Environmental News For The Week Ending 18 October 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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Note: Because of the high volume of news regarding the coronavirus outbreak, that news has been published separately:

• 18 Oct 2020 – Coronavirus Disease Weekly News 17October 2020

• 18 Oct 2020 – Coronavirus Economic Weekly News 17October 2020

Summary:

New virus cases in the US hit an 11 week high on Thursday and topped that by 8% on Friday. New cases in the US over the past 7 days are up 25% over those from two weeks ago, after rising slowly since Labor Day. Daily US coronavirus deaths are still little changed – for now. Here’s an update (October 15) of the Reuter‘s map I included last week, which again is interactive with state data (as of October 10) at Reuters if you click on it:

Most of the states shown with record cases above are setting new records for virus cases several times a week; in Ohio, for instance, we set a record for the state with 1,835 new cases on Friday the 9th, broke that record with 2,036 cases on the 14th, topped that record with 2,177 new cases on the 15th, and then set another record with 2,212 new cases on the 18th.

If you recall, the first and most deadly US outbreak was centered in the Northeast – New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and adjacent states, with large outbreaks in Michigan, Washington, Florida, and California

This summer’s outbreak was across the southern tier of states, with record numbers of new cases in Texas, Florida, California and the southeast, and was probably exacerbated by people staying indoors in the heat.

More recently, the worst outbreak has shifted north, and has been mostly centered in the upper midwest states of Wisconsin and the Dakotas, with the national totals holding nearly steady because new cases were falling in Texas and Florida at the same time.

New cases globally hit new records three times this week, with the week over week total worldwide increasing nearly 14%. A surge of new cases in Europe is responsible for much of that increase. So this virus is far from being done with us yet..

Calculated Risk continues to track US testing. The decline in positive test results over July and August dfefinitely ended in September. The trend is now up. In September the increase in new cases was attributed to increased testing. In October that has changed – increases in new cases are now arising from increased percentage of tests returning positive. The October 20 graphic:

A Johns Hopkins graphic for global new cases as of the end of last week can be viewed here.

Here’s this week’s news on the environment and energy:

Michigan Officials Warn Of Another “Scary” Virus That People Should Worry About – While Michiganders focus on the COVID-19 issue as well as attempting to get their state’s economy back on track, Michigan public health officials are now warning of another potential breakout of a new virus, Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE). EEE is spread by mosquitoes and MI officials claim they are doing everything they can to stop the spread as COVID fatigue sets in with citizens across the country. One of the methods officials have devised is strikingly similar to what they are suggesting for COVID – i.e. urging residents to stay indoors after dark and protect themselves against mosquitoes when they are out. All this comes after a resident in Barry County was suspected of contracting EEE. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services announced the case last week. “This suspected EEE case in a Michigan resident shows this is an ongoing threat to the health and safety of Michiganders and calls for continued actions to prevent exposure, including aerial treatment,” Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, chief medical executive and chief deputy for health at MDHHS, said in a statement. “MDHHS continues to encourage local officials in the affected counties to consider postponing, rescheduling or cancelling outdoor activities occurring at or after dusk, particularly those involving children to reduce the potential for people to be bitten by mosquitoes.”22 horses located across ten counties have been confirmed to have EEE, a number that is allegedly twice that of the previous year. The state is now engaging in aerial spraying to reduce the number of mosquitoes. Nationwide, 5 cases of humans contracting EEE have been reported to the CDC – three in Massachusetts and two in Wisconsin. Generally speaking, there are only 5 to 9 cases of EEE in the US every year with 30% of those cases resulting in death. The incubation period of EEE is usually around 4 to ten days, and symptoms can be mild including fever, chills, aches, and general discomfort. Severe cases can involve swelling of the brain and meningitis.

There have been multiple sightings of a hairy, venomous caterpillar in Virginia – CNN – It’s small, hairy and you don’t want to get anywhere near it. It is considered to be one of the most venomous caterpillars in the US, and there have been multiple reports of the puss caterpillar appearing in “parks or near structures” in eastern Virginia. The Virginia Department of Forestry is warning residents to stay away from the caterpillar because it has venomous spines across its thick, furry coat. “There are little hollow hairs in that fluffy, hairy material,” Theresa Dellinger, a diagnostician at the Insect Identification Lab at Virginia Tech, told CNN. “It’s not going to reach out and bite you, but if someone brushes up against that hair, it’ll release toxins that you’ll have a reaction to.” That reaction can include an itchy rash, vomiting, swollen glands and fever, according to the University of Michigan. It’ll also put you in a world of pain. A Richmond, Virginia, resident described the feeling like a scorching-hot knife. A Florida mother said her teenage son began screaming when “stung” by one. The caterpillar isn’t commonly found in the state. Sightings are more likely farther south, in states like Texas, or in midwestern states like Missouri, according to researchers. No one is entirely sure why there have been so many recent reports in Virginia.

European Top Court Upholds French Ban on Bee-Harming Pesticides – The European Court of Justice on Oct. 8 found that France did not violate EU rules when it banned certain chemicals considered harmful to bees.The legal row between the French Crop Protection Association and France goes back to 2018, when the government banned some pesticides belonging to the neonicotinoid group.The ban placed France at the forefront of a campaign against chemicals blamed for decimating crop-pollinating bees.With its ban on five neonicotinoids outdoors and in greenhouses, France went further than the European Union, which agreed to outlaw three in crop fields.Opponents of the ban have said that it prevents farmers from protecting their sugar beet crops, which have been decimated by an infestation of green aphids. Sugar beet farmers argue that neonicotinoid chemicals are the only solution to combating such infestations. The Crop Protection Association brought the case to court, arguing that the French decree was incompatible with an EU regulation on the family of chemicals. The French government has since rowed back on parts of the controversial ban following pressure by beetroot growers.However, on Thursday, the EU’s top court ruled that France’s initial ban had satisfactorily demonstrated the need to curb a “serious risk to human or animal health or to the environment.”Last week, the pesticides were at the center of a legal battle between the French government and the left-wing and green opposition, which accuses President Emmanuel Macron of neglecting to fulfill his environmental commitments.On Oct. 6, the French National Assembly approved a proposal to give beetroot growers an exemption from the ban on the pesticides until July 2023.France is Europe’s top producer of beets used to make sugar and the sector provides 46,000 jobs.Introduced in the mid-1990s, lab-synthesized neonicotinoids are based on the chemical structure of nicotine, and attack the central nervous system of insects.They were meant to be a less harmful substitute to older pesticides, and are now the most widely-used to treat flowering crops. However, in recent years, bees started dying off from “colony collapse disorder,” a mysterious disease partly blamed on the use of such chemicals.Studies have since shown that neonicotinoids harm bee reproduction and foraging, while exposure also lowers their resistance to disease.

Avian Botulism Kills 40,000 Birds at National Wildlife Refuge – Normally Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge is a place where birds gather in abundance, feasting and fattening up as they continue their migration along the Pacific Flyway. Instead, I am sadly here to witness a massive outbreak of avian disease that is wiping out tens of thousands of birds. The Lower Klamath NWR is a “must see,” especially at the start of fall migration. Designated as an Important Bird Area by the National Audubon Society, the Lower Klamath NWR is one of a mosaic of refuges in the Klamath Basin, which together form an essential pinch point along the Pacific Flyway, causing waterbirds to congregate in huge numbers during migration. Birds coming south from Alaska stop to rest and refuel before continuing their journey south to estuaries along the coast, the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys of California, and beyond as far as the tip of South America. These birds can’t complete this journey without places like Lower Klamath NWR along their route. This year though, instead of broad sheets of water, green wetland stands, clouds of mosquitos, and throngs of noisy waterbirds – what greets me is a dry, barren landscape baking in the hot summer sun. Throngs of birds cram together in the few pools of hot, stagnant water that remain. Different species and guilds gather in a motley collection of unlikely neighbors; American white pelicans waddle near elegant black-necked stilts and American avocets, rather than spreading out across the open water and mudflats. These are exactly the kinds of conditions where disease can spread rapidly.It is not surprising then, that a massive avian botulism outbreak is ravaging the birds of the Lower Klamath and some of the surrounding refuges. At last estimate, 40,000 birds have died in the last month due to botulism and thousands more are at an emergency “duck hospital” operated by staff from Bird Ally X, California Waterfowl Association, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.Avian botulism is a waterborne bacteria, Clostridium botulinum, that occurs naturally in many wetlands, but becomes activated when hot temperatures heat the water. Overcrowding caused by insufficient water supplies have created ideal conditions for the bacteria to rapidly spread through the birds in the refuge. Birds eat infected food sources, become paralyzed and die, and in turn transmit it to other birds in a vicious cycle that spreads quickly across the wetlands.Overcrowding of birds, combined with a lack of water supplies to maintain these wetlands and push clean water through these habitats, worsens the outbreak as water sits and concentrates. Making matters worse, some species of waterbirds are molting and will be unable to fly to better habitat for approximately a month..

New England’s Forests Are Sick. They Need More Tree Doctors. NYT –As climate change accelerates, the trees in the Eastern forests of the United States are increasingly vulnerable. For many arborists, the challenges facing trees are reshaping and expanding the nature of their work. Many said they are spending more time on tree removal than ever before – taking down dead or unhealthy trees, or trees damaged or felled by storms. “We are a heavily treed state,” said Kristina Bezanson, an arborist and a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “We are having more tree problems that require lots of arborists, and there is a shortage of arborists.” Many New England towns are verdant, and the area is roughly 75 percent forest – forests that have generally grown back twice, after clearing by colonists for agriculture and after logging for timber in the early 1900s. To the untrained eye, it looks good: lots of green.Not to the trained eye. Bear LeVangie pointed to a fungus on a maple tree, a sign of decay. To spend time with tree experts is to remove one’s green-tinted glasses and to see Oz as it really is. Many species – including ash, oak, maple, hemlock, elm, and white pine – have their own particular pest or disease threatening them. And there are more pests and diseases on the horizon, including insects like the spotted lanternfly and infections that weakened trees cannot fight off. Many trees are also stressed by bouts of drought or intense rain, by rising temperatures and changing season length, by extreme weather – by all the various manifestations of climate change – as well as by air pollution and by invasive plants choking or displacing them. The list of threats is long, synergistic, and growing rapidly, which means that trees do not have sufficient time to recover and adapt. On a morning in late summer, the LeVangies inspected several trees in Petersham, where, since 2014, Melissa LeVangie has been warden – a position every municipality in Massachusetts has been required to have since 1899. When she can’t make it, her twin checks on the trees. Bear LeVangie works for Eversource, traveling a circuit of 35 towns in Connecticut, overseeing trimming and pruning crews and looking for “hazard trees,” including those that are dead or dying. They visited an ash being treated for emerald ash borer, an invasive insect that has killed tens of millions of trees, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Bear LeVangie flipped over a leaf. More trouble: tussock moth larvae and two other pests. They visited an oak that had put on scant growth this season, likely because of the drought. Now over four months long, the drought has led to increased wildland fire risk across the state. And they visited a young maple with red and yellow leaves. “People look at that and say ‘Oh look, fall is coming early, it is going to be a colorful fall!’ No. This is happening early because the trees are very stressed out,” said Bear LeVangie.

Trump creates federal government council on global tree planting initiative –President Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order involving the federal government in a global tree planting initiative that already has private sector participation in the U.S. The executive order creates a council that’s in charge of “developing, coordinating, and promoting Federal Government interactions with the Initiative with respect to tree growing, restoration, and conservation.” The council will also create methods to track and measure the number of trees planted, conserved or restored and address any laws and regulations that get in the way of these actions. “On January 21, 2020, I announced that to further protect the environment, the United States would be joining the World Economic Forum’s One Trillion Trees initiative… an ambitious global effort to grow and conserve one trillion trees worldwide by 2030,” the executive order said. “Following through on my commitment, and given the expansive footprint of our Federal forests and woodlands, this order initiates the formation of the United States One Trillion Trees Interagency Council to further the Federal Government’s contribution to the global effort,” it continued. The order did not specify how many trees the federal government would seek to grow or conserve. The Trump administration has touted its decision to join the World Economic Forum’s Trillion Trees Initiative, which plans to grow, restore and conserve that many trees across the globe, as an action it has taken to better the environment. However, it has also taken steps to reduce restrictions on the timber industry cutting down trees. It has proposed, for example,opening up a previously protected 9.37 million acre area of the Tongass National Forest to logging. That forest is a major carbon sink, meaning its trees soak up carbon from the atmosphere, lessening the impacts of climate change.Scientists have said planting trees can help but that it isn’t a panaceaand that the U.S. will also have to significantly reduce its emissions to mitigate climate change impacts.The new council will be chaired by Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, Trump’s economic advisor Larry Kudlow and Deputy Chief of Staff Christopher Liddell. Other council members are presidential advisers Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, and several cabinet members including Secretary of StateMike Pompeo, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler and Education Secretary Betsy Devos.

Wild Predators Are Relying More on Our Food-and Pets — SOME OF NORTH America’s big predators-wolves, mountain lions, bobcats, and the like- are now getting nearly half their food from people. It’s a big shift away from eating foods found in nature and could put them in conflict with one another, or lead to more human-carnivore encounters on running trails or suburban backyards. A new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of New Mexico used hair, fur, and bone samples to identify the diets of seven carnivore species across the Upper Midwest, from the outskirts of Albany, New York, to remote Minnesota forestland. The scientists used chemical tracers to show that the animals were relying on human food sources either directly, such as by raiding fields or trash bins, or indirectly by preying on smaller animals that do, such as mice, rabbits, or sometimes even pets.”These species are eating human food,” says Philip Manlick, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico and the lead author of the study, which was published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “In some cases, up to half of their diets are coming from humans. It might be garbage, or corn residue, or house cats and pets,” Manlick says. “This is bad news for carnivores, because people don’t want predators eating their pets-and, generally speaking, people don’t like carnivores in their backyard.” The complete list of these carnivores studied in the report includes foxes, coyotes, fishers, and martens. And not only are they coming into contact with people more frequently (you probably already saw this six-minute viral video of the Utah jogger chased by a mountain lion after he got too close to her cubs), but they are also fighting each other for food, Manlick says. “They will use their weapons against each other as well,” Manlick says. “As their diets begin to overlap, they are more likely to kill each other. The consumption of food resources presents a lot of challenges for carnivores in the future.” The researchers found that foxes were the most likely to eat from human food sources, getting about half their food by eating domesticated animals or by foraging in areas that have been disturbed by agriculture, while the wolf and bobcat were the least likely, getting less than 5 percent of their diet from these sources.

