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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Global Warming May Dwindle the Supply of a Key Brain Nutrient – Glaciers continue to melt. Sea levels are on the rise. And now scientists believe the changing climate may put our brains at risk. A new analysis predicts that by 2100, increasing water temperatures brought on by a warming planet could result in 96 percent of the world’s population not having access to an omega-3 fatty acid crucial to brain health and function. That molecule is called docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA. It is the most common fatty acid in the mammalian brain and plays a key role in the survival and function of our neural cells, especially during the organ’s development. Data suggest that not having enough of the compound may increase the risk of conditions such as depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and impair cognition in people with early dementia.Our bodies do not make much DHA, so, for the most part, we obtain it through diet. Plants and meats have modest amounts of the fatty acid, but the most abundant source by far is fish (or fish-derived supplements). Fish obtain DHA by consuming algae. The authors of the new study predict that rising temperatures could disrupt algal DHA production and lead to a 10 to 58 percent reduction in availability of the compound, depending on the geographic region. Their predictions show that larger countries with rapid population growth in East and Southeast Asia – including China, Japan and Indonesia – will face the most severe DHA shortages. Most African countries – especially landlocked ones – will also end up falling below recommended DHA intake, whereas nations with small populations and active fishing industries, such as Norway, Chile and New Zealand, will likely maintain access to adequate omega-3s.
How the global fish market contributes to human micronutrient deficiencies — Fish are a source of micronutrients that help to prevent nutrient-deficiency diseases, which are a leading cause of infant deaths worldwide. Determining whether the consumption of locally caught fish could reduce the incidence of nutrient-deficiency diseases in countries particularly affected by this problem requires having access to the relevant data. Writing in Nature, Hicks et al.1 report their assessment of the nutritional content of 367 species of fish. For 43 countries, the authors mapped the relationship between the fish-derived nutrients available from fisheries’ catches and the prevalence of nutrient-deficiency diseases in communities living within 100 kilometres of the coast. Hicks and colleagues focused on six crucial micronutrients: calcium, iron, zinc, selenium, omega-3 and vitamin A. They also considered protein content. Using some previously available data, the authors generated a model that could correctly predict the levels of these nutrients in different species of fish. By mining databases containing information about fisheries’ catches taken between 2010 and 2014, the authors gathered information about the amount and type of fish caught in each country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) – the area of its coastal waters over which it has sovereign fishing rights. Hicks and colleagues used their model to estimate the nutrients available from these fish catches and thus determine the spatial pattern of this nutrient availability in global fish catches. In developing countries around the tropics, fish add the missing micronutrients and proteins to what would otherwise be an unbalanced diet. In many developing countries, fish are the food source2 that provides the majority of the inhabitants with most of the micronutrients studied by the authors. Hicks and colleagues’ data demonstrate that fisheries’ catches in some developing countries should be enough to meet the key micronutrient needs of their populations. In some cases, ensuring that even a fraction of a country’s total fish catch is retained for local consumption could have a substantial impact on public health. This is particularly true for children under five years old, during a crucial stage of their development when micronutrient deficiencies have a severe effect. For 22 of the countries that Hicks and colleagues studied, 20% or less of the fish caught could provide enough key micronutrients to meet the needs of all children under five years old.
Researchers find lead in turmeric – It’s billed as a health booster and healing agent, but it may be the source of cognitive defects and other severe ailments. A new Stanford-led study reveals that turmeric – a commonly used spice throughout South Asia – is sometimes adulterated with a lead-laced chemical compound in Bangladesh, one of the world’s predominant turmeric-growing regions. Long banned from food products, lead is a potent neurotoxin considered unsafe in any quantity. A related analysis published recently confirms for the first time that turmeric is likely the primary contributor to elevated blood lead levels among Bangladeshis surveyed. “We know adulterated turmeric is a source of lead exposure, and we have to do something about it.” Many traced the issue to the 1980s when a massive flood left turmeric crops wet and relatively dull in color. Demand for bright yellow curry led turmeric processors to add lead chromate – an industrial yellow pigment commonly used to color toys and furniture – to their product. The practice continued as a cheap, fast way to produce a desirable color. As a potent neurotoxin, lead increases the risk of heart and brain disease in adults and interferes with children’s brain development. About 90 percent of children with elevated blood lead levels live in lower-income countries, and resulting cognitive damages are associated with nearly one trillion dollars in lost productivity annually.
Officials cover up lead in water crisis in Newark, New Jersey – On Monday, New Jersey and Newark officials announced preliminary filter testing results in Newark’s Pequannock water service area for removing dangerous amounts of lead in the water. Democratic Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka and Democratic Governor Phil Murphy declared that the filters distributed to residents in 2017 were “doing their job to protect our residents from the risks of lead.” Officials stated that testing results have revealed 97 percent of homes with PUR filters had water lead levels under 10 parts per billion (ppb) and that a detailed report will be released in the coming weeks. The claim that the filtered water is safe to drink is a deadly lie. Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, noted in a statement responding to the remarks of Baraka and Murphy: “The CDC and the EPA said there should be no traces of lead in the water. The private well drinking act sets the standard for houses on wells for 5ppb. 10ppb but it is still way too high and that will have serious health impacts on children and the people of Newark. It shows we are doing too little too late.” Lead is a deadly neurotoxin which can cause organ damage, weakness and anemia. It is especially harmful to children and pregnant women which is why the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends lead levels in water to be below 1 ppb. Most of Newark’s water is far above this recommended level. Newark residents receive water from two treatment facilities, the Pequannock Water Treatment Plant (WTP) for western Newark and the Wanaque WTP for eastern Newark. But filters were distributed only in October 2018 and only to Newark residents serviced by the Pequannock WTP even though, according to the National Resources Defense Council, in 2014 ten percent of households serviced by the Wanaque WTP had lead levels above 15 ppb. The 30,000 residents who are serviced with water by the Wanaque WTP have never received filters and were excluded from the recent testing. Many residents who did receive filters had faucets incompatible with the equipment and faced installation difficulties. The city provided no assistance in filter installation. In addition, a significant portion of residents do not read English and couldn’t possibly have interpreted the filter installation instructions by themselves. As a result, some residents had loose filters which leaked lead-contaminated water, were running hot water through them, which damaged the filters, or did not know how to replace filter cartridges.
World Health Organisation Says Tanzania Is Withholding Info On Suspected Ebola Cases – In a statement on Sunday, the World Health Organisation (WHO) accused the government of Tanzania of deliberately withholding information about suspected cases of Ebola virus disease, the Washington Post reported. The allegation follows reports of multiple cases throughout the nation, beginning in the capital city of Dar es Salaam, after which WHO said it was shut out from blood tests and informed by Tanzanian officials that the Ebola virus had been ruled out. According to WHO, Tanzanian officials have not offered alternative diagnoses for the cases. However, it has received “unofficial reports” that a 34 year old doctor returning from Uganda who died on September 9 in Dar es Salaam tested positive for Ebola, while a second person tested negative. The status of a third possible case is unclear, the Post wrote, and the WHO statement is the “most pointed rebuke toward any government yet” in dealing with an ongoing outbreak that began in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo last year. “… Clinical data, results of the investigations, possible contacts and potential laboratory tests performed for differential diagnosis of those patients have not been communicated to WHO,” the agency wrote in the statement. “This information is required for WHO to be able to fully assess of the potential risk posed by this event.” As the Post noted, Tanzania has never before reported any cases of Ebola, and its heavily tourism dependent economy could suffer if the virus is confirmed to have spread there. Theongoing outbreak in the DRC began in August 2018 has involved over 3,000 reported casesand resulted in over 2,100 deaths, but has largely been contained within two provinces and is now being fought with newer, more advanced drugs. However, WHO officials have “pursued potential cases in the outbreak that [have] travelled as far as Dubai and China,” according to the Post.On September 15, according to Al Jazeera, Tanzanian Health Minister Ummy Mwalimu said that the government had investigate two cases and found that the “patients did not have Ebola. There is no Ebola outbreak in Tanzania as we speak, people should not panic.” However, the network noted that Mwalimu did not clarify whether those two cases included the deceased doctor.
Gene-Editing Unintentionally Adds Bovine DNA, Goat DNA, and Bacterial DNA, Mouse Researchers Find – The gene-editing of DNA inside living cells is considered by many to be the preeminent technological breakthrough of the new millennium. Gene-editing has many potential uses. These include altering cells to treat human disease, altering crops and livestock for breeding and agriculture. Chinese researcher He Jiankui claims to have edited human babies to resist HIV by altering a gene called CCR5. For most commercial applications gene-editing’s appeal is simplicity and precision: it alters genomes at precise sites and without inserting foreign DNA. This why, in popular articles, gene-editing is often referred to as ‘tweaking’. The tweaking narrative, however, is an assumption and not an established fact. And it recently suffered a large dent. In late July researchers from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) analysed the whole genomes of two calves originally born in 2016. The calves were edited by the biotech startupRecombinetics using a gene-editing method called TALENS (Norris et al., 2019). The two Recombinetics animals had become biotech celebrities for having a genetic change that removed their horns. The calves are well-known because Recombinetics has insisted that its two edited animals were extremely precisely altered to possess only the polled trait. However, what the FDA researchers found was not precision. Each of Recombinetics’ calves possessed two antibiotic resistance genes, along with other segments of superfluous bacterial DNA. Thus, apparently unbeknownst to Recombinetics, adjacent to its edited site were 4,000 base pairs of DNA that originated from the plasmid vector used to introduce the DNA required for the hornless trait. The FDA finding has attracted some media attention; mainly focussed on the incompetence of Recombinetics. But FDA’s findings are potentially trivial besides another recent discovery about gene-editing: that foreign DNA from surprising sources can routinely find its way into the genome of edited animals. This genetic material is not DNA that was put there on purpose, but rather, is a contaminant of standard editing procedures. These findings have not been reported in the scientific or popular media. But they are of great consequence from a biosafety perspective and therefore for the commercial and regulatory landscape of gene-editing. They imply, at the very least, the need for strong measures to prevent contamination by stray DNA, along with thorough scrutiny of gene-edited cells and gene-edited organisms. And, as the Recombinetics case suggests, these are needs that developers themselves may not meet.
MIT Media Lab, already under scrutiny for Epstein connections, dumped chemicals in excess of legal limit – – Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab have dumped wastewater underground in apparent violation of a state environmental regulation, according to documents and interviews, potentially endangering local waterways in and near the town of Middleton.Nitrogen levels from the lab’s wastewater registered more than 20 times above the legal limit, according to documents provided by a former Media Lab employee. When water contains large amounts of nitrogen, it can kill fish and deprive infants of oxygen. Nine months ago, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection began asking questions, but MIT’s health and safety office failed to provide the required water quality reports, according to documents obtained by ProPublica and WBUR. This triggered an ongoing state investigation. After ProPublica and WBUR contacted MIT for comment, an institute official said the lab in question was pausing its operations while the university and regulators worked on a solution. Tony Sharon, an MIT deputy vice president who oversees the health and safety office, didn’t comment on the specific events described in the documents.The state’s investigation adds to recent scrutiny of the Media Lab for accepting donations from Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender who was charged with trafficking minors before he died in jail last month. Joichi Ito, the director of the Media Lab, has resigned, and students have called for the resignation of MIT President L. Rafael Reif, who signed off on at least one of Epstein’s gifts. The lab responsible for the dumping is the Open Agriculture Initiative, one of many research projects at the Media Lab. Led by principal research scientist Caleb Harper, who was trained as an architect, the initiative has been under fire for overhyping its “food computers”: boxes that could supposedly be programmed to grow crops, but allegedly didn’t work as promised.
Trump Threatens to Veto First Ever Congressional Action on “Forever Chemicals” — A handful of multibillion-dollar chemical companies have waged war on our bodies and our environment for nearly 70 years without our knowledge or consent. Although the federal government – tasked with protecting the public and upholding the law – became aware of this chemical assault 20 years ago, it chose to conceal the truth,downplay the threat, and expand the use of a class of chemicals known to endanger the health of present and future generations. PFAS are a class of nearly 5,000 synthetic chemicals that make products water- and grease-resistant. They are in non-stick cookware, water-repellent clothing, stain-resistant carpets, lubricants, firefighting foams, paints, cosmetics and paper plates our kids eat off at schools. Humans are exposed to PFAS through contaminated food, air, dust, rain, soil and drinking water. Termed “forever chemicals,” PFAS can take thousands of years to break down in the environment and can remain in our bodies for decades. PFAS are now in the blood of 99 percent of Americans and have contaminated the drinking water of as many as 110 million Americans – particularly those living near chemical manufacturing facilities, airports and military bases. Even the smallest exposure to PFAS can cause a variety of cancers, thyroid disease, hormone disruption, decreased fertility and other serious health issues. Yet, Trump’s EPA and Department of Defense (DoD) remain dependable PFAS defenders. The EPA has yet to set a safe, enforceable drinking water standard for PFAS, has colluded with the chemical industry to keep health risks secret, and has approved the use of more than 600 new PFAS chemicals in the last 10 years. The DoD has long been aware that PFAS in firefighting foam endangers the health of soldiers, their families and surrounding communities. But again, the life of U.S. soldiers are not as valued as the chemicals that kill them. As of August 2017, there are more than 400 known or suspected military sites contaminated with PFAS. A recent report found PFAS water contamination at 130 military bases across the country – nearly two-thirds had more than 100 times levels considered safe. Nonetheless, the DoD supports the continued use of PFAS despite the availability of safer alternatives, opposes spending the $2 billion in PFAS cleanup costs needed on and around military bases and has pressured the EPA toweaken cleanup standards.
Just One Tea Bag Can Release Billions of Microscopic Plastic Particles Into Your Drink, Study Finds – From Arctic snow to the deep sea, microplastics have been found in some unusual places. Now, it turns out they could be lurking at the bottom of your cup of tea! McGill University chemical engineering professor Nathalie Tufenkji decided to test tea bags after she was given one in a Montreal cafe that looked like it was made from plastic. “I said, ‘Oh God, I’m sure if it’s plastic it’s, like, breaking down into the tea,'” she told CBC News. So she asked her graduate student Laura Hernandez to purchase several tea bag brands from Montreal stores. The scientists then tested them to see if they left any plastic particles behind. The results, published in Environmental Science and Technology Wednesday, far surpassed the researchers’ expectations. “We were shocked when we saw billions of particles in a single cup of tea,” Tufenkji told CBC News. In total, the researchers found that steeping a plastic tea bag at 95 degrees Celsius released around 11.6 billion microplastics and 3.1 billion nanoplastics into a single cup. That’s much more than other foods and beverages commonly contaminated with plastics, Tufenkji told New Scientist. “We think that it is a lot when compared to other foods that contain microplastics,” she said. “Table salt, which has a relatively high microplastic content, has been reported to contain approximately 0.005 micrograms plastic per gram salt. A cup of tea contains thousands of times greater mass of plastic, at 16 micrograms per cup.” Whether or not this is actually a problem for human health is uncertain. The World Health Organizationconcluded last month that plastic particles in drinking water were a “low” risk to humans at their current levels. But the report also said more research was needed, especially on the health impacts of chemical additives and of microplastics less than 150 micrometers in diameter, which could enter the body’s tissues. Plastic tea bags are made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and nylon, which are approved as food packaging, according to CBC News. In order to assess their potential toxiciity, Tufenkji and her team did an initial test of how the plastic particles impacted water fleas. “The particles did not kill the water fleas, but did cause significant behavioural effects and developmental malformations,” Tufenkji told New Scientist.
