Environmental News For The Week 08Sept 2019

Written by rjs, MarketWatch 666

This is a collection of interesting news articles about the environment and related topics published last week. This is usually a Tuesday evening regular post at GEI (but can be posted at other times).

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Contaminant found in marijuana vaping products linked to deadly lung illnesses, tests show – State and federal health officials investigating mysterious lung illnesses linked to vaping have found the same chemical in samples of marijuana products used by people sickened in different parts of the country and who used different brands of products in recent weeks. The chemical is an oil derived from vitamin E. Investigators at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration found the oil in cannabis products in samples collected from patients who fell ill across the United States. FDA officials shared that information with state health officials during a telephone briefing this week, according to several officials who took part in the call. That same chemical was also found in nearly all cannabis samples from patients who fell ill in New York in recent weeks, a state health department spokeswoman said. While this is the first common element found in samples from across the country, health officials said it is too early to know whether this is causing the injuries. Vitamin E is found naturally in certain foods, such as canola oil, olive oil and almonds. The oil derived from the vitamin, known as vitamin E acetate, is commonly available as a nutritional supplement and is used in topical skin treatments. It is not known to cause harm when ingested as a vitamin supplement or applied to the skin. Its name sounds harmless, experts said, but its molecular structure could make it hazardous when inhaled. Its oil-like properties could be associated with the kinds of respiratory symptoms that many patients have reported: cough, shortness of breath and chest pain, officials said. “We knew from earlier testing by New York that they had found vitamin E acetate, but to have FDA talk about it from their overall testing plan, that was the most remarkable thing that we heard,” said one official who listened to the briefing but was not authorized to speak publicly. The FDA also told state officials Wednesday that its lab tests found nothing unusual in nicotine products that had been collected from sick patients, according to another person who took part in the call. The investigation has been particularly challenging for health authorities. “We don’t know what we’re looking for,” an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is leading the investigation, said last week.

Michigan Becomes First State To Ban E-Cigarette Sales, Citing Youth ‘Health Emergency’ — Michigan has become the first state to ban the sale of flavored e-cigarettes after its health department declared youth vaping a public health emergency. The ban is effective immediately and applies to all retail and online sales in the state, with businesses given 30 days to comply. According to The Washington Post, which broke the story early Wednesday, the ban will last for six months at which point lawmakers can renew it for another six months. Simultaneously there’s reported legislation being developed to put in place a permanent ban. Surprisingly it was Michigan and not California or New York – both typically at the forefront of banning products over health fears – to be the first to take aggressive legislative action. San Francisco was the first city that recently enacted a ban on e-cigarettes. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D) cited the state health department to say youth vaping was an urgent public health emergency which demanded immediate action. “My number one priority is keeping our kids safe and protecting the health of the people of Michigan,” Whitmer said. Though ironically vaping has been marketed as a “safer” alternative to traditional cigarettes, critics say the variety of flavors are designed to appeal to young people.

Hormone therapy during menopause raises breast cancer risk for years, study finds – A sweeping new analysis adds to the evidence that many women who take hormone therapy during menopause are more likely to develop breast cancer – and remain at higher risk of cancer for more than a decade after they stop taking the drugs. The study, published Thursday in the Lancet, looked at data from dozens of studies, including long-term data on more than 100,000 women who developed breast cancer after menopause. Half of those women had used what’s known as menopausal hormone therapy, or MHT. The longer women took the medicine, the more likely they were to develop breast cancer. Experts say the findings could shape how women and their health care providers decide how to manage symptoms of menopause. “This is a consensus of many researchers and many studies all around the world. These are important new results,” said said Valerie Beral, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Oxford and one of the lead authors of the new study. Women have long been prescribed synthetic versions to replace the hormones that decline during menopause. The medications – usually delivered in a pill, but sometimes in a patch, gel, or injection – provide women either estrogen or a combination of estrogen and progesterone. For many women, they help to tamp down symptoms of menopause, including osteoporosis. For years, research has suggested a potential link between MHT and an increased risk of breast cancer. But there wasn’t much information on whether that risk persisted, or how it differed based on the type of MHT a woman took. So an international group of researchers pulled together data from dozens of studies – published and unpublished – to examine the issue more closely. The researchers found that compared with women who never used MHT, women who did had a significantly higher risk of developing invasive breast cancer. They estimated that 6.3% of women who never used MHT developed breast cancer, compared to 8.3% of women who used the combination drug continually for five years. That’s roughly one extra cancer diagnosis for every 50 users.

Cancer now ‘leading cause of death’ in rich countries –Cancer has become the leading cause of death in rich nations, overtaking heart disease, according to the results of two landmark, decade-long global surveys of health trends released Tuesday.Heart disease remains the leading cause of mortality among middle-aged adults globally, accounting for more than 40 percent of deaths, the data showed.It was thought to have been responsible for around 17.7 million deaths in 2017. But in richer countries, cancer now kills more people than heart disease, according to the twin studies published in The Lancet medical journal.”The world is witnessing a new epidemiologic transition among the different categories of non-communicable diseases, with cardiovascular disease no longer the leading cause of death in high-income countries,” said Gilles Deganais, emeritus professor at Laval University, in Quebec. He said his team’s study showed that cancer was the second most common cause of death globally in 2017, accounting for just over a quarter (26 percent) of all deaths.Deganais said that as heart disease rates fell globally, cancer could become the leading cause of death worldwide “within just a few decades”. The study followed more than 160,000 adults, in high-, middle-, and low-income countries over the course of decade. It determined that people in poorer nations were on average 2.5 times more likely to die from heart disease than those in richer ones. It conversely found that non-infectious diseases such as cancer and pneumonia were less common in low-income states than in richer ones. A second study, also by researchers in Canada, and looking at data from patients in the same 21 countries, found that so-called “modifiable risk factors” accounted for 70 percent of heart disease cases globally. These included diet, behavioural and socioeconomic factors, they said.

Biohackers are pirating a cheap version of a million-dollar gene therapy – MIT Technology Review –Citing the tremendous cost of new drugs, an international group of biohackers say they are creating a knock-off of a million-dollar gene therapy.The drug being copied is Glybera, a gene therapy that was the world’s most expensive drug when it came on the market in Europe in 2015 with a $1 million per treatment price tag. Glybera was the first gene therapy ever approved to treat an inherited disease.Now a band of independent and amateur biologists say they have engineered a prototype of a simpler, low-cost version of Glybera, and they plan to call on university and corporate scientists to help them check, improve, and test it on animals.The group says it will start sharing the materials and describe their activities this weekend at Biohack the Planet, a conference in Las Vegas that hosts citizen scientists, journalists, and researchers for two days of presentations on body implants, biosafety, and hallucinogens. “This was developed in a shed in Mississippi, a warehouse in Florida, a bedroom in Indiana, and on a computer in Austria,” says Gabriel Licina, a biohacker based in South Bend, Indiana. He says the prototype gene therapy cost less than $7,000 to create. Experts briefed on the biohacking project were divided, with some calling it misguided and unlikely to work. Others say the excessive cost of genetic treatments has left patients without options and created an incentive to pirate genetic breakthroughs. “It’s a fairly big deal to see biohackers turning their focus to gene therapies because the potential consequences can be quite large,” said Rachel Sachs, an associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert on drug pricing. “They may see themselves as serving the interests of the patient community.”

Smartphone Radiation: iPhones Emitting Double Reported Levels – A recent investigation has reignited debate over the safety of cell and smartphones. The Chicago Tribune recently released findings of its own investigation into radiofrequency radiation emitted by popular smartphones, including several variations of the iPhone.Overall, Tribune reporters, using accredited lab tests that mimic human tissue, tested 11 models from four companies: Apple, Samsung, Motorola, and BLU.The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – which regulates cell phones, among other things, in the U.S. – has set radiation standards for cell phones at 1.6 watts per kilogram averaged over 1 gram of tissue. Most of the phones the Tribune tested well exceeded that amount at 2 millimeters, or the distance your phone would be in your pocket.”Radiofrequency radiation exposure from the iPhone 7 – one of the most popular smartphones ever sold – measured over the legal safety limit and more than double what Apple reported to federal regulators from its own testing,” the Tribune reported. Radiofrequency (RF) radiation is of a concern because, according to the FCC, “It has been known for many years that exposure to very high levels of RF radiation can be harmful due to the ability of RF energy to heat biological tissue rapidly.” Essentially, it operates the same way a microwave cooks food, and organs like the eyes and testes are particularly vulnerable because there’s not enough blood flow to cool them down. But there are larger concerns over how much radiation the U.S. federal government allows cell phones to emit, especially after the Tribune’s reporting found they often were in excess of that. The FCC’s standards were set in 1996 and reflected the typical amount of use during that time and on a 200-pound man. But phones back then were just that – phones. Now with unlimited games, applications, and social media, the average time spent on smartphones is now 3 hours and 10 minutes per day. And that’s from people of all ages, sizes and genders. Some of that use borders on addiction.

21 Million Americans Are Relying on Unsafe Drinking Water, Here’s What We Can Do About It – Since the Flint drinking water crisis erupted five years ago, Americans have realized that many cities and towns struggle to ensure safe water. Currently residents of Newark, New Jersey are drinking bottled water after the city realized lead filters it handed out had failed.While most water systems in the U.S. provide reliable, high-quality drinking water, our research has shown that as of a few years ago, 21 million people in the U.S. relied on water from utilities with health violations. Why? Infrastructures are aging, environmental hazards are evolving and cities lack the funds to make fixes.No amount of lead in the body is safe, and children under age five are especially at risk. Lead poisoningcan damage the central nervous system, reduce IQ, delay growth and cause behavior and learning problems. Nearly half a million children in the U.S. have elevated blood lead levels. Exposure comes primarily from lead paint, but lead in drinking water also contributes. Our research group studies long-term trends in drinking-water quality and what factors cause unsafe water. Our studies have shown that this public health crisis can be corrected through better enforcement, stricter sampling protocols, revised federal regulations and more funding for state agencies.

PFAS toxins found in drinking water throughout Southern California – Wells of nearly two dozen Southern California water agencies have reportable levels of PFAS, a chemical family increasingly linked to cancer, liver and kidney damage, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, low fertility, low birth weight and ulcerative colitis.Seven of those agencies have shut down wells in the past year because of the presence of those chemicals and two more plan closures, an investigation by the Southern California News Group found. The state only this year began ordering testing for the chemicals, and a state law requiring that customers be notified about the presence of those chemicals won’t kick in until next year. The substances are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they resist breaking down in nature. Over the decades, these chemicals have been used to help waterproof and stainproof clothes, shoes, furniture and carpets, to make nonstick cookware, to fortify cardboard food containers and paper food wrappers, to improve the firefighting foam used at airports and to assist in the process of chrome plating. “PFAS is the climate change of toxic chemicals,” said Andria Ventura, toxics program manager for the advocacy group Clean Water Action. “They never go away. Virtually all Americans have them in their blood. Babies are born with them. … They’re some of the scariest things I’ve worked on.” The Center for Disease Control has found PFAS in the blood of 98% of people 12 and older who were tested for the chemicals. Growing concern about the toxins led to the state to announce Aug. 23 that it was drastically lowering its required reporting threshold, making it likely that more water agencies will be reporting the toxins’ presence in upcoming months.

Germany to Ban Glyphosate From End of 2023 – Use of glyphosate will be banned in Germany from the end of 2023, after a phased effort to reduce its application by farmers. The ban, agreed by the Cabinet on Wednesday, is part of an insect conservation program from Environment Minister Svenja Schulze. It includes a “systematic reduction strategy,” which would initially prohibit use of the chemical in domestic gardens and allotments, and on the edge of farmers’ fields. Germany’s move comes after lawmakers in Austria passed a bill banning all use of the weedkiller, making the country the first to do so. Some 20 French mayors banned it from their municipalities last month – in defiance of their national government. Glyphosate – also the subject of legal claims over an alleged link with cancer – was developed by Monsanto under the brand name Roundup. The chemical is now out of patent and is marketed worldwide by dozens of other chemical groups. They include Dow Agrosciences and Germany’s BASF. Worries about the chemical’s safety came to light when a World Health Organization agency report concluded in 2015 that it probably causes cancer.

US Beekeepers File Suit Against Trump EPA Charging ‘Illegal’ Approval of Insecticide Linked to Mass Die-Off – A group of beekeepers joined forces on Friday against Trump’s EPA by filing a lawsuit over the agency’s move to put a powerful insecticide – one that scientists warn is part of the massive pollinator die-off across the U.S. – back on the market. The lawsuit (pdf) charges that the EPA’s approval of sulfoxaflor – touted by its manufacturer, agro-chemical giant Corteva, as a “next generation neonicotinoid” – was illegally rendered as it put industry interests ahead of the health of pollinators and ignored the available science.”EPA is harming not just the beekeepers, their livelihood, and bees, but the nation’s food system.””Honeybees and other pollinators are dying in droves because of insecticides like sulfoxaflor, yet the Trump administration removes restriction just to please the chemical industry,” said Greg Loarie, an attorney with Earthjustice, the legal aid group representing the beekeepers. “This is illegal and an affront to our food system, economy, and environment.” According to a statement by Earthjustice:EPA first approved sulfoxaflor in 2013, but thanks to a lawsuit brought by Pollinator Stewardship Council, the American Beekeeper Federation, and Earthjustice, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision. The Court ruled EPA failed to obtain reliable studies regarding the impact of sulfoxaflor on honeybee colonies.In 2016, EPA re-approved sulfoxaflor subject to significant restrictions to reduce the risk to honeybees and other pollinators. On July 12, 2019, without any public notice, the Trump administration removed these restrictions on sulfoxaflor and approved a host of new uses for the bee-killing insecticide.Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include beekeeper Jeff Anderson, the Pollinator Stewardship Council, and the American Beekeeper Federation.”It is inappropriate for EPA to solely rely on industry studies to justify bringing sulfoxaflor back into our farm fields,” said Michele Colopy of the Pollinator Stewardship Council. “Die-offs of tens of thousands of bee colonies continue to occur and sulfoxaflor plays a huge role in this problem. EPA is harming not just the beekeepers, their livelihood, and bees, but the nation’s food system.”

Armyworms continue their relentless attacks on crops worldwide – The fall armyworm is one of the most destructive pests in the world. The armyworm is actually the larval stage of the Spodoptera frugiperda moth, but it’s in this stage that the insect can wreak havoc on crops. The armyworm isn’t picky and can feed on more than 80 plant species. Researchers are racing to find ways to control and manage fall armyworm invasions,especially in countries in Africa where in recent years, the pest has destroyed billions of dollars worth of crops. The fall armyworm is native to tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas but was recently detected in Nigeria in 2016, according to the US Food and Agricultural Organization. By 2017, the fall armyworm spread to 28 countries in Africa. Last week during trade talks between Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and President Trump, it was agreed that Japan would buy excess US corn because of armyworm infestations. There are now fears that the pest will spread to Australia and Europe. Predators in South America and the southern US help manage fall armyworm populations. It’s still not known how the armyworm spread to Africa but the damage it can do, even in one night, is considerable. Roger Day from the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International office in Kenya has been monitoring the fall armyworms steady march across sub-Saharan Africa, and the pest has become a main priority. Day and a team of researchers estimated that uncontrolled armyworm infestations could cost $6.2 billion in crop damages. “The caterpillars eat rice, sugar cane and maize, and can destroy a farmer’s entire crop in a night,” Day told New Scientist.

Chinese Demand Threatens To Wipe Out Kenyan Donkey Stocks As ‘Pig Ebola’ Outbreak Worsens – As African swine flu – better known as ‘pig ebola’ – continues to ravage Chinese pig farms, triggering a massive surge in pork prices, we’ve written about how consumers’ search for alternatives to the dietary staple has turned duck farmers into millionaires overnight. But duck isn’t the only protein alternative that Chinese consumers are buying up in droves as pork prices have climbed nearly 70% over the past year, to near-unprecedented levels.As China Dialogue, a China-based English-language publication, reports, surging demand for Donkey meat and skin in China is rapidly depleting donkey stocks in Kenya. If demand continues to climb, animal rights activists warn, the Kenyan Donkey could soon disappear from the East African country. Over the past five years, four new donkey abbattoirs have opened up in Kenya to help meet rising demand in China. This, of course, predates the ‘pig ebola’ outbreak, as the Communist Party and state-backed agribusiness has struggled to source food for China’s 1.4 billion consumers even under normal conditions.Though most US consumers would probably cringe at the thought of eating donkey, their meat is considered a delicacy in China. Their skins are also processed into a traditional remedy called ejiao that’s used to treat everything from anemia to dizziness. Ejiao has also grown in popularity alongside China’s growing prosperity. According to a report by the African Network for Animal Welfare, the slaughterhouses are operating at less than half of their capacity, as demand from China has already depleted the donkey population from around 1.8 million animals in 2009 to roughly half that level – about 900,000 – today.

