according to NBC News.That level will put humans in new, unfamiliar territory. “For millions of years, we haven’t had an atmosphere with a chemical composition as it is right now,” said Martin Siegert, co-director of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, to NBC News.In fact, just two weeks ago, on Feb. 10, NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory, an atmospheric baseline station in Hawaii, recorded the daily average of CO2 levels on as 416.08 parts per million, according to Common Dreams.Carbon Dioxide concentrations are an effective measure of how many fossil fuels we are burning. Coal and crude oil contain carbon that plants have pulled out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis over million of years. However, in short order, human activity has returned that trapped carbon back into the atmosphere, asNOAA reported.”We’ve done in a little more than 50 years what the earth naturally took 10,000 years to do,” said Siegert toNBC News.Elevated concentrations of carbon dioxide are a hallmark of the climate crisis since they are associated with higher temperatures, melting ice and sea level rise, among other effects. University of Exeter geography professor Richard Betts, head of the climate impacts division at the UK’s national weather service, expects this year’s CO2 concentrations to be 10 percent higher than normal, with one or two percent of that carbon rise attributed to the Australia wildfires, as NBC News reported. The fires, which raged for nearly five months, released about 900 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
JP Morgan Economists Warn of ‘Catastrophic Outcomes’ of Human-Caused Climate Crisis -Climate campaigners on Friday expressed hope that policymakers who are stalling on taking decisive climate action would reconsider their stance in light of new warnings from an unlikely source: two economists at J.P. Morgan Chase.Extinction Rebellion spokesperson Rupert Read revealed Thursday that he had obtained a report, entitled “Risky Business: Climate and the Macroeconomy,” by J.P. Morgan economists David Mackie and Jessica Murray. The report issued warnings to bank clients similar to those promoted by climate action groups – describing extreme weather events and global conditions that could result from the continued extraction of fossil fuels.In doing so, the economists implicated the bank’s own investment activities in the potentially catastrophic effects of the climate crisis.J.P. Morgan is the world’s largest financial backer of fossil fuel companies, helping to fund fracking, pipeline projects, and Arctic oil and gas exploration. The company has contributed $75 billion to such projects since the Paris climate agreement was forged in 2015. The agreement called on governments to reduce fossil fuel emissions to help limit global heating to 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures.If activities like the ones funded by J.P. Morgan continue to release fossil fuels into the atmosphere, Murray and Mackie wrote, “We cannot rule out catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened.” Failing to move away from global systems that scientists agree are causing the planet to warm “would likely push the Earth to a place that we haven’t seen for many millions of years,” they added.
Planet Is Screwed, Says Bank That Screwed the Planet –JP Morgan Chase is the world’s leading financer of fossil fuel projects. And according to a report from within the company, recently leaked to the press, the world is seriously underestimating the adverse effects of climate change. The 22-page report, entitled “Risky Business: the climate and the macroeconomy” and dated January 14, 2020, has been reported by multiple outlets since Friday as containing a gloomy assessment of the risk presented by climate change in the near future. But it also offers a withering takedown of how economists in particular have tended to think about the climate crisis, criticizing findings from several of the field’s experts by name, including a recent winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. “We cannot rule out catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened,” the report concludes. It’s a stunning bit of cognitive dissonance from a bank that is doing so much to fuel the crisis. It also shows a growing push for a more grounded assessment of the crisis than mainstream economics has offered in recent decades. Essentially an informational document, the report – written by U.K.-based JP Morgan economists David Mackie and Jessica Murray – reviews a battery of academic literature on climate change. It examines several predictions of climate change’s impact on gross domestic product, including economist Richard Tol’s 2018 survey of 26 different climate models – one of the more comprehensive recent works. While Tol haslinks to organizations that have cast doubt on the scientific consensus around the climate crisis, as his own research has, the findings listed are not especially controversial. But the JP Morgan Chase report authors push back on those and other prominent predictions. “Most likely,” the authors conclude, “these estimates of the income and wealth effects of unmitigated climate change are far too small.”
JPMorgan Hopes to Block Shareholder Climate Risk Resolutions – Banking giant JPMorgan Chase & Co. grabbed headlines Tuesday when it announced plans to phase out financing of coal production and use, and not fund fossil fuel development projects in a U.S. Arctic wilderness. But the firm is still trying to block shareholders from forcing it to reveal its exposure to climate risk and commit to additional climate action. The three resolutions, which were filed by three institutional investor members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, ask JPMorgan to disclose its exposure to climate risks that could threaten the value of their share holdings, as well as plans for ending fossil fuel lending and lowering the carbon footprint of all lending. The Interfaith Center is a coalition of 300 shareholder advocates who view the management of their financial investments as a catalyst for social change.The Securities and Exchange Commission is expected to respond to JPMorgan’s request for permission to block voting on the proposals prior to the bank’s annual general meeting, which is typically held in May.”We think today’s announcement is an important first step, but it’s nowhere near where they need to be in terms of reducing their climate impact,” said Danielle Fugere, president of As You Sow, a nonprofit organization that works with shareholders to advocate for corporate environmental, climate, and social responsibility. The group’s shareholder resolution asks JPMorgan to report on its plans to measure and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with its lending activities to a level in line with the Paris Agreement. “The company has not been willing to do that,” said Fugere.
BP Calls It Quits with 3 Trade Associations, but Continues Membership in NAM, API, US Chamber – British Petroleum (BP) is working to clean up its climate image. In the two months since environmental law nonprofit Client Earth filed a complaint against the UK oil giant with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) alleging its ads were misleading, BP has announced intentions to reach “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, stop all “corporate reputation” advertising and, now, withdraw from trade associations with approaches on climate that are out of step with its values.The company announced this week it will resign its membership in the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) and the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) and will not renew its membership with the Western Energy Alliance (WEA).The decision came after BP conducted a review comparing the climate-related policies of several trade associations to its own. The company found its policies are not aligned with those of the AFPM, WSPA and WEA.BP cited WEA’s opposition of federal methane regulation as a main area of misalignment. BP said “recent and developing differences in the area of carbon pricing” have contributed to its decision to leave the WSPA, as has its current focus on stopping a low carbon fuel standard (LCFS) initiative in Washington state. But while proclaiming to support a tax on carbon, BP contributed nearly $13 million to a campaign by the WSPA to help defeat a Washington state carbon emissions fee initiative in 2018.BP listed disagreements over carbon pricing as the main reason for leaving the AFPM.However, BP will remain a member of the American Petroleum Institute (AP), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), despite finding that its policies are only partially aligned with those groups. According to its review, BP disagrees with the API’s opposition to the federal regulation of methane, disagrees with NAM over its opposition to carbon pricing and differs from the Chamber’s approach to climate science and emissions reduction efforts.Yet for now, BP will remain a member of these groups, despite the fact that the API, U.S. Chamber and NAM are well-known architects of climate science denial.
Elizabeth Warren pushes Larry Fink on BlackRock’s pledge to fight climate change — Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants Blackrock‘s Larry Fink to put more strength behind his pledge to have the world’s largest money manager tackle climate change, and to detail how he expects to do it.In a letter made public Wednesday, Warren, D-Mass., asks Fink to support her Climate Risk Disclosure Act, which requires companies to reveal their climate-related risk. Warren is one of a number of advocates who believe creating clear, public measuring sticks is one of the only ways to hold companies accountable to their pledges of sustainability.Warren also pushed Fink to better explain how he will back up his promises of making sustainability “the new standard for investing.” She asked him to describe the “concrete steps” BlackRock will take to meet its commitments and any changes in management or policies it plans to implement to support it.She asked that Fink describe BlackRock’s definition of exchange-traded funds with a focus on environmental, social and governance, or ESG, issues. He pledged to double BlackRock’s offerings of ESG-themed products. These funds have drawn scrutiny for including companies seemingly at odds with their objective, like fossil fuel companies. The letter, dated Tuesday, comes days ahead of Super Tuesday, in which Warren will fight for delegates in her run to be the Democratic nominee in the presidential election. Among the 14 states voting on Tuesday is California, which has been plagued by environmental disasters such as wildfires that experts have blamed on climate change.Fink announced in January that BlackRock will exit investments with a high sustainability-related risk, such as coal. He attributed the decision to “a fundamental reshaping of finance” and warned that climate change is a “defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects.” He also said BlackRock will join the Climate Action 100+ investor coalition, which focuses on tackling greenhouse gas.The move followed criticism of the money manager from activists who argued that its investments in coal were at odds with the societal focus Fink puts forward in his highly publicized annual investor letter. BlackRock has voted against every single resolution backed by the Climate Action 100+ investor coalition to tackle greenhouse gas.