Monkey ‘Gang Wars’ Keep Killing People in India -On October 6, Laxman Tulsiani, a gold dealer, and Veera, a caretaker, were examining a construction site in Agra city in north India’s Uttar Pradesh (UP) state. A massive monkey brawl broke out at the property, resulting in a wall collapsing on the two men. Laxman and Veera died at a nearby hospital. With a monkey population of more than 50 million, there have been at least 13 deaths caused by monkey attacks across India since 2015. More than 1,000 cases of monkey bites are reported every day in Indian cities, according to a government run primate research centre. “India has been facing a monkey menace since the late 80’s. Before that, humans and primates peacefully co-existed without such conflicts,” Dr Iqbal Malik, a primatologist, with 40 years of experience in studying monkey species in India, told VICE News. Dr Malik points to a variety of reasons behind the deteriorating relationship between humans and primates. “Lack of population control of both humans and monkeys, depletion of forest areas which could have been habitats for monkeys, and shift to monoculture farming has led to increased rivalry and aggression amongst monkeys.” “This aggression then carries on to humans, especially in cases when the land inhabited by monkeys is usurped by the authorities.” Between 2002 and 2018, India lost 310,624 hectares of forest cover due to deforestation and industrialisation. Depending on the scale and nature of damage, state governments have come up with various ideas to tackle the issue. In the national capital, Delhi, the government has been relocating monkeys to a wildlife sanctuary. There have also been efforts to shift monkeys from Delhi to forests in neighbouring states. In India, people’s cultural beliefs impact the way they treat monkeys. Hanuman (also called Bajrangbali), the monkey deity, is one of the most popular gods in Hindu mythology. “People call me to relocate monkeys in urban areas, but I can’t bear to see them caged. After all, they are our lord Bajrangbali,” Ravi Kumar, a monkey chaser in Delhi, told VICE News. Kumar, who chases monkeys by imitating their sound, describes himself as a “security guard for monkeys”.

Whales, Sea Turtles, Seals: The Unintended Catch Of Abandoned Fishing Gear – There are fewer than 500 North Atlantic right whales left in the world. And now, one less: This weekend, one of the 45-ton creatures was found dead off the coast of Maine, completely entangled in fishing line – head, flippers and all.This was not an isolated incident.In late June, an endangered blue whale wrapped in fishing gear was seen struggling off the coast of Dana Point in Southern California. Rescuers were unable to extricate it before it swam away. And earlier this month, rescuers unsuccessfully tried to free anentangled humpback whale near Newport. Spotters say they believe the humpback eventually found its way free of most of the gear, though they’re unsure if there’s anything still trapped in its mouth.While any kind of fishing gear can be lost or abandoned at sea, gillnets, crab pots and traps are the most common types that continue to “ghost fish” – entrapping marine animals like whales, seals, sea lions and sea turtles.Last year, the West Coast saw 61 whale entanglements – a record number that is nonetheless likely to be broken this year. So far in 2016, there have been 60 reports of entanglements as of late September. Why it’s happening is unclear. Researchers say there’s more derelict gear in the water today, and more reported sightings, but population numbers and migratory patterns of whales have also shifted. What happens when a whale becomes entangled is grim. “The gear is really, really heavy and when a whale comes in contact with it, it thrashes around to shed the gear,” says Kristen Monsell, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. Sometimes that works; sometimes it entangles the whale even further. “Sometimes it can drown the whale immediately, or it can happen over weeks, because they get so tired,” she says. “They eventually die of exhaustion. If the gear is in their mouths, it impedes their ability to feed. It can amputate their tails or other parts of the body. And for younger whales, the gear may wrap around them, but the whale keeps growing and it cuts into their flesh.”

Cargo Vessels Are Killing More Whales – A New Effort Aims to Save Them — A blue whale can weigh as much as 200 tons and consume 12,000 pounds of krill in a single day. But even the largest animal on Earth doesn’t stand a chance against a fast-moving cargo ship.Collisions between whales and shipping vessels are especially prevalent in areas where whale habitat overlaps with busy port traffic, such as the Santa Barbara Channel. This 70-mile stretch of water between mainland California and the Northern Channel Islands is a thoroughfare for thousands of cargo ships going to and from the busy ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. It’s also a hotspot for endangered and threatened whales.The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has instituted voluntary slow-speed zones, but whale-ship strikes have still been on the rise for the past few years.To reverse that trend, a group of scientists from all over the country have collaborated on a new project spearheaded by U.C. Santa Barbara’s Benioff Ocean Initiative. Whale Safe, a technology-based mapping and analysis tool, provides near real-time data on whale activity in the Santa Barbara Channel in the hope of reducing fatal whale-ship collisions.We spoke to Morgan Visalli, the science lead at the Benioff Ocean Initiative, about how the technology works and what the public can do to help hold shipping companies accountable. Many whale species thankfully are recovering from the days of intensive whaling, when they were hunted to the brink of extinction. But now they’re facing other threats from ship strikes and fishing gear entanglements.The Santa Barbara Channel, where we’ve launched Whale Safe, is a really important feeding ground for blue, humpback and fin whales – all species that are either endangered or threatened. Those three species are the ones that we’re focusing on with this first launch of the project.The past two years were some of the worst on record for ship strikes off the West Coast of the United States. Even worse, the number that we actually see recorded in the data is likely a small percentage of the actual number of ship strikes that occurred.Scientists estimate that only about 5% to 17% of whale carcasses are actually observed and recorded. So if we see 13 whale carcasses that wash up on the beach, as was the case last year on the West Coast of the United States, it’s likely that that could actually be closer to 130 ship strikes that occurred.

New mass deaths of sea animals discovered off Russia’s Kamchatka – (video) Authorities reported Monday, October 12, 2020, that a new mass die-off of marine animals has been discovered off the coast of Russia’s Kamchatka, where mysterious toxic pollution along a 40 km (25 miles) stretch recently killed 95 percent of seabed animals and caused health hazards among surfers since September. Kamchatka Governor Vladimir Solodov said he received reports from scientists and witnesses of dead marine creatures off the coast, following the initial discovery last week. Divers who studied the waters reported that 95 percent of seabed creatures were found dead, including sea urchins, octopi, seals, and starfish. Greenpeace Russia called the situation an “ecological disaster,” which prompted authorities to investigate marine pollution. “95 percent are dead,” said Ivan Usatov of the Kronotsky Nature Reserve in a meeting with other scientists and Solodov. “Some large fish, shrimps, and crabs have survived, but in very small numbers.” Solodov noted that neighboring beaches were not affected, but the evidence showed that “the scale of the occurrence is extremely large.” He added that the deaths were “almost certainly linked to climate change and other polluting effects we as humankind cause to the Pacific Ocean.” “We can’t say that a local man-made object near [the port city of] Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky was the cause,” the governor said. On Monday, Russian Academy of Sciences vice president Andrei Adrianov theorized that the mass die-off was caused by toxins from an algae bloom. This has been backed by leading Russian marine biologists, who took note of the presence of yellow foam covering the affected region seen from space.In September, the toxic pollution was first reported by local surfers and swimmers, who suffered apparent chemical burns, vomiting, fever, coughing, and eye problems after going in the waters. Some developed lesions on their corneas and 11 people had to be taken to the hospital. Solodov said he ordered authorities to conduct a comprehensive research project to examine the mysterious deaths. “We’ve encountered a new large-scale phenomenon that science has yet to comprehend.”

Pollution Prosecutions Plummet to Lowest Level in Decades Under Trump – A new report finds that criminal prosecutions for polluting the environment in violation of the Clean Water Act or the Clean Air Act have dropped to their lowest levels in decades under the Trump administration, as The New York Times reported.The report was written by David Uhlmann, a law professor at the University of Michigan who worked for the Department of Justice for 17 years and served as its top environmental prosecutor from 2000 to 2007.In the paper, the career prosecutor-turned-professor analyzed 14 years of cases and found that in the first two years of the Trump administration, criminal prosecutions for violations of the Clean Water Act dropped 70 percent. Similarly, prosecutions for violations of the Clean Air Act dropped 50 percent in the first two years since Trump took office.”No matter what the future holds, the data from the first two years under President Trump reveals a dramatic departure from the non-partisan support for pollution prosecutions that had existed across administrations, which leaves Americans less safe and the environment less protected,” Uhlmann wrote.Uhlmann presented the paper at the American Bar Association’s fall environmental conference. While the paper is available online now, it will be published in the Michigan Journal of Environmental and Administrative Law, according to The New York Times.The paper noted that there were only nine criminal prosecutions under the Clean Water Act in 2018. “Under President Donald J. Trump the bottom fell out,” Uhlmann wrote, as The New York Times reported.Uhlmann told The New York Times that the numbers show a dramatic decline in both the quantity and the quality of the prosecutions that the administration is pursuing.While the study looked at the first two years of the Trump administration and found a pattern that shattered the author’s perception that law enforcement operated independently of political influence, recent data has shown the trend continued through 2019. According to Justice Department data analyzed by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), the total number of environmental prosecutions in fiscal year 2019 was lower than any year during the administrations of the previous three presidents, which dates back to 1993, asCourthouse News reported.

Shuffle of EPA’s science advisers elevates those with industry tries A shuffle to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) independent board of science advisers will add a longtime consultant who has worked for the tobacco and chemicals industries while promoting a member listed as someone “not to pick” by the Union of Concerned Scientists to be the panel’s chair. The EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB) is meant to serve as an outside sounding board on the agency’s actions, with 40 or so of the nation’s top scientists weighing in on the scientific backing behind a number of policy proposals. But the board has shifted under the Trump administration, adding more members with ties to industry and fewer members with an academic background, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office. That follows a move by prior EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt barring academics from serving on the board if they received agency grants for their research. A list of new appointees released Wednesday includes the usual cast of academics and state environmental and health officials. But it also adds Kenneth Mundt to the board, a consultant with Cardno ChemRisk who critics say has a history of working to discredit science on the harms of tobacco and a number of chemicals. “Kenneth Mundt is pretty much a classic product defender. He has been employed by the chemical industry on pretty much every harmful chemical you can think of to defend it and to downplay the science on it,” said Genna Reed with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy. Though Mundt is new to the board, he’s already being placed in a leadership role, assigned to chair the SAB’s chemicals subcommittee. “They’re not even trying to hide that they are undermining all the independence of the Science Advisory Board. By placing him at the helm of the chemicals subcommittee they are basically announcing they are going to be pushing out peer reviews that are more favorable to industry.” Mundt has worked to defend hexavalent chromium – the contaminant at play in the Erin Brockovich film – as well as formaldehyde and chloroprene, used in the production of synthetic rubber neoprene. Each has been linked with various types of cancer. When he was hired to represent chloroprene manufacturer Denka, the Natural Resources Defense Council called Mundt “the right person for the job, having previously defended chemical and tobacco industries. As a consultant for Philip Morris and the tobacco industry, Mundt attacked the National Cancer Institute’s findings that low-tar cigarettes could cause lung cancer.”

Statistics: Sharp increase in natural disasters over the past 20 years – A new United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) report confirms how extreme weather events have come to dominate the disaster landscape at the beginning of 21st century. Floods and storms were the most prevalent disaster events, followed by earthquakes, extreme temperatures, landslides, droughts, wildfires, volcanic activity and dry mass movement. UNDRR used statistics from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) which records disasters which have killed ten or more people, affected 100 or more people, resulted in a declared state of emergency, or a call for international assistance. There were 7 348 major natural disaster events from 2000 to 2019, with 1.23 million lives lost and 4.2 billion people affected, resulting in approximately US$2.97 trillion in global economic losses. This is a sharp increase over the previous 20-year period (1980 – 1999) when EM-DAT recorded 4 212 natural disasters worldwide, 1.19 million lives lost, 3.25 billion people affected, and approximately US$1.63 trillion in economic losses. On average, there were 367 disaster events each year from 2000 to 2019, the majority of which were floods and storms (44% and 28%, respectively). According to the report, much of the difference is explained by a rise in climate-related disasters, including extreme weather events: from 3 656 climate-related events (1980 – 1999) to 6 681 climate-related disasters in the period 2000 – 2019. Floods and storms were the most prevalent disaster events. The last twenty years have seen the number of major floods more than double, from 1 389 to 3 254, while the incidence of storms grew from 1 457 to 2 034. There has also been a rise in geo-physical events including earthquakes and tsunamis which have killed more people than any of the other natural hazards under review in the report.

Southern New England hit by a rare derecho, NWS confirms – The unusually powerful storm in Southern New England last week, October 7, 2020, was a rare derecho, the National Weather Service (NWS) confirmed. The storm killed at least two people, left more than 200 000 customers without power, caused damage to a 515 km (320 miles) stretch, and recorded a wind gust of 109 km/h (68 mph) — the region’s highest daily gust for the month of October. The storm ranks as one of the strongest severe weather events in the United States this year. On October 7, a sudden storm struck New York and New England, resulting in two fatalities and major wind damage. More than 200 damaging wind reports were received from New York to Massachusetts.Power was cut to more than 200 000 customers. National Grid spokeswoman Virginia Limmiatis said the area has not experienced an outage this widespread in more than a decade.”The last time we would’ve seen 200 000-plus customers out and that widespread damage, probably was back in 2008 with the ice storm.”Widespread wind gusts between 80 and 95 km/h (50 and 60 mph) were registered down the Mohawk Valley into the Greater Capital District, with a 107 km/h (67 mph) wind gust measured at the Albany International Airport.This ranks as the highest gust for the month of October with records dating back to 1987. “The wind speed did break a record for the day,” confirmed Mike Evans of the NWS Albany. “It’s definitely an unusual event. It would be a little bit more typical to see something like this in the summer, but really, to see this at any point in the year, I would consider it fairly unusual.”

