Month: November 2017

The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending Nov. 17, 2017 follows.  Please forward the URL to anyone you think might be interested.

Because of the Thanksgiving holiday next week, the next Weekly Roundup will come out on December 1.

Policy and Politics

The Trump administration used its only public forum at the U.N. climate talks in Bonn on Monday to promote fossil fuels and nuclear energy, prompting Michael Bloomberg to tweet, “Promoting coal at a climate summit is like promoting tobacco at a cancer summit”.  Meanwhile the UK and Canada launched a global alliance of 20 countries committed to phasing out coal for electrical energy production.  Environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert provided her take on the activities of the Trump administration.  One of the accomplishments of the Paris Climate Agreement was the concept that all nations had a responsibility to fight climate change and should contribute what they could, “in light of different national circumstances”.  There has been a movement in Bonn to walk that back and divide the world’s countries into two groups, which many countries, both developed and developing, oppose.  French president Emmanuel Macron promised to replace the $2 million annual donation withdrawn by the U.S. from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

There is a civil war brewing within the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).  At issue is whether they should support withdrawal of the 2009 endangerment finding for CO₂ and other greenhouse gases that is the basis for the Clean Power Plan.  In a chilling article in The Washington Post, Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis report on a closed-door meeting of climate change deniers who were critiquing the Trump administration on its dismantling of environmental regulations.  Almost as chilling is Robinson Meyer’s article in The Atlantic, in which he says that most progressive voters “trust that Democrats have a legislative plan to resolve [the] climate crisis, and that the party only needs to be granted control of Congress to pass it.  But nothing of a similar scale exists, and some of the Senate’s most vocal Democrats on the issue resist formulating one.”  Some good news: U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R FL), who started the House Climate Solutions Caucus, and May Boeve, executive director of 350.org, were presented with this year’s John F. Kennedy New Frontier Awards on Thursday evening at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

In a very informative New Yorker article about atmospheric CO₂ removal, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote: “Carbon-removal plants could be built anywhere, or everywhere.  Construct enough of them and, in theory at least, CO₂ emissions could continue unabated and still we could avert calamity.  Depending on how you look at things, the technology represents either the ultimate insurance policy or the ultimate moral hazard.”  Speaking of insurance and hazards, the major insurance companies recently said that the potential damage from severe weather events may become so unpredictable that it is impossible to model, which is an unacceptable risk to them.  The issue of damages from climate change has been important at COP23, causing Julie-Anne Richards of the Climate Justice Programme to say “A climate damages tax on the fossil fuel industry is one way to reverse the injustice of climate change, and ensure the fossil fuel industry pays for its damage – not poor people.”

Climate

Solar radiation management (SRM) is one form of geoengineering, whose objective is to decrease the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface, thereby cooling the planet and buying time for reduction of CO₂ emissions.  Now a new paper in Nature Communicationshas found that if aerosols were released just from the northern hemisphere, other parts of the world could face an increase in droughts, hurricanes, and storms.

According to a new paper published in Nature Scientific Reports, better soil management could boost carbon stored in the top layer of the soil by up to 1.85 Gt/year, about the same as the carbon emissions of transport globally.  Another paper, this one in the journal Nature Communications, concluded that by adopting organic farming practices, in combination with other changes, the projected world population in 2050 could be fed without increasing the amount of land under cultivation, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  This paper was met with skepticism by the agricultural community.

A new study by NASA scientists, published in Science Advances, reported that public officials in charge of preparing for sea level rise need to consider the melting rate of specific glaciers, not just their aggregate impact.  This is because as glaciers melt, they become lighter, which impacts gravitational forces in their vicinity, thereby influencing whether nearby land masses rise or fall.  Speaking of melting glaciers, scientists have long known that West Antarctica has many more melting glaciers than East Antarctica.  Now a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters has found that West Antarctica receives more heat from within the Earth than East Antarctica.  In Sunday’s Washington Post, Bill McKibben had a review of Jeff Goodell’s book The Water Will Come.

