Month: January 2020

The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending January 31, 2020 follows.  Please forward the URL to anyone you think might be interested.

Politics and Policy

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said on Wednesday that the Fed can help keep climate change from destabilizing U.S. banks and financial markets.  The German government approved a bill Wednesday that will codify the country’s closure of coal-fired power plants by 2038, defending the plan against critics who say it’s not ambitious enough.  At Open Democracy, author Simon Pirani argued that decarbonizing the economy will be impossible unless we transform our economic and social systems.  Meanwhile, at Yale Environment 360, Prof. David Victor wrote that attaining deep decarbonization will require creating the incentives and markets essential for sparking new technology and businesses.  The New York Times published excerpts from panels and speeches on climate change at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

House Democratic leaders rolled out their vision for a $760 billion, five-year infrastructure proposal that places a major emphasis on climate change.  According to an article in the Washington Examiner, the major themes of the pending Republican agenda for addressing climate change are capturing CO₂, curbing plastic waste, exporting natural gas, and promoting “resilience” or adaptation to sea-level rise and other effects of climate change.  At Politico, Zack Coleman and colleagues also wrote about Republican plans.  In spite of what they think about climate change, many liberals and conservatives agree on the benefits of renewable energy.

In a clear-eyed essay in MIT Technology Review, James Temple wrote that planting trees is “a limited and unreliable way of addressing climate change.”  Although people have often discussed increasing the carbon content of soil as one way of fighting climate change, few large-scale programs have been implemented.  As discussed by Sarah Wesseler, that now may be about to change because of the actions of some start-ups aiming to pay farmers to sequester carbon.  New Jersey will become the first state to require that builders take into account the impact of climate change, including rising sea levels, in order to win government approval for projects.  Four Native-American tribes in Louisiana and one in Alaska have filed a formal climate change complaint with the UN, arguing that the U.S. is violating their human rights and not addressing the serious harm climate change is having on their communities.  Lawsuits against energy companies in U.S. courts face critical legal challenges.

Social scientists speak of social tipping points, whereby a society’s attitudes about a given movement change rapidly after a precipitating incident triggers cascading changes in perceptions.  Some climate activists think this provides hope for the climate movement.  Now, new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) constructs a framework for understanding social tipping points and the kinds of interventions that might trigger them.

Climate and Climate Science

The Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) has announced an independent inquiry into the ongoing bushfires, including how climate change, human activity, and other factors had contributed to the blazes.  With the increasing frequency, severity, and extent of forest fires, even forests made up of species that thrive on cycles of fire and regrowth are losing resilience.

In a commentary for the journal Nature, Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters argue against the use of the phrase “business as usual” to describe the RCP8.5 emissions scenario.  The pair say emissions as high as in RCP8.5 are “increasingly implausible” and that the scenario, while still useful to study, would be better described as a “worst case”.  Climate scientist Michael Mann commented on the article on his website.  The Capital Weather Gang at The Washington Post released new temperature maps that show where records were broken around the world in each of the past several years.  A study published in the journal PLOS One used machine learning to predict where people would move in the U.S. if sea level rose 3 ft and 6 ft, looking at in-migration at the county level.  Climatologist Gavin Schmidt has released his annual comparison of modeled and actual mean global temperatures at RealClimate.  The models continue to track the real world.

Scientists in Antarctica have recorded unusually warm water (35.6°F) beneath Thwaites glacier at its grounding line, where it transitions from resting wholly on bedrock to spreading out on the sea as ice shelves.  A reporter from BBC News accompanied the scientific expedition for part of the time and described what the scientists did and learned.

Climate change may be powering the swarms of desert locusts that have invaded eastern Africa, ravaging crops, decimating pasture, and deepening a hunger crisis, experts on locusts and climate said.  The world’s tropical forests are losing their ability to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, while boreal forests are absorbing emissions at an increasingly fast rate, a study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution finds.  Furthermore, A perfect storm of climate change, extreme weather, and pressure from human activity is threatening to collapse Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystems, according to a new study published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.  This is particularly important because indigenous lands and protected areas in the Amazon contribute far less to climate change than the rest of the rainforest since they account for only 10% of carbon emissions while covering 52% of the region, a study in PNAS shows.  Likewise, in Africa indigenous groups battle to maintain control over their lands.