October 2020 La Nina update by Emily Becker, ENS0 Blog, NOAA’s Climate.gov — La Nina’s reign continues in the tropical Pacific, with an approximately 85% chance of lasting through the winter. Forecasters currently think this La Nina will be on the stronger side. The temperature of the ocean surface in the Nino3.4 region was about 0.8 degC cooler than the 1986-2015 average, according to the ERSSTv5 dataset. We monitor the Nino3.4 index with a few different temperature datasets-more on that here-but they are all comfortably below the La Nina threshold of -0.5 degC. The three-month-average Nino3.4 index, called the Oceanic Nino Index(remember this for later!) was -0.6 degC. The Oceanic Nino Index is our primary metric for the El Nino/Southern Oscillation, aka ENSO, the whole El Nino/La Nina ocean/atmosphere system. The atmosphere is responding to La Nina’s cooler-than-average ocean surface. A strengthened Walker circulation is what we expect with La Nina conditions, and it’s what we have: air rising vigorously over the very warm western Pacific, traveling eastward high up in the atmosphere, sinking over the cooler central-eastern Pacific, and traveling back westward near the surface. Near-surface winds along the tropical Pacific (the trade winds) were stronger than average through the month of September and into early October, as were upper-level winds over the east-central Pacific. The two indexes we use to measure the change in sea-level pressure between the western and eastern Pacific, the Southern Oscillation Index and the Equatorial Southern Oscillation Index were positive, indicating the presence of more rising air (lower surface pressure) over the west and more sinking air (higher surface pressure) over the east-more evidence of an enhanced Walker circulation. Most of the dynamical computer model forecasts predict that La Nina will last through the winter and diminish in the spring. Also, there remains a substantial amount of cooler-than-average water under the surface of the central-eastern Pacific. This will provide a source of cooler water for the surface, giving confidence to the forecast that La Nina will continue.

Darwin records highest October daily rainfall since 1941 – Northern Territory, Australia – Northern Territory’s capital Darwin was hit by up to 177 mm (7 inches) of rainfall on Thursday, October 8, 2020– the city’s highest daily rainfall for October since record-keeping began in 1941, the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) confirmed. The agency added that the rain came from multiple lines of storms consistent with La Nina conditions. “The heavens opened in Darwin,” said BOM senior meteorologist Sally Cutter. “It’s been a dramatic contrast to the past two wet seasons, which were much drier.” Northern Territory had a flying start to the west season as rainfall in Darwin was 17 times greater than what fell during the same time in 2019. Marrara in north Darwin recorded 177 mm (7 inches) of rain on Thursday morning, Royal Darwin Hospital saw 137 mm (5 inches), while Darwin airport received 113 mm (4 inches). The previous record for the highest October daily rainfall was 95.5 mm (3.7 inches) set in 1969. Before modern data-keeping started in 1941, the Darwin Post Office registered 117 mm (5 inches) of rain in 1880. According to BOM, the rain came from multiple lines of storms consistent with La Nina conditions, which usually increases early wet season rains in the Top End. During the wet season, the average total rain for Darwin City is 1 676.1 mm (66 inches). The highest wet season rainfall recorded was 2 918.4 mm (115 inches) during the last significant La Nina event in 2010/11. This was about 1.7 times higher than usual.

Hurricane Delta Floods Parts of Louisiana Still Recovering From August’s Laura — Record-breaking hurricane Delta made landfall as a Category 2 hurricane near Creole, Louisiana Friday evening, striking another blow to a region still recovering from Hurricane Laura just six weeks earlier.Especially hard hit by the one-two punch of storms was the town of Lake Charles, The Associated Press reported. While Delta was weaker than Category 4 Laura, which damaged almost every building in the town, the second storm brought more flooding, inundating hundreds of the same buildings. “Add Laura and Delta together and it’s just absolutely unprecedented and catastrophic,” Lake Charles Mayor Nic Hunter told The Associated Press. “We are very concerned that with everything going in the country right now that this incident may not be on the radar nationally like it should be.” In addition to walloping Lake Charles, Delta also knocked out power to more than 400,000 homes and businesses in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas as of Sunday morning, CNN reported. The outages had deadly results. An 86-year-old man in St. Martin Parish, Louisiana died in a fire after trying to fuel a generator in his shed. The storm weakened to a post-tropical cyclone and moved north out of Louisiana over the weekend but continued to cause damage. A train derailed in Lilburn, Georgia because of heavy rain, and two tornadoesalso touched down in the state, injuring two. By Sunday night, the post-tropical remnants of the storm were located about 60 miles north-northeast of Atlanta, Georgia and were expected to continue to weaken, the National Hurricane Center said.

Aerial footage: See Hurricane Delta’s damage in Cameron Parish during flyover tour –Aerial footage shows Hurricane Delta’s damage in Cameron Parish on Saturday, Oct. 10, 2020. Delta made landfall along the southwest Louisiana coast Friday evening, bring wind damage, high rain totals, flooding and more to the region.

Delta’s Impacts Less Severe, But Part of Big-Picture Recovery – Hurricane Delta brought more flooding than wind, but teams surveying Louisiana and Texas so far are reporting less damage to infrastructure and facilities than what they saw after Hurricane Laura just a few weeks ago. With back-to-back hurricanes, teams are assessing the big-picture impact of two storms in a short amount of time. “You can’t look at Delta without Laura,” says Erika Walter, spokeswoman for the Pelican chapter of the Associated Buliders and Contractors. “A lot of the Lake Charles area was still bleeding when Delta came, and that just picked the scab and made it worse.” Delta made landfall Friday evening in Creole, La., as a Category 2 storm, just six weeks after Laura came on shore about a dozen miles away as a Category 4 hurricane. Walter says it helped that contractors have had storm protocols in place for weeks, on top of COVID-19 precautions they’ve had to take for the past six months. “I think our contractors did shine in these areas because they’re used to the last-minute changes a hurricane can throw into the equation of a job site,” she says. As of Monday morning, Entergy Corp. had restored power to over three-fourths of its 493,375 customers in Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi who had lost power at the peak of Hurricane Delta. Compared to the catastrophic damages of Hurricane Laura on Aug. 27, Delta’s impact on the region’s power grid appears to be far less severe, the utility reported Monday morning. Transmission and distribution systems in southeast Louisiana had to undergo a full-scale reconstruction that left many without power for weeks. “Although Hurricane Delta caused outages to the transmission system in southwest Louisiana, initial assessments indicate minimal transmission damage, which will allow for facilities to be restored much more quickly than following Hurricane Laura,” Entergy spokesman Jerry Nappi said in a statement. Delta knocked out service for 162 transmission lines and 215 substations. As of Monday morning, there were 176 substations and 107 lines back in service by Monday morning. Entergy rebuilt most of the transmission system after Laura, and the utility reports that Delta’s impact to the ongoing restoration of the remaining facilities appears minimal. Using drones, airboats, helicopters, and on-ground surveyors, Entergy on Monday continued its regional damage assessments, which the utility says could take up to three days.

In and around Lake Charles, Laura-weary residents pick up the pieces again after Hurricane Delta – In late August, Hurricane Laura’s winds, whistling like a train, tore the roof off Brian Schexnayder’s home in southwest Louisiana and nearly destroyed it. He put a tarp on it and tried to move on. But on Friday night, Hurricane Delta took a remarkably similar path through his neighborhood, bringing high winds and lashing rain. The Category 2 storm sounded less menacing than Category 4 Laura, he said, but the effect was still disastrous. “In the first five minutes, it blew the tarp off,” said Schexnayder, 62, who goes by “Shakey.” The rain poured down into every room in his house. The house is now a total loss, he said. Hurricane Delta: Nearly half a million in Louisiana without power; see latest for metro New Orleans Hurricane Delta: Nearly half a million in Louisiana without power; see latest for metro New Orleans Rain gauges maintained by the National Weather Service show that Iowa received 17 inches of rain as Delta blew through Friday evening. It was the heaviest rainfall seen anywhere in the state. On Saturday morning, Schexnayder and several neighbors were trying to sort out the new damage from the old damage. This time, flood waters filled the streets – an effect they didn’t see with Laura. Schexnayder was also trying to round up his animals. When the water came up Friday, he moved his hog to higher ground in his back yard. Inside his shed, his cats also found that their favorite napping spot, a 1995 red Corvette, had taken on water. After Laura, it took 24 days for people in Iowa to get power back. Even then, their power grid was running off a generator. Hurricane Delta undid that progress, initially cutting off power to more than 600,000 households around the state, according to Gov. John Bel Edwards. Schexnayder and his neighbor, Elsie Lane, had both stocked up on gas to power their own generators ahead of the storm, and she offered him extra in case he ran out. “I don’t think this one’s hit me yet,” said Lane, 50, as she assessed how close flood waters had come to entering her house. But she said she feels compelled to help her neighbors even more now that her own home has survived the past two storms.

Over 32,000 without electricity in Louisiana Tuesday afternoon – As of 11:45 a.m. Tuesday, slightly more than 32,000 remain without power in Louisiana and in the capital region, just over 800 are without electricity, according to Entergy. Entergy says 100% of their customers are expected to have power returned sometime Tuesday. Meanwhile, on Tuesday morning DEMCO tells WBRZ its crews have been successful in clearing debris from roadways, so now they’re able to get to work on restoring power to homes and other buildings. The news reflects the progress of both utility companies in the aftermath of Hurricane Delta’s impact on the state. The worst of the outages occurred Saturday, when more than 320,000 Entergy customers were without power across Louisiana and DEMCO reported that a quarter of its customers were without electricity. In the Greater Baton Rouge area, power outages started around sunset as Delta made landfall on Friday evening. The outages continued as the night went on and weather conditions became increasingly severe, with whipping wind knocking trees onto lines and toppling poles. On Saturday morning, Entergy was in the assessment phase of restoration and crews assessing damage would also be able to reconnect some customers, a spokesperson said. By Sunday evening Entergy said crews had already restored power to over 200,000 customers, and estimated restoration times are now available for all customers who were impacted by the storm.

Severe floods in Southeast Asia claim at least 28 lives – Heavy rains and floods since the beginning of the month have left at least 28 people dead and hundreds of thousands affected in Southeast Asian countries of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. Most of the fatalities were in Vietnam and Cambodia, where thousands of people have been displaced and wide swaths of crops destroyed. Floods worsened after Tropical Storm “Linfa” made landfall over Quang Nam and Quang Ngai, Vietnam on October 11. In Cambodia, at least 11 people have died since the beginning of the month, a disaster official reported Sunday, October 11. Among the fatalities, 10 reportedly drowned in floodwaters while one was killed by lightning. Several hundred families have been evacuated to higher areas. As of October 10, around 14 000 people were believed to be affected. About 40 000 ha (98 800) of crops and paddy fields have been ravaged. Prime Minister Hun Sen has ordered local authorities to mobilize assistance to flood victims. The Department of Public Works and Transportation banned trucks from flooded roads in Battambang and Pursat, the worst affected provinces in the northwest. Other affected areas are Banteay Meanchey, Kampong Chhnang, Kampong Speu, Kandal, Pailin, Svay Rieng, Phnom Penh, and Takeo. In Vietnam, at least 17 people have been killed by floods in central provinces, while 13 people remain missing. Around 45 835 people have been displaced, while about 109 034 houses have been submerged and damaged, according to a government report. Floods have hampered the delivery of food supplies to thousands of victims. Fatalities were reported in Quang Tri, Thua Thien-Hue, Quang Nam, Da Nang, Quang Binh, Quang Ngai, Gia Lai, Dak Lak, and Lam Dong. Linfa brought further rainfall to Vietnam’s central provinces after it made landfall over Quang Nam and Quang Ngai on Sunday, October 11. Inundations are expected to continue as more heavy rainfall is on the way.

Death toll climbs to 29, over 130 000 houses flooded in central Vietnam (videos) At least 29 fatalities have been confirmed in central Vietnam as of Tuesday morning, October 13, 2020, after prolonged heavy rains triggered destructive floods and landslides. 12 others remain missing, more than 130 000 houses have been inundated, and wide swaths of crops have been damaged or destroyed. More rains are expected in northern and north-central Vietnam after Tropical Storm “Nangka” makes landfall on Wednesday, October 14. According to the Central Steering Committee for Natural Disaster Prevention and Control, 23 of the victims succumbed to floodwaters, three died in boating accidents, while the remaining three lost their lives due to electrocution. Most of the fatalities were reported in Quang Tri Province, where eight deaths occurred, while six casualties were reported each in Quang Nam and Thua Thien-Hue. Among the victims in Thua Thien-Hue was a 35-year-old pregnant woman who was going into labor. She and her husband took a boat on the way to a local medical center for delivery, but the boat upturned and she was swept away by floodwater. Two fatalities each were reported in Quang Binh and Kon Tum, while one death each was reported in Da Nang, Quang Ngai, Gia Lai, Dak Lak, and Lam Dong. The severe weather has left 12 others missing, flooded more than 130 000 homes, and damaged 4 000 ha (10 000 acres) of crops, as well as bridges and several roads, the committee added. Since last week, the central region has been struck by intense rains after a cold spell and tropical turbulence came into contact. The turbulence then strengthened into a tropical depression and was named Linfa. The storm made landfall over Quang Nam and Quang Ngai on Sunday, October 11, worsening the situation. Almost 50 000 people have been evacuated from flood-hit areas in Quan Binh, Quang Tri, Thua Thien-Hue, and Quang Nam. Local authorities have appealed to the government for urgent food assistance of more than 6 500 tons of rice, 5.5 tons of dry provisions, 20 000 boxes of noodles, and other rescue equipment.

Tropical Storm “Nangka” makes landfall in Vietnam just three days after Linfa – Tropical Storm “Nangka” made landfall in northern Vietnam at around 06:00 UTC on October 14, 2020. Nangka is the 16th named storm of the 2020 Pacific typhoon season. The storm hit land just 3 days after Tropical Storm “Linfa” — further exacerbating flooding across the region. Prolonged heavy rainfall is affecting Vietnam, Cambodia, and neighboring countries since the start of the month, affecting hundreds of thousands of people and claiming the lives of at least 40. In Cambodia, an estimated 140 000 people have been affected and more than 10 000 evacuated after Tropical Storm “Linfa” moved over the country on October 11 and 12, 2020, triggering flash floods. According to officials, seasonal rains made worse by Linfa triggered floods in 19 of Cambodia’s 25 provinces, killing at least 11 people since the start of the month. More than 40 000 ha (98 800 acres) of crops and paddy fields have been destroyed.Linfa made landfall in Vietnam at 03:00 UTC on October 11, bringing heavy rainfall to its central provinces. In just 7 days, A Luoi in Hue registered 1 888 mm (74.33 inches) of rain, Khe Tre in Hue 1 788 mm (70.39 inches) while Huong Linh in Quang Tri recorded 1 520 mm (59.8 inches). Over 370 000 customers lost power in Vietnam after the storm. At least 29 fatalities have been confirmed in central Vietnam as of Tuesday morning, October 13. 12 others remain missing, more than 130 000 houses have been inundated, and wide swaths of crops have been damaged or destroyed. Both countries are expecting more heavy rainfall associated with Tropical Storm “Nangka” which made landfall in Hainan, China at 11:20 UTC on October 13 and continued toward northern Vietnam where it made landfall on October 14 with maximum sustained winds of 65 km/h (40 mph). Parts of northern and central rainfall are expecting an additional 400 mm (16 inches) of rain from Wednesday, October 14 to Friday, October 16.