On Wednesday, Carbon Action Tracker released a report prepared by three independent European research groups, saying that current policies meant the world was headed for warming of 3.4°C by 2100, down from 3.6°C it predicted a year ago.  Unfortunately, even if all countries adhere to their pledges under the Paris Climate Agreement, global temperature rise will exceed 3°C.  Deutsche Welle examined what five cities would experience under such a situation.

A modeling study published in Nature Geoscience found that with business-as-usual climate change, mid-latitude storms could travel further before reaching their maximum intensity and, as a result, countries further from the equator, including the UK and the U.S., could face more frequent and more intense storms during winter months.

The extreme rains that inundated the Houston area during Hurricane Harvey were made more likely by climate change, according to a new study by MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  The work also suggested that such extreme flooding events will become more frequent as Earth continues to warm.

Energy

After three years of almost flat emissions, global CO₂ output is expected to rise in 2017.  Much of that rise is due to increased CO₂emissions by China.  Somini Sengupta of The New York Times analyzed the apparent contradiction between China’s desire to lead on climate change and its continued reliance on coal.  However, coal-fired power capacity across China will be capped at 1,100 gigawatts by 2020 as they work to increase transmission capacity to make better use of their renewable energy.  Increasing the use of hydrogen in power generation, transportation, heating, and industry could deliver around 20% of the total carbon emission cuts needed to limit global warming to safe levels by mid-century, according to a report released at COP23 by the Hydrogen Council.

A growing number of insurance companies increasingly affected by the consequences of climate change are selling holdings in coal companies and refusing to underwrite their operations.  However, none of the major U.S. insurers such as Berkshire Hathaway, AIG, and Liberty Mutual have taken action.  In an effort to make its sovereign wealth fund less vulnerable to a permanent drop in oil prices, Norway has proposed dropping oil and gas companies from its benchmark index, which would mean cutting its investments in those companies.

The supply surge from U.S. shale oil and gas will beat the biggest gains seen in the history of the industry, the International Energy Agency predicted in its annual World Energy Outlook.  By 2025, the growth in American oil production will equal that achieved by Saudi Arabia at the height of its expansion, and increases in natural gas will surpass those of the former Soviet Union.  The report also projected that renewable energy is likely to grab a bigger share of the market in the coming decades, generating more electricity than coal by 2040.  Zeke Hausfather provided an in-depth summary of the report at Carbon Brief.

On Thursday evening Tesla introduced its new long-haul truck, which will travel 500 miles at 60 mph on a single charge and accelerate to 60 mph in 5 sec empty and 20 sec fully loaded.  Bloomberg analyzed the truck and what it will take to succeed, particularly given the rivals that are already working hard.

According to 50 States of Grid Modernization, a new policy update from the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center, in the third quarter of 2017, there were 184 actions on grid modernization proposed, pending, or enacted across 33 states and the District of Columbia.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is considering new safety rules for small modular nuclear reactors.

The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending Nov. 10, 2017 follows.  Please forward the URL to anyone you think might be interested.

Policy and Politics

During Senate hearings on Wednesday, Kathleen Hartnett White, President Trump’s nominee to head the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, when asked about the link between human activity and climate change, acknowledged that there was probably some human contribution, but said “the extent to which I think is very uncertain.”  On Thursday, the Senate confirmed William Wehrum on a 49-47 vote to head the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation.  Also on Thursday, the EPA proposed a rule to repeal tighter emissions standards for heavy-duty trucks with older engines that had been put into place by the Obama administration.  When Robert Litterman, chairman of the Risk Committee at Kepos Capital, decided to apply the basic tenets of Wall Street risk management to climate change, he came to the conclusion that carbon taxes should be higher than anything proposed or enacted almost anywhere in the world.  He also decided that a carbon tax would be a great way to eliminate the deficit in the current Republican tax reform plans.

