Environmental News For The Week Ending 09December 2018

Written by rjs, MarketWatch 666

This is a collection of interesting news articles about the environment and related topics over the last week. This is a Tuesday evening regular post at GEI.

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Visualizing Eastern Europe’s Deadly HIV Problem – Saturday marked World AIDS Day which aims to promote awareness of the disease and mourn those who have died from it.As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, the event came into existence in 1988 and it has been widely observed by health officials, governments and non-governmental organizations since then.One aspect of HIV which needs to be highlighted more frequently is its growing infection rate across Eastern Europe and Russia in particular. According to new data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and World Health Organization, there were 71 new HIV diagnoses per 100,000 people in Russia last year.Ukraine came a distant second with 37 while third-placed Belarus had 26. The lowest rates of new diagnoses per 100,000 people were recorded in Bosnia and Herzegovina (0.3), Slovakia (1.3) and Slovenia (1.9). (graphic map)

Scientists, ethicists slam decisions behind gene-edited twins -As more details regarding the first gene-edited humans are released, things continue to look worse. The researcher who claimed the advance, He Jiankui, has now given a public talk that includes many details on the changes made at the DNA level. The details make a couple of things clear: we don’t know whether the editing will protect the two children from HIV infections, and we can’t tell whether any areas of the genome have been damaged by the procedure. All of that raises even further questions as to whether He followed ethical guidelines when performing the work and getting consent from the parents. And, more generally, nobody is sure why He chose to ignore a strong consensus that the procedure wasn’t yet ready for use in humans. In response to the outcry, the Chinese government has shut down all further research by He, even as it was revealed that a third gene-edited baby may be on the way. While the US already has rules in place that are intended to keep research like He’s from happening, a legal scholar Ars spoke with suggested there may be a loophole that could allow something similar here. In light of that, it’s important to understand the big picture He has potentially altered. What exactly happened in China and why does it concern so many in the scientific community? Prior to this work, a strong consensus existed among the scientific community that, although technology for editing the human genome was available, we didn’t know enough yet about how to check its safety and effectiveness to determine how to ethically use it. And, as it turns out, He’s work appears to provide a demonstration of nearly everything that had the research community concerned.The fact that one of the two twins has different deletions also points to another worrisome aspect to this work: not every cell in the embryo was edited at the same time and in the same manner, even though the editing machinery was injected when the embryo was a single cell. The resulting embryos could be a mosaic of unedited cells and cells with different types of damage to the intended gene. In fact, we now know that one of the twins also has some cells where one copy of the gene wasn’t edited at all, meaning this twin has thus taken on the risks of gene editing without the supposed benefit of HIV protection. This also means we don’t know which of these changes (if any) will be inherited by any kids the twins have.

Despite CRISPR baby controversy, Harvard University will begin gene-editing sperm MIT Technology Review – In the wild uproar around an experiment in China that claimed to have created twin girls whose genes were altered to protect them from HIV, there’s something worth knowing – research to improve the next generation of humans is happening in the US, too. In fact, it’s about to happen at Harvard University.At the school’s Stem Cell Institute, IVF doctor and scientist Werner Neuhausser says he plans to begin using CRISPR, the gene-editing tool, to change the DNA code inside sperm cells. The objective: to show whether it is possible to create IVF babies with a greatly reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease later in life. To be clear, there are no embryos involved – no attempt to make a baby. Not yet. Instead, the researchers are practicing how to change the DNA in sperm collected from Boston IVF, a large national fertility-clinic network. This is still very basic, and unpublished, research.Yet in its purpose the project is similar to the work undertaken in China and raises the same fundamental question: does society want children with genes tailored to prevent disease?Since Sunday, when the CRISPR babies claims was made public, medical bodies and experts have ferociously condemned He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist responsible. There is evidence his experiments – now halted – were carried forward in an unethical, deceptive manner that may have endangered the children he created. China’s vice minister of science and technology, Xu Nanping, said the effort “crossed the line of morality and ethics and was shocking and unacceptable.” Amid the condemnation, though, it was easy to lose track of what the key experts were saying. Technology to alter heredity is for real. It is improving very quickly, it has features that will make it safe, and much wider exploratory use to create children could be justified soon.

The US Military Is Genetically Engineering New Life Forms To Detect Enemy Subs — Via: Defense One: How do you detect submarines in an expanse as large as the ocean? The U.S. military hopes that common marine microorganisms might be genetically engineered into living tripwires to signal the passage of enemy subs, underwater vessels, or even divers.It’s one of many potential military applications for so-called engineered organisms, a field that promises living camouflage that reacts to its surroundings to better avoid detection, new drugs and medicines to help deployed forces survive in harsh conditions, and more. But the research is in its very early stages, military officials said. The Naval Research Laboratory, or NRL, is supporting the research. Here’s how it would work: You take an abundant sea organism, like Marinobacter, and change its genetic makeup to react to certain substances left by enemy vessels, divers, or equipment. These could be metals, fuel exhaust, human DNA, or some molecule that’s not found naturally in the ocean but is associated with, say, diesel-powered submarines. The reaction could take the form of electron loss, which could be detectable to friendly sub drones.

Global food system is broken, say world’s science academies – The global food system is broken, leaving billions of people either underfed or overweight and driving the planet towards climate catastrophe, according to 130 national academies of science and medicine across the world. Providing a healthy, affordable, and environmentally friendly diet for all people will require a radical transformation of the system, says the report by the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP). This will depend on better farming methods, wealthy nations consuming less meat and countries valuing food which is nutritious rather than cheap. The report, which was peer reviewed and took three years to compile, sets out the scale of the problems as well as evidence-driven solutions. The global food system is responsible for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than all emissions from transport, heating, lighting and air conditioning combined. The global warming this is causing is now damaging food production through extreme weather events such as floods and droughts. The food system also fails to properly nourish billions of people. More than 820 million people went hungry last year, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, while a third of all people did not get enough vitamins. At the same time, 600 million people were classed as obese and 2 billion overweight, with serious consequences for their health. On top of this, more than 1bn tonnes of food is wasted every year, a third of the total produced. “The global food system is broken,” said Tim Benton, professor of population ecology, at the University of Leeds, who is a member of one of the expert editorial groups which produced the report. He said the cost of the damage to human health and the environment was much greater than the profits made by the farming industry.

One in six pints of milk thrown away each year, study shows – One in six pints of milk produced around the world is lost or wasted, according to research conducted at Edinburgh University for the Guardian. Sixteen percent of dairy products – 116m tonnes – is lost or discarded globally each year, according to Prof Peter Alexander, a member of the newly formed Global Academy of Agriculture and Food Security. He calculated that retailers, distributors and consumers are responsible for half of this waste, throwing away roughly 60m tonnes of dairy a year. About 55m tonnes are lost before they even reach a store – during production and distribution – due to spoilage and waste at the farm, or while the milk is being distributed and exported abroad. However, some analysts believe dairy waste figures could be as high as 30% if further inefficiencies such as flooding foreign markets, using milk as animal feed and overconsumption, are taken into account. “To achieve a more efficient system, and reduce the environmental impacts from our food production, we need to consider ways to reduce all these sources of loss,” said Alexander. In many developing countries, the percentage of milk lost from farm to store is much higher than in more economically developed countries, due to difficulties in storing and transporting products. For example, 15% of Oman’s milk is lost at the farm level, compared with 0% in Sweden, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). In more developed countries, such as the UK, milk and dairy tend to get thrown away at the retailer and consumer level. According to Wrap, the UK government’s waste reduction body, a fifth of all food waste in the UK is dairy. Despite this, dairy production has been growing rapidly around the world over the past four years, rising by 6% between 2014 and 2018, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The biggest production increases were seen in India, Canada, the Netherlands and Ireland.

Waste Not, Want Not – No one condones trashing edible food, especially when 12 percent of U.S. households don’t know where their next meal is coming from. And it has serious environmental consequences: Agriculture generates a third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and roughly a fifth of the nation’s pesticide, water, and fertilizer usage goes into growing food that will nourish no one. It’s also a waste of money. Researchers estimate that 40 percent of the American food supply isn’t eaten, a shopping cart worth $218 billion. Schools are a big part of the problem. The USDA’s National School Lunch Program serves 30 million kids every school day, a point of justifiable pride. But the program also wastes about $5 million worth of edible food every school day. That’s $1.2 billion in losses per school year. The price tag is bad enough, but tacitly teaching children that it’s OK to throw out untouched portions of cheese ravioli and chicken tenders may be even worse. Why do schools waste so much? The quality of food can be questionable, given the lack of on-site cooking facilities and minimal USDA funding. And many students end up with food that they don’t want, thanks to a USDA reimbursement requirement that students take lunch items from at least three out of five categories – vegetable, fruit, protein, grains, and milk. At least one of those choices must be a fruit or vegetable. In theory, having food choices reduces waste, but students aren’t allowed to take just one or two items they know they’ll eat. Aiming for the federal government to cover a “reimbursable meal,” staff often push students to take more.

Sustainable palm oil doesn’t make the grade – From food and biofuels to cosmetics and detergents, palm oil is found in countless products these days. Demand for the oil has surged in the last decade – global usage went from 37 million metric tons in 2006 to 64.2 million in 2016 – in part because it is cheap and, for a time, enjoyed a good-for-you reputation. But what sounds good for us isn’t good for the forests where oil palms (Elaeis guineensis) are harvested. According to a Purdue University study, deforestation is rising in major oil palm-producing countries. And it’s happening even faster in areas certified as “sustainable.” “Oil palms are grown in some of the most sensitive and ecologically important forests in the world. Protecting them is important,” said Roberto Cazzolla Gatti, research associate at the Forest Advanced Computing and Artificial Intelligence Lab of the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue University. “But we’ve seen that even when operations are certified as sustainable, there is still significant forest loss. It seems that there is no way to sustainably produce palm oil to meet today’s global demand.” The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), formed by retailers, banks, investors and environmental advocates in 2004, and the Palm Oil Innovation Group, a similar organization founded in 2013, developed guidelines that allow for sale of palm oil as sustainable. That label means ensuring that forest conservation value is assessed and steering clear of high-carbon stock areas. Those efforts, according to Gatti’s research, are not effective. In areas where certified sustainable palm oil is being harvested, deforestation is rapidly increasing.

Farmers’ Dilemma: Save Bees or Save Themselves – Saving the bee – an indispensable pollinator for many crops – is one of the most pressing challenges facing agriculture today. Yet farmers are being paid government subsidies to plant crops in ways that are harmful to bees.Many US farmers have to decide whether they want to reverse the decline of bee populations through sustainable practices, or risk devastating their own livelihoods – and the future of some major food crops – through the pursuit of short-term profits. The key to avoiding mass extinction of species like the honey bee and preventing ecosystem collapse – suggests a UC Berkeley study – may be enhancing biodiversity in working lands: farmland, rangeland, and forests. “Sustainability is a real issue, and in order to create systems that are truly sustainable, it’s important to take care of the biodiversity that provides critical ecological services underlying sustainability,” Promoting diversity on working lands could be as simple as adding trees, hedgerows, or different flowering plants along the edges of fields, or as complex as using crop rotations and keeping livestock on a single farm. Farms that grow only a single crop remove biodiversity from vast amounts of land; the process degrades habitats for bees and other organisms. One sustainable practice that could make a big difference is the use of cover crops, which help to improve soil quality and enhance wildlife and pollinator habitat.Many pollinators are habitat-specific, and much pollinator habitat has been lost to agriculture, resource extraction, and urban and suburban development. Cover crops, like clover and alfalfa, provide highly nutritious food for bees. While beekeepers in the United States have been attempting to stabilize the number of honeybee colonies, it’s not a permanent solution. There are not enough habitats to allow bees to survive without the help of beekeepers.