Humans and Big Ag Livestock Now Account for 96 Percent of Mammal Biomass – A first-of-its-kind study published Monday shows that, when it comes to impacting life on Earth, humans are punching well above our weight. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first ever comprehensive census of the distribution of the biomass, or weight of living creatures, across classification type and environment. It found that, while humans account for 0.01 percent of the planet’s biomass, our activity has reduced the biomass of wild marine and terrestrial mammals by six times and the biomass of plant matter by half. Humans account for about 36 percent of the biomass of all mammals. Domesticated livestock, mostly cows and pigs, account for 60 percent, and wild mammals for only 4 percent. The same holds true for birds. The biomass of poultry is about three times higher than that of wild birds.

Part cow, part… bacterium? Biotech company makes heifer of gene-editing blunder — A Minnesota-based gene-editing company is left red in the face after it took on bull genetics – and got slammed. The company, Recombinetics, set out years ago to genetically engineer Holstein dairy cattle to come without their troublesome horns, which farmers typically remove to keep themselves and other cows safe. In 2015, the company seemed to have succeeded, unveiling two hornless bulls, Spotigy and Buri. Recombinetics touted them as a bona fide, 100%-bovine success story. Though Spotigy was sacrificed for research, Buri lived on to sire 17 offspring – one of whom graced the cover of Wired, as MIT Technology Review notes. And, until just a few months ago, Brazil was set to create a herd of hornless Holsteins from shipments of Buri’s sperm, Wired reported. But the plans were bucked after scientists at the Food and Drug Administration stumbled upon an utterly damning find earlier this year – Buri isn’t all bull: he’s a wee bit bacterium. When Recombinetics edited the cow cells that would later give rise to Buri, the company did so using bacterial DNA-editing machinery – which inadvertently got stitched into Buri’s genome. Recombinetics’ scientists used a standard method to get the TALENs into the cow cells – they delivered the TALENs via a loop of bacterial DNA called a plasmid. Usually, after the plasmid-encoded TALENs do their snipping, the plasmid’s work is done and it doesn’t hang around. But in Buri’s case, the whole plasmid ended up inserting itself into the bull’s genome, right next to the inserted stretch of DNA for hornlessness. That means that Buri’s genome contains the entire DNA sequence of the plasmid. And in addition to all the bacterial-editing machinery from the loop of DNA, Buri’s genome includes the antibiotic resistance genes present on the plasmid, too – though they’re unlikely to have any effect. The plasmid insertion is a big cow plop. But the fact that the company didn’t find the problem itself is perhaps more embarrassing. In their report on the case, FDA scientists noted that their find “highlights a potential blind spot in standard genome-editing screening methods.”

Beyond Meat uses climate change to market fake meat substitutes. Scientists are cautious – As concerns mount over the dangers of a rapidly warming planet, upstart food companies are targeting a major climate-damaging food: beef. Beyond Meat and its privately held rival Impossible Foods have recently grabbed headlines and fast-food deals for their plant-based burgers that imitate the taste of beef. They’ve also turned the environmental benefits of abstaining from meat into a key marketing tool for their products – drawing some skepticism from environmental researchers who say plant diets are healthier and less carbon emitting than producing processed plant-based products.Animal agriculture is responsible for 14.5% of global greenhouse emissions, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, with 65% of those emissions coming from beef and dairy cattle. Scientists warn that climate change will trigger an international food crisis unless humans change the way they produce meat and use land.While companies producing imitation meat boast of the environmental benefits, some researchers point out that for people wanting to substantially lower their carbon footprint, having unprocessed plant-based diets instead of eating imitation products is healthier and better for the planet.Beyond and Impossible use different sources of proteins to create their meatless meats. Beyond primarily works with protein from peas, while Impossible uses genetically modified soy.“It makes sense to develop alternatives to beef, because we have to change our eating habits to more plant-based diets if we want to limit global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius. Impossible and Beyond tap into this market,” said Marco Springmann, a senior environmental researcher at the University of Oxford. “However, while their processed products have about half the carbon footprint that chicken does, they also have 5 times more of a footprint than a bean patty,” he said. “So Beyond and Impossible go somewhere towards reducing your carbon footprint, but saying it’s the most climate friendly thing to do – that’s a false promise.”

Video: Chinese Company Makes Genetic Engineering Leap by Cloning Its First Cat – According to the National Human Genome Research Institute, animals are cloned by removing a mature somatic cell from them. Researchers then “transfer the DNA of the donor animal’s somatic cell into an egg cell, or oocyte, that has had its own DNA-containing nucleus removed.” Once the egg has developed into an embryo, it’s implanted into an adult female animal. The company managed to successfully clone Garlic, a two-year-old British Shorthair cat who belonged to Huang Yu and that had died because of a urinary tract infection. In August 2018, Sinogene took cells from Garlic to use for its clone, which was born just a few weeks after the embryo with Garlic’s cells were implanted into a surrogate mother. “In my heart, Garlic is irreplaceable,” Huang told the New York Times. “Garlic didn’t leave anything for future generations, so I could only choose to clone.” However, upon seeing Garlic’s clone, Huang was elated, claiming the “similarity between the two cats is more than 90 percent.”According to Mi Jidong, Sinogene’s chief executive, the company began cloning pets in 2015 after a survey of around 1,000 participants revealed many were willing to pay for the service. Since then, the company has cloned more than 40 dogs, as well as some other pets. AFP reported that the company charges roughly $53,000 to clone a dog and $35,000 for a cat.“Whatever the origin of pets, owners will see them as part of the family. Pet cloning meets the emotional needs of young generations,” Mi is quoted as saying by AFP. China has been making strides in this area of science, cloning primates and producing super strong dogs. Chinese scientist He Jiankui of Shenzhen’s Southern University of Science and Technology even created the first genetically-edited, HIV-resistant babies last year, the Guardian reported.Although pet cloning remains illegal in many countries, it appears to be gaining popularity. In an interview last year with the New York Times, American singer Barbra Streisand revealed that two of her dogs were clones of another one, Samantha, that had died. “You can clone the look of a dog, but you can’t clone the soul. Still, every time I look at their faces, I think of my Samantha … and smile,” Streisand said in the interview.

Scientists warn West Coast ocean heat wave could pose major risk to whales, salmon, sea lions – A heat wave forming off the west coast in the Pacific Ocean resembles a 2014-15 phenomenon that led to major disruptions to marine life along the western seaboard, federal scientists said Thursday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) wrote in a blog post that a growing belt of warm water that stretches from Alaska to California “ranks as the second largest marine heatwave in terms of area in the northern Pacific Ocean in the last 40 years, after ‘the Blob,’ ” referring to the 2014-15 heat wave. “It’s on a trajectory to be as strong as the prior event,” said scientist Andrew Leising of NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, Calif.“Already, on its own, it is one of the most significant events that we’ve seen,”Leising added. The 2014-15 event had major effects on marine life on the West Coast, including “multiple” fishery disasters and a massive coastal algal bloom that ended crabbing and clamming efforts along the coast for months, according to the NOAA. Salmon numbers also declined during that time. Whales including humpbacks were forced closer to shore, resulting in entanglements with fishing lines, while thousands of sea lions were reportedly stranded on shore. Scientists are hopeful, however, that the heat wave could dissipate if a ridge of high pressure that allowed upper layers of the ocean to warm ends in the next few months. “It looks bad, but it could also go away pretty quickly if the unusually persistent weather patterns that caused it change,” said Nate Mantua, a scientist at NOAA’s Southwest facility. At issue as to how long the heat wave will last is how deep the heat wave extends into the ocean. For now, scientists say just the top levels of the ocean have been affected by the warming. “There are definitely concerning implications for the ecosystem,” “It’s all a matter of how long it lasts and how deep it goes.”

Hurricane Dorian ‘Off the Charts’ as It Batters Bahamas With 185 MPH Winds – Dorian came ashore in the Bahamas tied as the most powerful storm to hit land anywhere in the Atlantic.The hurricane brought 185 mile-per-hour winds, up to 30 inches of rain in isolated areas, and a storm surge that could top 23 feet and leave the islands devastated for years. The fate of Florida remains uncertain as the storm churns in the ocean just 155 miles away.The eye of Category 5 Dorian struck Elbow Cay about 12:40 p.m. with wind gusts of more than 220 mph (354 kilometers per hour) in addition to its sustained winds, and then moved onto Great Abaco Island, the U.S.National Hurricane Center reported. The storm is about 75 miles (121 kilometers) from Freeport, Grand Bahama Island. It is maintaining its peak winds of 185 mph. Dorian tied the 1935 Labor Day hurricane, which crushed the Florida Keys, as the strongest storm ever to hit land anywhere in the Atlantic, said Maureen O’Leary, spokeswoman for the National Weather Service.“I wouldn’t want to be on the Abaco Islands, they are going to have 12 to 15 hours of hurricane force winds with only the eye as the respite,” said Jeff Masters, co-founder of Weather Underground, an IBM business. “Everything in that eye is going to get totaled, it is going to take them years, if not a decade, to recover.” Roughly 100,000 of the 370,000 Bahamas population live in areas that are going to be hit by the storm, according to Bahamas Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Kevin Peter Turnquest, adding in a response to queries that Abaco suffered “severe destruction of homes and infrastructure.” While many people focus on winds, most hurricane deaths are caused by storm surge and drowning from flooding.

Hurricane Dorian unleashes 220-mph wind gusts as it slams Bahamas – Hurricane Dorian packed sustained winds of 185 mph with staggering 220-mph gusts as it made landfall in the Bahamas on Sunday, prompting President Trump to tweet that the churning monster “is looking like one of the largest hurricanes ever” as it moved within 205 miles of Florida. Only four storms in the Atlantic have ever had higher sustained wind speeds, and none since Hurricane Wilma in 2005, AccuWeather reported, while the National Hurricane Center called Dorian “the strongest hurricane in modern records for the northwest Bahamas.” The storm slowed its march over the ocean to just 7 mph as it approached the Abaco Islands in the Bahamas, and could remain over the archipelago for 30 hours as it brings up to 30 inches of rain and storm surges of up to 23 feet, the hurricane center said.“It’s going to be very bad for the Bahamas,” said hurricane center director Ken Graham, calling Dorian a “very treacherous, very dangerous, life-threatening situation” for the islands.Forecasters said Dorian could veer north before slamming the Florida coast, but state officials were taking no chances – the Sunshine State remained under a state of emergency Sunday as Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a mandatory evacuation order for the coasts of Palm Beach and Martin counties.

South Carolina to evacuate coast as Hurricane Dorian closes in – South Carolina’s governor has ordered a mandatory evacuation of his state’s entire coast as Hurricane Dorian threatens.Gov. Henry McMaster’s order goes into effect at noon Monday, when state troopers will begin reversing lanes so that people can all head inland on major coastal highways.Authorities say the order covers approximately 830,000 people, many of whom will be evacuating for the fourth time in four years. McMaster says he knows some people won’t be happy having to leave their homes. But he says “we believe we can keep everyone alive.” The National Hurricane Center forecasts the center of Dorian to stay off shore while paralleling the South Carolina coast starting Wednesday afternoon. But a small change in the forecast could send the eye and strongest winds into the state.

‘It Is Pure Hell’: Videos From Bahamas Show Devastation Left by Hurricane Dorian as Storm Heads Toward US – Videos posted online late Sunday and early Monday provided the first glimpse of the scale of destruction Hurricane Dorian – a historic Category 5 storm – left in its wake in the Bahamas as it slowly moves toward the southeastern coast of the United States,forcing nearly a million residents of Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas to evacuate.”I have seen utter devastation here… We are surrounded by water with no way out,”said ABC News correspondent Marcus Moore, who was on the ground in Marsh Harbour. “Absolute devastation, there really are no words,” said Moore, surveying destroyed homes and buildings. “It is pure hell here on Marsh Harbour on Aboca Island in the northern part of the Bahamas.” The Guardian characterized Dorian as “the biggest storm to hit the Caribbean island chain in modern times,” with wind gusts reaching as high as 220 mph. During a press conference Sunday, Bahamian prime minister Hubert Minnis said Dorian “will put us to a test that we’ve never confronted before.” “This is probably the most sad and worst day of my life to address the Bahamian people,” said Minnis. “I just want to say as a physician I’ve been trained to withstand many things, but never anything like this.” According to the National Hurricane Center, the storm remained at Category 5 strength Monday as it drifted over Grand Bahama Island, unleashing heavy rainfall and severe wind. “This is a life-threatening situation. Residents on Grand Bahama Island should not leave their shelter when the eye passes over, as winds will rapidly increase on the other side of the eye,” the center said. “These hazards will continue over Grand Bahama Island during most of the day, causing extreme destruction on the island.” Forecasters on Monday said the storm could get “dangerously close to the Florida east coast” as early as Monday night.

Bahamian Official Filmed Cat-5 Dorian As It Swallowed His Home — Like many Bahamians, Michael Pintard, the country’s minister for agriculture, hunkered down in his home to wait out what was a category 5 hurricane at the moment Dorian slammed the small Caribbean island’s coast Sunday night. The largest storm currently on the planet and the strongest to hit the Bahamas in recorded history had sustained winds of 180 mph, and some gusts ranging up to 220 mph as it made landfall there. Pintard on Monday uploaded surreal video to the internet showing storm waters rising to above his windows, which are at least 20 feet above the ground, according to his estimate. Minister of Agriculture and Marco City MP Michael Pintard, who lives on Grand Bahama, showing some utterly frightening footage of his home during the passage of Hurricane Dorian. pic.twitter.com/gugVsLMroB – Travis C-Carroll (@TravisCC) September 2, 2019“This is what I’m facing at the moment, and I have neighbors that are in a far worse position than me and my family,” he said.The now viral clip shows the government minister’s home being essentially swallowed up in the massive storm surge and flooding as Hurricane Dorian passed over Grand Bahama. “That’s water hitting my front window which is extremely high. Of course I’m already completely flooded out. That’s my kitchen window that water is hitting and that has to be a minimum of about 20 feet above the ground,” he narrates amid the chaotic scene. “This is water by my back door that came from the canal that height has to be 20 to 25 feet above sea level. This is what I’m facing at the moment. I have neighbors who are in a far worse position than me and my family. That’s my bedroom water hitting there,” Pintard says.Waters in some parts of the islands didn’t appear to abate Monday as rescue operations are underway. * The images and videos out of Grand Bahama are getting worse. pic.twitter.com/lnQvmHz1SJ – Travis C-Carroll (@TravisCC) September 2, 2019 Footage from inside other homes in the Bahamas appeared to show families huddled in attics while water rose to roof level. Find floatation devices and use hammers to escape your attics through the roof, officials in the northwestern Bahamas reportedly tell residents as they become overwhelmed with distress calls. More: https://t.co/e9ujsvGTmH pic.twitter.com/2vUrkZbNmA

Hurricane Dorian kills five in the Bahamas as it moves slowly on to Florida – The government of the Bahamas confirmed the death of five people Monday afternoon as massive Hurricane Dorian lashed both Grand Bahama and Abaco islands and came to a virtual standstill, causing “extreme destruction.” News reports said that storm surges grew 12 to 18 feet above normal tide levels with winds at 145 mph and gusts of up to 170 mph. Weather analysis showed that the hurricane had moved just 14 miles between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. on Monday, stubbornly thrashing the northern tier of the Bahamas, a collection of 700 islands, 31 of which have a combined population of 391,000 people. Bahamian Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said the police confirmed the five deaths on Abaco Island, although no other details were made available. He also reported that “many homes, businesses and other buildings have been completely or partially destroyed” and that “downtown Grand Bahama is under three feet of water.” The International Federation of the Red Cross reported that as many as 13,000 houses have been severely damaged or destroyed and that flooding is believed to have contaminated wells with salt water on Abaco island. Sune Bülow, manager of the IFRC Emergency Operation Center in Geneva, said, “We don’t yet have a complete picture of what has happened. But it is clear that Hurricane Dorian has had a catastrophic impact. We anticipate extensive shelter needs, alongside the need for short-term economic support, as well as for clean water and health assistance.” Family members reported loss of phone contact with their loved ones in the Bahamas. Some residents posted videos of the devastation and reported that roofs had been blown off of homes and others had been completed destroyed by the high winds and water.