Delicate Wash Cycle Uses More Water and Releases 800,000 More Microplastics – The delicate wash cycle uses much more water than other settings, which triggers the release of hundreds of thousands of plastic microfibers, which travel down the drain and potentially into marine waterways, according to a new study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. Researchers at Newcastle University in the UK found that the delicate cycle, which uses about twice as much water as other settings, releases an average of 800,000 more plastic microfibers than lower-water volume settings. The findings that water volume is the greatest determinant of plastic microfiber release upend the previous wisdom that it was agitation that led textiles to shed their microfibers, according to the study.”Our findings were a surprise,” said Grant Burgess, a marine microbiologist who led the research, to the Guardian. “You would expect delicate washes to protect clothes and lead to less microfibers being released, but our careful studies showed that in fact it was the opposite. If you wash your clothes on a delicate wash cycle the clothes release far more plastic fibers. These are microplastics, made from polyester. They are not biodegradable and can build up in our environment.” That build up is worrying to scientists, who have discovered microplastics everywhere, from the bottom of the ocean to the seemingly pristine arctic snow and ice. Millions of plastic microfibers are shed every time we do a load of laundry that has clothes made of nylon, polyester or acrylic. The fibers are so tiny that they easily slip through the drain filter and out of the washing machine where they can enter rivers, streams and eventually the oceans where they are swallowed up by the animals living there, as the Irish Times reported.
Wrapping the Planet in PLASTIC is Underway – The garden vegetables remains crisp for three days at your local market. Wrap it in polyethylene shrink wrap and its longevity extends to 14. That, in short, explains the rapid growth of plastic food packaging, projected to become a $370 billion market next year. With those numbers, it comes as little surprise that the way humans buy and consume food is having such a tangible impact on the oceans. Nine of the Ocean Conservancy’s top ten items retrieved from its annual beach cleanups are related to food and drink. Food packaging remains the second most common trash item collected during the group’s annual beach cleanup in 2018. And now for the first time, plastic forks, knives, and spoons have made the list, according to the group’s new report. Aside from food packaging – more than 3.7 million individual wrappers were collected – the list of disposable plastics includes straws, stirrers, cutlery, bottles and caps, grocery bags and other plastic bags (for food and other uses), lids, cups, and plates. The exception is cigarette butts, which contain plastic filters, and has remained the No. 1 item for many years. “Cigarette butts are a separate issue and they win the race every year,” says George Leonard, the Ocean Conservancy’s chief scientist. “If you run down the rest of the top ten list, what strikes me is that the vast majority are not recyclable. To the extent we talk about recycling as a solution to ocean plastic problems, it would have to get to 50 or 90 percent, which is a huge lift and gets complicated very quickly,” he says. The 2018 cleanup also drew more than a million people for the first time. They collected more than 23.3 million pounds of trash on beaches in more than 120 nations, and catalogued nearly a million separate items, creating a snapshot of nearly everything humans make and use. The cleanup collection included more than 69,000 toys, more than 16,000 appliances, a chandelier, an artificial Christmas tree, a garage door, and a cash register. The organization is conducting an extended analysis of data, looking for global patterns that could inform the effort to keep plastic trash out of the oceans, Leonard says.
90% Of Plastic Waste Polluting Earth’s Oceans Comes From Asia and Africa – Despite westerners being lectured by climate activists like Greta Thunberg, a study has found that around 90 per cent of plastic waste polluting earth’s oceans comes from Asia and Africa. During her U.S. tour, Thunberg cited “horrifying pictures of plastic in the oceans,” as one of the primary reasons why Americans should listen to her.However, researchers at Germany’s Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research discovered that a small number of rivers account for the vast majority of plastic pollution and none of them are located in western countries. “The 10 top-ranked rivers transport 88-95 percent of the global load into the sea,” Dr. Christian Schmidt, a hydrogeologist who led the study, told the Daily Mail. “The rivers with the highest estimated plastic loads are characterized by high population – for instance the Yangtze with over half a billion people.”Out of the top ten rivers that produce the most pollution, eight are in Asia and two are in Africa. The Yangtze River in China and the Ganges River in India were responsible for the most plastic pollution.While westerners are being told to alter their lifestyles and have fewer children to save the planet, virtually nothing is being said about or to the people in the countries responsible for the vast majority of pollution.This is probably one of the main reasons why many in the west remain skeptical about the true motives of the environmentalist movement.
India to Ban Single-Use Plastics; Global Recycling Market Still Chaotic – Jerri-Lynn Scofield – In June 2018, prime minister Narendra Modi announced that India will ban single-use plastics by 2022. Canada and the European Union have promised to ban some single-use plastics by 2021. Last month, Modi promised to elaborate on the scope of India’s ban on 2nd October, the 150th anniversary Mahatma Gandhi’s birth.Even the most casual visitor to India would be aware of its serious waste management problem, where waste disposal remains the responsibility of the informal sector. In 2012, Katharine Boo won a Pulitzer Prize for Beyond the Beautiful Forevers, an account of life in Annawadi, a settlement on the outskirts of Mumbai, some of whose residents make their living by waste picking. If you’ve not read this book – please do. I recommend it highly.Despite the efforts of these residents of Annawadi – as well as thousands of other Indians – huge amounts of plastics foul India’s rivers. Ten rivers that carry 90% of plastics waste into the oceans are located in Asia, according to the World Economic Forum, and two of these, the Indus and the Ganga, flow through India.The issue isn’t whether better waste disposal – of which control over plastics comprises a key element – is necessary in India. Per the FT:“The situation in India is so severe that the ban is really required,” said Sourabh Manuja, an environmental engineer at The Energy and Resources Institute. But the details of what exactly will be banned next month are still not known. Over to the Economic Times:According to Reuters, the government could ban six items, including bags, cups, straws and certain sachets. Another news report pegged the number of items to be outlawed at twice as many. These reports have pushed industry lobbies to issue statements highlighting the adverse impact of a ban and to take out advertisements in newspapers in defence of plastic. The composition of plastics waste in India differs from that in many Western Countries. PET water bottles, for example, are single-use plastics elsewhere, but in India, 90% of these are reused. Moreover, India already recycles more of its trash than the global average. Economic Times: India’s plastic recycling rate is 60 per cent , three times higher than the global average of 20 per cent , and India’s per capita plastic consumption – at 11 kg in 2014-15 – is less than half the global average of 28 kg. Bt that still leaves a lot of plastics, some of which cannot be recycled . The most common is multilayered plastic (MLP) packaging, used for potato crisps, , biscuits, chocolates, etc., and include single-use sachets of common toiletries (which are supplied to guests at hotels geared to domestic travellers rather than foreign tourists). Other forms or single-use plastics include grocery bags, straws, cups, glasses, cotton buds, and takeaway packaging. A telling issue will be whether India tackles to problem of plastics package, which currently comprises a third of its plastic consumption, according to the Economic Times.
When smog travels from South Asia to the United States – As we head for a hiking trip up in the Rocky Mountain National Park, Neil, our bus driver, points to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s electronic alerts that urge those sensitive to high ozone levels to avoid prolonged exposure between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Saturday, August 24, 2019. Ozone is the main component of smog and excessive ground-level ozone can worsen lung and heart disease, trigger asthma attacks and lead to early deaths. People most at risk from breathing air containing ozone include people with asthma, children, older adults, and people who are active outdoors, especially outdoor workers. The ground-level or “bad” ozone is a colourless gas that forms when sunlight strikes various human-created pollutants. This ozone is different from the naturally occurring ozone in the upper atmosphere which blocks harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. In Colorado, which for years has failed to meet the U.S. government’s standards for ozone thresholds, Neil explains why people avoid pumping gas in the heat of the day. He says ozone “cooks” (forms) at high temperature (from precursors nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and volatile organic carbons) and the vapours from gasoline can contribute to its formation. Denver saw the return of its dreaded ‘brown cloud’, an unhealthy mix of ozone, smoke, and other particles from human activities: a stark reminder of the state’s dependence on cars and the impact of its oil and gas industry.But even as Colorado works on ramping up controls in the oil and gas sector, the role of foreign pollutants – particularly from a rapidly-developing Asia – in disrupting local air quality standards, has been fueling debates. Specifically, in the western part of U.S., there is a lot of debate whether we can blame upwind states and continents for the local pollution, notes Gabrielle Pfister of theNational Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which is now generating high-resolution, experimental, 48-hour forecasts of air pollutants across the contiguous United States. In 2004, NASA scientists announced that a giant, smoggy atmospheric “brown cloud” that forms over south Asia and the Indian Ocean has “an intercontinental reach and has effects around the world.” According to the University of Colorado, Boulder researcher Owen Cooper, most of the pollution is high above the surface and it never reaches the surface of North America. While ozone from other countries does impact the surface air in the U.S., it is not the major contributor to ozone pollution events. Cooper explained that ozone from Asia drifts across the Pacific Ocean to North America all year long, but the pathway is fastest and most direct during March, April and May. This is the time when the jet stream is in a favourable position to loft pollution from the surface of Asia into the free troposphere and transport it to the western U.S.A and Canada.
$1m a minute: the farming subsidies destroying the world — The public is providing more than $1m per minute in global farm subsidies, much of which is driving the climate crisis and destruction of wildlife, according to a new report.Just 1% of the $700bn (£560bn) a year given to farmers is used to benefit the environment, the analysis found. Much of the total instead promotes high-emission cattle production, forest destruction and pollution from the overuse of fertiliser. The security of humanity is at risk without reform to these subsidies, a big reduction in meat eating in rich nations and other damaging uses of land, the report says. But redirecting the subsidies to storing carbon in soil, producing healthier food, cutting waste and growing trees is a huge opportunity, it says. The report rejects the idea that subsidies are needed to supply cheap food. It found that the cost of the damage currently caused by agriculture is greater than the value of the food produced. New assessments in the report found producing healthy, sustainable food would actually cut food prices, as the condition of the land improves. “There is incredibly small direct targeting of [subsidies at] positive environment outcomes, which is insane,” said Jeremy Oppenheim, principal at the Food and Land Use Coalition (Folu), the collaboration of food, farming and green research groups that produced the new report. “We have got to switch these subsidies into explicitly positive measures.” He said the true global total was likely to be $1tn a year, as some subsidies are difficult to quantify precisely: “That trillion dollars of public funding is available and is a massive, massive lever to incentivise the farming community across the world to act differently.” A series of major recent reports have concluded the world’s food system is broken. It is driving the planet towards climate catastrophe while leaving billions of people either underfed or overweight, 130 national academies of science and medicine concluded in November. But Oppenheim said: “We couldn’t find any examples of governments using their fiscal instruments to directly support the expansion of supply of healthier and more nutritious food.”
Judge temporarily blocks logging in nation’s largest national forest – A federal judge on Monday temporarily halted the Trump administration’s plans to open up thousands of acres in the nation’s largest national forest to logging. The decision by the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska placed a preliminary injunction on the logging of 42,500 acres of temperate rainforest in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. It comes days before the administration was set to begin reviewing bids and offering contracts for the logging of old-growth timber in the forest. The court ruled that “Plaintiffs have demonstrated that they are very likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of preliminary injunctive relief,” according to the ruling. The order temporarily blocks the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) from allowing the “cutting of trees, road construction, or other ground-disturbing activities” in the covered areas. The court additionally banned the opening of any bids or awarding of any contracts related to loggin in Tongass. The USFS was scheduled to take and review bids on an initial sale of 1,156 acres of trees on Sept. 24. “Based on the foregoing, Plaintiffs have established that they will suffer irreparable harm if the harvest – particularly of old growth trees – authorized by the Twin Mountain Timber Sale occurs,” the court wrote of its decision to grant the injunction. The USFS announced plans to open up the 2.2 million acres of forest to sales in March. Under the plan, more than 42,000 acres would be eligible for logging, with the remaining acres open to road construction. Environmental groups filed a lawsuit in May to block the plans. “Today’s preliminary ruling is a victory for wildlife and proper management of our nation’s irreplaceable forests. Moving forward with this initial sale would have ignited 15 years of clearcutting that would further destroy and fragment the remaining ancient forest habitat on Prince of Wales Island,” said Patrick Lavin, senior Alaska representative at the Defenders of Wildlife.
Inside the Trump Administration’s Chaotic Dismantling of the Federal Land Agency – Early this month, workers at the Washington headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management gathered to discuss a Trump administration plan that would force some 200 people to uproot their lives or find other jobs. With a vague plan that keeps changing as officials describe it – and no guarantees that Congress would fully fund their relocations – the employees were being detailed to distant locations in the West like Grand Junction, Colorado, and Reno, Nevada. Many career staff saw the move as part of a wider Trump administration effort to drive federal employees out of their jobs. Acting White House chief of staff Mike Mulvaney has described that approach as a “wonderful way to streamline government.” The hemorrhaging has already begun. After an hour of exasperated questions from employees, Steve Tryon, a deputy assistant director, told the room he had taken an assignment elsewhere in the Interior Department, the BLM’s parent agency. The post, he explained, had a chance of leading to a permanent placement in Washington.“I have two kids in high school. One’s a senior and one’s a sophomore. If I don’t get another job, I’m moving to Grand Junction or Denver without them. And that’s that. That’s my Plan B. Move to Denver without my family.” . It was just one painful choice of many that will be made in coming months, as anticipated departures hollow out the agency that protects nearly 250 million acres of public lands and stands between oil and gas companies and the natural resources that can enrich them. The top BLM official, acting director William Perry Pendley, has offered contradictory accounts of who will be forced to move and how these changes will affect the agency’s accountability to Congress and the public. ProPublica reviewed internal memos and an accounting of which Washington jobs are being transferred to existing BLM offices in places like Reno, Salt Lake City, Utah, and the proposed new headquarters in Grand Junction. Employees, who formally learned of the plan two months ago, received assignment letters this week, detailing specific locations in the West, where most BLM properties are located.
Zimbabwe’s Access to Water Is in Peril -The 2 million residents of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, and its surrounding areas found themselves without water on Monday and Tuesday when the authorities abruptly shut down the city’s main water treatment plant, raising fears of cholera outbreaks and other water borne diseases, as the AP reported.Zimbabwe’s crumbling economy has left the local government without enough money to import the necessary water treatment chemicals to allow the water to run. The Harare City Council deputy mayor Enock Mupamawonde told reporters that the local authority required 40 million Zimbabwe dollars a month ($2.7 million) for water chemicals – well short of the 15 million Zimbabwe dollars it collected in monthly revenue, asReuters reported. He said the money shortage meant the council had to close its Morton Jaffray treatment plant outside of Harare. “It (the shutdown) is due to the non availability of foreign currency…it is devastating to say the least,” Mupamawonde told reporters as he urged President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government to declare the water crisis a national disaster, according to Reuters. He also told reporters that officials were working to secure a week’s supply of chemicals from Bulawayo, the country’s second-biggest city, to resume operation and they hoped to get water running in homes by late Tuesday, according to CNN.The Morton Jaffray treatment plant did resume pumping water yesterday, which brought some relief to residents, as Reuters reported. “The secured quantities will only last seven days during which period other quantities will be secured. We are currently engaging all stakeholders, including the government to find a lasting solution to the water crisis,” said Mupamaonde on Tuesday, as CNN reported.Zimbabweans have endured a harsh drought this year after an abnormal El Niño season. Water levels in the country’s polluted reservoirs have dropped precipitously, leaving cities and towns without the ability to provide water to their residents. Earlier this summer, the country’s two largest cities started rationing water to their residents, allowing some people to have running water only once a week, as EcoWatch reported.
