Environmental News For The Week 17June 2018

Written by rjs, MarketWatch 666

This is a collection of interesting news articles about the environment and related topics over the last week.

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‘DISEASE X’: New Strain Of Bird Flu Kills 40% Of Those Who Contract, 100s Dead In China – A “new” strain of deadly bird flu dubbed “Disease X” by the World Health Organization (WHO) has killed hundreds of people in China, and is just three mutations away from becoming transmissible between humans, according to experts. The strain, H7N9, circulates in poultry and has killed 623 people out of 1,625 infected in China – a mortality rate of 38.3%. While first identified in China in 2013, H7N9 has recently emerged as a serious threat seemingly overnight. Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, deputy chief medical officer for the UK, told The Telegraph that H7N9 could cause a global outbreak. “[H7N9] is an example of another virus which has proven its ability to transmit from birds to humans,” said Van-Tam, who added “It’s possible that it could be the cause of the next pandemic.” The WHO says N7N9 is “an unusually dangerous virus for humans,” and “one of the most lethal influenza viruses that we’ve seen so far” “H7N9 viruses have several features typically associated with human influenza viruses and therefore possess pandemic potential and need to be monitored closely,” said Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Researchers led by James Paulson of the Scripps Research Institute in California have been studying the mutations which could potentially occur in H7N9’s genome to allow for human-to-human infection.The team’s findings, published in the journal PLoS Pathogens on Thursday, showed that in laboratory tests, mutations in three amino acids made the virus more able to bind to human cells – suggesting these changes are key to making the virus more dangerous to people. –Japan TimesThat said, the mutations would need to occur relatively close to each other to become more virulent, which has a low probability of happening according to Fiona Culley, an expert in respiratory immunology at Imperial College London.”Some of the individual mutations have been seen naturally … these combinations of mutations have not,” and added: “The chances of all three occurring together is relatively low.” Wenday Barclay, a virologist and flu specialist also at Imperial College says the study’s findings reinforce the need to keep the H7N9 bird flu under close surveillance. “These studies keep H7N9 virus high on the list of viruses we should be concerned about,” she said. “The more people infected, the higher the chance that the lethal combination of mutations could occur.”

Plague Strikes Idaho: Officials Confirm First First Human Case Since 1992 — A child in Elmore County, Idaho has contracted the plague according to the state health officials. While the plague has been diagnosed in squirrels as recently as 2016, this marks the first human transmission in Idaho in over a quarter-century according to the Central District Health Department. The child, whose age and sex are unknown, is currently recovering while receiving antibiotic treatment. Officials are unsure whether the child contracted the plague at home in Idaho or during a recent trip to Oregon – where there have been eight human cases of plague since 1990 vs. two in Idaho.

Polio makes comeback in Venezuela after decades — Polio has been reported in Venezuela, a crisis-wracked country where the disease had been eradicated decades ago, the Pan-American Health Organization reports. The organization said the child had no history of vaccination and lives in an under-immunized extremely impoverished Delta Amacuro state. Polio, or poliomyelitis, is a crippling childhood disease caused by the poliovirus, and preventable through immunization. Doctor Jose Felix Oletta, a former Minister of Health, told AFP that the last case of acute poliomyelitis in Venezuela was reported in 1989.

In the Battle against Lyme Disease, the Ticks Are Winning – In the space of two generations, the natural landscape in many American states has been slowly transformed from a place of refuge and peace to one of peril and menace. Blacklegged ticks that transmit Lyme disease and other illnesses inhabit half of US counties, where they infect some 300,000 people yearly in grassy meadows, urban parks, backyards and many other places. Although children are the most frequently diagnosed group and thousands of infected patients develop long-term infirmity every year, little has been done to curb the spread of ticks or to control the harm inflicted by the Lyme bacterium. Instead, the list of new and threatening tick species and illnesses grows.This lack of progress is not a random development. It is, rather, the product of a false image of Lyme disease, embraced by health officials and repeated in reviews of the medical literature, as an illness that is easy to diagnose and readily treatable. That picture should long ago have given way to a more nuanced view that acknowledges flaws in diagnostic tests and the limits of short-course antibiotics to cure the disease.

The ‘bleeding’ veggie burger is under fire – Stanford biochemist Pat Brown’s “bleeding” vegan patty started winning over carnivoresfour years ago – Chang was the first high-profile convert, and since then, the burger has surfaced on almost 2,000 menus, including Food Factory’s last month. The food start-up’s success is undeniable – and a noticeable affront to Big Meat – but Impossible Foods’ hasty rise has also made the $400 million Silicon Valley darling an unexpected set of enemies: consumer groups and environmentalists who exposed FDA letters questioning the safety of the burger’s “magic ingredient,” then started demanding more proof that Impossible’s alt-meat is the harmless, vegan product it claims. Almost everyone agrees that the vegan patty is a game changer that looks, smells, and even sizzles like real beef. And some of America’s smartest food writers have declared it “very impressive” and “remarkably like beef,” despite the fact that it’s a combination of wheat, potato protein, coconut oil, and a protein called soy leghemoglobin, or SLH, that delivers the so-called “magic” blood – heme, a ferrous molecule abundant in animal muscle.

A serious new hurdle for CRISPR: Edited cells might cause cancer, find two studies – Editing cells’ genomes with CRISPR-Cas9 might increase the risk that the altered cells, intended to treat disease, will trigger cancer, two studies published on Monday warn – a potential game-changer for the companies developing CRISPR-based therapies.In the studies, published in Nature Medicine, scientists found that cells whose genomes are successfully edited by CRISPR-Cas9 have the potential to seed tumors inside a patient. That could make some CRISPR’d cells ticking time bombs, according to researchers from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and, separately, Novartis.CRISPR has already dodged two potentially fatal bullets – a 2017 claim that it causes sky-high numbers of off-target effects was retracted in March, and areport of human immunity to Cas9 was largely shrugged off as solvable. But experts are taking the cancer-risk finding seriously. The CEO of CRISPR Therapeutics, Sam Kulkarni, told STAT the results are “plausible.”

Monsanto Relied on These ‘Partners’ to Attack Top Cancer Scientists — This fact sheet describes the contents of Monsanto’s confidential public relations plan to discredit the World Health Organization’s cancer research unit, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), in order to protect the reputation of Roundup weedkiller. In March 2015, the international group of experts on the IARC panel judged glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, to be probably carcinogenic to humans. The Monsanto plan names more than a dozen “industry partner” groups that company executives planned to “inform / inoculate / engage” in their efforts to protect the reputation of Roundup, prevent the “unfounded” cancer claims from becoming popular opinion, and “provide cover for regulatory agencies.”

Beekeepers File Legal Complaint Against Bayer Over Glyphosate in Honey — Bayer, which recently wrapped up its takeover of Monsanto, now owns glyphosate and the liabilities surrounding it.Last Thursday, the same day the $63 billion acquisition closed, a beekeeping cooperative in northern France filed a legal complaint against the German chemical giant after the controversial weedkiller was detected inoney produced by one of its members, AFP reported.Famille Michaud, one of France’s largest honey marketers, found the chemical in three batches supplied by one of its members, according to Jean-Marie Camus, the head of the 200-member beekeeping union, L’Abeille de l’Aisne.

Bayer-Monsanto and Nuremburg – The Nuremburg tribunal provides the precedent according to which all of today’s elite criminals – government and corporate leaders – should be judged and sentenced. It also provides a precedent for the death penalty for a corporation: In this case the chemical conglomerate IG Farben and three of its six constituent companies were dissolved, allegedly because of their participation in Nazi crimes against humanity. And yet even the unfathomable crimes of the slave labor program and death camps weren’t enough to warrant the death penalty for three of the IG Farben companies, including Bayer and BASF. These, unlike the cartel itself and the three lesser companies, were considered by the US to be too structurally important to the corporate-technocratic project. So they and their executives were given just a slap on the wrist. In fact, no corporations or corporate executives were judged according to the moral pretensions of the Tribunal, but only according to what place US elites saw for these German corporations in the post-war globalizing system. This proves:

• 1. If a corporation is big and powerful enough, there is no level of crime up to and including literal mass murder which it will not be allowed to commit with impunity.
• 2. In fact, a core purpose of the corporate form is to organize the commission of crimes against humanity and the Earth, and to provide legal impunity for the leaders of these criminal projects.
• 3. We the people can never look to government, which creates and exonerates these corporations in the first place, for justice or relief. If we want to be free of the corporate tyranny, as indeed we must become if humanity is to have a future at all, we must organize and carry out the anti-corporate abolition movement from the soil up. That’s the only way.

Gene-Edited Supercrops To Be Grown in UK for First Time — Gene-edited super-crops are to be sown in Britain in a European-first after scientists exploited a legal loophole.The Government has quietly approved the farming of gene-edited (GE) Camelina oilseed crops as part of a trial to super-charge the plants to produce Omega 3 fish oils, one of the most popular food supplements.The pilot was approved because, unlike genetically modified (GM) plants, the Camelina oilseed crops contain no foreign DNA. Instead, they had their genetic code altered in a way that could have happened naturally. Scientists say gene-editing can cut the time it takes to engineer new plants from decades to months.

Tiny bug inflicts massive damage year after hail storm – A major hailstorm can inflict $1 billion or more in car and roof damage, as was the case in the Denver area on May 8, 2017, and in the Dallas – Fort Worth area several times over the past decade. Likewise, when hail pounds a wheat field, the immediate damage can be widespread and costly. But there’s an accessory to the hail that’s little known outside agricultural circles – one that can sock farmers with major trouble long after the storm has passed. This partner is a minuscule creature, a mere 0.008 inches (0.2 millimeters) long, called the wheat curl mite. It’s an unassuming critter that takes advantage of the conditions in a hail-ravaged wheat field to bide its time until the next year’s crop is planted. Then the mite goes to work by distributing the destructive wheat streak mosaic virus, which stunts and discolors the plants. Identified more than a century ago, wheat streak mosaic virus is a worldwide problem. In Kansas alone, the virus cost farmers at least $76 million in 2017.