Bees Get Stung by Decision to Scale Back National Monument – One year after President Trump slashed the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in half, new research shows that at least 80 species could be harmed. And that’s just the bees.Trump’s proclamation noted President Clinton had declared the Utah wilderness “one of the richest floristic regions in the Intermountain West.” But it asserted that Clinton identified “only a few” species worth protecting – and those few species would still do fine after Trump fractured the monument and shrunk it by 870,000 acres.As the courts decide whether Trump’s move was legal, bees could face new problems from human disturbances made worse by climate change (though some may ultimately benefit).Researchers have spent years studying all the bee species – 660, they believe – that live within the national monument’s 1.7 million acres. Much remains a mystery. There’s almost as many bee species in Grand Staircase-Escalante as there are east of the Mississippi, said Olivia Messinger Carril, one of the study’s authors. The findings were published in the journal PeerJ.They include highly specialized creatures whose range is the size of a living room. Some live off a single kind of cactus or venture into the open air for a few weeks each year. Others are as small as George Washington’s nose on the quarter, she said. Trump split the monument into three pieces while removing protections from about half the area, at the recommendation of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. He did the same with another Utah national monument, Bears Ears. Environmentalists have sued to stop it, arguing that presidents don’t have the power to undo monument protections (E&E News PM, Dec. 4, 2017).The move could bring more grazing and motor vehicles. And the newly unprotected areas include some bees known only in the Mojave Desert.“These are ‘edge’ populations,” study author Joseph Wilson, a Utah State University professor, said in a statement. “That is, in the face of climate change, they could be the first to go extinct as the region gets hotter and drier, or the area could provide a refuge for populations of the same species now inhabiting the Mojave Desert,” he said.

Monarch butterflies disappearing from western North America – Monarch butterfly populations from western North America have declined far more dramatically than was previously known and face a greater risk of extinction than eastern monarchs, according to a new study in the journal Biological Conservation.“Western monarchs are faring worse than their eastern counterparts,” said Cheryl Schultz, an associate professor at Washington State University Vancouver and lead author of the study. “In the 1980s, 10 million monarchs spent the winter in coastal California. Today there are barely 300,000.”Schultz adds, “This study doesn’t just show that there are fewer monarchs now than 35 years ago. It also tells us that, if things stay the same, western monarchs probably won’t be around as we know them in another 35 years.”Migratory monarchs in the west could disappear in the next few decades if steps aren’t taken to recover the population, Schultz said.Like eastern monarchs, which overwinter in Mexico, western monarchs have a spectacular migration. They overwinter in forested groves along coastal California, then fan out in the spring to lay their eggs on milkweed and drink nectar from flowers in Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Utah. They return to their coastal overwintering sites in the fall.In the 1990s, residents of coastal California became alarmed that a once common butterfly seemed to be disappearing. The Biological Conservation study indicates that those concerns were justified. The researchers combined data from hundreds of volunteers who have participated in the Xerces Society’s Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count since 1997 with earlier monarch counts conducted by amateur and professional butterfly enthusiasts in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. They then predicted the monarch population’s risk of extinction over the next several decades.

Birds Dying at Alarming Rates in Collier County – Sick birds are flocking to a Collier County Animal Hospital. People are pulling up to the Von Arx Wildlife Hospital Florida after finding sick, weakened birds along the shores in Marco Island. Joanna Metzger, an animal lover who lives in Marco Island says it’s a horrible sight at Residents Beach. She saw a bird fall right out of the sky Friday morning. “It’s heartbreaking; the other day I sat in the car and cried because I brought two that were alive when I left Marco Island and halfway here they died trying to save them,” said Metzger. Over the past three weeks, people have brought in about 10 birds a day. They were shorebirds known as Sandwich terns and Common terns. Director of the Von Arx Wildlife Hospital Joanna Fitzgerald says that at least six or seven of them are still recovering. “Most of them are dying within an hour or so,” said Fitzgerald. “Many of them are passing away very quickly after they arrive.” The birds are carried into the hospital weak and barely able to stand, many of them don’t make it. “Whatever is happening is hitting them hard and taking them out hard,” said Fitzgerald. As soon as the birds arrive, veterinarians, hop into action. “Immediately getting them on oxygen is the main thing because they are in respiratory distress,” said Fitzgerald. And then provide them with fluids and other types of medication, so that they can live to fly another day. “We have to fix this; we have to do something,” said Metzger. “It’s been going on too long, and it’s frustrating.” The cause is unknown. Staff at the Conservancy sent a few birds to a University in Georgia for testing. They are waiting for the results.

Lost lands? The American wilderness at risk in the Trump Era -When Trump took office in 2016, he promised the energy industry a new era of “American energy dominance“. This would only be possible by exploiting America’s 640m acres of public land: mountains, deserts, forests and sites of Native American history that cover more than a quarter of the country. Under Trump, environmental advocates fear a shift to the extreme: land offered indiscriminately for mining and drilling, with disregard for other potential uses.Two years after Trump came to power, a new study produced by the Wilderness Society, a not-for-profit organization advocating for the protection of public lands, and shared exclusively with the Guardian, reveals the full extent of his government’s efforts. Key findings include:

• 13.6m acres onshore have been made available for leasing by the Trump administration, far more than in any two-year period under the Obama administration.
• More than 153m acres of ecologically sensitive habitats – from the California desert to the Arctic national wildlife refuge – have seen conservation protections rolled back in some form.
• More than 280m acres have been made available for offshore leasing in the Gulf of Mexico and along nearly 90% of the US coastline.

For Hoyt, the prospect of mining on formerly protected lands is a scenario almost too painful to contemplate. On a recent August afternoon, as temperatures climbed to 95F, he bumped and shuddered down a winding road at the wheel of his expedition vehicle. His destination: a lookout point, from which the Circle Cliffs, an almost incomprehensibly vast segment removed from the Grand Staircase-Escalante national monument, could be viewed. Motoring through the auburn hills, he became visibly emotional. “This is where the mining trucks would be driving in and out.” The Guardian profiled three affected communities in the American west – in the Utah desert, the southern Rockies, and valleys of western Colorado – to see three different responses to this shift toward energy development.

Lake Erie faces dire future, per new climate change report – Cleveland Plain-Dealer – The landmark National Climate Assessment report released last week predicts a dire future for the Great Lakes, and Lake Erie in particular.Much of the harm already is underway, according to the study.It foresees more severe storms, more lake-effect snow and rain, expansion of invasive species that threaten local wildlife, larger “dead zones” in Lake Erie, and worsening of the algal blooms that can close beaches and threaten drinking water.The study “shows that the impacts of climate change already are, and will continue to be, deep and widespread in our region,” said Jenna Jorns, an author of the report and a program manager of the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments based at the University of Michigan.The report, issued by 13 federal agencies within the Trump Administration, has been called the most comprehensive research on climate change in history. President Trump, however, said on Tuesday, “I don’t believe it.”White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said the report “is not based on facts. We’d like to see something that is more data-driven. It’s based on modeling, which is extremely hard to do when you’re talking about the climate.”The report said changes already are visible in the Great Lakes. Local experts agreed. Extreme weather events are causing increased erosion from agricultural fields, sending fertilizer runoff rushing into the Maumee River watershed and eventually the Western Basin where the nitrogen and phosphorus feed algal blooms. Conservation practices reduce impact of heavy rains Integrating strips of native prairie vegetation into row crops has been shown to reduce sediment and nutrient loss from fields during heavy rain events, according to studies at Iowa State University.Joe Cornely of the Ohio Farm Bureau said there’s not much the Maumee River Valley farmers can do to prevent it. “Ten or 15 years ago, we didn’t have these 4-inch rainfalls in a 2-hour window, but they’re becoming more common,” Cornely said in an interview with The Plain Dealer last month. “We’re trying to figure out what needs to be done on the farms to mitigate those occurrences.”

West Coast fishermen are suing oil companies for climate change damages – Fishermen are still waiting for permission to catch Dungeness crabs off California’s northernmost coast this season – and they want oil companies to pay for the delay. State officials have postponed the start of the commercial Dungeness crab season because of high levels of a neurotoxin called domoic acid. Similar closures have wreaked economic havoc on the industry in recent years. The neurotoxin’s presence in the prized crabs has been linked to warming ocean waters, one of the many effects of human-caused climate change. That’s why the West Coast’s largest organization of commercial fishermen is suing more than a dozen oil companies, arguing they have knowingly peddled a product that threatens ocean life and the people whose economic fortunes depend on it. The oil companies “engaged in a coordinated, multi-front effort to conceal and deny their own knowledge of those threats, discredit the growing body of publicly available scientific evidence, and persistently create doubt,” the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Assns. said in its lawsuit, filed last month. “Families and businesses that depend on the health and productivity of the Dungeness crab fishery to earn their livings suffer the consequences,” the federation said. The fishermen’s group joins cities from California to New York that have sued the fossil fuel industry over its role in causing climate change. The lawsuits have been compared to legal actions brought against the tobacco industry in the 1990s, seeking damages to treat lung cancer and other health consequences of smoking.

Crab fishermen and environmentalists square off over whale entanglements – Climate change is bringing migrating whales closer to the shores of Northern California, and subsequently a record number of marine mammals have died or been injured because of fishing gear – especially California’s Dungeness crab pots.The issue has pitted two local interest groups against each other: Those who depend on the $68 million California Dungeness crab fishery for their livelihood, and those who advocate shutting down areas to crabbing to protect humpback whales and other endangered species. Caught in between are everyday shoppers who love having Dungeness crab on their tables, but probably wouldn’t want marine mammals hurt in the process.“I’m frankly very scared of what the upcoming season could mean for whales,” said Kristen Monsell, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, an Oakland environmental group that sued the state over the issue last year. The case is due to go before a judge in February. From 2000 to 2014, there were an average of 10 whale entanglements per year on the West Coast, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. However, in the midst of the El Niño weather pattern and a marine heat wave (sometimes known as the “warm blob”) that started in 2014, the number went up to 30 in 2014, to 62 in 2015 and then another 71 in 2016. The main species affected were humpback whales. Dungeness crab fishing gear, which has lines that run from buoys on the surface down to crab traps as deep as the sea floor, was the main culprit.

100% of Sea Turtles in Global Study Found With Plastics in Their Bellies – A new study of sea turtles in three oceans and seas drove home the point, green campaigners said Wednesday, that the world’s governments and corporations are not doing enough to reduce plastic pollution – and marine life is suffering as a result.One hundred and two sea turtles inhabiting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Mediterranean Sea were the subject of the study by the University of Exeter and Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the United Kingdom – and all 102 of the creatures were found with plastics, microplastics and other synthetics in their digestive systems.”From our work over the years we have found microplastic in nearly all the species of marine animals we have looked at; from tiny zooplankton at the base of the marine food web to fish larvae, dolphins and now turtles,” said Penelope Lindeque, who co-authored the report. “This study provides more evidence that we all need to help reduce the amount of plastic waste released to our seas and maintain clean, healthy and productive oceans for future generations.”A total of about 800 particles less than half a centimeter long were found in the turtles’ guts, with scientists finding an average of 150 pieces of plastic in each animal. The Mediterranean was found to be the most polluted body of water the scientists studied, with some turtles’ bodies containing 500 plastics.“How many more studies like this do we need for corporations to take strong action to curb the production of throwaway plastic which is predicted to quadruple by 2050?” said Graham Forbes, global plastic project leader for Greenpeace USA. “This global environmental crisis must be tackled at the source for the sake of marine life, the world’s oceans, our health and our communities.”

Scallops Absorb Billions of Microplastics in Just 6 Hours – One of the biggest concerns surrounding the proliferation of microplastics in the world’s oceans is how they might move up the food web from smaller to larger marine life, eventually ending up in our stomachs.Now, a first-of-its-kind study has shown just how quickly the tiny particles can accumulate in the bodies of shellfish under current levels of marine plastic pollution. The answer? Billions in just six hours.Researchers led by a team at the University of Plymouth exposed the commonly sold great scallop (Pecten maximus) in the laboratory to concentrations of plastic nanoparticles equivalent to those found in the marine environment. After six hours, billions of 250 nanometer (nm) particles had spread through the scallops’ intestines, while even more tiny 20 nm particles had lodge themselves in the mollusks’ other organs including their kidneys, gills and muscles.”The results of the study show for the first time that nanoparticles can be rapidly taken up by a marine organism, and that in just a few hours they become distributed across most of the major organs,” research leader Dr. Maya Al Sid Cheikh of the University of Plymouth said in a press release. Researchers exposed the scallops to nanopolystyrene that had been radio labeled with carbon. This allowed the researchers to locate the plastic particles in the scallops after exposure. Further, it allowed them to determine how long the plastic pieces lasted in the scallops’ system. The 20 nm particles took 14 days to disappear, whereas the 250 nm particles lasted 48 days.The study, which was published Nov. 20 in Environmental Science & Technology.

