Month: May 2018

The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending May 18, 2018 follows.  Please forward the URL to anyone you think might be interested.

Policy and Politics

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt appeared on Wednesday before the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, ostensibly about EPA’s 2019 budget, although much of the questioning focused on his conduct.  Also on Wednesday, at a meeting of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks (R) asserted that erosion plays a significant role in sea level rise.  On the bright side, new NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said to employees on Thursday, “I don’t deny the consensus, I believe fully in climate change and that we human beings are contributing to it in a major way.”  More good news: After the Trump administration canceled NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System last week, Congress acted this week to restore the funding.  A consortium of environmental and advocacy groups filed a complaint with EPA’s External Civil Rights Compliance Office asking the agency to overturn North Carolina state permits for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and requesting a new environmental justice analysis of it.

Last week I provided a link to an article about California’s new requirement that homes built in 2020 and thereafter have solar panels.  This week David Roberts at Vox looked at the pros and cons of such a policy.  The state of Alaska has deep internal contradictions because it is being impacted more by climate change than any other state, yet it’s economy is based on fossil fuel development.  Brad Plumer of The New York Times examined the developing climate action plan in light of these contradictions.  A new research study published in the British Journal of Management has found that most U.S. insurance companies have not adapted their strategies to address the dangers of climate change, making them likely to raise rates or deny coverage in high-risk areas.  Roughly six-in-ten Americans say climate change is currently affecting their local community either a great deal or some, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.  Pew also found that Republicans and Democrats broadly favor the use of more solar and wind energy, but disagree on the use of more fossil fuels and nuclear energy.  Deloitte also released the results of a new poll that looks at generational differences on climate change.

In an effort to explain the urgency of action on climate change, climate scientists developed the concept of the carbon budget.  Unfortunately, that has not speeded up countries’ responses to climate change, in part because the uncertainties associated with the budget have not been adequately expressed.  Now, in separate analyses published this week in Nature Geoscience, two researchers, one at the Center for International Climate Research and the other at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, argue that the solution is to completely rethink the way policies designed to push us towards climate goals are set.  In a blog post at the Niskanen Center, David Bookbinder, Chief Counsel for the Center, argued that climate nuisance litigation against fossil fuel producers is a good idea.

Climate

A new paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters investigated the number of people facing multiple climate change risks for various degrees of warming.  At 1.5°C of warming in 2050, 16% of the world’s population will have moderate-to-high levels of risk in two or more sectors (e.g., water, energy, food, or environment).  At 2.0°C of warming, 29% of the global population is at risk, while at 3°C, 50% is.  Also, a paper in the journal Science projected that with 3.2°C of warming, which is what is expected from current emission reduction pledges, ecosystem range losses of >50% will occur for ~49% of insects, 44% of plants, and 26% of vertebrates.  At 2°C warming, this falls to 18% of insects, 16% of plants, and 8% of vertebrates and at 1.5°C, to 6% of insects, 8% of plants, and 4% of vertebrates.

In a new study published in the journal PLOS One, scientists have predicted the response to future warming of nearly 700 species of fish and other sea creatures inhabiting the waters around North America.  They found that hundreds of species of fish and shellfish will be forced to migrate northwards to escape the effects of climate change, putting global fisheries at risk.

New research, published in the journal Nature, shows that there is now a “clear human fingerprint” on the global water supply, although natural variability also played a role in driving changes to water availability over the past 15 years.  Dr. Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, presented a tutorial at Carbon Brief about how climate change is already making droughts worse.  Meanwhile, the World Resources Institute argued that Middle Eastern and North African countries could tap into their solar-energy potential to cope with fresh water scarcity by switching to solar energy from fossil fuel electricity generation that uses up water.

Normal temperatures, generally defined to be the 30-year average at a location, are trending up across most of the U.S.  Since 1980, the average continental U.S. temperature has risen 1.4°F.  Also, NOAA confirmed that April was the 400th consecutive month that was warmer than the 20^th century average for that month.  The last month cooler than the 20^th century average was December 1984.