The drought is now so severe it is biting in even the greenest corners of the country – Farmers along Australia’s normally green eastern coast are reeling from the worst drought they have ever seen and face a tough summer if it doesn’t rain in the next few months. But the region has been in drought for two years now and farmers say it is starting to bite. “We normally get 40 inches of rain [a year] and I think we are up to around 8 inches,” fourth-generation beef farmer Tony Saul told 7.30. “And that might be all we’re going to get for the year.” He is standing in a dry river bed that stretches for hundreds of metres through his property near Kempsey. It’s usually full of water where his cattle drink. “This is the longest and the driest it’s been since I can remember and I’ve been here for my whole life,” Mr Saul said. “We’ve had dry periods – you know, it might be dry for three or four months. “But it’s been dry for 12 months here and the big concern is we’ve just been through our wet period of the calendar year.”
‘In for a roasting’: Australia ‘on brink’ of ‘apocalyptic’ conditions – The Arctic is on fire. Now, Antarctica is suddenly experiencing a heatwave. And that means a looming rainfall apocalypse for Australia. According to a recent report by senior researchers from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, we’re in for higher than normal spring temperatures. And less rain. It’s all because of record warm temperatures in the air swirling above Antarctica.It’s producing a domino effect.The stratospheric “polar vortex” has been disrupted. It could even reverse direction.It’s pushing stormy Southern Ocean wind streams over Tasmania, New Zealand’s South Island and South America’s Patagonia. This is away from its regular route over the Australian mainland. And that means NSW and southern Queensland – already in parts devastated by bushfires so early in the season – are set to face worsening conditions and an even more catastrophic bushfire season. “The warming began in the last week of August when temperatures in the stratosphere high above the South Pole began rapidly heating,” the article published in The Conversation reads. Four senior Bureau of Meteorology forecasters compiled it.“Thanks to improvements in modelling and the Bureau’s new supercomputer, these types of events can be forecast better than ever before.”It foresees a looming stronger-than-usual melt of sea ice.It foresees a shift in the typical wind temperatures and patterns coming off the Antarctic continent. “In the coming weeks the warming is forecast to intensify, and its effects will extend downward to earth’s surface, affecting much of eastern Australia over the coming months,” the forecasters warn.
Endless Summer? NOAA Predicts U.S. Will Have Above Average Autumn Heat —Most of the U.S. will likely see higher than normal temperatures this autumn, according to a three-monthforecast projected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The entire nation will experience warmer weather now through December, but those with the greatest temperature increases include northern Alaska, the Southwest and the Four Corners Region of New England, according to USA Today. It’s a continuation of a warming trend observed for the last few decades. “During the past 30-35 years, there has been an underlying warm-up in the climate,” NOAA meteorologist Anthony Artusa told the publication. “Unless we can predict climate factors or drivers that can override this warm trend (such as El Niño or La Niña), it’s best to go with trends.” Through the end of this week, temperatures will be between 10 and 20 degrees above average across the Deep South and into the Ohio Valley and mid-Atlantic, reports The Weather Channel. NOAA’s three-month outlook suggests that through the end of the year, there is a 30 to 50 percent chance that states on both the east and west coasts, the Gulf of Mexico, southern border states and Alaska will see temperatures above normal. Parts of the Midwest and around the Great Lakes are expected to see temperatures near normal. Precipitation is expected to juxtapose that outlook, with the Great Lakes region and parts of the northern Midwest having a high chance of above-average rain and snowfall. Meanwhile, most of California and western Nevada will see lower-than-normal precipitation through the end of the year. “The overall retreat in the Beaufort Sea is about as extreme as our analyses have shown in the last 20 years,”wrote the National Weather Service in Anchorage. As the Washington Post reported, Alaska’s most northern town saw temperatures above freezing since June 25. July 2019 was the hottest month on record for the planet with polar sea ice melting to record lows, according to an August statement released by NOAA. Globally, July was 1.71 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average of 60.4 degrees, making it the hottest July since modern records began 140 years ago. A newly released analysis of preliminary findings by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) found that sea ice coverage in the Arctic dropped 1.6 million square miles (4.15 square kilometers) over the course of the summer, tying 2019 as the second-lowest year along with 2007 and 2016. The record for lowest sea ice extent is still held by 2012.
30 years after Hugo tore it down, SC coast builds back in the danger zone – When Hurricane Hugo hit Georgetown County 30 years ago, the big storm pounded a barren sand spit at the south end of Litchfield Beach, chewing up dunes and eroding the oceanfront, before cutting through South Carolina on a trail of destruction. At the time, no one said much about Hugo’s impact on the narrow spit because not much was there. Then in the late 1990s, construction workers arrived on the property, building the first grand home in a row of new oceanfront houses. Today, about three-dozen houses perch precariously on the sand spit, between the Atlantic Ocean on one side and a tidal creek on the other. Some are fortified by an unapproved seawall, built as protection from the rising seas. Despite causing $7 billion worth of damage on Sept. 21-22, 1989, Hugo did little to discourage new or more intense development on many stretches of the state’s coast. In places where small beach cottages once stood, magnificent new houses have been erected. Tidal creeks just off the oceanfront are booming with development. And in some vulnerable spots, high-rise condominiums tower above the ocean. All this is occurring as sea level rises and more powerful storms lash the coast, and as S.C. legislators dismantle regulations to control coastal development. The coastal buildup is a big issue for an array of reasons. It’s potentially dangerous because more people are living in the path of storms and rising seas, but building too close to the coast also threatens to pull money from the pockets of taxpayers. When people lose homes, condos and hotels along the coast, the federal government often winds up bailing out wealthy property owners through insurance, beach renourishment funding and emergency services. People familiar with the post-Hugo development say the state didn’t learn many lessons about building near the sea. If a storm like Hugo hit today, smacking the coast directly and plowing through the state to Charlotte, it would cause an economic loss of $16 billion, according the University of South Carolina’s hazards research institute. That’s mainly because of the increased population and residential development on the coast, USC researchers say.
Houston Cleans up After Imelda’s Devastating Rains – Authorities confirmed a fifth death this weekend linked to devastating rainfall from Tropical Storm Imelda as the Houston area struggles to recover from last week’s intense flooding. Around 60 residents were rescued by boat Friday after the storm dropped as much as 43 inches of rain in some areas. Cleanup crews are still surveying damages in the area to determine if the county is eligible for FEMA funds to mitigate the impacts. Extreme rainfall is a classic signature of climate change: the number of record-breaking rainfall events globally has significantly increased in recent decades, and the fingerprint of global warming is documented in this pattern. As reported by the Associated Press: The National Weather Service said preliminary estimates suggested Jefferson County was hit with more than 40 inches (102 centimeters) of rain in a span of just 72 hours, which would make it the seventh-wettest tropical cyclone to hit the continental U.S.“The issue is that you can’t get 40 inches of rain in a 72-hour period and be fully prepared for that,” Jefferson County spokeswoman Allison Getz told the Associated Press on Friday. “At this point we haven’t been able to fully assess what’s happened.”Getz said dozens of people have traveled to the county with boats in tow from Louisiana and other parts of Texas to assist with rescue efforts, an outpouring of support reminiscent of volunteer efforts during Harvey. In nearby Chambers County, preliminary estimates indicate about 800 homes and businesses sustained some level of damage from floodwaters, county spokesman Ryan Holzaepfel said. Emergency personnel rescued about 400 people during the deluge, mostly from homes, he said. For a deeper dive: AP, Houston Chronicle, LA Times, Texas Tribune, Fox News. Background: Climate Signals
In this crippled part of the Bahamas, US medics can smell more bodies than they can find – CNN – It takes just seconds here to be overwhelmed by the stench of death. More than two weeks after Hurricane Dorian wiped out entire neighborhoods, East Grand Bahama still looks like a war zone. The carnage is so widespread that even police officers can’t bear to see it. “Police say they don’t want to go there. It’s too hard on them to go see their own people,” said Patricia Freling, a Florida nurse who’s volunteering in East Grand Bahama. “They think there will be a lot of bodies. So we are preparing for everything.” Freling is part of a US medic team on an aid trip to Grand Bahama — a once gorgeous island of 51,000 residents before Dorian pulverized it. The team includes paramedics, nurses, a counselor and a retired US Marine. Mental health counselor Betsy Rosander is used to difficult circumstances. But today is different. “I think we are going to be seeing some real tough stuff,” she said. “Most people have not wanted to come here,” Brittany Reidy said. “But we said, ‘Take us to the worst part.'” During the team’s hour-long drive from Freeport to the east end of Grand Bahama, the medics smell the carnage before they see it. “That is the smell of dead bodies,” Reidy said from the back of a pickup truck.The official death toll across the Bahamas is 52. But that number is expected to skyrocket, with 1,300 people still missing two weeks after the hurricane. Some may be trapped under mountains of rubble where houses once stood. Others may have been washed away in the storm surge, their bodies only recently surfacing on land.
Slow-Moving Atlantic Storms Like Imelda and Dorian are Growing More Common – Dr. Jeff Masters — Tropical Storm Imelda, the fifth-wettest tropical cyclone in continental U.S. history, made landfall as a minimal tropical storm with 40 mph winds southwest of Galveston, Texas, on September 17, less than two hours after getting named. At landfall, Imelda was traveling northward at just 5 mph, and it maintained a generally northward motion at between 3 and 7 mph for the next 48 hours, gradually weakening. This excruciatingly slow pace allowed Imelda to dump rains of up to 43.39″ over southeast Texas, causing catastrophic flooding that killed five. Imelda’s price tag will undoubtedly be in the billions. This year’s strongest storm, Hurricane Dorian, also moved agonizingly slowly at landfall when it pounded The Bahamas. Dorian meandered at less than 2 mph as a Category 5 hurricane over Grand Bahama Island and Great Abaco Island, causing catastrophic storm surge, wind, and fresh-water flooding. Damage is estimated at $7 billion or higher – a huge fraction of their $12 billion GDP, and by far the most expensive disaster in Bahamian history. According to CSU’s Dr. Phil Klotzbach, Dorian tracked only 25 miles in 24 hours – the second shortest straight-line distance tracked by an Atlantic major hurricane in a 24-hour period since 1950. . Joining Dorian and Imelda in the slow-motion catastrophic Atlantic storm club in recent years were Hurricane Florence of 2018 and Hurricane Harvey of 2017. Florence killed 53 and caused over $24 billion in damage to the southeast U.S. after hitting North Carolina as a slow-moving Category 1 hurricane. Hurricane Harvey, which meandered over southeast Texas and the adjacent waters for days, killed 89 and was the second most expensive hurricane of all-time, with $128 billion in damages. Both hurricanes unleashed all-time record rains over their landfall regions due to their very slow motion, with Harvey’s 60.58″ setting the all-time U.S. rainfall record for a tropical cyclone. From August 22 – 25, 2018, Category 5 Hurricane Lane slowed from a forward speed of 9 mph to 3 mph just west of the Big Island of Hawaii, which recorded the second-highest rainfall on record from a U.S. tropical cyclone: 58.00″. Though Lane never made landfall, its rains made it Hawaii’s third costliest hurricane ever, with damages of $250 million.
Hundreds of India villages under water as Narmada dam level rises — Last week, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi celebrated his 69th birthday at the controversial Sardar Sarovar Dam (SSD) in his home state of Gujarat. But 186km upstream in Barwani town on the banks of the Narmada River in neighbouring Madhya Pradesh state, the mood was anything but celebratory.Nearly 2,000 men, women and children, riding bikes and packed in tractors and trucks, rallied in Barwani, a town of about 55,000 people, against submersion of their homes, property and businesses due to the dam. The country’s biggest dam has led to mass submergence after the authorities recently raised the water level to its maximum height of 138.68 metres. Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), a grassroots movement agitating for the rights of the indigenous people displaced by the dam, said at least 178 villages in Madhya Pradesh have partially or fully submerged after the dam’s water level was raised.However, the state government has yet to put out a specific number of villages submerged so far, which it says is fewer than the number cited by the NBA.Protesters gathered at Kasrawad bridge on Narmada River alleged the dam’s water level was raised before the schedule to mark the birthday of Prime Minister Modi, who had pushed for it when he was the chief minister of the Gujarat state. They waved blue NBA flags and posters featuring the prime minister that said: “Mera janam din, tumhara maran din”, meaning “my birthday is your day of death”. Slogans such as “Modiji ek kaam karo, Sardar Sarovar mei doob maro” (Mr Modi, do one thing, drown in the Sardar Sarovar) were raised as people dumped Modi’s effigy into the Narmada waters.The submergence has already killed three people. On August 22, Laxman Gopal, a 62-year-old farmer from Jangharva village in Barwani, died of a heart attack after a tiff with policemen who were evicting his niece from the submergence site. On August 7, two men were electrocuted while travelling in a boat.
‘Oceans Are Sending Us so Many Warning Signals’: New UN Climate Change Report — It’s time for low-level coastal communities to head for the hills. Once-in-a-hundred-years sea level events will be an annual occurrence by 2050. The oceans will rise three feet by 2100, fish will struggle to survive, ocean currents will weaken, snow and ice will start to vanish, and we will need to brace for stronger and wetter hurricanes and harsher El Niño weather systems, according to a new UN report released Tuesday, as the AP reported. The report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders in policymaking, warns that warming seas are contributing to a drop in fish populations, and ocean oxygen levels are dropping while acidity levels are starting to spike, which threatens fragile marine ecosystems. The warming waters are also fueling wetter and more intense hurricanes and cyclones, as The New York Times reported. The fact is ocean surface temperatures have been warming steadily since 1970, and for about the past 25 years, they’ve been warming twice as fast. “The oceans are sending us so many warning signals that we need to get emissions under control,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, a marine biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany and a lead author of the report, to The New York Times. “Ecosystems are changing, food webs are changing, fish stocks are changing, and this turmoil is affecting humans.” The IPCC’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate includes contributions from more than 100 scientists from 36 different countries. It highlights the bleak state of the most remote parts of the world, where rapid thawing of ice sheets and glaciers is changing the landscape of the polar regions and will affect people and animals all around the globe for decades. This report is unique because for the first time ever, the IPCC has produced an in-depth report examining the furthest corners of the earth – from the highest mountains in remote polar regions to the deepest oceans,” said Ko Barrett, vice chair of the IPCC, as CNN reported. “We’ve found that even and especially in these places, human-caused climate change is evident.” Half of the world’s largest cities and nearly 2 billion people around the world live on the coasts. If global heating is restricted to just 2 degrees Celsius, scientists still predict $7 trillion in damage every year and millions of migrants, according to a new study published last week, as The Guardian reported. The report found that of the major ice sheets, Greenland is melting the fastest. When it melts completely, it can add 17-23 feet to sea levels, according to a NASA study published earlier this year. The report found that Greenland has averaged an annual ice loss of 275 gigatons from 2006 to 2015. The Anatarctic ice sheet also saw its ice loss mass triple from 2007 to 2016 compared to the previous decade, as CNN reported.
To Save Our Oceans, We Have to Change What We Do on Land – For decades, oceans have served as the planet’s carbon garbage dump, soaking up 90 percent of the excess atmospheric heat generated since 1970 and a third of our greenhouse gas emissions. Now the 71 percent of the Earth that makes life on land possible has reached a frightening tipping point that threatens human existence, according to a landmark report issued Wednesday by the United Nations-supported Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The findings suggest severe consequences for both humanity and nature, according to Ko Barrett, the panel’s vice chair, who spoke at a press briefing on Tuesday. “This report highlights the urgency of timely, ambitious, coordinated and enduring action,” said Barrett, who is also the deputy assistant administrator of oceanic and atmospheric research at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “What’s at stake is the health of ecosystems, wildlife, and importantly, the world we leave our children.” Even if greenhouse gas emissions magically ceased today, so much heat is already baked into marine ecosystems that the ocean would continue to warm, sea levels would keep rising, and acidification and deoxygenation would persist for decades to come, noted Nate Bindoff, a report author and oceanographer at Australia’s University of Tasmania. The report comes as the ocean faces growing threats from overfishing, plastic pollution, and seabed mining. The key findings are alarming: Ocean warming has doubled since 1993. The frequency of marine heat waves, which are devastating the world’s coral reefs, have doubled since 1982 and are intensifying. Reefs remain at high risk of extinction even if global temperature rise is kept to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, as called for by the Paris climate accord. Extreme flooding of coastal areas will likely occur at least yearly by 2050. Fish populations face collapse thanks to a combination of ocean acidification, loss of oxygen, and warming of the ocean’s surface, which blocks the flow of nutrients to and from the deep sea. Alas, there’s more: Sea levels will continue to rise as the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets accelerates throughout this century. If emissions are kept in check, sea levels could rise by an estimated 1 meter (3 feet) by 2300. But if carbon emissions climb unrestrained, sea levels could increase by several meters – without factoring in the potential collapse of Antarctic ice sheets.