In case you have friends who still maintain that climate change is due to the sun, try showing them the graphs in this article from The Conversation.  A study, published Monday in PNAS, detected a pattern that links Arctic sea ice decline since the late 1990s with more frequent El Niños in the Central Pacific Ocean.  Research published Monday in Nature Communications found that marine heat off the coast of California led to a change in forage species, which caused whales to move closer to shore and into fishing grounds, causing more whale entanglements in nets.  A study published in the journal Science of the Total Environment found that acidity in the Pacific Ocean is affecting the shells of Dungeness crab larvae, making them more vulnerable to predators and limiting shell effectiveness in supporting the growth of muscles.

Energy

According to a new report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the amount of CO₂ the U.S. adds to the atmosphere each year is projected to begin rising by the 2030s and by 2050 emissions are expected to be just 4% below 2019 levels.  Carbon Tracker warns that the oil industry is at risk of a global market shock that could halve the value of fossil fuel investments if governments delay setting policies to tackle the climate crisis and must abruptly change their policies.

Nicholas Kusnetz of Inside Climate News took a comprehensive look at methane leakage from the oil and gas industry as he addressed the question of whether natural gas can be part of a climate change solution.  Australia’s government plans to boost natural gas supply and renewable energy as part of a $1.4 billion deal with New South Wales, its most populous state.  It will upgrade parts of the east coast power grid, help pay for two new interstate transmission links, and back emissions reduction projects.

The Canadian firm Svante and the Swiss company Climeworks AG have a new “joint development agreement” to pilot the combination of the former’s industrial CO₂ capture system alongside the latter’s direct air capture technology.

Texas accounted for more than a quarter of all corporate renewable energy deals signed around the world last year.  Denmark-based energy company The world’s first commercial-scale green-hydrogen plant to be powered solely by surplus offshore wind energy has been announced by a trio of Belgian companies.  Meanwhile, in England, green-hydrogen is being injected into a small natural gas grid in a test of the concept of mixing hydrogen and methane.

Electrical grid congestion costs consumers billions of dollars and is hampering renewable energy deployment.  However, Hudson Gilmer, co-founder and CEO of LineVision Inc., says that his company has demonstrated that there’s additional capacity in our existing grid that can be unlocked by using dynamic line rating technology.

Potpourri

By embracing climate science and presenting it in a simple, locally-relevant manner, TV meteorologists have become some of the most effective and trustworthy climate change educators in the country.  Journalist Nina Burleigh wrote lovingly of the beauty and fragility of the Everglades in a time of climate change and sea level rise; the accompanying photos by Erik Freeland are spectacular.  Michael Svoboda has compiled information on 16 books about “life in the Anthropocene”.  If you are interested in talking about climate change to business people, you might benefit from this interview with climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe at Harvard Business Review.  At Fast Company, Adele Peters imagined what work might be like in 2040 when the global average temperature is 1.5°C above preindustrial times and Kristin Toussaint visited a Singapore apartment to see what life might be like in a hotter future.  Steve Mnuchin’s wife, Scottish actress Louise Linton, defended Greta Thunberg on Instagram, but the post was deleted without explanation about 30 minutes after it appeared.

The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending January 24, 2020 follows.  Please forward the URL to anyone you think might be interested.

Politics and Policy

On Thursday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands on their Doomsday Clock to 100 sec. before midnight, the time of the metaphorical end of life on Earth.  This is the first time that the clock setting has been less than 2 min. since it was established in 1947.  The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) contains a cornucopia of free-trade provisions for oil and gas companies.  One environmentalist calls it “a climate failure any way you look at it.”  In a letter on Wednesday to OMB, Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-DE), ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, argued that the Trump administration’s plan to cut back future increases in fuel-efficiency standards “if finalized in its present form, will lead to vehicles that are neither safer, nor more affordable or fuel-efficient.”  The Trump administration on Wednesday approved a right-of-way grant allowing for the construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline across 44 miles of BLM land in Montana.

An article in The Guardian stated “Though the climate crisis is creating conditions where workers are facing hotter temperatures on a more frequent basis, there are no federal safety protections for workers in extreme temperatures, and only three states, California, Washington and Minnesota, have heat stress workplace protection standards.”  A study published in the journal Climate found that neighborhoods with higher temperatures were often the ones subjected to discriminatory, race-based housing practices nearly a century ago.  The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said that the world needs to prepare for millions of people being driven from their homes by the impact of climate change.  Furthermore, governments must take into account the risks of climate change when considering a refugee’s claim for asylum, the UN Human Rights Committee has ruled.