A new study published in the journal PLOS One found that between 1990 and 2015 forest growing stock increased annually by 1.3% in high income countries and by 0.5% in middle income nations, while falling by 0.7% in 22 low income countries.  The authors argue that as incomes rise, farmers abandon marginal lands, allowing them to reforest and that this is responsible for regreening, rather than fertilization due to high CO₂ levels, as some have claimed.

An analysis of stream flow data from USGS stream gauges has shown that the amount of rainfall in the Midwest has been increasing over the last 100 years.  On a larger scale, a 14-year NASA mission has confirmed that a massive redistribution of freshwater is occurring across Earth, with part of the middle-latitudes drying and the tropics and higher latitudes gaining water supplies.  Climate change is thought to be at least partially responsible for each.

Energy

A while back I provided a link to an article about Vaclav Smil.  Now Paul Voosen has an article about him in Science, entitled “Meet Vaclav Smil, the man who has quietly shaped how the world thinks about energy.”

Between January and March, wind power produced 18.8% of the UK’s electricity needs, compared to nuclear energy’s 18.76%. Gas was still the dominant source of the country’s electricity, at 39.4%.  This is the first time that wind energy has exceeded nuclear over such a protracted period.  In the U.S., new research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) suggested that the value of offshore wind energy makes it a better bet than onshore wind energy for many locations along the East Coast.  The report provides the first rigorous assessment of offshore wind’s economic value on the eastern seaboard.  Another report from LBNL found that if wind and solar resources provided 40 to 50% of generation, wholesale energy prices would drop by as much as 1.6¢ per kilowatt-hour.

A new report from the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions suggested state and federal policy options that could preserve existing nuclear power generation, with its zero CO₂ electricity.

I’ve mentioned previously the advantages of lead-acid batteries for energy storage in the U.S. because of the highly advanced supply chain for recycled components.  Unfortunately, such a supply chain does not exist in much of Africa, leading to environmental problems with lead-acid batteries.  A San Diego-based startup is advocating for the use of electric school buses as backup batteries for the electric grid.

Apple, along with Alcoa and Rio Tinto, announced a collaboration in Canada to fund a technology that can reduce CO₂ emissions from the high-temperature smelting process that goes into making aluminum.  If successful, the technology will eliminate around 17% of the CO₂ emissions associated with aluminum production.  A new pilot facility under construction in northern Sweden will produce steel using hydrogen from renewable electricity. The only emissions will be water vapor, explains the CEO of Hybrit, the company behind the process, which seeks to revolutionize steelmaking.

The Interior Department said Thursday it plans to approve the Palen solar farm, which will be built on public lands just south of Joshua Tree National Park, in the open desert east of the Coachella Valley.  The 3,100-acre, 500 MW power plant would be one of the country’s largest solar projects.  However, some object because of the proximity to a National Park and the farm’s potential impact

The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending May 11, 2018 follows.  Please forward the Roundup to anyone you think might be interested.  For an archive of prior posts visit the CAAV website.  It also contains news of events in the Central Shenandoah Valley as well as activities in which CAAV is involved.

Policy and Politics

At the Paris climate talks in 2015 the developed countries pledged $100 billion per year to help the poorest nations fight climate change.  The Trump administration withdrew the U.S. from that commitment, thereby raising the question at this week’s Bonn talks of how that money will be replaced.  This led, in part, to the poorer nations saying that they are fed up with foot dragging by the richer countries, with the talks ending in a stalemate.  Consequently, another week has been added in September to try to resolve the issues prior to COP24 in Poland in December.  Carbon Brief has a summary of the key outcomes from the Bonn talks.  Dave Roberts laid out at Vox the types of policies required to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.