This town is like thousands that are vulnerable to contaminated water, with no fix in sight – It’s what Virginia Tech engineering Professor Marc Edwards calls America’s “dirty little secret.” He explains it this way: That often times towns like Enterprise are stuck with aging infrastructure that they can’t fix, leaving few options for them to deal with complaints about dirty or contaminated water. The US Environmental Protection Agency says the nation needs $743 billion to fix America’s water system. Edwards says he makes long drives to small towns that are hurt by dwindling populations, and slowly being forgotten. Edwards has spent nearly two decades testing water and challenging federal, state, and local governments on water quality. His work helped to reveal high levels of lead in the water in Flint, Michigan.Edwards says Virginia Tech, where he is a professor, supports his work, as long as he can afford to pay for his travel, which he has done for years. The EPA told CNN that more than 300 million Americans depend on 50,000 community water systems across the country for safe, reliable water every day. Over 92% of the population supplied by community water systems receives drinking water that meets all health-based standards all of the time. But, a 2018 EPA report found that nationwide, nearly one-third of the nation’s public water systems had at least one violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act. Those systems serve more than 87 million Americans.In 2016, the EPA reported nearly 8% had violations of health-based standards. About 3% of public water systems were serious violators, typically with multiple violations over a sustained period.But, multiple government reports over the years show that the water quality issue may possibly be much worse, especially in rural America, because local communities may not always be accurately reporting their data. In a May EPA report, the agency’s inspector general said, “This situation can lead to conditions where the EPA and public may not know if water arriving at taps meets national drinking water standards.”

Total of 79 Chinese cities trigger air pollution alerts: Xinhua (Reuters) – A total of 79 Chinese cities have triggered air pollution alerts as severe winter smog covers wide swaths of the country, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Saturday. As of Nov. 30, five cities had issued red pollution warnings, the most severe in China’s pollution warning system, 73 had issued orange warnings, the second-most severe, and one city had issued a yellow warning, triggering the implementation of emergency management and control measures, Xinhua reported. The affected cities lie in and around the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region that includes China’s capital, as well as in the Fenwei plains area of Shanxi, Shaanxi and Henan provinces, and in the northern Yangtze River delta region, home to Jiangsu province, China’s second-largest steelmaking hub. China’s capital issued its first air pollution alert for the winter season on Nov. 23, and Jiangu province issued orange smog alerts in late November, forcing factories and utilities to slash output. Northern China often sees heavy smog over the winter, which runs from mid-November to mid-March, as homes and power utilities burn more coal for power and heating. On Saturday evening, the concentration of small particulate matter, known as PM2.5, at Beijing’s Temple of Heaven was 193 micrograms per cubic meter, according to data from China’s National Environmental Monitoring Centre, five-and-a-half times the state standard of 35 micrograms per cubic meter. China has taken steps to broaden its campaign against air pollution, including extending a monthly air quality ranking to 169 cities from 74 to pressure local authorities to clean up dirty skies.

Do you know what you’re breathing? – The hottest new apocalypse preparation choice for 2019 is not a bunker or a gun or a lifeboat. And it’s not moving to New Zealand. It’s a small gadget that measures the air pollution around you.As climate change reports become increasingly dire, and as wildfires tear across the American West, and as trust in the federal government’s air quality oversight fades, thousands of people around the country are taking air measurements into their own hands. Installed on a porch, a console table or hooked to a backpack, these small, sleek and increasingly inexpensive devices measure hyper-local air quality. They are marketed to the discerning and alarmed consumer. Some have begun to self-identify as “breathers.” Fans of the new pollution monitors tend to also be skeptical of government efforts to keep air clean and say they are wary of the air quality data that the government provides. “At some points,” Ms. Kozyr said, “you can’t trust the government.” The Trump administration has urged the Environmental Protection Agency to ease air quality rules. New E.P.A. leadership seems to be on board with this plan. The administration is working to overhaul restrictions on coal, which by its own estimates could lead to as many as 1,400 more premature deaths annually by 2030 from an increase in the airborne particulate matter. President Trump claimed in October that the United States has the cleanest air in the world, which is inaccurate. The administration in August unveiled plans to freeze antipollution and fuel-efficiency standards for cars. Outlining the effort, the E.P.A. acting administrator, Andrew Wheeler, and the secretary of transportation, Elaine L. Chao, published an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal called “Make Cars Great Again.” Mr. Wheeler announced in October that next year the E.P.A. would be disbanding a key scientific review panel on clean air and pollution. Tony Cox, who sits on the E.P.A. committee on clean air, has said that the benefits of clean air are exaggerated and, in a paper sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, that it cannot be shown that particulate matter in the air leads to deaths; this is contradicted by information provided by the E.P.A. Robert Phalen, a researcher who joined the E.P.A.’s board of science advisers to work on air quality issues, has said that air has gotten too clean.“People don’t necessarily want to know where air quality is bad in some cases.” “Of about 3,000 counties” in the United States, Ms. Nolen said, “only eight or nine hundred have air quality monitors at all.”Having so few monitors means that something like the downwind effects of a wildfire can be hard to detect.

SpaceX Capsules May Be Contaminating International Space Station – Capsules from Musk’s SpaceX, containing spare food and parts that are being delivered to the International Space Station on the company’s Falcon 9 rockets, may be doing far more harm than good, according to a new report from Wired. These deliveries – called Dragon capsules – may be contaminating the space station by outgassing the second that they arrive.At the ISS, an onboard piece of scientific equipment called the SAGE III, used to measure ozone molecules and aerosols in the Earth’s atmosphere, has seen its contamination sensors, generally used to measure how its environment could influence its readings, show spikes after three Dragon capsules docked at the ISS.Something in the docking Dragon capsules has been outgassing, according to the article. Outgassing is when molecules from construction wind up being released into the atmosphere. It is what gives new cars their “new car smell” (you’re smelling PVC emanating from parts and components, i.e. the dashboard, etc.) and was the basis behind Whitney Tilson‘s formaldehyde-based Lumber Liquidators short some years back. Preliminary reports indicated that a Dragon capsule may have deposited up to 21 times the allowed amount of contamination on one sensor on the ISS. The sensors perked up yet again when the next Dragon capsule docked, with reports estimating that it may have left behind up to 32 times the limit of extra matter on another sensor.

Weak El Nino conditions developing in the Pacific this winter: IMD — There is a strong possibility of weak El Nino conditions developing during the current winter season as equatorial sea surface temperatures across most the Pacific Ocean show an increasing trend, according to a forecast by the India Meteorological Department (IMD). “There is a definite mild El Nino — above 0.5 degree warming — in the western Pacific Ocean. But, the atmosphere has so far not started responding to the sea temperature changes yet. However, we have to see how these conditions will develop post-February,” IMD director general K J Ramesh told BusinessLine on Monday. “We all will be closely watching how the situation develops. In fact the global community is concerned about the development as different countries get impacted differently by the abnormal warming in the Pacific Ocean,” he said. In India, a strong El Nino is linked to abnormal dry spells in the following monsoon season. The IMD also forecast that the ongoing winter season would be slightly warmer than usual in most parts of the country barring a few hilly regions. “The forecast suggests that above normal minimum temperatures (above 0.5 degree Celsius) are most likely over most of subdivisions of the country except Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand in the north, Sub-Himalayan West Bengal, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh in the north east, Odisha in the east and Chhattisgarh in Central India where normal (between 0.5 and -0.5 degree Celsius) seasonal minimum temperatures are most likely to prevail,” IMD said in a statement. “It is not expected to have any impact on rabi crop as the anomaly is not crossing one degree Celsius,” said the IMD DG. Higher warmer weather during winter months is a concern as wheat, the mainstay of the rabi season, is highly vulnerable to a rise in temperature.

Two power plants in Norfolk, Nebraska caused several inches of snow to fall in parts of the state on Monday. –Nebraskans are being dusted in snow generated by the steam from power plants right now.The National Weather Service reported on Monday that two plants in Norfolk are responsible for snow in Seward and Lincoln, located downwind of the power facilities. The phenomenon of industrial snow is “not super common in this area,” Brian Barjenbruch, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Valley, Nebraska told Motherboard.“What’s causing the snow to develop today is the addition of moisture,” Barjenbruch explained. “The atmosphere is currently at the perfect temperature for snow product,” and as the steam escapes – instead of evaporating – it adds moisture and warmth to the ice crystal-laden clouds, giving them a boost at producing snow. It’s similar to lake-effect snow, which occurs when cold air moves across relatively warmer water, accumulating moisture which then falls as snow, usually over land. Earlier this year, a power plant near the Kentucky-Indiana border created light flurries. And the Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania caused a “freak storm” in 2013. The National Weather Service said it didn’t know which plants were responsible for the flakes. “Meteorologically speaking, it looks like the winds are going to decrease and temperatures are going to cool off this evening, putting an end it,” Barjenbruch predicted. Up to two inches have fallen in some areas.

Dozens injured as 22 tornadoes reported in central Illinois – ABC News – A rash of tornadoes broke out Saturday afternoon and evening across central Illinois, injuring at least 30 people and turning homes into piles of splintered wood. There were 22 tornadoes reported to the National Weather Service on Saturday, all in central Illinois. The offices in Lincoln, Illinois, and St. Louis, Missouri, will conduct storm surveys on Sunday to confirm the intensity and track of the tornadoes. At least 30 people were injured in Christian County, Illinois, just southeast of Springfield, where many of the storms hit. Amity Food Mart in Taylorville, Ill., was severely damaged in a suspected tornado on Saturday, Dec. 1, 2018. Mike Crews, emergency manager for Christian County, said there were no more than 30 people transported to hospitals. There are still task forces out with ambulances to make sure there are no more people injured or trapped. No fatalities have been reported. Officials said 21 people were taken to Taylorville Memorial Hospital with one injury considered critical. Crews also said at a press conference Saturday night that emergency officials responded to about 12 to 15 homes that had people trapped inside. All of them were safely evacuated. Stephanie PorterA home was ripped apart by a suspect tornado in Taylorsville, Ill., on Saturday, Dec. 1, 2018. The homeowners were able to escape. A box truck with chemicals was also overturned, officials said, and a hazmat crew was working to clean it up. Further assessment of the damage will be done starting at 7 a.m. Sunday. One person was killed during a severe storm in southwestern Missouri on Friday. Scott Lakin in the Lawrence County Coroner’s Office confirmed to ABC News that a man was found dead with debris on top of him in Aurora, Missouri.

In the millions of dollars’- Earthquake damage assessments continue amid aftershocks – A collapsed section of road on the Glenn Highway north of Anchorage is set to snarl traffic for days as Southcentral Alaska pivoted from crisis response to cleanup in the area’s most significant earthquake in a half-century.The 7.0 earthquake jolted Anchorage and the rest of Southcentral Alaska on Friday morning, cracking and collapsing roads and highways, damaging buildings, knocking out power and sending people scrambling outside and under furniture. The violent shaking left many homes a mess, and aftershocks continued through the night and through the day Saturday. Schools in Anchorage will be closed until Dec. 10, and many schools in the Mat-Su Borough will be closed until at least Wednesday.Seismologists called the earthquake the most significant in Anchorage since the 1964 Good Friday earthquake, in terms of how strong the ground itself shook and severity of impact. The size of the quake and a risk of underwater landslides in Cook Inlet triggered an unusual localized tsunami warning. The day after, people all over Southcentral Alaska were rattled and anxious. But relief was tangible as Anchorage officials reported that there were no deaths, and generally minor injuries – a broken arm, cuts from glass. And despite widespread reports of varying degrees of structural damage, no buildings entirely collapsed, which officials credited to Anchorage’s strict building codes. Hospitals and airports were fully functional Saturday and businesses were beginning to reopen. The shifting earth did wreak havoc on transportation networks north of Anchorage. Major damage was reported on state roads in at least eight areas, and cracks and shifting earth indefinitely halted train service between Anchorage and Fairbanks. Aftershocks and ground settling caused even more damage Saturday, said Shannon McCarthy, a spokeswoman with the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities.

