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Former Republican EPA chiefs back Obama on climate change

by Cosetta Shallenberger Posted on August 2, 2013

Former Republican EPA chiefs back Obama on climate change

By John Upton

Shutterstock

What do Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and George W. Bush have in common?

Yes, OK, obviously they were all Republican presidents. But now there’s something else that ties them all together.

EPA administrators who worked for all of those presidents have come out in support of stronger actions on climate change, co-signing a powerful op-ed in The New York Times supporting Barack Obama’s climate plan and arguing that “the United States must move now on substantive steps to curb climate change.”

Here are some highlights from the op-ed, which was written by William D. Ruckelshaus, Lee M. Thomas, William K. Reilly, and Christine Todd Whitman:

The costs of inaction are undeniable. The lines of scientific evidence grow only stronger and more numerous. And the window of time remaining to act is growing smaller: delay could mean that warming becomes “locked in.”

A market-based approach, like a carbon tax, would be the best path to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, but that is unachievable in the current political gridlock in Washington. Dealing with this political reality, President Obama’s June climate action plan lays out achievable actions that would deliver real progress. He will use his executive powers to require reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the nation’s power plants and spur increased investment in clean energy technology, which is inarguably the path we must follow to ensure a strong economy along with a livable climate. …

Rather than argue against his proposals, our leaders in Congress should endorse them and start the overdue debate about what bigger steps are needed and how to achieve them — domestically and internationally. …

We can have both a strong economy and a livable climate. All parties know that we need both. The rest of the discussion is either detail, which we can resolve, or purposeful delay, which we should not tolerate.

Mr. Obama’s plan is just a start. More will be required. But we must continue efforts to reduce the climate-altering pollutants that threaten our planet. The only uncertainty about our warming world is how bad the changes will get, and how soon. What is most clear is that there is no time to waste.

The op-ed also states that there “is no longer any credible scientific debate about the basic facts” of global warming. But, then, nobody should need a bunch of former EPA chiefs to tell them that.

Source

A Republican Case for Climate Action, The New York Times

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Former Republican EPA chiefs back Obama on climate change

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Sally Jewell doesn’t want any climate deniers at Interior

by JohnsieaJensen Posted on August 2, 2013

Sally Jewell doesn’t want any climate deniers at Interior

By Claire Thompson

BLM OregonSally Jewell.

Obama has staffed his second-term team with a couple of kickass women ready to take the lead on climate action. Two days after EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy called bullshit on the notion that environmental regulations kill jobs, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, in an address to her employees, made clear that she won’t tolerate any debunked theories, either. “I hope there are no climate change deniers in the Department of Interior,” she said.

E&E News reports:

If there are any [deniers], she invited them to visit public lands managed by the agency — be it the melting permafrost in Alaska or shrinking snowpacks in the Sierra Mountains — as proof. “If you don’t believe in it, come out into the resources,” she said.

Interior will be following through on President Obama’s climate change plan, including achieving 20 gigawatts of renewable power on public lands by 2020, she said.

“You and I can actually do something about it,” she said several times. “That’s a privilege, and I would argue it’s a moral imperative.”

Moreover, the former head of REI said the federal government is able to take action on climate change on a scale “orders of magnitude” larger than any individual business, even one as huge as Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Right-wingers flipped out over Jewell’s comments about employees who might not be conversant in basic scientific facts. Don’t be surprised if deniers start twisting her statement into a form of workplace discrimination. Globalwarming.org, a denier blog with the tagline “May Cooler Heads Prevail,” fumed:

Such moralizing would be funny were it not for the chilling effect it is bound to have in an agency already mired in group think. …

Ms. Jewel’s anti-’denier’ sermonizing is morally vacuous. It will, however, discourage candor and independent thought in an important and powerful agency.

Only a few months on the job and Jewell already behaves like a self-righteous bully. A good swift dose of congressional oversight is in order. It might just keep the thought police from harassing climate dissenters at DOI.