60,000-Strong Fridays for Future Protest in Hamburg, Germany Prompts Question: ‘Where Are You, USA?’ – U.S.-based youth climate activists on Friday drew attention to the climate protest in Hamburg, Germany, where organizers said roughly 60,000 people took part, and hoped that Americans took inspiration from their European counterparts. Among those taking part in the large Fridays for Future action in the northern German city was school strike for climate founder Greta Thunberg of Sweden. Fridays for Future organizer Alexandria Villaseñor of New York City shared Thunberg’s tweet showing the massive crowd and asked, “Where are you USA?””The United States needs these types of numbers on a regular basis,” said Jerome Foster II, a high school senior and Fridays for Future organizer in Washington, DC. “What is it going to take for the U.S. to rise up like this?” wondered the Durham, N.C. branch of Extinction Rebellion. “We are in a climate catastrophe and people around the world, particularly in the global south are facing the brunt NOW! January 2020 was the warmest since we’ve recorded temperatures.” Thunberg, who’s in her 79th week of Fridays for Future actions, noted in her remarks to the Hamburg crowd that the weekly actions have spread globally. “For almost one and half years young people have been striking from school all over the world,” she said. “The world is failing on ensuring us a future. And I honestly don’t understand how the people in power can continue like now. How they can look their children in the eyes while they are stealing their future?” she asked.”We are facing an existential crisis,” said Thunberg, “but we must keep on pushing.”While the Hamburg march drew attention for its size Friday, other youth-led climate actions took place in communities across the globe, which many documented on social media:
Schools challenged to teach climate change as students join Greta strikes – Dozens of students packed onto a boat docked in a flood-prone area of Bangladesh listen closely to a lesson highlighting the natural life of the rivers around them. It is a normal day on a school boat project which aims to keep students in classes during monsoon season – and teach them about a changing climate in a country facing increasingly devastating floods fuelled by global warming. The project is at the vanguard of a global movement pushing for schools to teach children about the impact of a rapidly warming world, with countries from Italy to New Zealand also putting climate change onto the curriculum. Students aged five to 11 in northern Bangladesh study a curriculum based on water and environment, from a nature-based alphabet to watching documentaries on climate change and how to farm more sustainably, taught on about 20 wooden boats. “They are the future citizens. If we provide them with timely education on climate and how to survive the present challenges and prepare them for future, bigger, challenges then actually they will be able to adapt to the changing climate.” Education has been highlighted as a key plank in tackling climate change by the United Nations education body UNESCO amid warnings from scientists that world leaders are failing to take sufficient action to curb global warming. The move comes as students worldwide follow the lead of Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and strike on Fridays, calling for governments and companies to take action to curb rising greenhouse gas emissions. Italy last year become the first country to make climate change education compulsory in schools, and New Zealand introduced climate change curriculum last month.But many students taking part in the swelling global youth climate movement say they are being failed by their schools.The youth-led Teach the Future campaign network in Britain is demanding a new UK law that would instruct all schools to teach climate issues.
‘Anti-Greta’ teen activist to speak at biggest US conservatives conference – A German teenager dubbed the “anti-Greta” – climate sceptics’ answer to theschoolgirl activist Greta Thunberg – is set to address the biggest annual gathering of US grassroots conservatives. Naomi Seibt, 19, who styles herself as a “climate sceptic” or “climate realist”, will this week address the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)near Washington, joining speakers including Donald Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence. Seibt is in the pay of the Heartland Institute, a thinktank closely allied with the White House that denies established science showing humans are heating the planet with dangerous consequences. CPAC will be the biggest stage yet for Seibt, a so-called “YouTube influencer” who tells her followers Thunberg and other activists are whipping up unnecessary hysteria by exaggerating the climate crisis. “Climate change alarmism at its very core is a despicably anti-human ideology,” she has said. The teenager, from Münster in western Germany, claims she is “without an agenda, without an ideology”. But she was pushed into the limelight by leading figures on the German far right and her mother, a lawyer, has represented politicians from the Alternative für Deutschland(AfD) party in court. Seibt had her first essay published by the “anti-Islamisation” blog Philosophia Perennis and was championed by Martin Sellner, leader of the Austrian Identitarian Movement, who has been denied entry to the UK and US because of his political activism.
In Massachusetts, students step up to pressure schools on renewable energy – Student campaigns are underway on more than a dozen campuses demanding a transition to 100% renewables. As momentum grows in Massachusetts for greater adoption of renewable energy, student activists are playing an increasingly vital role in the movement. Student groups on college and university campuses across the state are attempting to convince their schools to commit to using only renewable energy, and they are joining in the fight for a new bill that would transition the state to 100% renewable energy. “Young people are so important to the conversation because climate change is the biggest issue facing our generation,” said Julia Seremba, a campus organizer with the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, or MassPIRG. “We are really the generation that are going to endure some of the worst effects of climate change, and we are also poised to do something about it right now.” Earlier this month, MassPIRG student chapters across the state and partner Environment Massachusetts launched their latest campaign to lobby colleges and universities to make the switch to 100% renewable energy. Approximately 15 schools statewide – including all four of the campuses in the University of Massachusetts system – are involved in the effort, said Ben Hellerstein, state director for Environment Massachusetts. While the shift to renewable energy must happen in all sectors, colleges and universities are powerful targets for change, Hellerstein said. As education and research institutions, he said, they have the power to influence how people understand issues, so it is essential that they lead by example on the issue of renewable energy. Furthermore, these institutions are large enough to make a difference in emissions on a community level, he said. “They are large consumers of energy, often some of the biggest in their communities,” Hellerstein said. “So the decisions they make about how they procure their power could have a big impact.”
Ocasio-Cortez reads entire Green New Deal into congressional record — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) read the entirety of the Green New Deal on the House floor Wednesday, marking over a year since shefirst introduced the resolution.Republicans have sought to weaponize the ambitious climate proposal against Democrats, and the measure has failed to advance through either chamber.“But throughout this entire year, as we’ve discussed the Green New Deal, I’ve noticed there’s been an awful lot of misinformation about what’s inside this resolution, a tremendous amount of wild claims: everything from saying we’re seeking to ban airplanes to ending ice cream,” Ocasio-Cortez said on the House floor.“And, as a consequence, I’ve realized that many of my colleagues have never even read the resolution that they’re speaking on,” she added. “They haven’t opened a single word of it – and it’s actually only about … just 14 pages long. So I have decided that since some of my colleagues across the aisle could not for some reason read the resolution, that perhaps this hour would be spent best reading it to them, for the public record.”The Green New Deal seeks to move the U.S. toward net-zero greenhouse gas emissions while putting a focus on “good, high-wage jobs.” It offers a wide range of policy proposals, including an entirely renewable energy-driven power grid, investments in high-speed railroads and support for family farming.Ocasio-Cortez prefaced her reading by pointing to data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations research group that has released catastrophic projections on the unchecked effects of man-made climate change. She noted that the issue was not brought up once at the Democratic presidential primary debate in South Carolina on Tuesday night. “As I was preparing for this evening, I would be remiss but to say that last night we had a national Democratic debate and not a single question was asked about our climate crisis,” the New York Democrat said.