China sees historical 21 large-scale floods and above national average rainfall in 2020 – China has seen 21 large-scale floods in 2020, 1.6 times more than that of past years, hitting a record since 1998. This year’s national average rainfall of 616 mm (24 inches) is 13% more than the same period in 2019, setting the record for second-highest since 1961.The floods took place in the six main river basins in China, including in the rivers Yangtze and Yellow. A total of 833 rivers have risen above warning levels– 80 percent more than in the same period of that year, said China’s Ministry of Water Resources.267 of the rivers were above the safety level, while 77 hit historical record highs, including the country’s largest freshwater lake Poyang, which hit its highest level since 1998. The Qingyi River, an upper Yangtze tributary, had set its worst flooding in a century. RIvers Yangtze and Huai had seen their highest level of rainfall since records began in 1961, officials said. This year, the national average rainfall reached 616 mm (24 inches)– 13 percent more than the same period in 2019 and the second-highest since 1961.Water levels in some major rivers in the Northeast are still above the limit or warning levels. The ministry and other relevant authorities assured that efforts are ongoing to conduct solid flood control operations as the country is now in its late-stage flood season.As of October 12, this year’s floods have caused property damage worth 32 billion dollars. About 219 people were dead or missing. The affected regions include Guangxi, Guizhou, Sichuan, Hubei, Chongqing, and the lower regions of the Yangtze basin.

At least 13 killed as worst rains in more than 100 years flood Hyderabad, India – A deep depression that crossed Andhra Pradesh coast near Kakinada on Tuesday, October 13, 2020, brought unprecedented rainfall over Hyderabad, capital of the Indian state of Telangana, from Tuesday night to Wednesday morning, claiming the lives of at least 13 people. Authorities are urging residents to stay indoors and remain cautious as more heavy rainfall is expected in the days ahead. Meteorologists said the rains that hit the region are rare and unseasonal. According to the India Meteorological Office, Ghatkesar on the city outskirts received record rainfall of 322 mm (12.6 inches) from Tuesday night to Wednesday morning. This is the heaviest rainfall the city has seen in more than a century. During the same period, Hayathnagar recorded 294 mm (11.5 inches) and Hastinapuram 283 mm (11.1 inches). The resulting floods submerged dozens of colonies in the city and its suburbs, forced authorities to deploy rescue boats and evacuate hundreds of people from their homes. Local media reported hundreds of vehicles stranded on the Hyderabad-Vijayawada highway. Traffic was slow or brought to a standstill on the Hyderabad-Bengaluru highway and toward Hyderabad Airport at Shamshabad. Some parts of the city were without power for over 12 hours, TWC India reports. According to local media reports, 9 people were killed and 3 others injured when a wall collapsed and fell on two houses in Bandlaguda in the old city of Hyderabad. 2 people drowned and 2 others went missing in the Gaganpahad area in Shamshabad on the outskirts of Hyderabad. 2 more persons were feared killed in Abdullahpur, also on the outskirts.

Death toll jumps to 77 as unseasonal, record rains hit parts of India – Heavy rains affecting parts of India, including Telangana, Maharashtra, and Karnataka this week claimed the lives of at least 77 people by October 16, 2020. Meteorologists described the rains as rare and unseasonal. At least 50 people have died in Telangana, many of them in the capital Hyderabad, since Tuesday night (LT), October 13, 2020, when a deep depression brought unprecedented rains and floods. According to the India Meteorological Office (IMD), Ghatkesar on the city outskirts received record rainfall of 322 mm (12.6 inches) from Tuesday night to Wednesday morning. IMD said Hyderabad has last seen such heavy October rains in 1891. 2020 is now the wettest year on record for Telangana, with 404% more than normal annual rainfall. Hyderabad itself has received 404% excess rainfall.

At least 12 people dead after heavy rains trigger flooding in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania – At least 12 people lost their lives after heavy rain and flooding hit Dar es Salaam, Tanzania overnight Tuesday to Wednesday, October 13 to 14, 2020.The deaths occurred in Ilala and Kinondoni Police Zones, Dar es Salaam Special Zone Police Commander Lazaro Mambosasa reported Thursday, October 15.”At around 16:00 UTC (19:00 LT) on October 13, Mariam Yahaya (45), a resident of Vingunguti, died after she drowned while trying to save her belongings which were washed away by water,” he said in a statement.Yahaya’s remains were retrieved in the Msimbazi River, so as five other bodies. Two of the casualties were identified as 18-year-old Herieth Kanuti and 19-year-old Ipyana Mwakifuna. The other three were yet to be identified. The body of another victim, 30-year-old Philipo Feliciani from Tabata Kimanga, was found in Tenge River on Wednesday.”The victim died after falling off and being washed away by water as he tried to cross the bridge used by pedestrians at Tabata Kimanga.” Two unidentified men were found dead in Ukonga-Sabasa and Msimbazi River. Meanwhile, two children from the same family drowned after their house in Kogogo valley was inundated. Two adults were also killed.

Statistics: Sharp increase in natural disasters over the past 20 years – A new United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) report confirms how extreme weather events have come to dominate the disaster landscape at the beginning of 21st century. Floods and storms were the most prevalent disaster events, followed by earthquakes, extreme temperatures, landslides, droughts, wildfires, volcanic activity and dry mass movement. UNDRR used statistics from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) which records disasters which have killed ten or more people, affected 100 or more people, resulted in a declared state of emergency, or a call for international assistance. There were 7 348 major natural disaster events from 2000 to 2019, with 1.23 million lives lost and 4.2 billion people affected, resulting in approximately US$2.97 trillion in global economic losses. This is a sharp increase over the previous 20-year period (1980 – 1999) when EM-DAT recorded 4 212 natural disasters worldwide, 1.19 million lives lost, 3.25 billion people affected, and approximately US$1.63 trillion in economic losses. On average, there were 367 disaster events each year from 2000 to 2019, the majority of which were floods and storms (44% and 28%, respectively). According to the report, much of the difference is explained by a rise in climate-related disasters, including extreme weather events: from 3 656 climate-related events (1980 – 1999) to 6 681 climate-related disasters in the period 2000 – 2019. Floods and storms were the most prevalent disaster events. The last twenty years have seen the number of major floods more than double, from 1 389 to 3 254, while the incidence of storms grew from 1 457 to 2 034. There has also been a rise in geo-physical events including earthquakes and tsunamis which have killed more people than any of the other natural hazards under review in the report.

Natural disasters surge in past 20 years, likely to continue to wreak havoc: U.N. (Reuters) – Extreme weather events have increased dramatically in the past 20 years, taking a heavy human and economic toll worldwide, and are likely to wreak further havoc, the United Nations said on Monday. Heatwaves and droughts will pose the greatest threat in the next decade, as temperatures continue to rise due to heat-trapping gases, experts said. China (577) and the United States (467) recorded the highest number of disaster events from 2000 to 2019, followed by India (321), the Philippines (304) and Indonesia (278), the U.N. said in a report issued the day before the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction. Eight of the top 10 countries are in Asia. Some 7,348 major disaster events were recorded globally, claiming 1.23 million lives, affecting 4.2 billion people and causing $2.97 trillion in economic losses during the two-decade period.Drought, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires and extreme temperature events caused major damage. “The good news is that more lives have been saved but the bad news is that more people are being affected by the expanding climate emergency,” Mami Mizutori, the U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction, told a news briefing. She called for governments to invest in early warning systems and implement disaster risk reduction strategies. Debarati Guha-Sapir of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at the University of Louvain, Belgium, which provided data for the report, said: “If this level of growth in extreme weather events continues over the next twenty years, the future of mankind looks very bleak indeed. “Heatwaves are going to be our biggest challenge in the next 10 years, especially in the poor countries,” she said. Last month was the world’s hottest September on record, with unusually high temperatures recorded off Siberia, in the Middle East, and in parts of South America and Australia, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said. Global temperatures will continue to warm over the next five years, and may even temporarily rise to more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in July. Scientists have set 1.5C (2.7 Fahrenheit) as the ceiling for avoiding catastrophic climate change.

Wildfires rage across South America, causing ‘total destruction’ – (5 videos, graphics) Wildfires have been tearing through parts of South America this year, particularly Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay, causing ‘total destruction’ in some parts of the continent, according to primatologist Martin Kowalewski, who measured the scale of fires in the number of caraya monkeys that have perished.”Of the 20 family groups that we used to trace in the wild, each group consisting of seven or eight monkeys, at least five groups were burned alive,” Kowalewski told the Guardian.”Carpinchos (giant South American rodents), otters, two species of fox, guazu deer, yacare caimans, turtles, snakes. Birds are better at escaping the fire, but that was before all the deforestation. Now they have nowhere to go because there is nowhere else. The forest is so fragmented that they have nowhere to nest.” The main areas affected are the Gran Chaco forest that touches Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, the Brazilian and Bolivian Amazon, the Pantanal wetlands shared by Brazil and Paraguay, and Argentina’s Parana Delta wetlands. In Argentina, a dozen provinces are suffering the worst fires in decades, causing health issues in citizens from a number of smoke-invaded cities. Wildlife has also been destroyed, affecting endangered monkeys, jaguars, birds, and reptiles. Parts of the heavily deforested northern Gran Chaco are burning, as well as the eastern Parana Delta wetlands.In Paraguay, the congress has declared a national emergency on October 1 as more than 12 000 outbreaks were recorded, ripping through wide swaths of the Chaco dry forest. Omar Cabanellas, mayor of the Chaco town of General Bruguez, said a man died in “totally uncontrollable” fires that affected 155 000 ha (383 000 acres). In Bolivia, the land-locked country next to Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, a state of emergency was declared last month as flames ripped through 1.1 million hectares (2.7 million acres). More than 50 active fires have been reported, but the number of areas subject to smoke hazards was much greater due to drought and the use of fire to graze farmland. “The fires are advancing, and due to winds and high temperatures there is no other way to face this crisis,” said Defense Minister Fernando Lopez. More than 600 families have been affected in the country.

Mount Kilimanjaro Is On Fire – Mount Kilimanjaro, which is Africa’s highest peak at nearly 6,000 metres, is on fire.The cause of the inferno which is believed to be occurring hundreds of metres above sea level is yet to be established.Eyewitnesses say efforts by local communities to extinguish the wild fires are underway but this is hampered by the altitude of the blaze. The flames could easily be seen from as far as Moshi town which is some tens of kilometers away from the mountain. According to the Kilimanjaro National Park (Kinapa), the fire broke out late in the afternoon on Sunday October 11. This was later confirmed by the Tanzania National Parks Communications manager Patrick Shelutete, who said the agency would issue a detailed statement later. Mountain climbers on the Marangu route who were at Kibo Hut said they saw the fire in shrubs that are close to Mandara. Given the nature of the vegetation, it could spread further if not contained.

PG&E equipment suspected as cause of deadly Zogg fire – Los Angeles Times –Pacific Gas & Electric Co. said California investigators were looking at its equipment as a possible cause of a fire that killed four people and burned more than 56,000 acres in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the northern part of the state.The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has taken some of the utility’s equipment in its investigation of the Zogg fire in Shasta County, which is 95% contained, PG&E said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The utility has filed a report on the incident with state regulators.PG&E said in a statement that its report was preliminary and it was cooperating with investigators. Cal Fire has yet to determine the cause of the blaze. The company emerged from bankruptcy this summer, having agreed to pay $25.5 billion to settle damage claims from a series of deadly fires blamed on its equipment. It also pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter over the 2018 Camp fire in Northern California, the deadliest corporate crime in U.S. history. The California utility giant has vowed to overhaul its operations and put a greater focus on safety in an effort to avoid sparking another catastrophic fire. It remains on criminal probation overseen by a federal judge in San Francisco. The utility had cut power in the general area of the Zogg fire, but it hadn’t deenergized lines where the blaze is thought to have started. PG&E said its records indicated that its equipment recorded alarms and other activity related to a power line in an area where the Zogg fire began and near the time of its ignition. The company’s data don’t show what caused the problems on the line, PG&E said in its report.

Trump Admin Denies California’s Request for Wildfire Aid – The Trump administration rejected California’s federal relief request to help recover from six recent wildfires,The Los Angeles Times reported.California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office requested a presidential disaster declaration for federal relief funds to help with cleanup efforts, including the Creek Fire, the largest in the state’s history, CNN reported. The relief would have also assisted recovery efforts from the Bobcat Fire in Los Angeles County and the El Dorado Fire, which resulted from a gender-reveal party mishap.”The request for a Major Presidential Disaster Declaration for early September fires has been denied by the federal administration,” Brian Ferguson, a spokesperson for the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services told CNN.Ferguson told the The Los Angeles Times that he could not provide a reason for the denial.Newsom wrote a letter to President Trump on September 28 asking for federal assistance, during which time the August Complex Fire continued to grow; it has since burned more than one million acres.”The severity and magnitude of these fires continue to cause significant impacts to the State and to the affected local jurisdictions, such that the recovery efforts remain beyond the State’s capabilities,” ABC Newsreported Newsom wrote in September. “Many of the counties impacted by these wildfires are still recovering from previous devastating wildfires, storms, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.”The state plans to appeal the decision. In the meantime, “officials are looking for other avenues for federal assistance” to help wildfire victims, a spokesperson for the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services told ABC News.The state did not request a specific dollar amount, though Newsom did ballpark the figure around $346 million, ABC News reported. Ferguson, however, said the figure could easily pass that number.