Just yesterday, Jewell’s bullying resulted in Interior’s first auction of offshore wind power rights. That’s $3.8 million for the federal government, and renewable power on its way to American ratepayers in as little as five years, in the first of many such auctions Interior plans to hold. If this is what self-righteous bullying looks like, bring it on.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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Should we turn deserts into carbon-sucking tree plantations?

by nortom23 Posted on August 1, 2013

Should we turn deserts into carbon-sucking tree plantations?

By John Upton

ACICAFOC

A Barbados nut plantation.

To fight climate change, some scientists think we should vegetate the hell out of deserts. The latest such idea calls for large plantations of a hardy species of Central American tree to be planted in near-coastal desert areas and irrigated with desalinated water.

While forests soak up carbon dioxide, deserts do comparatively little to help with climate change. So should these seas of sand be planted and watered out of existence in a bid to reduce CO2 levels?

Some say yes. The approach would be like geoengineering, but rooted in a more natural system. Scientists call it bioengineering or carbon farming.

The idea of replacing deserts with forests to help the climate is not brand new. A few years ago, for example, scientists proposed planting eucalyptus trees through the Saharan and Australian deserts to help absorb carbon dioxide.

The latest suggested approach, which would involve the planting of vast orchards of Barbados nut trees, technically known as Jatropha curcas trees, was proposed Wednesday by a group of German researchers in the journal Earth System Dynamics. They say vegetating the world’s near-coastal deserts with this species, which can withstand harsh growing conditions, could provide an alternative to mechanical carbon-sequestration techniques.

The researchers crunched some numbers and determined that the carbon-farming costs would be competitive over 20 years with carbon capture and storage, an embryonic technology in which a power plant’s carbon emissions are captured and funneled underground. Carbon farming could be funded by governments through carbon taxes and through the sale of carbon allowances.

“Suitably deployed, these plants could transform unused, barren lands into long-term carbon sinks,” they write in the paper. “The carbon efficiency of this bio-ecosystem would compare favourably with all other existing processes for carbon storage and sequestration, including the cultivation of bio fuels.”

Not only would the trees soak up CO2 and deposit some of it into the soil, but their growth could influence rainfall patterns, soil quality, and regional climates, paving the way for the natural growth of other plants.

Jatropha curcas can withstand conditions that would make most plants wither, but they’re not magical. They still need water. The scientists propose desalinating water from the sea to irrigate the orchards. This is an expensive and energy-intensive way of obtaining fresh water, but the scientists incorporated that into their cost estimates.

Oil from the trees is already used extensively for biofuel, and the scientists say that after an orchard had been growing for a few years it would produce nuts and leaves that could be burned to provide some of the power needed for desalination.

The idea seems worthy of further investigation — although it wouldn’t be much good for the tortoises and other wildlife that revel in the world’s deserts.

Here’s a graphic from the paper that helps explain the proposal:

Earth System DynamicsClick to embiggen.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Koch brothers hire lobbyists to fight carbon tax, save poor and old people

by agerere567 Posted on August 1, 2013

Koch brothers hire lobbyists to fight carbon tax, save poor and old people

By Grist staff

Charles and David Koch really, really don’t want a carbon tax.

Carbon-tax proposals are going nowhere in Congress, but the Koch brothers aren’t taking any chances.

A few non-office-holding Republicans and a few actual-office-holding Democrats are calling for a carbon tax, but the current Congress would never pass one, and even the Obama administration has said it doesn’t want one.

Still, a grandstanding Republican representative, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, is pushing a House resolution declaring that “a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy” and “to American families and businesses,” and that it would “fall hardest on the poor, the elderly, and those on fixed incomes.” (Never mind that many carbon-tax proposals are designed specifically to ease burdens on low-income Americans. Facts are not of interest here.)

The billionaire oil-mogul Koch brothers — who’ve convinced many politicians to sign a “No Climate Tax Pledge” — have now hired a gang of lobbyists to push Scalise’s pointless resolution, The Hill reports.

Just how would a tax on carbon pollution hurt American families and businesses? Well, it might take a bite out of the Koch family’s coffers and the Kochs’ businesses.

Still, the Kochs really are concerned about the poor. In fact, Charles Koch is pushing his own plan for lifting people out of poverty; one key component is eliminating the minimum wage.

