Environmental News For The Week Ending 28 December 2019

Written by rjs, MarketWatch 666

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

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The Wall Street Journal: ‘All You Need Is One Person On A Plane’: Stifling A Lethal Measles Outbreak – International health officials are expanding their efforts to prevent a potential spread of measles to more Pacific islands during the holiday travel period, following a large and deadly outbreak in Samoa. Tonga, Fiji and American Samoa, a U.S. territory, have all reported outbreaks or cases of measles in recent weeks. But Samoa, an independent country that is an eight-hour ferry ride from American Samoa, has suffered the largest outbreak by far. As of Saturday, measles had killed 79 people in the island nation and sickened more than 5,400 since September, out of a population of around 200,000. More than 60 of those who died were under the age of 4.

Important Donor To Anti-Vax Movement Has Been Cashing In On ‘Alternatives To Vaccines’ As Measles Outbreaks Surge – KHN –The Wall Street Journal reports that contributions from osteopathic physician Joseph Mercola account for about 40% of funding to a center that spreads anti-vaccine information. News on vaccines comes from the Pacific Islands, Virginia, Connecticut and other places, as well. The Washington Post: A Major Funder Of The Anti-Vaccine Movement Has Made Millions Selling Natural Health Products The nation’s oldest anti-vaccine advocacy group often emphasizes that it is supported primarily by small donations and concerned parents, describing its founder as the leader of a “national, grass roots movement.” But over the past decade a single donor has contributed more than $2.9 million to the National Vaccine Information Center, accounting for about 40 percent of the organization’s funding, according to the most recent available tax records. That donor, osteopathic physician Joseph Mercola, has amassed a fortune selling natural health products, court records show, including vitamin supplements, some of which he claims are alternatives to vaccines. (Satija and Sun, 12/20)

Flu season: CDC reports 1,900 deaths, virus is widespread in 30 states – The flu is widespread in 30 states and has caused almost 2,000 deaths this season, including 19 children, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly every state has reported elevated activity, the CDC said in its weekly update Friday. The CDC estimated there have been at least 3.7 million flu cases this season, 32,000 requiring hospitalization. It reported 1,900 deaths. Most patients are infected with a strain called B/Victoria that usually doesn’t appear until the end of flu season. The virus tends to strike children and young adults more often, but anyone can be affected, according to the CDC. The weekly report finds widespread flu in Puerto Rico and 30 states: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Washington.

Antibiotic Crisis Coming as Superbugs Gain Strength and Drug Companies Go Bankrupt – Countries around the world are seeing a mounting threat from antibiotic resistance. After decades of overprescribing antibiotics and overusing them in factory farming, rivers are polluted with antibiotics and complications from drug-resistant infections are projected to cost $100 trillion by 2050, according to Scientific American. The Centers for Disease Control released a report last month that said more than 2.8 million people in the U.S. experience an infection from antibiotic resistant bacteria each year, leading to 35,000 deaths. The report also pointed out that this is a global crisis, not just a domestic problem. In fact, this spring, the United Nations declared this problem an urgent global crisis in need of immediate action. Just when the fight against superbugs needs to ramp up, drug companies are either going bankrupt or refusing to invest in research, according to The New York Times. Achaogen and Aradigm, two antibiotic start-ups, both went bankrupt. Pharmaceutical giants like Novartis and Allergan have stopped investing in antibiotic research. And one of the largest developers of antibiotics, Melinta Therapeutics, recently said it was running out of money. The prospect of losing money has investors fleeing the sector, just when more money is needed, according to The New York Times. “This is a crisis that should alarm everyone,” “Antibiotic resistance has long been a problem, but the threats we face are real, immediate, and demand immediate action. Antibiotic resistance threatens modern medicine – our ability to safely perform routine surgeries and complicated organ transplants, as well as chemotherapy, all rely on the ability to prevent and treat infections,” said Dr. Jesse Jacob from the Emory Antibiotic Resistance Center at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta to Medical News Today. The Trump administration has worsened the problem by cutting the budges of nationwide, hospital-based programs researching the issue. It has also ignored the World Health Organization’s suggestions on reducing antibiotic use in livestock, as NBC News reported. Companies that have spent billions to find a solution to the increasing strength of germs that have developed a resistance to common antibiotics have not found a market to recoup their investment into research. Most antibiotics are used for short durations, unlike profitable medicines for chronic conditions, and many hospitals are unwilling to pay the high price for new therapies, according to The New York Times.

“Stop Referring to a Coming Post-antibiotic Era – It’s Already Here:” Centers for Disease Control –The front face of antibiotic resistance is a problem for medicine. But behind the scenes, the problem of antibiotic resistance becomes a problem of incentives and therefore of economics. For example, health care providers for a long time had an incentive to under-invest in preventing infections, because after all, it was easy and cheap to cure infections with antibiotics.In addition, each health care provider individually has an incentive to focus only on the patient sitting in front of them, and whether “just-in-case” or precautionary use of antibiotics might help that patient, while not taking into account the consequence that widespread use of antibiotics will also lead to a rise in infection that are resistant to antibiotics. Further, the incentives for researchers to seek out and commercialize new antibiotics (or alternative anti-infection treatments) is shaped by incentives for innovation embodied in government support of research and development spending, regulations affecting how soon a new drug can be commercialized, protections for intellectual property, and whether government health care finance would (at least in some cases) be willing to pay a higher price for newly invented anti-infection drugs. These issues all arise in Antibiotic Resistance Threats in the United States 2019, published by the Centers for Disease Control (November 2019). A substantial portion of the report is given over to estimating the size of the problem, and thus why the CDC concludes that the “post-antibiotic era” is “already here.” More than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur in the United States each year, and more than 35,000 people die as a result. To make the message just a little more grim, this issue is a global one. Globalization means that infections with antibiotic resistance can evolve anywhere, and then travel anywhere via people, animals, or even just in the environment.

Drug Overdoses Contribute To Rise In Midlife Mortality In Ohio River Valley – The Ohio River Valley has seen some of the largest jumps in mortality rates among people in midlife – those between ages 25 and 64 – in recent years. Appalachia has been hit especially hard by the opioid epidemic, and Ohio and West Virginia have suffered the worst, with the highest rates of overdose deaths. Since the drug epidemic started spiraling out of control, Detective Sgt. Randy Stewart with the sheriff’s office in Belmont County, Ohio, has seen the effects tear families up. “Going out, taking these young kids in body bags and seeing how it crushes the parents – it’s tough,” Stewart says. He and his fellow officers have responded to overdoses all over the rural county: “Alongside the roadway,” Stewart says. “Pull-offs. Back roads. Bathrooms for gas stations, restaurants, the truck stop. We pulled overdoses out of all those areas.” Wearily, he says he sees no sign of things turning around. “I don’t even think we’re close. From what I see on a daily basis, we’re kind of in last place here.” Health data for Belmont County show that the county ranked 50th of 88 Ohio counties for health outcomes. As with the rest of the state and the U.S. overall, Belmont County is seeing a trend of people dying younger, as life expectancy dips. Smoking, obesity, alcohol abuse and organ system diseases all contribute, along with drug overdoses. The drug epidemic that has ravaged these Ohio River communities has followed a now-familiar progression. For many, it started with prescription opioids. Then, drug users switched to heroin, which was cheaper. Now, law enforcement officials are seeing more and more methamphetamine, a powerful stimulant. “Right now, methamphetamine is the drug of choice,” says detective sergeant Stewart. “It’s probably topped the charts around here.”Stewart links the spike in meth to the arrival of transient oil and gas workers, drawn to Belmont County by Ohio’s fracking boom.“Talking to these people that we arrest, methamphetamine gives them that ‘go’ to work those 16-, 18-, 20-hour shifts that the oil fields are requiring,” Stewart says.

More atmospheric CO2 could reduce cognitive ability, especially in children – New research from the University of Colorado Boulder, the Colorado School of Public Health, and the University of Pennsylvania found that higher levels of atmospheric CO2 in the future could lead to cognitive issues. A new study found that higher concentrations of atmospheric CO2 could negatively impact our cognitive abilities – especially among children in the classroom. The findings were presented at this year’s American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting Prior research has shown that higher-than-average levels of CO2 can impair our thinking and lead to cognitive problems. Children in particular and their academic performance can be negatively impacted by this, but, so far, researchers have identified a simple and elegant solution – open the windows and let some fresh air in. However, what happens when the air outside also shows higher-than-usual CO2 levels? In an effort to find out, the team used a computer model and looked at two scenarios: one in which we successfully reduce the amount of CO2 we emit into the atmosphere, and one in which we don’t (a business-as-usual scenario). They then analyzed what effects each situation would have on a classroom of children. In the first scenario, they explain that by 2100 students will be exposed to enough CO2 gas that, judging from the results of previous studies, they would experience a 25% decline in cognitive abilities. Under the second scenario, however, they report that students could experience a whopping 50% decline in cognitive ability. The study doesn’t look at the effects of breathing higher-than-average quantities of CO2 sporadically – it analyzes the effects of doing so on a regular basis. The team explained that their study was the first to gauge this impact, and that the findings – while definitely worrying – still need to be validated by further research. Note that the paper has been submitted for peer-review pending publication but has yet to pass this step.

Study: Obesity Worsens Carbon Emissions — The growing human population and an increasing average body size is interfering with attempts to arrest and reduce carbon emissions, a new study has suggested – with obesity the latest carbon emissions contributor to be uncovered.According to the study, published in the journal of The Obesity Society, people with higher body mass produce more carbon dioxide, which is a product of metabolism for all oxygen-consuming living organisms.“Also,” the authors of the research said, “maintenance of greater body weights requires more food and drinks to be produced and transported to the consumers. Similarly, transportation of heavier people is associated with increased consumption of fossil fuels.”As a result, obesity was estimated to generate some 700 megatons of carbon dioxide annually, which is equal to about 1.6 percent of all anthropogenic carbon emissions.”This study makes it clear that we pay a steep price for making it difficult to access care for obesity. Not only does obesity affect the health of the individuals who have it, untreated obesity might also contribute to environmental issues,” said Ted Kyle, founder of health organization ConscienHealth, which focuses on tackling obesity as quoted by Eurekalert. Incidentally, ConscientHealth recently carried a report on a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that warned obesity rates in the United States are rising. By the end of the 2020s, the research said, half of Americans would be obese, with severe obesity now seen in as much as 25 percent of people in the U.S.

Obesity in pregnant moms linked to lag in their sons’ development and IQ – A mother’s obesity in pregnancy can affect her child’s development years down the road, according to researchers who found impaired motor skills in preschoolers and lower IQ in middle childhood for boys whose mothers were severely overweight while expecting them. A team of nutrition and environmental health researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Columbia University found that the differences are comparable to the impact of lead exposure in early childhood. At age 3, the researchers measured the children’s motor skills and found that maternal obesity during pregnancy was strongly associated with lower motor skills in boys. At age 7, they again measured the children and found that the boys whose mothers were overweight or obese in pregnancy had scores 5 or more points lower on full-scale IQ tests, compared with boys whose mothers had been at a normal weight. It isn’t clear why obesity in pregnancy would affect a child later, though previous research has found links between a mother’s diet and cognitive development, such as higher IQ scores in kids whose mothers have more of certain fatty acids found in fish. The researchers controlled for several factors in their analysis, including race and ethnicity, marital status, the mother’s education and IQ, as well as whether the children were born prematurely or exposed to environmental irritants such as air pollution. What the pregnant mothers ate or whether they breastfed were not included in the analysis.The team also examined and accounted for the nurturing environment in a child’s home in early childhood, looking at how parents interacted with their children and whether the child was provided with books and toys. A nurturing home environment was found to lessen the negative effects of obesity. “The effect on IQ was smaller in nurturing home environments, but it was still there,” Widen said.

Washington Post Denies Claim New Estrogen-Packed ‘Impossible Whopper’ Will Make Men Grow Breasts – The Washington Post published an entire article denying a claim by a veterinarian that Burger King’s new estrogen-packed vegan ‘Impossible Whopper’ could make men grow breasts if they eat too many. According to James Stangle, a doctor of veterinary medicine in South Dakota, the soy-based Impossible Whopper contains 18 million times more estrogen than the original beef Whopper. That works out at 44 milligrams of estrogen in the vegan burger compared to just 2.5 nanograms in the original beef Whopper. “Just six glasses of soy milk per day has enough estrogen to grow boobs on a male,” wrote Stangle.The Post tried to debunk his claims by pointing out that Tri-State Livestock News, where his article was published, is “a trade publication for the livestock industry” and represents cattle ranchers who have “declared war” on Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, two of the biggest companies behind plant-based meat substitutes.The science on whether substantial soy consumption feminizes men is still disputed, although given what many soy enthusiasts look and sound like, there appears to be a strong correlation.A Texas man who complained of sore, enlarged breasts and a decreased libido was later found to have estrogen levels eight times higher than normal, a result explained by his over-consumption of soy milk.Another 2008 study found that “men who ate the most soy had lower sperm concentration.” As Chris Menahan writes, “It’s worth noting that while the Washington Post is encouraging the pleb masses to chow down on estrogen burgers, the owner of the Post – the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos – is clearly taking large amounts of testosterone.”