Pine-killing southern beetle may be more deadly in north – A beetle that has killed millions of acres of pines in southern forests is munching its way north, and new research suggests its tree-killing prowess could be magnified in cooler climes. Once unheard-of north of Delaware, southern pine beetles have been steadily expanding their range as the climate warms. Efforts are underway to quell a large outbreak in Long Island’s pine barrens and monitoring traps have caught beetles as far north as New England. The insect could reach Nova Scotia by 2020 and cover forests from the upper Midwest to Maine by 2080, according to a Columbia University study published in the journal Nature Climate Change in August.Now there’s more bad news in a new study from Dartmouth College: Cooler fall and winter temperatures in this new range increase the beetle’s destructive potential. That’s because larvae developing in the fall are put on hold as pupae when the temperature drops below 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius), to emerge as adults for a mass killing spree in springtime. The researchers found that in warmer regions, beetles mature at various times rather than all at once. “The way they kill trees is by attacking in large numbers, like a pack of wolves killing a moose,” said Matthew Ayres, co-author of the study published last month in the journal Oecologia. “When they all attack at once, they draw down the tree’s defenses – bleed it out – and the tree is toast.”

Africa’s baobab trees can live for more than 1,000 years, but many of the oldest and largest are dying — The oldest and biggest angiosperm trees in the world, the African baobabs, are dying or already dead, an international team of scientists has found. The scientists added that the spate of deaths, described in the journal Nature Plants, might be the result of a changing climate – though they say that research needs to be done to confirm or deny that idea. The baobab known as Adansonia digitata L. is an icon of the African savannah. With wide, cylindrical trunks and gnarled branches, the trees appear to have been yanked out of the ground, flipped over and shoved back in, roots in the air. These giant plants are the largest and longest-living angiosperm (or flowering) trees today, with some individuals surviving for close to 2,000 years. Baobab trees have been nicknamed the “tree of life,” but they could just as well be called the giving tree: The leaves and fruit of many species also provide nutritious food, their bark can be made into rope and cloth, their wood can be harvested for hunting and fishing tools, the seeds hold an oil that’s used in cosmetics, and their broad, occasionally hollowed-out trunks can be used for shelter. “Baobabs are particular trees, with unique architectures, remarkable regeneration properties and high cultural and historic value,” lead author Adrian Patrut, a chemist at Babes-Bolyai University in Romania, said in an email. In addition, “they play an important role in carbon sequestration and create a distinct microenvironment. Baobabs are the oldest and largest angiosperms and the impact of their loss would have profound consequences.” 

Africa’s Iconic Baobabs Are Dying, Including World’s Oldest Flowering Tree –When researchers set out to investigate the structure, growth and age of Africa’s iconic baobab trees – the largest and longest-living flowering trees in the world – they received a devastating surprise. Many of the oldest, largest baobabs were dead or dying. The final study, published in Nature Plants Monday, reported that nine of the 13 oldest and five of the six largest African baobabs had entirely or partly died during the research period from 2005 to 2017. The oldest was 2,500 years old.”It is definitely shocking and dramatic to experience during our lifetime the demise of so many trees with millennial ages,” study co-author Adrian Patrut of the Babes-Bolyai University in Romania told AFP. The researchers studied every known large African baobab in Africa, on islands off its coast or outside Africa for a total of more than 60 trees. All of the dying trees were found in the southern African countries of Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa, Zambia and Namibia.Baobabs survive the dry Savannah by storing water in their large trunks, but researchers thought conditions were now getting too dry even for them.The cause of the trees’ deaths was unknown, but was not attributed to disease, and the deaths of the oldest trees coincided with an uptick in mortality in other mature baobabs. The researchers therefore hypothesized that the impact of climate change on Southern Africa was to blame. “We suspect this is associated with increased temperature and drought,” Patrut told BBC News.The report also memorialized the oldest, largest and most famous trees to die.The oldest, Panke, was a sacred tree in Matabeleland North, Zimbabwe. At around 2,500 years old, it was not only the oldest baobab, but the oldest angiosperm, or flowering tree, in the world.

‘Australia doesn’t realise’: worsening drought pushes farmers to the brink – In the south-west corner of NSW’s Liverpool plains, in an area called Bundella, farmer Megan Kuhn runs beef cattle and merino sheep with her husband, Martin.They have 400 breeding cows that will calve in six weeks. Shortly, 89 of those cows will leave the property, sold to an abattoir because the cost of feeding the animals during drought has become too great. “There is nowhere to send them to pasture so they are going to be slaughtered,” Kuhn says.“We’re killing a cow and a calf at this late stage of pregnancy. The drought is so widespread there’s just no options left for stock producers to put them anywhere. Further north, about 20 km from Mullaley, Margaret Fleck is seeing conditions on her property she has not encountered in the 20 years she has been there.She and her partner Paul run beef cattle, producing grass-fed beef for the domestic and export markets. December was the end of their seventh calendar year of below-average rainfall. In the 12 months to May this year, they have had just over 50% of their annual average rainfall.“It’s terrible on the back of seven below-average rainfall years in a row,” Fleck says.“We can’t get over a string of really hot summers. With the sheer consistency of extreme temperatures, the rate of evaporating is so high. We don’t have any surface water left on our property.” “We spoke to the owners who had this property from 1954 to 1989. We asked what the creek was like in their 34 years. They said it had never dried up,” Fleck says. During the past 14 months, the Bureau of Meteorology has recorded below-average rainfall across New South Wales, central Queensland, the north-west of Victoria and into South Australia.NSW has been the hardest hit in 2018. With the exception of the north and south coasts, most of the state has recorded the lowest rainfall in a five-month period since 1900.Soil moisture levels are below average across much of Australia and in its latest winter outlook, the bureau is forecasting warmer and drier than average conditions across large parts of the country. Communities in NSW say people are struggling and the rest of the country is not aware of the extent of the troubles in parts of that state.

Dust Rising — Asthma in Imperial County is rampant. More children are admitted to the emergency room here for asthma-related cases than anywhere else in the state; almost 1 in 5 children suffer from the condition. There’s a long list of reasons why the county is home to such staggering rates of asthma: the fine layer of dust that coats nearly every surface; the gentle mist of pesticide sprayed across acres of produce; the black towers of soot emanating from crop burns; emissions from cars stalled at the border; and fumes from the Mexican maquiladoras wafting over the border. Kicked up by the strong desert winds, microscopic particles from each of these sources fill the air. There’s another source of pollution in the valley that poses a major risk, though it’s only starting to make itself felt: the Salton Sea. An enormous blue void at the north end of the Imperial Valley, the Salton Sea once attracted more visitors than Yosemite. But California’s largest lake is now mostly forgotten, and those who know of it don’t have flattering things to say: they’ll tell you about vast beaches where the sand is made of fish bones; about eerie, half-abandoned Mad Max-esque communities; and most of all, its noxious emissions. In 2012, the Salton Sea burped up a cloud of sulfurous odor so thick that residents in Los Angeles 150 miles away were hit by the nauseating smell of rotten eggs. Terminal lakes like the Salton Sea, bodies of water that have no natural drain, are particularly vulnerable. Iran’s Lake Urmia – once the largest body of water in the Middle East – has shrunk by almost 90 percent over the last 30 years; Africa’s Lake Chad is also 90 percent smaller than it was in the 1960s; and Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea, once the fourth largest salt lake in the world, has practically been wiped off the map. When these lakes evaporate, they can upend industries and erase surrounding communities. For residents near the Salton Sea, the most pressing problem is the threat of toxic dust: up to 100 tons of dust could blow off the playa daily. If it isn’t captured, that dust will push the area’s asthma crisis from bad to dire. The Salton Sea is a dust bomb that has already begun going off.

Delhi’s air pollution is now so bad it is literally off the chart – Smog more toxic than can be measured by monitoring devices has blanketed the Indian capital this week, months before the start of Delhi’s traditional “pollution season”. A thick haze was visible across the city from Tuesday and some government pollution monitors have recorded concentrations of 999 – the highest they can measure – as dust storms kicked up in nearby Rajasthan state blanketed the region. Though the billowing clouds of dust and sand were blamed for the immediate spike in pollution levels, the sight of dense smog engulfing Delhi months before winter has underscored a growing awareness that harmful air is a year-round problem for the city. Air quality in Delhi usually begins to plummet in October when slower winds and cooler temperatures trap pollutants closer to the ground. But data published by the government’s Central Pollution Control Board shows that air quality has been classed “very unhealthy” – with index scores as high as 270 – every April and May for the past three years, or since authorities began collecting and publishing the statistics. Just a single day in April or May of the past three years had air classified as “good” – 12 April this year, when levels fell to 99. Authorities have ordered a halt to all construction in the capital and its satellite cities until the weekend to reduce pollution levels, and doctors have advised people to stay indoors as much as possible. Meteorologists said the presence of a layer of dust across the city is also trapping heat, sending temperatures soaring in excess of 40C. Concern about north India’s air quality crisis is usually most acute after the Hindu festival of Diwali in autumn, when hundreds of thousands of Indians release firecrackers that combine with existing pollutants to form a poisonous haze over the region that persists for months until temperatures cool. Public health experts said pollution levels on some days in November last year were the equivalent of smoking 50 cigarettes per day.

Large Wildfires Scorch Forests in Drought-Stricken Southwest – A number of wildfires are currently ablaze in the Western U.S. as severe drought envelops much of the region.The 416 Fire in Colorado, which has scorched 27,420 acres since it broke out on June 1, has forced the evacuation of more than 2,000 homes and the closure of all 1.8 million acres of the San Juan National Forest.The fire is currently 15 percent contained and no structures have been destroyed, the Rocky Mountain Incident Management Team said.The National Wildfire Coordinating Group noted that the blaze has been fueled by abnormally dry conditions and prolonged drought.Large fires in the West are also burning the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona, the Gila National Forest in New Mexico, Manti-Lasal National Forest in Utah and Medicone Bow-Routt National Forest in Wyoming, the National Interagency Fire Center reported Tuesday.New Mexico’s Santa Fe National Forest, one of the state’s most popular recreation sites, has been closed since June 1 due to fire danger.”Under current conditions, one abandoned campfire could cause a catastrophic wildfire, and we are not willing to take that chance with the natural and cultural resources under our protection and care,” Santa Fe National Forest Supervisor James Melonas said in a statement.The Buffalo Fire, a new fire in Colorado that erupted Tuesday, is edging dangerously close to a ski resort town and has already prompted the evacuation of more than 1,300 homes, the Associated Press reported. Western states experienced a winter with very little precipitation and a hot spring, which poses a threat come fire season. National Interagency Fire Center forecasters predicted an “above normal” fire potential this June especially in the drought-ridden Four Corners region, where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah meet – and an area experiencing “extreme” to “exceptional” drought.