As global leaders meet, the Amazon rainforest burns – The fires that burned through the Amazon rainforest last month sparked international outcry and offers of help, but as world leaders meet in New York, the planet’s largest rainforest remains engulfed in flames. The latest satellite data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) shows 131,600 fires burning since January within the country, where 60 percent of the Amazon lies. The fires, which are mostly caused by humans with the goal of clearing land for farming and cattle ranching, are having a grievous effect on the forest: the rate of deforestation in the Amazon has nearly doubled since far-right President Jair Bolsonaro came to power on January 1, with the equivalent of 110 football fields of land being cleared every hour. “It’s sad to see Brazilians attacking me for fires in the Amazon, as if they hadn’t always existed,” Bolsonaro wrote on Facebook Thursday. We “remain below the average of the last 15 years. But I’m accused of being a Nero, who sets fires everywhere.” Yet fires are at a seven-year high, according to INPE data, and despite a slight drop at the start of the month, the number of active fires recorded in Brazil from the start of the year to September 19 was up 56 percent over the same period in 2018. Nearly half of the blazes are in the Amazon. Environmental groups have little faith that Bolsonaro will change tack. The government “wants to show that it is doing the best for the forest. In fact, it is doing its utmost for deforestation,” said Greenpeace’s Astrini. “Brazil is running a campaign to show that it is taking care of the Amazon. It’s a lie,” he said.
At Least 500 Jaguars Lost Their Lives or Habitat in Amazon Fires – The fires ravaging the Amazon forest in Brazil and Bolivia this year have burned key habitats of at least 500 adult, resident jaguars as of Sept. 17, rendering them dead or homeless, say experts at Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization. “The number of homeless or dead jaguars has undoubtedly increased since Panthera’s estimate was released, and will continue to increase until the rains come,” Esteban Payan, Panthera’s South America regional director, told Mongabay in an email. Panthera researchers used the total area of jaguar habitat burned, taken from burned areas reported by the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and the Environmental Secretariat of the Governor’s office of Santa Cruz, Bolivia. They combined this with a jaguar density estimate of 2.5 jaguars per 100 square kilometers (39 square miles) derived from a 2018 study authored by jaguar experts. In Bolivia in particular, the fires have so far destroyed more than 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) of forest in one of South America’s key “catscapes,” a region that Panthera has identified as having the highest predicted density of cat species on the continent. Some parts of Bolivia’s catscape are home to eight cat species, including the jaguar, puma (Puma concolor), ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), margay (Leopardus wiedii), oncilla (Leopardus tigrinus), jaguarundi (Herpailurus yagouaroundi), Geoffrey’s cat (Leopardus geoffroyi) and Pampas cat (Leopardus colocola). Some researchers estimate that millions of animals have likely been lost to the Amazon fires this year. But given the widespread and destructive nature of the fires this year, the exact number of jaguars killed is difficult to calculate. Panthera researchers, however, predict that hundreds of jaguars will starve or turn to killing livestock in neighboring ranches as a consequence of the fires, “where they will be hunted down,” Payan said.
Amazon deforestation is driven by criminal networks, report finds – Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is a lucrative business largely driven by criminal networks that threaten and attack government officials, forest defenders and indigenous people who try to stop them, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch. Rainforest Mafias concludes that Brazil’s failure to police these gangs threatens its abilities to meet its commitments under the Paris climate deal – such as eliminating illegal deforestation by 2030. It was published a week before the UN Climate Action Summit. Amazon’s indigenous warriors take on invading loggers and ranchers Read more Ricardo Salles, Brazil’s environment minister in the government of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, has argued that poverty drives degradation, and that development of the Amazon will help stop deforestation. But the report’s author, Cesar Muñoz Acebes, argues that Amazon needs to be better policed. “As long as you have this level of violence, lawlessness and impunity for the crimes committed by these criminal groups it will be impossible for Brazil to rein in deforestation,” he said. “These criminal networks will attack anyone who stands in their way.” The report documents 28 killings in which it found evidence that “those responsible were engaged in illegal deforestation and saw their victims as obstacles”. Victims included indigenous people, forest residents and environmental agents, and only two cases went to trial. It cites “serious flaws” in investigations of six killings. More than 300 killings were counted by the Pastoral Land Commission, a not-for-profit group connected to the Catholic church, over the last decade in the Amazon, of which just 14 went to trial.
Massive Mont Blanc Glacier in Danger of Collapsing Soon – Authorities have closed roads and evacuated buildings in the Italian Alps after scientists warned Wednesday that a massive chunk of a glacier is in danger of collapsing. Experts say a 250,000 cubic meter section of the Planpincieux glacier on Grande Jorasses peak of the Mont Blanc massif could break off at any time as the glacier’s movement has increased rapidly. “This phenomenon once again testifies that the mountain is in a phase of strong change due to climatic factors, therefore it is particularly vulnerable,” Stefano Miserocchi, the mayor of Alpine resort town Courmayeur, said in a statement.The announcement comes on the heels of a devastating UN report on the state of the world’s oceans and ice, which finds that glaciers are increasingly endangered due to climate change, threatening the world’s high mountain economies and communities that rely on glacial melt and snow runoff for agriculture and drinking water – and bringing more wildfires to places like the Arctic.As reported by NBC News Digital:The glacier, which spreads 1,327 square kilometers (512 square miles) across the mountain, has been moving up to 50 centimeters (nearly 20 inches) a day. “There are no models to tell us if it will fall entirely or in pieces,” the mayor told Sky TG24. “We need to keep an eye on the monitoring.” He emphasized that even if a large chunk of the glacier collapses, no residents would be at risk, just the area of road that has been closed. For a deeper dive: AP, NBC, USA Today, New York Times, The Guardian
Something strange is happening to Greenland’s ice sheet – National Geographic – When the remnants of Europe’s second summertime heat wave migrated over Greenland in late July, more than half of the ice sheet’s surface started melting for the first time since 2012. A study published Wednesday in Natureshows that mega-melts like that one, which are being amplified by climate change, aren’t just causing Greenland to shed billions of tons of ice. They’re causing the remaining ice to become denser.“Ice slabs” – solid planks of ice that can span hundreds of square miles and grow to be 50 feet thick – are spreading across the porous, air pocket-filled surface of the Greenland ice sheet as it melts and refreezes more often. From 2001 to 2014, the slabs expanded in area by about 25,000 square miles, forming an impermeable barrier the size of West Virginia that prevents meltwater from trickling down through the ice. Instead, the meltwater becomes runoff that flows overland, eventually making its way out to sea.As the ice slabs continue to spread, the study’s authors predict more and more of Greenland’s surface will become a “runoff zone,” boosting the ice sheet’s contribution to global sea level rise and, perhaps, causing unexpected changes. “We’re watching an ice sheet rapidly transform its state in front of our eyes, which is terrifying,” says lead study author Mike MacFerrin, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Arctic sea ice shrinks to 2nd-lowest mark on record –Arctic sea ice shrank to its second-lowest level on record last week, according to statements released Monday by the National Snow and Ice Data Center and NASA. Sea ice affects Arctic communities and wildlife such as polar bears and walruses, and it helps regulate the planet’s temperature by influencing the circulation of the atmosphere and ocean. “If you decrease the amount of sea ice, you start warming up the Arctic, and when you start warming up the Arctic, you start changing the circulating of the jet stream, which brings weather to us here,” NASA scientist Nathan Kurtz said. Sea ice extent was measured at 1.6 million square miles Sept. 18. That’s 811,000 square miles below the average, tying with both 2007 and 2016 for second-lowest level on record, the data center said. “This year’s minimum sea ice extent shows that there is no sign that the sea ice cover is rebounding,” Claire Parkinson, a climate change senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement.September is the month Arctic ice reaches its lowest “extent” of the year, toward the end of the Northern Hemisphere’s summer. According to NASA, it was a very warm summer in the Arctic, with average temperatures 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.
Global Climate in 2015-2019: Climate change accelerates – WMO Press Release – The tell-tale signs and impacts of climate change – such as sea level rise, ice loss and extreme weather – increased during 2015-2019, which is set to be the warmest five-year period on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere have also increased to record levels, locking in the warming trend for generations to come.The WMO report on The Global Climate in 2015-2019, released to inform the United Nations Secretary-General’s Climate Action Summit, says that the global average temperature has increased by 1.1°C since the pre-industrial period, and by 0.2°C compared to 2011-2015.The climate statement – which covers until July 2019 – was released as part of a high-level synthesis report from leading scientific institutions United in Science under the umbrella of the Science Advisory Group of the UN Climate Summit 2019. The report provides a unified assessment of the state of Earth system under the increasing influence of climate change, the response of humanity this far and projected changes of globalclimate in the future. It highlights the urgency and the potential of ambitious climate action in order to limit potentially irreversible impacts.An accompanying WMO report on greenhouse gas concentrations shows that 2015-2019 has seen a continued increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) levels and other key greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to new records, with CO2 growth rates nearly 20% higher than the previous five years. CO2 remains in the atmosphere for centuries and in the ocean for even longer. Preliminary data from a subset of greenhouse gas observational sites for 2019 indicate that CO2 global concentrations are on track to reach or even exceed 410ppm by the end of 2019.“Climate change causes and impacts are increasing rather than slowing down,” saidWMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas, who is co-chair of the Science Advisory Group of the UN Climate Summit.“Sea level rise has accelerated and we are concerned that an abrupt decline in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which will exacerbate future rise. As we have seen this year with tragic effect in the Bahamas and Mozambique, sea level rise and intense tropical storms led to humanitarian and economic catastrophes,” he said.“The challenges are immense. Besides mitigation of climate change, there is a growing need to adapt. According to the recent Global Adaptation Commission report the most powerful way to adapt is to invest in early warning services, and pay special attention to impact-based forecasts,” he said.“It is highly important that we reduce greenhouse gas emissions, notably from energy production, industry and transport. This is critical if we are to mitigate climate change and meet the targets set out in the Paris Agreement,” he said. “To stop a global temperature increase of more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the level of ambition needs to be tripled. And to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees, it needs to be multiplied by five,” he said.
Rising energy use to push CO2 far above target through 2050 (Reuters) – Global energy consumption will rise nearly 50% by the middle of the century, according to projections published by the U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) this week. Energy consumption is set to increase by 15% in the industrialised member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and by almost 70% in non-OECD economies by 2050. The projections highlight the enormous policy and technology challenge of providing more energy, especially in developing countries as living standards rise, while simultaneously reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. EIA projections show increased consumption of energy from all sources, including oil, gas, coal, nuclear and renewables, by 2050 (“International Energy Outlook”, EIA, Sept. 24). The projections show the fastest growth in renewables (+166%) and natural gas (+44%) but also continued increases in nuclear (+36%), oil (+22%) and even coal (+12%). Declining consumption of coal, oil and nuclear in the OECD countries will be more than offset by increases in the faster-growing economies of the developing world. Long-term, multi-decade projections are notoriously error-prone because they are sensitive to small changes in assumptions about population growth, economic growth and energy intensity, as well as changes in technology. But producing them is a good intellectual discipline. They provide a useful framework for thinking about the various forces driving change and the policy challenges involved in altering them.
Goldman Sachs released a 34-page analysis of the effects of climate change. And the results are terrifying. – Goldman Sachs released a report on the effect of climate change on cities around the world and the results made for grim reading. The bank’s Global Markets Institute, led by Amanda Hindlian, warned of “significant” potential risks to the world’s largest cities, which are especially vulnerable to more frequent storms, higher temperatures, rising sea levels, and storm surges. Cities generate about 80% of global GDP and are home to more than half of the world’s population, a share that Goldman says, citing the United Nations, is projected to reach two-thirds by 2050. About 40% of the global population lives within 100 kilometers of a coast, it says, and 1 in 10 live in areas less than 10 meters above sea level.Goldman highlighted three cities which would be subject to those storm surges and in the future could face harmful flooding – New York, Tokyo, and Lagos. Miami, Alexandria, Dhaka, and Shanghai face major flood risks due to being less than 11 meters above sea level. Goldman’s researchers said that when starting the study they took a broad consensus that human activity, namely emission of greenhouse gasses “is causing the earth to warm in ways that are affecting the climate.”Natural ecosystems would be damaged, and risks to human health would rise, as well as pressures on food and drinking water. Agriculture would also be massively affected: “Warmer temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns could reduce yields and nutritional quality as well change growing seasons and agricultural zones around the world.” Goldman gave some fairly stark warnings about potential outcomes:
- More frequent, more intense, and longer-lasting heatwaves.The consequences will affect human health, productivity, economic activity, and agriculture. “Higher surface temperatures could exacerbate the warming process by causing permafrost to melt, releasing further methane and CO2 into the atmosphere.”
- Destructive weather events, including storms, winds, flooding and fires. It’s not just New York, Tokyo and Lagos. “Other major low-lying coastal or already flood-prone cities include Shanghai, Dhaka, Mumbai and Karachi – each of which has a population of 15 million people or more.”
- Changing disease patterns. “Warmer temperatures could cause disease vectors to migrate from the tropics to regions where people have less immunity; this is true not only for viruses like malaria and dengue fever but also for water-borne and food-borne diseases.”
- Shifting agricultural patterns and food shortages. “Livestock could be affected by higher temperatures and reduced water supplies. Ocean acidification is likely to put stress on aquatic populations and affect current fishing patterns. Some of these changes are already underway. Some climate scientists, for example, estimate that coral reefs will be all but extinct over the course of the century due to ocean acidification.”
- Water. “Half of the world’s population will live in water-stressed areas as soon as 2025,” Goldman notes, citing the World Health Orgnization. “Even in non-stressed areas, the quality of surface water could deteriorate as more rain and storms drive erosion and the release of toxins. These dynamics could affect everything from the availability of drinking water for people to a shortage of water for livestock and crops (with negative effects for the food supply) to decreases in hydroelectric power generation.”
Why Your Carbon Footprint Is Meaningless – Almost every good deed you’ve been asked to do to fight global warming is counterproductive. Individual behavior change isn’t action – it’s distraction. But worse than that: every carbon offset bought by a well-meaning liberal is another get-out-of-jail free card for the fossil fuel industry and the other major contributors to global climate destruction. It shifts the blame from the actual causes of climate change to fake ones, and shifts attention away from meaningful actions to meaningless, psychological ones. And by making real solutions harder to achieve, the mistaken focus on individual behavior change makes global warming worse.First, if you run the numbers, it’s obvious that even if every do-gooder in the world changed their light bulbs to fluorescents, stopped going on vacation, and bought carbon offsets for every art project they built at Burning Man, none of this would make a dent in global carbon dioxide emissions. There just aren’t enough bleeding hearts to go around.Moreover, individual behaviors are not the major causes of global warming. The major drivers are collective enterprises like power grids, industry, and transportation systems. Cutting back on flying while allowing cars and trucks to operate as usual is like drinking diet soda with a bacon double cheeseburger. Their benefit is negligible, and totally negated by the much, much larger problems that are going unchecked.Fighting global warming takes systemic change, collective action, and cooperation (witting or not) among much larger populations, not just those motivated (and privileged) enough to make changes by themselves. It takes legislation to shift the most carbon-intensive industries – energy production, transportation, and food production – who will not change on their own. And it takes real solutions for China and India, who are rapidly approaching United States levels of resource consumption, and who have no intention of missing out on the benefits that Europe and the U.S. have enjoyed (itself an offensive, colonialist notion). Let’s look at some of the numbers.
Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds, and about 1 in 4 are taking action – Washington Post – In a coastal town in Washington state, climate change has a high school junior worried about the floods that keep deluging his school. A 17-year-old from Texas says global warming scares him so much he can’t even think about it. But across the country, teens are channeling their anxieties into activism. “Fear,” said Maryland 16-year-old Madeline Graham, an organizer of a student protest planned for this week, “is a commodity we don’t have time for if we’re going to win the fight.” A solid majority of American teenagers are convinced that humans are changing Earth’s climate and believe that it will cause harm to them personally and to other members of their generation, according to a new Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Roughly 1 in 4 have participated in a walkout, attended a rally or written to a public official to express their views on global warming – a remarkable level of activism for a group that has not yet reached voting age. The poll by The Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) is the first major survey of teenagers’ views since the explosion of the youth climate movement last year. Inspired by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, whose year-long “strike” in front of the Swedish Parliament and carbon-neutral sailboat voyage across the Atlantic have made her an activist icon, growing numbers of teens have been skipping school on Fridays to protest on behalf of something they say is more important.
No future, no children: Teens refusing to have kids until there’s action on climate change – A Canadian teen’s pledge not to have children until her government takes serious action against climate change is drawing support from young people around the globe.Emma Lim, 18, launched a climate change movement this week called “#No Future, No Children” that includes a website where other teens can take her pledge.”I am giving up my chance of having a family because I will only have children if I know I can keep them safe,” she says on her website. “It breaks my heart, but I created this pledge because I know I am not alone. … We’ve read the science, and now we’re pleading with our government.”By Thursday afternoon more than 1,200 kids had signed on. Jacob Diercks, 18, lives near the North Sea in Meldorf, Germany. He signed onto the pledge, saying that in his lifetime he has seen the North Sea warm considerably. He said farmers there are in trouble due to flooding and summers so hot they burn the fields. “I see it as irresponsible to bring children into such dangers,” he wrote. “Our government is doing too little to protect the climate and thus our region.”In Stockholm, Sweden, 18-year-old Isabelle Axelsson signed on.”I am taking this pledge because I don’t want to give birth to a child that will feel the same climate anxiety and fear as I do,” she wrote. “I don’t want any more children to have to face the consequences of our inaction.” Lim writes that she always imagined herself being a mother someday. She says she loves children so much she has worked as a nanny. But she is concerned about the world she would be bringing her children into.
‘Four million’ join students in climate marches, building pressure on leaders – More than four million people have taken part in an unprecedented wave of climate protests across the world, organisers said, in the most powerful message to governments yet to take serious action. The global strike was billed as the largest climate protest in history days before world leaders gather in New York for a three-day climate action summit convened by UN secretary general António Guterres starting Saturday. Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly young people, some accompanied by parents, gathered in Foley Square in front of the Thurgood Marshall courthouse in downtown Manhattan in September heat, waving colourful hand-painted placards. “Cooler is cool”, “Remember when the earth was cool” and “The earth should not be hotter than me” read some of the signs, encapsulating a sense that climate action was now utterly mainstream. The protest marched through the streets of New York to Battery Park, at the southern tip of Manhattan, to hear from Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. The social movement she inspired in such a short amount of time culminated in a powerful message to governments that to remain relevant to young voters, their actions need to change. Organisers 350.org said protests around the world had mobilised more than four million people in 163 countries. That number could not be independently verified. Amazing images flooded social media, those are shared below. At the summit on Monday, politicians will make their response by announcing their plans for greater ambition.
‘How Dare You!’ Greta Thunberg Rebukes World Leaders – After rallying 4 million people into the streets on Friday in the biggest global climate strike yet, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg brought her message inside United Nations Headquarters today with a furious speech that repeatedly demanded of world leaders, “How dare you?” Seated alongside UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and two other young climate activists, Thunberg opened the UN Climate Action Summit by blasting the assembled heads of government with a speech that was equal parts “J’accuse” and hardball politics. “My message [to world leaders] is that we’ll be watching you,” Thunberg began. Then, as tears of rage and grief overtook her, the founder of the global climate strike movement all but shouted, “I shouldn’t be here. I should be back home, at school…. You come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my childhood and my dreams. And I am one of the lucky ones. People all over the world are suffering and dying. And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”“For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear,” Thunberg continued. “How dare you look away and say that you are doing enough!” Noting that the world’s carbon budget for a 1.5 degree Celsius future will be exhausted within 8.5 years if current trends continue, according to the scientists of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, she repeated, “How dare you pretend that this can be solved with business as usual?” Predicting that none of the speeches from world leaders today would wrestle with those imposing numbers, Thunberg declared that world leaders are “still not mature enough to tell it like it is.” The fury returning to her face, she warned, “You are betraying us…. If you choose to fail us, then I say, ‘We will never forgive you.’”As Thunberg’s speech appeared live on one internal UN video feed, a second feed showed Donald Trump arriving at the UN – but not for the Climate Action Summit. In a clear snub, the White House instead reserved a conference room where Trump would attend a conference on religious freedom along with Secretary of State Michael Pompeo. Greta Thunberg, for her part, made it clear that she and other young activists will take no prisoners as they demand emergency action against climate breakdown. In a challenge to Trump and all leaders who are not stepping up at this decisive moment in human history, Thunberg warned, her eyes flashing, “We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now, is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.”
Teenager Thunberg angrily tells U.N. climate summit ‘you have stolen my dreams’ (Reuters) – Teenage climate change activist Greta Thunberg on Monday opened the United Nations Climate Action Summit with an angry condemnation of world leaders for failing to take strong measures to combat climate change – “How dare you,” she said. Days after millions of young people took to the streets worldwide to demand emergency action on climate change, leaders gathered for the annual United Nations General Assembly aiming to inject fresh momentum into stalling efforts to curb carbon emissions. A visibly emotional Thunberg, 16, said in stern remarks at the opening of the summit that the generations that have polluted the most have burdened her and her generation with the extreme impacts of climate change. “This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you,” said the Swedish teenager, her voice quivering. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” Thunberg said, adding that the plans that leaders will unveil will not be enough to respond to the rate of the planet’s warming. Thunberg has galvanized a new wave of climate change activism through her weekly Fridays for Future school strikes, which she began with her weekly, solitary protests outside of the Swedish parliament. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had warned governments ahead of the event that they would have to offer action plans to qualify to speak at the summit, which is aimed at boosting the 2015 Paris Agreement to combat global warming. In his opening remarks, he tried to capture the urgency of climate change and called out the fossil fuel industry. “Nature is angry. And we fool ourselves if we think we can fool nature, because nature always strikes back, and around the world nature is striking back with fury,” Guterres said. “There is a cost to everything. But the biggest cost is doing nothing. The biggest cost is subsidising a dying fossil fuel industry, building more and more coal plants, and denying what is plain as day: that we are in a deep climate hole, and to get out we must first stop digging,” he said.
‘How Dare You!’: Greta Thunberg Rages at ‘Fairytales of Eternal Economic Growth’ -In a speech to the United Nations Climate Action Summit Monday, Swedish youth climate activist Greta Thunberg lit into world leaders for their “empty words” around solving the climate crisis and said decades of inaction have left her generation without a future. “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosytems are collapsing. We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth,” said Thunberg. “How dare you!” Thunberg delivered her remarks during a panel on the climate crisis after she was asked what she thought of the worldwide climate strike movement that she began, alone, 13 months ago. But the youth activist wasn’t interested in rehashing the past or praise from politicians. “I shouldn’t be standing here,” said Thunberg. “I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to me for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” “For more than 30 years the science has been crystal clear,” Thunberg continued. “How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you are doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.” On Monday, Thunberg also joined with 16 youth activists to present the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child with a “landmark complaint” alleging the world is not living up to its responsibilities under the treaty to provide “a world worth inheriting to the future,” according to Fridays for Future organizer Alexandria Villaseñor. In her remarks to the panel on Monday, Thunberg put world leaders on notice. “We will not let you get away with this,” said Thunberg. “Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.”
Greta Thunberg Rips World Leaders at the U.N. Over Climate Change YouTube.
‘You Are Failing Us’: Greta Thunberg Rips Into World Leaders for Lack of Climate Action, Glares at Trump – Swedish 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, who was instrumental in launching the Fridays for Future school strike movement, refused to let world leaders off the hook in an emotional speech at the start of the UN Climate Action Summit Monday. “This is all wrong,” Thunberg said, according to a transcript published by The Guardian. “I shouldn’t be standing here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to me for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” UN Secretary General António Guterres had asked attending countries to present plans for reducing emissions 45 percent over the next decade, but Thunberg suggested this goal did not go far enough. She said there was only a 50 percent chance that achieving it would limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.”Maybe 50 percent is acceptable to you. But those numbers don’t include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of justice and equity,” she said. “They also rely on my and my children’s generation sucking hundreds of billions of tonnes of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. So a 50 percent risk is simply not acceptable to us – we who have to live with the consequences.”Thunberg’s comments came three days after four million people around the world attended the largest youth-led climate protest yet, something she alluded to at the end of her speech. “You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not,” she concluded.
Video of Greta Thunberg crossing paths with Trump at UN goes viral – Video of Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg crossing paths with President Trump following her forceful speech at the United Nations on Monday quickly went viral across social media. The encounter between the two came after Thunberg accused leaders of failing her generation during a blistering speech at the U.N. General Assembly climate summit. As Trump arrived for this week’s U.N. General Assembly, cameras caught Thunberg, an activist who inspired the worldwide youth movement to combat climate change, staring directly at Trump. It remains unclear what exactly she was reacting to. Her reaction quickly gained widespread attention, though, with many suggesting that Thunberg was glaring at the president in way that showcased her anger with the president and his stances on climate change. Thunberg said last month that Trump “obviously” doesn’t listen to science when assessing global warming. “If a picture is worth 1,000 words then this GIF is worth 100,000,” the news organization NowThis tweeted. Others joked that the glare evoked one you’d give your “worst enemy” and that the look said “a lot.” A headline on New York Magazine humorously read: “Greta Thunberg Accidentally Warms Globe With Her Scorching Glare.”
Macron Slams Greta Thunberg After Teenage Activist Sues France Over Climate – But Leaves Out China – French President Emmanuel Macron slammed Greta Thunberg after the 16-year-old climate activist filed a legal complaint accusing five countries of inaction on global warming in violation of the 30-year-old UN Convention on the Rights of a Child. Germany, France, Brazil, Argentina and Turkey. Notably, she left out China – which is the world’s worst polluter by total volume. After browbeating the UN for ‘stealing her childhood‘ on Monday, Thunberg tweeted “Today at 11:30 I and 15 other children from around the world filed a legal complaint against 5 nations over the climate crisis through the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.” Thunberg’s complaint calls out nations that have ratified the UN treaty, yet – according to her – have not upheld their obligations. And again, she’s said nothing about pollution from China or India. In response to the Swedish activist, French President Emmanuel Macron told Eruope1 that her stance was “very radical” and likely to “antagonize societies.” “All the movements of our youth – or our not-so-young – are helpful,” said Macron, adding “But they must now focus on those who are furthest away, those who are seeking to block the way.” The head of state stressed that he didn’t feel “that the French government nor the German government, currently, were blocking the way.” Macron also said he wanted young people to “help us put pressure on those who are blocking the way” and to “partake in very clear action.” –Business Insider
How 16-year-old Greta Thunberg’s rise could backfire on environmentalists – Sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg from Sweden is the new face of the environmentalist movement, thanks to a pair of impassioned speeches to the U.S. Congress and the United Nations. But while personalizing a movement, especially with the innocent face of a child, is usually PR gold, Greta’s ascendancy to the forefront of environmental activism could end up being a major negative to the movement – and the environment. Just how inspiring or even persuasive you find Greta’s speeches and overall activism likely depends on where you stand on the political spectrum. There are plenty of politicians and regular voters claiming to be inspired by her words and passion. There are also lots of observers expressing general alarm at what they see as an indoctrinated child being coerced by adults to make their political arguments with her youth as a shield from any criticism.Her story signals a clear change in environmental movement tactics, and just how much more divisive and ineffective that change is likely to be.Greta, and the adults guiding her, are seeking to shift almost all the focus from personal responsibility to governments and big corporations to enact environmental reform. Their argument is that individual people can’t do much to save the world from climate change disaster when energy companies and governments focused mostly on economic growth don’t care enough to make the big changes. The adult version of that argument emerged earlier this month when Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren basically mocked personal conservation efforts. Warren told a climate town hall audience and later tweeted that the fossil fuel industry wants the public to discuss issues like plastic straws, lightbulbs, and cheeseburgers so they can continue to get away with producing most of the emissions blamed for climate change.
Could Climate Change Fuel the Rise of Right-Wing Nationalism? – Two trends have defined the past decade and both have been on display at this year’s session of the United Nations General Assembly. One has been the escalating effects of climate change, which were the focus of the United Nations’Climate Action Summit. Forest fires, floodsand hurricanes are all rising in their frequency and severity. Eight of the last 10 years have been the warmest on record. Marine biologists warned that coral reefs in the U.S. could disappear entirely by the 2040s. The other trend has been the surge of right-wing nationalist politics across Western nations, which includes Donald Trump’s election in the U.S., and the rise of nationalist political parties around the world. Indeed, the first four speeches of the United Nations general debate were given by Brazilian right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro, Trump, Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and far-right Turkish President Recep Erdogan. These two trends are rarely discussed together. When they are, their correlation is sometimes viewed as an unfortunate coincidence, since many nationalist politicians actively obstruct climate change solutions. However, our new research suggests that these two trends may be closely related, and not in the way you might think. The effects of climate change – and the way it makes societies feel threatened – may be one of the elements fueling the rise of right-wing nationalism.
Elizabeth Warren’s Climate Risk Disclosure Act Tries to Do What the SEC Didn’t – The Green New Deal has been the focal point of the climate debate among the Democratic presidential candidates. Less publicized is the Climate Risk Disclosure Act, a proposal from Senator and presidential contender Elizabeth Warren, that seeks to frame climate change as a threat to the public markets.The idea: force companies to publicly disclose how their valuation would fare should climate change continue versus how they would do should temperature rise be capped at 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, the benchmark outlined in the Paris agreement. “The Climate Risk Disclosure Act empowers investors to make smart decisions about where to invest their money by requiring that public companies be straight about how climate change and related policies will affect their bottom lines,” said Sen. Warren in an exclusive statement sent to Cheddar. “Shareholders weighing this new information will compel big companies to speed up the transition to a clean energy economy, reducing the odds of an environmental and financial disaster without spending a dime of taxpayer money.”First proposed in 2018, and reintroduced with changes earlier this summer, Warren’s bill would use the Securities and Exchange Commission to force publicly-traded companies to confront their own position within the climate crisis – and share that information with investors. The law, the Senator’s office explains, would also have companies reveal their direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions, share the total fossil fuel assets they own or manage, and outline their climate change risk management strategies.It’s certainly not the only climate proposal from the Massachusetts senator, but the Climate Risk Disclosure Act does appear fundamentally Warren-esque in its hope to use regulatory agencies – in this case, the SEC – to push the free market toward a less environmentally-destructive future.Notably, the legislation was co-sponsored by several other presidential hopefuls, including Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Cory Booker, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. It has also won the endorsement of sustainability advocacy organizations, including the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (Ceres) and the U.S. Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment (US SIF). Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) introduced the bill in the House, where it just passed the House Financial Services Committee.