In April of last year, EPA removed an informational website about climate change for review and updating.  It still isn’t back.  More than 10,000 documents, made public as part of a Freedom of Information lawsuit by the Sierra Club, showed that the EPA’s close control of Administrator Scott Pruitt’s events has been driven more by a desire to avoid tough questions from the public than by concerns about security, contradicting Pruitt’s longstanding defense of his secretiveness.  With last month’s confirmation of Pruitt’s deputy, the former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, it appears that the likelihood of Pruitt being fired has increased.  On Thursday Pruitt said that he wants to radically revise how basic, health-based national air quality standards are set, giving more weight to the economic costs of achieving them and taking into account their impacts on energy development.  However, a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court opinion, written by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, affirmed that the agency cannot consider the cost of implementation when setting the standards.  Major automakers are telling the Trump administration they want to reach an agreement with California to avoid a legal battle over fuel efficiency standards, and support continued increases in mileage standards through 2025, as long as they “also are consistent with marketplace realities.”  According to The Washington Post, “Internal changes to a draft Defense Department report de-emphasized the threats climate change poses to military bases and installations, muting or removing references to climate-driven changes in the Arctic and potential risks from rising seas…”  Meanwhile, the Trump administration has cancelled NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System, which is crucial to the verification of the national emission cuts agreed to in the Paris Climate Agreement.

The California Energy Commission voted on Wednesday to change the state building code to require all new homes built in 2020 or after to be equipped with solar panels.  However, some say this will provide a glut of solar energy during the day that will compound California’s energy problems.  The Utah Legislature recently adopted a resolution that moves the state from denial of global climate change to the recognition that finding a solution is crucial.  How did this happen?  Because of students from Logan High School, who refused to give up.  The social cost of carbon (SCC) is an important parameter in determining appropriate strategies for addressing climate change and the damage it will cause.  In an opinion piece in The Hill, economics professors Robert S. Pindyck and James H. Stock argue why the SCC should not be set to zero.  KQED interviewed climate scientist Michael Mann.  You can listen or read the transcript here.

Climate

In December of 2016, the North Pole was 50°F above its usual winter temperature.  A recent paper in the journal Weather and Climate Extremes has found that 60 to 70% of that warming was due to the loss of sea ice associated with climate change. The rest was caused by natural intrusions of warm air into the Arctic, including contributions from El Niño.  Furthermore, the number of times temperatures have risen above freezing in February has been increasing since 1997.  On a related topic, growing inflows of warmer ocean waters on both sides of the Arctic Ocean are driving heat, nutrients, and temperate species to new polar latitudes — with profound impacts on Arctic Ocean dynamics, marine food webs, and longstanding predator-prey relationships.

A 350-page report released on Wednesday by the California Environmental Protection Agency tracks 36 indicators of climate change in the state and concludes that it is having a significant impact there.

A new paper in the journal Earth’s Future reports that the extraordinary rainfall associated with hurricane Harvey was fueled by record high water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.  Another study, this one in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that the rapid intensification of hurricanes increased from 1986 to 2015 in the central and eastern tropical Atlantic Ocean.  These findings are of concern because the peak season for Atlantic storms, which officially starts on 1 June, is predicted to have as many as 18 named storms, with up to five of them developing into major hurricanes, according to separate forecasts from North Carolina State University and Colorado State University.

Surface wind speeds across landmasses all over the planet have fallen by as much as 25% since the 1970s as a result of climate change.  One consequence will be calm air over cities at certain times of year, leading to more intense air pollution.

Scientists have discovered a new positive feedback loop to add to those that make global warming worse.  As freshwater lakes warm, aquatic plants such as cattails flourish.  Unlike forest debris that may wash into lakes, cattail debris causes an increase in the production of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

A new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change examined the potential impact of climate change on marine protected areas (MPAs) during this century.  It found that without drastic action MPAs will be ‘devastated’ by rapid global warming.

Energy

North Carolina is the center of hog production for the Atlantic coastal area.  Unfortunately, along with that distinction came infamy, the odor associated with “standard practice” for disposing of the hog waste.  One farm has shown that things can be done better, leading to a microgrid combining solar, biogas, and batteries to serve the local area.

Transportation is a big user of energy, most provided by fossil fuels.  Two articles this week provided some ideas for lowering their use.  One is about five ways to change buses so that people would want to use them.  The other presents a radical idea for limiting air travel.  In addition, The New York Times reviewed the things that auto companies have done to increase the fuel economy of their vehicles.  A new AAA survey has found that 20% of Americans say their next vehicle will be an electric car.  That’s up from 15% in 2017, the first time that AAA asked the question.  And on Tuesday, Audi said it plans to sell about 800,000 battery-electric and hybrid powered cars in 2025.