Nearly 1,400 Aftershocks Rattle Alaska After 7.0 Earthquake – Roughly 1,400 aftershocks have followed after Friday’s monster 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck near Anchorage, Alaska, Anchorage Daily News reported.The aftershocks all surrounded the original temblor that was centered about 7 miles north of Alaska’s largest city.Of the 1,400 aftershocks recorded since Sunday, 593 measured greater than a magnitude 2.0, 17 were at least a 4.0, and five were at least a 5.0, the report said.In all, up to 2,200 aftershocks greater than a magnitude 3 are possible, according to a post from Ian Dickson of the Alaska Earthquake Center on Sunday, citing the U.S. Geological Survey aftershock forecast.Friday’s quake was described by state seismologist Mike West as the “most significant” to strike the city since the magnitude 9.2 Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 – the most powerful ever recorded in the U.S. It was also the largest since the 7.1 that struck near Anchorage in 2016.”I’m not aware of large-scale building collapses, but I think it’s safe to say there are thousands of homes and businesses and buildings that were damaged in some fashion, be it a deck that slid downhill, a cracked foundation, a gas line disconnected from the house,” he said during a Facebook Live interview, as quoted byUSA TODAY.Miraculously, no deaths were reported. However, “hospitals reported receiving two patients with life-threatening injuries and dozens of less serious cases, including broken bones, injuries from falls, and lacerations from broken glass,” Dickson wrote. Although the seismic activity has been nerve-racking to the area’s residents, earthquakes are not new to Southcentral Alaska. In the last century, 14 other earthquakes greater than a magnitude 6.0 have occurred within 150 kilometers (approximately 93 miles) of Friday’s temblor, according to USGS. The state itself averages about 40,000 earthquakes per year. USGS reported that the Nov. 30 quake was “the result of normal faulting at a depth of about 40 km.”

Greenland Melting Is ‘Off the Charts’ – The first continuous, multi-century study of surface melt from the Greenland ice sheet was published inNature Wednesday, and the results are clear: the ice sheet is now melting at rates unseen within at least the last 350 years.”Melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet has gone into overdrive. As a result, Greenland melt is adding to sea level more than any time during the last three and a half centuries, if not thousands of years,” lead study author and Rowan University School of Earth & Environment glaciologist Luke Trusel said in a press release from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), one of the institutions involved in the research. Greenland is Melting Faster than Ever – YouTube The researchers found that melting first increased on the ice sheet in the 1800s, when the Arctic began to warm as the process of industrialization started pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. However, it is only in recent decades that the melting has increased beyond the point of natural variability. There is now 50 percent more meltwater runoff entering the oceans from the sheet since the start of the industrial era, and 30 percent more since the 20th century. “From a historical perspective, today’s melt rates are off the charts, and this study provides the evidence to prove this,” WHOI glaciologist and study author Sarah Das said.

PIOMAS December 2018 – Arctic Sea Ice by Neven – Another month has passed and so here is the updated Arctic sea ice volume graph as calculated by the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the Polar Science Center. November has been an excellent month for Arctic sea ice. With 4226 km3, it recorded the highest volume increase for November in the 2007-2018 period, well above the average of 3491 km3. The reasons for this are obvious: rapid growth in ice extent and relatively low temperatures (more on that below). This means that 2018 has dropped from 4th lowest to 6th lowest, and the gap with leader 2016 has grown by a whopping 1322 km3! Here’s how the differences with previous years have evolved from last month: Because all the trend lines go up fast around this time of year, I’m posting another Wipneus graph that visualises PIOMAS volume anomaly, showing 2018’s massive increase more clearly: On the PIOMAS volume anomaly graph we see a massive surge towards 2 standard deviation territory: As for average thickness (crudely calculated by dividing PIOMAS volume numbers with JAXA extent), it hasn’t increased as spectacularly, which means that that the spectacular increases in both volume and extent cancelled each other out. This may seem counter-intuitive, but thickness only changes radically if one of the two parameters does so as well, while the other doesn’t change as fast. And so the 2018 trend line goes up, more or less in tandem with the other trend lines: The Polar Science Centre version basically shows the same, as it often does: And now for temperatures and ice extent. As Zack Labe‘s excellent monthly air temperature ranks (north of 70°) show, this past November was 12th lowest on record:Of course, the Arctic wouldn’t be the Arctic, if it didn’t let one radical swing get followed by another radical swing. While November also saw the largest increase in sea ice extent in the 2005-2018 period, with 2018 at one point almost taking the second highest position, the trend line on the JAXA graph has effectively flatlined into December and may very well be second lowest tomorrow:

Planet-warming carbon emissions are rising in wealthy nations for the first time in five years – Carbon dioxide emissions from advanced economies will rise in 2018 for the first time in five years, the International Energy Agency reports, marking a setback for the global campaign to fend off the worst effects of climate change.Energy-related carbon emissions from North America, Europe and developed nations in the Asia-Pacific region are set to rise by about a half a percent this year, according to a preliminary assessment from the IEA. Over the past five years, the group saw its emissions fall by 3 percent.The increase is being driven by higher energy use as the global economy grows at a brisk pace. While wealthy nations continue to move away from burning coal, rising oil and natural gas consumption in those economies is increasing carbon emissions, the agency says.The report comes as the nations of the world gather in Katowice, Poland, for a United Nations meeting to assess their progress cutting greenhouse gas emissions since the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. The accord aims to prevent global temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.”This turnaround should be another warning to governments as they meet in Katowice this week,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement. “Increasing efforts are needed to encourage even more renewables, greater energy efficiency, more nuclear, and more innovation for technologies such as carbon capture, utilisation and storage and hydrogen, for instance.” In October, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the path to staving off catastrophic impacts from climate change is quickly narrowing. Global temperatures could rise by 1.5 degree Celsius as soon as 2030, the climate change panel warned, requiring unprecedented global action to halt the increase.

California wildfires’ carbon emissions equal to a year of power pollution – Wildfires in California in 2018 released the rough equivalent of about 68 million tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide – about the same amount of carbon emissions as are produced in a year to provide electricity to the state, U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said Friday. The carbon dioxide figure – based on data analyzed by the U.S. Geological Survey – is more than 15 percent of all emissions produced by California in a year, according to Zinke.”We know that wildfires can be deadly and cost billions of dollars, but this analysis from the U.S. Geological Survey also shows just how bad catastrophic fires are for the environment and for the public’s health,” Zinke said in a statement.This year included California’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire – a blaze in November that took out nearly 14,000 homes in a rural Northern California county and killed at least 88 people. Another fire that started the same day in Southern California killed three people and destroyed 1,500 structures, including the homes of celebrities in tony Malibu.Those two fires produced emissions equivalent to roughly 5.5 million tons of carbon dioxide, Zinke said. The 2018 emissions figure for California wildfires is “strikingly high, significant in the context of overall statewide emissions, and likely a record value for single-year direct carbon emissions from wildfires in California history,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.”It is an alarming number, but we live in a fire-prone state,” said Dick Cameron, director of science for land programs at the California chapter of the Nature Conservancy.Zinke used the carbon figure he released Friday to continue to push for the thinning of forests. Cameron said that would help but that climate and home construction were also significant factors in the destructiveness of the fires.

California wildfires accelerated climate change as much as a whole year of power use – California’s 2018 fire season, including the largest fire in state history, released nearly as much climate-warming and air-polluting emissions as a year’s worth of electricity use there.The wildfires released 68 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2018, according to the US Geological Survey, or 15% of the state’s total emissions. For comparison, all electricity use in California in 2016 produced roughly 76 million tons in emissions.Those figures were the highlights of a Nov. 30 statement from the Interior Department that blamed the wildfires largely on forest-management practices. The statement echoed a tweet from US president Donald Trump that there is “no reason” for the fires except “poor” forest management.“There’s too much dead and dying timber in the forest, which fuels these catastrophic fires,” Interior secretary Ryan Zinke wrote in the statement. “Proper management of our forests, to include small prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, and other techniques, will improve forest health and reduce the risk of wildfires, while also helping curb the carbon emissions. The intensity and range of these fires indicate we can no longer ignore proper forest management.” Fire officials, scientists, and California government officials have all rebuked this sentiment. Fire officials note that it also mischaracterizes the problem: Many of the burns were not in forests at all.

Decades of Denial and Stalling Have Created a Climate Crunch — In a 1965 speech to members, American Petroleum Institute president Frank Ikard outlined the findings of a report by then-president Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee, based in part on research the institute conducted in the 1950s. “The substance of the report is that there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequence of pollution, but time is running out,” Ikard said, adding, “One of the most important predictions of the report is that carbon dioxide is being added to the earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate beyond local or even national efforts.” Many scientists were reaching similar conclusions, based on a body of evidence that had been growing at least since French mathematician Joseph Fourier described the greenhouse effect in 1824. In the 1950s, Russian climatologist Mikhail Budyko examined how feedback loops amplify human influences on the climate. He published two books, in 1961 and 1962, warning that growing energy use will warm the planet and cause Arctic ice to disappear, creating feedback cycles that would accelerate warming. The predictions have proven to be accurate, and evidence for human-caused global warming has since become indisputable. What happened? Over the ensuing decades, the fossil fuel industry didn’t try to resolve what it knew would become a crisis. Instead, it worked to downplay and often deny the reality of climate change and to sow doubt and confusion. Knowingly putting humanity – and countless other species – at risk for the sake of profit is an intergenerational crime against humanity, but it’s unlikely any perpetrators will face justice.

Fact-checking the second volume of the U.S. National Climate Assessment – This recently-issued study (the “Assessment”) was seized on by the media as proof of the massive damage the US will suffer if nothing is done about climate change. The Assessment’s conclusions are based largely on speculative model projections that aren’t amenable to checking, but it also claims that the US is already experiencing some of the impacts of man-made climate change, and these claims can be checked. This post accordingly evaluates them claim-by-claim and finds that they are rarely backed up by any hard data, that in some cases they are contradicted by disclaimers buried in the text, and that in no case is there any hard evidence that conclusively relates the impacts to man-made climate change. The credibility of the Assessment’s predictions can be judged accordingly. The Assessment is 1,600 pages long and I doubt that anyone has read it from cover to cover – I certainly haven’t. I have obtained my information from the Summary Findings, Overview, Report Chapters and Downloads sections in the boxes that clicking on this link leads to. These sections themselves contain several hundred pages of text, much of it repetitive, but there is always the possibility that I’ve missed some critical graphic or piece of text. On the other hand, if I’ve missed it the media, who will have read the introductory sections only, will have too. And how did the media report the Assessment’s results? Here are some excerpts: […] And what are the climate change impacts that the Assessment claims are “happening here and now”, which are the only ones we can verify, or not verify as the case may be, against observations? These excerpts identify them either explicitly or implicitly: […] After eliminating repetition and sorting the individual impacts into something resembling order we are left with droughts; floods; heavy precipitation; heat waves; wildfires; Atlantic hurricanes; tornadoes; winter storms; sea level rise; glaciers and snowpack; injuries, illnesses and death. We will review these in order of appearance: The Assessment begins by claiming that climate-change-induced droughts are intensifying in the US. Then later in the text it shoots itself in the foot: While there are a number of ways to measure drought, there is currently no detectable change in long-term U.S. drought statistics using the Palmer Drought Severity Index… And adds a graphic to prove it, reproduced below as Figure 1:

Global carbon emissions set to rise further this year: study (Reuters) – Global carbon dioxide emissions are set to rise nearly 3 percent this year due to continued fossil fuel use, scientists said on Wednesday, dashing hopes that an increase in 2017 was temporary after two years of slowdown. World emissions grew by 1.6 percent last year and will increase even more this year due to the sustained use of coal, oil and natural gas, an annual report by the Global Carbon Project showed, a group of 76 scientists in 15 countries. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions were roughly flat from 2014-16, which led to hopes that emissions had peaked in 2013. The data, presented during talks among around 190 nations in Poland on implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement climate accord, are a setback for a global goal of curbing emissions to avert more floods, heat waves, and rising sea levels. The world is on track for a 3-5 degrees Celsius rise in global average temperature this century and if all known fossil fuel resources are used the rise will be even bigger, the U.N. World Meteorological Organization warned last week. “The projected growth in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry is 2.7 percent in 2018, but uncertainties persist and growth rates between 1.8-3.7 percent remain possible,” the Global Carbon Project report said. CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, cement and industry, which make up the bulk of manmade greenhouse gases, are on track to rise to a record high of around 37.1 billion tonnes this year. CO2 emissions from all human activities, including fossil fuels, industry and land-use change, will reach around 41.5 billion tonnes, the report said.