Who Owns Your Grocery Store? –“Who owns your grocery store?” It’s the question emblazoned on the back of a van that has ferried me across 34 states to visit 128 consumer-owned grocery stores (food co-ops) and another 20 in development. I spent 13 years investigating every facet of the food supply. It led me to the conclusion that the grocery store is, hands down, the most influential force shaping food, the planet and our health. So I wrote a book about it, bought a tour van and took the book on the road. The message I’m sharing is that it’s time to pay a lot more attention to who owns the grocery stores we shop at and what those answers mean to the future of food and the future of our communities.We have invested considerable energy over the past decade into deepening our understanding of how and where food is grown and who grows it. Organic food has exploded into a $50 billion industry in the U.S. Farm-to-table restaurants are plentiful. Farmers markets are thriving and community supported agriculture models are enabling new generations of farmers to usher in a new food paradigm. But there remains a cavernous gap in the effort – where we buy our groceries. If 10 percent of our weekly food budget is at a farmers market, what about the other 90 percent? It’s almost certainly being invested in a grocery store. So what are we investing in? If it’s The Fresh Market, you’re investing in Apollo Global Management – a firm that includes the former Blackwater in its portfolio. If it’s Trader Joe’s, you’re investing in Aldi Nord – a German multinational grocer. If it’s Whole Foods, you’re investing in Amazon and lining the pockets of the wealthiest person on the planet. And what of the smaller chains? The trajectory of grocery consolidation suggests you’re investing in what will likely become an acquisition by one of a handful of hungry grocery giants. Look at Canada and the U.K., where market concentration in grocery retail is remarkably high. In Canada, two companies alone receive over half of Canadians’ grocery dollars. Combined with the next three largest grocers, those five companies command 80 percent of the market. The numbers are similar in the U.K.

Trump’s EPA Goes to Bat for Bayer as Company Fights $25 Million Verdict in Roundup Cancer Case – President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency – already accused of being “pesticide cheerleader” – threw its weight behind chemical company Bayer AG on Friday when the agency asked a federal appeals court to reverse a lower court’s ruling in favor of a man who said the company’s Roundup weedkiller was responsible for his cancer. The case centers on Edwin Hardeman of California, who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2015 after using the glyphosate-based pesticide, made by Monsanto, for years on his property. Bayer acquired Monsanto last year. A federal jury in July ordered the company to pay Hardeman roughly $25 million in damages, a lower amount than the $80 million a federal judge had ordered months earlier. The EPA maintains – to the outrage of environmental and public health groups – that glyphosate is not a carcinogen. The federal decision notwithstanding, California in 2017agreed with the World Health Organization’s 2015 classification of glyphosate as a “probable carcinogen.” Trump’s EPA has pushed back on the state’s finding and said that product labels informing users of that cancer risk would “misbranding” and announced in August of this year that the agency would not approve of labels carrying that warning. The filing from the federal government came the same week Bayer AG asked the appeals court to toss out the lower court’s ruling and defended Roundup’s safety. Bayer is currently facing nearly 43,000 claims related to glyphosate-linked cancer in federal courts. An end to the company’s legal woes is unlikely to happen soon,according to Bloomberg Environment.

Trump’s EPA Backs Bayer’s Appeal in Roundup Verdict Appeal – The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) added its weight to back Bayer AG in its appeal against a federal jury verdict that decided its Roundup weed killer causes cancer, according to Bloomberg.Bayer is looking to overturn a verdict that first awarded a plaintiff $80 million, but was reduced to $25 million by a federal judge, in a suit that claimed the world’s most popular herbicide caused a man’s non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The EPA, working with the U.S. Department of Justice, filed papers in court on Friday fully and unequivocally supporting Bayer’s claim that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, does not cause cancer, as The Wall Street Journal reported.When the U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria cut the jury reward in the spring, he refused to overturn the jury’s findings that Roundup should have been sold with a cancer warning on the label. The EPA, however, said in papers that it had vetted and approved the Roundup warning label issued by Monsanto, which Bayer acquired in 2018 for about $63 billion, and it did not require a cancer warning, as Bloomberg reported.The filings by the EPA and Justice Department said that Monsanto, and subsequently Bayer, could not print a cancer-risk warning on its label because the EPA has the sole authority over warning labels on chemical products and the EPA would not have approved a cancer warning on Roundup labels, according to The Wall Street Journal.”That label, once reviewed and approved by EPA, is controlling,” the agency said, as Bloomberg reported. “States cannot impose distinct labeling requirements.”In August, the EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler said his agency would not allow a cancer-risk warning on glyphosate-based herbicides, saying it was tantamount to false labeling since the EPA had deemed it safe, asThe Wall Street Journal reported.”EPA has a longstanding position – It’s not just this administration which determined that this pesticide does not cause cancer,” said Jeffrey Clark, the assistant attorney general of the Environment and Natural Resources Division at the Justice Department in an interview, to The Wall Street Journal. “EPA should be in control. Congress set it up that way.”

What the World’s Most Controversial Herbicide Is Doing to Rural Argentina – American farmland has long been the largest market for genetically engineered seeds and the glyphosate herbicides used on them, but the United States is by no means the only country to have adopted the new technology with open arms. Farmers in Argentina started using genetically engineered seeds about the same time farmers in the United States did, after regulators in Argentina approved Monsanto Company’s Roundup Ready soybeans in 1996. Soy production soared over the next decade as farmers who previously had been tending to grass-fed cattle, growing rice and potatoes, or running dairy farms shifted their focus to growing soybeans. Many farmers plowed up pastures to become part of what was billed as a biotech revolution. As in the United States, aggressive use of glyphosate year after year on farm fields led to a rise in glyphosate-resistant weeds, spurring many farmers to use more and more of the herbicide, often alongside other chemicals, to fight back. According to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, total pesticide use in Argentina rose by 90 percent between 1997, when the country was beginning to adopt the new type of farming, and 2011, when it was well established. Use of herbicides, including glyphosate, rose by 185 percent during that time frame. And, just as in the United States, concerns for human health and for the environment have emerged. By 2002, less than a decade after Roundup Ready soybeans were launched, some doctors in soybean-growing areas started reporting a suspicious rise in health problems in their patients, including birth defects and several types of cancer. People living in rural soybean-growing areas were notably affected, with sharply increased rates of miscarriage as well, according to scientists and physicians. In Santa Fe, cancer rates were documented at two to four times higher than the national average. In Chaco, regional birth reports showed a quadrupling of congenital defects, from 19.1 per 10,000 to 85.3 per 10,000 in the decade after GMO crops and glyphosate took hold in Argentina. Doctors there found that more of the diseases and birth defects occurred in villages near the soy fields than near cattle ranches. A government study also noted troubling levels of agrochemical residues in the soil and drinking water in certain areas, with roughly 12 million people living in the country’s farm belt potentially at risk.

Green Cancer-Causing Slime Oozes Onto Michigan Highway — Motorists traveling on Interstate 696 in Michigan caught a peculiar sight on Friday when a mysterious green slime oozed onto the highway from a retaining wall, according to The New York Times. Authorities blocked sections of the highway in Madison Park, a Detroit suburb, while hazardous material cleanup crews worked to contain and remove the material. The Michigan state police tweeted on Saturday that the green slime was the cancer-causing chemical hexavalent chromium, which was leaking from the basement of a local business, as CNN reported. “It’s a serious situation,” “Clearly, this site needs to be cleaned up.” The contaminated water is migrating underground and working its way to the freeway, she said, as the Detroit Free Press reported. Hexavelent chromium is the cancer-causing manufacturing compound that is usually made during industrial processes like plating and is a known carcinogen, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Hexavalent chromium damages the respiratory system, kidneys, liver, skin and eyes, as CNN reported. The chemical was traced back to a pit in the basement of the local business, Electro-Plating Services Inc. whose owner was previously convicted of illegally storing dangerous chemicals in leaky containers, according to the Detroit Free Press. The chemical leaked down into the ground and found its way into a drain that emptied onto the eastbound side of the interstate. “The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) indicated that once the chemical came up thru the drain, it froze into a yellow blob,” police tweeted, as CNN reported. “The plan to dispose of the chemical is to bring in a type of excavator, scoop up the frozen waste, and place it into a safe container.” Cleanup crews were using a sump pump on Sunday to remove the hexavalent chromium from the pit, according The New York Times. “We have cleaned out the sewers and the clean out drains between the facility and 696,” said Greenberg, as CNN reported. “We’re also in the process of cleaning up the basement of the facility.” The EPA teamed up with local authorities to determine that the liquid likely was groundwater contaminated with hexavalent chromium, the Detroit Free Press reported. “We are operating under the presumption that this is groundwater contaminated with chromium from historic plating operations,”

Heavy road salt use a growing problem, scientists say — The Canton Repository – Each year, Americans spread more than 48 billion pounds of salt on roadways to ward off the effects of winter weather. But it comes at a cost: De-icing salt degrades roads and bridges, contaminates drinking water and harms the environment, according to a slate of scientists expressing growing alarm. “The issue of road salt has been out in front of us for decades but has received very little attention until the past five years,” said Rick Relyea, a biological scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute near Albany, New York. “Then we see, my goodness, it is everywhere, and it is a growing problem.”It’s a problem that’s growing exponentially. The country used about 164,000 tons of road salt in 1940, U.S. Geological Survey data shows. It broke one million tons in 1954, 10 million in 1985, and now averages more than 24 million tons a year. While salt helps keep roads clear in winter, it doesn’t just disappear with the snow. Some melts into rivers, lakes and even water supplies. The portion that remains on roadways eats away at pavement and bridges. It does the same to pipes that carry drinking water, causing lead contamination in some places. Too much salt in the environment can kill small organisms and change the sex of frogs.“We have only recently begun to recognize the serious long-term consequences of excessive road salt use,” said Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech corrosion expert who helped uncover the lead drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan. The Northeast is a top contributor. At the top are five New England states that used the most salt per mile of road lanes over the past four years: Rhode Island (44.2 tons), Massachusetts (34.6 tons), New York (28.0 tons), New Hampshire (25.1 tons) and Vermont (23.3 tons). And that’s just the salt we know about. ClearRoads data tracks only state governments; salt used at private businesses and parking lots, on residential driveways and sidewalks, and by some cities isn’t captured. Many experts believe private industry could be using more salt than government, but no one’s tracking that. A Washington State University professor estimates the country spends $5 billion a year on infrastructure damages caused by road salt – and it might not nearly be enough. Due to its chemical properties, road salt can exacerbate the damage roads already suffer each winter when they repeatedly freeze and thaw. That’s because road salt, particularly an alternative variety of magnesium chloride, can slowly leach calcium out of concrete in bridges, as well as roads and sidewalks.

Microplastics Are Raining Down on Cities — Microplastics have been found everywhere in the world, from the depths of the ocean to the pristine mountaintops of the Pyrenees mountains to Arctic snow. Now a team of researchers in the United Kingdom is testing the concentrations of microplastics in cities. Sure enough, the tiny plastic particles are raining down on urban populations, as The Guardian reported. So far, the scientists have tested four cities and found microplastics – pieces of plastic roughly the size of a sesame seed or smaller – in all of their samples. Scientists do not yet know what health effects, if any, are associated with breathing in microplastics, though they do know thatair pollution can damage nearly every organ and affect every cell in the human body, according to a comprehensive global review published earlier this year. “We found a high abundance of microplastics, much higher than what has previously been reported,” said Stephanie Wright, from Kings College London, who led the research, to The Guardian. The concentration of microplastics in London was alarming. The researchers collected microplastics falling onto the roof of a nine-story building in central London. They found a range of 575 to 1,008 pieces of plastic per square meter per day, according to the research published in the journal Environment International, as The Guardian reported. By contrast, when researchers found microplastics in the Pyrenees in southern France, they found roughly 11,400 pieces per square meter in a month, which is about one-third of what was collected in London. “We kind of expected to find plastics there, but we certainly were not prepared for the numbers we found,” said Deonie Allen, one of the lead researchers in the Pyrenees study, to The New York Times. “It was astounding: 11,400 pieces of microplastic per square meter per month, on average.” What Dr. Wright and her team found in London comprised 15 different types of plastics. Most were acrylic fibers, likely from clothes. Only 8 percent of the microplastics were particles like polystyrene and polyethylene, which are ubiquitous in food packaging, as The Guardian reported. Furthermore, the plastics they found were between 0.02mm and 0.5mm. That’s large enough to enter the airways or to get trapped and swallowed in saliva. However, smaller particles that are particularly damaging to the lungs and can enter the bloodstream were too small to be measured by current technology, according toThe Guardian.