Amy Harder of Axios sat down with some House Republicans to discuss their climate plans.  With the Axios article as background, here is an opinion piece that deserves a read, as does this interview with Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN).  However, Kate Aronoff, a staff writer for The New Republic remains skeptical.  On Tuesday, Florida lawmakers advanced a proposal that would create a statewide Office of Resiliency and establish a task force to begin looking into how best to protect the state’s 1350 miles of coastline from rising oceans.  A group of state lawmakers from North and South Carolina want to deregulate the states’ electricity markets by allowing competition for power production.  Both states are regulated monopolies with Duke Energy or Dominion Energy as their suppliers.  Reuters has compiled summaries of the climate change policies of the top eight Democrat presidential contenders.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, President Trump was pushing U.S. fossil fuels while the other heads-of-state and business leaders were seeking climate solutions, although the latter were vague about what exactly they would do and how quickly.  Prior to Davos, Robert J. Samuelson had an interesting column about the limitations on investors fighting climate change.  Writing about the Davos meeting, Marianne Lavelle of Inside Climate News wrote about Trump, “But the more he’s talked [about climate change], the less clear it’s been to many people whether he knows enough about the science to deny it.”  On Thursday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin mocked Greta Thunberg (causing her to hit back), prompting Philip Bump at The Washington Post to query environmental economist Gernot Wagner of New York University.  Meanwhile, a book-length report, published by the Bank for International Settlements, in Basel, Switzerland, signaled that climate change risks could be the overriding theme for central banks in the decade to come.

Climate and Climate Science

The bushfires in southeastern Australia this season have burned about eight times as much land as the 2018 fires in California, which covered nearly two million acres and were the worst in that state’s recorded history.  As a result the Australian fires are contributing to one of the biggest annual increases in the concentration of CO₂ in the Earth’s atmosphere since record-keeping began more than 60 years ago.  The human cost of the bushfires increased Wednesday when three U.S. firefighters were killed in the crash of their Lockheed C-130 Hercules plane.  The fires, however, which have directly affected more than half of all Australians, have also served to energize Australia’s environmental and climate movement.  Nevertheless, climate change deniers in Australia’s Parliament are still in control.

Now that all of the official climate data from 2019 are in, Carbon Brief published its annual “State of the Climate” report.  As part of its “Climate Solutions” series, Washington Post reporter Ben Guarino wrote about efforts to plant a trillion new trees on Earth.  Two weeks ago, I provided a link to an article about the appropriation of $4 million to NOAA to study geoengineering.  This week there was an article about what NOAA will do with the money.

Atmospheric concentrations of HFC-23, a greenhouse gas nearly 13,000 times more potent than CO₂, rose faster than ever over a three-year period starting in 2015, a new study in Nature Communications has found. The findings suggest that China and India may not be living up to recent pledges to dramatically reduce emissions of the pollutant.

The latest generation of climate models, referred to as CMIP6, are showing higher climate sensitivity (amount of warming in °C associated with a doubling of CO_2e in the atmosphere) than previous models.  Drastic fluctuations in climate could cause significant deterioration to tens of thousands of steel-girder bridges built across the U.S. after World War II.

Climate change is aggravating an erosion crisis in Nigeria that is wrecking buildings, roads, and farmland; damage may cost up to $100 million a year.  It is also causing permafrost to thaw all over the Arctic.  Environmental writer Ed Struzik visited the Canadian Arctic to learn the impacts.  New research, published in the journal Scientific Reports, suggests that Arctic sea ice cannot “quickly bounce back” if climate change causes it to melt.

Energy

At Foresight: Climate and Energy, energy analyst Serge Colle of Ernst & Young Global Limited addressed the question of whether the potential gains for energy companies outweigh the risks of an accelerated transition to renewable energy.  Oil and gas companies put their own survival at risk if they fail to adapt to providing clean-energy solutions to the world, the International Energy Agency said in a report Monday.  Arizona Public Service, the state’s biggest electricity provider, announced Wednesday that it will seek to produce all of its power from carbon-free sources by 2050.  According to Energy Information Administration data released Tuesday, wind and solar will make up 32 of the 42 GW of new capacity additions expected to start commercial operation in the U.S. in 2020, dwarfing the 9.3 GW of natural-gas-fired plants to come online this year.