In a very interesting essay on disaster planning in an age of climate change, Brad Plumer of The New York Times quoted Dr. David Titley, who heads a climate center at Pennsylvania State University: “If climate adaptation is a marathon, we’ve run about the first 50 yards so far.  Grudgingly.”  Part of our adaptation should be to fix the National Flood Insurance Program.  Bob Henson of Weather Underground took a deep dive into why that has been so difficult.  With respect to planning, New Zealand’s climate change minister hopes to create an experimental humanitarian visa for climate refugees.  Planning requires that we know what is happening with the climate.  Consequently, 26 scientists published a paper in the journal Earth’s Future, which was released Thursday, that calls for a coordinated and expanded measurement network focused on answering key scientific questions about Earth’s climate.

At COP 23 in Bonn, Syria announced it plans to join the Paris Climate Agreement, leaving the U.S. as the only country not on board.  Because of his plans to remove the U.S. from the Agreement, President Trump is, “for the time being,” not invited to a climate change summit to be held in Paris in December, according to an official in French President Macron’s office.  “We Are Still In”, the organization established in response to President Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Agreement, has opened the U.S. Climate Action Center, a pavilion and forum where dozens of American leaders will convene throughout the negotiations.  China under President Xi Jinping is moving to shape the consensus on how to rein in greenhouse gases after President Donald Trump decided to scale back U.S. involvement.  The head of the Africa group of climate negotiators said on Thursday that the wealthiest countries on earth are failing to take seriously the need to speed up the money they have promised to help the poor cope with climate change.  One example of the need is Fiji, a small island nation that is facing climate adaptation costs over ten years that exceed its GDP.  Meanwhile, Michael Bloomberg, U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change, announced a $50 million commitment to partners worldwide to catalyze a global effort to move nations away from coal dependence.  The New York Times has an interesting infographic showing how far we have to go to keep warming below 2°C.

Climate

Let’s start off with a little hope!  Damian Carrington, environment editor at The Guardian wrote on Wednesday about “the seven mega-trends that could beat global warming.”  And in an opinion piece at MacLean’s, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe wrote: “It’s not the science of climate change that we must emphasize to prevent ‘dangerous human interference with the climate system.’  It’s the immediacy of its impacts, and the hope its solutions offer for a better future for us all.”  On the other hand, while David Roberts at Vox agrees that it is futile to emphasize the science to conservative elites, he argues that the way to win the climate wars is to do “everything possible to publicize their intransigence and make it core to their identity” so they end up crying “‘Hey, We Like Clean Energy Too!’”

In a statement released on Thursday, NOAA formally declared that La Niña conditions were present in the tropical Pacific Ocean.  Andrew Freedman explained what this might mean for winter weather in the U.S. and Canada.  Vox presented some interesting graphics of climate change data.

A study published Monday in Geophysical Research Letters found that algal growth was more important than deposited dust and soot to the darkening of ice in one region of western Greenland.  Dark ice melts more rapidly than clean ice.  On the other side of the Arctic, black guillemots nest on Cooper Island, an uninhabited strip of land 5 miles offshore near Barrow, Alaska.  They have been studied each summer since 1975, providing one of the longest, continuous records of the impact of climate change on a single species.

Like the U.S., data from New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research indicates that their winter has decreased in length by a month over the last 100 years.

On Wednesday, a subcommittee of the House Science Committee held a hearing on geoengineering, which was quite informative and without the usual posturing.  One of the witnesses, Douglas MacMartin, is a co-author on five papers examining by simulation the impacts of the injection of sunlight-reflecting aerosol particles into the stratosphere.  They were published together in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres this week.  One reason some climate scientists are beginning to consider geoengineering is their inability to model cloud behavior.  How and where clouds move and how that will change as the climate warms and the atmosphere becomes either more or less polluted remain among the biggest unanswered questions in climate science.

In case you haven’t had a chance to look at Part 1 of the National Climate Assessment that was released last week, Sabrina Shankman has a summary at Inside Climate News.  In another article there, Georgina Gustin wrote: “Scientists at the University of Hawaii at Manoa reviewed medical literature to identify ways in which the body responds to heat and how organs are affected.  They calculated that there are 27 ways, physiologically speaking, for a person to die from extreme heat.”