Since 2010 investments in solar energy have outpaced investments in wind energy.  In an effort to catch up, turbine manufacturers and operators are turning to better software, artificial intelligence, and improved weather forecasting to generate more electricity per turn of the blades.  The U.S. Geological Survey has a new database of the more than 57,000 commercial wind turbines in the country.  A Washington Post analysis of the data revealed that Kern County, CA, has more wind turbines than any other county.

Costa Rico hopes to become the first country in the world to decarbonize its economy by eliminating all use of fossil fuel, its new president announced during his inaugural address.  Between April 2017 and March 2018, India added around 11.8 GW of renewable energy capacity. That’s more than double the 5.4 GW of capacity addition in the coal and hydro power sectors during the same period.

A new study, published in Nature Climate Change, has found that tourism accounted for 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions from 2009 to 2013, four times larger than previously thought.  Carbon Brief has a more detailed report.

The UK and the EU generate a greater percentage of their electricity from renewable sources than the U.S.  In fact, this summer there will be periods when they are generating more renewable energy than they can use.  In a new report, UK’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers said the answer could be to use the excess power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, with the hydrogen functioning as a form of energy

The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending May 4, 2018 follows.  Please forward the Roundup to anyone you think might be interested.  For an archive of prior posts visit the CAAV website.  It also contains news of events in the Central Shenandoah Valley as well as activities in which CAAV is involved.

Policy and Politics

According to Inside Climate News, “the Trump foreign policy team, now more than ever, is a tight cabal of hardline foes of climate action.”  Thus, while the career diplomats meeting in Bonn this week would like to have some influence on the outcome of negotiations on the rules of how to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, they have few bargaining chips to offer.  In addition, developing countries say they are “frustrated” with the lack of leadership from the developed world.  In fact, according to Climate Home News, they and their advocates feel that rich nations are not even engaging in discussions on the financial support they need to deal with the problems of climate change.  While I had hoped for a week without articles about EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, it wasn’t to be, with articles about his relationship with lobbyists, his expenditures while in Oklahoma, and his travel at EPA (“After taking office last year, Pruitt drew up a list of at least a dozen countries he hoped to visit and urged aides to help him find official reasons to travel…”).

Fortune 500 corporations are facing renewed pressure from climate-focused activist investors.  Of the more than 420 shareholder resolutions proposed recently, about 20% focused on climate, tied for the largest of any proposal category, according to a report by the group Proxy Impact.  In addition, a group of 279 investors — pension plans, insurers, mutual funds, and exchange traded-funds — with a collective $30tn in assets, has banded together to tackle the issue via a five-year global initiative called Climate Action 100+.  A report by two industry groups — the Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute and the Alliance for Responsible Atmospheric Policy — was sent Wednesday to the Trump administration.  It finds that the U.S. would reap broad economic gains if the federal government ratifies the Kigali amendment to the Montreal Protocol, which calls for the phase out of hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants.  California Attorney General Xavier Becerra filed a lawsuit on Tuesday challenging the EPA’s April 2 determination that the fuel economy requirements for cars and light trucks are too stringent and must be revised.  Sixteen other states and the District of Columbia are joining California on the lawsuit.  Together, they represent about 43% of new car sales nationally.

National Book Award winner Richard Powers has published a new novel, The Overstory, which is about trees.  Amy Brady interviewed him for the Chicago Review of Books, which shared it with Yale Climate Connections.  On the subject of books, A new study published this week in the journal Environmental Communication found that less than 4% of the pages in the most popular college-level introductory physics, biology, and chemistry textbooks published between 2013 and 2015 were devoted to discussing climate change.

Climate

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that illnesses from mosquito, tick and flea bites more than tripled in the United States from 2004 to 2016.  Although many factors contributed to this increase, climate change played an important role.  Warming ocean waters likely are contributing to the expansion northward of the ranges of bottlenose dolphins, false killer whales, and bull sharks, according to two recent scientific articles.

According to a new study by Florida International University, mangroves just south of Miami were migrating westwards over marshland at a rate of about 100 ft a year until they were halted by the L-31E levee, a flood barrier in Miami-Dade County.  As a consequence, they are likely to be submerged by water within 30 years, killing them and destroying the protection they provide during storms.  This is unfortunate because a recent study indicates that mangroves store about 50% more carbon than had previously been thought.