Hurricane Dorian is a powerful Category 4 hurricane – pummeling the Bahamas and heading “dangerously close” to Florida – A worst-case scenario is playing out the Bahamas. Florida and the Southeast US may be spared the worst. But uncertainties remain. On Monday, Hurricane Dorian slammed into the Abacos Islands in the Bahamas as an incredibly powerful Category 5 hurricane, with howling winds in excess of 185 mph and with gusts up to 220 mph. The storm brought with it a surge – coastal flooding – of 18-to-23 feet above normal tide. Dorian is estimated to be the second-most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean, and ties the record for the most powerful storm to make landfall, according to the National Weather Service. Preliminary reports from the Abacos Islands show extreme devastation.The storm weakened slightly and was (very slowly) moving through Grand Bahama Island on Monday, with winds gusting over 200 mph and 18 to 23 feet of coastal flooding. Plus, the forward motion of the storm nearly stalled, moving west at just 1 mph. The slower a storm moves, the more time it has to destroy communities in its path. It’s a worst-case scenario for a hurricane. “Devastating winds and storm surge will continue to affect Grand Bahama Island through tonight,” the National Hurricane Center (NHC) warned. “Everyone there should take immediate shelter and not venture into the eye.”As of Monday evening, the storm was sustaining 145 mph winds, making it an extremely dangerous Category 4 “major” hurricane.

Why Are Hurricanes Like Dorian Stalling, and Is Global Warming Involved? – Hurricane Dorian’s slow, destructive track through the Bahamas fits a pattern scientists have been seeing over recent decades, and one they expect to continue as the planet warms: hurricanes stalling over coastal areas and bringing extreme rainfall. Dorian made landfall in the northern Bahamas on Sept. 1 as one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record, then battered the islands for hours on end with heavy rain, a storm surge of up to 23 feet and sustained wind speeds reaching 185 miles per hour. The storm’s slow forward motion – at times only 1 mile per hour – is one of the reasons forecasters were having a hard time pinpointing its exact future path toward the U.S. coast. . Recent research shows that more North Atlantic hurricanes have been stalling as Dorian did, leading to more extreme rainfall. Their average forward speed has also decreased by 17 percent – from 11.5 mph, to 9.6 mph – from 1944 to 2017, according to a study published in June by federal scientists at NASA and NOAA. The researchers don’t understand exactly why tropical storms are stalling more, but they think it’s caused by a general slowdown of atmospheric circulation (global winds), both in the tropics, where the systems form, and in the mid-latitudes, where they hit land and cause damage.Hurricanes are steered and carried by large-scale wind flows, “like a cork in a stream,” said Tim Hall, a hurricane researcher with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and author of the study. So, if those winds slow down or shift direction, it affects how fast hurricanes move forward and where they end up. Jim Kossin, co-author of the June study, said scientists suspect the overall slowing of winds is at least partly due to rapid warming of the Arctic. The temperature contrast between the Arctic and the equator is a main driver of wind. Since the Arctic is warming faster than lower latitudes, the contrast is decreasing, and so are wind speeds. In a 2018 paper, Kossin showed that the increase in tropical cyclones stalling is a global trend. Hurricane Harvey dumped 60 inches of rain on parts of Texas in 2017 and stalled over the Houston area for days. Hurricane Florence stalled in 2018, flooding parts of coastal North Carolina. Kossin said Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, also took an unusual path that may have been affected by shifting global wind patterns, turning west and slamming into New Jersey instead of being carried eastward, out to sea and away from land, by prevailing westerly winds.

Hurricane Dorian: Residents flee South Carolina coast ahead of storm – Parts of historic Market Street in Charleston were under a foot of water and gusting winds blew rain sideways Thursday as Hurricane Dorian continued its unrelenting advance on the U.S. coast, days after devastating parts of the Bahamas.Hundreds of thousands of coastal residents of the Carolinas were packing up to flee their homes or were already gone. More than 220,000 homes and businesses across the state already were without power. The historic storm, which dropped slightly to Category 2 status, was about 65 miles southeast of here at 11 a.m. ET Thursday with maximum sustained winds at 110 mph, the National Hurricane Center said. “It is the water that kills people,” Gov. Henry McMaster said. “Water is the real danger. And it’s clear that we are going to have a lot of water.” The center warned the storm “continues to lash the coast of the Carolinas” and hurricane conditions are likely over portions of the area later Thursday. The center of the storm was forecast to move closer to the coast of South Carolina through the day and then move near or over the coast of North Carolina overnight and Friday. Charleston was experiencing wind gusts in excess of 60 mph. Similar gusts were recorded elsewhere in the state and in North Carolina, the hurricane center said.Hurricane-force winds were extending outward up to 60 miles from the center, and tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 195 miles.

Stunning aerial footage from CNN shows the devastating Hurricane Dorian damage in the Bahamas – While tornados don’t cover nearly as wide an area as hurricanes, they are known for having more intense winds. But according to CNN meteorologist Jennifer Gray, the damage inflicted by Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas was so intense that it combined the worst of both worlds – a wide path like a hurricane, combined with the intensity of a tornado.A video aired by CNN on Tuesday showed an aerial view of the Bahamas’ Great Abaco Island following Hurricane Dorian. With the video playing, Gray commented, “It looks like tornado damage. This storm had the winds of an EF4 tornado. And imagine a tornado sitting on the same spot for several days; that’s the kind of damage that you’re seeing.” A Gray colleague at CNN agreed, commenting on the “wide swath of devastation” on Great Abaco Island. “It just goes on and on, and on,” she said – to which Gray agreed, commenting, “I think this damage is going to be so widespread.”

Vast destruction revealed as Hurricane Dorian leaves the Bahamas – In scenes reminiscent of the drowning of New Orleans 14 years ago, desperate survivors of Hurricane Dorian are stranded on rooftops and other structures on the islands of Grand Bahama and Abaco, waiting for rescue in the wake of nearly two days of continuous battering by the giant storm.As the hurricane moved very slowly toward the northwest, and winds that had topped 185 miles per hour abated, it became possible for the outside world to glimpse the full impact of the storm on the low-lying islands in the northern part of the Bahamas, home to 73,000 people.The official death toll remains at seven, all on Abaco, but aerial photos showing that half of the houses on the two islands have been destroyed or suffered major damage and that nearly 60 percent of Grand Bahama remains under water suggest that the loss of life will be far greater.Much of the public infrastructure in the two islands is under water, including the airport on Grand Bahama. Vehicles and shipping containers were thrown about by the storm surge and by wind gusts of up to 220 miles per hour.According to one estimate, the storm surge from Dorian was as high as 23 feet – not counting waves and tides – while the highest point on Abaco and Grand Bahama is only 30 feet. Nearly every structure on the two islands was completely flooded up to the top of the ground floor.Large tracts of housing have been reduced to splinters. One Bahamian government official said that nearly three-quarters of all homes on Grand Bahama remained under water. This includes the second-largest town in the Bahamas, Freeport, with a pre-storm population of 27,000. Hurricane Dorian made landfall in the Bahamas Sunday as a Category 5 storm and its eyewall remained over the two northern islands until early Tuesday, an unprecedented duration. It has since weakened to a Category 2, lingering off the east coast of Florida and moving slowly north toward Georgia and the Carolinas.

Dorian-Devastated Island With 50K Residents Now 70% Under Water – Hurricane Dorian has absolutely devastated Grand Bahama island, which is now 70% under water according to Bloomberg, citing government sources. The roughly 50-mile wide vacation destination in the Bahamas is home to approximately 50,000 people. Bahamian Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said that the damage to homes, businesses and other buildings is “unprecedented and extensive,” while the National Emergency Management Agency has issued an “urgent plea” to owners of equipment such as jet skis, small boats and flatbed trailers to assemble at the Grand Bahama shopping mall to assist with the rescue. The US Coast Guard along with the British Royal Navy have also been sent to the region. There are “still many outstanding rescue missions,” on the island of Grand Bahama, Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Kevin Peter Turnquest said, in reply to written questions. “It’s not looking good as we expect catastrophic damage.” – Bloomberg BREAKING PHOTOS: What remains inside airport in Freeport on Grand Bahama Island – WPTV-TV pic.twitter.com/f0GM2JE1cI According to the Red Cross, 13,000 houses have been damaged or destroyed. When combined with nearby Abaco Island which lies just to the East, 45% of all dwellings are reported to have been obliterated, and 62,000 people do not have fresh water.

As Aerial Footage of Devastated Bahamas Emerges, Campaigners Ask How Much Destruction and Death Before Global Climate Action Taken? – As the National Hurricane Center announced Tuesday that Hurricane Dorian’s core was “finally moving away from Grand Bahama Island,” toward the Southeastern U.S. coast, footage of the storm’s devastation flooded the internet alongside calls for governments and the news media to recognize the here-and-now destruction of the climate emergency. Through Tuesday evening, the center warned, “dangerous winds and life-threatening storm surge” from Dorian would continue to ravage Grand Bahama – over which the storm stalled Monday after making landfall as a Category 5 hurricane on the Bahamas’ Abaco Islands Sunday. “There’s still hurricane-force winds and rain coming down on us, and yet these people are going out and pulling people from their houses, from on top of their houses, and saving their lives,”reported CNN‘s Patrick Oppmann, who is on the ground in the Bahamas. Climate advocacy groups emphasized the importance of not only aiding those affected by this storm but also of pursuing bolder action to limit rising temperatures that scientists say are making hurricanes more devastating. In the Bahamas, as many as 13,000 homes – or nearly half of all houses on the impacted islands – may have been severely damaged or destroyed by Dorian, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Flooding on Abaco “is believed to have contaminated wells with saltwater,” so some 62,000 people will need access to clean drinking water. About 45,700 people in Grand Bahama and 14,500 in the Abacos may need food, a spokesman for the U.N. World Food Program told The Associated Press, which reported Tuesday on the region’s emerging humanitarian crisis. Bahamas Health Minister Duane Sands tells The Associated Press that Hurricane Dorian devastated the health infrastructure in Grand Bahama island and massive flooding has rendered the main hospital unusable. He said Tuesday that the storm caused less severe damage in the neighboring Abaco Islands and he hopes to send an advanced medical team there soon. Sands said the main hospital in Marsh Harbor is intact and sheltering 400 people but needs food, water, medicine, and surgical supplies. He also said crews are trying to airlift between five and seven end-stage kidney failure patients from Abaco who haven’t received dialysis since Friday.

Bahamas death toll rises to 30 after Hurricane Dorian – The death toll in the Bahamas in the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian rose to 30, according to multiple reports. Bahamian Prime Minister Hubert Minnis told CNN about the increased fatalities Thursday evening. Previous reports indicated that 23 people had died due to the storm. The Bahamas’s minister of health, Duane Sands, told The New York Times that the death count after the storm hit “could be staggering.” “We are embalming bodies so that we have more capacity as new bodies are brought in,” Sands said. “We need to get coolers into Abaco and Grand Bahama, because we believe that we may not have the capacity to store the bodies,” he added, referring to areas that were hit hardest by Dorian. The storm has been weakened since it hit the Bahamas and was headed toward North and South Carolina on Thursday. The National Hurricane Center tweeted Thursday night that the wall of Dorian’s eye was “very near” Cape Fear, N.C.

Hurricane Dorian Battering North Carolina With Flooding Rain, Storm Surge, High Winds, Tornadoes – Hurricane Dorian is lashing North Carolina with storm surge flooding, rainfall flooding, high winds and tornadoes and will have impacts in southeast Virginia and southeast Massachusetts Friday and Saturday.Dorian’s maximum sustained winds have ticked down slightly, making it a Category 2hurricane. Regardless of these small intensity changes, the hurricane’s impacts will likely be similar.Tropical storm conditions continue in North Carolina with damage has been reported more than 50 miles inland. An observation from Federal Point, North Carolina, recently reported a sustained wind of 61 mph and a hurricane-force gust. The eyewall containing the strongest winds in Dorian is scraping along the North Carolina coast as Dorian accelerates northeastward.Given Dorian’s continued movement, areas just up the coast from Emerald Isle, North Carolina, could experience the hurricane’s most intense winds in this ring of convection closest to the center. Tornado watches are in effect for parts eastern North Carolina overnight. Isolated tornadoes are common mainly in outer rainbands when tropical storms and hurricanes affect land.Heavier rainbands continue to wrap in around Dorian into eastern North Carolina and the mid-Atlantic. Tropical-storm-force winds (39-plus mph) extend up to 220 miles from the center, while hurricane-force winds (74-plus mph) extend up to 60 miles from the center. Dorian may track close enough to bring a period of rain and some tropical storm-force winds to southeastern New England before it quickly races toward parts of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland later Saturday into Sunday. Dorian is expected to strike Nova Scotia as a hurricane Saturday evening.

Dorian’s floodwaters trap people in attics in North Carolina – – A weakened Hurricane Dorian flooded homes on North Carolina’s Outer Banks on Friday with a fury that took even storm-hardened residents by surprise, forcing people to retreat to their attics. Hundreds were feared trapped by high water, and neighbors used boats to rescue one another. Sheriff’s officials sent medics and other rescuers to Ocracoke Island – accessible only by boat or air – to reach those who made the mistake of defying mandatory evacuation orders along the 200-mile ribbon of low-lying islands that stick out from the Eastern Seaboard like the side-view mirror on a car. “There is significant concern about hundreds of people trapped on Ocracoke Island,” Gov. Roy Cooper said. “There are rescue teams ready as soon as they can get in.” Its winds down to 90 mph, Dorian howled over the Outer Banks as a far weaker storm than the brute that wreaked havoc on the Bahamas at the start of the week. Just when it looked as if its run up the Southeast coast was coming to a relatively quiet end, the Category 1 hurricane lashed communities with rain and surging seas, sending water coursing onto the main floors of elevated homes. Over and over, longtime residents said that they had never seen flooding so bad, or that things that had never flooded before were inundated. “The wall of water just came rushing through the island from the sound side. And it just started looking like a bathtub, very quickly,” said Steve Harris, who has lived on Ocracoke Island for most of the last 19 years. “We went from almost no water to 4 to 6 feet in a matter of minutes.”

Hurricane Dorian pulling away from the U.S., racing toward Nova Scotia – As Hurricane Dorian finally began to move away from the mid-Atlantic states, it picked up speed Friday night and began racing toward Nova Scotia where hurricane-force winds were soon to be felt.A hurricane warning was issued Friday afternoon for parts of eastern Nova Scotia, as Hurricane Dorian started pulling away from the U.S. coast and heading toward Canada. “On the forecast track, the center of Dorian should move move to the southeast of extreme southeastern New England tonight and Saturday morning, and then across Nova Scotia late Saturday or Saturday night,” the National Hurricane Center said at 8 p.m. The hurricane was still about 275 miles south-southwest of Nantucket Island, the 8 p.m. Friday advisory said. The storm’s forward motion accelerated to 24 mph on a course that could take it near southeastern Massachusetts and northeastern Maine as it closes in on eastern Canada. Dorian’s top winds remained at 90 mph and were expected to weaken Saturday, although they would retain hurricane-force as the storm approached Nova Scotia, according to the National Hurricane Center.“Hurricane Dorian will begin to race towards Atlantic Canada later today – severe impacts across the region during the weekend,” the Canadian Hurricane Centre said. Warning of severe winds, torrential rain and pounding surf, the Canadian Hurricane Centre issued the Nova Scotia warning, as well as a hurricane watch for Prince Edward Island, southwestern Nova Scotia, the Magdalen Islands, and southwestern Newfoundland.“Dorian will remain a very potent post-tropical system with hurricane or near hurricane force winds as it crosses Northern Newfoundland,” the Canadian Hurricane Centre said Friday.Dorian, which brought flooding, evacuations, tornadoes and torrential rain on its 700-mile trip up the U.S. coast, is expected to veer away later Friday. For the next few hours, however, the storm’s wide wind field and heavy rains were expected to continue roughing up North Carolina, Virginia and Delaware. The storm continued to produce top winds of 90 mph, putting at Category 1 strength, according to the 11 a.m. update from the National Hurricane Center.