How Fuel Breaks Actually Fuel Wildfires (and Spread Invasive Weeds) — This past winter, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) began preparing two Environmental Impact Statements to review the environmental consequences of creating a region-wide series of “fuel breaks” that will add thousands of miles of new linear pathways across the Great Basin portion of Nevada, Idaho, Oregon and Utah.The goal of fuel breaks is to reduce large wildfires in sagebrush habitat.Unfortunately, the creation of a massive network of linear pathways in the sagebrush steppe likely will not preclude large fires and will have serious impacts on sagebrush ecosystems.Indeed, the BLM has admitted as much in a recent report where it concluded; “Despite the extensive use of fuel breaks in sagebrush landscapes, “no specific research within the sagebrush ecosystem has been conducted to evaluate their effectiveness” The causes of large wildfires have to do with two factors that are off-limits for the BLM to consider.One is climate change which the Trump administration denies is real. Yet there is abundant evidence that large wildfires are a direct consequence of warm, dry conditions. The second factor leading to greater wildfire occurrence is expansion of cheatgrass as a result of livestock grazing. Livestock destroy the biocrusts that cover undisturbed soils aiding cheatgrass germination. The elimination of native vegetation and the disturbance created by fuel breaks tend to enhance the spread of exotic weeds. One study in California found a 40% increase in exotic annuals along fuel breaks.

12 Northern California wildfires sparked by PG&E power lines, investigators say – – At least a dozen wildfires that ripped through Northern California last October, including the deadly Atlas and Nuns fires in the North Bay, were caused by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. power lines, state officials said Friday.The findings by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection are the first to lay out an official source of ignition for any of the Wine Country blazes, which killed 41 people and destroyed nearly 9,000 homes in a wind-driven inferno. The most destructive of the burns, the Tubbs Firethat hit Santa Rosa, remains under investigation.The completed investigations show that downed electric lines or trees and branches coming into contact with power equipment sparked eight fires in Sonoma and Napa counties, which resulted in eight fatalities, as well as Mendocino County’s Redwood Fire, which left nine dead. Three smaller blazes, in Lake, Humboldt and Butte counties, were also ignited by PG&E equipment, according to Cal Fire. The finding of responsibility “is great news,” said Clifford Rainey, a glass sculptor who lost his life’s work in Napa County’s Atlas Fire and is among many victims suing PG&E for damages. “It’s definitely worth a glass of wine tonight.” In eight of the 12 fires, Cal Fire officials said PG&E violated state law, though investigators did not specify which laws were broken.

Pacific Gas & Electric May Face Criminal Charges After Probe of Deadly Wildfires – Late Friday, California confirmed what many across the state’s devastated wine country had suspected for months: Equipment owned by utility giant PG&E Corp. ignited some of the deadliest and most destructive wildfires that tore through their homes in October.The most unexpected and crucial part of the findings, though, was at the very bottom of California’s end-of-day statement: The state had found evidence of alleged violations of law by PG&E in connection with eight of the blazes. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said in its Friday statement that PG&E equipment caused at least 12 of the wine country blazes, including the Redwood fire that killed nine; Atlas fire that burned 51,624 acres and claimed the lives of six; and Nuns fire that killed at least two. The agency is still investigating the cause of the Tubbs fire, which became the most destructive in state history and led to 22 casualties. Many of the 12 blazes were caused by tree limbs hitting PG&E’s power lines. In one instance, a fire was ignited by a downed power line after PG&E attempted to re-energize it, the fire department said. For its part, PG&E said in a statement that years of drought, extreme heat and millions of dead trees had created “a new normal” in California, contributing to more intense wildfires. In a Friday interview, California state Senator Jerry Hill challenged the idea that global warming was to blame for the fires, saying “climate change and the new normal don’t ignite fires.”

Crisis on the High Plains: The Loss of America’s Largest Aquifer – the Ogallala – The grain-growing region in the High Plains of America – known as America’s breadbasket – relies entirely on the Ogallala Aquifer. But long term unsustainable use of the aquifer is forcing states in the region to face the prospect of a regional economic disaster. As the High Plains states reach the verge of a major crisis, the states have taken different approaches to conservation with varying results. The Ogallala Aquifer supports an astounding one-sixth of the world’s grain produce, and it has long been an essential component of American agriculture. The High Plains region – where the aquifer lies – relies on the aquifer for residential and industrial uses, but the aquifer’s water is used primarily for agricultural irrigation. The agricultural demands for Ogallala water in the region are immense, with the aquifer ultimately being responsible for thirty percent of all irrigation in the United States. The Ogallala Aquifer has long been unable to keep up with these agricultural demands, as the aquifer recharges far slower than water is withdrawn. Aside from the obvious agricultural ramifications from the Ogallala’s depletion, recent studies have shown that groundwater depletion also has a severe effect on freshwater ecosystems in the region. Each state has had to confront the issue in their own way, but the depletion of the aquifer has become severe enough to warrant the attention of the federal government as well. The federal government has set up financial and technical assistance for farmers who commit to conservation and is funding large-scale pipeline projects to bring in water to the more desperate areas of the High Plains.

Turkey Uses Ilisu Dam to Play Politics with Iraq’s Water Supply — Turkey’s decision to start filling the Ilisu dam earlier than promised, took Iraq by surprise. Iraq is currently suffering from a water crisis, as drought and the dams built by Turkey slow the flow of the Tigris to a trickle. Iraq’s reliance on the Tigris-Euphrates Basin is due to the low volume of rainfall, with the country averaging 216mm per year, combined with the absence of alternative water sources. Turkey’s decision to hold back water to fill up the Ilisu dam has aroused fears of severe water shortages, which would have wide ranging implications, especially for food production. Iraqi officials claim that water reserves are large enough to supply drinking water, but have admitted that they can only supply half of the water needed for irrigation over the summer. With reduced water flow in the Tigris, Iraqi farmers may have little option but to draw water from already strained aquifers.Demand for water continues to increase as Iraq’s population grows. The Iraqi population is expected to increase from 37 million in 2016 to 44 million by 2030, putting further strain on already scarce water resources. Water has become an increasingly contentious issue between Iraq, Turkey and the Kurds. In the past, the filling of Turkish dams has reduced water flow in Iraq by 80 per cent. Increased tensions over water resources have led to military confrontations on two separate occasions. The first was in 1975, when the construction of the Keban dam in Turkey and the Tahba dam in Syria, combined with a drought, resulted in severe water shortages in Iraq. The second, in 1990, occurred when Turkey filled the Ataturk dam reservoir by holding back water from the Euphrates, reducing the water flow entering Iraq and Syria by 75 per cent. In retaliation, Iraq threatened to bomb the dam and Turkey responded by threatening to stop the water flow to Iraq and Syria completely.

Trump’s move to redefine water rule threatens wetlands banks – A private firm is making big money selling promises about some gator-infested Florida swampland. The Panther Island Mitigation Bank isn’t another land boondoggle, but part of a federal system designed to restore wetlands across the United States. Panther Island’s owners preserved one of the nation’s last stands of virgin bald cypress, 4 square miles (10 square kilometers) on the western edge of the Everglades where they cleared away invasive plants and welcomed back wood storks, otters and other native flora and fauna. Banks like this sell “wetlands mitigation credits” to developers for up to $300,000 apiece, offsetting the destruction of marshes by construction projects elsewhere. It’s a billion-dollar industry that has slowed the loss of U.S. wetlands, half of which are already gone. This uniquely American mix of conservation and capitalism has been supported by every president since George H.W. Bush pledged a goal of “no net loss” of wetlands, growing a market for mitigation credits from about 40 banks in the early 1990s to nearly 1,500 today. Investors include Chevron and Wall Street firms, working alongside the Audubon Society and other environmental groups. Now the market is at risk. Administrator Scott Pruitt’s Environmental Protection Agency has completed a proposal for implementing President Donald Trump’s executive order to replace the Waters of the United States rule, or WOTUS, with a much more limited definition of what constitutes a protected federal waterway. The EPA said the proposal now faces months of reviews before being released for public comment, but experts in mitigation are already alarmed. “It would destroy wetland mitigation banking at the federal level,” said Royal Gardner, a professor at Florida’s Stetson University College of Law.

USC researchers find some shades of LED lamps threaten wildlife –A new generation of outdoor lights spreading across landscapes require greater scrutiny to reduce harm to wildlife, says a USC-led research group that developed a new tool to help fix the problem. The team of biologists surveyed select species around the world to determine how the hues of modern light-emitting diode (LED) lamps affect wildlife. They found that blues and whites are worst while yellow, amber and green are more benign. Some creatures, including sea turtles and insects, are especially vulnerable. The findings, which include the first publicly available database to help developers, designers, and policymakers choose wildlife-friendly lighting colors, appear today in the Journal of Experimental Zoology Part A: Ecological and Integrative Physiology. Big cities and industrial sites so illuminate night sky now that much of Earth resembles a big, glowing ball. Scientists have spent years studying how light brightness and direction affects wildlife, including migration and attraction, predator-prey relationships and circadian rhythms. The USC team availed that existing ecological data and broke new ground by examining how a range of commercially available LED lights impact species. LED lights are expected to comprise 69 percent of the global market by 2020, compared to just 9 percent in 2011. They are popular because they have many uses, conserve energy and last longer than other lamps.

Toxic Leftovers From Giant Mine Found in Snowshoe Hares – Even though it was closed decades ago, the Giant Mine on the outskirts of Yellowknife has left a long environmental legacy.The gold extraction process, which required roasting ores at extremely high temperatures, created a toxic byproduct called arsenic trioxide. For about 55 years (1948-2004), arsenic and other toxic elements were released into the environment, causing widespread contamination of the terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems around Yellowknife. About 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust is buried underground, and several nearby lakes show arsenic contamination. Elevated arsenic levels have also been reported in soil, vegetation and fish around Yellowknife, but we knew little about how it has affected the health of the small mammals that live in the area. Many of these fur-bearing animals are still being trapped for their pelts and for food, so knowing their arsenic levels is also important for human health. Small mammals can serve as sentinels for environmental contamination. Snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus) live in a relatively small area and eat soil, so they are likely to accumulate higher levels of arsenic and other trace metals from the environment. Exposure to elevated levels of arsenic can cause damage to the liver and other organs. And cadmium, a toxic metal and another byproduct of the gold extraction process, can replace calcium in the bones, leading to bone deformities and weakness. In humans, chronic arsenic exposure (usually from water) can lead to changes in skin colour, skin growths and cancers of the skin, lung and internal organs.