TOXMAP, Federal Database Allowing Public to Track U.S. Pollution, Shut Down After 15 Years by Trump Administration TOXMAP, an interactive map that allowed public users to pinpoint sources of pollution, was pulled from the internet after 15 years. Hosted by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the website was beneficial to researchers and advocates. While most of the information from TOXMAP has been dispersed to other websites, some of the information has disappeared. “Several resources in TOXNET [the Toxicology Data Network, of which TOXMAP was a part] came from other organizations, such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and will continue to be available from those sources,” read a statement from the NLM. “Some databases will be retired.” In addition to TOXMAP, information about chemicals, household product safety, risk assessment and other related topics was held at TOXNET. “Part of the decision was prompted by the increasing availability of the underlying data from their original sources,” said NLM in a statement released to Undark. “Many sources such as the EPA, among others, offer several products that provide similar geographic information system functionality.” Some observers believe the disappearance of TOXMAP is connected with President Donald Trump’s rollbacks of environmental policies set forth by the Obama administration.

Trump Administration Removes Federal Database That Tracked Pollution – TOXMAP, an interactive online map that used various sources to track toxic pollution across the U.S., disappeared from the internet earlier this month, alarming environmental advocates, according to The Hill. The 15-year-old interactive map was beneficial to researchers and environmentalists. The National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institute of Health, hosted it. Some of the information has moved to other sources, while some has just disappeared completely, as Newsweek reported. TOXMAP offered detailed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data for clearly labeled toxic release sites and offered extensive health and demographic data, like mortality rates, that users could easily overlay on to the maps. The various capabilities and wealth of data earned TOXMAP a devoted following among researchers, students, activists and other people eager to pinpoint sources of pollution, according to Undark. With little explanation, it was announced in September that the map would be taken down. Then it was removed last week and the former URL showed a message acknowledging its disappearance and ushered visitors to other potential sources of information, as Undark reported. People who used the resource see the hiding of data and removal of information as part of the Trump administration’s pattern of obfuscation and regulatory rollbacks of environmental policies, as Newsweek reported. Furthermore, the alternative of combing through nine other websites takes away the consolidation of data and the user-friendly interface of TOXMAP. “Because this information has gotten so complex, and there’s so much of it, it’s very difficult for someone who’s not really trained in the area to navigate it,” said Chris Sellers, an environmental historian at Stony Brook University and a member of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), which monitors federal environmental data sources and advocates for greater public access, to Undark. “This tool actually cut through all the jargon, all the different interfaces that EPA, for instance, puts up before you get to the actual data that you’re interested in.”

Statistic of the Decade: The Massive Deforestation of the Amazon – This year, I was on the judging panel for the Royal Statistical Society’s International Statistic of the Decade. Much like Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Year” competition, the international statistic is meant to capture the zeitgeist of this decade. The judging panel accepted nominations from the statistical community and the public at large for a statistic that shines a light on the decade’s most pressing issues. On Dec. 23, we announced the winner: the 8.4 million soccer fields of land deforested in the Amazon over the past decade. That’s 24,000 square miles, or about 10.3 million American football fields. This statistic, while giving only a snapshot of the issue, provides insight into the dramatic change to this landscape over the last 10 years. Since 2010, mile upon mile of rainforest has been replaced with a wide range of commercial developments, including cattle ranching, logging and the palm oil industry. This calculation by the committee is based on deforestation monitoring results from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, as well as FIFA’s regulations on soccer pitch dimensions. There are a number of reasons why this deforestation matters – financial, environmental and social. First of all, 20 million to 30 million people live in the Amazon rainforest and depend on it for survival. It’s also the home to thousands of species of plants and animals, many at risk of extinction. Second, one-fifth of the world’s fresh water is in the Amazon Basin, supplying water to the world by releasing water vapor into the atmosphere that can travel thousands of miles. But unprecedented droughts have plagued Brazil this decade, attributed to the deforestation of the Amazon.During the droughts, in Sao Paulo state, some farmers say they lost over one-third of their crops due to the water shortage. The government promised the coffee industry almost $300 million to help with their losses. Finally, the Amazon rainforest is responsible for storing over 180 billion tons of carbon alone. When trees are cleared or burned, that carbon is released back into the atmosphere. Studies show that the social cost of carbon emissions is about $417 per ton.Finally, as a November 2018 study shows, the Amazon could generate over $8 billion each year if just left alone, from sustainable industries including nut farming and rubber, as well as the environmental effects.

Three Pangolin Species Closer to Extinction – The pangolin’s future looks gloomy, according to the latest update by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which assesses the conservation status of species. Of the eight known species of the pangolin, one of the world’s most trafficked mammals, two African species, the while-bellied (Phataginus tricuspis) and the giant ground pangolin (Smutsia gigantea), have been moved from “vulnerable” to “endangered” on the IUCN Red List. One Asian species, the Philippine pangolin (Manis culionensis), has been uplisted from “endangered” to “critically endangered.” No species improved in status in the assessment. Much of the decline in the armor-clad mammals can be attributed to the loss of their habitat and large-scalepoaching for the animals’ scales and meat, experts say. “It is extremely disheartening but unsurprising that three additional pangolin species are now formally classified as endangered and critically endangered,” Audrey Delsink, Africa wildlife director of Humane Society International, said in a statement. Pangolin scales, largely made of keratin just like human fingernails, are sought after in Asian markets, mainly China and Vietnam, where people erroneously believe the scales have medicinal properties, such as promoting menstruation and lactation and in treating rheumatism and arthritis.The shy mammals are also hunted for bushmeat in Africa, although in China, pangolin meat is consumed both as a luxury food item and for its purported curative properties. In 2016, countries voted to list all eight species of pangolin on CITES Appendix I, banning commercial trade in the animals. Yet, widespread trafficking of their body parts continues.

Kentucky horse killings: Police hunt after 20 found shot dead – BBC News — Police in Kentucky are hunting whoever is responsible for killing 20 horses in an “inhumane and cruel” act that created a “battlefield for horses”. The Dumas Rescue group said some of the horses were pregnant mares, others foals including a one-year-old. It is offering a $20,000 (£15,460) reward. The herd of about 35 horses roams over a wide area of eastern Kentucky, making the search for survivors difficult. The horses had been shot with a low-calibre weapon, police said. The bodies have been found spread out across the site, an open-cast mining area, and Dumas Rescue is covering about 4,000 acres (1,620 hectares) a day. Mass death of wild horses in Australia heat What to do with Wyoming’s wild horses Killings were first reported on 16 December, with the latest six dead animals found on Sunday. The culprit could face animal cruelty charges at a minimum, according to Floyd County Sheriff John Hunt. He told WYMT: “This is very inhumane and it’s a very cruel act of somebody who just apparently had nothing else to do.” According to the sheriff, one of the horses still had grass in its mouth when it was shot dead. Mr Hunt said that this was one of the worst cases of animal cruelty he had ever seen. The herd, which Dumas says is largely made up of animals abandoned by owners, is very approachable and the horses are often fed by members of the local community. It is thought they were all killed at the same time. According to the rescue group, the animals appear to have been hunted.

Roasted Australia: Hottest Days on Record for the Continent – Australia is having a December heat wave for the ages, with some of the most widespread and intense heat ever observed on the island continent. The nationally averaged high temperature on Wednesday was an astounding 40.9°C (105.6°F), beating the previous daily record of 40.3°C from January 7, 2013. Even more impressive, Thursday topped the Wednesday reading by a full degree Celsius, coming in at 41.9°C (107.4°F). Thursday’s reading is almost certainly the hottest nationally averaged high not only for Australia but for any continent on Earth at any time of year. All other continents see at least some of their summer heat modulated by the presence of either tropical rainforests or cooler midlatitude/high-latitude regions. On Thursday, Nullarbor in South Australia topped out at 49.9°C (121.8°F). This is the highest temperature recorded anywhere on Earth in any December, and the fourth highest at any location on any date in Australian history. The current heat wave is not expected to topple the nation’s all-time single-location record of 50.7°C (123.3°F) set at Oodnadatta, South Australia, on Jan. 2, 1960. I wouldn’t rule out such a reading entirely, though. Adelaide (pop. 1.3 million) suffered through that city’s hottest December day in 132 years of recordkeeping on Thursday, when the high at the West Terrace site hit 45.3°C (112.3°F). Wildfires fueled by the heat and drought have been plaguing much of southern and eastern Australia in recent weeks. New South Wales was placed under a state of emergency Thursday, the state’s second such declaration in the 2019-20 bushfire season.

In Australia’s drought towns, angry residents rely on charity, not government, for water A few months ago, Russell Wantling pulled over to the side of the road near the southern Queensland town of Stanthorpe to speak to a family he saw carrying buckets of water from the town dam. Again and again, they lugged each bucketload up the dam wall and poured it into a tank strapped to the tray of an old ute. “I just stopped and asked what they were doing,” Wantling says. “He said to me that they had no water, he couldn’t afford to buy water because he’d lost his job. So I went to my wife and said ‘we’ve got to do something, this is terrible’. “They talk about this Day Zero all the time, but it already is Day Zero.” Wantling, a truck driver, now coordinates the handout of about 340,000litres of water a week in Queensland’s granite belt region. He is one of several ordinary people trucking water to desperate and drought-ravaged parts of Queensland and New South Wales, where Day Zero has long come and gone. This is a familiar, hopeful story about the resilience of Australians and their communities, the sort condensed into our folklore at times of natural disaster and crisis. But it is also punctuated by anger and disbelief that the burden of supplying the most basic necessity to thousands of people in inland towns, on rural properties and in Indigenous communities has fallen mostly to community groups and charities. The longer they wait for rain, the more acutely people learn they cannot rely on interventions from local councils or governments. At the water shed run by Granite Belt Water Relief in Stanthorpe, people in old paddock bashers and newer four-wheel-drives queue for a 1,000L allocation of free water every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon. Almost all come from outside town, beyond the reticulated water supply. They all tell slight variations of the same story, one after the other. The tanks are empty. No one is listening. The tanks on Amy Doherty’s property have been dry since March. Until Wantling began his deliveries, she and her family were able to shower only once a week. About two months ago, she became sick and unable to work, Doherty says, as she lines up. “I live with my mother and my two young kids and I said to my Mum, ‘I can’t do this any more. I cannot cope’.“We had to have four horses put to sleep because we had no food, no water and our horses were just suffering. With less showering there were hygiene issues. It was hard. It was even hard to talk about it. But you have to swallow your pride, and that’s even harder.”

Chinese company approved to run water mining operation in drought-stricken Queensland – A Chinese-owned company has been granted approval to run a 96m litre a year commercial water mining operation in severely drought-hit southern Queensland, where locals are on water rations and communities at imminent risk of running dry. Last week the Southern Downs regional council approved a development application for the company, Joyful View Garden Real Estate Development Resort Pty Ltd, to operate a water extraction and distribution facility at Cherrabah, a large property at Elbow Valley near the Queensland-New South Wales border. The following day the council implemented extreme water restrictions for residents at the nearby towns of Warwick and Stanthorpe, limiting residents to 80L a day. Stanthorpe is expected to run out of drinking water within weeks. Neighbours of Cherrabah have told Guardian Australia they have not had a reliable water supply at their properties for more than a year, and have been trucking water in on a regular basis. Some cattle properties have removed all their cattle. “I don’t understand how it is allowed to happen,” one resident says. “If that water drains away from the shallow aquifers, it affects our long-term viability.” Joyful View is ultimately owned by Chinese investors Wenxing and Wenwei Ma. The company had attempted to build a large-scale luxury resort at the remote property but pulled the proposal in 2016 after planning and environmental difficulties, including concern for a local population of spotted-tailed quolls. The water extraction licence for the property was first issued by the Queensland government in 2008 and extended in 2016 to allow Joyful View to pump 96m litres from the aquifer until 2111 – another 92 years. Council documents show the company plans to send the water to a bottling plant on the Gold Coast.