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Alaska’s heat wave breaking records, killing salmon

by BessMEIF Posted on August 1, 2013

Alaska’s heat wave breaking records, killing salmon

By John Upton

Douglas Brown

A grizzly bear basks in the Alaskan sun.

Something smells fishy about a record-breaking heat wave in Alaska.

It might be the piles of dead salmon.

The Land of the Midnight Sun has been sweating, relatively speaking, through a hot and sun-soaked summer. From the AP:

Anchorage has set a record for the most consecutive days over 70 degrees during this unusually warm summer, while Fairbanks is closing in on its own seasonal heat record.

The National Weather Service said Alaska’s largest city topped out at 70 degrees at 4 p.m. Tuesday, making it the 14th straight day the thermometer read 70 or higher. That breaks a record of 13 straight days set in 2004.

In Fairbanks, temperatures Monday reached 80 or higher for the 29th day this summer.

While most of the world is getting warmer, the 49th state appeared recently to be getting colder – the temporary effect of a long-term oceanic weather pattern known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Now the unusually toasty summer is raising questions about whether climate change is heating up the state, though some are arguing the heat wave could just be an anomaly.

What isn’t being questioned is the link between the hot weather and a die-off of 1,100 king salmon. The fish were returning to a hatchery south of Petersburg to spawn when they succumbed to hot water and low oxygen levels, perhaps worsened by low tides. From a weekend report by the AP:

Alaska Department of Fish and Game sportfish biologist Doug Fleming said he found the dead fish July 18 after last week’s warm weather, when temperatures were in the 80s.

He began monitoring water levels earlier in the week when it appeared temperatures were reaching dangerous levels.

“And so, getting through till Wednesday which appeared to be the hottest day, then on Thursday I was conducting an aerial survey just to get a grip on how many fish may have been killed by the warm water, not expecting to see a large die-off but some, and I was shocked to see the numbers of fish that we lost,” he said.

So hold your nose when you enjoy your paddle in that balmy river, Alaskans.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Offshore auction signals start of wind bonanza

by Christinef76 Posted on August 1, 2013

Offshore auction signals start of wind bonanza

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Coming soon, to a coastline near you …

Wind developers have accepted invitations to the government’s New England offshore wind energy party.

There are currently no offshore wind farms in U.S. waters, but the Obama administration intends to change that. On Wednesday, the government auctioned off the right to construct turbines in nearly 165,000 acres of federal waters south of Massachusetts and Rhode Island — the first of many offshore auctions the Interior Department has planned.

The brown bits should get turbines within a few years.

Hedge fund-backed Deepwater Wind LLC beat out two other bidders at the auction, agreeing to pay $3.8 million for the development rights. The Providence, R.I.-based company said it could spend as much as $6 billion building up to 200 wind turbines in the area plus transmission lines, with construction possibly beginning in 2017 and power production in 2018.

From Bloomberg:

“We’re hoping that this year and next year we can start putting the power purchase agreements together,” [Deepwater CEO Jeff] Grybowski said. The project will likely be built in phases with 200 megawatts to 400 megawatts of generating capacity, he said. …

Deepwater hasn’t selected a wind turbine vendor and plans to use “at least 6-megawatt turbines, and possibly larger,” Grybowski said.

The Interior Department’s next offshore auction will be on Sept. 4, for nearly 113,000 acres off the coast of Virginia. On the auction block later this year and next: areas off the coasts of Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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BMW’s i3 electric car earns gushing praise

by epxxatlw Posted on August 1, 2013

BMW’s i3 electric car earns gushing praise

By John Upton

The BMW i3 electric sedan, officially unveiled this week, is getting rave reviews.

The car sells for as little as $41,350 — not bad for a Bimmer, and that’s before the $7,500 federal EV rebate. Those with range anxiety can drop a few grand more for a small backup gas-burning engine (or just take advantage of BMW’s nifty SUV-sharing offer).