Will Trump’s ‘deep state’ purge hit energy agencies? — Thursday, February 27, 2020 —President Trump is reportedly on the hunt for the so-called deep state across the federal government – including agencies that oversee everything from offshore drilling to hammering out energy policy. Even if the administration’s search for “anti-Trump” employees doesn’t result in a reshuffling of political or career staff at the Energy Department or other agencies, experts are warning “deep state” rhetoric threatens to put a chill on the federal workforce. The term hints at a conspiracy theory in some conservative circles that a secretive group of bureaucrats exists and is determined to sabotage the Trump administration’s agenda. “Whether these efforts result in a widespread purge or even just the fear that will happen, they threaten to undo protections for federal civil servants that have taken more than a century to build up,” said Nick Schwellenbach, director of investigations at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight. “Those protections exist so public servants are empowered to follow the laws passed by Congress and make decisions based on facts and the broader public interest, rather than for the narrow political benefit of appointees, the president and their patrons,” he said. “These efforts absolutely will create a more chilled work environment. Most feds will want to keep their heads down to survive.” That, according to one DOE career official who asked to remain anonymous, is what’s happening at the agency now. “Most of the appointees here keep their head down and do anything they can to not be noticed,” the career staffer said. “I anticipate that there will be little interest from the White House during their purge, but who knows?” Trump acknowledged the search Tuesday, telling reporters at a press conference in India that he doesn’t believe it will involve a large number of employees – and that the country will be better off because of it. “I don’t think it’s a big problem. I don’t think it’s very many people,” Trump said, pointing to what he called the “fake” whistleblower who reported the president’s July 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, which uncovered Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine and led to his impeachment by the House. “We want to have people that are good for the country, are loyal to our country, because that was a disgraceful situation,” Trump said. White House spokesman Hogan Gidley told Fox News in an interview Monday that it was “not a secret that we want people in positions that work with this president, not against him.”
Bridgestone and Dominion in dispute over $2.7 million solar project at SC tire factory – Bridgestone, one of South Carolina’s largest tire producers, is accusing Dominion Energy of preventing the manufacturer from using a $2.7 million solar project at its factory in Aiken County. The international tire company filed a legal complaint this month with the state Public Service Commission, which regulates investor-owned utilities in South Carolina. The case alleges that Dominion, the new owner of South Carolina Electric & Gas, delayed Bridgestone Americas’ use of a roughly 2 megawatt solar array for more than a year. The solar project was built to power part of Bridgestone’s 2.7 million-square-foot factory in Graniteville, where it makes tires for passenger vehicles and light trucks. But Dominion, which supplies electricity to the plant, has yet to review the new solar array and sign off on the project so it can start producing power. Dominion put the project in line behind a number of other solar projects, which are being built by independent power companies who want to sell electricity back to Dominion’s ratepayers. The utility reviews those projects in the order they are submitted. That process ensures the projects meet engineering standards and won’t cause problems on Dominion’s electric tranmission grid. Rhonda O’Banion, a spokeswoman for Dominion, said the utility is handling Bridgestone’s solar development just like it does other projects. “The law does not allow Dominion Energy to provide special treatment to any solar developer, including Bridgestone,” she said. “Dominion Energy is simply requiring that Bridgestone play by the same rules as everyone else.”
DEP’s First Step Toward Reducing Greenhouse Gases Dismissed as Too Tame by Critics – The state is proposing to clamp down on carbon pollution limited to permitted facilities under regulation by officials, a strategy faulted by environmentalists yesterday as far too tame to achieve New Jersey’s climate reduction targets. The Department of Environmental Protection proposal is its initial effort to comply with Gov. Phil Murphy’s directive to focus on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 80% below 2006 levels by midcentury, while also pushing the state to 100% clean energy by 2050. The issue is sure to be controversial because the agency is directed by the Murphy administration to implement far-reaching regulatory proposals to curb greenhouse-gas emissions from a variety of sources – some that have never been ratcheted down for pollution contributing to climate change. “Business as usual won’t get us to 80% reductions by 2050,’’ said Frank Steitz, director of the Division of Air Quality at the DEP. The agency hopes to propose emissions reductions to curb carbon dioxide emissions from permitted facilities by the end of the year, and adopt them by the following January, he said.
Wind has surpassed hydro as most-used renewable electricity generation source in U.S. – In 2019, U.S. annual wind generation exceeded hydroelectric generation for the first time, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Electric Power Monthly. Wind is now the top renewable source of electricity generation in the country, a position previously held by hydroelectricity.Annual wind generation totaled 300 million megawatthours (MWh) in 2019, exceeding hydroelectric generation by 26 million MWh. Wind generation has increased steadily during the past decade, in part, because the Production Tax Credit (PTC), which drove wind capacity additions, was extended. Annual hydroelectric generation has fluctuated between 250 million MWh and 320 million MWh in the past decade, reflecting a stable capacity base and variable annual precipitation. Annual changes in hydroelectric generation are primarily the result of variations in annual precipitation patterns and water runoff. Although weather patterns also affect wind generation in different regions, capacity growth has been the predominant driver of annual changes in wind generation. Both hydroelectric and wind generation follow seasonal patterns. Hydroelectric generation is typically greatest in the spring when precipitation and melting snowpack increase water runoff. Seasonal patterns in wind generation vary across the country, but wind generation is usually greatest in the spring and fall. Wind capacity additions tend to come online during the fourth quarter of the year, most likely because of tax benefits. Wind capacity additions totaled 10 gigawatts in 2019 (3.8 GW installed in the fourth quarter), making 2019 the second-largest year for wind capacity additions, second only to 2012. As of the end of 2019, the United States had 103 GW of wind capacity, nearly all of which (77%) were installed in the past decade. The United States has 80 GW of hydroelectric capacity, most of which has been operating for several decades. Only 2 GW of hydroelectric capacity has been added in the past decade, and some of those additions involved converting previously nonpowered dams. Although total installed wind capacity surpassed total installed hydroelectric capacity in 2016, it wasn’t until 2019 that wind generation surpassed hydroelectric generation. The average annual capacity factors for the hydroelectric fleet between 2009 and 2019 ranged from 35% to 43%. The average annual capacity factors for the U.S. wind fleet were lower, ranging from 28% to 35%.
How Texas’s wind boom has spawned a Bitcoin mining rush – Is Texas the new promised land for Bitcoin miners? The backers of several big-money projects are betting yes, thanks to the state’s cheap electricity and unique regulatory environment. If their ambitious plans come to fruition, it could lead to a profound shift in the geographic distribution of an essential component of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency network. Bitcoin mining success depends heavily on how much electricity a given facility can devote to the task, which explains why the announcements of new mining sites often read like announcements of new power plants. A project that went live last week in west Texas has drawn particular attention, thanks to backing by investor Peter Thiel. Layer1 Technology, which recently raised $50 million from Thiel and other venture capitalists, has launched a facility that it says will soon have 100 megawatts of electricity devoted to mining Bitcoin. Leading mining chip maker Bitmain, which is based in China, has also moved into Texas, opening a facility with 50 MW of power in a town called Rockdale in October that it says can eventually scale up to 300 MW. A third big player, a German firm called Northern data, says it plans to build the largest mining facility in the world, also in Rockdale, which it says will devote a full gigawatt (1,000 MW) to cryptocurrency prospecting. Today, Bitcoin’s network is using just over 10 gigawatts, according to an estimate by researchers at the University of Cambridge. These are just the most high-profile mining operations laying claim to the Lone Star State. A number of other firms are either planning (or rumored to be planning) to set up facilities there, all chasing inexpensive power. Bitcoin’s heavy electricity consumption – the same researchers estimate that the network’s annual use of power ranks it between the Philippines and Belgium – stems from the way it secures its public accounting ledger, called the blockchain, without relying on a central authority. To demonstrate their trustworthiness to the network, Bitcoin’s miners, thousands of which are distributed all over the world, constantly consume huge amounts of computing power as part of a competition to solve a complicated cryptographic puzzle. Every 10 minutes, a winner earns the right to add a “block” of new transactions to the ledger, and in return they receive newly minted bitcoins. Essentially, the system deters attacks by making them very expensive.