Fox News’s Shepard Smith blasts Trump for Dorian map edit: ‘Some things in Trumplandia are inexplicable’ – Fox News chief anchor Shepard Smith on Thursday roasted President Trump for repeatedly backing his own forecast about Hurricane Dorian’s path that incorrectly included Alabama. “Some things in Trumplandia are inexplicable,” Smith said. “Maybe he got some bad info from somebody, maybe he made a mistake, maybe he was confused, we don’t know. But he was wrong. And since, for days and days, he’s been insisting – with fake visuals in hand – that he was right.” Trump tweeted on Sunday that “in addition to Florida – South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated” by Hurricane Dorian. Trump repeated the statement later that day while at a briefing at Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters.The National Weather Service in Birmingham quickly corrected the president, saying this was not the case, and meteorologists have sincecalled him out for his assertion.Trump later attacked ABC News for reporting that he made an error and continued to defend his statements.“That could’ve been it – the end of it. Everybody makes mistakes,” Smith said. “Instead, the next day, the president blamed the media for his own inaccurate warning and then started to rewrite history on the matter.”On Wednesday, the president referred to a seemingly doctored map of Dorian’s original path that looped in Alabama with black marker.Trump then doubled down on his remarks Thursday, insisting on Twitter that “certain models strongly suggested” Alabama and Georgia would be hit by the hurricane and that “what I said was accurate!” “Why would the president of the United States do this?” Smith said. “He decries fake news that isn’t and disseminates fake news that is. Think China pays the tariffs. The wall is going up. Historic inauguration crowds. Russia probe was a witch hunt. You need an ID to buy cereal. Noise from windmills causes cancer. It’s endless.”

“Precious hours were wasted”: Trump’s doctored map affected hurricane forecasters – On Wednesday, when President Donald Trump was showing off a doctored hurricane forecast in the White House Oval Office, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center were mortified. It was a critical moment for the federal tropical cyclone experts because Hurricane Dorian had begun to show signs of re-intensifying – it would later become a major hurricane again – and its track appeared increasingly likely to bring the storm’s center ashore somewhere in the Carolinas. Two sources in the Miami-based hurricane center told Ars that Trump’s “update” on Hurricane Dorian effectively paralyzed operations.After Trump spoke, the forecasters’ cell phones buzzed with incessant distractions. Media briefings were stopped for the afternoon. “Precious hours were wasted,” one official at the center told me. “We aren’t going to put out bad forecasts, but we need to keep the eye on the ball here.” Instead of warning residents of the Southeastern United States about a re-strengthening Dorian just as it posed its greatest threat to the nation, the media subsequently pivoted to cover Trump’s preposterous attempt to re-write the history of Dorian’s forecast. As an American, I felt embarrassed. As a meteorologist, I was livid.

Climate change is altering winter precipitation across the Northern Hemisphere – A team of scientists has successfully teased out the influence of human-caused climate change on wintertime precipitation over the last century, showing that the warming climate altered wintertime rainfall and snowfall across the Northern Hemisphere. The study, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), used an innovative approach that relied on observations of precipitation and large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns, along with statistical techniques and computer climate simulations. This enabled the research team to identify the amount of average monthly precipitation in specific regions of North American and Eurasia that fell as a result of human impacts on the climate, rather than natural variability. “I thought this was quite revealing,” said NCAR senior scientist Clara Deser, a co-author of the study. “Our research demonstrates that human-caused climate change has clearly affected precipitation over the past 100 years.” The results show that warming temperatures associated with societal emissions of greenhouse gases spurred a noticeable increase in wintertime precipitation across widespread regions of northern Eurasia and eastern North America since 1920. The work may point the way to more detailed studies into the influence of climate change on precipitation changes year-round. Precipitation globally is projected to increase by an average of 1-2% per additional degree Celsius because a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor. But local changes may be highly variable, with some regions becoming dryer and others far wetter.

Artificial highlands aren’t enough to protect Kaziranga animals during annual floods The floodwaters in Assam have receded. Among the most telling images of the devastation it caused on helpless animals, was that of a group of one-horned rhinos huddled on a dry piece of land in the submerged Kaziranga National Park. Presumably exhausted, some of the animals were lying down, even as another tried climbing up from the surrounding water. There have been many other similar pictures of helpless animals standing atop highlands created inside the national park to offer succour during the annual floods. Kaziranga has 144 artificial highlands – of which 33 were sanctioned three years back – to bring down animal casualty during this yearly tragedy. But are these artificial highlands beneficial in the long-run, both for the national park’s fragile ecosystem and the animals? Environmentalists and other experts believe otherwise. More than 200 animals, including 18 one-horned rhinos, were killed in the floods in Kaziranga this year. An image of a tiger fleeing from the floods in Kaziranga National Park and taking refuge in a shop went viral on social media – indicating the animals’ level of desperation. Many such animals, guided by their instinct to climb up and survive, sought refuge on the artificial highlands. But are these highlands a long-term solution, given that Assam gets ravaged by floods every year, most times in not just one, but two or three waves? The 880 sq km Kaziranga National Park, with a core area of 430 sq km, is surrounded by the Brahmaputra on the North and the hills of Karbi Anglong in the South. Apart from being the world’s major stronghold of the one-horned rhino, Kaziranga is home to several globally threatened animal species like the tiger, Asiatic elephant, wild water buffalo, gaur, sambar deer, hog deer and the hoolock gibbon. The annual floods put immense pressure on these animal species for survival.

Coral reefs: breakdown in iconic spawning puts species at risk of extinction – new research –It’s rather tricky to reproduce if you’re stuck to the floor – unless you’re a coral. Their spectacular spawning events are a beautiful sight to behold. Once a year, they spill billions of sperm and eggs into the sea, peppering the deep blue with a palette of vivid reds, yellows, oranges, and whites.But according to new research, some corals are no longer reproducing with the same clockwork timing, adding yet another survival threat to the long list already befalling reefs. The new research monitored mass spawnings on corals reefs in the northern Red Sea. The researchers compared spawning timings of five coral species between 2015 and 2018 to results from two other studies conducted on the same species in the 1980s. In the speciesAcropora eurystoma, they also measured various reproductive traits, such as the number of sperm and eggs within a colony, the number of colonies reproducing in a given area and the size of coral colonies in the area – an index of their age. Unfortunately, it’s not yet known exactly what is causing the apparent decline in spawning synchrony, making it difficult to put forward a solution to the problem. Increases in light pollution from coastal development and hormone pollution from contraceptive pills have recently been shown to disrupt the natural triggers for coral spawning. The same is true of water temperature, which has increased by 1.2℃ at the test site since the 1980s. However, further research is needed to establish whether these factors are causing corals to reproduce out of sync with each other.

Acid oceans are shrinking plankton, fuelling faster climate change – Increasingly acidic oceans are putting algae at risk, threatening the foundation of the entire marine food web.Our research into the effects of CO₂-induced changes to microscopic ocean algae – called phytoplankton – was published today in Nature Climate Change. It has uncovered a previously unrecognised threat from ocean acidification.In our study we discovered increased seawater acidity reduced Antarctic phytoplanktons’ ability to build strong cell walls, making them smaller and less effective at storing carbon. At current rates of seawater acidification, we could see this effect before the end of the century. Carbon dioxide emissions are not just altering our atmosphere. More than 40% of CO2 emitted by people is absorbed by our oceans.While reducing the CO₂ in our atmosphere is generally a good thing, the ugly consequence is this process makes seawater more acidic. Just as placing a tooth in a jar of cola will (eventually) dissolve it, increasingly acidic seawater has a devastating effect on organisms that build their bodies out of calcium, like corals and shellfish. Phytoplankton use photosynthesis to turn carbon in the atmosphere into carbon in their bodies. We looked at diatoms, a key group of phytoplankton responsible for 40% of this process in the ocean. Not only do they remove huge amounts of carbon, they also fuel entire marine food webs. Diatoms use dissolved silica to build the walls of their cells. These dense, glass-like structures mean diatoms sink more quickly than other phytoplankton and therefore increase the transfer of carbon to the sea floor where it may be stored for millennia.The more acidic the seawater, the more the diatom communities were made up of smaller species, reducing the total amount of silica they produced. Less silica means the diatoms aren’t heavy enough to sink quickly, reducing the rate at which they float down to the sea bed, safely storing carbon away from the atmosphere.On examining individual cells, we found many of the species were highly sensitive to increased acidity, reducing their individual silicification rates by 35-80%. These results revealed not only are communities changing, but species that remain in the community are building less-dense cell walls. Most alarming, many of the species were affected at ocean pH levels predicted for the end of this century, adding to a growing body of evidence showing significant ecological implications of climate change will take effect much sooner than previously anticipated.

UN High Seas Treaty Looks Set to Founder – A two-week long meeting, the third in a series of four substantive sessions of an intergovernmental conference of 190 member states to agree a conservation treaty to regulate the high seas under UN auspices, finished last week on August 30, without “a serious commitment”, as reported by Inter Press Service (IPS) in Is the UN’s High Seas Treaty Heading Towards Troubled Waters? The UN General Assembly has been meeting in New York to agree the final text of the new treaty on marine biodiversity – first proposed nearly 20 years ago – under the UN Law of the Sea treaty, to which the US never formally acceded. Its demise was a result of Reagan administration opposition (details of which I will not reprise here as I want to keep this post short). As I noted in two previous posts, prospects were never auspicious for this project when it launched in 2018 (see UN to Launch Talks on Treaty to Regulate High Seas and First Set of High Seas Treaty Negotiations Concludes in New York). I was well aware of the longstanding efforts to codify the law of the high seas, as a mentor of mine, J. Daniel Nyhart, was an intellectual father of this project. Alas, as IPS reports: The world’s high seas, which extend beyond 200 nautical miles, are deemed “international waters” to be shared globally – but they remain largely ungoverned.“It’s a jungle out there”, remarks one diplomat, describing a virtually lawless wide-open ocean which has steadily undergone environmental destruction, including illegal fishing and overfishing, plastics pollutions, indiscriminate sea bed mining and degradation of marine eco systems. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has warned that the world’s fisheries have continued to decline, with 33 percent of fish stocks “overfished,” resulting in devastating economic consequences for coastal nations and small island developing states (SIDS). This sad prognosis is reinforced by others with a keen interest in biodiversity, as reported by Nature Wolrd News in New UN High-Seas Treaty Must Close Gaps In Biodiversity Governance: Thousands of marine species could be at risk if a new United Nations high-seas biodiversity treaty, now being negotiated in New York, does not include measures to address the management of all fish species in international waters, not just the commercial species…

Hunger for concrete eats away at mountains (AFP) – To feed the concrete demands of hotels, holiday homes and road-building, quarries are eating away at the mountains where his goats graze. From Cyprus to New Zealand, Lebanon and beyond, environmentalists worry about the proliferation of quarries in a world ever more greedy for concrete. Between 40 billion and 50 billion tonnes a year of sand and gravel are extracted around the world from mountains, rivers, coastlines and marine environments, the majority for construction, according to UN environment agency figures. Concrete consumption has tripled over the past 20 years and with the global population expected to grow by two billion by 2050, demand can only go up, the UN says. But the extraction process often comes with deforestation, air pollution and disruption of traditional human activities. Near the hut where Jamal makes traditional “hellim” cheese, trucks come to collect rock, kicking up clouds of dust and frightening the animals. On the quarried area of the mountain slope, vegetation has disappeared. A policeman asks the goat herder to stay back as an explosion triggers a huge cloud of smoke and part of the rock face collapses. On another mountain, Jamal was injured and lost animals to quarrying work. Rocks “rained down on us,” he said. While he understands the “need for rock to build”, he hopes the company running the site will help him find quieter pastures. With some 355,000 inhabitants according to Turkish Cypriot planning officials, the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) walks the line between development and conservation. “Today, the island is fed by tourism so we need hotels, guest houses, roads and airports. We don’t have any other choice than to exploit the quarries,” Cenk Sarper, head of the Stone Quarries Union, told AFP.

As India Hosts Global Desertification Meet, A Third Of Its Land In Crisis – Even as it prepares to host a global conference on rising desertification, India faces a growing crisis of land degradation: Nearly 30% of its land area, as much as the area of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra put together, has been degraded through deforestation, over-cultivation, soil erosion and depletion of wetlands.This land loss is not only whittling away India’s gross domestic product by 2.5% every year and affecting its crop yield, but also exacerbating climate change events in the country which, in turn, are causing even greater degradation, as we discuss later. How can countries slow down this loss of land and biodiversity that threatens global food security and hastens climate change, impacting 3.2 billion people all over the world? This question will lead discussions at the 14th Conference of Parties (COP 14) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), starting on September 2, 2019 in New Delhi. This is the first time India will host this biennial gathering of 196 countries, scientists, private leaders, industry experts and non-profits.Ahead of the event, India has pledged to restore 5 million hectares of degraded land by 2030. But this is just 1.5% of the country’s geographical area, 28.5 percentage points less than the total land left degraded.For countries like India that are highly vulnerable to climate change, land degradation is a critical issue. Degraded land loses its capacity to absorb carbon-dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas (GHG) that is the biggest factor in worsening global warming. Over 600 million people risk the impact of climate change in India and if land degradation is not addressed, the problem could get more acute. The country is home to 18% of the world’s population with only 2.4% of its land.

Amazon fires: Almost 4,000 new blazes started across Brazil in 48 hours – Almost 4,000 new forest fires were started in Brazil in the two days after the government banned deliberate burning of the Amazon, officials have revealed.Some 3,859 outbreaks were recorded by the country’s National Space Research Institute (Inpe) in the 48 hours following the 60-day prohibition on setting trees alight. Around 2,000 of those blazes were in the Amazon rainforest. The figures come as the latest blow in an environmental crisis that has caused panic across the world, and which led the agenda at the recentG7 summit in France. More than 72,000 fires had already been detected across Brazil between January and August – the highest number since records began in 2013 and an 83 per cent increase on the same period last year. Because it is the world’s largest rainforest, the fate of the Amazon – often called the “lungs of the world” – is widely considered by climate change experts as key to the future of the planet. It is a vital carbon store that slows down global warming while providing some 20 per cent of the world’s oxygen. Its destruction – deliberate or otherwise – reduces the ability of nature to suck carbon from the atmosphere. But Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, who came into power promising to clear vast tracts of the rainforest for development, had, until last week, remained unmoved. He has systematically weakened institutions designed to protect the rainforest, while offering moral support to farmers wishing to turn the land into cattle ranches. And, although he has now placed a 60-day ban on burning and deployed 44,000 troops to fight the ongoing blazes, critics fear it is too little too late.

Rain will not extinguish Amazon fires for weeks, weather experts say (Reuters) – Weak rainfall is unlikely to extinguish a record number of fires raging in Brazil’s Amazon anytime soon, with pockets of precipitation through Sept. 10 expected to bring only isolated relief, according to weather data and two experts. The world’s largest tropical rainforest is being ravaged as the number of blazes recorded across the Brazilian Amazon has risen 79% this year through Aug. 25, according to the country’s space research agency. The fires are not limited to Brazil, with at least 10,000 square kilometers (about 3,800 square miles) burning in Bolivia near its border with Paraguay and Brazil. While Brazil’s government has launched a firefighting initiative, deploying troops and military planes, those efforts will only extinguish smaller blazes and help prevent new fires, experts said. Larger infernos can only be put out by rainfall. The rainy season in the Amazon on average begins in late September and takes weeks to build to widespread rains. The rain forecast in the next 15 days is concentrated in areas that need it least, according to Maria Silva Dias, a professor of atmospheric sciences at University of Sao Paulo. Less precipitation is expected in parts of the Amazon experiencing the worst fires, she added.

After a Quiet Summer, ‘Dangerous’ California Wildfire Burns Equivalent of 753 Football Fields in Five Hours A fast moving wildfire burned through 753 football fields worth of Southern California in just five hours Wednesday, CNN reported.The Tenaja Fire jumped from 25 acres when it was first reported Wednesday afternoon to 994 acres just five hours later. As of 5:30 p.m. Thursday, the blaze had spread to 1,974 acres and was 10 percent contained,The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) reported. The fire-fighting agency said the blaze was moving at a “dangerous rate of speed,” according to TIME. The fire broke out in La Cresta, California in Riverside County and was named for a road near where it ignited. It has since spread to other cities including Murrieta, California, a town of 104,000 people 80 miles south of Los Angeles. Since Wednesday, around 415 homes and 1,200 people had been evacuated, Riverside County Fire Department spokesperson Jody Hagemann told TIME. Others are waiting for an evacuation order.Schools in the Murrieta Unified School District were closed Thursday, and more area districts said they would close Friday, according to ABC7. Public health officials also warned residents to protect themselves from smoke by staying indoors as much as possible. “Ash and smoke can be hard on anyone to breathe, but especially those with lung disease,” Riverside County public health official Dr. Cameron Kaiser said in a statement reported by TIME. “Everyone worries about the flames, but smoke can impact you even if you’re miles away from the fire.”