Cattle have stopped breeding, koalas die of thirst: A vet’s hellish diary of climate change – Bulls cannot breed at Inverell. They are becoming infertile from their testicles overheating. Mares are not falling pregnant, and through the heat, piglets and calves are aborting.My work as a veterinarian has changed so much. While I would normally test bulls for fertility, or herds of cattle for pregnancy, I no longer do, because the livestock has been sold. A client’s stud stock in Inverell has reduced from 2000 breeders to zero. I once assisted farmers who have spent their lives developing breeding programs, with historic bloodlines that go back 80 years. These stud farmers are now left with a handful of breeders that they can’t bear to part with, spending thousands keeping them fed, and going broke doing it. Cattle that sold for thousands are now in the sale yards at $70 a head. Those classed as too skinny for sale are costing the farmer $130 to be destroyed.They are all gone and it was all for nothing. The paddocks are bare, the dams dry, the grass crispy and brown. The whole region has been completely destocked and is devoid of life. For 22 years, I have been the vet in this once-thriving town in northern NSW, which, as climate change continues to fuel extreme heat, drought and bushfires, has become hell on Earth.Here, we are seeing extreme weather events like never before. The other day we had about eight centimetres of rain in 20 minutes. These downpours are like rain bombs. They are so ferocious that a farmer lost all of his fences, and all it did was silt up the dam so he had to use a machine to excavate the mud. Most farmers in my district have not a blade of grass remaining on their properties. Topsoil has been blown away by the terrible, strong winds this spring and summer. We have experienced the hottest days that I can remember, and right now I can’t even open any windows because my eyes sting and lungs hurt from bushfire smoke. For days, I have watched as the bushland around us went up like a tinderbox. I just waited for the next day when my clinic would be flooded with evacuated dogs, cats, goats and horses in desperate need of water and food. The impact of the drought on wildlife is devastating to watch, too. Members of the public are bringing us koalas, sugar gliders, possums, galahs, cockatoos and kangaroos on a daily basis. The koalas affect me the most. To see these gorgeous, iconic animals dying from thirst is too hard to bear. We save some, but we lose just as many. The whole town is devastated. My business has halved. But with no horses to breed, no cattle to test and care for, what am I going to do? I have worked day and night to build a future for my family, but who would want to buy our property out here? Who would want to buy a vet clinic in a town where there are no animals to treat because it’s too hot and dry? Where the cattle become infertile from the 40-degree heat. All this on black, baked ground.

Incredible moment thirsty Koala stops South Australian cyclist to drink water news.com.au(video) A desperate koala suffering through the soaring temperatures in South Australia approached a group of cyclists to drink from a water bottle.The koala was spotted in the middle of the road when it approached the cyclists, with the incredible moment was caught on camera.Anna Heusler told 7 News she was riding towards Adelaide with the group of cyclists when they came around a bend and saw the koala on the road.“Naturally, we stopped because we were going to help relocate him off the road,”she told 7 News.“I stopped on my bike and he walked right up to me, quite quickly for a koala, and as I was giving him a drink from all our water bottles, he actually climbed up onto my bike. “None of us have ever seen anything like it.”

‘Everything is Burning’: Australian Inferno Continues, Choking Off Access to Cities Across Country Australia is on fire. The country on Saturday saw delayed flights on the second day of a national state of emergency due to raging brushfires near every major city and choked out smoke conditions. Australian reporter Saffron Howden used a map from the Government of Western Australia to show how the blazes have ringed the entire continent. “My god,” Howden tweeted. The fires in Australia’s southeastern state of New South Wales (NSW) were at the “catastrophic” level on Saturday, according to the BBC. “These fires are likely to continue to spread well past Christmas,” said NSW Rural Fire Services Inspector Ben Shepherd. Photos shared on social media showed hazy skies around the country. “Everything is burning,” said one Twitter user. As Common Dreams reported Thursday, Australia just endured a heat wave that broke records for temperature in consecutive days. “I think this is the single loudest alarm bell I’ve ever heard on global heating,” said Kees van der Leun, a director at the American consultancy firm Navigant. Temperatures dropped on the back of a cooling wind on Saturday, but, as The Guardian reported, the wind brings with it other problems: A southerly change swept through at 5pm, making the fire even more erratic and changing the fire direction. Around this time, NSW authorities began warning of a bushfire-generated thunderstorm that had formed over Currowan and Tianjara fires in the Shoalhaven area, on the NSW south coast. The fire service said this would lead to increasingly dangerous fire conditions. Such storms, known as pyroCB, can produce embers hot enough to spark new fires 30km from the main fire. While his country was on fire, right-wing climate-denying Prime Minister Scott Morrison was on vacation in Hawaii. Morrison returned to Australia on Saturday after two firefighters died fighting one of three huge blazes near Sydney. Morrison’s absence during the crisis pprovoked outcry from constituents. One Twitter user posted a picture showing from above the blazes around Sydney as Morrison was arriving in the city, reportedly after circling for an hour due to runway closures. The map mentioned in the article.

Australian fires bring growing global climate crisis into stark relief – Fires claimed more lives and property across Australia over the weekend, while once again blanketing cities such as Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane in dense clouds of smoke. More than 200 major fires are still burning out-of-control and, with extreme heat and no significant rainfall predicted in much of the country, the situation is expected to worsen over the coming weeks and months. Towns and hamlets in the Adelaide Hills suffered some of the greatest devastation, as fire tore through farms and vineyards. South Australian Premier Steven Marshall reported that at least 86 homes were destroyed, along with hundreds of outbuildings and vehicles. Ron Selth, 69-years-old, was killed while he attempted to defend his home from the flames in the small township of Charleston. Firefighters and residents were injured trying to protect property. In New South Wales (NSW), an extensive area of forest is burning in the mountain ranges, in what are now the largest fires in the state’s history. Since September, some 2.7 million hectares have gone up in flame. The 70,000-strong volunteer Rural Fire Service (RFS) has been stretched to breaking point mobilising the personnel to fight fire fronts that are more than 11,000 kilometres in length. On Saturday, naval helicopters had to be called in to rescue people threatened by fire into the coastal communities of Fisherman’s Paradise and Sassafras to the south of Sydney. On Thursday night, two volunteer firefighters from Sydney were killed and three injured in a vehicle accident while fighting the fires in the nearby town of Buxton. More than 60 fires are burning in south east Queensland. In Victoria, huge fires are raging in forests in Gippsland, to the east of Melbourne. In Western Australia, an out-of-control bushfire north of Perth had burnt more than 11,000 hectares with residents on Saturday being urged to leave while they still could. Nationally, some 1,000 homes have been destroyed so far in the 2019 – 2020 fire season, with the traditionally worst period in January and February still to come. Thousands of unpaid volunteer firefighters have suffered major financial losses due to being repeatedly asked to take time off from their employment. Dozens have been injured. The extensive fires in Australia follow the blazes that have engulfed large areas of California, Siberia, Borneo and the Amazon. In Siberia alone, Greenpeace estimates that some 12 million hectares have been burnt out this year. The fire emergency brings into stark relief the lack of conscious planning and preparation, at both the national and state level, for the impact of climate change. Capitalist governments around the world, to protect corporate profit and the fortunes of the wealthy, have blocked any serious reductions in carbon emissions and left their populations to face the consequences.

Australia fires: The thousands of volunteers fighting the flames – BBC – “We’re doing it because it’s a passion. It’s a brotherhood,” says Daniel Knox. He is one of thousands of Australians who’ve dropped their ordinary lives to battle the nation’s raging fire crisis. For weeks, the 22-year-old landscaper has lived around his phone, springing into action when called upon. He is part of the New South Wales Rural Fire Service (NSW RFS) which calls itself “the world’s largest volunteer firefighting organisation”. Its 70,000 members are extensively trained and, except for a few senior staff, mostly unpaid. En route their truck was hit by a falling tree, which caused it to roll. Three firefighters in the back seat were injured but were able to escape. Mr O’Dwyer and Mr Keaton – both fathers to young children – were killed at the scene. They died five days before Christmas. Since September, close to 3,000 firefighters have been out every day in NSW battling blazes the size of small European countries. Close to 90% of those people on the ground are unpaid volunteers, says the NSW RFS, the government-funded organisation leading the fight. Volunteers make up the majority of the firefighting crews battling Australia’s fires This century-old model is common across Victoria, South Australia, and Western Australia – Australian states which have traditionally had bushfires each summer. In recent years, fires have also flared up in Tasmania and sub-tropical Queensland. In NSW, most of the 2,000 or so brigades are found in country towns and rural centres dotted among eucalyptus bushland. Members are almost always locals, stepping in to save their own communities. Historically, the work has tended to be patchy, which has been a key factor behind the volunteerism. Fires don’t rage all year round, and there have been years when many areas aren’t affected at all. But this year, the situation has changed. Intense blazes typically seen in later summer have flared in spring, forcing authorities to wage full-blown campaigns earlier than ever before.They’re also dealing with hundreds more fires, burning simultaneously in hotter and drier conditions. NSW has been in drought for years, and fires are ripping through the state.

Firefighters in Australia Say Situation ‘Out of Control’ as Prime Minister Denies Request for Emergency Aid –The ring of bushfires raging around Australia is “out of control,” firefighters said Monday night, and the country’s government appears unwilling – or unable – to take action to assist those battling the blazes despite the danger.Volunteer Fire Firefighters Association president Mick Holton, in comments to Australian paper the Age, said that Prime Minister Scott Morrison and New South Wales (NSW) premier Gladys Berejiklian were ignoring the need for equipment and income support from firefighters on the front lines.As the BBC reported, Morrison is standing firm against aiding the firefighters: Public support for the “firies” is at an all-time high. In the swing of the Christmas season, shops and restaurants are donating profits to the NSW RFS. Online, there have been fundraisers to buy masks, food, and other supplies for the crews.However, Australia’s government has so far rejected the calls for compensation.“Now is not the time to go into it. Let’s get through this [bushfire crisis] first,” said Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Monday.“Basically, they [the government and RFS] are saying keep chewing smoke and we will have a look at it after the fire season,” Holton told Age. Making things worse, Holton said, was the fact that NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons appears unwilling to directly ask for assistance.”The fact that they haven’t asked for federal support indicates that they believe they have the situation in hand,” said Holton. “That is definitely not the case.””The situation is quite the opposite,” Holton added. “It is out of control.”The perceived inaction by federal officials in Australia to comprehend the magnitude of the crisis was on display Monday when Morrison refused to consider curbing coal production. As Common Dreams reported, Morrison’s statement was met with incredulity by green groups and advocates, who called the statement shortsighted.

How much closer to their doors must the fire burn? It’s immoral not to connect the dots – Catastrophic conditions were forecast for the first time in Greater Sydney last month – on November 12 to be exact. On Thursday, a little over a month later, while parts of Australia experienced record heatwaves into the 40s celsius, catastrophic conditions were forecast for Greater Sydney yet again, coupled with extreme heat for the entire state. The NSW Premier declared a state of emergency for the next seven days, including Christmas Day. This is the second time a catastrophic bushfire danger rating has been declared over such a densely populated area, covering almost 5 million residents across eastern NSW. In catastrophic conditions, fires cannot safely be fought. Homes are not built to withstand fires in these conditions, and lives can be lost. Already, it is estimated that more than 2.9 million hectares has been burnt in NSW and Queensland, with 2.7 million of that in NSW, where its perimeter runs to more than 19,235 kilometres. Six people have died in bushfires this year, and in NSW alone the latest official tally of homes lost is more than 760. There have also been 296 homes damaged, 52 facilities (such as halls and public or commercial buildings) destroyed, 68 facilities damaged, 1704 outbuildings destroyed and 730 outbuildings damaged. I know how devastated those homeowners feel. I lost a home to bushfire in 1994, at Jannali in NSW. But back then, fires were more manageable than they are today. There is another, hidden consequence of these bushfires. They may be helping supercharge climate change itself. Since August, greenhouse gas emissions from bushfires in Australia equate to half of the nation’s usual annual emissions.Although trees take up carbon when they regrow, it might take decades for the carbon emitted during fires to be fully sequestered, and for some vegetation types that are ill-adapted to fire, much longer.It’s simply immoral not to connect the dots that climate change has contributed to worsening bushfires. Those who are still obstructing action to reduce emissions claim that if Australia cut its emissions today, there’d be no impact on the bushfires. This is nonsense. People understand that the greenhouse gas pollution we emit today helps fuel the fires of tomorrow.Our Prime Minister has a moral obligation to protect the citizens who elected him, and those who didn’t. He should play a constructive role in the ongoing climate negotiations, and so help with that task of emissions reduction. Were he to do so, Australia’s actions could help inspire the world to cut emissions hard and fast.