Cameron Peak Fire grows to largest in Colorado’s history – The Cameron Peak Fire started on August 13, 2020, on the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests near Cameron Pass and Chambers Lake in Colorado. By October 14, it surpassed both the 2002 Hayman and 2020 Pine Gulch fires to become the largest wildfire in history completely contained within the State of Colorado.The cause of the fire is still under investigation.As of 16:30 UTC on August 15, the fire grew to 66 425 ha (164 140 acres) and is 56% contained. The estimated containment date is November 8.The Cameron Peak Fire has now surpassed the 2020 Pine Gulch Fire, which burned about 56 254 ha (139 007 acres), and the Hayman Fire, which burned through more than 55 846 ha (138 000 acres) in 2002 and destroyed 600 structures. On Wednesday, October 14, fire officials upgraded evacuations from voluntary to Mandatory for Lory State Park. “Residents and business occupants should evacuate the area immediately and as quickly as possible due to immediate and imminent danger. Do not delay leaving to gather belongings or make efforts to protect your home or business,” they said in a statement. “Evacuating immediately not only supports your safety but also allows emergency crews better access to the area.” The fire has so far damaged or destroyed 95 buildings, including 33 homes. It was extremely active today as a result of dry conditions and high winds.High winds will continue to push the fire through the crowns well into the evening hours. High rates of spread and extreme fire behavior are expected.Continued high rates of spread due to dry conditions and high winds is expected over the next 24 hours.

Colorado Battles Largest Wildfire in State History – For the second time this year, Colorado is battling the largest wildfire in state history.Strong winds pushed the Cameron Peak fire 17 miles to the east Tuesday and Wednesday, Wildfire Today reported. It burned more than 20,000 acres in a single day, swelling to 158,300 acres by 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and placing at least nine new areas under evacuation orders, the Fort Collins Coloradoan reported. “This really was almost an epic day for doing evacuations and again, for everybody that’s been moved, I know it’s extremely difficult,” officials said Wednesday night, as CBS4 Denver reported. “We do know that we lost structures today and for anybody who is impacted, you know, our heart goes out to you.” One family lost two cabins they owned in the Buckhorn Canyon area. .. Despite these individual tragedies, Larimer County Sheriff Justin Smith said the day could have been even worse.”We have no reported injuries, no deaths, a lot fewer structures were impacted that we truly anticipated based on what we saw with that said, there’s certainly a lot of folks that got hit,” he said, as Colorado Public Radio reported. The Cameron Peak fire has been burning since Aug. 13 in the Arapahoe and Roosevelt National Forest. It has persisted despite a snowstorm in early September and more snow on Sunday, fueled by high winds anddrought. It had already destroyed or damaged 99 structures before exploding Tuesday, and officials said conditions were still too dangerous to assess the total number of buildings impacted in the last 24 hours. It is now 56 percent contained and more than 1,000 people are fighting it.The fire is burning to the west of Fort Collins, but Smith said he did not think the flames would reach that more populous area or the nearby city of Loveland because they are protected by bodies of water and a lack of the heavy timber that feeds the flames.The two largest fires in Colorado history both ignited this year. The Cameron Peak fire unseated the Pine Gulch fire, which burned 139,007 acres over the summer and held the record for only 48 days.The ten largest fires in Colorado history all took place in the last 20 years, and seven took place in the last 10, according to figures reported by the Fort Collins Coloradoan. As of August, 2020 was Colorado’s third driest year on record and twelfth warmest, according to Colorado Public Radio. Almost a fourth of the state is experiencing extreme drought.

Climate change could shift Pennsylvania’s wildfire season | StateImpact Pennsylvania – Wildfires aggravated by the effects of climate change have been raging across the western United States for weeks. The commonwealth is starting to see changes in its fire season as well. Data from the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources shows Pennsylvania had 686 fires on average each year between 2015 and 2019. Most of the state’s fires are small and are extinguished quickly. They also typically happen in the spring. But Mike Kern, Chief of Forest Fire Protection under DCNR, said this year they saw an unusually high number of fires in February – 161 this year compared to 11 a year earlier. “It’s pretty rare,” he said. “Usually in February we have snow on the ground or it’s cold enough, there’s not a lot of fires. Anytime the vegetation here is dormant and it’s dry enough, we can have fires.” Scientists expect Pennsylvania’s climate to get warmer and wetter because of climate change. Kern said that might make fires more common in different seasons. He said it only takes a few degrees for a snowstorm to turn to rain. In that case, some rain will soak into the ground, some will dry up, and dormant vegetation will be susceptible to fires. The Wolf Administration has warned of a heightened wildfire risk in Pennsylvania this fall. Precipitation totals from the National Weather Service show a wide area of central Pennsylvania with below-average rainfall this year.DCNR is responsible for only two million of the state’s 17 million forested acres. Kern said the best prevention tool the state has is public education. More than 95 percent of Pennsylvania’s wildfires are caused by people. The most common cause of Pennsylvania’s wildfires is debris burning.

What We Can Learn From Indigenous Traditions – Indigenous people around the world have lived in concert with nature for centuries, practicing responsible land management, regenerative farming practices and water conservation. From the Americas to the Amazon to Australia, culturally significant controlled burns have been an integral part of proactive fire management that prevents forest fires from spreading.In one example, Karuk tribal traditions in Northern California use frequent, low-intensity fires to help restore and maintain the region’s flora and fauna, according to researchers in The Conversation. More specifically, the fires help restore grassland for elk and for making basketry. Meanwhile, smoke from summer fires provides cool temperatures for river fish.”[Cultural burning] links back to the tribal philosophy of fire as medicine,” Frank Kanawha Lake, a research ecologist with the USDA Forest Service, firefighter and Karuk descendent, told the The History Channel. “When you prescribe it, you’re getting the right dose to maintain the abundance of productivity of all ecosystem services to support the ecology in your culture.”Aboriginal Australians monitor controlled fires to prevent them from damaging seedlings or soil nutrients. They also avoid burning logs or trees that house insects and animals. Furthermore, the controlled burns help to restore growth and strengthen ecosystems, Yes! Magazine reported. Over in the Amazon, the Kuikuro people in the Xingu Indigenous Territory use an elaborate system of ditches, dikes and roads to create a break that controls the spread of wildfires, according to The New York Times.

Extreme drought drains Paraguay River to its lowest level in 50 years – The Paraguay River is now on its lowest level in 50 years as the region is reeling from months of extreme drought. The drop in water levels slowed down cargo vessel traffic, resulting in cost overruns for imported goods and a loss of 250 million dollars. The river has been depleted due to a lack of rainfall in the Pantanal area of Mato Grosso, Brazil. The water flows from that area, running through Bolivia and Argentina. Around 85 percent of Paraguay’s foreign trade is conducted through the river. The crisis has led to major cost overruns for the transport of imported goods such as fuel, fertilizer, and food, as the water depletion slowed down cargo vessel traffic. The crisis has also exposed the precariousness of Paraguay’s access to drinking water, the Associated Press (AP) noted. Nery Gimenez, president of the Paraguayan Importers Center, told the AP that the country has never had a situation as serious as this one. “We have never had a situation as serious as the one we are experiencing now. We are approaching the end of the year, a time when more products must enter.” Gimenez added that the government had announced the lifting of pandemic-related lockdown, but the river crisis is threatening the resurgence of economic activity.

La Nina to Intensify U.S. Drought This Winter, NOAA Predicts – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted a mild winter for most of the U.S. Thursday, forecasting that the drought that now covers nearly half the country will get worse, according to The New York Times.NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center released its winter outlook for 2020-2021 Thursday and predicted that much of the South and Southwest will remain dry this winter, while areas in the Pacific Northwest and the Upper Plains will have the opposite problem – they will have a wetter than average winter, as CNN reported.That means that the current drought that blankets just under 47 percent of the continental U.S. will only get worse during the months that usually bring relief. The country is currently in its most widespread drought since 2013.NOAA’s prediction model said that this year’s La Nina will drive warmer and drier weather through the southern part of the country this winter. This zone includes areas where wildfires are currently burning, like Southern California and Colorado.”With La Nina well established and expected to persist through the upcoming 2020 winter season, we anticipate the typical, cooler, wetter North, and warmer, drier South, as the most likely outcome of winter weather that the U.S. will experience this year,” said Mike Halpert, deputy director of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, in a news release, as The Washington Post reported. The model splits the lower 48 states into three stripes. One massive stripe runs coast-to-coast from Southern California to North Carolina. It will see a dry winter. A band that encompasses Oregon and Washington and runs along the northern part of the country to Michigan will see a wet winter. The rest of the country will see fairly normal conditions, as the AP reported.

Droughts That Start Over the Ocean? They’re Often Worse Than Those That Form Over Land – Droughts usually evoke visions of cracked earth, withered crops, dried-up rivers and dust storms. But droughts can also form over oceans, and when they then move ashore they are often more intense and longer-lasting than purely land-born dry spells.A Sept. 21 study published in the journal Water Resources Research found that, of all the droughts that affected land areas globally from 1981 to 2018, about 1 in 6 started over water and moved onto land, with a particularly high frequency along the West Coast of North America, said senior study author Noah Diffenbaugh, a Stanford climate researcher.”Because they usually take a number of months to migrate onto land, there is a potential that tracking moisture deficits over the ocean could provide advance warning to help protect against at least some of the most severe droughts,” he said, adding that the landfalling droughts, as those that move from the ocean to terra firma are known, grow three times as quickly as land-only droughts. The research zoomed in on West Coast landfalling droughts and linked them with Pacific Ocean weather patterns that are changing in a warming world. Those dry spells happen when large areas of stable air persist much longer than normal off the West Coast. That pattern lingered so long in the period from 2012 to 2017 that scientists named it the “ridiculously resilient ridge,” and a 2016 studyshowed that global warming made that pattern more likely. The long drought dried forests and brush, killing millions of trees, and partly setting the stage for the 2020 siege of wildfires.Currently, more than half the West-nearly 1 million square miles-is experiencing acute drought conditions, according to the National Integrated Drought Information System. The epicenter is the Southwest, where drought conditions have mostly prevailed since about 2000, the start of a megadrought that could last for decades, according to recent research. The current Western drought could soon rise to a crisis level, with federal water managers warning that Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two key Colorado River reservoirs, may drop to levels that could result in economically damaging cuts to water allocations in the Southwest and California. In the last four decades, severe droughts caused $252.7 billion in economic losses and damage in the United States, about 14 percent of the total cost of climate disasters in that span. Only hurricanes, at $954.4 billion, and severe storms, at $268.4 billion, have caused more damage.

Study finds ocean warming has killed half the coral in Great Barrier Reef – A recent study found that ocean warming has killed half of the coral in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B on Wednesday London time, involved four Australian researchers who counted coral abundance over three decades starting in 1995. The researchers discovered that “the abundance of large colonies on the crest” fell by up to 98 percent, while there was a minor 25-percent increase in coral on the southern slope. The unusually warm ocean temperatures affected coral of all sizes, almost all species and in shallow and deeper weather, Terry Hughes, a co-author, told The Washington Post. Hughes, a professor at the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Queensland, said branching and table-shaped corals were the “worst affected” during record-high temperatures in 2016 and 2017. “We expect this decline to continue,” Hughes said, citing the warming caused by humans. “The only effective way to improve the outcome for coral reefs is global action on greenhouse gasses. If global temperatures rise to 3 or 4 [degrees Celsius], the reef will be unrecognizable, so there is no time to lose.” Andreas Dietzel, another co-author and professor at the ARC Center, told the Post that the coral recovering rates are going “very slowly” and are not keeping up with the destruction. “Corals are tremendously resilient because of their capacity to produce millions of babies but they/we desperately need a break from disturbances,” Dietzel said. Second GOP senator attends Barrett hearings in person after COVID-19… Majorities in four battleground states support ObamaCare: poll Gabby Ahmadia, the director of ocean science at the World Wildlife Fund, told the newspaper that some coral are establishing a resistance to warming, providing some hope. But she noted, “a lot of people say 90 percent of coral loss will happen by 2050.”

Earth breaks September heat record, may reach warmest year – Earth sweltered to a record hot September last month, with U.S. climate officials saying there’s nearly a two-to-one chance that 2020 will end up as the globe’s hottest year on record. Boosted by human-caused climate change, global temperatures averaged 60.75 degrees (15.97 Celsius) last month, edging out 2015 and 2016 for the hottest September in 141 years of recordkeeping, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Wednesday. That’s 1.75 degrees (0.97 degrees Celsius) above the 20th century average. This record was driven by high heat in Europe, Northern Asia, Russia and much of the Southern Hemisphere, said NOAA climatologist Ahira Sanchez-Lugo. California and Oregon had their hottest Septembers on record. Earth has had 44 straight Septembers where it has been warmer than the 20th century average and 429 straight months without a cooler than normal month, according to NOAA. The hottest seven Septembers on record have been the last seven. That means “that no millennial or even parts of Gen-X has lived through a cooler than normal September,” said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello, herself a millennial. What’s happening is a combination of global warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas and natural variability, Sanchez-Lugo said. But the biggest factor is the human-caused warming, she and Dello said. The globe set this record despite a La Nina, which is a cooling of parts of the central Pacific that changes weather patterns and usually slightly lowers temperatures. The first nine months of 2020 are the second warmest on record, a shade behind 2016 when there was a strong warming El Nino. But Sanchez-Lugo said her office’s calculations show that there’s a 64.7% chance that 2020 will pass 2016 in the last three months to take the title as the warmest year on record. And if it doesn’t make it, she said it’ll easily be in the top three, probably top two.