Air Force Jet Accidentally Fires White Phosphorus Rocket Over Arizona – What was supposed to be a routine Air Force training mission has grabbed headlines after a fighter jet accidentally unleashed part of its pay load over a desert in Arizona. An Air Force statement said an A-10C Thunderbolt II or ‘Warthog’ was conducting a training mission in a military area between Phoenix and Tucson when it mistakenly fired rocket. The aircraft “unintentionally released a single M-156 rocket” at about 10:40 a.m. during a training mission, the statement said. The unauthorized release of the M-156 rocket in an area not designated for live fire landed over Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in a remote desert area, specifically at a remote desert wash near Mount Graham.”This training area is not designated for munitions release,” the Air Force said.“The rocket impacted in a desert wash in an uninhabited area” the statement added.An investigation said no injuries or structures were damaged in the incident.

Alaska: Log, Mine, Drill, Despoil – While fires rage in the Amazon and Anchorage, Alaska, registers record high temperatures, the Trump administration plans to open the world’s largest intact temperate rain forest for exploitation. The Washington Post reported last week: President Trump has instructed Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to exempt Alaska’s 16.7-million-acre Tongass National Forest from logging restrictions imposed nearly 20 years ago, according to three people briefed on the issue, after privately discussing the matter with the state’s governor aboard Air Force One.The move would affect more than half of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, opening it to potential logging, energy and mining projects. It would undercut a sweeping Clinton administration policy known as the “roadless rule,” which has survived a decades-long legal assault.Trump has taken a personal interest in “forest management,” a term he told a group of lawmakers last year he has “redefined” since taking office.The Grey Lady’s editorial board laments:…Mr. Trump has breathed new life into bad ideas thought to be dead and buried or getting there. Together they demonstrate again how Mr. Trump, when faced with a choice between commerce and conservation, reflexively sides with the former, even when the economic case for conservation is strong. Alaska has large tourism and fisheries industries. Tourism is Alaska’s second largest private sector employer, accounting for one out of every eight Alaskan jobs; seafood is second only to oil and gas as a source of Alaska’s exports. As for the Tongass, according to the NYT: The economic gains would be uncertain at best; the timber industry has been in steep decline for years, whereas renewed large-scale logging would inflict damage on two big moneymakers, tourism and the seafood industry. The Tongass is the spawning ground for about 40 percent of the wild salmon that populate the West Coast. At the end of the day the biggest loss may be the trees themselves and all the good things they do, which include storing and absorbing carbon dioxide, a major cause of global warming. Which, as we know, is the last thing on the president’s mind. This forestry decision follows on another July decision by Trump’s Environmental Protection Administration (EPA)to unblock the permitting process for the controversial Pebble gold, copper, and molybdenum mine. The EPA had suspended the permitting process in 2014. If this project finally goes forward, it would be the second largest such complex in the world.

Alaska’s Sea Ice Completely Melted for First Time in Recorded History – The country of Iceland has held a funeral for its first glacier lost to the climate crisis. The once massive Okjökull glacier, now completely gone, has been commemorated with a plaque that reads: “A letter to the future. Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.” This reality is reverberating across the globe, far beyond Iceland. Even when no literal funeral is being held, we are, in a sense, witnessing an ongoing funeral for the world we once knew.July was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth since record keeping began in 1880. Nine out of the 10 hottest Julys ever recorded have occurred since 2005, and July was the 43rd consecutive July to register temperatures above the 20th century average. In Greenland, scientists were stunned by how rapidly the ice sheet is melting, as it was revealed the ice there was not expected to melt like this until 2070. The melt rate has been called “unprecedented,” as the all-time single-day melt record was broken in August as the ice sheet lost a mind-bending 12.5 billion tons of water in one day. It is worth remembering that the Greenland ice sheet contains enough ice to increase global sea levels by 20 feet, and it is now predicted that it will lose more ice this year than ever before. Also for the first time in recorded history, Alaska’s sea ice has melted completely away. That means there was no sea ice whatsoever within 150 miles of its shores, according to the National Weather Service, as the northernmost state cooked under record-breaking heat through the summer.

Climate change: Greenland’s ice faces melting ‘death sentence’ Greenland’s massive ice sheet may have melted by a record amount this year, scientists have warned. During this year alone, it lost enough ice to raise the average global sea level by more than a millimetre. Researchers say they’re “astounded” by the acceleration in melting and fear for the future of cities on coasts around the world. One glacier in southern Greenland has thinned by as much as 100 metres since I last filmed on it back in 2004. Why does Greenland matter? Essentially because its ice sheet is seven times the area of the UK and up to 2-3km thick in places. It stores so much frozen water that if the whole thing melted, it would raise sea levels worldwide by up to 7m. No one is suggesting that could happen for hundreds or even thousands of years but even a small increase in the rate of melting in coming decades could threaten millions of people living in low-lying areas. Bangladesh, Florida, and eastern England are among many areas known to be particularly vulnerable to rises in sea level over the course of the century. And although the island of Greenland is remote, stretching from the north of the Atlantic high into the Arctic, its fate could have major implications for the severity of future flooding and may even alter coastlines and force communities to move inland.

Why the Arctic is smouldering – The Arctic is transforming before our eyes: the ice caps are melting, the tree-line is shifting northwards, starving polar bears wander into cities. The region is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet due to climate change, largely due to changes in albedo – the loss of sunlight-reflecting ice and snow, replaced by sunlight-absorbing ocean and soil. This is driving a dangerous positive feedback cycle where heating spirals into more heating. And, now, the Arctic isn’t only losing its ice. It is being set ablaze. Gargantuan forest fires in Siberia, which burned for more than three months, created a cloud of soot and ash as large as the countries that make up the entire European Union. More than four million hectares of Siberian taiga forest went up in flames, the Russian military were deployed, people across the region were choked by the smoke, and the cloud spread to Alaska and beyond. Fires have also raged in the boreal forests of Greenland, Alaska and Canada.Though images of blazing infernos in the Arctic Circle might be shocking to many, they come as little surprise to Philip Higuera, a fire ecologist at the University of Montana, in the US, who has been studying blazes in the Arctic for more than 20 years.“I’m not surprised – these are all the things we have been predicting for decades,” he says. Higuera and his team predicted in 2016, based on sophisticated computer modeling, that fires in the boreal forests and Arctic tundra would increase by up to four times by 2100. A key tipping point, he says, is an average July temperature of 13.4C over a 30-year period. Much of the Alaskan tundra has been perilously close to this threshold between 1971 and 2000, making it particularly sensitive to a warming climate. The number of areas near to and exceeding this tipping point are likely to increase as the climate continues to warm in the coming decades, says Higuera. “Across the circumpolar Arctic, the take-home message is that there are distinct thresholds above which you start to see the tundra burning – it’s like a binary switch,” says Higuera. “This threshold relationship is part of what makes the Arctic so sensitive: areas will stay below this threshold for years, off our radar for fire activity – and then all of a sudden with a change in temperature it will start to burn.”

Billionaires prepping for an apocalyptic ‘event’ – but what happens to everyone else? – The Earth is in the midst of an environmental disaster. Humankind may not survive the Anthropocene.Climatologists and other scientists are warning that if the Earth’s temperature rises more than 2 degrees Celsius that the human race may have reached a point of no return in terms of stopping global warming and the catastrophes it will cause.Global warming is causing rising sea levels which threaten at least one billion people. Global warming is also generating a weather feedback loop which is causing hurricanes, blizzards, firestorms, and droughts to become more extreme. There is also a shortage of arable land and fresh water. Entire ecosystems are collapsing all over the planet.The world’s militaries are preparing to fight “resource wars.” These conflicts will likely kill many thousands (if not millions of people). Resource wars will also create a global refugee crisis as entire populations are displaced. As global warming melts glaciers in Antarctica, Siberia, Greenland and elsewhere there will also be a mad scramble by the United States, Russia, China, and other nations to secure rare earth metals and other resources.As the Earth’s climate and weather continues t o worsen who will live and who will die? The answer: the rich will find a way to survive while everyone else will experience gradations of misery and death depending on their socioeconomic status. This is the logical and predictable result of extreme inequality where 1 percent own half the planet’s wealth. This inequality is also a function of neocolonialism where the West continues to enrich itself by siphoning a huge amount of resources and other wealth away from the Global South and the “Third World” every year. Rich countries also benefit disproportionately from destroying the world’s environment.

Hundreds of young people join Greta Thunberg in climate protest outside UN — Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg was joined by swelling and excited crowds of American teenagers at a protest outside the UN headquarters in New York on Friday, in a further blossoming of the youth environment movement given extra thrust by the Swede’s transatlantic boat crossing. Some US children said they were at their first ever climate demonstration; others said they had been passionate about the environment for a while but had been galvanized to act by Thunberg’s rising profile.On Friday afternoon, Thunberg and two young activists were spontaneously invited inside the UN for a meeting with a senior leader, described as “very supportive”. Just two days after Thunberg disembarked from a yacht in New York, following two weeks on rough seas crossing from the UK, young protesters dominated the crowd of up to 1,000 outside the United Nations skyscraper in Manhattan.They came together to demand politicians and older generations take urgent and comprehensive action to reverse the climate crisis.Carrying hand-drawn placards with messages such as “United behind the science” and “Act now or we will”, children and young people of all ages surged into a park in front of the flags of the world outside the UN on Friday morning.Thunberg sat cheerfully but pensively in the middle of the rally, which had a rather more earnest than festive atmosphere. Young speakers gave spontaneous speeches or led chants of “System change, not climate change” and “Don’t just watch us, join us”.Alexandria Villaseñor, 14, who has been protesting every Friday outside the UN since December, was in her usual spot and said she had been inspired by Thunberg’s school strike campaign.She said: “Greta being here will really galvanise students just because of how much of an inspiration she is. Everyone who’s been striking on Friday was really empowered by Greta and the action she was taking.” Thunberg held her trademark “skolstrejk för klimatet” (Swedish for “school strike for climate”) sign, which she was seen carrying from the racing yacht on Wednesday, after refusing to take a flight to the US because of the polluting emissions.

Attacks on Greta Thunberg, Say Allies, Show Just How ‘Terrified’ Reactionary Forces Have Become of Global Climate Movement – Champions of Greta Thunberg – and the 16-year-old climate activist herself – hit back against malicious right-wing bullies over the weekend as she called her Asperger’s syndrome diagnosis a “superpower” and her defenders said there is but one reason that people attack the person who has galvanized the global climate strike movement: they are afraid of her.”The bile thrown at Greta Thunberg is motivated by one thing alone: this incredibly intelligent, eloquent and compassionate 16 year old has terrified some of the most hateful and reactionary so-called ‘grown ups’ on earth.” – Owen Jones”The bile thrown at Greta Thunberg is motivated by one thing alone: this incredibly intelligent, eloquent, and compassionate 16-year-old has terrified some of the most hateful and reactionary so-called ‘grown ups’ on earth,” said British political columnist activist Owen Jones. “She’s achieved more [at age] 16 than they ever will.” Following her recent arrival in the United States to attend rallies outside the United Nations and promote a week of international climate strike actions, taking place from Sept. 20 – 27, Thunberg on Saturday suggested that a fresh wave of criticismdirected at her from climate science denialists and right-wingers – including those mocking her Asperger’s diagnosis – exposes much more about them than her. “I’m not public about my diagnosis to ‘hide’ behind it, but because I know many ignorant people still see it as an ‘illness’, or something negative,” Thunberg added. “And believe me, my diagnosis has limited me before.” In a column on Al-Jazeera English published Monday, writer Andrew Mitrovica came to the defense of Thunberg as he referred to those attacking her as “scientifically illiterate bullies.” According to Mitrovica, agreeing with Jones, it is Thunberg’s attributes – including her fearlessness and abilility to speak and act so matter-of-factly – that makes hers such a potent voice. He writes: She disdains celebrity. She makes no claim to heroism. She rebuffs efforts to idolise her. She isn’t calculating or preoccupied with fame or ego. There is no artifice about her. She speaks plainly, without affectation or embroidery.

This Climate Strike Is Part of the Disruption We Need – By Bill McKibben – Business as usual is what’s doing us in.We live on a planet that finds itself rather suddenly in the midst of an enormous physical crisis. Because weburn so much coal and gas and oil, the atmosphere of our world is changing rapidly, and that atmospheric change is producing record heat. July was the hottest month we’ve ever recorded. Scientists predict with confidence that we stand on the edge of the sixth great extinction event of the last billion years. People are dying in large numbers and being left homeless; millions are already on the move because they have no choice.And yet we continue on with our usual patterns. We get up each morning and do pretty much what we did the day before. It’s not like the last time we were in an existential crisis, when Americans signed up for the Army and crossed the Atlantic to face down fascism and when the people back home signed up for new jobs and changed their daily lives.That’s why it’s such good news that the climate movement has a new tactic. Pioneered last August by Greta Thunberg of Sweden, it involves disrupting business as usual. It began, of course, in schools: Within months, millions of young people around the world were striking for days at a time from their classes. Their logic was impeccable: If the institutions of our planet can’t be bothered to prepare for a world we can live in, why must we spend years preparing ourselves? If you break the social contract, why are we bound by it?And now those young people have asked the rest of us to join in. After the l ast great school strike in May, they asked adults to take part next time. The date is Sept. 20, and the location is absolutely everywhere. Big trade unions in South Africa and Germany are telling workers to take the day off. Ben and Jerry’s is closing down its headquarters (stock up in advance), and if you want to buy Lush cosmetics, you’re going to be out of luck. The largest rally will likely be in New York City, where the U.N. General Assembly begins debating climate change that week – but there will be gatherings in every state and every country. It will almost certainly be the biggest day of climate action in the planet’s history. (If you want to be a part – and you do want to be a part – go to globalclimatestrike.net.)

Flight Shame: The Climate Hazards of Air Travel – In mid-August, to much fanfare, sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg set sail from England on the Malizia II, a solar-powered yacht. With a small crew, she embarked on a journey across the Atlantic in order to attend the UN Climate Action summit in New York in September. Conditions on the vessel were austere, The New York Times reported. While aboard, Thunberg drank seawater made potable by a desalination machine; in lieu of a toilet, she used a bucket. Last Wednesday, after two weeks at sea, the yacht pulled into the North Cove Marina in Lower Manhattan, where it was greeted by a jubilant crowd. Thunberg is the most celebrated of a small but expanding tribe of environmentalists who eschew air travel: “non-flyers,” as some of them call themselves. Non-flyers are not typically afraid of flying – at least not in the usual sense. They do not fear that a plane will malfunction but that it will function exactly as intended. If Thunberg had flown from London to New York and back, her share of the flight’s CO2 emissions would have amounted to roughly a ton: more than the average annual per capita emissions in fifty-six of the world’s countries, according to an analysis by The Guardian. In Thunberg’s native Sweden, two women have launched a campaign to encourage people to give up flying for a year. Reflecting these attitudes is a Swedish neologism: flygskam, or flight-shame. Here in the US, Thunberg has given new life and luster to a crusade that has been building slowly for some years, mainly centered in academia. A growing number of environmentalist academics have pledged to cut back on flying or stop altogether, and a few are trying to persuade their colleagues and institutions to follow their lead. In 2015, Parke Wilde, a food economist at Tufts University, and Joseph Nevins, a geographer at Vassar, established a petition, asking universities to take measures to reduce flying by faculty, staff, and students “commensurate with the cuts suggested by climate science.” Aviation accounts for a relatively small fraction of global greenhouse gas emissions: a commonly cited figure is 2 percent, although some estimates are higher. But air travel is projected to rise sharply in the next few decades, and aviation is one of the sectors of economic activity least susceptible to greening.