In a new peer-reviewed article in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists from World Weather Attribution and the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research wrote that they had developed techniques that “make it possible to assign extreme events to human-induced climate change and historical emissions” and “allow losses and damage associated with such events to be assigned country-level responsibility.”

Energy

Renewables combined with energy storage technologies could generate enough secure power to cover the world’s entire electricity demand by 2050 while proving cheaper than the current fossil-fuel dominated system, according to a study by German non-profit Energy Watch Group and the Lappeenranta University of Technology in Finland, released on Wednesday at COP23 in Bonn.

China Energy Investment Corp. plans to invest $83.7 billion in shale gas development, chemical manufacturing, and underground storage of natural gas liquids derivatives in West Virginia over 20 years, according to a memorandum of understanding.  European governments have drastically underestimated methane emissions and will miss their Paris Agreement goals unless they urgently scale down its use, a major new study by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research has found.

According to the International Energy Agency’s new “Energy Access Outlook 2017” report, the number of people without access to electricity fell to 1.1 billion in 2016 from 1.7 billion in 2000.  More than 100 million people have gained electricity access every year since 2012, much of it with renewable energy.

The Energy Storage Association, in collaboration with Navigant Research, has released a white paper entitled “35×25: A Vision for Energy Storage”, which charts a path toward 35 GW of new energy storage systems by 2025.

On Wednesday, the EU proposed sharp automobile emission cuts over the next decade to support the Paris Climate Agreement and compete with China by spurring electric vehicle (EV) production.  To be prepared for greater penetration of EVs in the market, filling stations are experimenting with ways to retain their customers’ loyalty after they buy an EV.

The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending Nov. 3, 2017 follows.  Please forward the URL to anyone you think might be interested.

Policy and Politics

The 600-plus-page Climate Science Special Report, which is Volume 1 of the fourth National Climate Assessment, has been released by the White House.  It concludes that it is “extremely likely” that human activities are the “dominant cause” of global warming.  President Donald Trump’s pick to lead NASA, Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), was slammed by Senate Democrats on the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation during his nomination hearing Wednesday, while he waffled on the scientific consensus about climate change.  Also on Wednesday, President Trump’s nominee to be the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s chief scientist, Sam Clovis, withdrew his name from consideration.  He previously had admitted in a letter to Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, that he has no academic credentials in science or agriculture.  On Thursday, the Senate confirmed the appointments of Republican Kevin McIntyre and Democrat Richard Glick to FERC, giving the commission a full panel for the first time in two years.  Rep. Lamar Smith (R, TX), climate change denier and Chair of the House Science Committee, has announced that he will not seek reelection in 2018.

The four commissioners of the U.S. International Trade Commission on Tuesday voiced their support for tariffs and other import restrictions to protect domestic solar companies from an influx of cheap solar panels being produced overseas, but South Korea’s trade ministry said it may consider filing a complaint with the World Trade Organization if tariffs are imposed.  According to a new report entitled “Creating Markets for Climate Business”, released by the International Finance Corporation, a subsidiary of the World Bank, at least one trillion dollars are being invested globally in ways to reduce the threat of climate change.  On the other hand, a report, co-authored by Corporate Accountability, asserts that global negotiations seeking to implement the Paris Climate Agreement have been captured by corporate interests and are being undermined by powerful forces that benefit from exacerbating climate change.

A new report published by World Resources Institute suggests that 49 countries have already seen their greenhouse gas emissions peak, representing around 36% of current global emissions.  Another 8 countries representing another 23% of emissions have commitments to peak in the next decade or so.  In addition, according to the latest Low Carbon Economy Index from PwC, the carbon intensity of the world’s economy fell 2.6% in 2016, although that falls well short of the 6.3% rate needed to keep temperature increases under 2°C.  Meanwhile, the Trump administration will promote coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy as an answer to climate change during a presentation at the UN’s COP23 climate talks Nov. 6-17 in Bonn, Germany.  Entitled “The Role of Cleaner and More Efficient Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Power in Climate Mitigation,” it will have speakers from Peabody Energy, a coal company; NuScale Power, a nuclear engineering firm; and Tellurian, a liquefied natural gas exporter.