Australian PM Responds To Greta Thunberg: “We’ll Do What We Think Is Right For Australia” – Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the patron saint of environmentalists, Greta Thunberg, have been duking it out in headlines as far as who is responsible for the raging brushfires near every major city across Australia.Morrison rejected Thunberg’s call for political action as bushfires spread across the country, reported Bloomberg.“We’ll do in Australia what we think is right for Australia.”@ScottMorrisonMP responds to @GretaThunberg. #auspol #AustralianFires pic.twitter.com/4zY68Hsvls – David Marler (@Qldaah) December 23, 2019Morrison said, during a news conference Sunday, it wasn’t the time to “make commentaries on what those outside of Australia think Australia should do” as he responded to Thunberg’s tweet that draws the connection between climate change and the raging inferno across the country.Not even catastrophes like these seem to bring any political action. How is this possible?Because we still fail to make the connection between the climate crisis and increased extreme weather events and nature disasters like the #AustraliaFiresThat’s what has to change.Now. https://t.co/DQcZViKJQz – Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) December 22, 2019 Morrison said he’s not trying to “impress people overseas” and won’t cave to international climate change demands:”I have always acknowledged the connection between these weather events and these broader fire events and the impact globally of climate change. But I’m sure people equally would acknowledge that the direct connection to any single fire event, it’s not a credible suggestion to make that link.” Morrison said bushfires in Australia are nothing new and have been happening for a long time.

NSW’s Emergency Services Minister David Elliott goes on holiday as fire danger ramps up again – After a brief weather reprieve, the bushfire danger across large parts of Australia is about to ramp up again – but a key figure in tackling the blazes has gone on holiday. Less than a week after Prime Minister Scott Morrison apologised for taking his family on a Christmas break to Hawaii as hundreds of fires raged across the nation, NSW’s Emergency Services Minister David Elliott is taking a trip to the UK and France. He told The Daily Telegraph he was considering cancelling his trip, but eventually decided to push ahead with it. “Bushfire-affected communities and firefighters are always at the front of my mind during this difficult time in NSW,” Mr Elliott told the newspaper in a statement. Prisons Minister Anthony Roberts will take over in his absence. The departure comes as the state, along with Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania, prepare for the worst due to an “extreme” heatwave that’s building over the coming days. Sky News Meteorologist Rob Sharpe said the heatwave is currently moving through southern parts of Australia. “Initially, winds are not going to be that strong so we’re going to see a few regions with severe fire danger on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. “It’s not going to be that dangerous, but it really ramps up at the end of heatwave on Monday.” He said that, on Monday, strong winds will “suddenly” pick up and severe heat will hit Victoria, South Australia, NSW and even Tasmania. Temperatures are set to hit the 40s on the mainland and the mid-30s in Tasmania.

Wildfires cause turmoil in CA property insurance market – Kent Michitsch seemed to be running out of traditional options to insure the home he’s lived in for more than 30 years northeast of San Diego as California’s massive property insurance market reels from three consecutive years of destructive wildfires. Michitsch, 57, has received three non-renewal notices in three years, and says he feared getting a fourth one when his homeowners’ policy comes up for renewal the middle of next year if it wasn’t for California lawmakers’ recent intervention in the market. Michitsch says he’s never made a claim on his insurance and never had fire damage. Thousands of homeowners like Michitsch have lost their insurance policies in the last few years as insurers pull out of areas that are at risk of fire damage or stop insuring homes altogether. They’ve been forced to scramble to find coverage from regular insurance providers or to turn as a last resort to a government sanctioned plan that at the moment only provides fire coverage. State Farm, the largest insurer in the state, Allstate and other insurers declined to renew roughly 350,000 policies in areas at high risk for wildfires since 2015 the California Department of Insurance said back in August, and the department has gotten “record numbers” of requests this year from insurers to increase the rates they charge property owners. The data also show 33,000 policies were not renewed by insurers in zip codes affected by the major wildfires. While the insurance industry says the California property insurance market is resilient, state lawmakers and officials have had to scramble to keep the market from grinding to a halt from the unexpected additional risk. The California Legislature passed a law earlier this year giving the Department of Insurance emergency powers to keep policies in effect for those in fire-prone areas. This month California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara put a one-year moratorium on non-renewals, in hopes that lawmakers, insurance companies and other stakeholders can reach a more substantial solution for the roughly 1 million homeowners in zip codes adjacent to previous wildfires.

How power shutoffs are changing California’s way of life — in October. Every gas station, grocery store and restaurant closed due to massive power shutoffs as part of the state’s efforts to avoid a major wildfire. The mayor found himself loaning out his personal pickup truck and RV, which have built-in generators, to the town’s 2,000 residents as they scrambled to save food in their refrigerators, charge their phones and find a way to stay warm. At all levels of government – from state officials to small-town mayors – California leaders are in uncharted territory, and scrambling to adjust their plans and operations to the realities of regular disruption. For now, their only answer to calamitous wildfires is shutting off power to millions of residents in advance, which residents now lament as a man-made disaster. Mike McGuire, the state senator representing the Santa Rosa area devastated by fires in 2017, said California is “the canary in the coal mine” as climate change threatens to upend life across the world. Residents in some of California’s most bucolic settings are stuck figuring it out on their own, rich and poor, urban and rural alike. While Fatula navigated his working-class community with generators in his pickup, NBA star LeBron James was forced to flee his estate near Los Angeles in the middle of the night, “driving around with my family trying to get rooms,” he said in a tweet. In the long-term, the state’s brightest minds have offered plenty of ideas: move power lines underground; microgrids; better forest management; no new homes in areas surrounded by desiccated hillsides. In the meantime, what wildfires and their accompanying blackouts mean is that every level of government in the most populated U.S. state is scrambling to govern with this reality. Changes California leaders envision could take a decade or more to have an impact. After shying away from shutoffs last year before the historic Camp Fire, which killed more than 80 people and virtually decimated the town of Paradise, Pacific Gas & Electric Company moved in the opposite direction this fall. The utility aggressively cut power across vast swaths of Northern California, from the Silicon Valley to the Sierra Nevada.

The Northeast warms ahead of rest of USA: ‘Our winters now are not like our winters before’ – For one scientist, climate change in the Northeast announces itself in the abnormal appearances of warm-water fish – an abundance of mahi-mahi and unprecedented sightings in January of Gulf Stream flounder and juvenile black sea bass in shallow waters off New England.“Nobody had ever seen that before,” said Glen Gawarkiewicz, an oceanographer from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.For another scientist, the phenomenon materializes in ocean temperatures, which have been rising for more than a generation, influencing coastal weather and pushing snowfall farther inland.“Our winters now are not like our winters before,” said Lenny Giuliano, the state meteorologist in Rhode Island. As water temperatures rise in the Atlantic Ocean and its connected gulfs and bays, the warmth may spread inland and generate temperature variations at the county level. The water-to-land effect appears along the Great Lakes, which also are warming, said Mark Wysocki, New York state climatologist and a professor at Cornell University. “There’s a very strong connection,” Wysocki said. Though the Southwest saw the greatest rise in average air temperatures during thepast five decades, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows the Northeast warmed the most over both longer and shorter time spans. Nowhere more so than Rhode Island: The state’s average temperature has increased 3.64 degrees compared with its 20th-century norm, according to NOAA records dating back to 1895. Other states trail closely: New Jersey came in 3.49 degrees warmer; Connecticut, 3.22; Maine, 3.17; Massachusetts, 3.05; and New Hampshire, 2.93.

Record rain, darkness: Seattle braces for floods, mudslides (AP) – Record rainfall and darkness has hit Seattle as a major storm begins to lift across western Washington on the first day of winter, though the region is still at risk for flooding, mudslides and avalanches. Friday became the wettest day in Seattle in the past 10 years, and the most rain recorded for Dec. 20 since record-keeping at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport began in 1945. The National Weather Service said the airport recorded 3.25 inches (8.25 centimeters) of rain Friday, making it also the fifth rainiest day in city history. Seattle also broke a daily rainfall record on Thursday with 2.91 inches (7.39 centimeters) of precipitation, making it the 11th wettest day recorded at the airport. Parts of the soaked Seattle region and western Washington are under a flood watch through Sunday evening. Rivers in King and Snohomish counties are expected to crest and slowly recede Saturday. The weather service warned drivers not to go through flooded areas as that “is the cause of most flood related deaths in Washington.” The low-lying areas of the northern Oregon coast are also at risk for flooding. Astoria saw 3.42 inches (8.69 centimeters) of rain on Friday, breaking a record previously set 113 years ago. There also remains an increased threat for landslides in western Washington with high levels of soil moisture expected through the weekend. Multiple mudslides were reported Friday. Snow is also falling in areas above 3,000 feet (914 meters) in elevation. The weather service issued a back country avalanche warning for the Mount Baker area for Saturday. Friday also broke a record for measured sunlight in Seattle. The University of Washington recorded just 0.37 million Joules of solar radiation, the lowest level of sun energy measured since the university started counting over the past 20 years.

Record high temperatures cast gloom over festive season in Moscow – Russia’s capital has seen record high temperatures in December with snow not predicted until the end of the month. Moscow hit 6.2 degrees Celsius (43.2 degrees Fahrenheit) on – Tuesday, the warmest recorded temperature for that date. The city is often blanketed with snow in December, but unseasonably warm temperatures have cast a gloomy pall over the streets decorated with festive lights for the New Year holiday. The unusually warm weather has prompted public discussion about the climate crisis, a subject that is not often a priority in a country that heavily depends on hydrocarbon exports. In Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annual press conference last week, a journalist asked about what risks climate change poses to the country. Putin acknowledged rising global temperatures, but cast doubt on the human role in climate change. “We know that in the history of the Earth there have been periods of warming and cooling, and this might depend on the global processes in the universe,” he said. “A small tilt of the Earth’s axis and its orbit around the sun can lead to and have already led to very serious climate changes on the Earth, which had dramatic consequences — good or bad, they were still dramatic.” “And it is happening again now. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to work out exactly how humankind affects climate change. But we cannot stay idle either, I agree with my colleagues. We should make our best efforts to prevent dramatic changes in the climate,” he added.

Warm ‘Blob’ of Hot Water Bigger Than Texas Heading Towards South America – A warm “blob” of hot water reported to have formed in the Pacific Ocean near New Zealand is making its way towards South America.An image from Climate Reanalyzer (a website produced by the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine) made headlines this week after its weather maps showed a patch of unusually warm water in the South Pacific on Monday.According to a report in The Guardian, the patch is around one million square kilometres and approximately 1.5 times the size of Texas.The conditions were brought on by a combination sunny skies, high pressures and gentle winds, James Renwick, a professor in physical geography and a weather and climate researcher at the Victoria University of Wellington, told the New Zealand Herald.“Sea temperatures don’t actually vary too much and a degree [Celsius], plus or minus, is quite a big deal and this area is probably four degrees or more than that above average and that’s pretty huge,” said Renwick.The center could be more than 6 degrees Celsius hotter than average – making it “one of the warmest spots on the planet at the moment.” At the time of writing, Climate Reanalyzer shows the warm patch in the Pacific part way between New Zealand and southern Chile.

Ocean Acidification Could Eat Away at Sharks’ Teeth and Scales – As carbon dioxide levels in the oceans increase, upping the acidity of the water, shark teeth and scales may begin to corrode, compromising their ability to swim, hunt and feed, according to research published today in Scientific Reports. Ultimately, sharks could be displaced as apex predators, disrupting entire ocean food webs, says the study’s senior author Lutz Auerswald, a fisheries biologist at Stellenbosch University in South Africa and the nation’s Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. “Some of the bigger species, like great white sharks, are also already highly endangered, so this might wipe them out.” The researchers captured puff adder shy sharks in a harbor in Cape Town, South Africa, and transported them to a government research aquarium, where the fish acclimated for four months. They divided 13 of the sharks into control and experimental groups. Control animals stayed in an aquarium with a mildly basic pH of 8.1, matching that of the ocean, while the researchers gradually dropped the pH of the experimental animals’ water to 7.3, the level that ocean water is predicted to hit by 2300 if carbon dioxide emissions continue. (In some areas, including the waters off South Africa and California, the pH can already drop to 7.3 or lower, depending on prevailing currents and winds.) After two months, an electron-microscope analysis revealed that the concentrations of calcium and phosphate in the sharks’ denticles were significantly reduced. About 25 percent of the experimental group’s scales were damaged, compared with only 9 percent in the control group. “If dissolution is already visible [after just two months], one can only speculate how the sharks would look after a year or more,” says Fredrik Jutfelt, a biologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, who was not involved in the latest research but co-authored the only other study of shark scales in acidic conditions. “Increased dissolution of denticles could have serious consequences for sharks for many reasons.”