The Green New Deal will be tremendously expensive. Every penny should go on the government’s tab. Although its seeds are freshly planted, the Green New Deal (GND) resolution has already regenerated the US policy landscape.By coupling concrete, evidence-based goals with policy proposals that explicitly support these goals, Green New Dealers have shown not only courage but savvy.Advocates of the GND reject “soft denialist” suggestions that the climate crisis is merely a technical problem we can fix by “unrigging” old markets, manufacturing new markets, or implementing isolated taxes. This recognition has helped shift the discussion toward ambition – and toward survival.In support of this evolution, most advocates embrace another cold, hard truth: Only the federal government holds the fiscal tools powerful enough to achieve a just transition.Accordingly, people who truly want to see a GND in our time should fully embrace the power of the public purse. Instead of focusing on financial returns or relying on failed ideas like public-private partnerships, the GND should be financed through public spending and nothing else.From the onset, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – one of the GND’s most visible supporters – has demanded our elected officials approach the crisis as straightforwardly as possible, just as policymakers responded to World War II.The analogy is on point. During the war, Treasury economistslearned an important lesson: Ultimately, the US federal government is constrained not by financial resources but by the physical resources (like labor and machinery) that it can marshal with its spending.It doesn’t mean elected officials should ignore the effects of new spending; rather, Congress should appropriate as much public money as necessary to accomplish GND projects, while avoiding the widespread shortages of goods and services that may result from the creation of excess purchasing power. This framework aligns with theactual goals of the GND rather than distractions – like boosting financial returns on investment. Some GND advocates want the explicitly transformational agenda to appear less costly and less “invasive.” Whether they do this out of concern for the “price tag,” a “socialist label,” or both, matters little. They want to “leverage markets,” “unlock the potential” of private capital, and otherwise minimize the ostensible burden of the GND on government balance sheets. Their proposals typically involve the federal government either substituting public spending for public “lending,” via a national development bank or a network of public banks, or taking “equity stakes” in private companies (thereby granting the federal government the right to a percentage of future profits, as well as influence, but not ownership, over the private businesses.)
Jeff Bezos unveils sweeping plan to tackle climate change –Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled a sweeping new plan on Thursday to tackle climate change, committing the retail giant to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement 10 years ahead of schedule. In what he is calling the “Climate Pledge,” Bezos also promised to measure and report the company’s emissions on a regular basis, implement decarbonization strategies and alter its business strategies to offset remaining emissions. Bezos expects 80% of Amazon’s energy use to come from renewable sources by 2024, up from a current rate of 40%, before transitioning to zero emissions by 2030. “We want to use our scale and our scope to lead the way,” Bezos said at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. “One of the things we know about Amazon as a role model for this is that it’s a difficult challenge for us because we have deep, large physical infrastructure. So, if we can do this, anyone can do this.” The plan calls for other companies to join Amazon in pledging to have net zero carbon emissions by 2040 – a decade ahead of the Paris accord’s goal. As part of the announcement, Amazon has agreed to purchase 100,000 electric delivery vans from vehicle manufacturer Rivian. Bezos said the first electric delivery vans will be on the road by 2021, and he estimates 100,000 vehicles will be deployed by 2024. The move builds on Rivian’s $700 million investment round in February, which was led by Amazon. Amazon has invested $440 million in Rivian, the announcement said.
Google to Invest $2 Billion in Wind and Solar Energy -Ahead of the UN climate summit and the global climate strike, the world’s largest search engine announced that the tech behemoth will make its biggest corporate purchase of renewable energy yet, signing on to a series of agreements that will increase Google’s wind and solar investments by 40 percent, as Quartzreported.Google struck 18 clean energy deals that span the globe, from the U.S., Chile and Europe. The agreements mean that Google will purchase energy from solar farms in South Carolina, North Carolina and Texas. It will use solar and wind power to run its data centers in Chile, as Cnet reported.NoneAbout half of the new investment will be in Europe, including projects in Finland, Sweden, Belgium and Denmark, according to the Guardian.The company’s CEO Sundar Pichai said it’s “the biggest corporate purchase of renewable energy in history,” in a blog post. Google will buy 1,600 megawatts, or 1.6 gigawatt, of clean electricity in its new energy deals, as Cnet reported.Added it to Google’s existing purchases of clean energy, the new investment will allow Google to purchase 5.5 gigawatt of clean energy.”Together, these deals will increase our worldwide portfolio of wind and solar agreements by more than 40 percent, to 5,500 MW – equivalent to the capacity of a million solar rooftops,” wrote Pichai in his blog post. “Once all these projects come online, our carbon-free energy portfolio will produce more electricity than places like Washington D.C. or entire countries like Lithuania or Uruguay use each year.”Pichai added that the deals will “spur the construction of more than $2 billion in new energy infrastructure,” including millions of solar panels and hundreds of wind turbines across three continents, as the Guardianreported. “This means we’re not buying power from existing wind and solar farms, but instead are making long-term purchase commitments that result in the development of new projects,” he wrote in his blog post.
Casper Regional Landfill begins burying turbine blades — One wind farm in Glenrock and two from the Saratoga area have partnered with the Casper Regional Landfill to dispose of their old wind turbine blades. More than 900 blades will be brought to the landfill beginning now until the end of next spring. The Casper Solid Waste Manager, Cynthia Langston, said that though most turbine blades can be reused, there are some that are simply un-recyclable. “Ninety percent of the turbines are completely reclaimed, recycled, and reused, but there is ten percent that is fiberglass, so those are coming to us from three different farms in the state.” Langston said that though the motor houses can be crushed, the blades are too strong. To save space, they cut each blade into three separate parts before transporting them, then stack them on each other to be buried. Langston said that Casper was the only facility in the region that could handle such a project. “So Casper happens to be, I think it is, the biggest landfill facility in the state of Wyoming. These blades are really big, and they take up a lot of airspace, and our unlined area is very, very large, and it’s going to last hundreds of years.” She also mentioned that Casper is the only landfill in the state that has the certification to show that it is environmentally responsible, but being conscious for the Earth isn’t the only reason Casper decided to bring the project to the city. They are making a pretty large profit from the deal; $675,485 to be exact. “So the revenue from the special projects, um, that go in the unlined area, help with the whole cost of our facility so it keeps all of our rates low. Keeping prices low is important to the CRL, as they are the lowest price landfill in the state, much in thanks to these types of special projects.
Banned wind turbine infrasound articles became too hot for the Sierra Club to handle — After working without any compensation for months to uncover the most revealing, current scholarly studies, and thought-provoking news reports on the known health hazards associated with infrasound from industrial wind turbines, a two-part series of articles that was written at the Sierra Club’s request was suddenly retracted from one of their club’s magazines. Moreover, it was announced that the reason would not be revealed until December. This was a shocking outcome, especially considering that the articles had been the idea of the magazine’s editor, who along with a recruited author had painstakingly scrutinized, double-checked, and triple-checked every one of the extensive sources for the two-part article, and had verified not only the legitimacy of the sources, but also authenticated the interpretation of those reports. While the first part of the series – which delved into the potential health hazards of infrasound on wildlife, house pets, and farm animals – had been considered a completely acceptable report for months, one week after the second part of the series was published online – which focused on the potential human health hazards of wind turbine produced infrasound – both articles immediately became the target of a mysterious set of “editors” (plural) for a publication that had only an editor (singular) prior to the banning of that series. Apparently, the compilation of too many eye-opening pieces of evidence of infrasound danger in too little word space may have created too much truth for comfort for some of the Sierra Club’s largest money donors, who had purchased their positions as foundation directors, all of whom profit greatly from the promotion of costly and hazardous so-called green energy schemes (see the last portion of this article on how billionaire directors use the Sierra Club as a lobbying front, blatantly exchanging green hype for greenbacks in a well-orchestrated and highly successful scheme to increase their vast corporate profits). Therefore, not only was the article retracted, but a campaign to discredit the two-part report is also currently underway. The following is an account of the unfolding treachery of the Sierra Club, as documented in the email conversations between the author and the editor of the Desert Report magazine, where the travesty occurred …
Vermont Tech to shut down $4.2 million digester for lack of compost – Vermont Technical College will stop running its $4.2 million anaerobic digester in Randolph this December, citing problems with availability of food residuals. The college made the decision public on Sept. 13, said Amanda Chaulk, director of marketing and communications for Vermont Tech. The shutdown decision was based on economic, not technological, challenges, said Chaulk. Vermont Tech did not have enough food scraps to operate the digester at full capacity, which they attribute in part to delays in requiring haulers to collect compost. An anaerobic digester can turn food into energy. When the VTC digester went online in 2014, the college anticipated that there would soon be a statewide “distribution system in place for getting residential scraps to digesters like ours,” said Chaulk. She said Vermont Tech also anticipated that the Salisbury anaerobic digester, which is being constructed now, would increase competition for the limited “feedstock” needed to run the digester.
Expanding biogas production – U.S. Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Pat Roberts (R-KS) have reintroduced bipartisan legislation to encourage investment in biodigester systems, while establishing a market for farmers who already have a surplus of waste materials that can be used for biogas production. Brown and Roberts’ bill, the Agricultural Environmental Stewardship Act, will help expand the market for biogas by providing a 30 percent investment tax credit to help offset the upfront costs associated with building biodigester systems.Right now, farmers across the country have a surplus of organic material like manure, food scraps, agricultural residue, wastewater solids and liquids. All of which can be used to produce biogas that can be used to produce heat, electricity, fuel and can be injected into natural gas pipelines. It can also be used to process wastewater up stream, which reduces runoff and containments that impact potable water in a number of communities, especially those around Lake Erie.“Ohio farmers are struggling to safely dispose of livestock waste that could be used for renewable energy,” said Sen. Brown. “This legislation will encourage investment in the technology needed to convert these waste materials into natural gas that can be used to power households and businesses across the country.” “This legislation promotes a commonsense way to turn waste into energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, create jobs and grow the economy,”
Trump’s billion-dollar gambit: An ethanol deal to meet the demands of farmers and Big Oil – The Trump administration appears to be moving toward a deal to placate ethanol interests who have blamed the president’s deregulatory push for forcing the closing of 17 ethanol plants. It’s a deal where the administration is trying to do damage control and balance the demands of farmers and oil companies, two of Donald Trump’s most loyal constituencies. The deal, still not yet reduced to a written bill, is likely to help oil companies that have been given permission to stop blending ethanol with gasoline at some of their refineries to make up the lost production at other plants, said Geoff Cooper, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group for ethanol producers. The negotiations have happened in at least two recent White House meetings – one between President Donald Trump and Republican senators from farm states, including Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst of Iowa, The other, on Sept. 11, was between company executives and White House staff. There is still no timetable for when the plan will be finalized. The rules at issue are called small refinery exemptions, which the Trump administration has expanded at the behest of oil companies and to the consternation of ethanol interests. The exemptions let so-called small gasoline refineries – including some owned by oil giants Exxon Mobil and Chevron – out of their obligations to produce ethanol under the renewable fuel standards rules approved by Congress in 2005 and 2007 to address climate change. Because ethanol emits less carbon than conventional gasoline when burned, the renewable fuels standard requires that refiners include 15 billion gallons of ethanol in their products annually. That’s enough for most of the nation’s gasoline to include 10% ethanol, which is usable in every new passenger vehicle sold in the U.S., Cooper said. The U.S. Department of Energy says flex-fuel vehicles can use 15% ethanol fuel or 85% ethanol fuel, with the more ethanol-rich blends being more popular in farm states near where ethanol is produced. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency each year allocates each refinery’s quota for ethanol production in a rule implementing the statute. After that, however, the agency has been granting retroactive waivers to excuse refineries from their legal duty. The so-called SRE exemptions, which have been granted retroactively, reduce the market for ethanol to between 13 billion and 14 billion gallons annually, Cooper said.
BIOFUELS: Trump wants to limit RIN prices to help oil refiners: source — President Trump has told senators he favors limiting prices on biofuel credits to help petroleum refiners, according to an industry source briefed on yesterday’s White House meeting.
Backed by Over Two Dozen Cities and States, California Sues Trump Admin for Revoking Authority to Adopt Strict Emissions Standards California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, backed by top legal officials representing more than two dozen cities and states, sued the Trump administration Friday for revoking the Golden State’s authority to set its own greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and trucks. The Environmental Protection Agency, under the Obama administration, issued a waiver in 2013 that allowed California to develop state emissions standards that are stricter than federal ones. California’s standards have since been adopted in whole or part by several other states and the District of Columbia.”Over the past 50 years, the EPA has granted 100 waivers to California,” according to Becerra’s office. “Thanks to California’s vehicle emissions program, the state has reduced emissions by hundreds of thousands of tons annually, encouraged the development of emission controls technologies, and paved the way for stronger federal standards.”While President Donald Trump was fundraising in California on Wednesday, he tweetedabout revoking California’s waiver. The administration finalized that move on Thursday and unveiled its “One National Program Rule.”The new lawsuit (pdf), filed in the U.S. District Court for D.C., challenges the Trump administration’s attempt to kill the stricter standards and replace them with a new emissions rule jointly drafted by the EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), an agency under the Department of Transportation.”Two courts have already upheld California’s emissions standards, rejecting the argument the Trump administration resurrects to justify its misguided Preemption Rule. Yet, the administration insists on attacking the authority of California and other states to tackle air pollution and protect public health,” Becerra said in a statement. “The Oval Office is really not a place for on-the-job training,” Becerra added. “President Trump should have at least read the instruction manual he inherited when he assumed the presidency, in particular the chapter on respecting the Rule of Law. Mr. President, we’ll see you in court.”
23 states sue Trump to keep California’s auto emission rules(AP) – California sued Friday to stop the Trump administration from revoking its authority to set greenhouse gas emission and fuel economy standards for cars and trucks, enlisting help from 22 other states in a battle that will shape a key component of the nation’s climate policy. Federal law sets standards for how much pollution can come from cars and trucks. But since the 1970s, California has been permitted to set tougher rules because it has the most cars and struggles to meet air quality standards. On Thursday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration withdrew California’s waiver. The NHTSA action does not take effect for 60 days, but state leaders did not wait to file a lawsuit. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has clashed with President Donald Trump on several fronts, vowed the state “will hold the line in court to defend our children’s health, save consumers money at the pump and protect our environment.” The Trump administration’s decision does not just affect California. Thirteen other states, plus the District of Columbia, have adopted California’s standards. A spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration declined to comment on the lawsuit. But Thursday, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said the rules “were making cars more expensive and impeding safety because consumers were being priced out of newer, safer vehicles.” “We will not let political agendas in a single state be forced upon the other 49,” Chao said. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said its authority to set nationwide fuel economy standards pre-empts state and local programs. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra cited a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision that rejected the NHTSA’s argument that greenhouse gas emission standards under the Clean Air Act interfered with its ability to set fuel economy standards. “The Oval Office is really not a place for on-the-job training. President Trump should have at least read the instruction manual he inherited when he assumed the Presidency, in particular the chapter on respecting the Rule of Law,” Becerra said in a statement.