According to a report by scientists from Finland’s Lappeenranta University of Technology, the energy storage industry will grow to employ millions by 2050, fueling a renewables jobs boom as fossil fuel industries shed millions of workers.  You may have heard of Redox Flow Batteries for utility-scale energy storage, but know little about them.  Well, Energy Storage News has a primer on them.

A study, published in the journal Energy Policy, found that carbon emissions from China’s aviation sector could almost quadruple by 2050.

Incoming BP CEO Bernard Looney plans to expand the company’s climate targets and adopt broader carbon emissions reduction goals that will likely include emissions from fuels and products sold to customers rather than just those from BP’s own operations.  After spending nearly $13 million to defeat a carbon-pricing ballot measure in 2018, BP launched a public relations campaign last weekend to promote putting a price on carbon pollution in Washington state.  Meanwhile, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that the state’s Clean Air Act cannot be applied to companies that sell or distribute natural gas but do not directly release CO₂ by burning the fuel.

An article in The Economist stated “The question is no longer ‘whether’ Big Oil has a big role to play in averting the climate crisis. It is ‘when’.”  On the other hand, two historians of science argued that Congress must use its power to investigate Big Oil, just as it once investigated Big Tobacco.

Potpourri

The Washington Post has a “Climate Curious” column, where readers can submit questions about climate change.  This week’s column addressed the question of “What does ‘dangerous’ climate change really mean?”  Peter Sinclair has a new video; this one about the fires in Australia (where he lives), which are thought to be a sign of a fundamental change in its climate.  The last decade was the worst on record for economic losses from natural disasters, amounting to $3 trillion – over a trillion more than the previous decade, insurance broker Aon said on Wednesday.  If you enjoy using simulators to help you think about big questions, then you may be interested in the “En-Roads Climate Change Solutions Simulator” developed jointly by the MIT Sloan School of Management, Climate Interactive, and Ventana Systems.  Amy Brady interviewed Norwegian author Maja Lunde about her cli-fi novel, The End of the Ocean.  Makoto Shinkai’s new anime film, Weathering with You, features climate change as the backdrop of a story about two teenagers.  It was reviewed by David Sims in The Atlantic.

The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending January 17, 2020 follows.  Please forward the URL to anyone you think might be interested.

Politics and Policy

The latest survey (November 2019) from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication has found that the “Alarmed” segment of U.S. society is at an all-time high (31%), nearly tripling in size since October 2014.  A federal appeals court on Friday threw out the children’s climate lawsuit, which was trying to force the federal government to take action to address the climate crisis, ruling 2 to 1 that they must look to the political branches for action, rather than the courts.  James Temple took a cleared-eye view of all of the big infrastructure projects that will be required to adapt to climate change, concluding that we can’t achieve a set of cohesive national goals “if we simply allow cities and citizens to prioritize their individual concerns.”

Among 20 of the most powerful people in government environmental jobs, most have ties to the fossil fuel industry or have fought against the regulations they now are supposed to enforce.  The World Economic Forum’s annual risks report found that, for the first time in its 15-year history, the environment filled the top five places in the list of concerns likely to have a major impact over the next decade.  The European Commission has set out a plan to invest €1tn in climate action, towards its aim of net-zero emissions by 2050.  Data gathered by the UN’s climate body shows that 114 countries have produced more ambitious plans for cutting emissions or have signaled their intention to do so this year.  A new UN proposal calls for national parks, marine sanctuaries and other protected areas to cover nearly one-third or more of the planet by 2030 as part of an effort to stop a sixth mass extinction and slow global warming.  Australia’s vulnerability to climate change is aggravated by its geography because it is surrounded by developing countries that do not have the resources, skills, knowledge, and infrastructure to mitigate the impacts of climate change, leading to the potential for environmental refugees.

Close on the heels of the announcement of the Democrat’s CLEAN Future Act, which is still under development, Republicans began working on their own climate plan.  According to a climate plan unveiled Wednesday, Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is pledging to slash carbon pollution by 50% in the U.S. economy by 2030, with full decarbonization by 2050.  Microsoft has promised to be “carbon negative” within the decade and to use its technology, money, and influence to drive down carbon emissions across the economy.  At The Hill, Shahir Masri and Robert Taylor posited that a consensus is emerging in support of a national climate program to drastically reduce emissions, spur investments in clean energy, and provide protection and economic justice for families coping with increased energy costs.  Bloomberg New Energy Finance published the organization’s predictions for what the year 2020 will bring for the low-carbon transition in energy, transport, commodities, and sustainability.  Although written for a UK audience, Chris Goodall’s article about a carbon tax addresses many questions associated with the policy.  Eric Niiler at Wired examined the question of whether carbon offsets really work.