‘The Arctic Ocean Is Dying’: Grim Conclusion as Biggest North Pole Mission Returns — The largest Arctic research expedition in history returned to Germany Monday after 13 months in the Arctic, including several months with its ship deliberately trapped by sea ice, according to The New York Times.The mission aboard the German Alfred Wegener Institute’s Polarstern ship spent the year gathering vital information that would give scientists a window into the future of the Arctic during the climate crisis.”We witnessed how the Arctic ocean is dying,” said Markus Rex, the mission’s leader, to Agence-France Presse (AFP). “We saw this process right outside our windows, or when we walked on the brittle ice.” The team aboard the Polarstern comprised more than 300 hundred scientists from 20 countries, including the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China. According to Rex, the dramatic consequences of a warming planet were evident in an area he described as “the epicenter of climate change,” as AFP reported. “We basically achieved everything we set out to do,” Rex told The Associated Press (AP) by satellite phone as the expedition left the polar circle last week. “We conducted measurements for a whole year with just a short break.” The trip to measure the ice and gauge conditions in one of the planet’s harshest environments cost $177 million, according to the AP, and the mission almost had to be abandoned months early when the coronavirus was detected on the mission. And yet, the expedition was able to stay the course and complete its research. “We’re bringing back a trove of data, along with countless samples of ice cores, snow and water,” The observations of the crew reflect a grim future for the Arctic. Rex warned that if the current warming trend the planet is on continues, then soon the Arctic will see ice-free summer. He noted that in some areas that were once covered in ice, the crew was able to sail through open water stretching out as far as the eye could see, as AFP reported. “At the North Pole itself, we found badly eroded, melted, thin and brittle ice,” said Rex, according to AFP. “We went above and beyond the data collection we set out to do,” said Webster, according to the AP. The crew returned with 150 terabytes of data and more than 1,000 ice samples.

Maui Has Begun the Process of Managed Retreat. It Wants Big Oil to Pay the Cost of Sea Level Rise. – With nearly 300 miles of coastline, the Hawaiian islands that make up Maui County face the threat of sea level rise from all sides. It’s that assault that has formed the foundation of a lawsuit Maui filed this week against 20 fossil fuel companies seeking compensation for the rising costs of climate change.The lawsuit alleges that the companies, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and ConocoPhillips, knew their products produced warming greenhouse gases that threatened the planet but hid those dangers from Maui’s people and businesses to maximize corporate profits.”Defendants have known for more than 50 years that greenhouse gas pollution from their fossil fuel products would have significant adverse impacts on the Earth’s climate and sea levels,” the lawsuit said. “Instead of warning of those known consequences … defendants concealed the dangers, promoted false and misleading information, sought to undermine public support for greenhouse gas regulation, and engaged in massive campaigns to promote the ever-increasing use of their products at ever-greater volumes.” Roadways, parks, infrastructure and buildings that hug the coastline are vulnerable to billions of dollars in damages from sea level rise caused by climate change, the lawsuit said. Some of Maui’s most scenic and iconic highways are at risk, including a stretch of Honoapiilani Highway from Papalaua State Wayside Park to the Pali side of the town of Lahaina. Maui County, which consists of the islands of Maui, Lanai, most of Molokai and two uninhabited islands, already has begun working on a plan for managed retreat and new infrastructure to protect communities from the impacts of rising sea levels. Fossil fuel companies could have taken steps to reduce damage or warn people about the danger from continued use of oil and gas products that harm the environment, the lawsuit said. “It might be a David vs. Goliath case, but someone has to take a stand and oil companies need to pay for the damage they knowingly caused,” Maui Mayor Michael Victorino said in a prepared statement. “Our ‘rock’ is science, which clearly shows the impacts of burning fossil fuels have led to sea level rise and other environmental impacts that will get worse, perhaps much worse, in the years ahead.”

Emissions of Nitrous Oxide, a Climate Super-Pollutant, Are Rising Fast on a Worst-Case Trajectory – Emissions of nitrous oxide, a climate super-pollutant hundreds of times more potent than carbon dioxide, are rising faster than previously thought-at a rate that not only threatens international targets to limit global warming, but is consistent with a worst-case trajectory for climate change, a new study suggests. The findings, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, underscore the need for strong climate policies that do not focus solely on carbon dioxide, the dominant greenhouse gas.The study, arguably the most comprehensive assessment of the global nitrogen cycle ever conducted, found that nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions caused by human activities have increased by 30 percent since 1980. Those emissions, more than two-thirds of which come from agriculture, account for nearly half of all nitrous oxide released over the past decade, with the rest coming from natural ecosystems. Nitrous oxide is the third most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide and methane, and is responsible for roughly 7 percent of global warming since preindustrial times. It is nearly 300 times more potent at warming the planet than carbon dioxide, which means that even small sources of emissions can have an outsized impact on the climate. Nitrous oxide is also the largest contributor to atmospheric ozone depletion that is not controlled by the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement developed in the 1980s to phase out ozone depleting chemicals through mandatory emissions reductions. Some policy experts say the agreement should now be extended to include nitrous oxide. Emissions reported in the current study are in line with, or slightly higher than, a “worst case” emissions scenario by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Such a scenario assumes that growth in fossil fuel power production and the use of nitrogen-based fertilizer, the driving force in human-caused nitrous oxide emissions, continue unabated. Under the worst case scenario, the world’s average temperature would rise by approximately 4.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, far higher than the limit of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius of warming targeted in the Paris climate agreement. “Current nitrous oxide emissions are not tenable,” “The numbers are very large, and the increases are very rapid.”

Methane Emissions Soar 32% Despite Lockdowns and Green Pledges – The first eight months of the year saw global methane emissions rise by 32 percent, according to Paris-based data firm Karryos, as Reuters reported.The rise in the harmful greenhouse gas is notable because it happened during worldwide lockdowns that led to drops in carbon emissions. It also happened despite pledges from the oil and gas sector to limit their carbon emissions.Karryos, which analyzed satellite data to calculate the extent of methane emissions, says there are roughly 100 methane leaks happening around the world at any given moment.”Such increases in methane emissions are concerning and in stark contradiction to the direction set in theParis agreement,” said Antoine Rostand, president of Kayrros, as The Washington Post reported. “Despite much talk of climate action by energy industry stakeholders, global methane emissions continue to increase steeply.”According to Karryos’ data, in some methane hotspots, emissions rose 40 percent higher than over the same time frame in 2019. Those areas were Algeria, Russia and Turkmenistan. In addition to those three countries, the U.S., Iraq and Iran were the three largest methane emitters in the first two-thirds of 2020, as The Washington Post reported.Methane does not stick around the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide, but it is a far more potent gas in the short term. In fact, according to Climate Change News, methane’s impact on the heating of the planet is 84 times higher than CO2 over its first 20 years.The technology to reduce methane emissions in the oil and gas industry is already available. According to theInternational Energy Agency, if the industry used current technology, it could lower its methane emissions by three-fourths in the next decade, as Climate Change News reported.Rostand said the largest leak that Karryos was able to detect was in Iraq, which released 400 tons per hour. The leak extended 150 miles into Saudi Arabia. In the U.S., the largest leak emitted 150 tons of methane per hour, which is equivalent to 10 coal-fired plants running at maximum capacity, as The Washington Post reported.”We see from the sky, not on the ground, but what we are observing is the wrong trend. We should have expected decreases … but that has not been the case,” Rostand told the oil and gas news site Upstream.Fixing methane gas leaks is expensive and requires significant equipment upgrades, which the industry has been slow to invest in as its profits have plummeted in 2020 due to decreasing demand. “It’s a pure consequence of cost cutting,” Rostand said, as Reuters reported.

Carbon dioxide emissions may not surpass 2019 levels until 2027: analysis – Global carbon dioxide emissions are expected to increase after the pandemic, but may not exceed 2019 levels until 2027, according to a projection from the International Energy Agency (IEA). Demand for energy has decreased since the start of the pandemic for reasons including reduced air and vehicle travel. The IEA, which pushes for a “sustainable energy future,” projects a 7 percent drop in energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in 2020 amid reductions in fossil fuel use. The analysis predicted a decline in annual CO2 emissions to where they were a decade ago. However, it says there “may not have been” a similar fall in emissions of methane, a more powerful greenhouse gas. Under an IEA model based on today’s current energy policies in which the pandemic comes under control in 2021, the global economy will return to its pre-pandemic level in 2021 and energy demand will return by early 2023, but emissions won’t exceed 2019 levels until 2027. Energy demand will recover faster than the rate of emissions because renewables will make up a greater share of the market, while the use of coal will decline, according to the model. In 2020, the report estimates that global energy demand will drop by 5 percent and energy investment will drop by 18 percent. Specifically, demand for oil is expected to drop 8 percent while coal use is expected to drop 7 percent. Natural gas demand is slated to drop 3 percent while renewables grow slightly. In the long term, the report projects that under this scenario coal will remain about 8 percent lower than pre-coronavirus levels through 2030, while oil demand is expected to recover by 2023 but plateau after 2030. It projects that natural gas will increase by 14 percent over 2019 levels by 2030.

Investors Worth $5 Trillion Set Major Emissions Reduction Targets -Thirty of the world’s largest investors, who together control $5 trillion in assets, have pledged to cut thegreenhouse gas emissions of their portfolios by as much as 29 percent in five years.The investors, who include Allianz, the Church of England and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, are all part of the UN convened Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance. The group formed in 2019 with the goal of reducing the emissions of their investment portfolios to net zero by 2050 and limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. On the road to that goal, the group announced their 2025 Target Setting Protocol Tuesday, which includes the goal to reduce emissions across members’ portfolios by 16 to 29 percent of 2019 levels by 2025.”According to the UNEP Emissions Gap Report, every year of postponed emissions peak means that deeper and faster cuts will be required,” UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative leader Eric Usher said in apress release. “The Target-Setting Protocol represents world-leading progress on the required emissions reductions from some of the biggest investors in the world.”To reach their goal, the investors will pinpoint the 20 companies most responsible for their portfolios’ emissions, The Guardian explained. They will also set specific targets for highly emitting sectors like oil and gas, transport and utilities.Some financial institutions have acted on the climate crisis by divesting entirely from certain companies or refusing to fund certain ventures. For example, Norway’s largest hedge fund divested in August from companies that lobby against climate action or make more than five percent of their revenue from coal or oil sands. The Net-Zero Asset Owners Alliance, however, takes a different approach, seeking instead to engage with the companies it invests in in order to push the overall economy towards a just transition to renewable energy.”Although decarbonization of portfolios could be easily achieved by selling carbon intensive investments, it is highly questionable if such actions alone would have a positive impact on the real economy,” the group explained in the press release. “Additionally, it might undermine Alliance members ability to engage with these [companies] to effect reductions in the real economy.”Part of that engagement means encouraging companies to share regular reports on their climate actions and to craft plans to green their business, according to The Guardian. The alliance itself will also release yearly reports, and plans to grow its membership to 200 or the assets under its control to $25 trillion.”Alliance members start out by changing themselves and then reach out to various companies to work on the change of their businesses,” Alliance Chair Gunther Thallinger, who serves on the board of management for Allianz SE, said in the press release. “Reaching net-zero is not simply reducing emissions and carrying on with the business models of today. There are profound changes and opportunities that will come from the net-zero economy, we see new business opportunities and strong wins for those who are ready to lead.”

CLIMATE: FERC takes ‘landmark action’ on carbon pricing — Thursday, October 15, 2020 — A Republican-led Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued a proposed policy statement today saying the panel has the authority and willingness to consider potential grid operators’ requests to incorporate a carbon tax into its rate structures.The move – led by Republican FERC Chairman Neil Chatterjee and Democratic Commissioner Richard Glick – marks a milestone in the commission’s treatment of state-led, market-based policies that address carbon emissions stemming from the electric sector.”If these questions were easily answered, we’d have reached a solution already, but I don’t believe we can turn a blind eye or keep kicking the can down the road just because it’s the easy way out,” Chatterjee said. “So I’m proud of the landmark action we’re taking today at FERC to issue this first-of-its-kind, bipartisan proposed policy statement on carbon pricing,” he said.In effect, the proposed statement gives reassurance to states that the commission would not reject their carbon fee rate structure proposals out of hand, Chatterjee said.The statement follows a Sept. 30 technical conference where the vast majority of participants agreed that FERC had the authority, under Section 205 of the Federal Power Act, to address carbon pricing proposals from regional transmission organizations and independent system operators (Energywire, Oct. 1).FERC held the technical conference following a request from advocates and companies, including clean energy groups like the Advanced Energy Economy, the American Council on Renewable Energy and the Natural Gas Supply Association, and utilities like NextEra Energy Inc. and LS Power (Energywire, April 15).Chatterjee emphasized today that the proposed policy statement did not indicate that FERC would take a proactive approach to making a nationwide carbon fee or any other measure to address emissions. “I may sound like a broken record here, but I’ll say it again: The [Federal Power Act] does not give us authority to act as an environmental regulator,” Chatterjee said. “We have neither the expertise nor the authority to drive emissions policy in this space. So that is not the objective here today.”

Barrett deflects senators’ questions on climate change –Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett refused to say whether she accepts the science of climate change, saying she lacks the expertise to know for sure and calling it a topic too controversial to get into. On Wednesday, pressed at her confirmation hearing by Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California, Barrett framed acknowledgment of manmade climate change as a matter of policy, not science. Barrett said Harris, the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee as well as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was trying to get her to state an opinion “on a very contentious matter of public debate, and I will not do that.” Barrett was responding to a series of questions from Harris, including whether she thinks the novel coronavirus is infectious, whether smoking causes cancer and whether “climate change is happening and it’s threatening the air we breathe and the water we drink.” The federal appeals court judge responded that she does think coronavirus is infectious and smoking causes cancer. She rebuffed Harris on the climate change question, however, for seeking to “solicit an opinion” on a “matter of public policy, especially one that is politically controversial.” The exchange occurred during the committee’s hearing on Barrett’s nomination to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. Scientists say climate change is a matter of established fact and that the damage is mostly caused by people burning oil, gas and coal. Climate experts, including federal scientists in the Trump administration, say increasingly fierce wildfires, hurricanes and other natural disasters point to the urgency of global warming.

Amy Coney Barrett Says She Has No ‘Firm Views’ On Climate Change – Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett stood up again for not standing up when asked about climate change at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. During a leading line of questioning from Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) aimed at showing that Barrett has “thought about the world,” as he phrased it, she said she did not have a personal stance on climate change. “Do you have some opinions on climate change that you’ve thought about?” Kennedy asked her. “You know, I’m certainly not a scientist,” President Donald Trump’s nominee responded. After Kennedy encouraged her to elaborate, she said: “I mean, I’ve read things about climate change. I would not say that I have firm views on it.” Barrett’s line that’s she’s “not a scientist” has been a common refrain among climate-denying Republican lawmakers for years. President Barack Obama called out the phrase in his 2015 State of the Union speech, saying you don’t need to be a scientist to grasp that “the best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate.” Barrett saying she doesn’t have firm views on climate change ― something that nearly every scientist says people should view as the greatest threat to humankind ― seems to indicate that, if she’s confirmed, environmental groups challenging the Trump administration’s policies will have one less friend on the Supreme Court. Little has been known about how Barrett may rule on environmental issues. That’s in part because she’s spent most of her career teaching law, not practicing it. She was not asked about climate change during her 2017 nomination hearing for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.