Natural Gas Is Crushing Wind and Solar Power – The U.S. Energy Information Administration just announced some spectacular news that should be banner headlines across the country: The price of natural gas has fallen to its lowest February level in 20 years. The data shows that natural gas prices fell to $1.77 per million British thermal units. In inflation-adjusted terms, the price of gas has plunged by some 80 percent since its high of $13.60 12 years ago. The price is down 90 percent since 2005, when prices hit nearly $20. (Quick: Can you think of anything else that now costs one-tenth of what it did 15 years ago?) The Energy Information Administration also reports that U.S. natural gas production has hit an all-time high this year. This boom in production has affected the economy of every state, from Ohio and Pennsylvania to Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and the Dakotas. Today’s bargain-basement prices are partly due to moderate temperatures on the East Coast this winter, but this has been a long-term trend of cheaper and cheaper energy. America is now the Saudi Arabia of natural gas, and we are exporting more throughout the world than at any previous time in our history. It’s hard to believe that a decade ago, we were importing natural gas. Thanks to fracking and horizontal drilling technologies that keep getting more and more efficient, we now have hundreds of years of supply of this fuel. Yet liberal environmentalists are grousing about this good news. A recent Bloomberg news story exclaims in its headline: “Cheap Gas Imperils Climate Fight by Undercutting Wind and Solar.” “Gas is such a bargain that it’s being viewed less as a bridge fossil fuel, driving the world away from dirtier coal toward a clean-energy future,” the story tells us, “and more as a hurdle that could slow the trip down. Some forecasters are predicting prices will stay low for years, making it tough for states, cities and utilities to achieve their goals of being zero-carbon in power production by 2050 or earlier.” Ravina Advani, head of renewable energy at BNP Paribas, complained: “The fact that there’s an abundance of it makes the move to complete decarbonization much harder … (Gas is) reliable, and it’s cheap.” And that is bad news, why, exactly? It’s like saying a cure for the coronavirus is bad for hospitals and doctors..
Fossil-Fuel Subsidies Must End – Scientific American -When it comes to tackling the climate crisis, ending $400 billion of annual subsidies to the fossil-fuel industry worldwide seems like a no-brainer. For the past decade, world leaders have been resolving and reaffirming the need to phase them out. All of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have committed to eliminating fossil-fuel subsidies, and the vast majority of the American public supports doing so. International financial institutions such as the World Bank andInternational Monetary Fund have joined the chorus, pointing to the benefits of reform.In 2018, however, a group of researchers questioned the magnitude of the climate benefits of subsidy reform, reporting that their simulations showed its effect would be “limited” and “small.” Stories in the pressbegan asking whether such subsidies are such a big deal after all. We think this is wrong. In a new paper in the journal Nature, we make the case that they do matter – a lot. In the 2018 study, emissions reductions from subsidy removal were calculated by the researchers to be five hundred million to two billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2030. This figure is by no means “small.” It amounts to roughly one quarter of the energy-related emission reductions pledged by all of the countries participating in the Paris Agreement (four to eight billion tons). Hundreds of millions of metric tons of CO2 reductions is nothing to sneeze at, particularly when it can be achieved by a single policy approach that also brings strong fiscal, environmental and health benefits.In our analysis of the issue, we take the example of one specific subsidy: a federal tax break that allows U.S. oil producers to immediately deduct from their taxes most of the costs of constructing and drilling new wells. Conventional models assume that subsidies such as this are uniformly distributed across all oil fields, whereas in reality, governments often preferentially target new – rather than existing – capital investments. The result is a lowering of producers’ up-front cash-flow requirements, leading them to drill more new wells than they otherwise would. This process locks in and accelerates fossil-fuel production and, in turn, greenhouse gas emissions.
U.S. renewable fuel prices climb 25% after report on small refinery waiver program – U.S. renewable fuel prices rose 25% on Wednesday, traders said, after a Bloomberg report stated that the Trump administration has decided to pare exemptions for oil refineries from the nation’s biofuel blending laws, as reported by Reuters.In late January the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit said the Environmental Protection Agency must reconsider some exemptions it previously gave to oil refineries. The administration has decided to apply that ruling nationwide, which likely would mean fewer refineries receive exemptions going forward, according to the report.Following the report, renewable fuel (D6) credits RIN-D6-US for 2019 traded at 35 cents each on Wednesday, up from 28 cents in the previous session, traders said. Credits for 2020 traded at 40 cents each.Reuters did not independently confirm the report. EPA spokeswoman Molly Block declined to comment on the report.The EPA has been seeking White House guidance on how the court decision affects the small refinery waiver program.Under the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard, the nation’s oil refineries are required to blend billions of gallons of biofuels such as ethanol into the fuel or buy credits from those that do. But the EPA can waive their obligations if they prove compliance would cause them financial distress.According to the court’s decision, the EPA overstepped its authority to grant waivers in the past for HollyFrontier Corp’s Woods Cross and Cheyenne refineries and CVR Energy Inc’s Wynnewood refinery because the refineries had not received exemptions in the previous year.The court said the RFS is worded in such a way that any exemption granted to a small refinery after 2010 must take the form of an “extension.” According to EPA data, the agency granted seven biofuel waivers in 2015. That number rose to 35 in 2017 – meaning 28 waivers were given without having been granted in a previous year.
China dominates ‘rare earth’ industry. Can West Virginia be a player? Near Mt. Storm, West Virginia, a pilot plant under construction will soon test a potential win-win for industry and the environment.It aims to turn a major pollutant of streams and ponds – acid mine drainage – into badly needed minerals for everything from smartphones and electric cars to jet fighters and satellites.If it works, at a price that can earn companies a profit, the process would provide a major incentive for companies to clean up waters and streams, cut costs for the mining industry, and plug a strategic hole for the United States, which currently imports most of those minerals from China.“We think it’s going to be much more competitive than opening a brand new hard rock mine,” says Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of the West Virginia Water Research Institute here at West Virginia University, and the researcher who discovered the link between acid mine drainage and rare-earth metals. “There really isn’t a domestic supply chain for rare earths.”For years, U.S. companies and the military have worried about their reliance on China for rare earths. These are 17 elements, sitting at the bottom of the periodic table, with strange names like dysprosium, scandium, and yttrium. These metals are key for the manufacture of smartphones, advanced batteries, ceramics, satellite communications, and magnets used in everything from hard drives to antilock brakes. Some 80% of U.S. imports come from China. Researcher Wes Edge at the mineral extraction project in Morgantown, West Virginia. Currently most of the global supply of 17 rare-earth elements is from China. The minerals are vital for making everything from smartphones and advanced batteries to the magnets used in computer hard drives.And China has sometimes used that dominant position to sharply reduce its supply to nations (like Japan, temporarily, in a 2010 dispute) and threatened obliquely last year to do so again, this time against the U.S. in the middle of the trade war.
JPMorgan Chase takes baby step toward curbing fossil fuel loans – The Washington Post –JPMorgan Chase, one of the world’s biggest lenders to fossil fuel projects, announced Monday that it would curb loans to coal firms and bar the financing of oil and gas developments in the Arctic. But in a move that disappointed climate activists, JPMorgan will still provide loans to oil and gas projects in the Lower 48 states or other parts of the world.The bank has increasingly become a target of activists, who have denounced it for providing $196 billion in financing for coal, oil, natural gas and pipeline projects from 2016 through 2018, following the Paris climate accord. Among American banks, JPMorgan was the top financier of oil and gas drilling in the Arctic and of tar sands extraction in Canada during that three-year period.The bank has also come under criticism because its board includes former ExxonMobil chief executive Lee R. Raymond, who has a long record of dismissing concerns about climate change. Bill McKibben, an environmental studies professor at Middlebury College and leading climate activist, said the bank’s new commitments were disappointing and resembled pledges made recently by Goldman Sachs.“It seems like weak beer to me, basically just copying Goldman,” McKibben said. “But it shows that even the biggest bank on Earth feels citizen pressure, so we will keep supplying that!” He added that JPMorgan would “retain the title of the doomsday bank.” Climate activists have staged protests at JPMorgan branches in recent months over the bank’s outsize role in underwriting the oil, gas and coal industries. Earlier this month, for example, Monica Nelson, a student at the University of California at San Diego, helped organize a protest at the campus’s Chase branch where activists held up a banner reading “CHASE THEM OUT.” “We would like the university not to give them the next five-year lease,” she said.