Ocean floor mining: What could possibly go wrong? — The world’s nations may conclude a treaty governing undersea mining through the auspices of the United Nations as early as next year. Once that is concluded, large scale mining of ocean bottoms is expected to begin.One method – already in use in coastal waters controlled by individual countries – will be to suck up nodules of ore lying on the seabed with huge vacuums and filter out the sediment that comes with it. This method will move quickly to the deep ocean once the treaty is approved resulting in huge, dense clouds of particles suspended underwater for possibly hundreds of miles from underwater mining sites. Scientists are worried that both the vacuuming and the plumes will destroy entire ecosystems about which we know little. I am reminded of the hydraulic mining employed in California in the late 19th century to recover gold from the mountains there. What looks like natural erosion today in those mountains is quite often the result of high-pressure washing of mountainsides with water to unearth specks of gold hidden in the soil.Geologists estimate that this type of mining sent 13 billion cubic yards of the Sierra Nevadas hurtling down the mountains and into California’s rivers. The river bottoms filled, rose and dumped their debris on adjacent land covering thousand of acres of farmland with the detritus from mining. When the water reached the ocean underneath San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge, it was still brown with silt.Deep ocean mining will probably not affect shorelines because the mining will take place too far from land. But the affects are likely to be profound nonetheless. It turns that:About a third of the carbon dioxide generated on land is absorbed by underwater organisms, including one species that was just discovered in the CCZ in 2018. [The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, located between Hawaii and Mexico, is 1.7 million square miles of prime underwater real estate for mining that is also teaming with life.] The researchers who found that bacterium have no idea how it removes carbon from the environment, but their findings show that it may account for up to 10 percent of the volume that is sequestered by oceans every year. I have asked in a previous piece: “Which species are we sure we can survive without?” This little bacterium may be one of them. But, as it turns out, there are an untold number of species we know nothing about because no one has had the resources or equipment to go deep into the ocean to make a thorough-going catalog of living organisms there. Even so, we stand of the edge of eliminating many of them without even understanding whether we might need them to survive.

Carbon dioxide in homes, offices, and classrooms could cut our capacity for complex, strategic thinking by 50% within 80 years, scientists warn – The world’s carbon-dioxide problem doesn’t just affect the atmosphere – the gas is starting to fill our homes, schools, and offices, too.Indoor levels of the gas are projected to climb so high, in fact, that they could cut people’s ability to do complex cognitive tasks in half by the end of the century.That prediction comes from three scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Pennsylvania, who presented their findings last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The study is still under peer review but available online in the repository Earth ArXiv.The findings show that, if global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions continue to rise on their current trajectory, the concentration of CO2 in the air could more than double by 2100. Based on measurements of how humans function in spaces with that much CO2, the scientists warn, we could find ourselves scoring 50% lower on measures of complex thought by the end of the century.That includes the ability to plan strategies, respond to a crisis, make decisions, and use new information to achieve a goal. Americans spend about 90% of their lives indoors, where carbon-dioxide levels can build up quickly as we inhale oxygen and exhale CO2. The results showed that as CO2 levels increased, participants consistently struggled with strategy, information use, and crisis response. That backed up the findings of a similar study, which put 22 people in an office-like setting with different levels of carbon dioxide in the air and evaluated their performance on a set of tasks. As CO2 levels rose, participants showed significant decreases in decision-making ability. Similar results have been found in schools. A 2015 study found that, across 140 fifth-grade classrooms in the southwestern US, poor ventilation and high CO2 levels were strongly correlated with lower math scores for students. An earlier study of 434 classrooms in Washington and Idaho found a similar relationship between CO2 levels and rates of student absence.

Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbon Keeping global warming below 1.5 °C to avoid dangerous climate change1 requires the removal of vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as well as drastic cuts in emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that around 730 billion tonnes of CO2 (730 petagrams of CO2, or 199 petagrams of carbon, Pg C) must be taken out of the atmosphere by the end of this century2. That is equivalent to all the CO2 emitted by the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and China since the Industrial Revolution. No one knows how to capture so much CO2. Forests must play a part. Locking up carbon in ecosystems is proven, safe and often affordable3. Increasing tree cover has other benefits, from protecting biodiversity to managing water and creating jobs. The IPCC suggests that boosting the total area of the world’s forests, woodlands and woody savannahs could store around one-quarter of the atmospheric carbon necessary to limit global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial 2. In the near term, this means adding up to 24 million hectares (Mha) of forest every year from now until 2030. Policymakers are sowing the seeds. For example, in 2011, the German government and the International Union for Conservation of Nature launched the Bonn Challenge, which aims to restore 350 Mha of forest by 2030. Under this initiative and others, 43 countries across the tropics and subtropics where trees grow quickly, including Brazil, India and China, have committed nearly 300 Mha of degraded land (see Supplementary Information, Table S1). That’s encouraging. But will this policy work? Here we show that, under current plans, it will not. A closer look at countries’ reports reveals that almost half of the pledged area is set to become plantations of commercial trees (see Table S1). Although these can support local economies, plantations are much poorer at storing carbon than are natural forests, which develop with little or no disturbance from humans. The regular harvesting and clearing of plantations releases stored CO2 back into the atmosphere every 10 – 20 years. By contrast, natural forests continue to sequester carbon for many decades4. To stem global warming, deforestation must stop. And restoration programmes worldwide should return all degraded lands to natural forests – and protect them.

Warming toll: 1 degree hotter, trillions of tons of ice gone – Since leaders first started talking about tackling the problem of climate change, the world has spewed more heat-trapping gases, gotten hotter and suffered hundreds of extreme weather disasters. Fires have burned, ice has melted and seas have grown. The first United Nations diplomatic conference to tackle climate change was in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Here’s what’s happened to Earth since:

• – The carbon dioxide level in the air has jumped from about 358 parts per million to nearly 412, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That’s a 15% rise in 27 years.
• – Emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from fossil fuel and industry jumped from 6.06 billion metric tons of carbon in 1992 to 9.87 billion metric tons in 2017, according to the Global Carbon Project. That’s a 63% increase in 25 years.
• – The global average temperature rose a tad more than a degree Fahrenheit (0.57 degrees Celsius) in 27 years, according to NOAA.
• – Since Jan. 1, 1993, there have been 212 weather disasters that cost the United States at least $1 billion each, when adjusted for inflation. In total, they cost $1.45 trillion and killed more than 10,000 people. That’s an average of 7.8 such disasters per year since 1993, compared with 3.2 per year from 1980 to 1992, according to NOAA.
• – The U.S. Climate Extremes Index has nearly doubled from 1992 to 2018, according to NOAA. The index takes into account far-from-normal temperatures, drought and overall dry spells, abnormal downpours.
• – Nine of the 10 costliest hurricanes to hit the United States when adjusted for inflation have struck since late 1992. The other one, Andrew at No. 6, hit in August 1992, according to NOAA.
• – The number of acres burned by wildfires in the United States has more than doubled from a five-year average of 3.3 million acres in 1992 to 7.6 million acres in 2018.
• – The annual average extent of Arctic sea ice has shrunk from 4.7 million square miles (12.1 million square kilometers) in 1992 to 3.9 million square miles (10.1 million square kilometers) in 2019, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. That’s a 17% decrease.
• – The Greenland ice sheet lost 5.2 trillion tons (4.7 trillion metric tons) of ice from 1993 to 2018, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
• – The Antarctic ice sheet lost 3 trillion tons (2.7 trillion metric tons) of ice from 1992 to 2017, according to a study in the journal Nature.
• – The global sea level has risen on average 2.9 millimeters a year since 1992. That’s a total of 78.3 millimeters, or 3.1 inches, according to NOAA.

Ice cube meme misrepresents physics of sea level rise to claim melting ice has no effect — CLAIM: “A little science lesson for the #idiots at the global warming conference. Ice berg melts, ocean level remains the same.” This meme, which has spread widely on Facebook, implies that the science of human-caused global sea level rise is based on the faulty assumption that floating ice raises sea level as it melts. However, a critical step is missing in this set of “before-and-after” photos: the water level before the ice cubes were placed in the measuring cup. The ice on planet Earth – part of what is termed the “cryosphere“ – includes sea ice as well as glacial land ice. Sea ice is frozen seawater floating at the surface, not unlike the ice that covers a lake or river in colder winter climates. As such, the freezing and melting of sea ice does not have a significant effect on sea level, though the loss of polar sea ice does have profound impacts on local ecosystems and the Earth’s climate system. But on land, glaciers high in mountains around the world or making up part of the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, do raise sea level when they melt and flow into the ocean. Some glaciers end on land, with meltwater flowing down rivers to reach the ocean. Other glaciers slide into the ocean directly, calving off large blocks called “icebergs” that drift away as they melt. The melting of an iceberg does not raise sea level significantly, because it is already displacing that volume as it floats. (There is, however, a small additional contribution from the dilution of salty seawater with fresh melt from the iceberg. This adds 2-3% to the volume of displaced seawater.1) But as the land-based portions of glaciers shrink, more and more icebergs and meltwater are added to the ocean, raising sea level. Greenland, for example, lost around 3,800 billion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2018, while Antarctica lost about 2,700 billion tonnes between 1992 and 2017, together raising global sea level by about 18 millimeters over that timespan2,3. There is also one more process that is a primary contributor to sea level rise: thermal expansion. Like other fluids, seawater expands as its temperature increases. This means that as the oceans warm, their volume expands enough to raise sea level measurably.

Greenland ice loss is at ‘worse-case scenario’ levels, study finds – Greenland is losing ice mass seven times faster than in the 1990s, a pace that matches the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s high-end warming scenario – in which 400 million people would be exposed to coastal flooding by 2100, 40 million more than in the mid-range prediction. The alarming update resulted from the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise, a project involving nearly 100 polar scientists from 50 international institutions, among them two from the University of California, Irvine. IMBIE researchers combined 26 separate surveys to compute changes in the mass of Greenland’s ice sheet between 1992 and 2018. Altogether, data from 11 different satellite missions were used, including measurements of the ice sheet’s changing volume, flow and gravity. The findings, published recently in Nature, show that Greenland has lost 3.8 trillion tons of ice since 1992 – enough to raise global sea levels by 10.6 millimeters (almost half an inch). The rate of ice loss has risen from an average of 33 billion tons per year in the 1990s to 254 billion tons per year in the last decade – a sevenfold increase within three decades. “There is a rather universal agreement among the independent techniques used in this study and the international group of researchers about the mass loss in Greenland: half from surface melt, half from faster glacier flow,” said IMBIE team member Eric Rignot, chair, Donald Bren Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Earth system science at UCI. “The more remarkable result from this study is that Greenland is melting along the lines of the highest rate of warming examined by climate models. In other words, we’re in the worst-case scenario.”

When will the Netherlands disappear? – The local phonebook in the Dutch area of Noordwaard is a record of a community that no longer exists: Lists of numbers for homes that have been demolished, leaving just square patches in the grass where their foundations stood.Once a thriving farming area, Noordwaard is now an expanse of reedy marshlands in the southwest Netherlands, deliberately designed to flood in order to keep nearby Dutch cities dry. “Several years ago, when you came to that polder, big nice farms were there, acres with potatoes and onions,” said Stan Fleerakkers, a dairy farmer who lives nearby. “Now when you drive there, there’s nothing left of it.”The Noordwaard polder was one of 39 such areas selected for the Dutch government’s “Room for the River” program, in which land was given back to the water. It’s a modern reversal of the centuries-old practice of land reclamation by the famously low-lying country.It’s also a snapshot of the future the country faces: With unprecedented sea level rise forecast as a result of climate change, the Dutch government is racing against the clock to figure out how to keep one of the world’s richest countries from disappearing into the North Sea. Sea rise forecasts range from levels that are manageable as long as the increase is gradual, to doomsday scenarios that would outpace authorities’ ability to respond. If emissions continue on current trends, the IPCC predicts 84 centimeters of sea rise by 2100, and as much as 5.4 meters by 2300. Quietly, experts are beginning to model out potential futures on behalf of the government. In more optimistic scenarios, the feted Dutch dikes, storm barriers, pumps, and adaptations can cope, but at a cost – and even then only up to a point. “On the other end of the spectrum is controlled abandonment, which isn’t nice, because we somehow need to lead 10 million people somewhere,” said Maarten Kleinhans, professor of geosciences and physical geography at Utrecht University. “And as soon as this gets known, as soon as the shit hits the fan, there won’t be any investments anymore and local economies will collapse.”

Infographic Of The Day: Mapping A Changing Arctic – Today’s infographic shows the location of major oil and gas fields in the Arctic and the possible new trade routes through this frontier. [click here to enlarge infographic]

Earth’s magnetic north pole is skittering wildly across the Arctic. By 2040, our compasses ‘will point eastward of true North,’ an expert says. – Earth’s magnetic north pole has been leading scientists on something of a wild goose chase.Over the last 40 years, the spot toward which all our compasses point has moved by an average of about 30 miles per year. In September, magnetic north aligned briefly with geographic north (where all the lines of longitude converge at the North Pole) as it passed over the Prime Meridian. But then it kept moving, skittering from its previous location in Nunavut, Canada towards Siberia. “Magnetic north has spent the last 350 years wandering around the same part of Canada,” Ciaran Beggan, a scientist from the British Geological Survey (BGS), told Business Insider. “But since the 1980s, the rate it was moving jumped from 10 kilometers [6.2 miles] per year to 50 kilometers [31 miles].”Beggan is part of a group of scientists who track the errant pole from year to year. Their work informs the World Magnetic Model (WMM), a map of the planet’s magnetic field. According to the most recent update of the WMM, magnetic north is still zooming along, though its speed has decreased a bit, to 24.8 miles per year. “By 2040, all compasses will probably point eastward of true north,” Beggan said, adding that magnetic north’s march toward northern Russia is far from over.