Bernie Sanders’s $16.3T climate plan promises major waste and recycling shifts – Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., announced a sweeping climate platform last week characterizing climate change as a “global emergency” and pledging $16.3 trillion to address the crisis – including via multiple waste and recycling initiatives. The plan, which builds on the Green New Deal, calls for the establishment of a nationwide recycling program as well as significant funding for food recovery and composting programs. It would also enact a national right-to-repair policy for farm equipment and make “massive” R&D investments, including in chemical recycling for plastics. Furthermore, the plan seeks to ensure a “just transition” for environmental justice communities and workers impacted or displaced by the closure of incinerators, hazardous waste sites and other polluting facilities. Landfills are not mentioned specifically. Unveiled last Thursday in the wildfire-devastated town of Paradise, California, Sanders’s platform is described by media outlets and political commentators as the “boldest,” most aggressive climate plan yet released by a 2020 Democratic candidate. Sanders’s plan aims to achieve 100% renewable energy for electricity and transportation by 2030 and complete decarbonization by 2050. It alsooutlines several elements pertaining to the waste and recycling industries, including:

• A nationwide materials recycling program. Sanders’s platform promises extensive R&D for renewable technologies – which, in order to prevent an “outsized” environmental impact from harvesting raw materials, requires the use of “as many recycled materials as possible.” The proposal seeks to establish an extended producer responsibility program requiring large corporations to pay to take back goods from consumers – which will be processed in a national recycling program and used to “build the renewable energy equipment needed to transform our energy system.”
• A just transition for frontline communities. The plan shines a spotlight on communities “at the frontlines of the climate emergency,” citing a New School report revealing that nearly 80% of U.S. incinerators are located in low-income communities and/or communities of color. It seeks to advance environmental justice principles by expanding EPA investigations into environmental racism; updating permitting rules for polluting facilities; and proposing tighter regulations on hazardous waste sites, chemical and industrial plants, and decaying infrastructure. Sanders also aims to make Green New Deal jobs and training resources – including for cleaner manufacturing and recycling – available to disadvantaged and/or displaced workers.
• Expanded organics and sustainable agriculture infrastructure.The plan calls for a $410 billion investment in transitioning farms to “ecologically regenerative agricultural practices,” including carbon sequestration and a national right-to-repair law for farm equipment (the latter of which was previously proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.). Moreover, it pledges a $160 billion investment in food waste reduction and composting programs.

Pete Buttigieg unveils $1.1 trillion climate change plan – Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg unveiled a $1.1 trillion climate change plan Wednesday morning, with a goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 and creating over 3 million clean energy and infrastructure jobs in the next decade. The South Bend, Indiana, mayor’s plan contains three pillars:

• building a clean economy by creating clean energy jobs, strengthening rural communities and protecting natural resources;
• investing in disaster relief and prevention in vulnerable communities;
• building America’s role on the international stage in combating climate change.

The proposal includes a $200 billion investment over 10 years in clean energy research and development, the creation of a $250 billion Clean Energy Bank to finance innovative technologies, a $250 billion fund matched with $250 billion in private investment with American companies to lead development of green technologies and a $50 billion seed fund for riskier and experimental ideas. Buttigieg is polling at 4.7% behind rivals Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, according to a RealClearPolitics average. He released his plan ahead of Wednesday night’s “Climate Crisis” town hall, where candidates will each have 40 minutes to explain their environmental policies in front of a live audience. Buttigieg is scheduled to be interviewed on his proposal at 10 p.m. ET.

Democrats Propose Spending Trillions to Fight Climate Change – (AP) – Democratic presidential candidates are releasing their plans to address climate change ahead of a series of town halls on the issue as the party’s base increasingly demands aggressive action.New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Obama Cabinet member Julifln Castro laid out their plans Tuesday. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar released hers over the weekend.The release of the competing plans comes as issues of climate and the environment have become a central focus of the Democratic primary. On Wednesday, 10 Democrats seeking the White House will participate in back-to-back climate town halls hosted by CNN in New York. A second set of climate-focused town halls will be televised by MSNBC later in the month. Liberals had demanded that the Democratic Party focus at least one debate on climate change, but a climate debate resolution was defeated at the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting last month. The issue is so urgent among Democratic voters that Washington Gov. Jay Inslee made action to limit the worst extremes of climate change the core of his presidential bid. Warren’s clean-energy proposal builds on Inslee’s 10-year clean-energy plan in seeking to implement 100% clean-energy standards in three key sectors of the American economy. Warren says she will increase her planned spending on research and investment to cut carbon emissions to $3 trillion. She embraces tough deadlines for sharply cutting or eliminating the use of fossil fuels by the U.S. electrical grid, highways and air transit systems, and by cities and towns. That includes making sure that new cars, buses and many trucks run on clean energy – instead of gasoline or diesel – by 2030 and that all the country’s electricity comes from solar, wind and other renewable, carbon-free sources by 2035. Booker’s $3 trillion plan includes nearly a dozen executive actions to reverse Trump administration moves. He says that by no later than 2045, he wants to get the U.S. economy to carbon neutral – a point at which carbon emissions are supposedly canceled out by carbon-cutting measures, such as planting new forests to suck up carbon from the atmosphere. Booker also urges massive restoration of forests and coastal wetlands as carbon sponges and as buffers against rising seas. He sets a 2030 deadline for getting natural gas and coal out of the electrical grid. He would get there partly by scrapping all subsidies for fossil fuels, banning new oil and gas leases, phasing out fracking and introducing a carbon fee.

Elizabeth Warren Adopts $3 Trillion Climate Crisis Plan, Challenges All 2020 Candidates to Do Same — Sen. Elizabeth Warren announced that she would adopt Gov. Jay Inslee’s climate crisis plan and add in an $1 trillion in investments to help protect workers and to fund a dramatic shift in infrastructure away from fossil fuels if she is elected president, as CNN reported.Warren said her plan includes a “federal investment of $3 trillion” and “will leverage additional trillions in private investment and create millions of jobs,” as reported by Fox Business.”One of the most important of these ideas is the urgent need to decarbonize key sectors of our economy,” Warren wrote on Medium yesterday. “Today, I’m embracing that goal by committing to adopt and build on Inslee’s ten-year action plan to achieve 100% clean energy for America by decarbonizing our electricity, our vehicles, and our buildings. And I’m challenging every other candidate for President to do the same.”Earlier this summer, Warren announced she would invest $2 trillion in her Green Manufacturing plan. That plan, which she also posted to Medium, seeks to pivot the American energy and manufacturing sector toward the $23 trillion market for renewable energy.Last week, Warren met with Inslee, who campaigned for president on the climate crisis issue but recently suspended his campaign after failing to gain traction in polls, as the New York Times reported.”Jay didn’t merely sound the alarm or make vague promises. He provided bold, thoughtful and detailed ideas for how to get us where we need to go, both by raising standards to address pollution and investing in the future of the American economy,” Warren wrote on Medium yesterday. “While his presidential campaign may be over, his ideas should remain at the center of the agenda.”

Bill Gates is funding chemical clouds to help stop global warming – Fires burning across the Amazon rainforest have renewed the debate about solutions to climate change. Bill Gates is backing the first high-altitude experiment of one radical approach called solar geoengineering. It’s meant to mimic the effects of a giant volcanic eruption. Thousands of planes would fly at high altitudes, spraying millions of tons of particles around the planet to create a massive chemical cloud that would cool the surface.“Modeling studies have found that it could reduce the intensity of heat waves, for instance, apparently it could reduce the rate of sea level rise. It could reduce the intensity of tropical storms,” said Andy Parker, project director at the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative.The technology is not far from being ready and it’s affordable, but it could cause massive changes in regional weather patterns and eradicate blue sky.“These consequences might be horrific. They might involve things like mass famine, mass flooding, drought of kinds that will affect very large populations,” said Stephen Gardiner, author of “A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change.” Watch the video to learn how it would work and hear the debate around the ethics and efficacy of solar geoengineering.

EPA moves on implementing landfill emissions rule, still hopes for delay – The EPA recently issued a final rule making today the deadline for states to submit compliance plans for the 2016 Emissions Guidelines (EG) landfill rule. So far, the EPA has received, and proposed to largely approve, plans from various agencies in five states. The EPA also recently published a proposed rule to create a federal plan for state or tribal governments that haven’t submitted their plans. This was mandated by a California federal judge in May, following a lawsuit from multiple state attorneys general over the federal agency’s delayed action. At the same time, federal lawyers filed a motion Monday asking the judge to vacate an existing order that obligates EPA to promulgate regulations for a federal plan by Nov. 6. The government argues the revised state plan submission deadline means it now has until Aug. 30, 2021 to issue that plan. This issue continues to be one of the most high-profile federal regulatory fights affecting the waste industry. Initiated by the Obama administration as part of a push to reduce methane emissions that contribute to climate change, the regulations have been treated with far less enthusiasm in the Trump era. The 2016 rule applies to any MSW landfill that accepted waste after Nov. 8, 1987 and commenced construction on or before July 17, 2014. According to the EPA’s new federal plan proposal, this includes more than 1,900 sites in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The action was paired with 2016 New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for landfills that commenced “construction, reconstruction, or modification” after July 17, 2014.Per one of the EPA’s latest publications, the NSPS and EG “are based on the Administrator’s determination that MSW landfills cause, or contribute significantly to, air pollution that may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” The industry – led by NWRA, SWANA, Waste Management and Republic Services – sought to challenge the NSPS and EG rules in court in 2016. Those efforts were rewarded in May 2017, when then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt granted a 90-day administrative stay on submitting state plans. Shortly after, the agency successfully moved to put the industry court case in abeyance pending resolution.

Trump Admin Reverses Standards for Energy Efficient Light Bulbs – The Trump administration is rolling back energy efficiency standards for light bulbs that would have kept millions of tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, CNBC reported Wednesday.The Department of Energy (DOE) announced Wednesday it would reverse a requirement that three-way, recessed can, candle-shaped and round bulbs switch from incandescent and halogen bulbs to more energy-efficient LED varieties. The requirement would have gone into effect in January 2020 and would have impacted bulbs that fill 2.7 billion U.S. sockets, nearly half the sockets in the country, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) explained.The DOE also said it would not update standards for bulbs still included in a light-bulb efficiency regulation, like common pear-shaped bulbs. Together, the two decisions will add $14 billion to yearly U.S. energy bills up to 2025 and consume at least 25 power plants worth of energy annually, the NRDC calculated.”The Energy Department flat out got it wrong today,” Alliance to Save Energy President Jason Hartke said of the rollback, as CNBC reported. “Instead of moving us forward, this rule will keep more energy-wasting bulbs on store shelves and saddle the average American household with about $100 in unnecessary energy costs every year. Wasting energy with inefficient lightbulbs isn’t just costly for homes and businesses, it’s terrible for our climate.” The reversed regulation has its origins in a bill that passed Congress and was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2007. That bill aimed to phase out incandescent and halogen bulbs by 2020, according to the NRDC. It was updated in 2017 to include the reflector, candle-shaped, three-way and round bulbs that the DOE is now excluding.

DOE has decided many lightbulbs don’t have to meet efficiency standards – Among the stranger subjects that has been caught up in the political wars raging in the United States is the lowly lightbulb. Back in the George W. Bush administration, a law was passed that set efficiency standards for a variety of lightbulbs and allowed the Department of Energy (DOE) to expand the standards going forward. Almost immediately afterward, legislators who apparently find efficiency a threat to the American way of life had second thoughts, and they started undermining the law’s implementation. As a result, the first real evaluation and update of the standards didn’t take place until late in Obama’s second term. Now, the Trump administration has officially thrown out the results of the work done by Obama’s DOE and has issued a rule that prevents the standards from applying to a variety of bulbs. So how did lightbulbs become a political controversy? Back during the second Bush administration, bulbs were an obvious target for efficiency measures, given how poorly incandescents do on those measures and due to the fact that there were promising newer technologies – compact fluorescents and LEDs – that hadn’t really put a dent in the incandescent markets. As a result, lightbulb efficiency standards were written into the Energy Independence and Security Act, passed into law in 2007. Unlike many laws that become controversial, this one was remarkably reasonable. It set efficiency standards through a very simple measure: how many lumens of light were produced per Watt of power. It focused initial standards on the bulbs with the largest percentage of the market: standard-sized screw-ins for lamps and fixtures. It also included mechanisms for reevaluating the standards and expanding them to additional types of bulbs as more efficient technology matured. Within a few years, however, the law had ended up stirring a public controversy. Part of this is the idea that a law banning incandescent lightbulbs fed into the conservative narrative of government overreach and intrusion. (Technically, incandescents would be allowed if they could be made to meet the standards, a subtlety that was often ignored.) And part of it seems to be the general attitude among conservatives that anything environmentally friendly is good for their political opponents and has to be resisted (“wrecking the planet to own the libs” appears like it may be a thing).

Trump Seeks to Revoke California Emissions Waiver -Jerri-Lynn Scofield – Multiple outlets are reporting that the Trump administration is poised to revoke California’s de facto authority to set nationwide car emissions and fuel economy standards, originally granted as a waiver to the 1970 Clean Air Act. According to the New York Times, White House Prepares to Revoke California’s Right to Set Tougher Pollution Rules:The potential challenge to California’s authority, which would be a stinging broadside to the state’s governor and environmentalists, has been widely anticipated. But what’s notable is that the administration would be decoupling its challenge to California from its broader plan to weaken federal fuel economy standards, the latest sign that its plans for that rollback have fallen into disarray. Since the early months of the administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department have been pursuing one of Mr. Trump’s most consequential attempts to weaken regulations designed to fight climate change: A sweeping rollback of Obama-era rules designed to cut the emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases. The root of the dispute is the administration’s attempt to roll back tougher standards set by Trump’s predecessor. As the AP reports, Official: Trump to challenge California authority on mileage: The Trump administration has proposed freezing gas mileage requirements for automakers at 2021 levels, thus eliminating Obama-era regulations that require them to rise about 5% per year on average for the fleet of new cars sold in the U.S. A final proposal is expected next month.Trump’s own administration, in documents proposing to freeze the standards, puts the cost of meeting the Obama-era requirements at around $2,700 per vehicle. Thwarting the proposed tougher standards was a top priority for carmakers when Trump became president, and they deployed lobbying muscle accordingly. As the Wall Street Journal reports in Trump Administration Expedites Challenge to California on Auto-Emission Rules: Within days of his taking office, car companies began lobbying Mr. Trump for relief on the Obama era standards, arguing they were too strict and didn’t take into account the shift in consumer preference for trucks and SUVs that burn more fuel. Executives, however, didn’t expect such a drastic rollback by the administration, which wants to freeze the Obama era fuel economy standards at 2020 levels, or roughly 37 miles a gallon. The Trump capitulation didn’t pass muster with California, which under the authority of the 1970 waiver, de facto, sets the floor for nationwide standards, as carmakers don’t want to produce two versions of each model, one to comply with California standards, and another to be sold elsewhere. Twelve other states and the District of Columbia formally follow California’s lead, and adopt common standards (as does, IIRC, Canada). CBS News,Trump plans to revoke California fuel economy standards explains: California has had stricter fuel economy and auto emissions standards for decades. The state’s laws were enacted before the passage of the Clean Air Act to curb the automobile air pollution in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

Wall Street Journal and Senator Barrasso Still Peddling Koch’s Electric Car Myths – Senator John Barrasso and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial board are once again attacking the federal electric vehicle tax credit, and are once again relying on easily debunked talking points born of the Koch network’s influence machine. Senator Barrasso has reportedly sent a letter to Republican colleagues in the Senate, advising them not to extend the electric vehicle (EV) tax credit. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board cheered Senator Barrasso’s act in an editorial published Tuesday. The deception and falsehoods are so rife in the WSJ editorial that it that begs for rebuttal. So here goes. The piece itself opens with a whopper. “Washington has been underwriting EVs for nearly 30 years.” We asked the WSJ editorial board for a reference, but haven’t yet received a reply. The EV tax credit wasn’t introduced until 2009, and government research and development (R&D) spending on EVs was relatively small in preceding decades. In fact, in 1990, the federal government spent roughly $194 million on all energy efficiency programs, a small percentage of which may have been steered towards transportation electrification. It’s worth noting that this $194 million was less than half of the R&D support provided to both the nuclear industry and fossil fuel industries. Possibly they are referring to California’s Zero Emission Vehicle mandate, introduced in 1990. But, of course, California isn’t “Washington,” and a mandate isn’t exactly “underwriting.” Later, the board writes: “Itʼs hard to imagine a more blatant income transfer for the well-to-do. Electric cars are significantly more expensive than the average vehicle, with a starting price of around $36,000.” Actually, according to Kelly Blue Book, the average price for a new vehicle in the United States was $37,577 in December 2018.