Freedom from Fossil Fuels is Good for Your Health – Freeing ourselves from reliance on fossil fuels is not only good for the planet and future generations. It also saves lives here and now. That’s the message from studies of the public health “co-benefits” that come with reduced emissions. In many cases, these alone are large enough to provide a compelling case for replacing fossil fuels with clean energy, even without counting benefits for the climate.The burning of fossil fuels releases a toxic stew of air pollutants alongside carbon dioxide, the number one culprit in climate change. Foremost among these “co-pollutants” are sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which are hazardous in themselves and undergo chemical reactions in the air to form suspended particulates that penetrate the lungs and further damage human health. Coal-fired power plants are the main source of sulfur dioxide emissions, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has estimated are responsible for about 70% of the health costs from power plants.Air pollution is a leading cause of death at home and abroad. In the U.S., a 2019 study in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that outdoor air pollution kills more than 100,000 Americans each year. Globally, the World Health Organization estimates that dirty air kills more than 4 million people annually.Economically, this is a big deal – even bigger than the climate damages often measured by conventional cost-benefit analysis. And politically, the deaths and ill health caused by air pollution are more immediately visible than climate instability: the costs are borne by people alive today rather than by future generations, and they are borne mainly in the same places where the emissions occur rather than by people worldwide. In a recent study I carried out with colleagues at MIT and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, we analyzed the “co-pollutant cost of carbon” in U.S. electric power generation – the premature deaths from co-pollutants per ton of carbon dioxide emissions. A prior study by MIT researchers estimated that in 2005, power plant emissions were responsible for 53,900 deaths per year nationwide. Using standard EPA measures for the value of a statistical life, we found that in 2011 the average co-pollutant cost of carbon was roughly $45/ton. This can be regarded as a conservative estimate in that it does not include the costs of non-fatal illnesses. The co-pollutant cost was 20% higher than the “social cost of carbon” estimate of $37/ton that the Obama administration used for climate damages. In other words, including the here-and-now health benefits of cutting fossil fuels – alongside the climate benefits – would have more than doubled the economic rationale for doing so.
Paul LePage says he was paid $7,500 last year to advocate for CMP corridor – – Former Gov. Paul LePage confirmed on Monday that he was paid in 2019 by a lobbying firm to advocate for Central Maine Power Co.’s hydropower corridor, which has been perhaps the hottest political issue facing his Democratic successor. The Republican said in a Monday statement to the Bangor Daily News that he was paid $7,500 last year by Mitchell Tardy Jackson, a high-powered lobbying firm that has been working for the utility since last year to fend off legislative proposals aimed at killing the $1 billion proposal. LePage could do more paid work on the corridor in the future.The issue has long been a rare point of agreement between LePage and Gov. Janet Mills, who won the 2018 election on a promise to overturn much of the former governor’s conservative legacy. LePage’s paid involvement in the corridor fight may take on added political importance since he’s considering a 2022 run against Mills.The project would bring Hydro-Quebec power to the regional grid through a 145-mile transmission line, but it is under threat from opponents who recently delivered more than 75,000 signatures to the state in a bid to put a question killing the project on the November ballot.
The UK’s largest power plant to stop using coal next year, with up to 230 jobs lost – Coal-fired electricity production at the U.K.’s largest power plant is expected to end in March 2021, energy firm Drax said Thursday, with the move leading to between 200 and 230 job losses. Drax Power Station – which is located near the town of Selby, North Yorkshire – has a capacity of 3,906 megawatts and generates approximately 18 terawatt-hours of power annually, according to the firm. The facility has six units: four which have been converted to generate power using what Drax describes as “sustainable biomass,” and two which use coal. This shift, the company says, has resulted in carbon savings of over 80% compared to when the units were using coal. “Ending the use of coal at Drax is a landmark in our continued efforts to transform the business and become a world-leading carbon negative company by 2030,” Will Gardiner, the CEO of Drax, said in a statement. “Stopping using coal is the right decision for our business, our communities and the environment, but it will have an impact on some of our employees, which will be difficult for them and their families,” Gardiner went on to state. The firm is to consult with trade unions and employee representatives “over the coming months” and offer support to those impacted by the changes. While Drax said it did not expect the power station to use coal after March 2021, it added that the facility’s two coal units would “remain available until September 2022 in line with its existing Capacity Market agreements.”
Lawmakers and environmental advocates team up to support coal transition legislation – Bipartisanship was on full display Tuesday as Maryland lawmakers and environmental advocates came together to support legislation that would phase out the burning of coal at the state’s six coal-fired power plants and provide money to take care of workers who would be affected by the transition. The legislators and environmentalists spoke ahead of a Senate Finance Committee hearing on the legislation that began at 1 p.m. EST. The House Economic Matters Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the bill on March 5 at 1 p.m. EST. “It really is a bold step forward to say the worst of the dirty energy is something we’re targeting for termination and that we’re gonna do it in a way that doesn’t harm workers. So, that’s our overall goal,” House Environment and Transportation Committee Chair Kumar Barve, D-Montgomery, said at a news conference at the Miller Senate Office Building in Annapolis. “Our goal is to shut down coal in a fixed timeline and to take care of all the workers because we don’t want to forget the people who worked in these coal-fired power plants.” Barve said that the legislation calls for a five-year transition period but that the time frame will be negotiable. “We want do something that’s not too far in the future but also doesn’t provide market disruptions.” Sen. Chris West, R-Baltimore County, described the legislation as the “right bill at the right time.” He said Maryland has “an unsustainable model for how we generate electricity using coal.” None of the state’s coal-fired power plants has thus far operated for a single day this year, West said. Last year the plants operated for 17 days, he said, adding that the plants are dying a slow death. “Any kind of a model that involves these very dirty plants trying to operate continually and make any kind of a profit at 17 days a year just doesn’t work. It’s not sustainable. These plants are going to close. Whether they close tomorrow or three years from now – they’re going to close.
Last Smokestack Demolished at Former Coal-Fired Power Plant (AP) – The single remaining smokestack at Massachusetts’ last coal-fired power plant has been demolished. A controlled implosion brought down the 500-foot (152-meter) smokestack in seconds at the former Brayton Point power plant in Somerset on Saturday morning. WJAR-TV captured photos and video of the demolition. Three other chimneys were demolished in March, and two massive cooling towers were taken down in late April. Video from April showed the giant towers along Mount Hope Bay crumple to the ground and a large cloud of dust rise into the air. The company had said that the hulking concrete structures were believed to be the tallest power plant cooling towers ever brought down in a controlled demolition. The plant had burned coal since 1963, though the cooling towers were not added until decades later. The plant closed in 2017 as environmental groups pushed for cleaner sources of energy generation. The structures were long considered an eyesore by residents in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The new owners of the property, Commercial Development Co., plan to turn the site into a multi-use facility mainly dedicated to supporting offshore wind farms.