In Historic Ruling, Dutch Supreme Court Says Government Must Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions By 25% – In a move that has “put the rest of the world on notice,” the Dutch Supreme Court has upheld a landmark climate change ruling that requires the Dutch government to accelerate cuts of carbon emissions. It was called an “immense victory for climate justice,” according to AP. The Supreme Court upheld lower court rulings that the severity of the climate change crisis demanded greenhouse gas reductions of at least 25% by 2020, according to the Guardian. This is higher than the 17% drop in emissions that was planned by Mark Rutte’s liberal administration. The ruling was greeted with cheers in the courtroom an will act as a tailwind for similar cases worldwide. Similar cases are being planned in places like Norway, New Zealand, Uganda and the UK. Marjan Minnesma of the Dutch Urgenda Foundation said: “I am extremely happy that the highest court in the Netherlands has confirmed that climate change is a real, severe problem and that government should do what they themselves have declared for more than 10 years is necessary, namely between 25% and 40% reduction of CO2.”Jesse Klaver, the leader of the Dutch Greens, said of the original ruling that it was “historic news” and said “Governments can no longer make promises they don’t fulfil. Countries have an obligation to protect their citizens against climate change. That makes this trial relevant for all other countries.” To comply with the ruling, one new coal plan would have to be shut down. The state had argued that the judges were “sidelining democracy” by trying to force the policy change. But Judge Tan de Sonnaville was unconvinced, ruling: “Climate change is a grave danger. Any postponement of emissions reductions exacerbates the risks of climate change. The Dutch government cannot hide behind other countries’ emissions. It has an independent duty to reduce emissions from its own territory.”

“Where Should I Move To Be Safe from Climate Change?’ – No place on Earth is immune from the consequences of climate change, but some will fare better than others. So where should you live? Start by taking a second look at the place where you live now. I’m assuming that all of you reside in the United States, so let’s put things into perspective. Compared to other regions of the world, many parts of the U.S. are well-positioned to cope with the consequences of climate change, in part because of this country’s vast farmland, technological prowess, relative stability, and riches – though keep in mind that wealth inequality is vast and growing.What’s more, moving to a new place strips you from the web of social connections in your community. As journalist Madeline Ostrander has observed, such ties help people cope during emergencies: “Sense of place, community, and rootedness aren’t just poetic ideas. They are survival mechanisms,” she has written. So before you pack your bags, first make sure you understand the expected consequences of climate change where you live now. Do those risks outweigh the cost of leaving behind friends, neighbors, family, and professional contacts? U.S.-based readers will find these resources useful:

• A brief overview of how climate change is expected to affect each U.S. region
• An interactive tool that will enable you to look up how many hot days your city or a city near you could experience during future summers
• An interactive map that shows you what your city’s climate is likely to feel like in 60 years by comparing it to the present-day climate of another city
• Maps that show where wildfires have burned recently and which places are most at risk
• An article on how climate change could affect air quality
• An interactive tool that shows how sea-level rise could affect coastal areas
• A map that shows how precipitation in your region is expected to change in the future
• You can also explore projected changes in precipitation and temperature by ZIP code using this interactive tool.

German Green Party Urges Allowing 140 Million Climate Refugees To Migrate To West – The Green Party in Germany is urging that up to 140 million “climate refugees” should be allowed to migrate to the west and given citizenship. Political leaders like Claudia Roth are claiming that island states in the Pacific could “completely disappear” and that entire population groups should be allowed to re-locate to the west as a result.“Citizenship in the receiving country can be an option,” for people existentially threatened by global warming, said RothIn their proposal, the party cites the World Bank’s estimate that there could be as many as 140 million “climate refugees” flooding into the west from Africa, South Asia, and South America by the year 2050.Other parties in Germany expressed their opposition, noting that creating the idea of “climate refugees” would increase migratory pressure worldwide. Germany should “not function as Noah’s ark for the whole world,” remarked FDP general secretary Linda Teuteberg.The proposal is not likely to sit well with German voters, many of whom have expressed their opposition to mass immigration by voting in large numbers for the right-wing AfD party.As we previously highlighted, the former director of Germany’s foreign intelligence service has accused Angela Merkel of creating a “security crisis” in Germany as a result of her open border refugee policy. According to the German government’s own statistics, violent crime in Germany rose by 10 per cent between 2015 and 2016, when the country began accepting large numbers of migrants, many of them young men. More than 90 per cent of the rise was attributable to young male “refugees.” “Young male refugees in Germany got the blame…. for most of a two-year increase in violent crime,” reported Reuters. Germany also suffered a mass molestation of women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015, attacks almost exclusively carried out by migrant men. Given the establishment’s increasingly desperate effort to push the “climate emergency,” primarily by using Greta Thunberg as a poster child, look out for global warming hysteria to be the next excuse as to why the west needs to absorb tens of millions more migrants.

Our pathetically slow shift to clean energy, in five charts – MIT Technology Review By most measures that matter, clean energy had a stellar decade.The cost of large wind and solar farms dropped by 70% and nearly 90%, respectively. Meanwhile, renewable-power plants around the world are producing four times more electricity than they did 10 years ago. Similarly, electric vehicles were barely a blip at the outset of the 2010s. But automakers were on track to sell 1.8 million EVs this year, as range increased, prices fell, and companies introduced a variety of models. But the swift growth in these small sectors still hasn’t added up to major changes in the massive global energy system, or reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. So far, cleaner technologies have mostly met rising energy demands, not cut deeply into existing fossil-fuel infrastructure, as the charts that follow make clear.That’s a problem. Cutting emissions rapidly enough to combat the increasing threats of climate change will require complete overhauls of our power plants, factories, and vehicle fleets, all within a few decades. Global electricity generation from renewables, primarily wind and solar, soared from about 550 terawatt-hours in 2008 to nearly 2,500 in 2018, according to the 2019 BP Statistical Review of World Energy. But here’s what that growth looks like in the context of the total power sector. Renewables are the thin green slice on top, rising but dwarfed by other sources. The same general trends are true in the case of electric vehicles, except that they represent an even a smaller subset of the global market. Sales are booming in major markets around the world, at least relative to the low starting point earlier in the decade. But they’ve barely put a dent in total worldwide auto sales, which topped 80 million last year, as this BloombergNEF data highlights: If we stick to the average rate of clean energy additions during the last five years, it would take about 360 years to build a system of the size needed, Breakthrough’s Seaver Wang found. If we did it at the fastest rate in the last five years, it’d still take nearly 260 years.

Free Returns Come With an Environmental Cost – Every single day this December, an estimated 1 million return packages were picked up through UPS alone, and online shoppers are expected to send back even more purchases this holiday season. Each returned package – regardless of which carrier picks it up – leaves a trail of emissions from the various trains, planes, and giant trucks that carry it back to the seller. That pollution contributes to climate change and worsens air quality. Many of the discarded items head to a landfill. The environmental problem is only getting worse as e-commerce grows and free returns become the expected norm for shopping online. Amazon, which has driven the new shopping trends, just expanded its free return policy and is also delivering more of its own packages than ever. “People need to be aware that there are environmental consequences of sending back their returns. You know, they don’t just go into thin air and disappear,” About half of the “uglies” that American consumers return go back on sale again, according to research by Optoro, a company that helps retailers like Ikea streamline their returns processes. Retailers might send things back to the manufacturer that they can’t put up for sale again, or they might try to unload it to other companies who sell it at deep discounts. Wherever the unwanted purchase goes, taking it there means more trucks pumping out more planet-warming carbon emissions and other harmful pollutants. Hauling around returned inventory in the US creates over 15 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, Optoro found. That’s more than what 3 million cars might put out in one year. Then there’s the trash. Five billion pounds of returned goods end up in US landfills each year. Even if something was in good condition when the buyer put it in the mailbox, shipping it back can damage the item. Sometimes retailers realize that throwing out a returned item is the most cost-effective way to deal with the thing, instead of paying for it to be cleaned, repaired, and returned to the shelves. “If you’re buying a T-shirt or something like that and it only costs a few dollars, you can understand that the company just cannot afford to do anything but throw that onto the landfill,” Cullinane says. Landfills are filling up with packaging waste from e-commerce, too.

Opinion: Your electric car and vegetarian diet are pointless virtue-signalling in fighting climate change – Switch to energy-efficient light bulbs, wash your clothes in cold water, eat less meat, recycle more, and buy an electric car: We are being bombarded with instructions from climate campaigners, environmentalists and the media about the everyday steps we all must take to tackle climate change.Unfortunately, these appeals trivialize the challenge of global warming, and divert our attention from the huge technological and policy changes that are needed to combat it.For example, the British nature-documentary presenter and environmental campaigner David Attenborough was once asked what he as an individual would do to fight climate change. He promised to unplug his phone charger when it wasn’t in use. Attenborough’s heart is no doubt in the right place. But even if he consistently unplugs his charger for a year, the resulting reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions will be equivalent to less than one-half of one-thousandth of the average person’s annual CO2 emissions in the United Kingdom. Moreover, charging accounts forless than 1% of a phone’s energy needs; the other 99% is required to manufacture the handset and operate data centers and cell towers. Almost everywhere, these processes are heavily reliant on fossil fuels. Attenborough is far from alone in believing that small gestures can have a meaningful impact on the climate. In fact, even much larger-sounding commitments deliver only limited reductions in CO2 emissions. For example, environmental activists emphasize the need to give up eating meat and driving fossil-fuel-powered cars. But, although I am a vegetarian and don’t own a car, I believe we need to be honest about what such choices can achieve.

Bloomberg Recommends Virtue Signaling Elites Atone For Private Jet Use With Carbon Credits – Are you a rich, virtue-signaling hypocrite experiencing ‘eco-guilt’ for bouncing all over world in a private jet while condemning others for their vastly smaller carbon footprint? Fear not, Bloomberg News has you covered. To atone for your carbon sins – particularly if you just can’t bring yourself to fly commercial (private jets emit as much as 20x more carbon dioxide per passenger) – simply snap up some carbon credits! In addition to convincing yourself you’re not a hypocrite, you’ll be prepared for awkward interview questions in Aspen after igniting 400 gallons of jet fuel to shuttle your entourage to next year’s film festival. Beware of scams, however, as only Carbon credits which truly benefit the planet should only be purchased from ‘well-established NGOs.’ If you have the money, the easiest way is to pay for carbon credits. To make sure you’re investing in a project that will truly benefit the planet, look for credits from groups that well-established nongovernmental organizations support. Gold Standard, which NGOs including the WWF created, has issued more than 100 million carbon credits from about 700 projects worldwide. For example, you can offset a ton of CO2 by donating $18 to a reforestation effort in East Timor or by giving $15 to a program that provides fuel-efficient stoves for women in North Darfur. – Bloomberg More Q&A for the curious (Via Bloomberg):

• How do I know how much I need to offset? It depends on factors such as the amount of fuel burned and the altitude reached in flight. “People are put off by the fact they can go to different calculators and get different estimates of what that footprint of their flight would be,” Leugers says. “The reality is there are different levels of calibration.” One “finely calibrated” online calculator for commercial flights is from German nonprofit Atmosfair, she says. The unique details involved with a personal jet trip mean you’ll probably need to call in your own expert.
• Can I use biofuel for my jet? If you can find it. The 15 million liters (almost 4 million gallons) of aviation biofuel produced in 2018 accounted for less than 0.1% of total aviation fuel consumption, says the International Energy Agency. The IEA noted on its website in March that only five airports have regular biofuel distribution – Bergen, Norway; Brisbane, Australia; Los Angeles; Oslo; and Stockholm. Biofuels are also costlier. The aviation industry says this might eventually be resolved with ramped-up production of biofuels from cheap and plentiful feedstocks such as agricultural waste.

Trump is rolling back over 80 environmental regulations. Here are 5 you might have missed in 2019 – President Donald Trump has taken historically unprecedented action to roll back a slew of environmental regulations that protect air, water, land and public health from climate change and fossil fuel pollution. The administration has targeted about 85 environmental rules, according to Harvard Law School’s rollback tracker. Existing environment regulations are meant to curb greenhouse gas emissions, protect land and animals from oil and gas drilling and development, as well as limit pollution and toxic waste runoff into the country’s water. The administration views many of them as onerous to fossil fuel companies and other major industries. Oil price calls for 2020 aren’t looking great for crude-producing countries. However, the consequences of eliminating these regulations include more premature deaths from pollutants and higher levels of climate change-inducing greenhouse gas emissions, according to research from the NYU Law School. Here are five major environmental rollback stories of 2019 that highlight the administration’s efforts to loosen restrictions on methane emissions, power plants and automobile tailpipes, as well protections for endangered animals and clean water in the U.S.