EV Makers Face One Major Problem –– If one listens to statements from carmakers with ambitious EV plans, one’s left with the impression that the world is in for a true automotive revolution and that those of us in their middle age right now will actually live to see a world with an almost entirely electric fleet. Alas, carmakers with ambitious EV plans have a vested interest in making such statements. Reality, as usual, tends to be different, and now these ambitious plans are facing a challenge: battery recycling costs. Battery recycling has been garnering increasing media attention precisely because of the ambitious plans of international carmakers who are promising dozens of new EV models within a few years, and eyeing millions – even tens of millions – in sales. Yet these millions in sales are contingent on several factors, among them price parity with ICE cars. The issue of battery recycling could compromise this price parity. According to BloombergNEF, the surge in EV production would greatly increase the demand for battery raw materials. In the case of cobalt, demand will considerably exceed the current mined production. This trend naturally brings recycling to the fore as an alternative to mining new raw materials. However, recycling comes at a cost, too. It is this cost of recycling that could mess up carmakers price parity plans and that’s because for some minerals, it might become not an alternative to mining but a necessary substitute to it.“At some point it won’t make sense anymore to dig for raw materials, because enough batteries are available,” the managing director of a German battery recycling plant, Christian Hanisch, told Bloomberg recently. The problem, Bloomberg notes, is that the value of the minerals extracted through the recycling process does not cover the cost of the process itself. This means that the selling price of an EV would have to include the cost of recycling its battery. Batteries are already the most expensive component of electric cars, and automakers are actively seeking ways to reduce battery costs. Instead, they are now facing more costs. The average lifespan of an EV battery is about eight years or 100,000 miles. VW alone has plans to churn out 22 million EVs by 2028. By next year, in China alone there will be 5 million EVs on the road, according to government plans.

The Ugly Truth About Biofuels -It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged that the world needs to stop consuming so many fossil fuels–and to do so in a big hurry–if we are to have any hope lowering global carbon emissions in time to curb catastrophic climate change and to meet the goals set by the Paris climate agreement. In fact, according to an alarming 2018 study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in order to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial averages within this century, worldwide carbon emissions need to decrease by 45 percent by 2030 and be slashed all the way down to zero by the middle of the century–no easy feat.There are a huge number of alternative energy sources, from zero-emissions nuclear to solar and wind, and the world of renewable energy technology grows more diverse and advanced all the time. One of these alternative energies, however, may not be as clean or renewable as you may think.Biofuel seems like an obvious replacement for fossil fuels. It can be easily substituted for traditional fossil fuels without the cumbersome necessity of revamping the energy systems we already have in place. Take ethanol, for example, which you have already been using to fuel your car, as it is required by the government to be mixed into your gasoline. This is the beauty of biofuel–it’s so compatible with our current way of living, you may not even have known you were a biofuels user. This is also, however, exactly what’s wrong with biofuel. It doesn’t change a system that is clearly broken, dirty, and unsustainable. In many ways it’s just the same as the fossil fuels that we are so very problematically dependent upon. Like fossil fuels, biofuels need to be combusted, and therefore, like fossil fuels, biofuels (despite their very green-sounding name and eco-friendly connotation) create carbon emissions. While biofuel has enjoyed a fair amount of support from the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the United Nations has actually already acknowledged that biofuel, in many cases, does more harm than good. In the past, the UN has even tried to discourage the United States to reduce the country’s own biofuel production, which is itself a very sizeable industry backed by the country’s powerful corn lobby, because it is exacerbating the global food crisis. As Forbes has reported in the past, “Biofuels increase food prices (plus the volatility of those prices) and therefore don’t have many of the positive benefits for humanity claimed by proponents. In fact, the UN has asked the U.S. to suspend its biofuel mandates because it was exacerbating the food crisis: a child dies from hunger every 10 seconds. For the U.S. and the world, 48 million Americans live in poverty, and over 80% of the globe is undeveloped, so the rising competition between ‘fuel and food” is a moral issue.’”

Hydropower giant Bonneville Power is going broke — Nearly a century ago, America embarked on a great social experiment in the Pacific Northwest, charging up the Columbia River and erecting dams. Cheap electricity spurred the growth of cities like Seattle, Portland and Boise. Now the system is buckling. The Bonneville Power Administration, the independent federal agency that sells the electricity produced by the dams, is careening toward a financial cliff. BPA is $15 billion in debt, facing a rapidly changing energy market increasingly dominated by wind and solar and a desperate need to maintain aging infrastructure that’s expected to cost $300 million to maintain and upgrade by 2023. “If this were a private company, you would be shorting BPA,” “If it was a private-sector company, it would restructure. Or this would be a good time to declare bankruptcy.” Hydropower no longer produces the region’s cheapest electricity. In the past, the utility relied heavily on selling surplus power at high rates to states including California, often referred to as the utility’s ATM. But starting around 2008, California invested in wind and solar, and soon it no longer needed BPA’s power. Bonneville was left with virtually no customers for its extra power. As a result, BPA’s rates have risen 30% since 2008. BPA currently charges its utility customers nearly $36 per megawatt-hour. On the open market, they could buy electricity for $22. BPA has survived so far because it inked 20-year contracts with its utility customers in 2008, before California and others shifted to solar, wind and natural gas. But those agreements end in 2028, and if BPA doesn’t come up with a plan, its customers will buy cheaper electricity elsewhere. If even a few do that, BPA would likely have to raise rates even higher to cover costs, which could lead other customers to similarly head for the exits. And that, in turn, could force even higher rate increases. The economic term for that cycle, Jones said, is a “death spiral.”

NOV lands contract to build massive offshore wind turbine installation ship – Houston oilfield service company National Oilwell Varco has landed a contract to design and build one of the world’s largest vessels for installing offshore wind turbines. A subsidiary of the Tokyo engineering and construction firm Shimizu Corporation awarded NOV a contract to design and build a ship that will be used to install turbines for a 9-gigawatt wind farm off the coast of Japan. The 28,000-ton ship will be made at the Japan Marine United shipyard in Yokohama where it will be designed to accommodate 130 people and include a crane that can move cargo up to 2,500 tons.Planning remains underway for 9-gigawatt offshore wind farm, which will include ultra-large-scale wind turbines that can each produce between 9 to 12 megawatts of electricity. Touted as the largest and most-capable offshore wind turbine installation ship in the region, NOV is expected to deliver the vessel in late 2022. With historical roots going back to 1862, NOV is headquartered in Houston and has more than 35,000 employees in 65 nations. NOV reported a $31 million loss on $8.5 billion of revenue in 2018. The company has not made an annual profit since 2014.

Iowa Dumping Old Wind Turbine Blades In South Dakota; So Much For Re-Cycling — September 5, 2019 –North Dakota legislature is looking into this issue; they better move fast. Iowa is dumping wind turbines on unsuspecting landfills. From The [Sioux Falls, SD] Argus Leader: Iowa wind-farms brought dozens of their old turbine blades to the Sioux Falls dump this summer. But City Hall says it won’t take anymore unless owners take more steps to make the massive fiberglass pieces less space consuming.The wind energy industry isn’t immune to cyclical replacement, with turbine blades needing to be replaced after a decade or two in use. That has wind energy producers looking for places to accept the blades on their turbines that need to be replaced. For at least two wind-farms in northern Iowa, they’ve found the Sioux Falls Regional Sanitary Landfill to be a suitable facility to take its aged-out turbine blades.“Decade or two.” ??? Good reporting. Re-cycling? And millennials are worried about plastic straws. Well, good for them.

Texas power prices jump to record as heat bakes state (Reuters) – Spot power prices in Texas soared to a record high for Thursday as consumers cranked up their air conditioners to escape another brutal heat wave. Temperatures in Houston were expected to hit 99 degrees Fahrenheit (37 Celsius) on Thursday and 100 or more through Sunday before easing to the mid-90s next week, according to AccuWeather. The combination of heat and humidity will make it feel more like 108 F in Houston Thursday afternoon and above 110 over the weekend. The normal high in the city at this time of year is 92 degrees. Next-day power prices at the ERCOT North hub soared from $130 per megawatt hour (MWh) for Wednesday to an all-time high of $973.75 for Thursday, according to Refinitiv data going back to 2010. That tops the previous record of $751 on Aug. 15 during the last heat wave to hit the state. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), grid operator for much of the state, called on consumers to conserve energy on Thursday and Friday. “When electricity demand and heat reach levels like we expect … we ask Texans to consider taking a few steps to help keep power flowing for all of us,” ERCOT President and CEO Bill Magness said in a news release. ERCOT demand peaked at 68,546 megawatts on Tuesday, a record for September, and was expected to top 69,700 MW on Thursday and 72,200 MW on Friday. The grid’s all-time peak was 74,531 MW on Aug. 12. One megawatt can power about 1,000 U.S. homes on average, but as few as 200 during periods of peak demand. To make more power plants available for service, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state’s environmental regulator, told ERCOT that generators would be allowed to exceed their air permit emission limits during the heat wave.

Sometimes, a Greener Grid Means a 40,000% Spike in Power Prices -The road to a world powered by renewable energy is littered with unintended consequences. Like a 40,000% surge in electricity prices. Texas power prices jumped from less than $15 to as much as $9,000 a megawatt-hour this month as coal plant retirements and weak winds left the region on the brink of blackouts during a heat wave. It’s a phenomenon playing out worldwide. Germany averted three blackouts of its own in June and has seen prices both spike and plunge below zero within days as it swaps out coal and nuclear energy for wind and solar. In the U.K., more than a million homes lost power on Aug. 9, in part because a wind farm tripped offline.The recent stumbles serve as a warning shot to the rest of the world as governments work to displace aging nuclear reactors and coal-fired power plants with cheaper and cleaner renewable energy. Grid operators, policy makers and power providers are learning the hard way that losing massive, around-the-clock generators can be a challenge, if not carefully planned. “We have to have systems in place to make sure we still have enough generation on the grid — or else, in the best case, we have a blackout, and in the worst case, we have some kind of grid collapse,” said Severin Borenstein, an energy economist at the University of California at Berkeley, where state officials have a goal of getting all power from clean energy resources by 2045.

The dark side of renewable energy -Rare earth metals, hard-to-find materials, with unfamiliar names such as lanthanum, neodymium and europium, are used in wind and solar energy projects, but dwindling supplies could hinder a roll-out of low carbon technologies and slow China’s shift away from coal power. These compounds, which are highly toxic when mined and processed, also take a heavy environmental toll on soil and water, posing a conundrum for policymakers in China, the world’s biggest producer and consumer of rare earths. In 2012 the Chinese government named the city of Ganzhou, in the southeastern province of Jiangxi, a “rare earths kingdom”; even though at that time but its rare earth reserves were already almost depleted. According to a rare earths white paper issued by the State Council News Office in 2012, the reserves to extraction ratio for rare earth elements in southern China was 15. In other words, if mining continued at the existing rate, those reserves rich in medium and heavy rare earth elements (MHREEs) would only last for another 15 years. Three years later and 6,000 miles away in Paris, 190 countries signed the historic Paris Climate Agreement, including plans to introduce a greater share of wind and solar power in a “decarbonised” future. But few of the delegates gathered in Paris seemed to realise how important one small south-central Chinese city would be to achieving this target; as almost all the clean, smart and low-carbon technologies are reliant on rare earths. This prompts the questions: do we have enough rare earths to build the clean and smart future we’re imagining; can China, supplier of 90% of the global rare earths over the last 20 years, meet expected growth in demand; and what will the environmental consequences be.

Renewables Threaten German Economy & Energy Supply, McKinsey Warns In New Report -A new report by consulting giant McKinsey finds that Germany’s Energiewende, or energy transition to renewables, poses a significant threat to the nation’s economy and energy supply. One of Germany’s largest newspapers, Die Welt, summarized the findings of the McKinsey report in a single word: “disastrous.””Problems are manifesting in all three dimensions of the energy industry triangle: climate protection, the security of supply and economic efficiency,” writes McKinsey.In 2018, Germany produced 866 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, a far cry from its goal of 750 million tonnes by 2020. Thanks to a slightly warmer winter, emissions in Germany went down slightly in 2018, but not enough to change the overall trend. “If emissions reductions continue at the same pace as they did over the past decade, then CO2 targets for 2020 will only be reached eight years later, and 2030 targets will not be reached until 2046.” Germany has failed to even come close to reducing its primary energy consumption to levels it hoped. McKinsey says Germany is just 39% toward its goal for primary energy reduction.

The decline of American coal is taking a toll on the railroad industry – No matter what President Trump says, coal in America isn’t coming back – and it’s bringing other industries down with it. Coal demand for electricity is likely to drop by more than 50% in 11 years, according to a report by the rating agency Moody’s. In turn, revenue from transporting that coal around the country via trains is expected to drop $5 billion by 2030, or 5.5% of the railroad industry’s 2018 revenue. Coal’s dramatic decline is fueled by several factors: cheaper natural gas and renewable electricity, tougher environmental regulations in the Obama administration and the global shift to cleaner sources of energy in the face of climate change. Because of the industry’s outsized dependence on coal, the fossil fuel’s decline is hitting railroads especially hard. Coal makes up 13% of total freight volume, which is the largest single freight commodity moved by rail.

• 4 railway companies, led by CSX and Burlington Northern Sante Fe (BNSF), get more than 10% of their revenue from coal and are thus most at risk for revenue hits.
• CSX gets nearly 20% of its revenue from coal, while BNSF gets nearly 17%.
• Moody’s says credit effects for U.S. railroad companies “are likely manageable if the [coal] decline remains gradual.”

While ‘zombie’ mines idle, cleanup and workers suffer in limbo – As the governor of West Virginia and other mine owners warehouse their operations and avoid cleanup, the Trump administration stifles attempts to write rules that could restrict the practice. Their mines once fueled the coal and nuclear power plants that kept America’s lights on. Now, cheaper natural gas and renewables are helping push them into the red. But instead of properly closing the mines, their owners are idling them indefinitely, throwing workers into limbo and side-stepping legally mandated, but costly, environmental cleanup. Several dozen U.S. uranium mines and more than 150 coal mines sit idle and have not produced for years, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation. Also idled long-term are facilities such as processing plants, including more than 40 in the coal industry. Mine owners have exploited regulatory loopholes to warehouse their operations, changing the status of their permits on paper while little to no activity happens on the ground. Mining is a cyclical, boom-and-bust industry, so state and federal laws allow companies to pause work while prices rebound. In the coal industry, where the relevant permit status is usually called “temporary cessation,” this pause rarely has a cap – although regulators attempt to track the number that have been idled for at least three years. In uranium mining, where operations usually wait in “standby,” the limits differ by state – 10 years in Colorado but indefinitely in Utah if “good cause” is shown, for instance. But many of the mines identified in this investigation have remained “temporarily” paused for decades at a time, despite occasional increases in commodity prices. And most will likely never produce again. Uranium and coal are the mines most often idled for long periods, but the investigation also identified about 120 quarries and five Western gold mines paused for three or more years.

Appalachia’s Long, Proud Tradition of Labor Militancy — Harlan County, Kentucky, may be one of labor’s most hallowed battlegrounds. Its soil has been soaked in the blood of union men and women time and time again since theearly 20th century, when major labor disputes between miners and greedy mine operators roiled the area. Now, almost a century after the infamous Battle of Blair Mountain in neighboring West Virginia, one of the biggest and bloodiest class war uprisings in U.S. history, suffering Appalachian coal miners have taken matters into their own hands once again. On July 29, about 50 coal miners in Cumberland, Kentucky, banded together to stop a moving train. They blocked the tracks, refusing to allow the train, carrying $1 million worth of coal, to pass, according to Newsweek. They did the same thing the next day, and the next – literally putting their bodies on the line. Their protest began because Blackjewel, the company where they had until recently been employed, filed for bankruptcy in early July without paying the approximately $5 million in back pay the company owes to 1,700 miners, an attorney for the group told CNN. The standoff has now stretched on for weeks. The miners are not only dealing with financial hardships, but are also in legal limbo, unable to access health care benefits or file for unemployment, Cumberland mayor Charles Raleigh told CNN. The community and local churches have pitched in to help, and a collective of local trans anarchist activists are on the ground providing mutual aid, but many miners are still struggling. The Blackjewel mine was reportedly not unionized, but its former workers have used the tried-and-true union tactic of collective action to fight for what they are owed. In doing so they’ve become part of a long, proud tradition of Appalachian labor militancy… It’s worth noting that miners aren’t the only union folks represented in the region; teachers in West Virginia and Kentucky made headlines with a series of wildcat strikes in 2018 and earlier this year as part of the wider #RedforEd movement.