Newly opened US thermal coal mine for sale after operational, market problems – Owners of a thermal coal mine that was touted as the first to open under U.S. President Donald Trump’s pro-coal administration filed for bankruptcy and is now seeking a buyer. Paringa Resources Ltd. subsidiary Hartshorne Mining Group LLC cited both market conditions and a slew of technical challenges to getting the Poplar Grove mine in the Illinois Basin operating at full capacity as it filed a petition for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization on Feb. 20. “While the debtors continue to believe in the Western Kentucky region and the high-quality coal produced from the Poplar Grove mine, they have not been able to produce coal in the volumes necessary to generate a positive cash flow and stave off a liquidity crisis that ultimately necessitated the filing of these Chapter 11 cases,” Hartshorne President David Gay wrote in a bankruptcy court declaration. Several new metallurgical coal mines opened up in the months following Trump’s election in response to overseas demand for steelmaking coal that subsequently tempered. Grant Quasha, then the CEO and managing director of Paringa, told S&P Global Market Intelligence in mid-2017 that the company’s Buck Creek project in Kentucky, which included the Poplar Grove and Cypress mines, was the first new coal project announced in the U.S. to target thermal coal sales under the Trump administration. “The build-out of this newly emerging producer may not have been possible without the support of the Trump and [Kentucky Gov. Matt] Bevin administrations,” Quasha said. With expectations of low capital costs and known mine geology, Quasha said he expected the mine to be a “new stalwart in the dynamic Illinois Basin.” At the time, the coal executive was also banking on natural gas prices climbing toward $4/MMBtu. Instead, persistently cheap gas continues to challenge the entire coal sector and recently fell below $2/MMBtu. Even without a rise in gas prices, Quasha hoped the mine could take business from higher-cost coal operations as Paringa looked to expand on a long-term coal contract struck with Louisville Gas and Electric Co. and Kentucky Utilities Co. for above spot market prices for the region. The company was also committed to providing coal to Ohio Valley Electric Corp. and Indiana-Kentucky Electric Corp. through 2020.
Citizens make voices heard at coal ash meeting – One week after a small crowd gathered for the public hearing and question-and-answer session on the coal ash basin closure plan for the Duke Energy Mayo Plant, a much larger gathering came to the Department of Environmental Quality session on the company’s Roxboro plant on Hyco Lake at North Elementary School Wednesday night. Under a Jan. 31 consent agreement between Duke Energy, DEQ and several community groups represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center, Duke Energy will remove nearly 80 million tons of coal ash from six of its coal-fired power plants in North Carolina, including the Roxboro plant. That ash will be removed from the basins and placed in lined onsite landfills. DEQ representative Ben Jackson gave a presentation detailing the closure plan. The Roxboro Steam Electric Plant has two basins. The East Ash Basin contains 3.89 million tons of ash. The West Ash Basin contains 12.97 million tons. The Roxboro plant will have about 16.8 million tons of uncapped coal ash moved into the a new, lined landfill that will sit adjacent to an existing lined landfill in the East Ash Basin. The existing landfill sits on top of about 3 million tons of coal ash that will not be excavated. Landfill construction is expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2021. Ash excavation is expected to begin in the first quarter of 2023 and is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2035. The landfill is expected to completed and covered in the fourth quarter of 2036. The new landfill will be 180 feet above Dunaway Road. According to Duke Energy, drinking and recreational water supplies have always been safe from coal ash, but the submitted Corrective Action Plan will address the localized groundwater impacts immediately under and beside the basins. Duke Energy says the impacts are contained on company property and moving away from the plant’s neighbors.
Duke Energy reveals specific plans for coal ash removal – Dozens of people showed up to North Rowan High School Monday night, with questions and concerns to voice about Duke Energy’s plans to excavate 80 million tons of coal ash. According to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, the move is expected to be the largest coal ash cleanup in U.S. history, requiring more excavation than what was done in four neighboring states combined. Throughout the month of February, the DEQ has hosted public hearings around the area to explain Duke’s submitted plans and hear comments from the community. Altogether, 10 remaining coal ash basins will be closed, the DEQ says. At six of those, the ash will be removed and placed in lined basins on site. See the excavation and closure plans in detail below: The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has secured the excavation of more than 80 million tons of coal ash in North Carolina. Under a settlement agreement with community and environmental groups and Duke Energy that ends the appeal litigation, Duke Energy will move forward with excavation plans at the Allen, Belews Creek, Cliffside, Marshall, Mayo and Roxboro sites, moving coal ash into on-site lined landfills. Buck is one of four locations where coal ash will be excavated and recycled. Ed Mussler with the DEQ’s Division of Waste Management says recycled ash will have to be burned first to remove remaining carbon, so the ash can then be incorporated into cement. Throughout the process, Mussler says environmental impacts will be tracked. In total, Duke Energy expects the project to cost $8 million to $9 million. The DEQ says the process is expected to take ten or more years. Deborah Graham lives down the street from the Buck site and came to the meeting to voice her concerns with the burning of the ash before recycling. She also thinks Duke Energy should cover the cost of the cleanup. “I know, for 33 years, I’ve lived in my house, and I’ve paid my trash man every month to pick up my trash,” Graham said. “Duke Energy’s been down at the end of my street. They have not paid the trash man to pick up their trash for 33 years. Now, they want me to also pay for that. That’s just another slap in our face.”
Public meeting on Marshall Steam Station coal ash basin closure today The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality is hosting a public hearing about the closure of a coal ash basin at the Marshall Steam Station Wednesday at Maiden High School at 6 p.m. As part of the process to close the ash basins in North Carolina, DEQ is holding public meetings for citizens to learn about the closure plans for each of the six plants with on-site ash basins. Marshall Steam Station is in Catawba County by Lake Norman and NC 150. Duke Energy plans to drain the ash basin by Marshall, expand the lined landfill that is also on the station property and move the dry ash to the lined landfill. Dave Renner, a Duke Energy vice president, said water from the basin will go through Duke’s filtration system before it is put into Lake Norman. The filtration system meets state standards. The company will start moving the ash in 2021 or 2022. It will be able to move about 1.5 million tons per year, and the project will be complete by 2030. Renner said after all of the ash has been transferred to the double-lined landfill, it will be covered with an impermeable barrier.The dam between Lake Norman and the current basin will remain after the basin is free of coal ash because it is an important railroad spur for the plant. Wells will also be installed around the emptied ash basin. Some wells will pull groundwater affected by the coal ash to the surface for filtration while others will inject clean water into the water table. Duke spokesperson Bill Norton said only water on plant property had been affected as groundwater directly underneath the current basin has been contaminated, but the company wants to decrease the amount of impact as much as possible.
Can county stop a TVA landfill? – – A standing-room-only crowd filled the Anderson County Courthouse courtroom as citizens lined up for a hearing on the possibility TVA may build a landfill in the Claxton Community near Bull Run Fossil Plant. However, the question remained whether the county could officially do anything to stop the utility from building the landfill, planned to possibly be near the intersection of New Henderson Lane and Old Edgemoor Road. The county has invoked the Jackson Law, a state law which allows counties to block landfills. However, Bert Robinson, with TVA’s government relations team, said the county could not use that law to stop TVA. Tennessee Code Annotated 68-211-706 states the law “shall not apply to any private landfill that accepts solid waste solely generated by its owner if the waste is solely generated within the county subject to this part and if the private landfill does not accept county or municipal solid waste or ordinary household garbage.” Brooks and Robinson have both said TVA does not plan to bring any waste in from outside the county, instead only using the landfill for waste TVA generates and which is from the Bull Run site itself. The waste will be coal combustion residuals (CCRs), such as coal fly ash and gypsum, generated from the burning of coal at the plant in the past. County Commission member Tim Isbel of Rocky Top said TVA will still need the county to rezone the land from a residential to an industrial zone in order to build a landfill on the property already purchased by TVA. Powell resident Julie Bledsoe compared the case to a similar one that happened in North Carolina in which residents defeated a landfill using zoning.