• 1. Regulations on methane leaks to be rolled back. The Trump administration in August announced plans to significantly weaken regulation on climate-changing methane emissions. If adopted, the government would no longer have to require oil and gas companies to implement technology to monitor and fix methane leaks from facilities and pipelines. Methane is dangerous because large amounts of it is escaping from oil and gas sites across the country and accelerating global warming. Methane levels have soared since 2007, with natural gas production as a primary suspect.
• 2. Repealing the Obama-era clean water rule. The EPA in September repealed a major Obama-era clean water regulation that curbed the amount of pollution and chemicals in the country’s rivers, lakes, streams and wetlands. The repeal allows polluters to discharge toxic substances into waterways without a permit, which could significantly harm the country’s sources of safe drinking water and habitats for wildlife. The Obama-era rule had aimed to protect 60% of the country’s water bodies from contamination and keep
• 3. Weakening the Endangered Species Act – The Trump administration said in August it would change the rules for the Endangered Species Act, making it harder to protect wildlife from threats of human development and global warming. The new rules make it easier to take out protections for threatened animals and plants and allow federal agencies to conduct economic assessments when deciding whether to protect a species from things like construction projects in a critical habitat. The rules also remove tools used by scientists to predict future harm to species from climate change.
• 4. Weakening climate plan to help coal plants stay open – The Trump administration in June implemented a rule that will keep coal-powered plants open longer, replacing an Obama-era climate effort to reduce planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions and continuing the administration’s efforts to ease regulatory burdens for the coal industry.
• 5. Loosening Obama-era rules restricting auto pollution — The White House this year also prepared to eliminate an Obama-era regulation in place to reduce automobile emissions that contribute to global warming. The administration argues that the rollback is necessary for economic and safety reasons, though environmentalists say consumers would spend billions more in fuel costs and accelerate climate change. Four of the world’s largest automakers responded in July by striking a deal with California to reduce vehicle emissions. Later in September, the administration barred California from setting its own emissions standards, which officials said would give people access to cheaper and safer vehicles. California and 22 other states sued to challenge the administration’s decision, setting up a legal fight that could reach the Supreme Court.

Trump rails against windmills: ‘I never understood wind’ – President Trump lashed out again at wind farms on Saturday, claiming that the production of wind turbines causes a large carbon footprint. During a speech to the conservative student group Turning Point USA, Trump told attendees that he “never understood” the allure of wind power plants, according to a report from Mediaite. “I never understood wind,” Trump said, according to Mediaite. “I know windmills very much, I have studied it better than anybody. I know it is very expensive. They are made in China and Germany mostly, very few made here, almost none, but they are manufactured, tremendous – if you are into this – tremendous fumes and gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right?” “So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint, fumes are spewing into the air, right spewing, whether it is China or Germany, is going into the air,” the president added. Critics of wind power plants frequently point to the carbon emissions from concrete and other manufacturers involved in the production of wind power farms as a reason against further construction of wind farms. However, the American Wind Energy Association found that wind farms around the world generated enough energy to avoid 200 million tons of carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels last year and estimates that most wind power plants repay their own carbon footprints within six months of operation. Trump also claimed during his speech that wind power plants are responsible for killing birds, including bald eagles. “A windmill will kill many bald eagles,” he said, according to Mediate. “After a certain number, they make you turn the windmill off, that is true. By the way, they make you turn it off. And yet, if you killed one, they put you in jail. That is OK. But why is it OK for windmills to destroy the bird population?”

Trump Makes More Bizarre Claims About Wind Power – President Donald Trump doesn’t like wind power, and he wants everyone to know it. He fought and lost a legal battle to prevent a wind farm from going up near his golf course in Scotland and, in April, he claimed wind turbines caused cancer. Then, on Saturday, he lifted his lance to tilt at windmills yet again during a speech at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Florida, CNN reported. His remarks came as he attacked the Green New Deal, according to The Independent, a plan championed by progressive Democrats to transition the U.S. economy from fossil fuels to renewable energy while creating jobs and fighting inequality.”We’ll have an economy based on wind,” he said, according to a video shared by The Guardian. “I never understood wind. I know windmills very much, I have studied it better than anybody.” ‘I never understood wind’: Trump goes on bizarre tirade against windmills – YouTube He then went on to charge windmills with various defects. He said they were expensive and were made mostly in China and Germany. He also argued they were heavily polluting, according to The Guardian: “But they’re manufactured tremendous if you’re into this, tremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. “You talk about the carbon footprint, fumes are spewing into the air, right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything, right?” It is true that China and Germany are major producers of wind turbines, The Independent noted, but the technology is not a net emitter of greenhouse gasses. In fact, in 2018, electricity generated by wind prevented 200 million tonnes of carbon pollution from entering the atmosphere, the American Wind Energy Association found. Trump also repeated his argument that wind turbines harm birds. “You want to see a bird graveyard? Go under a windmill someday. You’ll see more birds than you’ve ever seen in your life,” he said, according to The Guardian. While it is true that wind turbines do kill birds, fossil fuel power plants are deadlier, CNN pointed out. Turbine collisions kill between 140,000 and 500,000 birds a year, but coal, oil, power lines and other energy sources kill millions, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Trump’s rant against wind turbines comes as he has lashed out against green technology in recent weeks. Earlier this month, he attacked water efficiency standards in construction by saying people were having to flush toilets “10 times, 15 times.” And at a rally in Michigan last week, he said that women had told him they had to run dishwashers multiple times to make them work, The Washington Post reported. All of this rhetoric has policy consequences. The Department of Energy (DOE) announced Friday it would keep incandescent and halogen light bulbs on the market instead of replacing them with more energy efficient varieties. And Trump has asked the Environmental Protection Agency and the DOE to look into relaxing Obama-era efficiency standards for appliances like dishwashers.

Lawmakers, PUCO left a bunch of coal in Ohioans’ stockings this year – This Christmas, the citizens of Ohio will be getting coal in their stockings rather than a bright shiny solar panel.The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine and other Ohio politicians all made sure that renewable energy projects, including American Electric Power’s 400-megawatt solar arrays in Highland County, would not be under the Christmas tree (“Regulators reject attempt to charge customers for solar projects,” Nov. 22).In Grinchlike fashion, t he 4,000 construction jobs and 150 permanent jobs for the AEP projects were snatched from the hands of southeastern Ohio citizens. AEP’s customers will also lose out on the projected $200 million in savings over 20 years.However, FirstEnergy Solutions got their present early in the form of House Bill 6, deemed the worst energy bill of the 21st century. The bill will gut energy efficiency standards, which will impact the employment of more than 10,000 people in Ohio. It will bail out two aging nuclear power plants as well as two coal-fired power plants and Ohio taxpayers will be paying for this $200 million annual gift for a long time. Make sure to check Santa’s naughty list to see if your legislator voted “yes” for HB 6. Let him or her know how you feel in 2020.

The decade that blew up energy predictions – America’s energy sources, like booming oil and crumbling coal, have defied projections and historical precedents over the last decade. It shows how change can happen rapidly and unexpectedly, even in an industry known to move gradually and predictably. With a new decade upon us, let’s look back at the last one’s biggest, most surprising energy changes. The following five charts show the U.S. Energy Information Administration projections for the future from a decade ago, along with current EIA data to compare those projections with what actually has happened.

• In 2010, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projected that in 2019, the U.S. would be producing about six million barrels of oil a day. The reality? We’re now producing 12 million barrels of oil a day. Meanwhile, EIA projected oil prices would be more than $100 a barrel. They’re currently hovering around $60 a barrel. What’s happening: A pair of extraction methods – horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing – have unlocked far more oil and gas than experts had predicted, and companies have gotten hyper-efficient extracting more oil from each well.
• Oil imports: EIA had projected in 2010 that the U.S. would be importing a net eight million barrels of petroleum by now, which includes crude oil and petroleum products like gasoline. In September, the U.S. actually exported a net 89,000 barrels of petroleum.
• Natural gas production: In 2010, EIA projected that the U.S. would be producing about 20 trillion cubic feet of natural gas by now. In 2018, the last full year of annual data, we produced more than 30 trillion. Horizontal drilling and fracking are the key drivers here too – though oil is typically more valuable than gas, so the increase has been greater with oil than gas.
• The EIA had projected that coal electricity would remain dominant in the U.S. and natural gas would remain relatively stable – even drop slightly in its share of power supply. The opposite is happening. Coal-fired power is plummeting and natural gas has risen significantly.
• EIA had projected in 2010 that U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide emissions would continue rising, albeit at a slower pace. In fact, they dropped. The same one-two punch that drove natural gas to dominate over coal in the electricity mix has driven this change. More recently, the growth in wind and solar, which don’t produce emissions, is accelerating this trend. Emissions have ticked back up, however, due to a growing economy and the fact that natural gas, although it emits half the CO2 as coal, is still a fossil fuel. It can also emit methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas. EIA does project emissions to decline slightly in the coming years.

Switzerland switches off nuclear plant as it begins exit from atomic power (Reuters) – Switzerland’s Muehleberg nuclear power station went off the grid on Friday after 47 years, marking the end of an era as the shutdown starts the country’s exit from atomic power. The 373-megawatt-capacity plant which opened in 1972 has generated enough electricity to cover the energy consumption of the nearby city of Bern for more than 100 years. In scenes shown live on Swiss TV, at 12.30 pm (1130 GMT) a technician pressed two buttons in the control room to stop the chain reaction and deactivate the reactor, shutting down the plant for good. The closure is the first of Switzerland’s five nuclear reactors to be shuttered following the 2011 nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, which triggered safety concerns about nuclear power around the world. Neighboring Germany is due to abandon nuclear power stations by 2022, while Switzerland’s government has said it would build no new nuclear reactors and decommission its existing plants at their end of their lifespan. The Swiss decision to quit nuclear power was upheld in a 2017 referendum which also supported government plans to push forward sustainable energy with subsidies to develop solar, wind and hydroelectric power. No dates have been set for the shutdown of Switzerland’s other nuclear power stations, although the Beznau plant near the German border, which dates back to 1969, is expected to be next. As recently as 2017, Switzerland’s nuclear power stations generated a third of the country’s power, compared with around 60% from hydroelectric and 5% from renewable. Muehleberg’s operator, the state-controlled energy company BKW, decided in October 2013 to shutter the plant, saying plans to invest in its long-term future were no longer viable. Output has been winding down in the last few weeks as the final fuel loaded in the summer of 2018 was depleted. After the shutdown, a 15-year decommissioning process will get under way, costing 3 billion Swiss francs ($3.06 billion). No plans have been agreed for how the site will be redeveloped.

Japan Proposes Dumping Radioactive Waste Into Pacific As Storage Space Dwindles — As the decade comes to an end, the future of nuclear power in the west remains in doubt. Almost nine years ago, a powerful underwater earthquake triggered a 15-meter tsunami that disabled the power supply and cooling at three of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The accident caused the nuclear cores of all three damaged reactors to melt down, prompting the government to issue evacuation orders for all people living within a 30 kilometer radius of the damaged reactors, a group that included roughly 100,000 people. And the evacuation zone map: Now, the Epoch Times reports that Japan’s Economy and Industry Ministry has proposed that TEPCO gradually release, or allow to evaporate, massive amounts of treated but still radioactive water being stored at the power plant. TEPCO, or the Tokyo Electric Power Co, is the owner of the Fukushima plant, and is also responsible for leading the clean-up of the damaged reactors.But as regulators have stepped in to try and guide TEPCO as it struggles to dispose of all the contaminated water, one ministry has offered a proposal that is almost guaranteed to anger the fishermen who have resisted all of TEPCO’s other plans for dumping the contaminated water.In its Dec. 23 proposal, the ministry suggested a “controlled release” of the contaminated water into the Pacific. Offering another option, the ministry also suggested allowing the water to evaporate, or a combination of the two methods.The government is stepping up the pressure on TEPCO to do something as Fukushima’s ‘radioactive water crisis’ worsens. The problem is that TEPCO is running out of room to store the contaminated water. But the ministry insisted that the controlled release of the contaminated water into the sea would be the best option because it would “stably dilute and disperse” the water from the plant, while also allowing the government and TEPCO to more easily monitor the operation.TEPCO says it is currently storing more than 1 million tons of radioactive water and only has space to hold up to 1.37 million tons, or until the summer of 2022, raising speculation that the water may be released after next summer’s Tokyo Olympics.

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