ACTIVISM: Hundreds of law students snub top firm over climate — Thursday, October 15, 2020 —Hundreds of law students pledged to boycott employment at one of the nation’s most prestigious law firms to protest lawyers who they say are exacerbating climate change by representing oil companies.

Mitsubishi Eyes Great Lakes for Offshore Wind Development – Japan’s Mitsubishi Corp. continues to explore the possibility of building an offshore wind project in Lake Erie to deliver power for New York state, as development zones off the Atlantic Coast remain in limited supply. Diamond Offshore Wind, a unit of Mitsubishi Corp., stirred up local opposition last year after submitting an interconnection request with New York’s grid operator for potential capacity in eastern Lake Erie. The developer still believes offshore wind turbines are a good solution for the Great Lakes region as states seek more renewable power and clean energy jobs, CEO Chris Wissemann told GTM. Diamond Offshore Wind was encouraged by a white paper from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority released this summer, looking at the state’s options for meeting its 70 percent renewable energy target for 2030. In the white paper (PDF), NYSERDA called for a feasibility study to “explore and confirm” the potential benefits of offshore wind in the Great Lakes. At this stage, Diamond still does not have a specific project under development in Lake Erie. “We’re watching earnestly to see if New York, through this feasibility study, concludes that projects are worthwhile in the Great Lakes,” Wissemann said. “If so, and if that ultimately turns into a solicitation in the next year or two, we’d be keenly interested in participating.”

JEA plan to raise powerlines over river raises eyebrows – Another costly plan by the JEA is coming under fire after Florida Times-Union reporter Christopher Hong reported the city-owned utility is looking at plans to raise high-voltage power lines crossing the St John’s River to allow bigger ships to access the port of Jacksonville.Hong also reported there is confusion as to who suggested the projected and if it is actually needed.News4Jax verified the information in the Times-Union report and has received the documents which show that the project — yet to be approved — could cost JEA electric ratepayers between $29 million and $96 million.The power-line project has raised many questions since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers determined that raising the power lines is not necessary as part of the current $484-million harbor-deepening project, also to accommodate the larger ships trying to access the Jacksonville Port Authority’s Blount Island docks.The new JEA management team was not aware of any request by the Army Corps to raise the power lines and it has not been discussed at any recent board meetings. The project was being discussed by the former management of JEA.

OUC to wipe out carbon emissions by switching from coal to natural gas, solar energy – – Orlando’s landmark power plants will cease burning coal by 2027 and switch to natural gas as an early step in a sweeping plan by the city’s utility for a surge in solar energy and cuts in carbon emissions of 50 percent by 2030 and entirely by 2050.”I think we have a very good balanced approached,” said Orlando Utilities Commission’s general manager, Clint Bullock. “We are municipal utility and we trying to keep in mind the needs of our community.” OUC has taken nearly two years and a $1 million study to respond in detail to a call by Orlando’s mayor and council for the city to have converted to 100 percent “clean, renewable energy” by the 2050. The utility will consider embracing some nuclear power, depending on the industry’s development of technology for small, modular units. A small portion of fossil-fuel energy, about 7 percent, will continue into 2050 to maintain reliability but would be offset by carbon-reduction measures. The vast majority of power is to flow from solar plants, the utility said.

Energy Demand to Receive a Work-From-Home Boost This Winter – “Get yours before they go,” says the headline on a home improvement article dedicated to the hottest housing trends. The must-have item? A patio heater. With winter in the northern hemisphere fast approaching, the Covid-19 pandemic is prompting families to buy outdoor heaters. Restaurants and bars are also snapping them up to provide al fresco dining and drinking, while Google searches for “patio heating” have jumped to a record high. These heaters rely on electricity or liquefied petroleum gas, like propane. Residential energy demand is set to increase in the coming months as millions of people in Europe, Asia and North America spend more time at home — either working, studying or relaxing on their patios. With many offices still open, commercial use should remain steady, creating a so-called ‘double-heating effect’ that could lead to more use of everything from kerosene to natural gas. Commodity traders are also beginning to bet on a colder-than-normal winter, due to the formation of a La Nina weather pattern in the Pacific Ocean. That — combined with the impact of the coronavirus — may mean that demand for some energy products could be surprisingly strong. “Weather agencies are forecasting a cold start to the 2020-21 winter,” said Amrita Sen, chief oil analyst at consultant Energy Aspects Ltd. in London. “Demand for LPG, kerosene, heating oil and low-sulfur fuel oil could all be boosted by varying degrees.” Heating fuels trading above pre-Covid levels as colder winter weather seen “Weather agencies are forecasting a cold start to the 2020-21 winter,” said Amrita Sen, chief oil analyst at consultant Energy Aspects Ltd. in London. “Demand for LPG, kerosene, heating oil and low-sulfur fuel oil could all be boosted by varying degrees.” The likelihood of higher-than-usual demand has already started to filter through to the market:

• U.S. spot propane prices rose to the highest level this year last week
• The price of natural gas, used to heat homes or produce electricity, has jumped in Asia and Europe to the highest since before the virus
• Double heating could add 5% to gas demand for Europe, said James Huckstepp, manager for EMEA gas analytics at S&P Global Platts
• Meanwhile, the U.S. Henry Hub gas benchmark rallied to a 19-month high earlier this week amid optimism for colder temperatures
• Asian kerosene margins have recovered to $1 a barrel from as low as minus $2 in early September amid an uptick in demand from Japan, where the fuel is used for heating households
• The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries said it expects an increase in U.S. heating oil consumption

The La Nina pattern is expected to bring below-average temperatures to North Asia, which is home to the biggest LNG importers, along with western Canada, parts of the northern U.S. and southern Europe, according to Todd Crawford, chief meteorologist at the Weather Company. Total winter natural gas demand rose by a third from the previous year due to the last major La Nina in 2010-2011, Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. said in a note this month. A colder winter will also likely boost thermal coal consumption in China, while traders say that Japanese buyers have been stockpiling kerosene.

Coronavirus response can ‘reshape the future of energy,’ IEA says in annual report – The world’s response to Covid-19 can “reshape the future of energy” for years to come, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday in its annual World Energy Outlook report.The IEA report underscored that most important of all is how the crisis will ultimately affect the transition to clean energy.The report noted that while the clean energy transition continues to gain momentum, faster and bolder structural changes are needed if the world is to reach net-zero carbon emissions.”The Covid-19 crisis has caused more disruption than any other event in recent history, leaving scars that will last for years to come,” the Paris-based agency said in a statement. “Covid-19 unleased a crisis of exceptional ferocity on countries around the world …The crisis is still unfolding today – and its consequences for the world’s energy future remain highly uncertain.”Going forward, IEA believes that renewables will take “starring roles,” and solar will take “center stage,” driven by supportive government policies and declining costs.”I see solar becoming the new king of the world’s electricity markets,” said Fatih Birol, IEA’s executive director. “Based on today’s policy settings, it is on track to set new records for deployment every year after 2022.”On the other hand, IEA forecasts that coal demand will not return to pre-coronavirus levels, and that it will account for less than 20% of energy consumption by 2040, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution. Oil will remain “vulnerable to the major economic uncertainties resulting from the pandemic,” with demand starting to decline after 2030, the agency said.Due to the ongoing impacts of Covid-19, the IEA expects global energy demand to fall by 5% in 2020, with oil and coal consumption falling 8% and 7%, respectively. Natural gas demand is expected to decline by 3% this year – the largest decline since it became a major source of fuel in the 1930s – but the agency sees an uptick in demand over the next decade driven by growth from emerging economies. The outlook has been revised slightly since April, when the agency predicted energy demand could drop 6% in 2020.

Solar the new ‘king of electricity’ as renewables make up bigger slice of supply: IEA (Reuters) – Solar output is expected to lead a surge in renewable power supply in the next decade, the International Energy Agency said, with renewables seen accounting for 80% of growth in global electricity generation under current conditions. In its annual World Energy Outlook on Tuesday, the IEA said in its central scenario – which reflects policy intentions and targets already announced – renewables are expected to overtake coal as the primary means of producing electricity by 2025. The combined share of solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind in global generation will rise to almost 30% in 2030 from 8% in 2019, it said, with solar PV capacity growing by an average 12% a year. “I see solar becoming the new king of the world’s electricity markets,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said. “Based on today’s policy settings, it is on track to set new records for deployment every year after 2022.” Maturing technology and support mechanisms have cut financing costs for major solar PV projects, the IEA said, helping to bring down output costs overall. Solar PV is now cheaper than new coal- or gas-fired power plants in most countries, it said. Power generation from renewables is the only major source of energy that continued to grow in 2020, the Paris-based agency added.

Trump Moves to Increase Solar Import Tariffs, Kill Bifacial Exemption – A presidential proclamation released by the White House this weekend would increase tariffs on imported solar cells and modules in the final currently planned year of the tariffs and eliminate an exemption for two-sided solar panels, which the administration argued has “impaired the effectiveness” of the tariffs. Trump also directed the U.S. Trade Representative to assess whether the duties, established in 2018 under Section 201 of the 1974 Trade Act, should be extended. The tariffs are currently set to expire in 2022.The American solar industry has thus far managed to live with the challenges brought by the solar tariffs. Though the tariffs, which began at 30 percent in 2018, made some imported panels more expensive, large-scale solar installations have continued to climb since they were established. Several manufacturers also set up shop in the U.S., encouraged by the potential to sell products to developers tariff-free.But increasing the tariffs from 15 to 18 percent in 2021 and extending their duration could pose difficulties for domestic solar installers as the coronavirus pandemic restrains the industry’s overall growth. Eliminating the exemption for bifacial solar panels – which the Trump administration hasrepeatedly tried to do – may have more significant ramifications. Developers have increasingly come to rely on bifacial modules due to their higher efficiency and only marginally higher costs.The Trump administration previously tried to revoke its bifacial exclusion through the U.S. Trade Representative but was rebuffed by the United States Court of International Trade after challenges were lodged by several solar players, including Invenergy and the Solar Energy Industries Association. Under the presidential proclamation, the exclusion would disappear 15 days from the order’s publication on Oct. 10, though the move is still open to legal challenge. The proclamation comes just weeks ahead of the 2020 election, but Trump’s move may have a lasting impact even if his reelection bid is unsuccessful. Democratic candidate Joe Biden has tied clean energy to economic recovery amid the pandemic and set a target for the United States to reach 100 percent clean electricity by 2035, a goal that would rely significantly on a large-scale build-out of solar. Depending on the terms of a possible tariff extension from the U.S. Trade Representative, however, Biden may have limited authority to pull back solar tariffs (it’s also not certain that a Democratic presidential administration would oppose solar tariffs).

Lawsuit filed to halt DeWitt County wind farm – herald-review.com– A lawsuit opposing development of an industrial wind complex in northwest DeWitt County has been filed on behalf of 69 constituents against the DeWitt County Board and Enel Energy, owner of Alta Farms II.”This was something we wanted to avoid, but at this point, we have no choice,” said Olivia Klemm, one of the opponents of the wind farm. “We are not done fighting.”In July, the county board voted 6-5 to approve a special use permit for Enel Energy, owner of Alta Farms II, to build 66 wind turbines, up to 599 feet tall on 12,000 acres in DeWitt County. A group of citizens has been fighting the project for several years. The county board’s two advisory boards, the Regional Planning Commission and the Zoning Board of Appeals, had been presented with 54 hours of testimony from residents and experts. Both of these committees voted not to recommend approval of the special use permit application, Klemm added.”Most of the DeWitt County Board members who voted for the special use permit did not attend the hearings where sentiment and evidence against the project were presented,” she said. “The County Board disregarded these recommendations by their advisory boards, failed to comply with local ordinances and ignored overwhelming community opposition to the wind turbine project,” said Teri Wilson, a DeWitt County resident who owns a home that will be surrounded by the industrial turbines if the project is built.

FERC’s Glick blasts fellow commissioners for intruding on New York’s resource mix decisions -The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Wednesday removed an exemption that had allowed some demand response resources to bid into the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) capacity market below generation offer floors. In a 2-1 decision, the commission determined that payments received under the Commercial System Distribution Load Relief Programs (CSRP) submitted by the ISO “do not qualify for exclusion from the calculation of [Special Case Resources] (SCR) offer floors.” FERC’s decision means these demand response resources, which are compensated by New York distribution utilities for their grid services, will have to bid in at a higher price and be less competitive. Commissioner Richard Glick dissented from the decision, writing that it “perverts buyer-side market power mitigation into a series of unnecessary and unreasoned obstacles to New York’s efforts to shape the resource mix.”For clean energy advocates, FERC’s decision is the most recent move by federal regulators to block the effects of state resource decision-making. Other power producers say the order simply ensures capacity prices reflect actual costs in competitive markets. A spokesperson for NYISO said the grid operator is still reviewing the order and had no comment. Buyer-side market power mitigation measures were developed to ensure entities with both supply and capacity needs could not suppress prices. But clean energy advocates say those rules are now being twisted in order to negate the effects of New York State energy policies. “It’s really an attack on New York’s authority to forge its own energy future,” said said Chris Casey, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Climate and Clean Energy Program. “It’s an unlawful federal overreach that threatens the integrity of the capacity market to protect old, polluting power plants.”

State looks to help people still burning coal for heat to change their ways – A new incentive helps Vermonters who are still heating with coal to switch to renewable energy. The program, designed by the Clean Energy Development Fund, pays 50% of the cost of installing advanced wood heat boilers and furnaces. Residents are eligible for up to $7,000, and businesses can receive up to $27,000 toward the change. While some are shocked that some Vermonters still burn coal, for others, it’s a way of life. Andrew Perchlik, director of the Clean Energy Development Fund, said he was surprised when he learned there were businesses and individuals still heating with coal. Perchlik said he spoke to some people who were eager to change what they saw as an antiquated and unclean heating system, but others have a longstanding commitment to coal. Perchlik worked on designing an incentive for people who wanted to switch their heating, but were facing a big bill. Businesses still using coal have concerns about where they’ll be able to buy it in the future. “We want to make sure they switch to a local, renewable fuel,” said Perchlik, who promotes advanced wood heat – efficient wood chip and wood pellet boilers and furnaces. These fuels can be obtained locally from trees grown in Vermont. According to Perchlik, 80 cents of every dollar spent on fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas leaves the state. With locally grown wood, the money remains in Vermont, where it supports the local economy through the purchase of fuel and delivery services. Burning wood also aligns with the department’s climate and environmental goals, reducing fossil fuel emissions.