We are in trouble.’ Global carbon emissions reached a record high in 2018. – Global emissions of carbon dioxide are reaching the highest levels on record, scientists projected Wednesday, in the latest evidence of the chasm between international goals for combating climate change and what countries are doing. Between 2014 and 2016, emissions remained largely flat, leading to hopes that the world was beginning to turn a corner. Those hopes appear to have been dashed. In 2017, global emissions grew 1.6 percent. The rise in 2018 is projected to be 2.7 percent. The expected increase, which would bring fossil fuel and industrial emissions to a record high of 37.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, is being driven by a nearly 5 percent growth of emissions in China and more than 6 percent in India, researchers estimated, along with growth in many other nations. Emissions by the United States grew 2.5 percent, while those of the European Union declined by just under 1 percent. As nations continue climate talks in Poland, the message of Wednesday’s report was unambiguous: When it comes to promises to begin cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change, the world is well off target. “We are in trouble. We are in deep trouble with climate change,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said this week at the opening of the 24th annual U.N. climate conference, where countries will wrestle with the ambitious goals they need to meet to sharply reduce carbon emissions in the coming years. “It is hard to overstate the urgency of our situation,” he said. “Even as we witness devastating climate impacts causing havoc across the world, we are still not doing enough, nor moving fast enough, to prevent irreversible and catastrophic climate disruption.”

Naomi Klein on the Urgency of a ‘Green New Deal’ for Everyone – Progressive journalist and activist Naomi Klein urged sweeping change that tackles the climate crisis, capitalism, racism and economic inequality in tandem on Friday in Burlington, Vt. If that seems challenging, add the fact that the clock is ticking and there might not be another chance. “We need to have started yesterday,” Klein said at the three-day Sanders Institute Gathering on a panel moderated by environmental activist Bill McKibben. “What all of us who follow the science know is that we just can’t lose these four years,” she said, referring to the presidency of climate change denier Donald Trump. The conference, organized by the think tank founded by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ wife, Jane, is aimed at forming bold progressive agendas for the future. Progressives are looking to incoming Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for leadership as she galvanizes a grassroots effort by the youth-led climate change group Sunrise Movement to reduce fossil fuel dependence. Eighteen members of Congress support the idea of creating a House select committee to look at making a realistic plan by January 2020.“This is not just about a Green New Deal, this is about a New Deal for the United States of America,” Ocasio-Cortez said at a press conference in Washington, D.C., on Friday. “Because in every moment when our country has reached the depths of darkness, in every moment when we were at the brink, at the cusp of an abyss and we did not know if we would be capable of saving ourselves, we have.”The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) recent report outlined what Klein called “a terrifying 12 years” to cut fossil fuel use nearly in half by 2030. The climate crisis is embedded in nearly every aspect of the issues you seeon the front page of the newspaper, but it is rarely framed that way. Mass migration is often fueled by climate instability and food insecurity, while experts predict rising sea levels will leave even more people unrooted in the future. Politicians who take campaign donations from oil and gas companiesare more likely to push policies that support them. The sweeping military-industrial complex has a dependence on fossil fuels. And poor people, as we saw most recently in the devastating California fires, are less likely to be able to protect themselves from disaster or recover afterward.

‘We Have Not Come Here to Beg World Leaders to Care,’ 15-Year-Old Greta Thunberg Tells COP24. ‘We Have Come to Let Them Know Change Is Coming’ – Striking her mark at the COP24 climate talks taking place this week and next in Poland, fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg of Sweden issued a stern rebuke on behalf of the world’s youth climate movement to the adult diplomats, executives, and elected leaders gathered by telling them she was not there asking for help or demanding they comply with demands but to let them know that new political realities and a renewable energy transformation are coming whether they like it or not. “Since our leaders are behaving like children, we will have to take the responsibility they should have taken long ago,” said Thunberg, who has garnered international notoriety for weekly climate strikes outside her school in Sweden, during a speech on Monday. Thunberg said that she was not asking anything of the gathered leaders – even as she sat next to UN Secretary General António Guterres – but only asking the people of the world “to realize that our political leaders have failed us, because we are facing an existential threat and there’s no time to continue down this road of madness.” Thunberg explained that while the world consumes an estimated 100 million barrels of oil each day, “there are no politics to change that. There are no politics to keep that oil in the ground. So we can no longer save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.” “So we have not come here to beg the world leaders to care for our future,” she declared. “They have ignored us in the past and they will ignore us again. We have come here to let them know that change is coming whether they like it or not. The people will rise to the challenge.”

David Attenborough- collapse of civilisation is on the horizon – The collapse of civilisation and the natural world is on the horizon, Sir David Attenborough has told the UN climate change summit in Poland.The naturalist was chosen to represent the world’s people in addressing delegates of almost 200 nations who are in Katowice to negotiate how to turn pledges made in the 2015 Paris climate deal into reality.As part of the UN’s people’s seat initiative, messages were gathered from all over the world to inform Attenborough’s address on Monday. “Right now we are facing a manmade disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change,” he said. “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.” “Do you not see what is going on around you?” asks one young man in a video message played as part of a montage to the delegates. “We are already seeing increased impacts of climate change in China,” says a young woman. Another woman, standing outside a building burned down by a wildfire, says: “This used to be my home.”Attenborough said: “The world’s people have spoken. Time is running out. They want you, the decision-makers, to act now. Leaders of the world, you must lead. The continuation of civilisations and the natural world upon which we depend is in your hands.”Attenborough urged everyone to use the UN’s new ActNow chatbot, designed to give people the power and knowledge to take personal action against climate change.Recent studies show the 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years, and the top four in the past four years. Climate action must be increased fivefold to limit warming to the 1.5C scientists advise, according to the UN. The COP24 summit was also addressed by António Guterres, the UN secretary general. “Climate change is running faster than we are and we must catch up sooner rather than later before it is too late,” he said. “For many, people, regions and even countries this is already a matter of life or death.”

Why “Green Growth” Is an Illusion — If the Paris climate agreement of December 2015 – the so-called COP21 – provided cause for optimism that, after years of fruitless diplomatic squabbling, coordinated global action to avoid dangerous climate change and ensure manageable warming of less than 2° Celsius, would finally happen, recent publications by climate scientists are loudly sounding the alarm bells. Specifically, Earth systems scientists (Steffen et al. 2018) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2018) warn that even if global emissions are drastically reduced in line with the 66% below 2°C goal of COP21, a series of self-reinforcing bio-geophysical feedbacks and tipping cascades – from melting sea ice to deforestation – could still lock the planet into a cycle of continued warming and a pathway to final destination: “Hothouse Earth.” Allowing warming to reach 2°C would create risks that any reasonable person – if not, perhaps, Donald Trump – would regard as deeply dangerous. To avoid those risks and keep warming below 1.5°C, humanity will have to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) to net zero by 2050. The early optimism about the Paris agreement is giving way to widespread pessimism that COP21 will not be working soon enough. Climate scientists and Earth systems scientists attempt to counter the growing pessimism by showing that limiting the global mean temperature increase to 1.5°C is neither a geophysical impossibility, nor a technical fantasy. The engineering solutions to bring about deep de-carbonization – including quick fixes and negative-emissions technologies – are available and are beginning to work. The real problem is that available solutions go against the economic logic and the corresponding value system that have dominated the world economy for the last half decade – a logic aimed at scaling back (environmental) regulations, pampering the oligopolies of big fossil-fuel corporations, powering companies and the automotive industry, giving free rein to financial markets and prioritizing short-run shareholder returns. Hence, as Steffen et al. (2018) write, the biggest barrier to averting going down the path to “Hothouse Earth” is the present dominant socioeconomic system, based as it is on high-carbon economic growth and exploitative resource use. We will only be able to phase out greenhouse gas emissions before mid-century if we shift our societies and economies to a “wartime footing,” suggests Will Steffen, one of the authors of the “Hothouse Earth” paper in an interview with Kate Aronoff (Aronoff 2018).

Mind The Chemtrails: New Study Calls For Global “Stratospheric Aerosol Injection” By 2030s – A fleet of aircraft injecting sulfates into the lower stratosphere could help protect the world from climate change. Well, that is according to a peer-reviewed paper published Nov. 23 in the journal Environmental Research Letters by researchers from Harvard and Yale universities. It sounds like rhetoric from the tinfoil-hat chemtrail conspiracy community. Large commercial airliners spraying sulfate microparticles into the stratosphere, anywhere from 8 to 30 miles high. The purpose is to help shield the Earth from sunlight to maintain lower temperatures. The report is one of the most in-depth and modern study yet of “stratospheric aerosol injection” (also known as “solar dimming” or “solar engineering” and or in the conspiracy community – “chemtrails”). Researchers examined how effective and expensive a solar geoengineering project would be beginning in the early 2030s. The goal of the program would be to halve the temperature increase caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases, sort of like the global cooling effects of volcanic eruptions. Gernot Wagner, a research associate at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is the lead author of the paper. He said their study shows this type of geoengineering “would be technically possible strictly from an engineering perspective. It would also be remarkably inexpensive, at an average of around $2 to $2.5 billion per year over the first 15 years.” The study’s co-author of the paper and lecturer at Yale, Wake Smith, explained that an entirely new aircraft needs to be designed for the chemtrail program. “No existing aircraft has the combination of altitude and payload capabilities required.” Researchers investigated what it would cost to develop an aircraft they call he SAI Lofter (SAIL). The report indicates the fuselage would have a stubby design and the wing area, as well as the thrust, would need to be twice as large. The estimated cost of the plane, a whopping $2 billion and $350 million to modify existing engines.

Trump mocks Macron, blames French riots on Paris climate accord – US President Donald Trump has criticised his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron in the wake of the recent large-scale anti-government protests over high taxes. Trump posted several messages about the demonstrations on his Twitter account, claiming the protests were a direct result of the Paris climate agreement of which France is a signatory, but the United States is not. “I am glad that my friend @EmmanuelMacron and the protestors in Paris have agreed with the conclusion I reached two years ago. The Paris Agreement is fatally flawed because it raises the price of energy for responsible countries while whitewashing some of the worst polluters in the world,” Trump wrote in the tweets. ….in the world. I want clean air and clean water and have been making great strides in improving America’s environment. But American taxpayers – and American workers – shouldn’t pay to clean up others countries’ pollution. – Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2018 The US president also retweeted conservative pundit Charlie Kirk, who falsely claimed France is a socialist country, the riots in the country did not receive any media attention and that protesters shouted: “we want Trump”. Trump’s tweets come as the French government mulls changes to a wealth tax that partially led to massive protests across the country over the last weeks. Government spokesperson Benjamin Griveaux told local media on Wednesday that the changes to the wealth tax could be turned back if not successful. “If a measure that we have taken, which is costing the public money, turns out not to be working, if it’s not going well, we’re not stupid – we would change it,” Griveaux said. The protests, which started November 17, were mostly about record prices at the pump, with the cost of diesel increasing by about 20 percent in the past year to an average of 1.49 euros ($1.68) a litre.Despite the protests, President Macron then announced further taxes on fuel, set to take effect on January 1, 2019, in a move he said was necessary to combat climate change and protect the environment. The decision sparked the so-called yellow vest protest movement, which takes its name from the high-visibility jackets participants adopted as a symbol of their complaint.