Four coastal Louisiana tribes that claim the U.S. government has violated their human rights by failing to take action on climate change submitted a formal complaint Wednesday to the UN in Geneva, Switzerland.  Several Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee slammed bipartisan legislation to gradually reduce the use of heat-trapping chemicals in air conditioners and refrigerators, arguing the measure would raise costs for consumers.  E-mails obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council under a federal Freedom of Information Act request revealed a closely coordinated effort between industry and the Justice Department’s environmental division to block climate lawsuits by the cities of Oakland and San Francisco.  The NHTSA and the EPA submitted proposed rules for 2021 through 2026 model years auto fuel efficiency to the White House’s OMB.

Climate and Climate Science

Reports from NASA and NOAA confirmed that 2019 was the second hottest year on record and that the past decade was the hottest on record.  Perhaps more importantly, the ocean heat content in 2019 was the hottest on record.  Robinson Meyer shared his thoughts about the significance of those events in The Atlantic.  In a study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE, a group of scientists concluded that the massive die-off of sea birds in 2014 through 2016 in the Pacific was caused by a record-breaking ocean heat wave that triggered systemic changes throughout the ocean ecosystem.  Leatherback turtles are making longer journeys, in some cases nearly twice as long as usual, from nesting to feeding grounds, because of rising ocean temperatures and changing sea currents.

Dana Nuccitelli explained how climate change has influenced Australia’s unprecedented fires.  An Australian forest expert worries that Australia is on the brink of a “major ecological shift.”  At Vox, Umair Irfan explained why Australia has always had weird weather and how climate change is influencing it.

Carbon Brief published an analysis of the ten climate papers most featured in the media in 2019.  A new paper in the journal Nature Climate Change reported that with a single day of global weather observations, scientists can now detect evidence of climate change.

Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rose 85% in 2019 compared to the previous year, according to a data-based warning system from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research.

Two articles this week dealt with ecological grief.  In The New York Times, author Emma Marris provided a five-step plan for dealing with it, while at The Guardian, several scientists revealed how they are coping with a profound sense of loss.

Energy

After Hurricane Maria, several companies and non-profits donated solar panels and batteries to community centers and critical infrastructure in Puerto Rico.  Adele Peters of Fast Company visited after the earthquake and wrote about how the solar facilities fared.  If you are interested in large-scale energy storage for stabilizing an electrical grid with a lot of renewable energy input, this review article from last week will serve as a good tutorial on the subject.

According to a report by BloombergNEF, burning hydrogen for electricity could work economically in some countries by 2050 if the price on carbon rises to $55 per ton of CO₂.  A bigger issue than the combustion of hydrogen will be the production, transportation, and storage of the gas.  Last year saw the global hydrogen fuel sector add more than 1 GW of new capacity for the first time.  U.S. investments in renewable energy set a record in 2019.

A report by the northeast regional advocacy group Acadia Center said that emissions from the power plants covered by the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) were down 47% from 2009 to the end of 2017 – outpacing the rest of the nation by 90%.  The gross domestic product of the RGGI states also grew by 47% over the same period – outperforming the rest of the country, which grew by 31%.  In 2019, U.S. power companies retired or converted roughly 15.1 GW of coal-fired electricity generation, second only to 2015 when 19.3 GW were retired.  On Thursday, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government and Germany’s four coal-producing states unveiled details of their plan to phase out coal-fired power plants by 2038 at the latest.

In 2020, holistically-planned livestock grazing and regenerative land management practices will be brought to nearly 2,400 acres of solar farms to create carbon sinks, restore biodiversity and soil health, and add to the environmental, social, and economic benefits of solar farms.

The U.S. isn’t the only country where the public is in love with SUVs, causing a dilemma for auto manufacturers facing tougher fuel economy standards.   At E&E News, David Ferris examined four questions that will determine whether the 2020s will be the electric vehicle decade.  The International Code Council, which sets voluntary guidelines for new homes, voted to approve a new provision that will make all new homes built in the U.S. “EV-ready.”  Waynesboro will be in the first group of Virginia cities to receive electric school buses under a plan devised by Dominion Energy.