Bills targeting coal ash move as water tests worry Juliette residents – The new test results that rolled in Feb. 19 were about what Fletcher Sams expected: Out of 36 drinking wells in Juliette, all but six showed troubling levels of a cancer-causing substance that has riled residents of the small middle Georgia town. The next day, also as expected, was spent breaking the bad news to families living near the coal-fired Plant Scherer, where environmentalists say the toxic ash byproduct of burning coal suspected to be affecting their well water has long been improperly stored. “It’s emotionally draining,” said Sams, executive director of the nonprofit Altamaha Riverkeeper. “People have been dealing with this issue for a long time.” As more test results arrive, local environmentalists like Sams are watching legislation in both chambers of the General Assembly aimed at curbing the health and environmental dangers of coal ash. The issue became an environmental priority for many Georgia lawmakers as state regulators received control over permitting and monitoring sites where coal ash is stored. Lawmakers and environmentalists are especially worried about the potential effects of coal ash kept in liquid ponds at several Georgia Power Co. plants, many of which environmentalists say lack protective liners to prevent groundwater contamination. Some bills before the state House and Senate call for installing liners on all Georgia Power ash ponds and requiring the company to give advance notice when the ponds being closed will be dewatered. Other bills seek to make the collection fee for coal ash at Georgia landfills the same as for other kinds of garbage, which supporters say would discourage out-of-state power companies from sending their ash to Georgia. A bill toughening rules requiring Georgia Power to give advance notice that it will dewater ash ponds cleared a House committee on Feb. 20 – though environmentalists note dewatering has already begun at some power plants. Another bill that would raise the fee for landfills to receive coal ash from $1 to $2.50 passed out of a Senate committee earlier this month.But the big piece of legislation environmentalists are eying would force Georgia Power to install impervious lining around every site where coal ash is stored to keep contaminated water from leaching into drinking wells and underground aquifers.
New water testing approved for Juliette amid allegations of contaminated water – Following recent claims of contaminated water, the Monroe County Board of Commissioners has agreed to fund further testing of water in Juliette.Citizens in Juliette believe coal ash from Plant Scherer has contaminated their groundwater supply. Coal ash is a by-product of burning coal and contains several different types of heavy metals.The Altamaha Riverkeeper Organization has completed testing of water in Juliette in recent weeks and claims to have found presence of contaminants in the water.In a media release Wednesday morning, Monroe County Commissioner Eddie Rowland said the commission will complete two separate water safety studies in the coming weeks.Rowland says the first study will take water samples from at least 50 different private well locations across Monroe County. Their goal is to determine whether the contaminants found in recent water testing near Plant Scherer are naturally occurring or are confined to the area near the plant. Monroe County Manager Jim Hedges says this study will cost $10,000. The results are expected back within 7 to 10 days of testing.The study will look for levels of Hexavalent Chromium. That is a compound associated with an increased risk of cancer according to the National Cancer Institute. According to the Altamaha Riverkeeper Organization, they have found high levels of hexavalent chromium, in some cases, in excess of 10 parts per billion.A second study has also been approved and will be completed by a Duke University student and professor. They will conduct an independent study of 10 to 12 wells within two miles of Plant Scherer. That testing is expected to take place March 14, 2020. Commissioners have agreed to fund the flight and rental car costs involved in the on-site testing by Duke University.
GA Senate panel seeks to block landfills near Satilla River – Legislation that would prevent new landfills from being built near the Satilla River in southeast Georgia is advancing at the state Capitol.Senate Bill 384, sponsored by Sen. William Ligon, a Republican from Brunswick, was approved unanimously by the Senate Natural Resources and Environment Committee on Tuesday. It could soon move to the full Senate for more debate.The bill would prohibit landfills, including coal ash and other types of municipal solid waste facilities, from being constructed within 3 miles (4.82 kilometers) from the highwater mark of the river. It wouldn’t impact any facilities currently in operation.“This is a bill to work to protect one of the vital areas of our state, the Satilla River corridor. It’s a unique area because it’s what we call a blackwater river, which means that it has a low level of dissolved oxygen,” Ligon said.“Our coastal blackwater rivers like the Satilla are a special resource for the state,” said Satilla Riverkeeper Laura Early, who advocates for the protection and restoration of the Satilla River. “Those clear dark waters, the white sandbars and great fishing opportunities are something that attract folks from across the state and beyond to this great recreational opportunity.”
Black Lung Benefits Drop For Kentucky Coal Miners After Controversial Law Change – Lynn Estel Stanley was the kind of coal mine foreman who wanted to know if there was a safety problem, and would always be the one to go fix it himself. He was also the kind of miner who refused to slow down, even when his men told him he was overexerting himself. But when he was 69, his doctor told him it was time to stop for good. Stanley wasn’t surprised. He knew he was getting sick. “It kept getting progressively worse and harder to breathe to the point where I just couldn’t do my job, I didn’t have enough oxygen,” he said. He had watched coal-miner relatives die of black lung, a form of lung disease caused by breathing in coal and rock dust. Particulates lodge in the lungs, causing the tissue to harden and restrict the amount of oxygen that can enter the bloodstream. Stanley also knew that if he could prove to a judge that he had the disease, he would be entitled to financial benefits. So he got a chest X-ray, and was diagnosed with progressive massive fibrosis, the most serious form of black lung disease, by a radiologist named Brandon Crum. Over the next few months, three more physicians would tell Stanley he had a serious case of the disease. But in court, none of that would matter. As the epidemic of black lung disease continues in Appalachian coal country, Stanley is one of many Kentucky miners caught up in changes to state law limiting who can diagnose black lung.Two years ago, Kentucky lawmakers made a controversial change to the rules for black lung benefits.. Now, state records show that since that change, the percent of Kentucky miners diagnosed by state-approved experts as having the disease fell from 54 percent before the law change to just 26 percent. An analysis of state data by the Ohio Valley ReSource also suggests that the doctors now making decisions on claims more often side with coal companies than with coal miners.
“Lax Oversight” Threatens Health Fund for Miners With Black Lung, Watchdog Finds – Just three bankruptcies of American coal companies have added more than $800 million in costs to a federal government program that funds health care for disabled coal miners, the Government Accountability said in a report released Wednesday. The report comes after a 2018 analysis by the same agency which found the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund faced significant financial challenges, and had borrowed taxpayer money to cover necessary expenses nearly every year since 1979. This new research shows that coal company bankruptcies have been a significant factor contributing to the fund’s financial debt, and lax oversight from the Department of Labor is partly to blame. The report is “completely consistent with the strategy coal companies have used to evade pension, retirement, and environmental obligations,” said Josh Macey, a Cornell University visiting Assistant Professor and researcher of coal bankruptcies. The Black Lung Disability Trust Fund provides monthly benefits and health care coverage for disabled miners whose own employer cannot cover the cost. Coal companies pay into the fund via a per-ton tax on coal. A coal company’s liability to the trust fund is the total cost of care for the lifetime of each miner disabled by black lung due to work in the company’s mine. If a company doesn’t have enough insurance or hasn’t put up enough collateral to cover those liabilities when it goes bankrupt, the cost of care falls on the trust fund.
Trump administration resuming coal leasing on public lands The Trump administration announced on Wednesday that it will be resuming coal leasing on public lands, angering conservationists. The Bureau of Land Management said in a statement Wednesday that it had completed an environmental assessment and found no significant impact from lifting the pause on processing applications for new coal leases. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of the Interior has ended the war on American energy and coal, which allows local communities to prosper,” said Casey Hammond, the acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management, in the statement. “Coal is and will continue to be a critical part of our nation’s energy portfolio and we are committed to the responsible development of our abundant resources and advancing American energy independence, jobs, and economic growth,” Hammond added. The administration first attempted to end an Obama-era ban on new coal leasing on public lands in 2017. A federal judge ruled last year that the Trump administration policy did not include sufficient assessments of mining’s environmental impacts. According to the administration, nearly 40 percent of the country’s coal is produced on federal lands and coal produced on these lands supported more than 32,000 jobs in fiscal 2018. Environmentalists criticized the review, implying it was not objective. “The result of this environmental review was cooked from the start – the Trump administration tried to end the coal moratorium three years ago, but was so sloppy that a judge told them to try again,” Jennifer Rokala, the executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement. “Instead of ensuring our public lands are part of the climate solution, the former oil lobbyist in charge of the Interior Department is trying to open even more places for drilling and mining,” Rokala added.