France’s fuel tax retreat dismays COP24 climate talks – France’s sudden U-turn over an unpopular fuel tax in the face of violent anti-government protests sent shivers through the COP24 climate summit. That’s because the sight of one of Europe’s most climate ambitious countries beating a hasty retreat over a proposal that would have hiked gasoline tax by 4 cents, or just under 3 percent, highlighted the difficulty of imposing any economic pain in the name of tackling climate change. The tax proposal sparked weeks of riots that devastated Paris, blocked highways across the country and left four people dead. France’s troubles were seized upon by climate skeptics to underline the unpopularity of costly decarbonization efforts.

France’s Gas Tax Disaster Shows We Can’t Save Earth by Screwing Over Poor People — France has turned into a bubbling cauldron of unrest over the past month as the so-called yellow vest movement has put up roadblocks and taken to the streets to protest a gas tax. Last week’s protests turned violent and facing a crisis, the government of Emmanuel Macron announced on Tuesday it would put a six-month moratorium on the tax.The tax was meant to combat climate change and reduce carbon pollution. While it likely would’ve done that, it would’ve done so on the backs of France’s rural low and middle class. The mass revolt against it doesn’t mean those groups oppose climate action. It means that Macron needs to include them in discussions about the best way to address climate change as part of a just transition, something the world at-large is grappling with as it aims to get a handle on carbon emissions.More than 280,000 protesters donned yellow safety vests that motorists are required to keep in their cars and took to the streets across France last weekend. The protests have arisen organically through Facebook and other social media platforms, and span the ideological divide. Their focus has largely been on the unfairness of Macron’s proposed gas tax, which would’ve raised prices by €0.029 per liter ($0.12 a gallon) on unleaded gas and €0.065 per liter ($0.24 a gallon) on diesel. Rising oil prices have pushed fuel prices higher still now was among the worst times to propose such a tax.The French government has spent years promoting diesel, and the tax would’ve left many already struggling to make ends meet with higher fuel bills on vehicles they’ve been encouraged to buy. The money it raised would also have been used to combat the national deficit, which has been made worse in part by the Macron government’s policies, like lifting portions of a wealth tax. In short, the gas tax was a technocratic fix without any real constituency and the benefits were poorly explained, leaving it open to criticism and protest. The yellow vests enjoy a broad base of support with a recent poll showing that 72 percent of the French public is sympathetic to the cause. The fight against the tax is not a fight against climate policy, however. “We are not against the ecology, on the contrary,” Benoit Julou, a spokesperson for the yellow vest movement, said on a France 3 talk show last week. Rather it shows that any policies that only consider climate benefits and are made top-down are destined to fail.

US plans to ‘showcase ways to use fossil fuels’ at a UN climate conference – The world’s nations are gathering this week for the second time since President Trump took office to discuss how they will try to stop runaway climate change. Despite a vow from Trump to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, the United States is again sending a delegation to the U.N. conference, which is being held in Poland. But the Trump administration is not attending the two-week meeting without making its policy preferences known. The U.S. government is planning to hold a side event promoting fossil fuels as part of the solution to global warming. The Trump administration plans to reinsert its voice at the climate conference in Katowice, in southern Poland’s coal country. There the U.S. government will hold a panel titled “U.S. Innovative Technologies Spur Economic Dynamism.” The event is meant to “showcase ways to use fossil fuels as cleanly and efficiently as possible, as well as the use of emission-free nuclear energy,” the State Department said in a statement. “These job-creating innovations have contributed to reducing U.S. emissions while also growing our economy and providing reliable and affordable access to energy,” the statement continued. “Fossil fuels will continue to be used across the globe for decades to come.” Numerous analyses suggest capturing carbon for coal-fired power will be necessary to simultaneously meet energy needs and climate goals since renewable sources such as wind and solar power cannot ramp up fast enough. “This is obviously not a popular message” at a climate conference, former Trump White House energy policy advisor George David Banks said in an interview. Banks made the administration’s presentation in Germany last year.

EPA plans to ease carbon emissions rules for new coal-fired power plants –The Environment Protection Agency on Thursday announced plans to ease rules for new coal plants, marking the Trump administration’s latest effort to roll back Obama-era climate regulations.The EPA’s proposal would allow newly built power plants to pump more planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It would scrap a 2015 provision that requires coal-burning plants to capture carbon emissions and store the greenhouse gas underground, a technology that has not been proven at commercial scale. “By replacing onerous regulations with high, yet achievable, standards, we can continue America’s historic energy production, keep energy prices affordable, and encourage new investments in cutting-edge technology that can then be exported around the world,” acting EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement. Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, said the Obama Administration’s determination was “disingenuous” because it “knew that the technology was not adequately demonstrated.” The move is largely symbolic. There are currently no plans to build new coal-fired power plants in the United States. The facilities not only faced higher regulatory burdens during the Obama administration, but stiff competition from cheap, cleaner-burning natural gas and renewable energy sources like wind and solar power.This year, U.S. coal consumption fell to its lowest in 39 years. Between 2007 and 2017, the United States retired 55 gigawatts of its total capacity of 313 gigawatts of coal-fired power. In 2018 alone, another 14 gigawatts are scheduled to come offline. “Today’s proposal is nothing more than another thoughtless attempt by the Trump Administration to prop up their backwards and false narrative about reviving coal at the expense of science, public safety, and reality,” Mary Anne Hitt, senior director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, said in a statement.

Making Manchin the Ranking Member of Energy Committee Might Be a Compromise Too Far – Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, like most coal-state Democrats, is a friend of coal. Manchin’s tolerance for the industry is at odds with his party’s public commitment to clean energy, however, and that incongruity may soon become newly salient. As Politico reported on Thursday, Manchin is expected to become the Democrat’s ranking member of the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee. That promotion would give him a role in shaping the Senate’s climate-change policy, even though coal made Manchin a wealthy man. As the New York Times reported in 2011, Manchin earned over $1.3 million from a coal brokerage Enersystems, Inc., in the 19 months before he first entered the U.S. Senate. At the time, Manchin said the income would not influence his votes, and that his earnings were in a blind trust. But as Emily Atkin noted early on Thursday in The New Republic, Manchin has been a pro-coal senator. During his 2010 Senate run, Manchin infamously filmed himself shooting a copy of the cap-and-trade bill, which established a cap on greenhouse emissions. In 2013, Manchin slammed President Barack Obama for allegedly declaring a “war on coal” via environmental regulatory reforms. “After Pope Francis released an encyclical on the need to fight climate change, Manchin responded with a statement about the importance of coal for America’s future,” Atkin wrote. Manchin has also earned a mediocre 45 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters, and while the senator has steadfastly maintained that climate change is real, he also voted in favor of a 2015 “resolution of disapproval” that would, as Vice put it, “nullify the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan – the first nation-wide limit on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, and key climate change policy.”

Poland’s Coal Habit Draws New Fire as UN Climate Talks Begin -Greenpeace has threatened to sue Poland’s biggest energy company if it does not take concrete action to reduce its climate impacts. Greenpeace Poland sent a letter last week demanding that state-owned Polska Grupa Energetyczna (PGE) stop investing in new coal plants and develop a plan to completely cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. The campaign group said it would take PGE to court if the company does not respond.The threat adds more pressure to Poland as it hosts the latest United Nations climate conference, COP24, in Katowice this week. Last month, another Polish energy company, Enea, was sued by environmental law group ClientEarth for green-lighting a new coal power plant.The Polish government has been unapologetic about its support for coal, which currently supplies around 80 percent of the country’s energy, and the industry is politically influential. It sparked a controversy by naming several state-owned fossil fuel firms as sponsors of the climate talks, including PGE and coal mining company JastrzÄ™bska SpóÅ‚ka WÄ™glowa. Katowice itself is a key coal mining centre.Poland has promised to reduce its coal use by 50 percent by 2040, but this is far behind other European countries that have goals to phase it out completely within the next decade including the UK, France and Italy . The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which issued dire warningsabout a climate crisis looming in the next few decades, said that to avoid catastrophic climate impacts, coal use must drop from providing 40 percent of the world’s electricity currently to between 1 and 7 percent by 2050.

China’s unbridled export of coal power imperils climate goals – Even as China struggles to curb domestic coal-fired power and the deadly pollution it produces, the world’s top carbon emitter is aggressively exporting the same troubled technology to Asia, Africa and the Middle East, an investigation by AFP has shown. “China is a world leader in terms of embracing the policy and investment needs to progressively decarbonise its economy,” said Tim Buckley, director of energy finance studies at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). “But internationally, China continues to invest in a range of coal project in direct contradiction to its domestic energy strategy.” A quarter of coal plants in the planning stage or under construction outside China are backed by Chinese state-owned financial institutions and corporations, according to research by IEEFA, an energy finance think-tank.

Coal’s lingering role complicates climate change efforts: Kemp (Reuters) – Global coal consumption is set to remain steady in absolute terms through the middle of the century, even as its relative share of total energy consumption declines in favour of oil, gas and renewables.The persistence of coal consumption is consistent with the experience of earlier energy transitions and is one of the central challenges for policymakers concerned about climate change.Continued coal combustion is one reason why policymakers are not on track to achieve their target of limiting the rise in global temperatures to well below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.Coal is projected to be the slowest growing primary energy source over the next three decades, with its share of total primary energy consumption expected to decline to just 20 percent by 2050 from 27 percent in 2015.But in absolute terms, global coal consumption is still projected to be around 165 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs) in 2050 up from 158 quadrillion BTUs in 2015, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.Rising consumption in India and other developing economies is expected to offset reduced combustion in the United States and China (“International Energy Outlook“, U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2017).Long-term projections have proved notoriously inaccurate in the past because they are sensitive to small changes in the assumptions underlying the model, so any effort at future-gazing should be treated with caution. But the projections show how the impact of rising populations and prosperity in developing economies is likely to drive an enormous increase in total energy demand which will continue to support absolute coal consumption.

TVA to keep cutting carbon with natgas, nuclear power plants: CEO (Reuters) – The chief executive of Tennessee Valley Authority said on Thursday the U.S.-owned power generator will keep cutting carbon emissions in future years after replacing much of its coal-fired fleet with plants run on natural gas, nuclear and renewables. Since Bill Johnson took the reigns as CEO in 2013, TVA has spent $15 billion to modernize its generating fleet, reduced carbon emissions by retiring coal units, and cut debt by $3.5 billion, all while keeping consumer electric prices basically flat for six years. “Carbon emissions are now down to 50 percent below 2005 levels. I predict CO2 will fall to 60 percent below 2005 levels by 2020/2021 and 70 percent by the end of the next decade,” Johnson told Reuters in an interview. Johnson, who announced his retirement in November, said he will continue as CEO until the board finds a replacement. The company continued to shut coal-fired units over the past two years despite efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump to prop up the coal industry by sweeping away former President Barack Obama’s climate change regulations, like the Clean Power Plan. Johnson said TVA shut old coal plants for economic reasons. “We have reduced carbon emissions simply by doing what is the most efficient and effective way to serve our customers,” Johnson said, noting the low cost of gas in recent years has made it more economic for TVA to build a new gas-fired power plant than refurbish a 60-year old coal unit. Over Johnson’s tenure, TVA’s generating mix transitioned from 41 percent coal and 12 percent gas in 2012, the year before he became CEO, to 19 percent coal and 20 percent gas in 2018, according to TVA’s federal filings. And TVA may not be done retiring coal plants. In November, the company said it is seeking public comment on potential environmental and socioeconomic impacts of closing the 870-megawatt (MW) Bull Run coal plant in Tennessee and the last 971-MW coal unit at the Paradise plant in Kentucky. One megawatt can power about 1,000 U.S. homes.