Pence’s eight-car motorcade ruffles feathers on Michigan’s Mackinac Island, where cars are banned – Vice President Pence’s arrival in Michigan with an eight-vehicle motorcade to attend the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference over the weekend ruffled some feathers on an island where cars are generally banned, the Detroit Free Press reported. The conference took place on the state’s Mackinac Island, which has a population of around 500 people, according to the 2010 census, that is known for its ban on vehicles. The ban first took effect in the late 19th century, Time magazine reported.According to the Detroit Free Press, the vice president’s motorcade is the first ever to arrive in the community, where residents generally commute by bike or snowmobile in colder weather. However, residents can be granted a temporary vehicle permit in certain circumstances.It has long been custom for the president and vice president to travel with several armored vehicles by motorcade as a security measure.However, the sight of the vice president’s motorcade on Mackinac Island prompted some criticism from local Democratic leaders. Former state Senate candidate Julia Pulver (D) tweeted a video of the vice president’s motorcade and wrote, “For those not from MI, you should understand what a huge transgression this is.” “Our #MackinacIsland has been a car free haven forever, a piece of history frozen in time. Tell anyone from MI @VP just drove not 1 but 8 CARS on this island & watch their blood boil,” she continued.
DOE allocates $56.5M toward clean coal-fired energy research – More than 30 companies, universities and research entities will receive $56.5 million in funding for development projects focused on advanced coal technologies. The U.S. Department of Energy announced the winners in federal funding for cost-shared research and development projects ranging from innovative uses of domestic coal, steam turbine technologies, coal-fired power plants and energy efficiencies, among other tracks. The funding is broken into six award categories. Award winners and research partners include Thermosolv, Battelle Memorial Institute, George Washington University, Ramaco Carbon LLC, University of Illinois, Ohio University, H Quest Vanguard Inc., University of Kentucky, General Electric, Rice University, Siemens, Clemson University, Gas Technology Institute, Infinite Cooling Inc. and West Virginia University Research Corp., among others. The first funding opportunity award is for $10 million for 10 projects focused on develop innovative uses of domestic coal for upgraded coal-based feedstocks used to produce power and make steel. The second funding opportunity award is for $11.9 million on advancing steam turbines for coal boilers. The two projects selected seek to improve the performance of steam-based power cycles. The third funding opportunity award is for $9.3 million for 10 projects working to improve performance economics for the existing and future coal fleet. This group support DOE’s Crosscutting Research Program covering a rnage of fossil energy uses. The fourth funding opportunity award is for $5 million for five projects working on development and deployment of innovative systems for improving efficiency and environmental performance. The fifth award funds three projects with up to $15 million on recovering rare earth elements and critical materials from domestic coal-based resources via conventional extraction, separation and recovery processes.The sixth and final award allocates $5.3 million to two projects supporting DOE’s program to improve characterization and prediction of subsurface fluid movement and enhance real-time measurement of critical subsurface properties.
TDEC to conduct testing on Bull Run mystery dust Anderson County mother Amie Deaver had one question for Tennessee’s environmental regulators Thursday as she scooped up her own samples of the particulate matter falling from the skies in her neighborhood.“Why is (the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation) letting (the Tennessee Valley Authority) do their own testing?” she asked in an interview with Knox News.She’s not alone. A growing number of residents living within a few miles of TVA’s Bull Run coal-fired power plant are reporting the discovery – for days now – of a substance similar in appearance and texture to forms of coal ash waste produced there. Both TVA and TDEC say monitoring equipment at the Bull Run Fossil Plant show no reason to think the particulate matter that has been coating houses, cars, mailboxes and driveways is coming from the plant or related to coal ash. At least a half dozen nearby residents, including Deaver, say they were told this week that TDEC – the state agency tasked with regulating TVA’s coal ash storage and protecting the environment – would be investigating. Some gave TDEC samples. On Thursday morning, TDEC told Knox News regulators were going to allow TVA to test the samples.
As coal companies fail, the workers are being left with nothing – Peggy Stanley can give you a rough running tally of the money that Blackjewel Mining owes her husband. First, there are the paychecks. One was supposed to be sent out mid-July, after the company filed for bankruptcy, but it never came. There’s also the one that was sent out in the middle of June but bounced two weeks later when the company ran out of funds, causing the Stanleys’ account to be frozen. Peggy estimates those checks amount to around $5,000. There’s also the money in their 401k, which the couple has been unable to access. And then there’s the mining equipment, the $400 worth of supplies in his locker that had been stolen. And for John and Peggy, who are in limbo as they wait for news about John’s job, every little bit of money counts right now.“We’re wondering how we will pay the next bill or get food,” Peggy said. The meltdown at Blackjewel, which currently owes millions of dollars to more than 1,000 workers in four different states, shows just how tenuous the coal industry can be for workers.Six coal companies filed for bankruptcy in the last year, putting workers in dire straits. In 2018, only around 80,000 people nationally were employed at coal mines – the lowest level on record. The collapse of coal threatens not just miners, but their neighbors in mining communities. A recent analysis identified 26 counties so dependent on coal for employment and tax revenue that they risk “fiscal collapse” because of the continuing decline of the industry. Around half of the big coal companies that have filed for bankruptcy since 2012, according to the Sierra Club, have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Unlike Chapter 7, which immediately shuts a company down, Chapter 11 allows companies to continue operating as they restructure.
Former Blackjewel Miners End Railroad Blockade In Kentucky -The nearly two-month blockade of a Kentucky railroad track is coming to an end as unpaid coal miners end their protest in order to take new jobs, start classes, or move away from their coal-dependent communities. When coal company Blackjewel abruptly declared bankruptcy in July, it left some 1100 Appalachian coal miners in Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia without pay. On July 29, five miners blockaded a train full of coal preparing to leave a Blackjewel facility in Harlan County, Kentucky. The miners’ rallying cry was “No Pay, No Coal.” But after 59 days on the tracks, the protest is coming to an end. Felicia Cress is married to a former Blackjewel miner, and has been at the protest since the first day. “This happened because we got shafted, which happens all the time,” Cress said. “You got these rich people that s*** on these poor people, and people just overlook it.” Felicia’s husband is currently looking for work. She said her bank has threatened to foreclose on her home unless she finds money for her mortgage payment by Saturday.
Appalachia’s Deep History of Resistance – When a group of Kentucky miners decided to block a coal-laden train from leaving a bankrupt mine in July, they weren’t just laying claim to missing paychecks.The miners in Harlan County won attention across the United States for their willingness to put their bodies on the line for their beliefs. In doing so, they’re invoking the long-entrenched spirit of civil disobedience and direct action in the Appalachian Mountains. The mine wars of the early 20th century led to the rise of American unions in the 1930s and 1940s, but it’s not just coal miners who have laid claim to a history of activism.The first day of the Harlan County train blockade, July 29, 2019, also marked the 89th day of a 24/7 protest in Kingsport, Tennessee, over a monopolistic health care provider’s move to downgrade a hospital’s emergency services and close its neonatal intensive care unit, where sick newborns are treated. And July 29 was the 328th day of the Yellow Finch Lane tree-sits in Montgomery County, Virginia, where two anonymous tree-sitters and a small support camp block construction of a 303-mile, 42-inch wide pipeline being built to move natural gas from the fracking fields of the Marcellus and Utica shale formations in northern West Virginia to a terminal just north of Danville in southern Virginia. From there, the gas would be sent on to the East Coast, and perhaps overseas.These ongoing actions aren’t recent aberrations. In 2018, more than 20,000 teachers in all of West Virginia’s 55 counties went on strike for two weeks to secure better pay and benefits – and in the end were successful. That action inspired similar teacher strikes in Kentucky, Oklahoma, and elsewhere.In the mid-’00s, activists trying to stop mountaintop removal coal mining – a form of surface mining that uses explosives to blow off ridge tops to expose underground coal seams – regularly took part in direct actions, chaining themselves to equipment, disrupting stockholder meetings, and blocking access to mine sites and facilities. These activists run the gamut in terms of age, class, race, ethnicity and hometowns. Women tend to be more prevalent in these actions than men, but everyone shares the frustration of fighting against a system that feels rigged, where other options are blocked, and the only thing left to do is to fight using one’s body.
Audit alleges W.Va. DEP violated state law for nearly a decade | WCHS -In a report presented to the joint Post Audit Committee, legislative auditors contend that the state Division of Environmental Protection has been skirting a law designed to make sure that coal mine reclamation bonds are on solid financial ground. Coal companies have to get the bonds to guarantee the land will be repaired once the mining is over. But, the audit report says the DEP ignored a stipulation that said insuring agencies have to be approved by the U.S. Treasury with a T-Listing. That certifies the insurers have suitable assets and financial practices. First Surety Corporation got into the business in 2006 and insures hundreds of bonds worth about 48 million dollars. However, the agency does not have the financial credentials that auditors say the law requires. “The legislature is very committed to requiring a T-Listing for these bills, surety bonds and so forth, that protect the land in West Virginia as its being mined for coal,” West Virginia Senate President Mitch Carmichael, (R) Jackson, said. The DEP’s general counsel says the agency interprets the law as having two paths to insure the reclamation bonds. One is for a company to have a T-Listing, the other is by the permission of the West Virginia Insurance Commissioner. Carmichael questioned the lawyer about the DEP’s stance. “Mr. President, my testimony is that the agency thought that there were two avenues pursuant to that rule by which a company would be allowed to submit surety bonds to the state,” Jason Wandling, General Counsel for the W.Va. DEP said. “And one of those avenues would be, would not include T-Listing?” Carmichael asked. Wandling replied, “That’s correct Mr. President.” “I’m at a loss as to how you obtain that understanding of it,” Carmichael said.
Federal judge orders Justice companies to pay $35M in 2012 lawsuit – West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice’s family companies have been ordered to pay $35 million in a lawsuit over a coal mining contract.On Monday, U.S. District Judge for the Eastern District of Kentucky Gregory F. Van Tatenhove entered amemorandum opinion and order.The judgment stems from a 2012 lawsuit filed by New London Tobacco Market Inc., which said Justice’s companies, James C. Justice Companies Inc. and Kentucky Fuel Corp., had breached a contract to mine coal. Among other things, Justice’s companies were accused of failing to pay minimum royalty payments and monthly retainer fees, and committing fraud.In an amended complaint filed September 2017, Justice’s companies were accused of transferring assets “with the intent to hinder, delay or defraud Plaintiffs as creditors of Justice Companies.” The lawsuit mentions a series of properties Justice’s companies transferred, including land in North Carolina and South Carolina.Lawyers for New London Tobacco Market Inc. believed, they wrote, that Justice’s companies intended to “convert real property to cash or other assets that will be difficult to trace or that can be dissipated or hidden, with the intent to hinder, delay or defraud Plaintiffs and other creditors.” The $35 million judgment is specifically for lost retainer fees, lost tonnage royalties, compensatory damages and punitive damages. As of June 26, 2019, Justice’s companies owed $970,000 in unpaid retainer fees, which increase by $10,000 on the first of each month – meaning they now owe $1 million. They also owe nearly $17 million in lost tonnage royalties, $20,000 for compensatory damages and $17 million in punitive damages.
Top energy regulator agonizes over the downfall of coal country – CNN -Neil Chatterjee, America’s top energy regulator, grew up in the heart of coal country. Now, he’s agonizing over the collapse of the coal industry, and there’s not much he can do to save it.”It is really, really difficult for me to watch,” Chatterjee, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, told CNN Business in an interview. The Republican from Kentucky said he’s seen firsthand the “devastating impact” that the closure of coal-fired power plants and mines can have on local communities.”People are left with no resources. There’s not a Walmart or Burger King for 30 miles where they can get alternative employment,” said Chatterjee, who was appointed to FERC, which regulates interstate power, in 2017 by President Donald Trump.The pain goes beyond those directly employed by coal, spreading to indirect jobs that support the industry and even to the local real estate market.”The only asset that people in these communities often have is their homes,” Chatterjee said, “and their homes lose value because no one wants to move to an area without hope for economic prosperity.” Yet Chatterjee, a former aide to Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, stressed that his hands are tied. FERC is an independent agency run by bipartisan commissioners. Chatterjee has pledged to make decisions based on the facts, not personal feelings.
Government sells coal leases for Wayne National Forest land (AP) – The federal government is holding a competitive lease sale for coal underneath nearly 500 acres inside Ohio’s Wayne National Forest. The Bureau of Land Management-Eastern States says Wednesday’s sale involves seven tracts in Perry and Morgan counties that contain an estimated 1.4 million tons of sub-surface mineable federal coal. The offering comes in response to a lease application by CCU Coal and Construction, formerly Westmoreland Coal Co. The company already operates an adjacent privately-owned underground coal mine that covers over 8,500 acres and produces 1.2 million tons of coal a year. In 2018, the mine employed 155 and supported 400 total jobs. Wednesday’s bid opening will deliver each tract lease to the highest bidder, provided the amount is above the fair market value and other bid requirements are satisfied.
McConnell’s Record on Coal Has Become a Hot Topic in His Senate Campaign – – Mitch McConnell staked his last Senate campaign, five years ago, in large part on his support for the coal industry and coal miners. But McConnell’s unwillingness to shore up the fund that supports miners with black lung disease or their pension fund, even after dozens of his constituents traveled 10 hours by bus this summer to his Washington office, has allowed a well-funded opponent to seize on what should be McConnell’s strength: coal. “Coal miners risked their lives to fuel our country and our growth into a world power,” Democrat Amy McGrath says in a recent attack ad. Borrowing a union battle cry that still echoes in the hills and hollows around here after more than 80 years, McGrath says: “The question for anyone in Congress is, which side are you on?” In an indication that it struck a nerve, McConnell’s campaign quickly hit back with his own ad, asserting that “Kentucky coal country knows that Mitch fights and wins for miners.” As the coal economy of eastern Kentucky has collapsed in recent years after decades of decline, there’s a growing impatience expressed even by some local Republicans and community activists with McConnell’s leadership on behalf of sick and out-of-work coal miners and their struggling towns in his home state. McConnell has propped up a dying coal industry as the economic engine of the region, instead of going all in on supporting economic diversity that could provide a future for communities. He failed to support legislation that would reclaim mine land for economic development. He shied away from a bipartisan coalition in his state that is nurturing tech, medical and even solar jobs. He led the Republican effort to cut taxes on the coal companies – taxes that would help struggling miners. And he has not pushed to shore up a badly underfunded miners’ pension fund.
Fracking ban could have unintended consequence of boosting coal – OpEd – A big environmental talking point this election season is a call to ban fracking. The argument is supported by the likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders(I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). This week, a group of Hollywood stars, political activists and 500 grassroots groups sent a letter to the United Nations asking the General Assembly to endorse a global ban on fracking. In some political circles, activists believe that decreased fracking would reduce carbon emissions. Those activists are actually wrong.Fracking produces natural gas, and when we use more natural gas we decrease our use of coal to produce electricity. We are in the midst of a natural gas boom, in large part because it is produced as a byproduct of fracking for oil. The natural gas produced through fracking has become abundant, cheap and a more environmentally friendly replacement for coal. In 2016, more than 31 percent of electricity in the United States was produced by burning coal in power plants. Natural gas is the best option to replace coal power generation quickly and transition to cleaner emissions. The best way to put pressure on utilities to make that transition is to keep pushing the price of natural gas lower so that coal cannot compete.According to a new report from IHS Markit, natural gas prices in the United States could fall to an average of $2 or less per thousand cubic feet next year. This incredibly low price for natural gas is being driven by an increase in associated gas, or gas that is produced and captured from oil wells. We have also seen an increase in pipelines built in fracking regions to transport that natural gas. Without the pipelines, the producers have to flare the natural gas, meaning they burn it off at the well. This is both wasteful and bad for the environment. The United States is producing so much natural gas that we can even afford to export it to other countries while keeping prices low for utilities at home. Liquifying and transporting natural gas abroad is now a growing business for the United States with new liquefaction. America’s LNG export capacity is expected to reach over 10 billion cubic feet per day in 2020, which is almost double the export capacity in 2018. There’s an obvious economic benefit to selling our abundant and inexpensive natural gas to the world, but there are also environmental and geopolitical benefits.