Feds Want To Halt Peabody-Arch ‘Joint Venture’ – The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday filed a complaint in federal court alleging that a proposal between Peabody Energy and Arch Coal to combine two coal mines in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin will eliminate competition between the two largest coal-mining companies in the U.S.“Whatever the product, the antitrust laws protect customers from mergers that lead to higher prices,” FTC Director of Bureau of Competition Ian Conner said in a written statement. “This joint venture would eliminate the substantial head-to-head competition between the two largest coal miners in the United States, and that loss of competition would likely raise coal prices to power-generating utilities that provide electricity to millions of Americans.” According to the complaint, Peabody and Arch Coal produced more than two-thirds of the coal mined in the Southern Powder River Basin.Coal mined in the Powder River Basin is the lowest cost coal available to the nation’s power plants. Further, the complaint says, power plants that burn PRB coal rarely switch to coal from other regions in the U.S.”The Joint Venture would create a single entity with a dominant share of SPRB coal reserves, and a dominant share of sales to SPRB customers,” the complaint says. “Post-Joint-Venture, the combined entity would control more than 60% of SPRB coal reserves and approximately 60% of SPRB coal production.” The two coal giants announced Wednesday that they intend to continue pursuing the “highly synergistic joint venture.”
Coal states sue California cities and Washington state to force ports to ship exports — Buffeted by falling domestic demand, America’s ailing coal industry set its sights a decade ago on the promise of reaching Asian markets. But that meant shipping from West Coast ports, and politicians there had other ideas.Some coastal communities, taking a stand against coal to fight climate change and protect public health, acted to block the exports. And now coal states are fighting back in the courts – all the way to the Supreme Court – and using taxpayer funds to boost a fading industry. Instead, the industry has endured one setback after another. Demand in Asia proved more volatile than expected. The home market worsened because of competition from cheap gas and renewable energy, and coal-fired power plants continued to close. President Trump’s regulatory rollbacks didn’t provide the industry renaissance he claims. On top of all that, the West Coast states and cities rebelled. Lawmakers in Oakland and Washington state blocked plans for coal-export terminals, citing health concerns and pollution risks. Just last month the Richmond City Council gave the California city’s port three years to phase out coal exports. Nearly all coal mined in Utah is exported to Japan through Richmond, an arrangement that would end under the new ordinance.Utah lawmakers, who previously agreed to spend $53 million to guarantee coal exports out of Oakland, are now weighing whether to set aside $500,000 to sue Richmond over its ban on coal handling and storage. Montana and Wyoming have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Washington’s decision to deny a water-quality permit to Millennium Bulk Terminals, which effectively blocked one potential route for coal to reach overseas markets.The two mining states depend on taxes from coal production to fund state services and public schools. In Utah, the coal industry is a smaller contributor to the state’s revenues and employment, but it has an outsized influence in rural communities; while it employs only about 2,700 miners, the jobs are some of the highest-paying in the state.Should the states lose their lawsuits, it could embolden left-leaning coastal states to use permitting decisions and zoning laws to fight global warming by preventing the export of fossil fuels. Alternatively, if the coal states win, they and other energy-producing states could try to force the West Coast to accept not only coal but also liquefied natural gas.
Santee Cooper plans $520M settlement of customer lawsuit over failed SC nuclear project –Santee Cooper has reached a tentative legal settlement that could secure cash refunds for customers of the state-run utility and hold off a potential sale of the power provider, The Post and Courier has learned. A proposed $520 million settlement – reached early Thursday morning after two days of marathon negotiations – would reimburse the ratepayers of Santee Cooper and South Carolina’s 20 electric cooperatives for the money they poured into the failed V.C. Summer nuclear project in Fairfield County. And, in return, Santee Cooper could be freed from the class-action ratepayer lawsuit that threatens to bankrupt the 86-year-old power and water utility. The potential settlement could boost Santee Cooper’s prospects in the South Carolina Legislature, where the future of the state-run utility hangs in the balance. Santee Cooper finds itself on the state’s auction block because it wasted $4 billion on the nuclear reactors before canceling the project in July 2017. State lawmakers are currently debating whether to keep Santee Cooper under state ownership, sell it to Florida-based NextEra Energy or hire another company to manage its operations for the state. NextEra, one of the largest power companies in the country, has already reached its own, $541 million proposed settlement with attorneys representing Santee Cooper customers. Until now, NextEra could boast about its unique ability to resolve the lawsuit that threatens Santee Cooper’s viability. That calculus changed this week, according to multiple sources who confirmed details of the preliminary agreement to The Post and Courier. They said they could not speak publicly because the judge presiding over the case, former S.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean Toal, has instructed attorneys to not discuss the negotiations.
SC utility execs under investigation asked few questions – Two current executives of South Carolina’s state owned utility who remain part of a criminal investigation into the failure to finish two nuclear plants in the state showed up for a meeting Wednesday after senators demanded their appearance.Santee Cooper Senior Vice President of Nuclear Energy Michael Crosby and Marion Cherry, the utility’s on-site manager for the nuclear project that cost $9 billion and never generated power, reluctantly took an oath to tell the truth at a Senate Finance Committee meeting and then were asked almost no questions.The committee is deciding Santee Cooper’s future, deciding between bids to let the utility reform itself, sell Santee Cooper to NextEra Energy of Florida or have it managed by Dominion Energy of Virginia.Senators wanted the men and two former executives to be at a similar meeting Tuesday, but their lawyers advised them not to show up because of criminal investigations into Santee Cooper and its majority partner in the nuclear project, the former SCANA Corp. Senate leadership threatened subpoenas if they didn’t show up.Through lunch Wednesday, senators asked the men only one question about how much Santee Cooper has spent to protect equipment, material and supplies at the construction site for the reactors north of Columbia since it was abandoned in July 2017. Prompted by Santee Cooper CEO Mark Bonsall, Cherry quietly answered from his seat three rows back that it was $20 million. The equipment is in limbo as Santee Cooper and the main contractor on the failed nuclear project, Westinghouse Electric Co., have sued each other. Westinghouse declared bankruptcy about three months before the reactors were abandoned.
SCANA and former execs sued by SEC for ‘fraud’ over failed SC nuclear project – Federal authorities accused SCANA Corp. and two of its top executives on Thursday of lying to the public about the V.C. Summer nuclear project, saying it had “repeatedly deceived” investors and regulators by hiding its mounting problems. The fraud allegations, brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for South Carolina, mark the first results of a years-long federal investigation into the nuclear project and how its problems were disclosed to investors. The lawsuit is not a criminal indictment, but the 87-page filing could be a prelude to criminal charges. Derek Shoemake, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office of South Carolina, said the office’s civil division assisted with the SEC’s investigation but added he could not comment on any criminal investigation. The allegations offer a new glimpse into the split reality of South Carolina’s nuclear boondoggle. It depicts how executives privately harbored dire concerns about the biggest project their company had ever undertaken and how they publicly sought to convince regulators and investors that everything was under control. One executive bluntly summarized the divide in a message obtained by federal investigators: The company’s top brass “flew around the country showing the same damn construction pictures … while the whole (expletive) was going up in flames.” The V.C. Summer project cost more than $9 billion before it was called off in 2017, mired in construction delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns. It’s now a financial burden felt heavily by the ratepayers of South Carolina Electric & Gas, which Cayce-based SCANA owned. SCE&G customers are still on the hook for another $2.3 billion for the abandoned reactors over the next two decades even after the utility’s sale to Dominion Energy of Virginia. The project’s demise and revelations about its hidden history of problems caused SCANA Corp.’s stock price to lose billions of dollars in value and led to the company’s takeover by Dominion. “When the truth was revealed, it resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses to SCANA’s investors and to South Carolinians,” the lawsuit says. The SEC’s lawsuit was filed against SCANA and Dominion’s electricity business in South Carolina, as well as two of SCANA’s top executives during the project: former CEO Kevin Marsh and former Executive Vice President Steve Byrne.
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