BMWBMW i3

Here’s some of what Wired has to say about the car, which weighs in at 2,700 pounds:

The reason the i3 is so svelte compared to other EVs is two-fold. First, it was designed to be an electric car from the beginning. Unlike BMW’s previous EV efforts — the Mini E (3,300 pounds, the same as a Nissan Leaf) and the BMW ActiveE (4,000 pounds) — they shaped the chassis and body around the motor and batteries to create a compact package with a low center of gravity. And then they got serious about weight savings.

For the first time in a mass-market car, the structure that makes up the i3′s passenger compartment is comprised entirely of carbon fiber reinforced plastic. That means it’s ultra-safe and as strong as metal, while being 50 percent lighter than steel and 30 percent lighter than aluminum. With less weight to move around, efficiency goes through the roof. And that allowed BMW to use a smaller, 450-pound battery enclosed in an aluminum shell to remove even more weight, boosting driving range and reducing charge times. (By comparison, the Nissan Leaf uses a 600-pound battery with only two more kWh of juice, and takes longer to charge because of its puny 3.3 kW on-board charger.)

The Christian Science Monitor touts the car as well-suited for city life:

“[BMW] is taking a very holistic approach to the electric vehicle and the idea of future transportation,” John O’Dell, senior editor for fuel efficiency and green cars at Edmunds, said in a telephone interview. “They see the world becoming more urbanized, with greater parts of the population living in urban areas, and they see the electrified car as making sense in that increasingly urbanized world.”

The introduction of the i3 means another contender in what is currently a three-car race for electric car dominance. Tesla Motors has had a strong run recently, nabbing a handful of major accolades and paying back a half-billion-dollar federal loan years ahead of schedule. Nissan has enjoyed a surge in sales after slashing the price of its Nissan Leaf in January.

The i3 will hit showrooms in the U.S. in spring 2014.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Company to start slaughtering horses next week, despite arson and lawsuit

by f45 Posted on July 31, 2013

Company to start slaughtering horses next week, despite arson and lawsuit

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Hey, horse, did you try to burn down that New Mexico slaughterhouse?

A New Mexico slaughterhouse plans to begin killing horses for meat on Monday — despite a looming lawsuit and an apparent arson attack.

Refrigeration units at the Valley Meat Co. in Roswell., N.M., lit up in flames on Tuesday. Firefighters extinguished the blaze, but not before five compressors were damaged beyond repair. The company pledged to replace them in time to begin slaughtering horses and chilling their meat on Monday. From Albuquerque’s KOB Eyewitness News 4:

Chaves County Sheriff’s Department said substances that could have been used to start the fire were found on the units and there is reason to believe it was arson. The owners are sure of it.

We’re not endorsing arson. But this was the same meatpacking company whose worker shot a horse in the head on camera and said, “All you animal activists, fuck you.”

Perhaps an animal activist out there reciprocated the “fuck you” sentiment.

Other horse lovers have been taking a different tack in attempting to prevent the facility from starting its slaughter. From a July 2 New York Times article.

Several animal rights groups filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the Agriculture Department, seeking to prevent it from inspecting horse meat that some companies want to produce for human consumption. …

The animal rights groups involved in the lawsuit — the Humane Society of the United States, Front Range Equine Rescue, Marin Humane Society, the Horses for Life Foundation and Return to Freedom, along with five individual plaintiffs — contend that the Agriculture Department did not perform reviews required by the National Environmental [Policy] Act before authorizing Valley Meat to operate.

“The U.S.D.A. has failed to consider the basic fact that horses are not raised as a food animal,” Hilary Wood, president of Front Range Equine Rescue, said in a statement. “Horse owners provide their horses with a number of substances dangerous to human health. To blatantly ignore this fact jeopardizes human health as well as the environment surrounding a horse slaughter plant.”

A hearing for that lawsuit is scheduled for Friday.

The slaughterhouse’s attorney is reminding reporters that the Bush-era Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act could lead to the arsonist being charged with terrorism.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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You get my drift? Pesticides cause big problems when they go where they’re not wanted

by Laura Posted on July 31, 2013

You get my drift? Pesticides cause big problems when they go where they’re not wanted

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Please be careful where you dump that toxic load.