The Impact of New Jersey’s New Environmental Justice Law –All 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia have some form of environmental justice policy, intended to protect minorities and low-income citizens from disproportionately high exposure to pollution; but many of these vulnerable communities are still plagued, and at scale, say advocates calling for reform. Now new legislation in New Jersey is getting play as one of the toughest laws against environmental polluters. S232, signed into law in September 2020, will bring a “sea of change” -at least in the Garden State, with its many heavily polluted, low-income neighborhoods, proclaims Governor Phil Murphy. It is the first state law mandating that permits be denied following the determination that a new facility would disproportionately impact “overburdened” communities, compared to other New Jersey communities. And it includes other aggressive measures.The bill explicitly requires that during its permit review, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) evaluates environmental and public health impacts of specific facilities on overburdened communities. (communities where 35% of households qualify as low-income according to the U.S. Census; 40% of households are minority; or 40% of households have limited English proficiency).Facilities that will meet this increased scrutiny include:

• Gas-fired power plants and co-generation facilities;
• resource recovery facilities or incinerators; and sludge processing facilities;
• sewage treatment plants with a capacity of more than 50 million gallons per day;
• transfer stations and solid waste facilities;
• recycling facilities that receive at least 100 tons of recyclable material per day;
• scrap metal facilities; and landfills; or
• medical waste incinerators, except facilities attendant to a hospital or university that accept regulated medical waste for disposal.

“No longer will economically disadvantaged areas of our state be dumping grounds, and no longer will the rights of residents to clean air and clear water be overlooked,” Governor Murphy proclaimed just after signing the new bill.Murphy said there will be involvement from multiple government entities “so that we continue to look inward at the machinery of government – at the policies and practices across departments, authorities, and agencies – to ensure that not just the letter of the law is followed, but the spirit of environmental justice is writ-large in all our actions.”He added, “only by ensuring this all-inclusive process can we ultimately deliver on the promise of lived equality.”

Recycling was a lie – a big lie – to sell more plastic, industry experts say – Although our landfills and oceans are full of it, we are as dependent as ever on plastic. And since COVID-19, it’s gotten worse. Last year, Canada announced it was working on a ban of single-use plastics, which was initally sidelined by the pandemic. Recently, the government announced that many single-use plastics will be banned by the end of 2021. At the same time, CBC News reports our single-use plastic use increased by 250 to 300 per cent as people tossed their personal protective equipment and stopped using reusable bags and containers over fears they would spread the virus.What makes our lives convenient is also burying us. Plastic Wars, presented by The Passionate Eye, looks at the mounting crisis and how the industry has spent millions promoting recycling – just to sell more plastic.Although activists sounded the alarm about plastic waste in the 1970s, the documentary claims from 1990 to 2010, plastic production more than doubled. We’ve been sorting our trash for decades, believing it would be recycled. But the truth is the vast majority of the plastic we use won’t be. Over the last seven decades, less than 10 per cent of plastic waste has been recycled. That’s because, says David Allaway, from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, the conversation has been almost exclusively about recycling and not reducing and reusing.In the ’80s, the industry was at the centre of an environmental backlash. Fearing an outright ban on plastics, manufacturers looked for ways to get ahead of the problem. They looked at recycling as a way to improve the image of their product and started labeling plastics with the now ubiquitous chasing-arrows symbol with a number inside. According to Ronald Liesemer, an industry veteran who was tasked with overseeing the new initiative, “Making recycling work was a way to keep their products in the marketplace.” Most consumers might have assumed the symbol meant the product was recyclable. But according to experts in the film, there was no economically viable way to recycle most plastics, and they have ultimately ended up in a landfill. This included plastic films, bags and the wrapping around packaged goods, as well as containers like margarine tubs. “Our own customers … they would flat out say, ‘It says it’s recyclable right on it,'” says Coy Smith, former board member of the National Recycling Coalition. “And I’d be like, ‘I can tell you, I can’t give this away. There’s no one that would even take it if I paid them to take it.'”

KY records second coal-mining death of 2020 within days | Lexington Herald Leader -After going a year without a coal-mining fatality, a second Kentucky miner has died in an accident in less than a week. Phillip Ramsey, 58, a miner from Madisonville, was killed Tuesday at the underground Cardinal mine in Hopkins County, the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet announced Wednesday. Ramsey, who had 29 years’ mining experience, was a shuttle-car operator. He was outside his machine working on curtains that direct air flow in the mine when a piece of equipment that hauls coal, called a scoop, hit him and killed him, according to the release. Ramsey was pronounced dead at Baptist Health Hospital.A 48-year-old miner, Douglas Slusher, died Oct. 9 when a coupling failed on a pressurized hose he was using to spray grass seed on an area at the Double Mountain Mining #3 surface mine in Bell County surface mine.The hose hit Slusher in the chest, killing him. Kentucky had five coal-mining fatalities in 2019 after several years with only one or two deaths, according to the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Secretary of Energy voices approval of Lambert’s Point Docks operation amid air quality study – The Virginian-Pilot – – The country’s top energy official said Monday he was confident about the safety of Norfolk Southern’s Lambert’s Point Docks operation as state officials begin to investigate how the coal loading facility is affecting Norfolk’s air quality.U.S. Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette wore an American flag neck gaiter as he toured the 1,850-foot-long pier on Monday. Brouillette met with Norfolk Southern workers and leaders during a visit he said was meant to show the Trump administration’s support for the domestic coal industry. For years, residents of Lamberts Point and other Norfolk neighborhoods have complained of coal dust coming down on them and worried about potential health effects. The state Department of Environmental Quality is planning to monitor how toxins connected to coal dust are traveling through nearby neighborhoods, using a new grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Brouillette acknowledged the seriousness of the issue and said he didn’t want to minimize the importance of improving safety measures. However, he said Norfolk Southern continues to step up precautions as technology improves.

CAMPAIGN 2020: Trump stopped talking about ‘beautiful’ coal — Thursday, October 15, 2020 —Donald Trump took the stage at a 2016 campaign stop in West Virginia to thunderous applause at the Charleston Civic Center, where audience members raised “TRUMP DIGS COAL” signs above their heads. The presidential underdog wore a hard hat and pretended to shovel coal after accepting the West Virginia Coal Association’s endorsement. His address sounded more like that of a mine operator than a real estate developer.”Miners, get ready, because you’re going to be working your asses off, all right?” Trump said, again eliciting boisterous cheers.Putting coal miners back to work was a central campaign promise back then that galvanized Trump’s base and helped deliver him an unlikely victory.Fast-forward to 2020. Those jobs haven’t materialized, and coal is all but missing from Trump’s reelection messaging.”I can’t remember the last time President Trump said the word ‘coal,'” said Phil Smith, spokesman for the United Mine Workers of America coal labor union.Reminding voters of his failed pledge to reinvigorate coal mining – especially in states that have realigned to reliably vote Republican – is not as politically advantageous today as it was when Trump vowed to end Democrats’ “war on coal” in 2016, analysts say.”Now they do have to say, ‘Yeah, coal has continued to slide, but think about how much worse it would have been if the Democrats had been in charge.’ That’s a much tougher message to sell,” said D. Stephen Voss, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky. Coal mining employment has been stagnant for most of Trump’s term, which coincided with a rise in demand for coal exports. Industry employment began declining last year and fell off a cliff when the coronavirus pandemic started. Today coal mining employs about 44,500 workers nationwide, 6,400 fewer than when Trump took office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Exelon Corp. Weighs Shedding Nuclear Plants, Other Non-Utility Assets – Exelon Corp. is considering a breakup that would involve separating its non-utility assets, according to people familiar with the matter. The Chicago-based company is working with advisers to evaluate the split, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the matter isn’t public. No final decision has been made and Exelon could opt to keep its current structure, they said. “As we most recently communicated on our second quarter earnings call, we regularly review our corporate structure and overall mix of businesses to determine how to best create value and position our businesses for success,” William Gibbons, a representative for Exelon, said in a statement. Exelon’s non-utility operations include 21 nuclear reactors as well several solar, wind and natural-gas generating assets, according to its website. A potential split would leave Exelon focused on the regulated power market, with a portfolio that includes a half-dozen utilities in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and elsewhere. Power companies are increasingly unloading unregulated assets to focus on their utilities, in part because investors prefer pure-play businesses. DTE Energy Inc. is considering unloading its non-utilities businesses, people familiar with the matter said last week. Dominion Energy Inc. agreed to sell its natural gas infrastructure earlier this year to Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Bribery Probe Into a Nuclear Plant Bailout Examines Facilities’ Owner – WSJ -A criminal investigation into an alleged bribe to secure a bailout of troubled nuclear plants in Ohio is looking at the energy company that prosecutors say supplied some of the money and now owns the facilities, according to people familiar with the matter.Federal prosecutors have subpoenaed Energy Harbor Corp., asking executives to turn over documents and communications as part of an investigation into whether anyone associated with the company understood that payments made by it were part of an alleged pay-to-play arrangement, rather than a legal lobbying effort, the people said.Energy Harbor and its former parent company, Ohio utility FirstEnergy Corp. FE 0.25% , paid millions of dollars to an entity that former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder allegedly used to fund support for the $1.5 billion bailout, which involves state subsidy payments to aid the nuclear plants, according to an FBI affidavit. FirstEnergy, which previously disclosed it had been subpoenaed, faces similar questions as Energy Harbor on what it knew about the money paid, the people said.Energy Harbor declined to comment. FirstEnergy said it is complying with the investigation. FirstEnergy has historically maintained a strong lobbying presence in the Ohio statehouse and made millions of dollars in campaign contributions to political candidates over the years.Mr. Householder was charged with racketeering in July. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio accused him and four associates of taking $60 million in bribes between 2017 and 2020. Mr. Householder allegedly used the money to secure the bailout, fund his campaign for Ohio House speaker and quash an effort to repeal the law that included the subsidy, the affidavit said. Mr. Householder has pleaded not guilty.The nuclear plants are now owned by Energy Harbor, a former FirstEnergy subsidiary that was spun off and renamed after filing for bankruptcy protection in 2018. The companyemerged from bankruptcy earlier this year with its assets partly subsidized by Ohio utility customers, who will annually contribute about $150 million to the company for seven years. Among the Energy Harbor executives asked to turn over documents are former hedge-fund investors John Kiani, the company’s executive chairman, and Stephen Burnazian, the company’s chief strategy officer, the people said. Their former funds, along with other investors, bought hundreds of millions of dollars in company debt, helped steer its reorganization and became shareholders upon its emergence. Energy Harbor declined to make Mr. Kiani or Mr. Burnazian available for interviews.

Ohio GOP lawmakers’ big stall in response to alleged HB 6 corruption cannot stand – Cleveland.com Editorial – It’s been more than 12 weeks since Ohio’s political landscape underwent an earthquake when federal agents arrested then-House Speaker Larry Householder and U.S. prosecutors unveiled an 82-page affidavit and criminal complaint alleging a $60 million conspiracy to pass House Bill 6, the nuclear bailout bill.The federal charges — which Householder and the other defendants have denied — describe shockingly pervasive corruption allegedly reaching deep into the Statehouse and the legislative process, and also into the electoral process by which sympathetic legislators were recruited and elected.HB 6s nuclear, coal and solar subsidies are due to kick in on Jan. 1, pulling in up to $170 million annually from Ohio ratepayers. Yet in the 12 weeks since the charges were unveiled, what has happened to repeal a bill that even a prime co-sponsor, state Rep. Jamie Callender, a Lake County Republican, acknowledges is tainted and in need of replacement?In terms of an outcome, not one thing.A new study committee was set up and has held hearings on HB 6 repeal bills but adjourned until after the election. And it’s unclear whether new House Speaker Robert Cupp, a Lima Republican, has the appetite to move on HB 6-related legislation in the lame-duck session. Democrats are collecting signatures on a discharge petition seeking to force a repeal vote on the floor, but do not yet appear to be close to the 50 signatures needed — with Cupp still controlling when the House is in session.And where is the drive to do what the legislature should have done last year — force Energy Harbor, the firm that owns the two Ohio nuclear plants, and its corporate predecessors, FirstEnergy Solutions and Solutions’ former corporate parent, FirstEnergy Corp., to provide proof that a bailout is even needed? This big stall is not what Ohio ratepayers and voters are entitled to expect from the lawmakers they elect and pay. Ohioans want action. Cupp et. al. need to deliver it.

Ohio House Bill 6 scandal inspires more questionable attacks in state legislative races – cleveland.com – A Republican-controlled legislature passed Ohio House Bill 6, the nuclear bailout law that’s now at the center of a federal corruption investigation, and a Republican governor signed it. But some Democrats played supporting roles in the bill becoming law, too, while some Republicans aggressively opposed it.Don’t expect any of that nuance to be captured in political attacks that are swirling in hotly contested state legislative races.One audacious ad from the Ohio Republican Party attacks Alexis Miller, the Democratic nominee for House District 89 in Northern Ohio.The ad attempts to tie Miller, a first-time candidate, to the HB6 scandal by noting – accurately – that House Democrats provided the votes for state Rep. Larry Householder to be elected speaker. Householder and four allies, including a former Ohio Republican Party chairman, were arrested in July for allegedly using more than $60 million in bribe money from FirstEnergy Corp. to secure the passage of the law, which gives a former subsidiary $1.3 billion in ratepayer money to support two nuclear power plants.”If Alexis Miller’s campaign is supported by the same people who supported Larry Householder, how can we trust her?” the mailer asks. What the ad doesn’t mention is that Miller’s GOP opponent, state Rep. D.J. Swearingen, was appointed to the legislature by Householder, a Republican. Swearingen also received donations from FirstEnergy, ex-FirstEnergy lobbyist Juan Cespedes, who was among those arrested, and the House GOP campaign committee, which was financially supported by Householder’s operation.

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