Author Archives: PercySpangler

Antarctica, most remote place on Earth, just hit a scary CO2 milestone

by PercySpangler Posted on June 17, 2016

Antarctica, most remote place on Earth, just hit a scary CO2 milestone

By on Jun 17, 2016 3:38 pm

Cross-posted from

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We’re officially living in a new world.

Carbon dioxide has been steadily rising since the start of the Industrial Revolution, setting a new high year after year. There’s a notable new entry to the record books. The last station on Earth without a 400 parts per million (ppm) reading has reached it.

Carbon dioxide officially crossed the 400 ppm threshold on May 23 at the South Pole Observatory. NOAA

A little 400 ppm history. Three years ago, the world’s gold standard carbon dioxide observatory passed the symbolic threshold of 400 ppm. Other observing stations have steadily reached that threshold as carbon dioxide has spread across the planet’s atmosphere at various points since then. Collectively, the world passed the threshold for a month last year.

In the remote reaches of Antarctica, the South Pole Observatory carbon dioxide observing station cleared 400 ppm on May 23, according to an announcement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Wednesday. That’s the first time it’s passed that level in 4 million years (no, that’s not a typo).

There’s a lag in how carbon dioxide moves around the atmosphere. Most carbon pollution originates in the northern hemisphere because that’s where most of the world’s population lives. That’s in part why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit the 400 ppm milestone earlier in the northern reaches of the world.

But the most remote continent on earth has caught up with its more populated counterparts.

“The increase of carbon dioxide is everywhere, even as far away as you can get from civilization,” Pieter Tans, a carbon-monitoring scientist at the Environmental Science Research Laboratory, said. “If you emit carbon dioxide in New York, some fraction of it will be in the South Pole next year.”

An animation showing how carbon dioxide moves around the planet. NASA/Youtube

Tans said it’s “practically impossible” for the South Pole Observatory to see readings dip below 400 ppm because the Antarctic lacks a strong carbon dioxide up and down seasonal cycle compared to locations in the mid-latitudes. Even factoring in that seasonal cycle, new research published earlier this week shows that the planet as a whole has likely crossed the 400 ppm threshold permanently (at least in our lifetimes).

Passing the 400 ppm milestone in is a symbolic but nonetheless important reminder that human activities continue to reshape our planet in profound ways. We’ve seen sea levels rise about a foot in the past 120 years and temperatures go up about 1.8 degrees F (1 degrees C) globally. Arctic sea ice has dwindled 13.4 percent per decade since the 1970s, extreme heat has become more common and oceans are headed for their most acidic levels in millions of years. Recently, heat has cooked corals and global warming has contributed in various ways to extreme events around the world.

The Paris Agreement is a good starting point to slow carbon dioxide emissions, but the world will have to have a full about-face to avoid some of the worst impacts of climate change. Even slowing down emissions still means we’re dumping record-high amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

That’s why monitoring carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa, the South Pole, and other locations around the world continues to be an important activity. It can gauge how successful the efforts under the Paris Agreement (and other agreements) have been and if the world is meeting its goals.

“Just because we have an agreement doesn’t mean the problem [of climate change] is solved,” Tans said.

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Antarctica, most remote place on Earth, just hit a scary CO2 milestone

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Which Tech Companies Are the Greenest?

by PercySpangler Posted on May 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared in Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

“It’s not easy being green” is a tired cliché, but it’s still particularly true if you are a giant technology company. Even Apple, Facebook, and Google—the best of the bunch, according to a new report from Greenpeace—will have to put in serious additional effort to fully shift to clean energy, especially in terms of lobbying at the state and local level. And the industry laggards, which include Amazon and eBay, have that much further to go.

Here’s how Greenpeace categorizes the tech giants:

Greenpeace

Energy efficiency in traditional appliances keeps improving, but our demand for energy is boosted by new technologies. In particular, companies that manufacture mobile devices and provide services like email, social networking, cloud storage, and streaming video have to contend with constantly escalating demand for data storage.

At the same time, being eco-friendly is important to many of those same companies—or at least important to their public image. Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Microsoft all dropped out of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) last year because of bad publicity around the right-wing corporatist group’s opposition to action on climate change. But tech giants will need to do a lot more than quit dirty lobbying groups, Greenpeace argues; they’ll need to actually get involved in the political sphere on behalf of clean energy solutions.