Potpourri

The BBC will have a year-long series of special programming and coverage on climate change.  David Roberts examined the growing use of wood in the construction of multistory buildings as a way to minimize greenhouse gases in the building industry.  Jane Fonda held her last “Fire Drill Friday” last week.  Lennox Yearwood Jr. and Bill McKibben urged people to “follow the money” in their fight against fossil fuels.  A study published in the journal Environmental and Resource Economics found that the installation of rooftop solar panels in a neighborhood increased the share of neighbors who believe human action is the primary cause of climate change.  YouTube has been “actively promoting” videos containing misinformation about climate change, says Time, reporting on findings released Thursday by campaign group Avaaz.  Rupert Murdoch’s younger son, James, and his activist wife, Kathryn, attacked the climate denialism promoted by News Corporation (the global media group) and by the Fox News Channel overseen by James’ older brother, Lachlan.  The Washington Post reviewed “Weathering with You,” an animated feature from Japanese writer-director Makoto Shinkai.  If you like video games, you might be interested in “The Climate Trail” (free and ad-free) by William Volk that can be played on iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows, and “Cranky Uncle” by John Cook that is still in prototype, but should be available soon for both iOS and Android phones.

The Weekly Roundup of Climate and Energy News for the week ending January 10, 2020 follows.  Please forward the URL to anyone you think might be interested.

Welcome to the first Weekly Roundup of 2020.  Perhaps the best way to start is to consider the words of climate scientist Ben Santer, written on New Years Eve.

Politics and Policy

Federal agencies would no longer have to take climate change into account when they assess the environmental impacts of highways, pipelines, and other major infrastructure projects, according to a Trump administration plan that would weaken the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).  In a related action, President Trump proposed changes to NEPA that would redefine what constitutes a “major federal action” to exclude privately financed projects that have minimal government funding or involvement, such as pipelines and other energy infrastructure.  As a result, Reps. Diana DeGette (D-CO) and Francis Rooney (R-FL) sent a letter to the entire House, urging their colleagues to oppose the proposed changes.

The head of the American Petroleum Institute on Tuesday warned that Americans risk choosing the “wrong path” in the 2020 presidential election if they vote for a candidate seeking to fight climate change by banning drilling.  Three members of Extinction Rebellion Scotland boarded a gas mining rig in the port of Dundee in an attempt to stop it from heading out to the North Sea.  There are still pipeline standoffs going on, these between gas companies and Indigenous Peoples in Canada, and they have resulted in a ruling by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.  Meanwhile, in the U.S., federal agencies are required by law to work with Native American tribes that might be affected by oil and gas projects, but they often don’t.  Critics of Rupert Murdoch’s Australian newspapers see a concerted effort to shift blame, protect conservative leaders, and divert attention from climate change in the debate about the bush fires.

During the 2017-2018 election cycle in the U.S., oil, gas, and coal industry lobbying and campaign donations totaled $359,165,917, whereas the renewable energy industries spent $26,204,224.  BlackRock, the world’s largest investor, has joined Climate Action 100+, an influential pressure group calling for the biggest polluters to reduce their CO₂ emissions.  At Vox, Laura McGann had a message for Boomers: “You can still be heroes in the story of climate change.”  On Wednesday, House Democrats released a white paper that outlined their vision for sweeping climate legislation that would push the U.S. to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.  Surprisingly, it did not call for an economy-wide price on carbon emissions.  Because buildings are a major source of urban greenhouse gas emissions, numerous cities across the U.S. are passing laws or formulating regulations aimed at decreasing the energy use of existing buildings.

In an opinion piece in The New York Times (NYT), Jochen Bittner of Die Zeit in Germany argued that moving away from nuclear energy could turn out to be one of the gravest mistakes of the Merkel era.  In the U.S., a line item in the recently passed $1.4 trillion budget provides NOAA with at least $4 million to study the impacts of placing materials in the stratosphere to counter global warming, i.e., geoengineering.  In the last of a four-part series, David Roberts discussed how carbon-capture-and-utilization could be used to build a circular economy around carbon.