Too many crop dusters are accidentally missing their targets and spraying poisonous pesticides where they’re not supposed to go, killing crops and sickening farmers’ neighbors.

Indiana Public Media reports that three-quarters of farm pesticide violations in the state involve what is euphemistically called “drift.” That is, the chemicals don’t land where they’re intended to. From the report, which is the first in a three-part series on the problem:

[Farmer Brett] Middlesworth grows about 300 acres of tomatoes each year, but last summer he saw about a tenth of his yield damaged by a single instance of pesticide drift.

It happened halfway through the growing season. His neighbor was spraying a soybean field with Roundup herbicide. The wind picked up and carried the spray across the property line and onto Middlesworth’s tomatoes.

As Roundup targets broadleaf weeds, and tomatoes are broadleaf plants, the area closest to his neighbor was a total loss. …

[T]he Office of the Indiana State Chemist, the agency tasked with enforcing state pesticide laws, documented 97 cases from 2010 through 2012 where applicators spraying farms violated anti-drift laws.

Most reports of harm caused by pesticides drifting onto someone’s property involve damage to plants. But in the last several years, the state has documented a dozen violations where someone said exposure to drifting pesticides made them sick.

Growers report making headway in the last few years with voluntary efforts aimed at preventing drift damage, but produce industry leaders say they are worried the approval of new genetically modified crops could undo that progress.

And other kinds of problems can arise from unintended pesticide fallout. We told you earlier this week that pesticides appear to be blowing from California’s Central Valley into the state’s mountains, where they are accumulating in the bodies of frogs.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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$100 million worth of natural gas goes up in flames every month in North Dakota

by OfeliaPPN Posted on July 31, 2013

$100 million worth of natural gas goes up in flames every month in North Dakota

By John Upton

Tim Evanson

Gas flaring in North Dakota.

Amidst an oil and gas drilling boom in North Dakota, a new report suggests that nearly a third of the natural gas that’s being sucked out of the ground is being wasted — burned on site and flared away.

The practice of flaring — burning off natural gas instead of capturing and selling it — is so rampant in the state that it is clearly visible from space. Reuters reports:

Remote well locations, combined with historically low natural gas prices and the extensive time needed to develop pipeline networks, have fueled the controversial practice, commonly known as flaring. While oil can be stored in tanks indefinitely after drilling, natural gas must be immediately piped to a processing facility.

Flaring has tripled in the past three years, according to the report from Ceres, a nonprofit group that tracks environmental records of public companies.

“There’s a lot of shareholder value going up in flames due to flaring,” said Ryan Salmon, who wrote the report for Ceres. …

Roughly 29 percent of natural gas extracted in North Dakota was flared in May, down from an all-time high of 36 percent in September 2011. But the volume of natural gas produced has nearly tripled in that timeframe to about 900,000 million cubic feet per day, boosting flaring in the state to roughly 266,000 million cubic feet per day, according to North Dakota state and Ceres data.

Ceres estimates that the practice is costing shareholders $100 million a month in lost gas sales. Why would companies be willing to just burn away that potential revenue? Perhaps because the figure pales in comparison with the $2.2 billion they’re earning each month from crude oil production.

But forget about shareholder value. The flaring is polluting the air and the atmosphere without providing actual energy to anybody. If the natural gas is going to be extracted and burned, it might as well be put to some use.

Here’s a graph from the new report showing how much gas is being wasted in North Dakota:

CeresClick to embiggen.

Ceres warns that that the problem will continue to grow. From the new report [PDF]:

Ceres’ projections indicate that total flaring volumes will continue to rise above 2012 levels through 2020 unless the percentage of flaring is reduced from its current level to below 21 percent. Furthermore, even if the state’s goal of 10 percent flaring were achieved, total volumes of flared gas in 2020 would still exceed the amount flared in 2010.

Unfortunately, the most appealing solution for industry would be to lay more disaster-prone gas pipelines. Another option would be to build power plants closer to the gas fields. Of course, a third option, crazy though it may sound, would be to ease off from the whole oil and gas drilling thing.

Ceres

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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