Climate

Tens of millions of people will be forced from their homes by climate change in the next decade, creating the biggest refugee crisis the world has ever seen, according to a new report from the Environmental Justice Foundation.  Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office has projected that by 2075 10 million Americans, most in coastal areas, will be impacted by climate change, causing government spending on disaster relief to increase.  Even more dire warnings have come from the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP), which released its annual emissions gap report this week.  The report warned that current pledges to cut emissions are only sufficient to hold warming to 3°C.  With that much warming, hundreds of millions of urban dwellers around the world face their cities being inundated by rising seawaters.  Writing at Carbon Brief, Zeke Hausfather summarized the UNEP report and discussed the six actions recommended to close the emissions gap.

This year Sri Lanka has faced what U.N. officials describe as the worst drought in 40 years.  With harvests expected to fall by as much as 50% and rice facing the worst harvest in a decade, the drought has accelerated migration from the countryside to the major cities.

A new study, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, found that as the winds around Antarctica intensify with rising global temperatures, they will enable warmer water from the depths to reach the base of the Totten Glacier’s floating ice shelf, accelerating its flow to the ocean.

The British medical journal Lancet has released a new meta-analysis that examines data from many studies to assess the impacts of climate change on health.  However, the analysis has been criticized because of its methodologies.

In a long piece in bioGraphic, Hannah Hoag writes “Years of sampling have shown that the Arctic Ocean is losing its distinctly Arctic traits and becoming increasingly more like the Atlantic. Its sea ice is melting, its water warming. In response, animals from warmer climes are encroaching, leading to a reorganization of its biodiversity.”  She then continues to describe research activities seeking to understand the changes occurring.

Driven by a combination of human activities and the El Niño weather phenomenon, concentrations of CO₂ in the Earth’s atmosphere surged to a record high in 2016, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization said on Monday.  The 2016 increase was 50% higher than the average of the past 10 years.  On a related note, the length of the U.S. winter is shortening, with the first frost of the year arriving more than one month later than it did 100 years ago, according to more than a century of measurements from weather stations nationwide.

Energy

Wind Europe, which promotes wind power in Europe, said in a press release that European wind energy set a new record on October 28, producing over 24% of the EU’s electricity demand.

In 2015, Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University professor, and colleagues, published a widely-cited paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) asserting that the U.S.’s electrical needs could be met fully by solar, wind, and hydroelectric power by 2050-2055.  This year, Christopher Clack, previously with NOAA and the University of Colorado, Boulder, but now with Vibrant Clean Energy, and coauthors, published a critique in the same journal of the Jacobson et al. paper, challenging its conclusions, followed by a rebuttal by Jacobson et al. and a reply by Clack et al. to the rebuttal.  Now in an unusual move, Jacobson has filed a $10 million law suit against Clack and the NAS.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said in a unanimous opinion that the Energy Department fulfilled its legal obligations under the National Environmental Policy Act and other laws when approving liquefied natural gas export terminals in Maryland, Louisiana and Texas.

The federal tax credit for electric vehicles will be eliminated under the tax reform plan introduced by Republicans in Congress.  Even if it survives, Tesla and Chevy Bolt buyers will soon face the limits built in to the current credit.

Using the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus as a test case, New York will be experimenting with a new micro-grid pricing system for renewable electricity.  The system has been designed to encourage the campus to sell electricity from its onsite solar panels, batteries or other generators to doctors’ offices and businesses in the vicinity.  And on the subject of renewable energy, according to financial adviser Lazard Ltd., it is starting to become cheaper to build and operate solar and wind farms than to continue to operate aging coal-fired and nuclear power plants in parts of the U.S.

Argentina plans to start building two new nuclear reactors in 2018, a 720 MW reactor to be built by a Canadian company and the Argentinian state nuclear company, and a 1,150MW reactor to be built by the China National Nuclear Corp.