One-Fifth of Britain’s Mammals Could Be Extinct in 10 Years — One-fifth of UK mammals could go extinct within a decade, according to the most comprehensive report in 20 years released Wednesday by The Mammal Society and Natural England. The report found that the Scottish wildcat, black rat and greater mouse-eared bat were the most endangered species left, The Guardian reported. Next came the red squirrel, water vole, beaver and grey long-eared bat, according to BBC News. The hedgehog, hazel dormouse, Orkney vole, barbastelle bat and serotine bat were all listed as vulnerable, BBC News further reported.”We have almost been sleepwalking,” The Mammal Society Chair and University of Sussex Environmental Biology Professor Fiona Mathews told The Guardian. “This is happening on our own doorstep, so it falls upon all of us to try and do what we can to ensure that our threatened species do not go the way of the lynx, wolf and elk and disappear from our shores forever,” she said.The largest threats faced by mammal species were habitat destruction due to development and agriculture, as well as diseases and invasive species, Mathews told The Guardian. According to Mathews, the UK is one of the most densely populated countries in Europe and one of the most wildlife poor countries in the world. The report assessed the more than 1.5 million individual records for animals belonging to the UK’s 58 terrestrial mammal species and considered their range, population size, trends and future prospects. Not all mammals were suffering. Populations of otter, pine marten, polecat, badger, beaver, wild boar, greater and lesser horseshoe bat and red and roe deer had all increased since the last survey in 1995, BBC News reported.

Does the US have a pet tiger problem? – BBC – Taj was a four-month-old tiger cub when purchased at a Texas truck stop by the driver of an 18-wheeler lorry. But after Taj began tearing up the truck’s cab, the driver contacted Austin Zoo to get the animal off his hands. The zoo now looks after the fully grown 17-year-old Bengal tiger male. Taj is one of as many as 7,000 tigers living in the US either in zoos or privately owned, according to some estimates. That’s nearly double the estimated 3,890 tigers still prowling in the wild around the world. Many of America’s tigers could be in people’s backyards as pets, and often aren’t registered, especially in states like Texas. No-one really knows just how many tigers there are out there. At the heart of this surprising tiger turnout is the very American notion of a God-given right to do one’s own thing, including owning a pet – no matter how exotic – being an individual liberty that the state should not mess with. “A man came up to me and called me a communist,” said Ben Callison, a former animal sanctuary director and animal welfare activist, describing the reaction after he addressed a US Department of Agriculture conference on the problems with exotic pets. “People say you are trying to take away their rights to own what they want, and do what they want.”

ORSANCO Moves to Eliminate Its Water Quality Standards for The Ohio River – A multi-state commission charged with protecting the Ohio River voted Thursday to move forward with an industry-backed proposal to eliminate its water pollution control standards for industrial and municipal wastewater discharges into the river. The Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission, known as ORSANCO, is supposed to ensure that the river is safe for drinking, fishing and recreation. Its commissioners from the federal government and eight states along the Ohio voted 14-to-6 at a board meeting in Louisville, KY to advance a proposal that would eliminate some pollution control standards. ORSANCO Director Richard Harrison said many of those protections are already addressed by the states, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Clean Water Act. “That has been the focus of the commission, to make sure our program in not redundant, that it’s the best use of our resources,” he said. But according to one ORSANCO report, there are 188 instances where state and federal rules are not redundant to ORSANCO’s. Gail Hesse from the National Wildlife Federation said the commission should continue to do its job and enforce its standards.“The vote is a shameful retreat for the officials charged with the environmental stewardship of the Ohio River,” she said.In addition to providing drinking water to 5 million people, the Ohio River is known as a “working river” because of the hundreds of industrial and wastewater treatment plants along its 981 mile route. Board members from Ohio and West Virginia voted for moving forward with eliminating the standards known as “Option 2.” But the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection representative voted “no.”

Flooding from high tides has doubled in the US in just 30 years — The frequency of coastal flooding from high tides has doubled in the US in just 30 years, with communities near shorelines warned that the next two years are set to be punctuated by particularly severe inundations, as ocean levels continue to rise amid serious global climate change concerns. Last year there was an average of six flooding days per area across 98 coastal areas monitored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) – an all-time record. More than a quarter of these locations tied or broke their records for high tide flood days, the federal agency states in a new report. Known as “sunny day flooding”, these events swamp streets and homes with water simply from the incoming tide, without the aid of a storm. Noaa said that in 2017 areas across the US north-east and Gulf of Mexico were worst hit, with Boston, Massachusetts, and Atlantic City, New Jersey, both experiencing 22 days of flooding, while Galveston, in Texas, was soaked on 18 different days. Noaa warned that cyclical climatic conditions during 2018 and 2019 “may result in higher than expected flood frequencies” in around half of the coastal sites it measures. The longer-term trend is even more certain, Noaa said, with melting glaciers, thermal expansion of sea water and altered ocean currents pushing the sea level steadily higher and causing further floods. “Breaking of annual flood records is to be expected next year and for decades to come as sea levels rise, and likely at an accelerated rate,” the report states. “Though year-to-year and regional variability exists, the underlying trend is quite clear: due to sea level rise, the national average frequency of high tide flooding is double what it was 30 years ago.”

Why chronic floods are coming to New Jersey – Sea level rise will have a profound impact on coastal infrastructure because it’s often built on cheaper, low-elevation land. As sea level rises, the systems that support the densely populated, urban areas – power generation facilities, wastewater treatment plants, and miles of transportation networks – will be at greater risk of flooding.Significant portions of the US’s eastern coast are also sinking, due to an ancient, melting glacial ice sheet and the subsidence of its bedrock.The video above details the impacts an accelerated rising sea level will have on the greater New York City metropolitan region. Rutgers University climate scientist Robert Kopp said that “with a higher sea level, it requires less of a storm to produce the same amount of flooding. And the same storm will produce more flooding.” The impact of increased floods will fall on residents who rely on low-lying infrastructure on a day-to-day basis. “Imagine if you were on a train and you had to wait for high tide to go out for the train to go through,” said Robert Freudenberg of the Regional Plan Association. “We’re facing an impending crisis of shutdown because of this connective tissue in our region in our infrastructure.”

Florida Lifeguards Treat More Than 600 People For Jellyfish Stings in Two Days – More than 600 people were treated over the weekend for jellyfish stings received at beaches along Florida’s central Atlantic coast. On Saturday, Volusia County lifeguards treated 107 people with jellyfish stings, according to the Associated Press. That number doubled on Sunday to 523, bringing the total to 630. Purple flags flew along county beaches on Sunday, indicating the presence of dangerous marine life, Volusia County Beach Safety spokeswoman Liz Driskell told reporters. If you are stung by a jellyfish, the University of Florida Health recommends getting immediate medical attention.

The Eastern Pacific Just Saw Its Second Major Hurricane in Less Than a Week — After a sluggish start to eastern Pacific hurricane season, the basin is making up for lost time. Hurricane Bud is the second of back-to-back major hurricanes to form in less than a week. The Category 3 storm is currently churning toward Baja California, though it’s thankfully forecast to weaken before likely landfall this weekend.As of 3 a.m. local time this morning, Bud was still picking up steam roughly 235 miles south of Manzanillo, Mexico. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) put Bud’s winds at 115 mph, making it a Category 3 storm. That’s the threshold for classifying storms as major hurricanes. Meteorologist Ryan Maue tweeted a more recent satellite image with data indicating Bud had reached Category 4 strength with winds around 132 mph.Either way, it’s quite a difference from how the storm looked yesterday. At 4 a.m. local time on Sunday, Bud had winds of just 50 mph, making it a moderate tropical storm . But just as Aletta before it, Bud underwent rapid intensification thanks to warm waters and low wind shear. Rapid intensification is a term used when a storm’s winds increase 65 mph in less than 24 hours. The outer bands of Bud’s winds could reach Mexico, prompting the NHC to issue tropical storm watches from Manzanillo north to the Puerto Vallarta area. The agency also forecast that up to 10 inches of rain could fall in isolated locations on Tuesday and “cause life-threatening flash floods and mud slides.” Bud follows Hurricane Aletta last week. That storm whipped up into a Category 4 hurricane on Friday, thankfully posing no threat to land. Aletta has since been downgraded to a tropical storm and is meandering westward into the Pacific as it weakens.

Old, Fat Fish Have the Most Offspring, Sustainability Study Finds – It might seem smart to eat the big fish and throw the little ones back. But a recent study in the journal Science says just the opposite. Big fish are the ones to throw back, especially if they’re female. That’s because bigger females have disproportionately more babies than their smaller counterparts.Biologists from Monash University in Australia and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama came to this conclusion after comparing size and fecundity across 342 fish species. In 95 percent of the species, larger mothers produced far more offspring, pound for pound, than smaller mothers. The authors point to Atlantic cod, for instance, where one 30-kilogram (approximately 66-pound) female can lay more eggs per spawning event than 28 smaller, 2-kilogram females. Scientists already knew this for some species, “but we didn’t know it was so widespread,” said ecologist Diego Barneche of the University of Sydney, who co-authored the study. Until recently, it was widely believed that for most fish, fecundity scaled linearly with size, meaning that 15 2-kilogram cod could lay the same number of eggs as one 30-kilogram cod. But this assumption is not only false, it may also severely underestimate the contributions of larger moms.

Plastic Shreds, Rubber Bands and Balloon Pieces Found in Thai Turtle — Plastic waste is being blamed for the death of a green turtlefound on the eastern province of Chanthaburi in Thailand.The turtle washed up on the beach on June 4, Weerapong Laovechprasit, a veterinarian at the Eastern Marine and Coastal Resource Research and Development Centre told AFP.X-rays on the reptile revealed a blockage in its stomach. A team of vets tried to save the turtle and feed it intravenously, but it died two days later, AFP reported.A necropsy on the turtle uncovered plastic shreds from fishing gear, rubber bands and other marine debris clogged in its stomach.ReReef on Instagram: “Another victim of marine plastic. A juvenile Green Turtle found sick near Laem Chabang, Chonburi on June 4th. A team of Vet tried their…”“It was feeling weak and couldn’t swim,” Weerapong told AFP. “The main cause of death is the sea trash.” The discovery comes not long after a pilot whale died in southern Thailand after swallowing 17 pounds of plastic waste, including 80 plastic bags.