A Coal Ash Spill Made These Workers Sick. Now, They’re Fighting for Compensation. – For dozens of Tennessee workers who cleaned up the nation’s worst coal ash spill and claimed it made them sick, the recent jury verdict against their employer was a major victory after a five-year slog through the federal courts. The jury found Jacobs Engineering failed to protect the workers, and it concluded that their exposure to toxic heavy metals and radiation in the coal ash could be responsible for their illnesses, from skin rashes to lung disease to cancer. Now, their attorneys will need to link each plaintiff’s coal ash exposure to their illness or death to determine financial damages, and legal experts say this step will be more difficult. The outcome is likely to be closely watched by others around the country who live near coal ash sites, and by companies that produce and dispose of coal ash waste. The human toll from the coal ash spill has been devastating. Some 30 people who cleaned up the ash at the power plant near Kingston have died with ailments that can be linked to exposure to toxic elements of coal ash, and more than 250 are sick or dying, according to an investigation by the Knoxville News Sentinel and the USA Today Network in Tennessee. Lead can cause hypertension or peripheral neuropathy, for example. Arsenic, cadmium and fine particulates can cause coronary artery disease. Cadmium and fine particulates can cause chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Ionizing radiation can cause leukemia. This first lawsuit involves an initial group of 70 plaintiffs. The incoming congressman for the Knoxville area, Republican Tim Burchett, has called for federal agencies or Congress to investigate the illnesses and deaths. “Those affected deserve answers and anyone at fault should be held accountable,” he said.

Toxic waste from 22 coal plants in Illinois puts drinking water for nearby communities at risk, reports show – Toxic waste contaminates water sources near all but two of the coal-fired power plants in Illinois, according to a new analysis based largely on testing conducted by energy companies.The compilation of industry-supplied reports from 24 coal plants highlights how federal and state officials have failed for decades to hold corporations accountable for the millions of tons of ash and other harmful byproducts created by the burning of coal to generate electricity.Most of the waste in Illinois has been mixed with water and pumped into unlined pits, where testing shows harmful levels of arsenic, chromium, lead and other heavy metals are steadily oozing through the ground toward lakes and rivers, including the state’s only national scenic river. One of the sites is the Waukegan Generating Station on Lake Michigan, a former ComEd coal plant now owned by NRG Energy that is ringed by two unlined ash ponds and an unlicensed landfill. Another is a Joliet quarry where ComEd and other companies dumped coal ash until NRG overhauled a nearby coal plant in 2016 to burn natural gas.Ten of the sites pose a danger to the drinking water supplies of nearby communities, according to the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, including the Joliet dump and ash pits surrounding another NRG coal plant along the Des Plaines River in Romeoville. “We’re reaching a turning point as energy companies are proposing to leave coal ash in floodplains of rivers and exposed to groundwater,” said Andrew Rehn, water resources engineer at the Prairie Rivers Network, another group that worked on the report. “We need stronger rules that provide permanent protection with a financial guarantee, and give the public a voice in these decisions.” Because the state’s energy system is deregulated and companies sell electricity generated in Illinois on the open market, shareholders, rather than ratepayers, would be forced to pay the tab for cleaning up the coal ash dumps. Faced with an intense lobbying effort by energy lobbyists, a state rule-making panel dominated by members appointed by Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner has repeatedly delayed action on the proposal. Federal officials also have been slow to act.

Clean coal’s dirty secret: More pollution, not less — Champions of coal say the superabundant fossil fuel can be made environmentally friendlier by refining it with chemicals – a “clean coal” technology backed by a billion dollars in U.S. government tax subsidies annually.,But refined coal has a dirty secret. It regularly fails to deliver on its environmental promises, as electric giant Duke Energy Corp found.Duke began using refined coal at two of its North Carolina power plants in August 2012. The decision let the company tap a lucrative federal subsidy designed to help the American coal industry reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides – also known as NOx, the main contributor to smog and acid rain – along with other pollutants. In nearly three years of burning the treated coal, the Duke power plants collected several million dollars in federal subsidies. But the plants also pumped out more NOx, not less, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency analyzed by Reuters.The NOx emission rate at Duke’s Marshall Steam Station power plant in Sherrills Ford, North Carolina, for example, was between 33 percent and 76 percent higher in the three years from 2012 to 2014 than in 2011, the year before Marshall started burning refined coal, the EPA data shows.The utility also discovered that one of the chemicals used to refine the coal, calcium bromide, had reached a nearby river and lakes – raising levels of carcinogens in the water supply for more than a million people in greater Charlotte.Duke stopped using refined coal at the plants in May 2015 because of the water pollution problems, said spokeswoman Erin Culbert. Bromide levels in the region’s drinking water dropped sharply several months later, said Barry Gullett, the city’s water director, in a 2015 memo.Duke’s experience reflects a fundamental problem with the U.S. clean coal incentive program, a Reuters examination has found. Refined coal shows few signs of reducing NOx emissions as lawmakers intended, according to regulatory documents, a Reuters analysis of EPA emissions data, and interviews with power plant owners, scientists and state environmental regulators.

U.S. coal consumption in 2018 expected to be the lowest in 39 years — EIA expects total U.S. coal consumption in 2018 to fall to 691 million short tons (MMst), a 4% decline from 2017 and the lowest level since 1979. U.S. coal consumption has been falling since its peak in 2007, and EIA forecasts that 2018 coal consumption will be 437 MMst (44%) lower than 2007 levels, mainly driven by declines in coal use in the electric power sector. The electric power sector is the nation’s largest consumer of coal, accounting for 93% of total U.S. coal consumption between 2007 and 2018. The decline in coal consumption since 2007 is the result of both the retirements of coal-fired power plants and the decreases in the capacity factors, or utilization, of coal plants as increased competition from natural gas and renewable sources have reduced coal’s market share. In 2007, coal-fired capacity in the United States totaled 313 gigawatts (GW) across 1,470 generators. By the end of 2017, 529 of those generators, with a total capacity of 55 GW, had retired. So far in 2018, 11 GW of coal-fired generating capacity has retired through September, and another 3 GW are expected to retire in the final three months of the year, based on data reported to EIA by plant owners and operators. If these plants retire as planned, 2018 will be the second-highest year for coal retirements. Another 4 GW of capacity are planning to retire by the end of 2019. One of the main drivers of coal retirements is the price of coal relative to natural gas. Natural gas prices have stayed relatively low since domestic natural gas production began to grow in 2007. This period of sustained, low natural gas prices has kept the cost of generating electricity with natural gas competitive with generation from coal. Other factors such as the age of generators, changes in regional electricity demand, and increased competition from renewables have led to decreasing coal capacity.

Trump’s EPA Wants to Build More Coal Plants as U.S. Consumption Falls to Lowest Level in 39 Years – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is currently overseen by ex-coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, is expected to announce a plan to end a climate regulation on coal-fired power plants on Thursday, the New York Times reported, citing four unnamed sources.The move would lift an Obama-era rule that required newly built coal-fired plants to use carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, ultimately removing a hurdle to build new plants, the publication said.That mandate, finalized in 2015, has previously faced legal challenges from coal companies and conservative lawmakers who argue that CCS is too costly and not commercially available, as Utility Dive noted.”We are supportive of EPA’s decision to revise the standards for new coal plants,” Michelle Bloodworth, president and CEO of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, told the Washington Examiner in a report published Tuesday. “We do not feel like the practicality of CCS has been adequately demonstrated or economically feasible. If we are ever going to build new coal plants in the country again, we will need reasonable standards.”The Trump administration’s latest environmental rollback is not expected to immediately jumpstart investments and construction of new coal plants, which are not financially viable because of cheap natural gas and environmental regulations, the Times said. Rather, it’s a yet another signal from the Trump administration that it is ignoring dire climate warnings and embracing the polluting fossil fuel industry instead.

EPA lifting greenhouse gas limits on US coal power plants -The Environmental Protection Agency, now led by acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, has announced more rollbacks regulations on coal-fired power plants. It’s a striking move for two big reasons: No new coal plants are being built in the US, and the EPA itself (along with 12 other federal agencies) recently put out a sweeping report detailing the need to reduce emissions from fossil fuels because of the grave threat of climate change. The new proposal involves loosening an Obama-era restriction on how much carbon dioxide new coal power plants can emit. Known as the New Source Performance Standards, a provision under the Clean Air Act, the rule established in 2015 said coal plants couldn’t emit more than 1,400 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour. This would have likely required new coal plants to install carbon capture technologies to limit some of their emissions. But the coal industry argued in court that these technologies are too expensive and immature to deploy at scale. The EPA now wants to relax the limit to 1,900 pounds of CO2 per MWh. “Consistent with President Trump’s executive order promoting energy independence, EPA’s proposal would rescind excessive burdens on America’s energy providers and level the playing field so that new energy technologies can be a part of America’s future,” said Wheeler in a press release.

U.S. Utilities Set To Retire Coal Capacity At Double The 2017 Rate – Domestic coal-fired power plants are set to shut down at double the rate of last year. The retirements would remove about 6 percent of all coal-generated capacity in the U.S. This comes despite the Trump administration’s promise to extend a lifeline to the coal industry.The utilities that coal once relied on have wandering eyes. Natural gas and renewable energy are increasingly competitive and efficient resources. S & P Global Market Intelligence calculated the impending capacity retirement. Coal reporter and co-author Taylor Kuykendall said the downward trend is clear.”In the meantime, these power plants that are already existing are only getting older; they’re only gonna get less efficient, and they’re only going to get closer to retirement age. None of these plants are gonna suddenly become brand new coal plants,” he said. Kuykendall wrote it’s clear utilities see a benefit to moving away from coal. “Whether because of climate risk or some other concern about coal, they’re not seeing those customers or investors wanting to be involved in the new coal plants or even keeping older coal plants around anymore,” Kuykendall said. Ashleigh Cotting, a commodites data journalist a S & P Global Market Intelligence and co-author of the same report said, “in our analysis, we found that the retirement slated for 2019 through 2024, only represented about 9 percent of operating coal capacity.” That’s an additional 9 percent. Exports have kept the coal market going, according to Kuykendall. It’s worth noting there’s still a lot of coal capacity in the country. Of 245.6 gigawatts of power, 14.3 are scheduled to come offline. Still, that’s the highest level since 2015.

Oakland Faces Lawsuit Over Obstruction of Coal Shipping- – A developer fighting to export coal from a planned marine shipping terminal in Oakland sued the city in state court Tuesday, accusing local officials of obstructing the project.It’s the second lawsuit against the city over the Oakland Bulk & Oversized Terminal (OBOT). In May, a federal judge overturned a ban prohibiting the storage and handling of coal at bulk-goods facilities in Oakland, suggesting it was enacted to kill the terminal project.Now, OBOT’s developers claim in a complaint filed in Alameda County Superior Court that the city has renewed efforts to obstruct the project, this time by falsely asserting OBOT defaulted on its lease at the former Oakland Army Base and giving it 72 hours to vacate the property.“In one egregious omission or act after another, the city has failed to perform its material obligations under the lease and [development agreement], and has aggressively taken steps to prevent OBOT’s performance under the lease and receipt of its benefit of the bargain thereunder,” the developers’ lawyer, Barry Lee of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, wrote in the 50-page complaint. OBOT’s developers – including Phil Tagami, a friend of Gov. Jerry Brown – want to haul coal by train from nearly 1,000 miles away in Utah and ship it to Asia through the $250 million facility. The terminal is being built next to the Port of Oakland and would be capable of exporting up to 10 million tons of coal annually, making it the largest coal export terminal on the West Coast.But in June 2016, the Oakland City Council passed two measures prohibiting the storage and handling of coal and petroleum coke at any bulk-materials facility in the city after multiple studies found coal dust blowing off trains can cause asthma or cancer, and that emissions from the terminal would worsen air quality in West Oakland, a community primarily composed of low-income people of color that already suffers from some of the worst air quality in California due to its proximity to major freeways and the port.The new regulations brought the project to a halt. Tagami sued in federal court to reverse the ban the following December, claiming it violated a 2013 development agreement between OBOT and the city.Tagami, whose Oakland-based real estate firm California Capital and Investment Group owns OBOT, argued the city knew before signing the development agreement the terminal might handle coal and didn’t object, but caved to political pressure from e environmental groups after four Utah counties announced plans to invest $53 million in the terminal to export their coal.