Nuclear energy too slow, too expensive to save climate: report(Reuters) – Nuclear power is losing ground to renewables in terms of both cost and capacity as its reactors are increasingly seen as less economical and slower to reverse carbon emissions, an industry report said. In mid-2019, new wind and solar generators competed efficiently against even existing nuclear power plants in cost terms, and grew generating capacity faster than any other power type, the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) showed. “Stabilizing the climate is urgent, nuclear power is slow,” said Mycle Schneider, lead author of the report. “It meets no technical or operational need that low-carbon competitors cannot meet better, cheaper and faster.” The report estimates that since 2009 the average construction time for reactors worldwide was just under 10 years, well above the estimate given by industry body the World Nuclear Association (WNA) of between 5 and 8.5 years. The extra time that nuclear plants take to build has major implications for climate goals, as existing fossil-fueled plants continue to emit CO2 while awaiting substitution. “To protect the climate, we must abate the most carbon at the least cost and in the least time,” Schneider said. The WNA said in an emailed statement that studies have shown that nuclear energy has a proven track record in providing new generation faster than other low-carbon options, and added that in many countries nuclear generation provides on average more low-carbon power per year than solar or wind. It said that reactor construction times can be as short as four years when several reactors are built in sequence. Nuclear is also much more expensive, the WNISR report said. The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29 – $56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189.
Residents voice concerns about Seabrook Station’s safety – Dozens of area residents urged nuclear officials to take serious precautions when reviewing the monitoring of the Seabrook, New Hampshire, nuclear power plant’s degrading concrete. A crowd of 100 people turned out in City Hall Auditorium for a two-hour public comment session Monday night hosted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board. The hearing was dedicated entirely to public comment. The session precedes a hearing to be held in City Hall Auditorium this week at which the board will review a contention from local whistleblower group C-10 on Seabrook Station’s concrete. C-10 monitors the safety of the Seabrook plant because six Massachusetts communities – Amesbury, Merrimac, Salisbury, Newburyport, Newbury and West Newbury – are within a 10-mile radius of the plant and are considered part of the New Hampshire plant’s emergency planning zone. The plant sits about 17 miles northwest – as the seagull flies – from parts of Gloucester and Rockport. The hearing was open to public viewing Tuesday in City Hall Auditorium. On Wednesday, the board will move into closed session and continue to meet through Friday, if necessary. Concrete degradation was first discovered at the plant in 2010 and is a result of alkali-silica reaction, or ASR, a chemical process that causes small cracks. The final contention the board will consider is: “The large-scale test program, undertaken for NextEra (Energy) at the Ferguson Structural Engineering Laboratory, has yielded data that are not representative of the progression of ASR at Seabrook. As a result, the proposed monitoring, acceptance criteria and inspection intervals are not adequate.”
Ohio’s Nuclear Bailout Is Inspiring An Unprecedented Campaign. But Why Now? | WOSU Radio – audio (WOSU radio) Chances are, you’ve seen the ads with a stomping Chinese army and a narrator warning that China wants to take over Ohio’s electric grid.Observers and fact-checkers call the ads misleading. Yes, the Chinese government invests in Ohio’s energy market, but so do many other foreign entities. And all voter information is public, so the Chinese government already has access to it, if it wanted it.In a referendum fight, these types of ads usually show up the weeks before an election, when the question is already on the ballot. Not this time.The law, House Bill 6, adds an 85 cent monthly fee to the electric bill of most Ohio customers. That fee will provide $150 million a year to FirstEnergy Solutions to prop up two unprofitable nuclear power plants in northern Ohio. It also lets utilities add subsidies to boost two failing coal power plants.Supporters of the nuclear and coal plant subsidies don’t even want the referendum on the ballot. They’ve gone as far as to hire third-party petition blockers to shadow signature gatherers and try to convince people not to sign.Ohio State University political science professor Herb Asher says the magnitude of this campaign is unparalleled. “We’ve never seen this kind of concerted effort to really use scare tactics to try to deter people from signing petitions,” Asher says.According to the Columbus tracking firm Medium Buying, after spending $9.5 million on broadcast ads to win legislative passage of the bailout, supporters have paid for an additional $3.5 million in radio and TV ads to stop the petitions. That doesn’t count the thousands of dollars spent on mailers and petition blockers. Medium Buying president Nick Everhart says in two decades of political consulting around the country, he can’t remember such bold and bizarre tactics. “They’re waging a campaign against a ballot issue that does not exist, that’s happening on an election cycle that’s down the road,” Everhart says. “So it’s almost like they are attacking and going after a ghost.”
Who’s behind the Chinese conspiracy ads against Ohio’s nuclear referendum? -The video ad starts like a horror film trailer.“They” are “coming for our energy jobs. The Chinese government is quietly invading our American electric grid.” Troops march in Tiananmen Square and Chinese President Xi Jinping appears as the announcer’s deep voice speaks. “Don’t sign the petition allowing China to control Ohio’s power.” The ads have circulated in recent weeks along with a massive print and mail campaign, all attempting to undercut a potential referendum on FirstEnergy power plant subsidies. The ads imply that signing the petition would give voters’ personal information to the Chinese government – a conspiracy theory that has been substantiallydebunked. Yet questions remain about where the money is coming from to fund both the petition drive for a public vote on FirstEnergy’s subsidies and the inflammatory campaign against it by a group called Ohioans for Energy Security.“The group operates largely in the shadows in terms of their funding,” Dave Anderson, policy and communications manager for the Energy and Policy Institute, said of Ohioans for Energy Security. The ads aim to prevent a referendum on a new law, House Bill 6, which will add charges to electric customers’ bills to subsidize nuclear and coal plants while gutting the state’s clean energy standards. Ohio lawmakers passed the law in July, and a group called Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts began working on a referendum initiative soon after. Ohioans’ right to seek a referendum on legislation is guaranteed by Article II of the state’s Constitution. On Aug. 30, the group got a go-ahead from the Ohio secretary of state to start collecting signatures for the referendum petition. Even before that approval came, Ohioans for Energy Security began its aggressive ads aiming to keep voters from getting a say on the bill’s coal and nuclear bailouts. And less than a week later, FirstEnergy’s bankrupt generation subsidiary, FirstEnergy Solutions, filed a lawsuit asking the Ohio Supreme Court to stop the referendum petition effort. FirstEnergy Solutions stands to lose roughly $900 million in subsidies for its nuclear plants if voters eventually reject HB 6. It’s not clear who’s behind Ohioans for Energy Security, and the group isn’t required to disclose the funders for any of its anti-referendum ads during the petition drive.
Dark-money campaigns have no place in our democracy – Editorial – Akron Beacon Journal – It’s a pretty simple concept. If you’re a person or company spending money to support a candidate or ballot issue and sway the opinions of Ohioans, your donation should be recorded and publicly released. That’s how voters would learn, for example, that an incumbent mayor had accepted a large donation from a developer seeking approval of a new project. Voters would be better informed about the incumbent’s behavior regardless of how they eventually vote. The good news is that Ohio already has laws on the books for candidates and political action groups seeking to place referendums before voters. Unfortunately, there are also numerous loopholes due to inaction by state lawmakers and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizen United ruling. That’s why you’re hearing so many “dark money” complaints about the horrendous and false advertising being aired by Ohioans for Energy Security in support of the bailout of Akron-based FirstEnergy Solutions, the bankrupt subsidiary of FirstEnergy Corp. Under current law, Ohioans for Energy Security does not have to disclose the identity of any of its funders, which presumably includes FirstEnergy Solutions. Thus, the funders remain in the dark, hidden from the sunshine of public disclosure. But if the group seeking to place the FirstEnergy bailout before voters succeeds, it would eventually be required to disclose its donors, which presumably includes natural gas interests. Advocates for open government correctly surmise that requiring funding disclosure for all groups would drastically increase the odds of groups such as Ohioans for Energy Security conducting more truthful campaigns without all of the scare-mongering evident in recent weeks. “In general, we think it would be less inflammatory if we could know who these individuals [contributing to the campaign] are,” said Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, at a news conference last week.
Pro-nuclear bailout group is now circulating its own, unofficial petitions – cleveland.com – As opponents of Ohio’s new nuclear bailout law work to gather enough voter signatures to hold a referendum on overturning it, supporters of the law are now circulating their own, unofficial petitions in favor of keeping it.Ohioans For Energy Security, the main group opposing a House Bill 6 referendum, is gathering the signatures to show the Ohio General Assembly how much public support it has, according to group spokesman Carlo LoParo.But backers of the referendum call the move a ploy to confuse voters and suck up the labor pool of petition circulators.The new pro-HB6 petition urges state lawmakers to “immediately enact legislation” prohibiting any foreign national, company, or government from holding a majority stake in any electric generation, supply or distribution company in Ohio. Such a measure fits in neatly with the theme of Ohioans For Energy Security’s massive ad campaign that the Chinese government is behind the referendum effort to infiltrate Ohio’s energy grid (a misleading claim that’s based on the fact that a Chinese government-owned bank has helped finance some Ohio natural-gas power plants). The petition isn’t an attempt to seek an initiated statute (in which voters force lawmakers to consider a piece of legislation), LoParo said. Rather, he said, it’s a more informal effort that “shows grassroots support for a new law.” LoParo said the petition effort is “absolutely not” an attempt to hurt their opposition’s efforts to collect the roughly 266,000 valid signatures needed by Oct. 21 to place a referendum on the 2020 ballot. “Nowhere on this petition does it reference House Bill 6, does it reference any repeal effort,” LoParo said.
Duke subsidiary gets OK to recover $258 million spent on nixed nuclear project – The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has cleared Duke Energy Carolinas to recover roughly $258 million in costs associated with the cancelled Lee Nuclear Station project in South Carolina under an amortization plan that veers from the commission’s normal policy. The proposed cost recovery methods were “a reasonable compromise that provide savings to the wholesale customers … and result in a reasonable sharing of the cancelled” project’s costs among those customers, FERC said in a Wednesday order (ER19-2468). The requested recovery of 50% of prudently incurred costs for the nuclear project’s development will be collected through wholesale formula rates of 14 power purchase agreements between DEC and its affected wholesale customers. Those customers include electric cooperatives and municipal utilities with service territories within the Duke subsidiary’s balancing authority area. Extensive negotiations produced a settlement with the affected wholesale customers that allowed each customer to select either a 12-year amortization period for their portion of the costs of the Lee project or a one-time payment to DEC for the full load-ratio share of the project’s costs. Commission policy generally dictates that cost recovery spans the life of the plant, which for the two-unit Lee facility would be 40 years, the length of the combined construction and operating license issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in December 2016. However, FERC has “recognized that, under ‘unusual circumstances,’ agreements that do not conform to Opinion No. 295’s ‘life of the plant’ amortization period requirement can be proper so long as the result is ‘a reasonable sharing of costs,'” the Wednesday order said. The commission agreed with DEC that the negotiated deal would significantly lessen the rate impact to DEC’s electric cooperative and municipal utility wholesale customers.
Pollution permits from troubled nuclear plant under review The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control is considering whether to allow a troubled nuclear fuel factory on Bluff Road to continue discharging contaminants from its industrial process into the air and the Congaree River. DHEC says pollution released from the Westinghouse nuclear fuel plant will be within safe limits, and in some cases, discharge limits will be tougher than they have been before at the 50-year-old factory. But skeptics aren’t so sure new pollution permits are warranted – at least not for now. Westinghouse has a recent history of spills, leaks, small explosions and the buildup of nuclear materials, all of which have made some neighbors in eastern Richland County nervous. At a meeting held Thursday night by DHEC, Gadsden resident Frank Woods urged the department to move deliberately on the permits until it knows more about the extent of the problems and pollution that have plagued the atomic fuel factory on Bluff Road. He said Westinghouse has not been forthcoming about its problems historically. ““They are not reporting when things go wrong,’’ he said. “They have a history of not being honest and open with the public, or with DHEC. We can’t just give them another permit to continue to do what they are doing now. That is unacceptable to me.’’ Thursday’s meeting was unusual because proposals to renew long-standing pollution discharge permits don’t typically attract attention for many industries, including Westinghouse. The company first received a wastewater discharge permit in the mid 1970s. But recent mishaps have heightened awareness. Neighbors of the nuclear fuel rod plant worry about how groundwater pollution and accidents might threaten their community.
State Rep. Mehaffie took money from Exelon PAC — Exelon Generation, First Energy and other entities associated with the nuclear industry have spent a combined $6.5 million in lobbying expenses in Pennsylvania since the third quarter of 2018, according to Citizens Against Nuclear Bailouts. CANB provided the numbers to the Press & Journal in response to comments made by state Rep. Tom Mehaffie, R-Lower Swatara Township, during a press conference held Friday marking the shut down of Three Mile Island. “Special interests … have been against us through this whole fight and have put millions and millions of dollars into a PR campaign that says ‘no nuke bailout,’ that have done things to benefit themselves and not think about the people of Pennsylvania,” said Mehaffie, who in March introduced legislation in the state House aimed at creating a subsidy credit to preserve TMI and other nuclear power plants in the state. CANB opposes the legislation as an unwarranted “bailout” of the nuclear industry in Pennsylvania, citing an “independent report” from a former PJM Interconnection chief economist who says that four of the state’s five nuclear power plants – all but TMI – are expected to remain profitable through at least 2028. CANB said its figures for lobbying expenses by Exelon and the others comes from the lobbying directory database of the Pennsylvania Department of State website. According to the figures provided by CANB, Exelon spent $587,337 in lobbying expenses in Pennsylvania in the third quarter of 2018, $435,292 in the fourth quarter, $988,059 in the first quarter of 2019 and $1,463,640 in the second quarter of 2019. Exelon’s lobbying expenses exceeded that of the other industry players referred to by CANB, including First Energy Solutions Corp., Talen Energy, Nuclear Powers Pennsylvania, Nuclear Matters, Nuclear Energy Institute and the Pennsylvania Rural Electric Association. Exelon and these other entities combined reported $684,787 in lobbying expenses for the third quarter of 2018, $573,878 for the fourth quarter, $2,372,110 for the first quarter of 2019 and $2,883,376 for the second quarter of 2019, according to CANB.
France to give millions of residents iodine pills while EDF spots problems in six nuclear reactors – France will soon start distributing radioactivity-blocking iodine pills to an additional 2.2 million people living near the country’s 19 nuclear power plants. Separately on Wednesday EDF acknowledged manufacturing problems in six reactors while one in Normandy was shut down due to signs of corrosion.The ASN nuclear safety authority had announced in June an extension of the safety radius to 20 kilometres (12 miles) of each plant, up from 10 kilometres set in 2016, when some 375,000 households were prescribed the pills.The watchdog said Tuesday that affected residents will receive a letter in the coming days with a voucher to collect stable iodine tablets from pharmacies, as well as information on what to do in case of a nuclear accident.”If radioactive iodine is released into the environment, taking stable iodine is one of the most effective ways of protecting the thyroid,” the ASN said in a statement.The thyroid, which produces hormones regulating the body’s metabolism, is particularly at risk from cancer caused by exposure to radioactive iodine released in nuclear accidents.On the same day, but not linked to the distribution of the Iodine pills, Energy giant EDF announced that it recognized manufacturing problems on six active nuclear reactors in France, but they were still deemed “fit for use”.”At this stage of the technical instruction on these components, EDF considers that the discrepancies noted do not call into question the service suitability of the equipment and do not require immediate treatment”, read the EDF statement.
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