What’s Happening to the North Atlantic Right Whale Is Just Plain Wrong – Imagine if safari-goers in Africa came upon an elephant trudging through the brush covered in a tangle of ropes and netting. What if, on closer inspection, they found that the animal’s mouth was blocked, preventing it from eating, or that lengths of rope had coiled around and cut into its legs, making every stride a battle? Imagine if the last thing those tourists saw was the elephant disappearing into the forest, dragging a veritable ball and chain of man-made debris behind it.Unfortunately, this hypothetical scenario comes pretty close to the actual, real-life nightmare suffered on a daily basis by a different creature, the North Atlantic right whale, in its primary habitat off the east coast of the U.S. and Canada.”It’s a horrific animal welfare issue, but because it’s out there in the ocean, we generally can’t see it,” saidFrancine Kershaw, a scientist with NRDC’s Marine Mammal Protection Project.Fewer than 450 North Atlantic right whales remain on Earth, and of that tiny population, 83 percent bear scars from entanglements in fishing gear. Around half of those have been entangled more than once. All in all, entanglement is now the number one cause of death for this species, responsible for 85 percent of all deaths since 2010, which both the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the International Union for Conservation of Nature classify as endangered. Over the past few decades, the North Atlantic right whale had been seeing slow but steady gains, thanks to international efforts to protect critical habitats, move shipping lanes away from the whales, and develop methods to monitor the whales’ health. But the population peaked around 2010 and is now in decline. At least 17 of the animals died as a result of entanglements and boat strikes in 2017 – nearly twice as many as had died in the previous five years combined.

These Scientists Say It’s Too Late to Rid the World’s Oceans of Plastic — They traveled the globe for nine months, sailed across three oceans, and combed the beaches of some of the world’s most idyllic islands – including Hawaii, Bermuda, and the Azores – looking for plastic.Their voyage complete, the experts and volunteers of the Swiss foundation Race for Water have delivered a damning verdict.”We cannot rid the oceans of the plastics they contain,” said foundation director Anne-Cécile Turner. Turner said that such an ocean cleanup would be “scientifically and financially unrealistic.” “There are too many sources of pollution, and we don’t possess the technology to rid the seas of all this plastic,” she added.”You often hear people talking about a so-called ‘plastic continent,’ but there’s no such thing,” said Kim Van Arkel, a young oceanographer who served as a scientific advisor on the expedition.”It’s more like a plastic soup, which is very difficult to detect because the particles are floating ten or so centimeters under the surface of the water,” she explained.Race for Water’s experts made over a dozen stops on land during their nine-month voyage, studying the environmental damage to various coastlines. In some major cities, including Valparaiso, Shanghai, or Rio de Janeiro, scientists spoke with locals about ocean conservation. On the small islands and archipelagos they visited, experts collected samples of plastics for analysis. “With the action of sun and salt, plastic disintegrates and becomes very hard to collect – even with tweezers,” noted Van Arkel.

Why China has Canada spooked about the world’s plastic waste crisis – Canada is trying to point the way out of a global plastic wastecrunch partially of its own making. Whales are choking to death on plastic bags in garbage-filled foreign waterways. Giant patches of plastic garbage are growing even larger in the world’s oceans, while minuscule bits of it are starting to show up in Canadian waterways.And now, six months after China shut its doors to accepting roughly half of the world’s plastic waste, bales of Canadian recyclables are being diverted to landfills or shipped to other plastic-choked regions of Asia for disposal.“It’s piling up,” environmental scientist Tony Walker said.Walker, who teaches resource and environmental studies at Dalhousie University, is among a number of scientists, activists, industry leaders and politicians who are sounding the alarm about plastic waste in the world’s oceans. They estimate more than 8 million tonnes of plastic waste are being dumped into the world’s oceans each year, or one dump-truck load of the stuff every minute.At this rate, it’s expected that plastic will outweigh fish in the world’s oceans by 2050.The federal government estimates 8,000 tonnes of plastic entered Canadian waterways in 2010 alone, despite the country boasting better than 80 per cent coverage with its recycling programs. The problem has prompted Canada to seek public advice on how to deal with the problem at home, and to use its G7 presidency as an opportunity to call for bigger-picture solutions from its allies.

The rate of Antarctic melting has nearly tripled in the past five years — The Antarctic ice sheet has lost more than 2,500 billion tonnes of ice in the past 25 years and nearly half of that has happened since 2012. An international team of polar scientists found that melting in Antarctica has jumped sharply from an average of 76 billion tonnes per year prior to 2012, to around 219 billion tonnes each year between 2012 and 2017. That’s adding 0.6 of a millimetre to sea levels each year. Antarctica stores enough water to raise global sea levels by 58 metres, and has contributed 7.6 millimetres since 1992, according to the research published in Nature today. The latest data is a continuation of previous assessments known as the Ice sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE), which began in 2011 and tracks ice-sheet loss from 1992 onwards. IMBIE was established with the support of NASA and the European Space Agency, to monitor the changes in ice-sheet cover around the world. It uses combined satellite data to measure the Antarctic ice sheet’s changing flow and volume. The increase in melting should act as a wake-up call, according to project leader Professor Andrew Shepherd from the University of Leeds. “The rapid increase in Antarctic ice loss is due to ocean melting of glaciers in the Amundsen Sea, and ice shelf collapse on the Antarctic Peninsula,” he said in a statement. “These events and the sea-level rise they’ve triggered are an indicator of climate change and should be of concern for the governments we trust to protect our coastal cities and communities.”

Antarctic Ice Melt Has Tripled in Five Years – Ice melt in Antarctica has tripled in the last five years, according to the most comprehensive assessment of the state of South Pole ice to date, published in Nature Wednesday.The Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE), as the assessment is called, involved 84 scientists, 44 international organizations and 24 satellite surveys and found that Antarctica had lost 219 billion tonnes of ice a year (approximately 241.41 billion U.S. tons) between 2012 and 2017, contributing 0.6 millimeters (approximately 0.02 inches) to global sea level rise, a Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling(CPOM) press release reported. Before 2012, ice loss held steady at 76 billion tonnes (approximately 83.78 billion U.S. tons) per year, for 0.2 millimeters (approximately 0.008 inches) of sea level rise.”A three-fold increase now puts Antarctica in the frame as one of the largest contributors to sea-level rise,” study co-leader and CPOM Director Professor Andrew Shepherd of Leeds University told BBC News.”The last time we looked at the polar ice sheets, Greenland was the dominant contributor. That’s no longer the case,” he said. The largest amount of ice loss came from West Antarctica, especially its Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers. Ice sheet collapse on the Antarctic Peninsula and slow growth of the East Antarctic ice sheet also contributed. The IMBIE assessment wasn’t the only study published Wednesday with alarming news about the impacts ofclimate change on Antarctica.A University of Waterloo study published in Science Advances discovered a mechanism that could further accelerate Antarctic ice loss. The two year study found that rising ocean and air temperatures are both destabilizing ice shelves from below and also causing them to crack on top, which ups the chance they might break off, according to a University of Waterloo press release published by Phys.org.

Antarctic ice loss has tripled in a decade. If that continues, we are in serious trouble. – Antarctica’s ice sheet is melting at a rapidly increasing rate, now pouring more than 200 billion tons of ice into the ocean annually and raising sea levels a half-millimeter every year, a team of 80 scientists reported Wednesday.The melt rate has tripled in the past decade, the study concluded. If the acceleration continues, some of scientists’ worst fears about rising oceans could be realized, leaving low-lying cities and communities with less time to prepare than they had hoped.The result also reinforces that nations have a short window – perhaps no more than a decade – to cut greenhouse-gas emissions if they hope to avert some of the worst consequences of climate change. Antarctica, the planet’s largest ice sheet, lost 219 billion tons of ice annually from 2012 through 2017 – approximately triple the 73 billion-ton melt rate of a decade ago, the scientists concluded. From 1992 through 1997, Antarctica lost 49 billion tons of ice annually. The study is the product of a large group of Antarctic experts who collectively reviewed 24 recent measurements of Antarctic ice loss, reconciling their differences to produce the most definitive figures yet on changes in Antarctica. Their results – known formally as the “Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-Comparison Exercise” (IMBIE) – were published Wednesday in the journal Nature. “We took all the estimates across all the different techniques, and we got this consensus,” said Isabella Velicogna, an Antarctic expert at the University of California at Irvine and one of the many authors from institutions in 14 countries. The lead authors was Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds in England and Erik Ivins of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The U.S. just observed its warmest 3-, 4-, and 5-year spans on record – The nation just witnessed its warmest May on record, but, it turns out, that month was only one small piece of a much longer and historically unprecedented stretch of warmth.Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicate that the past 36-, 48-, and 60-month periods rank warmest on record for the Lower 48, in records that date to 1895.Because weather patterns vary somewhat at random, not every month during this unrivaled warm era set a record for warmth. April even ranked as the 12th-coldest on record as the jet stream plunged south for much of the month. But that brief, cool excursion was more than offset by the record-warm May.More often than not, months have been warmer than normal if not record-challenging. Averaging them, the warmth of the recent 3-, 4-, and 5-year periods has no match.Average temperature ranking for the Lower 48 states over the past 48 months. Dark red indicates warmest on record. Orange indicates much warmer than normal. (NOAA)This collection of months is a reflection of long-term climate warming, set in motion by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.The four warmest years on record (2015, 2017, 2016 and 2012) have occurred since 2012, and eight of the 10 warmest years have happened since 1998. Our nation has warmed at a rate of between 0.3 to 0.4 degrees per decade since the 1980s. The average temperature for the period 2021 to 2050 is predicted to be between 2.5 and 2.9 degrees warmer than the period from 1976 to 2005. “Notably, a 2.5°F (1.4°C) increase makes the near-term average comparable to the hottest year in the historical record (2012),” the report said. “In other words, recent record-breaking years may be ‘common’ in the next few decades.”