Climate and Climate Science

More than three-quarters of the Australian continent experienced the worst fire weather conditions on record last month as 2019 set new benchmarks for heat and dryness across the country.  Carbon Brief compiled a summary of the media response to one of Australia’s worst bushfire seasons on record.  The piece includes an appraisal of the links between climate change, the nation’s recent extreme temperatures, and the fires.  Amid the ongoing bushfire crisis, Australian prime minister Scott Morrison rejected criticism of his government’s climate change policies.  Climate Home News reported that the fires will cost billions of dollars for recovery efforts, while Vox examined the origin of the estimate that around a billion animals had been killed.  Furthermore, many species are expected to go extinct because of habitat loss.  While the world has been focused on the Australian fires, space research agency INPE released data showing that the number of fires in the Amazon rainforest grew 30.5% in 2019 from 2018.  Inside Climate News reported that scientists say we’re witnessing how global warming can push forest ecosystems past a point of no return because some of the burned forests won’t recover in today’s warmer climate.  An important issue following a fire, is what to do with a burned forest.  Should it be cut and replanted, or should regrowth be allowed to occur naturally?

If you would like a short review of the major climate research published in 2019, Yale Climate Connections has one written by Dana Nuccitelli.  Chelsea Harvey asked climate researchers across a variety of disciplines about the biggest priorities and hottest topics for the 2020s.  The number of billion-dollar climate- and weather-related disasters in the U.S. more than doubled in the last decade, with costs soaring above $800 billion, according to a U.S. government report released on Wednesday.  Democratic Republic of Congo is one of several central African countries to be hit by severe flooding in recent months, which researchers have attributed to increasingly intense and unpredictable weather linked to global warming.

European scientists on Wednesday confirmed that 2019 was the second hottest year on record for Earth, behind 2016, which had a strong El Niño event.  Shrubs and grasses are springing up around Mount Everest and across the Himalayas.  Although little is known about the impact of plant growth in the Himalayas, studies of increased vegetation in the Arctic found that they delivered a warming effect in the surrounding landscape.

A new study, published in the journal Nature, has found a link between the amount of Arctic sea ice and the melting of permafrost, with less sea ice leading to greater melting.  Another paper in Nature reported that it was unable to replicate studies that found that acidified sea water negatively influenced some aspects of fish behavior.

Scientists think they’ve uncovered a tipping point in the deforestation of landscapes across Earth: Once an area loses half its forest, the rest of the forest is often swift to fall.

Energy

Led by an 18% drop in coal-fired electricity generation, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions dropped by 2.1% in 2019, according to the Rhodium Group.  Inside Climate News had a good analysis of the emissions drop with graphs for each sector of the economy.  Texas generated more energy from renewable sources in 2019 than from coal, according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.  E&E News published a discussion of five energy fights to watch in 2020.

In the “hopeful” column, researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a new copper- and iron-based catalyst that uses light to convert CO₂ to methane.  If the new catalyst can be improved further, it could help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, as well as provide a new method of energy storage.

Phoenix-based Nikola Motors is acquiring a battery start-up whose technology could double the distance a battery-electric vehicle can travel between charges, while cutting battery costs in half.  Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy has been chosen as the preferred turbine supplier for the 2.64 GW Dominion Energy Virginia Offshore Wind project.

As one might expect, MIT is conducting a significant amount of work on energy and its conservation.  This month it reported on efforts to reduce energy loss through windows, while last month it explained the various types of renewable energy generation.  Renovation of existing houses is an excellent way to cut the carbon footprint of housing.  Ensia examined how this can be done.

In the “Oh, good grief” column, according to Gilbert et al., the extraction of oceanic methane hydrates has the potential to supply the world with more than 1 million exajoules of energy, equivalent to thousands of years of current global energy demand.  It also has the potential to greatly exacerbate climate change.

Potpourri

At The Correspondent, meteorologist and writer Eric Holthaus provided “a story about our journey to 2030 – a vision of what it could look and feel like if we finally, radically, collectively act to build a world we want to live in.”  Manohla Dargis, co-chief film critic at the NYT reviewed the movie Earth.  Amy Harder has posted at Axios “10 energy and climate issues to watch in 2020”.  Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker, addressed the question, “What will another decade of climate crisis bring?”.  As we seek to adapt to climate change during the 2020s, we can obtain information from the Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange (CAKE), a collection of more than 2,000 vetted resources on climate adaptation compiled since 2010 by EcoAdapt, a nonprofit based in Washington state.