First, the good news is that some tech companies are making respectable efforts to power their operations through clean energy sources. Google has invested heavily in solar energy, and Apple announced just yesterday that it’s expanding its renewable programs to manufacturing facilities in China. But in many cases, the issue is not whether companies have good intentions but whether clean energy is available to them.

Here are a few key quotes from the Greenpeace report:

Apple continues to lead the charge in powering its corner of the internet with renewable energy even as it continues to rapidly expand. All three of its data center expansions announced in the past year will be powered with renewable energy.
Google continues to match Apple in deploying renewable energy with its expansion in some markets, but its march toward 100 percent renewable energy is increasingly under threat by monopoly utilities for several data centers including those in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Singapore and Taiwan.

And here are some challenges the report lays out:

Amazon’s adoption of a 100 percent renewable energy goal, while potentially significant, lacks basic transparency and, unlike similar commitments from Apple, Facebook or Google, does not yet appear to be guiding Amazon’s investment decisions toward renewable energy and away from coal.
The rapid rise of streaming video is driving significant growth in our online footprint, and in power-hungry data centers and network infrastructure needed to deliver it.
Microsoft has slipped further behind Apple and Google in the race to build a green internet, as its cloud footprint continues to undergo massive growth in an attempt to catch up with Amazon, but has not kept pace with Apple and Google in terms of its supply of renewable electricity.

The underlying problem in many cases is that dirty energy-dependent utility monopolies are providing the electricity for massive, and growing, data centers. If these utilities use coal or natural gas, then by extension so do the tech companies with data centers in their service areas. Meeting data-storage demand without burning more fossil fuels will not be easy. Greenpeace writes:

Big data’s massive growth is expected to continue with the emergence of cheap smartphones: nearly 80 percent of the planet’s adult population will be connected to the internet by 2020, and the total number of devices connected to the internet will be roughly twice the global population by 2018. Internet traffic from mobile devices increased 69 percent in 2014 alone with the rapid increase of video streaming to mobile devices, and mobile traffic will exceed what is delivered over wired connections by 2018.

There are different ways to increase renewable energy supply at data centers. The first, of course, is simply to generate clean power on site with solar panels or wind turbines. Apple is already doing this and other companies are following its lead. But data centers require so much energy that they won’t generally be able to cover most of their needs that way. Other free-market approaches include power purchase agreements, in which the tech companies can make a deal with a clean energy supplier, and “green tariffs,” in which they agree to buy 100 percent clean power from the local utility at a price premium.

To get all their energy from renewables, though, will require tech companies to engage in policy debates. Greenpeace writes:

In many markets, companies’ ability to power with renewable energy will remain severely limited without policy changes. Even in more liberalized markets, it behooves companies to advocate for policies that will green the broader grid, narrowing the ground that they need to cover to power with 100 percent renewable energy. Companies can and must become advocates with the regulators and policymakers who ultimately have the power to change markets in ways that will allow companies to achieve their renewable energy goals. State policymakers covet data center investments, offering significant tax incentives to companies to lure them into their borders. Companies could compel a similar race to the top on renewable energy.

There were a few instances last year of tech companies lobbying for clean energy policies—Google submitted comments in favor of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, and several major tech firms signed the “Corporate Renewable Energy Buyers’ Principles” calling on state regulators and utilities to expand access to renewable energy.

Greenpeace argues that tech companies particularly need to get engaged in state and local politics, forming an effective counterweight to the fossil fuel and right-wing interest group money that has swayed state legislative races and outcomes in recent years. Last year, Facebook and Microsoft submitted comments to the Iowa Utilities Board in favor of distributed electricity generation, but that was a relatively isolated event. That sort of activism needs to become routine.

In North Carolina, for example, Greenpeace notes that it’s illegal to buy renewable energy from a third party instead of buying whatever dirty energy is offered by state monopoly Duke Energy. The same state legislature that is offering tax incentives to attract data centers is considering changing that law. Tech companies should tell North Carolina that doing so is a precondition to getting any data centers located there, Greenpeace argues. Similarly, Virginia has a harsh cap on third-party clean power purchases, and the State Corporation Commission is due to review that rule this year.

You can be sure that the utilities, the Koch brothers, Art Pope, and Americans for Prosperity will be involved in these fights. If clean energy supporters are not, they will be over before they have begun. To really be green, tech companies need to put their muscle into this fight.

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Which Tech Companies Are the Greenest?

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