El Nino may be back by winter – The U.S. Climate Prediction Center issued an El Nino watch across the equatorial Pacific Thursday, with the odds jumping to 64 percent chance that it will come from December to February. That’s up from a 49 percent chance in the agency’s monthly report in May.“Conditions are now favorable for the emergence of El Nino sometime in the next six months,” said Michelle L’Heureux, a forecaster with the Climate Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland. “The watch hinges on that word, ‘favorable.’ We’re just above the threshold that we want to see to issue a watch.”El Ninos, which occur when the ocean warms and the atmosphere reacts, can have profound impacts on the planet, and on financial markets. A big one in 2015 cut cocoa, tea and coffee harvests throughout Asia and Africa, helped choke Singapore with smoke from wildfires and ushered in the warmest winter on record in the contiguous U.S., stifling natural gas demand.El Nino winters are typically cooler and stormier across the U.S. South, rainy in California and warmer in the Pacific Northwest and northern Rocky Mountains. In South America, Brazil can get drought, while Argentina may get more rain. Some past El Ninos have brought massive mayhem, including fires, floods and droughts that killed at least 30,000 people globally and caused $100 billion in economic damage in 1997 and 1998. And in 1918 and 1919, the phenomenon may have contributed to a global flu pandemic, according to the Climate Program Office.Forecasters have seen signs the ocean’s surface is starting to warm, L’Heureux said, including a “slosh” of warm water across the basin — technically called a down-welling Kelvin wave. “That’s a hint that things are warming up.”It’s not certain that El Nino will arrive. It requires the atmosphere above the Pacific to react to the warmer surface, which still hasn’t happened. “We say there’s about a 65 percent chance an El Nino will come for winter, but that’s a way to say there’s a 35 percent chance nothing will happen,” L’Heureux said. “It’s always good to reinforce that.”

CO2 Levels Break Another Record, Exceeding 411 Parts Per Million – Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeded 411 parts per million (ppm) in May, the highest monthly average ever recorded at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, home to the world’s longest continuous CO2 record. In addition, scientists found that the rate of CO2 increase is accelerating, from an average 1.6 ppm per year in the 1980s and 1.5 ppm per year in the 1990s to 2.2 ppm per year during the last decade.“Many of us had hoped to see the rise of CO2 slowing by now, but sadly that isn’t the case,” said Ralph Keeling, director of the University of California San Diego’s Scripps CO2 Program, which maintains the Mauna Loa record with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It could still happen in the next decade or so if renewables replace enough fossil fuels.”Annual CO2 concentrations ebb and flow depending on the season. The lowest levels are generally recorded in late August or early September, when vegetation growth in the Northern Hemisphere is at its peak. The highest concentrations are generally measured in May, following winter months with little or no plant growth and just before the springtime boost in productivity.From 2016 to 2017, the global CO2 average increased by 2.3 ppm – the sixth consecutive year-over-year increase greater than 2 ppm, according to Scripps researchers. Prior to 2012, back-to-back increases of 2 ppm or greater had occurred only twice. “CO2 levels are continuing to grow at an all-time record rate because emissions from coal, oil, and natural gas are also at record high levels,” Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, said in a statement. “Today’s emissions will still be trapping heat in the atmosphere thousands of years from now.”

Global Carbon Emissions on the Rise Again Due to Coal Comeback – Global carbon dioxide emissions from energy use increased 1.6 percent in 2017 following three years of stagnation, according to a new report from British oil giant BP. The analysis, published Wednesday, further emphasizes worldwide failure to meet the goals struck by theParis agreement to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Spencer Dale, the BP’s chief economist, told the Guardian that the globe’s emissions rise was “slightly worrying” and a “pretty big backward step.””It suggests to me we are not on a path to the Paris climate goals,” he added.The report, called the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, also pointed out that the world’s fuel mix has “strikingly” not changed in the last 20 years. “I am more worried by the lack of progress in the power sector over the past 20 years, than by the pickup in carbon emissions last year,” Dale noted to the Guardian.

Judge Orders EPA to Comply With Clean Air Act in Ozone Lawsuit – A federal judge ordered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to take action to fight air pollution entering New York and Connecticut from five other states, Reuters reported.The EPA had until August 2017 to complete plans for states that failed to adapt to new ozone air-quality standards set by the agency in 2008, but the plans never materialized, a Bloomberg News article published byThe Boston Globe reported.New York and Connecticut therefore sued the EPA in January to try and force it to create ozone plans for Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Virginia and West Virginia, since their emissions impact New York and Connecticut’s air.”The court’s decision is a major win for New Yorkers and our public health, forcing the Trump EPA to follow the law and act to address smog pollution blowing into New York from upwind states,” New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood told Bloomberg News.U.S. District Judge John Koeltl of Manhattan, who decided the case, said that New York and Connecticut had successfully proved they would be harmed by ozone coming from the five states in question. The two states, he said, were trying to “protect their citizens from the harmful effects of the high level of dangerous pollutants in their states caused by the pollutants coming from the defaulting states.”Up to two-thirds of New Yorkers breathe unhealthy levels of smog, Underwood said in a statement reported by Reuters.The judge gave the EPA until December 6 to complete the smog-reduction plans.”Given the prior violations of the statutory deadline by the EPA, it is a reasonable exercise of the court’s equitable powers to require the EPA to do the minimal tasks it has agreed it can do to remedy its past violation of the statute,” Koeltl wrote, according to Reuters.

GOP senators push Trump to submit pollution treaty amendment for Senate approval | TheHill – A group of Republicans senators is pushing President Trump to let them approve a treaty amendment meant to cut emissions of certain greenhouse gases. The Obama administration helped negotiate the Kigali amendment in 2016, meant to phase out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) around the world. HFCs are used mainly in refrigeration and air conditioning and are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the atmosphere. But Trump still hasn’t decided whether he supports it, in which case he would have to send it to the Senate for ratification.The 13 GOP senators, led by John Kennedy (La.) and Susan Collins (Maine), said the amendment would help domestic companies by leveling the playing field worldwide and giving them long-term certainty on what chemicals to use going forward. “By sending this amendment to the Senate, you will help secure America’s place as the global leader in several manufacturing industries, and in turn give American workers and advantage against their competitors in the international marketplace,” the senators wrote. They said the Kigali amendment would increase manufacturing jobs by 33,000 and boost exports by $4.8 billion.

Last Exit to the Road Less Traveled – J. D. Alt – “We now stand where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road – the one less traveled by – offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth. – Rachael Carson, Silent Spring What’s important to keep in mind in this quote from Rachael Carson’s 56-year-old warning shot over the bow of corporate civilization is that there are two roads being traveled now. We are no longer at a fork. The fork is half-a-century behind us. The goal is not to get the superhighway to somehow re-route itself and follow the path less traveled. It can’t. The superhighway will, and must, continue accelerating in its inevitable direction, simply because the greed and power of the people driving that highway will not allow them to alter course. But if there is any truth to Rachael Carson’s warning (and there seems to be growing evidence of it) the other path – the Road Less Traveled – will become the surviving branch of our evolutionary diagram. The present goal, therefore, should be to create as many exits from the superhighway as possible – and to encourage and enable as many people as possible to take those exits to explore and follow the other path. Visualizing how we all got on this superhighway in the first place will be helpful to seeing the exit ramps. To make this visualization, it isn’t necessary to speculate about an ancient, human pre-history. The process can be clearly seen and understood in a modern anecdote describing how one particular community of people joined the highway. I quote now from the book Fishing Lessons by Kevin M. Bailey*, where he retells author Robert Johannes’ story of fishermen in Palau, an island country in Micronesia. “Seafood was once abundant there. The Palauan fisherman never had trouble finding enough fish to satisfy their own and their village’s needs. The fisherman gave away the fish they didn’t eat to other villagers…. They lived in a state of ‘subsistence affluence.’ “The fishermen bought even bigger boats to catch the vanishing fish, but to do that they had to borrow money. They had to sell all their fish to pay off their loans. They stopped giving them away in the villages; instead they sold them to the outsiders and to other villagers. Now the people in the village had to work for the money to buy their food….“Pretty soon, there were not enough fish over the reefs for the fishermen to make payments on their loans, so the village sold their customary access rights to the fishing grounds. The people in the village began to eat imported fish in cans.” In a nutshell, that is the superhighway.

Coral Reefs Lost to KÄ«lauea Eruption – When searing black lava from fissure 8 slid into the Pacific Ocean at Kapoho Bay on June 3, it had been five weeks since the collapse of the Pu’u ‘ÅŒ’Å crater, along the eastern rift zone of the KÄ«lauea volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island. Toxic, acid-laden steam billowed high above boiling waves. Within 36 hours, the bay became paved over by lava, creating a new coastline almost a mile out and destroying shallow-water coral reefs and tidepools.”It’s been an absolute loss,” said marine biologist Misaki Takabayashi of the University of Hawaii at Hilo. The area was popular with snorkelers for its easy access and intense beauty. Takabayashi described the view as floating above a colorful coral reef set against stark black basalt. “When people would go, they were in awe,” she told me. The name Kapoho derives from the Hawaiian word poho, meaning a depression or hollow. Those dips in the seafloor created the Wai’Åpae Tidepools, part of which were protected by the state as a Marine Life Conservation District. Takabayashi’s team had been studying those for 12 years. They are now gone as well.

Guatemala volcano: woman searches for 50 buried relatives — Eufemia Garcia watched in horror as Guatemala’s Fuego volcano sent scalding ash and gas surging over her home a week ago, burying her children and grandson among 50 of her extended family. She has been searching for their remains ever since. At least 110 people died after Fuego erupted last Sunday, pushing fast-moving currents of dust, lava and gas down the volcano’s slopes in its greatest eruption in four decades, and close to 200 more are believed buried beneath the waste. Among them, Garcia believes, her nine siblings and their families as well as her mother, her own grown-up children and a grandson, making her family one of the hardest hit in a disaster that officials admit was made worse by delays in official warnings. The hamlet of San Miguel Los Lotes on the lush southern flank of the volcano was almost completely swallowed by several metres of ash, and formal search efforts have been suspended until the still-erupting volcano stabilises. Defying the suspension order, Garcia, 48, leaves the shelter she now sleeps in each morning, grabs a pickaxe or a shovel and heads into the danger zone, where groups of volunteers and other families dig down through ash hardened by rain and sun to try and reach their homes below. “I’m not going to give up until I have a part of my family and am able to give them a Christian burial,” Garcia said. A fruit seller who lived for more than three decades with her extended family in Los Lotes, Garcia said she was out purchasing eggs when she saw the volcanic flow racing toward her village. She sprinted back to her family’s homes, where uncles and a brother, children and cousins were preparing for a lunch to celebrate a sister visiting from a nearby town. She shouted at them to flee but few heeded the warnings. Her 75-year-old mother decided she could not outrun the danger. “Let God’s will be done,” she said. Garcia ran to safety and looked back to see the burning flow rise to the roof of her house, submerging it completely with her son Jaime, 21, inside. She watched as the ash rushed toward her daughter Vilma Liliana, 23, who sprinted for safety barefoot but was unable to outpace its terrible path. Her other daughter Sheiny Rosmery, 28, stayed at home, her son in her arms. The visiting sister and her husband have not been found. With almost no family left, she does not know where she will live next, or what she will do to survive. But for now, she says, all that matters is the search.