A study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances used modeling to predict increases in temperature variability in tropical countries over the coming decades.  The countries that have contributed least to climate change, and are most vulnerable to extreme events, are projected to experience the strongest increase in variability.  Thus, it is particularly sad that Oxfam has found that finance for poor countries to help them reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and deal with climate change is lagging behind the promises of rich countries.  In addition, while the poorest countries are making progress toward the UN’s sustainable energy goals, they are not progressing as quickly as development agencies had hoped, according to a new report from the UN, the World Health Organization, and three other international agencies.

A new paper in Geophysical Research Letters has found that between 2015 and 2017, around 23% of the annual surface melt across the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica occurred during the winter months.  All of the winter melt events were caused by a combination of strong wind, high temperatures, and low relative humidity.  The U.S. National Science Foundation and the British Natural Environment Research Council will deploy six field missions to Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica in the next several years in order to learn more about the large glacier’s stability.  And on the other end of the globe, the February sea-ice extent in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska set a record low this winter, being only half that of the previous lowest winter on record (2001).  In addition, the Bering Sea ice has never melted this early before.

Zeke Hausfather of Carbon Brief provided an analysis of the “state of the climate” after the end of the first quarter of 2018.  He projects that 2018 will be the fourth warmest year on record, following 2016, 2017, and 2015.  For the first time since humans have been monitoring, atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ have exceeded 410 ppm averaged across an entire month, pushing the planet closer to warming beyond levels that scientists and the international community have deemed “safe.”

It was 122.4°F (50.2°C) in Nawabshah, Pakistan, on Monday, and meteorologists say it is the highest temperature ever reliably recorded, anywhere in the world, in the month of April.  And on the subject of records, a rainstorm that hit Kauai, Hawaii in April dumped nearly 50 inches of rain in 24 hours, eclipsing the previous record of 28.5 inches set in 2012.  It was the first major storm in Hawaii linked to climate change.

Energy

With the exception of Tennessee and North Carolina, there are no wind turbines installed in the Southeastern U.S.  Several factors are responsible, as explained by Umair Irfan and Javier Zarracina at Vox.  General Motors has signed power-purchase contracts with wind farms, now under construction in Ohio and Illinois, that will put plants in Ohio and Indiana on the path to being able to say they get 100% of their electricity from renewable sources.

Mercedes-Benz Energy has determined that there is no economic benefit to basing home energy storage systems on automotive batteries and thus it is exiting the home energy storage business.  Rather, it will focus “exclusively on the development and construction of stationary energy storage systems for grid applications.”  A Stanford University team has developed a new battery that they say houses a large amount of energy, lasts a long time, and could be inexpensive enough to store energy for the grid.  On a smaller scale, Voltstorage has brought a vanadium-redox-flow energy storage system (i.e., a flow battery) to the residential market.

A report by UK accountancy firm Ernst & Young found that the U.S. has moved up to second place (after China) in a ranking of the most attractive countries for renewables investment.  For example, AT&T Inc. and Walmart Inc. are among 36 businesses, government agencies and universities that have agreed to buy 3.3 GW of wind and solar power so far this year. That’s on track to shatter the previous high of 4.8 GW of disclosed deals last year, according to a report Monday by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Anheuser-Busch announced Thursday that it will buy 800 hydrogen-electric powered semitrucks from Nikola Motor Company.  Its goal is to have its vehicles produce zero carbon emissions by 2025.

Russians are building a floating nuclear power plant that will provide electricity to a remote city near the Kamchatka Peninsula in northeast Russia.  Needless to say, opinions are divided about it.  On the other hand, as a result of the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, Japan is turning away from nuclear energy and back to coal for generation of its electricity, having opened at least eight new coal-fired power plants in the past 2 years.  Furthermore, it has plans for an additional 36 over the next decade.

Utility companies clashed with oil industry interests over electric vehicle and fuel subsidies at a meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).  Oil-backed groups proposed a resolution that opposed state efforts to subsidize non-gas vehicles and allow utilities to charge customers for EV charging stations. It was tabled after a protracted floor battle and opposition from utility interests like Duke Energy and the Edison Electric Institute.