Monumental Disaster at the Department of the Interior – This is a tough time to be a federal scientist – or any civil servant in the federal government. The Trump administration is clamping down on science, denying dangerous climate change and hollowing out the workforces of the agencies charged with protecting American health, safety and natural resources.At the Department of the Interior (DOI), with its mission to conserve and manage America’s natural and cultural resources, the Trump administration’s political appointees are stumbling over one another to earn accolades for disabling agency operations. I should know; I was one of dozens of senior executives targeted by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke for reassignment in a staff purge just six months into the new administration. From that day onward, Zinke and his political staff have consistently sidelined scientists and experts while handing the agency’s keys over to oil, gas and mining interests. The only saving grace is that Zinke and his colleagues are not very good at it, and in many cases the courts are stopping them in their tracks. The effects on science, scientists and the federal workforce, however, will be long-lasting.In a new report, Science Under Siege at the Department of the Interior, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has documented some of the most egregious and anti-science policies and practices at the DOI under Secretary Zinke. The report describes suppression of science, denial of climate change, the silencing and intimidation of agency staff, and attacks on science-based laws that help protect our nation’s world-class wildlife and habitats. It is a damning report and required reading for anyone who values public lands, wildlife, cultural heritage, and health and safety. It would be impossible to cover everything this clumsy political wrecking crew is up to, but the report provides details on the most prominent actions that deserve greater scrutiny, such as: the largest reduction in public lands protection in our nation’s history; a systematic failure to acknowledge or act on climate change; unprecedented constraints on the funding and communication of science; and a blatant disregard for public health and safety. Why is this administration so scared of science? Because, while science provides the best evidence we have for making policy decisions that serve the broader public, Ryan Zinke has been very clear that he is in office to serve the oil, gas and mining industries, not the general public.

Shell Ties New Climate Targets to Exec Pay – Royal Dutch Shell plc is introducing short-term carbon emission targets that will be directly tied to executive pay, the company announced Monday.The new Net Carbon Footprint targets will be set for periods of three to five years and will begin in 2020 and run to 2050 – by when Shell hopes to reduce its carbon emissions by half. The company is aiming for 20 percent reduction by 2035.Shell said it plans to link the new targets to executives’ remuneration (pay) policy, which will be subject to a shareholder vote at the 2020 Annual General Meeting.The company said the announcement is part of a drive to increase transparency around the topic of climate change, and to create clear benchmarks for performance.“Meeting the challenge of tackling climate change requires unprecedented collaboration and this is demonstrated by our engagements with investors,” Shell CEO Ben van Beurden said in a company statement. “We are taking important steps towards turning our Net Carbon Footprint ambition into reality by setting shorter-term targets. This ambition positions the company well for the future and seeks to ensure we thrive as the world works to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change.” Shell’s decision to adopt new climate targets comes just months after the company’s CEO said it would rather stick to broader ambitions than set specific climate targets. Van Beurden said this in light of the threat of additional legal action after Shell and other Big Oil companies were slapped with lawsuits by U.S. states and municipalities around climate change, Bloomberg reported.

California Becomes First State to Require Solar Panels on New Homes – California has taken the final step to be the first state in the nation to require solar panels on new homes. The California Building Standards Commission on Wednesday unanimously upheld a May 9 decision to require solar panels on homes up to three stories. The requirement goes into effect Jan. 1, 2020. Currently, just 9% of single-family detached homes in California have solar panels. But as the state pushes toward decreasing greenhouse gas emissions – and with a 2045 goal to transition to a fully renewable energy grid devoid of fossil fuels – this rule will help accelerate that progress. Aside from energy efficiency, solar panels reduce ozone-damaging household emissions, most of which come from natural gas-generated electricity.In the long-term, solar panels benefit homeowners. While the upfront cost for building a home will increase – by as much as $10,000, according to the California Energy Commission, or as much as $25,000-30,000, according to home construction company Meritage Homes – long-term energy bill savings will be considerable.

Aroostook wind power backers see opportunity if western Maine transmission line fails – Amid opposition to an overhead powerline that would bring Quebec hydro electricity to Massachusetts through western Maine, a group of companies behind a wind power proposal in Aroostook County are hoping their project will become a viable alternative. Amid opposition to an overhead powerline that would bring Quebec hydro electricity to Massachusetts through western Maine, a group of companies behind a wind power proposal in Aroostook County are hoping their project will become a viable alternative. Under a renewable energy procurement program by Massachusetts, Central Maine Power is seeking to build a 145-mile high-voltage transmission line carrying hydro power from Quebec through western Maine and into New England’s energy grid. The $1 billion proposed transmission line is facing significant opposition from western Maine communities and a host of environmental and outdoors groups, as did the initial proposed transmission line, the Northern Pass, that New Hampshire authorities rejected in March. The Maine proposal now needs several permits and approval from the Maine Public Utilities Commission, which is set to make a decision in March 2019. Maine Power Express proposes bringing electricity to Massachusetts from new wind farms in Aroostook County via underground transmission lines from the southern Aroostook area to Searsport and then through underwater transmission cables from Searsport to Boston. The transmission lines would total approximately 300 miles and would cost $1 billion or more, Gahagan said. Massachusetts ultimately selected Hydro-Quebec’s proposal to supply more than 1,000 megawatts of hydro-electricity. That proposal had the Northern Pass as its first choice for transmitting the power and the western Maine transmission line as its second. If Central Maine Power’s transmission line fails to gain approval, Gahagan said that the backers of the Maine Power Express proposal want to get fresh consideration from Massachusetts, such as through a reopened procurement process.

Kudlow calls for end to subsidies for electric cars, renewables — White House chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on Monday the Trump administration will seek to end subsidies for electric cars and renewable energy sources, according to reports. Kudlow said he expected subsidies for electric cars would end by 2020 or 2021. “We want to end, we will end those subsidies and others of the Obama administration,” he said, according to Bloomberg. It’s unclear how the administration plans to cut the tax credits, since Congress enacted them and would have to act to end them. Electric car buyers currently get tax credits of $7,500 per vehicle. But that phases out as each company sells 200,000 cars – a level that a handful of companies, including General Motors, are approaching. Utilities also get tax credits for producing wind power and for installing solar power equipment. Those incentives, enacted before former President Obama took office, are on track to phase out in the coming years. The remarks were made in response to a question about what the administration would do about GM’s plans to layoff 15,000 people and shutter five plants across North America. The company’s plans have sparked outrage in Washington from both parties. President Trump last week floated cutting GM’s subsidies for electric vehicles and raising auto tariffs to punish the company if it cuts jobs in the U.S. Conservatives have pushed back against subsidies and other policies meant to promote renewables over traditional sources. Democrats, though, are calling for a Green New Deal that would transition the country to 100 percent renewable energy for electricity to deal with climate change.

Will Koch Pull the Plug on Electric Cars? – When multibillionaire industrialist Charles Koch perceives a potential threat to his fossil fuel empire, he doesn’t mess around.To undercut the burgeoning wind industry, Koch’s network of advocacy groups, think tanks and Capitol Hill friends fought to terminate the federal production tax credit, and Congress ultimately agreed in 2015 to phase it out over the following four years.To slow the exponential growth of solar power, his network has been lobbying state legislatures to curtail the practice of net metering, which gives solar panel owners credit for the excess energy they generate and send back to the grid.Now Koch wants to kill a federal income tax credit of up to $7,500 for electric vehicle (EV) buyers for the first 200,000 EVs each automaker sells. Although EVs make up less than 2 percent of total vehicle sales nationally, 123,000 of them were snapped up in the first six months of this year, more than twice the amount sold in all of 2015, and more carmakers are expected to introduce new EV models over the next few months. Alarm bells are going off at Koch Industries headquarters.Last year, the initial draft of the House Republican tax reform bill included a provision ending the EV tax credit, but it survived in the final, end-of-the-year tax package President Trump signed in December. This year’s tax-break-extenders bill finds the Koch network back at work to block the EV tax credit, and it got a boost this week from White House chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow, who said the Trump administration wants to end EV subsidies. The rationale behind the tax credit, which Congress passed in 2009, is to create a stable market for EVs much in the same way government policies helped the gasoline-hybrid market grow. Congress has a long history of providing tax breaks to help emerging and established industries alike, and EVs are a natural candidate because auto industry entry barriers are steep, and electrifying the U.S. transportation sector is one of the most important steps the country can take to address global warming.

Congo declares cobalt ‘strategic’, nearly tripling royalty rate (Reuters) – Democratic Republic of Congo has declared cobalt a “strategic” substance, a government decree showed on Monday, nearly tripling the royalty rate miners will pay on the key component in electric batteries to 10 percent. Prime Minister Bruno Tshibala signed the decree, which is dated Nov. 24, despite fierce opposition from leading investors including Glencore and China Molybdenum, who have lobbied against tax hikes under a new mining code adopted earlier this year. The 10 percent royalty rate will also apply to coltan, which is used to power electronic devices, and germanium, which is used to make transistors. Before they were designated “strategic”, the minerals were all subject to a royalty rate of 3.5 percent. That was already an increase over the 2 percent rate in Congo’s previous mining code, which was in effect until June. Congo is Africa’s top copper producer and mines more than 60 percent of the world’s cobalt. Foreign investors say the tax hikes under the new code will deter further investment and have threatened to challenge some parts of the regulation in arbitration. Cobalt prices surged over the past two years, due largely to demand for electric cars, but have fallen more than 40 percent since March due to a surplus of cobalt chemicals.

Connecticut state regulators clear Millstone nuclear plants to compete in zero-emission energy auctions – Owners of the Millstone nuclear power plants will now be able to compete against wind and solar to sell power in “zero emission” state energy auctions as a result of a final decision issued Wednesday by Connecticut regulators. The final decision by the state Public Utilities Regulatory Authority found that the Waterford facilities are “at risk of retirement” if Dominion isn’t allowed to participate in those zero emission energy auctions. Dominion officials repeatedly warned that it might be forced to close the nuclear plants if it wasn’t given access to those energy markets. State and regional officials say the Waterford plants are a critical part of Connecticut’s and New England’s power grid and loss of the facilities would create serious problems.

PJM completes Ohio Valley Electric Corp. integration – The PJM Interconnection integrated the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation as a new transmission zone within PJM at midnight Saturday, which includes 2,200 MW of coal-fired generation capacity along with 705 miles of 345-kilovolt transmission lines, the grid operator said Monday. “PJM determined that OVEC met the membership requirements outlined in the PJM Operating Agreement and that its integration would not cause any reliability challenges for PJM,” the grid operator said in a statement Monday. PJM also notified stakeholders Monday about “an issue” with posting the OVEC Residual Aggregate locational marginal price component of its posted day-ahead clearing prices for December 2, according to an email. The issue from Saturday has been resolved, PJM spokesman Jeff Fields said in an email. PJM is still investigating the cause of the problem and will have additional information to post tomorrow, Shields said. OVEC and its subsidiary Indiana-Kentucky Electric were formed in 1952 to provide power to uranium enrichment facilities near Portsmouth, Ohio, owned by the Atomic Energy Commission, a US Department of Energy predecessor. OVEC owns and operates two coal-fired power plants, the 1,300-MW Clifty Creek Generating Station located along the Ohio River in Jefferson County, Indiana; and the 1,086-MW Kyger Creek Generating Station located on the Ohio River in Gallia County, Ohio. Brian Chisling, OVEC’s corporate attorney said during a November 2017 PJM Markets and Reliability Committee meeting that the company has no plans to retire the units.

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