Senate panel rejects Trump’s proposed Interior, EPA cuts | TheHill: A Senate subcommittee moved Tuesday to advance a $35.85 billion funding bill for the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), rejecting many of the proposed cuts that the Trump administration sought for both agencies. The total proposed funding level for fiscal 2019 is 26.7 percent higher than what President Trump asked for in his budget proposal earlier this year, which was $28.3 billion. It’s about $600 million higher than the funding Congress gave to the agencies for fiscal 2018.The proposal gained recent bipartisan support in the Senate Appropriations Committee’s subpanel with responsibility for Interior and EPA. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the subpanel’s chairwoman, said the bill rejects “unwarranted decreases proposed in the budget and [makes] investments in our highest priorities, especially infrastructure investment for the land management agencies, Indian country and wastewater and drinking water improvements.” Sen. Tom Udall (N.M.), the panel’s top Democrat, said he was able to support the bill that he and Murkowski wrote because of the major budget agreement that Congress and Trump reached earlier this year. “That allowed us to provide targeted but important increases to programs funded by this bill and to reject the administration’s unjustifiable cuts to Indian education and healthcare and EPA’s bedrock environmental enforcement functions, as well as its proposal to eliminate the Land and Water Conservation Fund and hemorrhage many of our national cultural institutions.” The EPA’s funding would be $8.82 billion, the same as fiscal 2018. Trump had sought a cut to $6.1 billion. The National Park Service would get $3.2 billion, $513 million higher than what Trump wanted. Importantly, the bill has no policy provisions, except ones that were in previous legislation that made it through Congress.

Pruitt Ordered Staff to Delay FOIA Requests, Top House Dem Says — U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Scott Pruitt directed staff to delay or withhold the release of requested public records relating to his scandal-ridden tenure at the agency, according to the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.”Your actions are particularly troubling in light of multiple reports that you have retaliated against EPA staff who disclose waste, fraud and abuse,” Rep. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland wrote in letter to Pruitt Monday.In the letter, Pruitt’s former aides told Cummings’ staff that the EPA boss appeared to be intentionally slowing down Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) responses for records related to the administrator, and directed staff not to respond until requests from the Obama administration had been completed.Cummings also alleged that Pruitt instituted a new review process requiring political appointees to review FOIA responses before they are released.”Under your tenure, EPA’s front office is now responding more slowly, withholding more information, and rejecting more requests, according to EPA’s own data and independent sources,” Cummings wrote. “Combined with your refusal to produce documents requested by Congress, your actions in delaying records under FOIA raise concerns about a fundamental lack of transparency at EPA.”The congressman said Pruitt’s actions violate EPA and Department of Justice rules, in which simple requests should be processed more quickly than complex requests.

Senate Republicans call for hearing on Pruitt scandal (Reuters) – Republican senators on Wednesday said embattled Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt should testify before the U.S. Congress to address the list of ethics scandals he faces, but stopped short of calling for his resignation. Pruitt came under fire earlier on Wednesday after a report by the Washington Post alleged that the EPA administrator tasked one of his aides and sought help from Republican political donors to find his wife a job. The report prompted Fox News television and radio host Laura Ingraham to call on Pruitt to resign. She is one of the most prominent Conservative voices to call for his resignation. The EPA chief has been under scrutiny the last few months amid reports involving questionable spending on travel and use of security detail, connections with lobbyists and industry groups and use of his office for favors. Pruitt currently faces a dozen investigations by the Office of the Inspector General, Congress and the White House. An EPA spokesperson was not immediately available for comment. President Donald Trump has so far defended Pruitt and praised him for carrying out his policies despite the barrage of negative media reports. On Ingraham’s radio show on Wednesday, fellow Oklahoman and Pruitt ally Republican Senator James Inhofe stopped short of calling for his resignation but said if the stream of scandals does not stop, he would be forced to ask him to step down. “I think something needs to happen to change that,” he told Ingraham. “One of those alternatives would be for him to leave that job.” A spokeswoman for Inhofe later told Reuters that while the senator is not ready to call for resignation, “he has concerns about the reports coming out and wants to hear directly from Pruitt” in a hearing.

After Years of Green Promises, Automakers Renege on Emissions Standards – When General Motors CEO Mary Barra recently affirmed a commitment to “a world with zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion,” she echoed similar statements from the company’s executives over the years. Back in 1972, GM Vice President Elliott Estes had declared that “the automobile will be essentially removed from the air pollution problem in the United States” within another decade or so. That didn’t happen, yet two decades later President Bill Clinton played along with this fantasy. Bowing to the power of GM and its then-Big Three partners, Ford and Chrysler, Clinton broke a campaign pledge to raise Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards and instead underwrote industry research on super-clean future cars. Meanwhile, fuel economy fell while CO2 emissions continued to rise.U.S. automakers have always been reluctant partners in the nation’s efforts to reduce air pollution and improve fuel efficiency. Today, Detroit is seeking to undo the carbon-cutting fuel efficiency targets agreed to during the Obama administration, again offering the false promise of green breakthroughs tomorrow. This time, however, it’s happening with the help of an administration and a ruling party openly hostile to the environment.

Global Investment in Wind and Solar Energy Is Outshining Fossil Fuels -In 2016, the latest year for which data is available, about $297 billion was spent on renewables – more than twice the $143 billion spent on new nuclear, coal, gas and fuel oil power plants, according to the IEA. The Paris-based organization projects renewables will make up 56% of net generating capacity added through 2025.Once supported overwhelmingly by cash-back incentives, tax credits and other government incentives, wind- and solar-generation costs have fallen consistently for a decade, making renewable-power investment more competitive.Renewable costs have fallen so far in the past few years that “wind and solar now represent the lowest-cost option for generating electricity,” said Francis O’Sullivan, research director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Energy Initiative.

How much of the world’s energy is supplied by renewables? – BP and the International Energy Agency (IEA) measure the contribution of renewables to the global energy mix in terms of primary energy consumed while the World Bank estimates it in terms of final energy consumed. All three give different results, with BP estimating a total renewables contribution of 9.5% in 2015 compared to IEA’s 13.7% and the World Bank’s 18.1%. The BP/IEA differences become larger when contributions are segregated by source (BP estimates almost three times as much energy from hydro as as IEA and IEA estimates four times as much energy from “other renewables” as BP). This post documents these discrepancies while making no attempt to say who is right and who is wrong – that would have to be the subject of another post. But it does raise the question of whether we really know how large a contribution renewables are making to the world’s energy mix. It’s important to establish exactly what primary energy is before proceeding. Fortunately there is general agreement on how to define it:

• OECD: Primary energy consumption refers to the direct use at the source, or supply to users without transformation, of crude energy, that is, energy that has not been subjected to any conversion or transformation process.
• United Nations: Primary energy should be used to designate energy from sources that involve only extraction or capture
• Global CCS Institute: A primary energy source is defined as one that is captured directly from natural resources. A secondary energy source is one obtained from a primary energy source through a transformation process, typically with the aim to make it suitable for a particular energy use.

Billions in U.S. solar projects shelved after Trump panel tariff (Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s tariff on imported solar panels has led U.S. renewable energy companies to cancel or freeze investments of more than $2.5 billion in large installation projects, along with thousands of jobs, the developers told Reuters. That’s more than double the about $1 billion in new spending plans announced by firms building or expanding U.S. solar panel factories to take advantage of the tax on imports. The tariff’s bifurcated impact on the solar industry underscores how protectionist trade measures almost invariably hurt one or more domestic industries for every one they shield from foreign competition. Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, for instance, have hurt manufacturers of U.S. farm equipment made with steel, such as tractors and grain bins, along with the farmers buying them at higher prices.

The Aberdeen Bay Offshore Wind Farm – After about 15 years in planning, the long awaited and largely hated Aberdeen Bay wind farm has taken shape in recent weeks. I seem to recall early reports saying that the turbines, located on the horizon, would be barely visible from shore. Well that was a lie. The huge towers completely dominate the once unspoiled and beautiful scenery of Balmedie Beach. Those who see this as environmental protection have sick minds. And President Trump, who owns a golf course not far away, and who fought this project in the courts, is going to be mighty angry. The wind farm comprises 11 * 8.4 MW Vestas 164 turbines giving a total installed capacity of 93.2 MW. Here is how Vattenfall, the operator, describe the scheme using the all too familiar venacular of renewables ideology:

• Annually produce 312 GWh.
• Have an installed capacity of 93.2MW
• Annually displace 134,128 tonnes of CO2
• Remove the equivalent of 736,817 cars from UK roads throughout its lifetime
• Produce enough electricity every year to meet the equivalent annual demand of 79,209 homes
• Generate more than the equivalent of 70% of Aberdeen’s domestic electricity demand and 23% of Aberdeen’s total demand
• Annually invest £150,000 to a Community Benefit Scheme

Microsoft Sinks Data Center Off Orkney – Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea off Orkney to investigate whether it can boost energy efficiency. The data centre, a white cylinder containing computers, could sit on the sea floor for up to five years.An undersea cable brings the data centre power and takes its data to the shore and the wider internet – but if the computers onboard break, they cannot be repaired.Orkney was chosen because it is a major centre for renewable energy research.The theory is that the cost of cooling the computers will be cut by placing them underwater. “We think we actually get much better cooling underwater than on land,” says Ben Cutler, who is in charge of what Microsoft has dubbed Project Natick. “Additionally because there are no people, we can take all the oxygen and most of the water vapour out of the atmosphere which reduces corrosion, which is a significant problem in data centres.”