Ameren announces controversial plan to cover its coal ash ponds – and leave material in the ground -When utilities burn coal for power, they’re left with coal ash – a byproduct that contains arsenic, mercury, and other contaminants. But where, and how, should the material be stored? That question has been the source of fierce debate in recent years, both nationally and around St. Louis. At Ameren’s coal-fired power plants in the region, decades of leftover ash fills massive storage ponds acres in size and dug up to 100 feet deep into the floodplains along major rivers – leak-prone sites that critics say pollute groundwater and adjacent waterways. But despite concerns and objections, that’s where Ameren’s legacy coal ash will remain, the St. Louis-based utility announced Friday, outlining a plan to cover its ash ponds while leaving the material in the ground and continuing to monitor groundwater. The decision is an outcome opponents fought hard – arguing instead for excavation of the coal ash – but feared was inevitable. Company officials framed the decision as the best overall move for the environment, neighboring communities, and for the utility’s customer base in terms of cost. “Some people suggested we’re walking away, and that’s absolutely not the case,” “The objective of this is to prevent rainwater infiltration,” Wood said, adding that the “localized, limited plume (of pollution) in the basin will shrink and go away over time” – a process that he said would happen decades faster than if the sites were opened up for lengthy excavation projects. But critics are not convinced, and say that Ameren has chosen the path of least resistance and cost. “It seems to be the worst of the options that they had on the table,” said Peter Goode, an environmental engineer focused mostly on water issues for Washington University’s Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic – a pro bono legal practice that commonly tracks pollution disputes involving Ameren. “It’s disappointing but not surprising. They seem to be taking the easiest and least costly way to close their ash ponds.”

West Michigan residents fear coal ash contaminating drinking water wells – State environmental officials are reviewing claims by multiple West Michigan residents that a coal ash storage site near Lake Michigan is contaminating drinking water wells. The Michigan chapter of the Sierra Club this summer helped four homes near the J.H. Campbell coal plant outside Holland obtain water samples that tested for contaminants linked with coal ash pollution, including arsenic and lead. One home’s well tested arsenic levels at 2.5 times the federal safe level for drinking, according to a report provided to the Energy News Network. “Certainly we’re looking into this and hope to get a look at their data,” said Margie Ring, solid waste engineering coordinator for the state Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy. Ring said this is the first instance the department has heard from residents claiming their wells may be contaminated from coal ash. Michigan has 37 coal ash ponds statewide, a majority of which show groundwater contamination levels exceeding federal pollution standards, according to a report last year by the Michigan Environmental Council. The four storage pits at Campbell are inactive, and the plant’s coal ash waste is sent to an onsite landfill or is reused in other products. State officials and Consumers Energy, the plant owner, have monitored groundwater around the Campbell plant for years and are planning to remediate pollution stemming from coal ash storage. Consumers has acknowledged coal ash residuals in groundwater at the facility, but utility and state officials say they have no evidence that it has migrated beyond the company’s property. “We don’t believe there are any impacts to groundwater off-site in terms of the drinking water supplies based on the information we have,” Ring said. She declined to comment on whether more residents should have their wells tested, saying more analysis is needed of the data so far. The Sierra Club says its recent testing – which advocates say has been shared with the state over the past month – disputes the state’s and Consumers’ claims.

Twenty-five-year-old miner crushed to death in Pennsylvania coal mine – Tanner Lee McFarland was killed Thursday evening when part of the wall and roof in the area of the mine he was working collapsed, crushing him under tons of coal and rock. McFarland, age 25, of Washington, Pennsylvania was killed around 6 p.m. Thursday while working at Consol Energy’s Enlow Fork Mine in Washington County, part of the company’s Pennsylvania Mining Complex. The mines are located about 60 miles south of Pittsburgh, near the West Virginia border. McFarland is survived by his wife Casey and their two-year-old son Gavin Lee. Tanner and Casey began dating in 2012 and were married in 2015. Casey is expecting their second child.In February of this year, the WSWS interviewed a miner who was especially concerned about the push for production in the mine at the expense of miners’ health and safety. (See: Miner warns of safety danger at United States’ largest underground coal mine)The miner explained that Consol was only looking to increase production and didn’t care about maintenance of the machines or the safety of the men. “Everyone in the mine is very mad and concerned,” he said. “It is all production, production, production but they are creating the conditions where something can happen.” In 2018, the three mines produced a record 27.6 short tons of coal, up 5.6 percent from the previous record of 26.1 short tons in 2017. The Enlow Fork Mine produced over 10 million short tons that year. Consol’s aim has been to produce more this year and the mine has been working at near 100 percent capacity.

Environmentalists Say Feds Fail to Protect Crayfish From Coal Mining – Political appointees in President Donald Trump’s Interior Department have weakened protections for Appalachia’s endangered crayfish to benefit the coal mining industry, environmentalists claim in a federal lawsuit.The Center for Biological Diversity sued the Interior Department on Wednesday, arguing the Trump administration has allowed former coal lobbyists in the department to interfere in critical habitat decisions that are supposed to be based purely on science. The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of West Virginia, claims “political appointees” in the department rejected guidance on crayfish projections developed by its own regional office and chose to instead adopt recommendations by West Virginia’s environmental protection agency, which the plaintiffs say is heavily influenced by the coal industry. “Trump appointees have enabled a rubber-stamp system allowing mountains to be blown up and streams to be polluted without protection for endangered species or the human communities of Appalachia,” said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the center. Two species of crayfish – the Guyandotte River crayfish and Big Sandy crayfish – were listed as endangered in 2016 during the Obama administration. In June 2017, the Interior Department issued a new directive that allowed mining firms to avoid drafting protection plans for projects within 500 feet of a known crayfish stream unless a company survey found a crayfish listed under the Endangered Species Act. The directive was based on guidance set by West Virginia and a 1996 biological opinion on surface coal mining which the plaintiffs say does not comply with the Endangered Species Act because full adherence with its terms would jeopardize listed species and harm critical habitats.

Climate Change-Induced Factors Threaten India’s Coal-Based Energy Sector: Report — India’s coal-fired power plants, which generate about 70% of the country’s electricity, are facing major risks due to over-capacity, low-cost renewables and water shortages, a new report has concluded.Climate change has exacerbated impacts as increasingly ambitious targets by the government have brought down the price of renewable energy alternatives and water shortages are growing due to erratic monsoons and an increase in extreme rainfall.“It is our conclusion that these issues, coupled with rising concern over climate change and increasingly ambitious government commitments to address it, will be an insurmountable hurdle for India’s coal sector,” the report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) said.According to the report, given the construction boom early on in the 2010s, the coal sector now has significant overcapacity. Coal-fired power capacity in India is now 20% higher than the level of peak demand and 50 gigawatts above average demand levels. Increased water stress in the country is another factor that is providing significant headwinds to the coal energy sector. Coal-fired power plants require large amounts of water for cooling purposes. Rapidly depleting levels of ground water, a decline in monsoon rain and increased instances of extreme rainfall have led to a shortage of water across the country. These issues are likely to worsen due to climate change and as a result, IEEFA concludes, the coal fired power sector could face shortages. Fierce competition from renewable energy sources – wind, solar and thermal power – are also contributing to stress in the coal sector, IEEFA has concluded. Solar and wind auction prices in India, at Rs 3.29 per kilowatt-hour, are now lower than the cost of coal-fired electricity which averaged at Rs 3.49 per kilowatt-hour during 2018-19.

Duke shuts Brunswick nuclear plant in North Carolina ahead of Hurricane Dorian – For the second time in a year, Duke Energy is shutting its two-unit Brunswick nuclear plant near Wilmington, North Carolina, in advance of the arrival of a hurricane. Plant operators told the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission Thursday that the 1,978-MW station would be shut soon as required by regulations, an agency spokesman said. Hurricane Dorian was a Category 2 hurricane with sustained winds of 110 mph Thursday afternoon, the National Hurricane Center said in an update. The eye of the storm was just off the South Carolina coast and the forecast carries the storm along the North Carolina coast and possibly onto land briefly overnight before eventually moving out to sea, the center said. Brunswick plant spokeswoman Karen Williams said forecasts call for hurricane force winds to arrive at the site, and that Duke was preparing to shut the two units. While the units are designed to withstand heavy winds and flooding, US nuclear reactors must be shut as a precaution at least two hours before winds over 74 miles per hour are forecast to arrive. Plants also take steps such as securing debris, protecting entrances from water entry and staging personnel and supplies at plants. NRC is keeping two resident inspectors at Brunswick overnight in case access to the site is difficult during the storm, agency spokesman Roger Hannah said. The two Brunswick units shut September 14, 2018 in advance of the arrival of Hurricane Florence. Flooding in areas around the plant prevented workers from entering or leaving for several days and the units did not return to service for about eight days.

Residents skeptical of plans to dismantle Oyster Creek nuclear plant – Residents in Ocean County, New Jersey, are skeptical of plans to dismantle the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant, which includes an accelerated timeline for removing the facility’s spent nuclear fuel and storing it indefinitely in casks onsite. More than 150 people attended a town hall Thursday night to grill representatives from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Camden-based Holtec International, which is overseeing the decommissioning process together with Canadian company SNC-Lavalin. They also implored U.S. Rep. Andy Kim, who hosted the event, and other elected officials in the audience to hold Holtec accountable. “You need to protect us,” said Barnegat resident Marianne Clemente, 73. Many questions focused on Holtec’s assertion it can decommission the plant in six to eight years thanks to new technology and streamlined processes. Exelon, the company that operated the plant, had proposed a 60-year timeline. “What technology miraculously got discovered to take you from 60 years to six years?” Clemente asked. Other residents raised concerns about the safety of storing spent fuel onsite – a virtual necessity given there are few alternative places to put the waste. Holtec wants to build an interim nuclear waste storage facility in New Mexico but is yet to win federal approval to do so, and the U.S. government has not established a permanent repository. “Do you have the research and the proof that you can monitor whether or not there is hydrogen gas build-up in those casks once they are sealed?” said Janet Tauro, an environmental activist with the group Clean Water Action.

Massachusetts Wants Halt to Entergy Nuclear Power Plant Sale – The Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrongly approved the sale and decommissioning of a Massachusetts nuclear power plant and should halt both immediately, the state’s attorney general told the commission in a Sept. 4 filing with the federal agency. Commission staff violated NRC regulations and the National Environmental Policy Act by approving the license transfer and exemption requests for the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station “even though it is clear today that insufficient funds exist” in the decommissioning trust fund to protect the public and the environment, Attorney General Maura Healey (D) said in the request to the NRC.

TMI closure: Exelon wants safety changes, including end to sirens, pills, evacuation zone Like many others living near Three Mile Island, Diane Senseman of Elizabethtown comes in every year at about this time to get her free potassium iodide pills. “I believe in precaution,” Senseman said of her annual trek to pick up the pills – also known as KI pills – which are supposed to protect the thyroid gland in case of a radioactive leak from TMI. Picking up the pills each year is just one of the things Senseman has grown accustomed to that go with living near a nuclear power plant. There are others, such as hearing the sirens go off when they are tested twice a year, and that slick pamphlet that comes in the mail from Exelon each year to remind everyone living within 10 miles of TMI what they are supposed to do in case of an emergency. But that could all go away by early 2021, as part of Exelon’s planned shutdown of the Unit 1 reactor at TMI on Sept. 30. A statement provided to the Press & Journal by Exelon spokesman David Marcheskie states that “as plant conditions change, the already low risk to public health and safety is reduced even further, and an emergency plan tailored to those conditions allows for more effective emergency management.” Under requests Exelon has filed with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the company’s responsibility for emergency planning would not extend beyond the island itself. Off-site emergency planning no longer would be necessary, because by about Jan. 30, 2021 – 488 days after the Sept. 30 shutdown – conditions on Three Mile Island will have changed to where a release of radiation into the atmosphere in excess of safety thresholds established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will no longer be considered “credible,” Exelon has said in documents the company filed with the NRC. The shutdown, the company states, means Unit 1 no longer will be an operating nuclear reactor, but a non-operating plant in a “permanently defueled condition.” That’s a significant difference, in terms of the danger the plant poses to the public off-site, Exelon says. No evacuation zone or emergency planning requirements pertaining to such a zone would be necessary, because after Jan. 30, 2021, “any releases beyond the site boundary are limited to small fractions of the EPA PAG (Protective Action Guideline) exposure levels,” Exelon says. Off-site radiation monitoring systems no longer would be required beyond January 2021 “due to the decreased risks associated with defueled plants,” Exelon says. Instead, off-site radiation monitoring would be performed “as the need arises.”

C-10: Seabrook plant’s concrete degradation poses threat – — A nuclear watchdog group is publicly setting the stage for its case against NextEra Energy with its expert comparing the Seabrook Station’s plan to address concrete degradation to treating cancer in the 19th and early 20th centuries.Newburyport-Mass.-based C-10 will go before the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Sept. 24 at Newburyport City Hall, contesting a license amendment granted to allow the nuclear power plant to operate until 2050.The amendment C-10 contests addresses how NextEra will mitigate the alkali-silica reaction in Seabrook Station’s concrete over the coming decades. C-10 also opposed the plant’s 2010 application to have its license extended 20 years, from 2030 to 2050.C-10 recently issued a press release citing its consultant Victor Saouma, Ph.D., who called the approved methods to address ASR at the plant “very simplistic.”Saouma drew an analogy between Seabrook’s core reactor containment enclosure building and a patient suffering from cancer. According to Saouma, while modern cancer treatment includes specialists, advanced testing and monitoring, he likened NextEra’s approach to general practitioners (engineers) using a stethoscope for simplistic observation. He claims NextEra’s and the NRC’s experts, though competent engineers, have limited expertise about the effects of ASR in concrete and stated the “basic safety of the population living within 10 miles of Seabrook cannot be reasonably assured.

Ohio’s great Chinese power conspiracy theory – An entity dubbing itself “Ohioans For Energy Security” has a warning for the good people of the Buckeye State: “The Chinese government is quietly invading our American electric grid; intertwining themselves financially in our energy infrastructure.” Before we get into the details of the one-minute ad in which a suitably ominous voice intones those words over much footage of President Xi Jinping, some context: Ohio recently passed legislation to subsidize struggling nuclear and coal-fired power plants, while also weakening incentives for renewable power and energy efficiency. The law benefits several incumbent power companies, especially FirstEnergy Solutions Corp., the bankrupt merchant-generation arm of utility FirstEnergy Corp. In response, opponents are busy gathering signatures for a petition to put a referendum aimed at scrapping the law on the November 2020 ballot. The ad warns Ohioans about such people approaching them to sign. As my Bloomberg News colleague Will Wade reports, Carlo LoParo, a spokesperson for OFES, explained that state-controlled Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd. has loaned money to several natural-gas-fired power projects in Ohio. Therefore, as those plants gain market share, so Beijing could gain undue influence over the state’s power system. Suffice it to say that loans made to power plants by a bank, state-owned or otherwise, do not actually grant that bank or its shareholders ownership of said plants, let alone influence over the grid they supply. Finance and power-market oversight just doesn’t work that way. LoParo says the ad was “produced in a way to get your attention,” and I can only agree with him on that. I also asked LoParo how OFES feels about Industrial and Commercial Bank of China’s role as a lender to none other than FirstEnergy itself. Surely having a Chinese bank provide credit to the actual owner of the grid presents a similarly sinister challenge? LoParo actually said he would “prefer” FirstEnergy not to take such funding.

Tempers Flare Over Fukushima Plan To Dump Radioactive Water In Ocean –South Korea has fired off a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to express concerns over a Japanese plan to release radioactive water into the ocean which has been collected since the 2011 nuclear disaster, according to NHK. An official of South Korea’s science ministry said on Thursday said that the letter expresses the country’s serious concerns about the environment impact of such a release. The official also said South Korea asked the international nuclear watchdog to play a more active role on the issue. –NHKTokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which operates the plant, is storing over 1.12 million tons of radioactive water on site, which is slated to reach capacity in 2022. The contaminated water has been treated using a system known as ALPS (multi-nuclide removal system), which removes 62 types of radioactive elements – not including tritium, before being stored stored in massive tanks on the Fukushima Daiichi grounds. The plan to release diluted wastewater into the ocean is one of several measures being discussed by an expert panel as possible ways to deal with the problem. Adding storage tanks is another option – which would kick the can down the road. the Japanese government is pushing to have the water released into the sea. But based on an investigation of 890,000 tons of Fukushima Daiichi water that had undergone ALPS purification (950,000 tons total), TEPCO announced in September 2018 that 750,000 tons – more than 80% – still included radioactive material above emission standards. Fukushima-area fishers continue to oppose the release of Fukushima Daiichi water in the ocean on that basis, and the Japanese government has yet to proceed with the discharge. –Hankyoreh.kr On Wednesday, the Japanese government announced that it had invited foreign diplomats to its Foreign Ministry in Tokyo for a briefing on the situation – the 103rd such meeting, yet the first one ever announced. “Since the start [of the briefings], we have continued to provide information to diplomats in Tokyo about conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant since the East Japan earthquake,” said the ministry.

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