Quebec State-Owned Energy Provider Halts Crypto Mining Projects – Quebec has seen a massive surge in demand for its super-cheap hydro electricity. The demand has caused Hydro-Quebec, the state-owned power supplier, to temporarily stop providing power for new blockchain-based projects. They will also be submitting a strategy to Regie de l’energie, the state’s energy regulator. This is to try to determine which companies will receive power in future. The Canadian energy minister, Pierre Moreau, said: “The measures announced today represent a responsible, prudent and practical approach to welcome top businesses from the blockchain tech sector …”

Tomago Aluminium warns of ‘energy crisis’ as power supply falters – Tomago Aluminium, Australia’s biggest smelter of the metal, warned on Friday that it faced curtailing operations for a third time this week because of power shortages across the national electricity market. As of Friday afternoon, NSW plants reporting outages or reduced output included the gas-fired Tullawarra power station, Mt Piper coal-fired power plant – both owned by EnergyAustralia. Also reporting coal-fired power units offline were Sunset Power’s Vales Point and AGL’s two Hunter Valley stations, Bayswater and Liddell.The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) issued an actual lack of reserve alert at 5.44 pm only to cancel it 23 minutes later after the market responded with extra supply – and demand eased back ahead of the long weekend. Tomago said it had been forced to halt each of three potlines this week – one on Tuesday and two on Thursday – because of a lack of reserve across the grid serving eastern states.

China’s Global Electricity Takeover – There has been no shortage of stories recently about looming trade wars and foreign investments with questionable implications for national security. But the business press recently took notice of one particularly large investment number: $452 billion. This is the amount China’s state controlled power companies have invested abroad over the past five years. The list of actual and potential Chinese utility investment locations includes Pakistan, Russia, Nigeria, Brazil, Chile, Portugal, Philippines, Germany, and the UK. Roughly one third of this almost half a trillion dollars of investment relates to power transmission projects. The Chinese are exporting their ultra-high voltage transmission technology. This, supposedly, is the secret of China’s technology-export success. Generally speaking, moving bulk electricity at higher voltages reduces line losses, which in turn reduces the cost of transmission.Transmission expenses, however, account for slightly less than 10% of end-use electricity costs, a relatively small piece of cost of the final product. A typical high voltage transmission line experiences losses of about 4% on average. An ultra-high voltage line brings losses down to about 1%.

Rocks Under I-95 Present Odd, and Scary, Threat to Power Grid Here’s something you probably didn’t know you needed to worry about: There’s a layer of 300 million-year-old rock under Interstate 95 that’s capable of killing the lights from Washington to Boston and beyond the next time the sun erupts in all its fury. Sound far-fetched? Perhaps. But not to scientists. A solar storm is now viewed as enough of a risk in fact that grid operators across North America are working on plans to respond to just such a disturbance. And a draft of a soon-to-be-published U.S. Geological Survey report pinpoints the Eastern Seaboard as one of the areas most in danger. That’s because this Paleozoic-era rock doesn’t let the energy from a major geomagnetic storm — a once-in-a-100-years kind of event — pass through it but instead acts as a backstop that sends the surge back up above the ground for a second shot at causing mayhem.

Power marketers are increasing their share of U.S. retail electricity sales – Competitive power marketers supplied about 21% of the retail electricity sold in the United States in 2016, up from 11% in 2005. The share of retail electricity sales of regulated investor-owned utilities fell from 62% in 2005 to 52% in 2016. This shift was driven by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which repealed the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 and closed the original federal regulatory structure established by New Deal-era legislation, which was a combination of public financial reforms and regulations in the 1930s. U.S. retail electricity sales are provided by entities with different ownership structures such as power marketers, cooperatives, government utilities, and investor-owned utilities. Investor-owned utilities (IOUs) have historically been the primary producers and distributors of electricity to retail customers in the United States. Some IOUs are still vertically integrated, meaning they offer generation, transmission, and distribution service. Other IOUs may partner with independent power producers to purchase generation service. IOUs are regulated by state and local agencies and also by federal agencies if they own transmission facilities. Retail consumption of electricity has remained relatively flat in the United States over the past decade, especially in the residential sector, where sales per capita have declined. Total retail sales of electricity provided by IOUs have declined over this period, falling from 2,264 terawatthours (TWh) in 2005 to 1,919 TWh in 2016.

U.S. Interior Department axed health study on coal without clear reason: watchdog (Reuters) – The U.S. Interior Department has been unable to adequately explain why it canceled a $1 million study on the public health impacts of mountaintop removal coal mining, the agency’s inspector general office said in a report released on Tuesday. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke canceled the government-funded study on the health impacts of the controversial mining technique used in Appalachia last August as part of what officials said was an agency-wide review of grants in excess of $100,000.

Watchdog: Interior thought mountaintop mining study wouldn’t ‘produce any new information’ | TheHill: Interior Department officials canceled a major mountaintop removal mining study because they didn’t think it would yield new findings, the agency’s internal watchdog said. Mary Kendall, Interior’s deputy inspector general, explained the finding in a letter to Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), which Grijalva released Tuesday. Interior officials had never publicly given that reasoning previously, saying only that the funding for the study that was being conducted by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NAS) was undergoing financial review..But Kendall’s staff also found that Interior did not have documentation to justify their conclusion that the study wouldn’t yield new information.

U.S. electricity commission sees no emergency in power market (Reuters) – All five members of the panel that regulates the U.S. power grid indicated at a Senate hearing on Tuesday there was no emergency in the country’s electricity markets, potentially undermining efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration to save ailing coal and nuclear plants through subsidies. Trump this month directed U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry to take emergency measures to keep coal and nuclear plants running in order to protect national security. Kevin McIntyre, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and one of three Republicans on the five member panel, said there was “no immediate calamity or threat” to power plants operating or serving the needs of consumers.

What Trump’s “unprecedented” power plant bailout would mean for the Ohio valley – President Donald Trump told the Department of Energy to “prepare immediate steps” to stop the closures of coal and nuclear power plants in the Ohio Valley region that are no longer economical to operate. But a number of energy analysts say the administration’s unprecedented effort to prop up struggling utilities will do little to solve their underlying problems and will likely end up costing consumers more.

FERC Throws Wrench Into Trump’s Pro-Coal Plan – The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission does not see any emergency in the U.S. electricity market, the panel regulating the national grid said at a Senate hearing. The opinion is likely to undermine efforts by the Trump administration to save non-competitive coal and nuclear power plants on the grounds that they guarantee the grid’s resilience in case of emergency.Reuters reported the chairman of the five-member panel and one member stated they saw “no immediate calamity or threat” to the national grid, and one other member responded to a question about whether she saw any risks to the grid’s resilience with “no.” The rest of the panel’s members refrained from expressing an opinion during the hearing.

AEP CEO on money-losing coal units: ‘We’ll shut ’em down’ – Any federal plan to forestall the closure of struggling coal and nuclear power plants to stabilize the electric grid should be reviewed by utilities so customers are protected from rising costs, said Nick Akins, CEO of American Electric Power Co. Akins was referring to a controversial proposal under development by the Trump administration to protect and pay electric generating units that play a role in national security, such as supplying a military base. “Everyone wants resiliency and reliability of the grid,” Akins, 57, said in an interview last week in San Diego during the annual meeting of the Edison Electric Institute. “The question becomes how do you do it? How do you do it within the market framework or outside the market framework? And who does it apply to?” he said of the draft plan sketched out with the help of the Department of Energy ahead of a National Security Council meeting on June 1.

Turkey to build third nuclear plant – The Turkish government will likely build the country’s third nuclear energy plant in Thrace, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Berat Albayrak has said. “The first phase of the Akkuyu [nuclear plant] will be put into operation in 2023. The location of the third one is almost determined. It will most probably be the Thrace region because this region has a high rate of energy consumption but the production is not so much in this region,” he said during a live interview with private broadcaster CNN Türk on June 13. The construction of the Akkuyu Nuclear Plant, in the Mediterranean province of Mersin, was kicked off by President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on April 3. Turkey had also signed a protocol with the Japanese government for the construction of a nuclear power plant in the province of Sinop on the Black Sea coast.

Bulgaria moves to revive suspended Russian-built nuclear plant – The parliament last week approved by 172 to 14 Prime Minister Boyko Borisov’s proposal to develop a plan to resume construction of the plant on the Danube River by the end of October. Bulgaria had already spent around $1.8 billion on the plant when the government in 2012 put a moratorium on further work, under pressure from the United States and European Union to limit its energy dependence on Russia. Bulgaria had also suspended the joint project with Russian company Atomstroieksport because it failed to find any foreign investors prepared to shoulder its spiraling costs, estimated at about $11.8 billion in total. Russia’s Rosatom has said it will make another bid to complete the project. Also in the running are Chinese state nuclear company CNNC and France’s Framatome, which is majority-controlled by EDF.

Jordan scraps $10bn Russian nuclear scheme – The Jordan Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) said Monday, 11 June that it cancelled the plan with Rosatom because the Russian side wanted to secure the finance through commercial loans, which it deemed too costly. In a statement, JAEC told The Jordan Times that commercial loans “would have increased the cost of the project and the prices of generated electricity“.

Another Fukushima Plant to be Scrapped — Tokyo Electric Power Company has officially announced that it will scrap the Fukushima Daini nuclear plant. The plant is one of two in the prefecture. The other is the Daiichi plant that was crippled in the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The plant is located about 12 kilometers south of Fukushima Daiichi. The governor says it’s the residents’ strong wish to have all nuclear reactors in the prefecture scrapped. All 4 reactors at the Fukushima Daini halted operation automatically following the major earthquake in 2011 and reached a state of cold shutdown by March 15th, with temperatures inside reactors kept below 100 degrees Celsius. All fuel rods in the reactors were then moved to storage pools. The Daini plant has been managed and maintained in this state since.

The Global Consequences of a Regional Nuclear War — While there is growing concern about a nuclear war as shown here: Doomsday Clock Animation from www.thebulletin.org on Vimeo….and with the United States military spending on nuclear weapons growing, an article by Alan Robock at Rutgers University and Owen Brian Toon at the University of Colorado at Boulder looks at the impact of a regional nuclear war between two of the world’s lesser nuclear powers; India and Pakistan.As most of us recall, in the early 1980s, science showed that a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States would drastically change the global ecosystem. This concept was first proposed by renowned scientist, Carl Sagan, who published a paper in Parade magazine on October 30, 1983 entitled “The Nuclear Winter: The World After Nuclear War” which you can find here. In this model, the smoke from fires resulting from the detonation of nuclear weapons would envelop the earth and absorb sunlight, resulting in a cold, dry and dark world. This world would be incapable of sustaining plant life and would lead to the elimination of food for the human race.The research by Robock and Toon looks at the ecological impact of a smaller scale conflict between India and Pakistan, two nations which have the following nuclear inventory according to a study by :

• 1.) Pakistan (paper authored by David Albright in 2015):
• 2.) India (paper authored by David Albright et al in 2015): between 77 and 123 nuclear weapons with the most likely number being around 97.

Here is a table showing India’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium and plutonium: