Category Archives: sustainable energy

California Democrats are raising the bar on climate action

by JosefGolden Posted on March 1, 2016

California Democrats are raising the bar on climate action

By on 29 Feb 2016commentsShare

In a presidential election season that has already managed to run the gamut from mildly infuriating to unequivocally bonkers, it’s easy to forget that run-of-the-mill state politics both a) exists and b) matters. California Democrats proved both of those points on Sunday with the adoption of a reinvigorated platform, bundled into which is an aggressive energy and environment plan. It’s a case study in an aggressive environmental agenda filing its already sharp teeth.

While a previous energy and environment plank called for “reduced reliance on dirty forms of energy such as coal,” the new platform calls for its total end. Language in the new plan opposes all investment in “new fossil fuel infrastructure projects” — the blanket nature of which covers everything from coal export terminals to natural gas plants. It also calls for the expansion of decentralized energy generation (think plenty of rooftop solar panels), especially in disadvantaged communities.

“Our platform is very forward-thinking,” said Eric C. Bauman, vice chair of the California Democratic Party. “It reflects the best values of Democrats and progressives, and it sets a standard against which candidates, elected officials, and activists all across the country look to measure themselves.”

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California’s government is blue across the board. With a Democratic governor, Democrats in control of both state houses, and no real prospect of electoral upsets, the state party’s platform promises to appeal to voters who are ready to usher in real action to fight climate change.

Last September, the California state legislature’s passage of Senate Bill 350 offered a mixed bag for environmentalists. While the law requires utilities to generate 50 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2030, it fails to rein in the state’s heavy gasoline consumption, thanks to pressure from the oil lobby. The new energy and environment platform revives the goal of cutting fuel use in half by 2030 and pushes the state to generate a whopping 100 percent of its electricity from “renewable and sustainable energy sources” by the same year. This is a platform that “gives hope to people that their political party and its elected officials, candidates, activists, and leaders will actually consider what makes life better for everybody,” said Bauman.

California often shines as a beacon of climate action in the United States, and the release of the Democrats’ environmental plan just turned up the wattage. As the state faces the 2018 election of a new governor to replace climate champion Jerry Brown, it will be enshrined values like these that will ensure the expansion of his already substantial environmental legacy.

In the wake of a Supreme Court stay on the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, local initiatives like these take on even greater importance. The Paris Agreement — discussions around which were broadly led by the United States — requires buy-in from all its signatories if it’s to succeed. In other encouraging news, Maryland’s state Senate passed a bill last week on a 38-to-8 vote to cut greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent by 2030, compared to 2006 levels. That, too, is the kind of state effort that lends itself to the kind of international credibility the United States needs to maintain as the U.N. agreement enters its implementation phase.

Raising the bar at the state level is always good news on the climate front, especially when federal action gets stuck in gridlock. Bauman argues that California Democrats can do so because they don’t have to use “the same kind of coded language” that he suggests crops up in national platforms. “We don’t have to do that. We get to give voice to the issues we believe in and we get to do it in an authentic way.” Here’s to hoping, as usual, that other states can follow California’s lead.

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California Democrats are raising the bar on climate action

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Coal use is down in the U.S. and China — and it’s not a blip

by DarrylSkurrie Posted on February 29, 2016

People wear protective masks near the Bund during a polluted day in Shanghai. Reuters/Aly Song

Coal use is down in the U.S. and China — and it’s not a blip

By on 29 Feb 2016commentsShare

China and the U.S. — the world’s two largest economies — are finally breaking up with coal.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics reports that coal consumption dropped in 2015, for the second time in two years, by 3.7 percent. That’s even faster than coal’s decline the year before, when consumption fell 2.9 percent. China’s carbon pollution has also declined by 1 to 2 percent since 2014, due in part to a slowing economy and the decline in cement and steel production.

Put another way, the “fall in coal use over past two years was equal to Japan’s total yearly coal consumption,” says Greenpeace (Japan is heavily reliant on coal itself).

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This likely isn’t a two-year blip: China plans to close more than 1,000 coal mines in 2016 and has halted approval for new coal mines for the next three years as part of its new front in the battle with air pollution. Its renewable energy industry, meanwhile, is expanding at an astounding rate. The country’s wind and solar capacity increased 34 and 74 percent respectively, which met the country’s growing electricity demand.

Before you get too excited about this rare good news for climate change, there’s one big disclaimer: We know that China’s reporting of emissions data isn’t always accurate; last November, we learned that Chinese officials had underreported 2012 emissions data.

But if these numbers are indeed accurate, it’s no small feat for fighting climate change. China is responsible for half of the world’s coal consumption. Meanwhile, the U.S. is also cutting coal in the power sector much faster than expected.

According to a February report from the Business Council on Sustainable Energy, coal accounted for just over a third of U.S. electricity sources in 2015, at 34 percent. At it’s peak in 2005, the industry accounted for 50 percent of the electricity sector. The precipitous drop in coal use — which hit a 35-year monthly low last November — puts the U.S. halfway to the Obama administration’s goal of cutting carbon emissions from the power sector by one-third over 2005 levels.

Even if coal is on the way out — an outcome most of the world agreed is necessary when it adopted the United Nations Paris climate agreement in December — the question is whether it’s happening fast enough. China promised to reach peak carbon emissions around 2030, but signs suggest that date may come much earlier.

“Nowadays people are talking about, ‘Wait a second, maybe the coal peak already happened in 2013,’” Director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy Qi Ye told Foreign Policy last year. Last fall, Goldman Sachs promised that, on the global scale, “Peak coal is coming sooner than expected.”

That said, most breakups have some bumps along the way — coal included. There have been been mixed developments on coal and greenhouse gas emissions around the world since the Paris summit: European Union now looks like it may overshoot its earlier emissions targets, while Australia’s carbon emissions are back on the rise after the repeal of its carbon tax.

The road to coal’s demise will certainly be long and fraught, but at least we have an idea now that it’s headed in the right direction.

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Coal use is down in the U.S. and China — and it’s not a blip

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This Chart Shows Where All the Candidates Stand on the World’s Biggest Issue

by LakeshaHorowitz Posted on October 30, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
James West/Climate Desk

At first glance, there are just two groups of presidential contenders when it comes to climate change: those who think it’s real and urgent, and those who don’t. But take a closer look, and the picture blurs. The matrix above depicts subtle differences, at least in the Republican field, in the extent to which the candidates believe the science and want to act on it. Of course, selecting each set of coordinates wasn’t an exact science—many of the White House hopefuls have a history of confused and contradictory statements on the issue. But here’s a short analysis of the candidates’ positions on global warming and an explanation of how we came up with this graph.

The Do-Nothing Denier crowd—Donald Trump, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, all Republicans—reject or aggressively downplay the science of manmade climate change, and they don’t want to do anything about it. They occupy the bottom-left corner of our matrix because they’ve called global warming a “hoax” (Trump) or “junk science” and “patently absurd” (Santorum), and have pushed dumb pseudo-science, such as Huckabee’s insistence that “a volcano in one blast will contribute more than a hundred years of human activity.” Santorum gets a little bit of a nudge to the right on our graph for saying during Wednesday’s presidential debate that “if we really want to tackle environmental problems, global warming, what we need to do is take those jobs from China and bring them back here to the United States, employ workers in this country”—which does sort of implicitly admit there’s a problem.

Former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, somewhat surprisingly, is an outlier on the denial side of the matrix. He told the San Francisco Chronicle in September: “There is no overwhelming science that the things that are going on are man-caused and not naturally caused.” (That comment inspired California Gov. Jerry Brown to send Carson a thumb drive full of climate research.) But Carson moves up in our estimate because of his apparent support for alternative energy. Maybe it was more “thought bubble” than policy, but he said he’d like to see “more than 50 percent” clean energy by 2030. “I don’t care whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, a liberal or a conservative, if you have any thread of decency in you, you want to take care of the environment because you know you have to pass it on to the next generation,” he said in a separate interview.

Sure it’s real, but we shouldn’t act on it alone, or at all. That’s basically the position of our next Republican outlier, Carly Fiorina, the former head of Hewlett-Packard. She appears to accept the science (mainly by avoiding it), but she doesn’t want to act on it, positioning herself as anti-regulation: “A single nation acting alone can make no difference at all,” she told CNBC, and therefore the United States needs to stop “destroying peoples’ livelihoods on the altar of ideology.” Fiorina’s opposition to climate action is pretty standard for the Republican pack. But her rivals have a more problematic history of tangling with the science.

Let’s move on to the “Humans Aren’t to Blame” crowd—those candidates, all Republicans, who admit that the climate is changing, but question just how much it can be attributed to humans burning fossil fuels. Take Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. He voted “yes” on a resolution declaring that climate change is real and not a hoax. He has promised to reverse President Barack Obama’s clean energy rules, but his campaign did announce a detailed energy policy that included “affordable fuel alternatives” (raising his position slightly up the “action” axis in our matrix). Still, Rubio actively casts doubt on humanity’s role in warming the planet by saying things like: “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.”

It could be argued that Ted Cruz belongs with the “Do-Nothing Denier” crowd on our matrix. But he at least engages in the science, somewhat. He voted in the Senate to call climate change real, but he has also called it a “pseudoscientific theory.” He subscribes to the “there’s no warming lately” theory: He told Seth Meyers that “satellite data demonstrate for the last 17 years there’s been zero warming, none whatsoever”—a statement that one climate expert criticized as “a load of claptrap…absolute bunk.” Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky acknowledges that the world is warming because of carbon, but he has also said he is “not sure anybody exactly knows why” climate change is happening. Somewhere over here is Jim Gilmore, the former governor of Virginia, who has, at times, called for acting on climate change, even if he’s not totally sure what’s causing it. “We do not know for sure how much is caused by man and how much is part of a natural cycle change,” he said in 2008, adding, “I do believe we must work toward reducing emissions…” More recently, however, Gilmore has called the goal of reducing carbon emissions “ephemeral” if China and India don’t act, too.

That brings us to a pack of Republicans with mixed histories on the issue. These candidates have at times acknowledged the science and importance of climate change, and may have even advocated steps to act on it, but they don’t want to be tarred and feathered as liberals. I’m calling them Dog-Whistlers. Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, is among this crowd. In general he says humans contribute to the globe’s warming, but he insists Obama’s policy agenda is wrong. “I think we have a responsibility to adapt to what the possibilities are without destroying our economy, without hollowing out our industrial core,” he told Bloomberg. What makes him different from Fiorina is that he previously claimed it was arrogant to assume the science was settled. And Bush’s energy policy proposes more drilling and less regulation—so not an all-star climate plan there.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie likes to brag about his state’s position as the country’s third largest solar energy producer—and did so again during Wednesday night’s CNBC presidential debate. But in 2011, Christie withdrew New Jersey from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a cap-and-trade program in the Northeast. And while he believes in climate change, he hasn’t put forward any concrete proposals yet. I’m going to put Ohio governor John Kasich in this clique, too. He started off sounding pretty moderate on the issue and has historically voiced his support for climate science. But then, as a candidate, he walked his position towards the Republican mainstream by saying, “We don’t want to destroy people’s jobs, based on some theory that is not proven.” Noncommittal, at best.

Curious in the club of Republicans are South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and former New York Gov. George Pataki, who have both urged action on climate change. Graham told CNN, “If I’m president of the United States, we’re going to address climate change, CO2 emissions in a business-friendly way.” He added: “When 90 percent of the doctors tell you you’ve got a problem, do you listen to the one?” Graham backed this up during the debate Wednesday by saying: “You don’t have to believe that climate change is real. I have been to the Antarctic. I have been to Alaska. I am not a scientist, and I’ve got the grades to prove it. But I’ve talked to the climatologists of the world, and 90 percent of them are telling me the greenhouse gas effect is real, that we’re heating up the planet.” Pataki was one of the driving forces behind RGGI’s creation. In 2007, he was named co-chair of the Independent Task Force on Climate Change organized by the Council on Foreign Relations and has become an advocate for climate action and green-friendly enterprise. He told the debate audience Wednesday that “one of the things that troubles me about the Republican Party is too often we question science that everyone accepts.” But Graham and Pataki are positioned lower on the matrix than the Democrats because neither of them has rolled out a clear and convincing plan explaining how they’d address climate change as president.

Now we move farther into the top right-hand quadrant, where candidates believe in science and really want to act on it. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal says he would repeal Obama’s climate regulations, but he has laid out smaller-scale projects such as forest management and the energy efficiency for airlines. For the record, he has called for action to combat warming temperatures—but he is a bit squishy. In 2014 he said, “Let the scientists decide the underlying facts,” and he questioned “how much” humans actually contribute to warming. Still, he earns a place in the top-right section of the graph because of a detailed energy policy that includes wind and solar.

Three Democrats vying for the nomination—former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley—all believe in climate change, want to do something about it, and have serious plans to combat it. Experts have weighed in on the strengths and weaknesses of each of their proposals, but for the purposes of this chart, they are all in essentially the same place. Clinton has put installing a half-billion solar panels by 2020 at the heart of her clean energy policy and wants to best President Obama’s own plans by generating 33 percent of America’s electricity from renewable sources by 2027. Sanders has said that “we have a moral responsibility to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy and leave this planet a habitable planet for our children and our grandchildren.” He’s also described climate change as the country’s greatest national security threat. O’Malley wants to phase out fossil fuels entirely by 2050. “As president, on day one, I would use my executive power to declare the transition to a clean energy future the number one priority of our Federal Government,” he wrote in a USA Today op-ed in June.

Mapping politicians like this is always a tricky process, and some of our expert readers will no doubt disagree with these conclusions. So tell us what you think. Leave your thoughts about the candidates’ various plans in the comments below to add to the discussion.

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This Chart Shows Where All the Candidates Stand on the World’s Biggest Issue

Posted in alo, alternative energy, Anchor, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, Meyers, ONA, oven, PUR, Radius, solar, solar panels, sustainable energy, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Chart Shows Where All the Candidates Stand on the World’s Biggest Issue

Clinton and Sanders Just Came Out Hard on the Issue Republicans Refuse to Talk About

by AmparoTrn382087 Posted on October 14, 2015

green4us

During the first Democratic debate in Las Vegas, climate change roared into focus. Republicans are largely silent on climate change. Democrats shout it loud. That’s the message from tonight’s debate in Las Vegas that was broadcast on CNN. Climate change was an awkward, 11th-hour topic in the second GOP debate last month that nobody seemed to want to talk about, in an exchange that lasted for only about four minutes. On Tuesday night, climate change roared into focus. Global warming was introduced as a big, banner election theme for the Democrats onstage. All but one spoke about it during opening remarks. “I want to address climate change, a real threat to our planet,” said former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee in the opening minutes of the debate. “We must square our shoulders to the great challenge of climate change and make this threat our opportunity,” former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley told the audience. “The future is what we make of it. We are all in this together. And the question in this election is whether you and I still have the ability to give our kids a better future.” Then, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, went even further. “Today, the scientific community is virtually unanimous,” he said. “Climate change is real, it is caused by human activity, and we have a moral responsibility to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy and leave this planet a habitable planet for our children and our grandchildren.” Later, Sanders described climate change as the greatest national security threat. Hillary Clinton, the current Democratic front-runner, framed climate change as an economic opportunity. “I’ve traveled across our country over the last months listening and learning,” she said. “And I’ve put forward specific plans about how we’re going to create more good-paying jobs: by investing in infrastructure and clean energy, by making it possible once again to invest in science and research, and taking the opportunity posed by climate change to grow our economy.”

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Clinton and Sanders Just Came Out Hard on the Issue Republicans Refuse to Talk About

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Clinton and Sanders Just Came Out Hard on the Issue Republicans Refuse to Talk About

Posted in eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, Hagen, Monterey, ONA, OXO, solar, solar power, sustainable energy, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Clinton and Sanders Just Came Out Hard on the Issue Republicans Refuse to Talk About

The 10 Best Moments of the Democratic Debate

by ThurmanFried Posted on October 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Democratic presidential contenders met in Las Vegas Tuesday night for the first of six debates. With just four of those debates scheduled to take place before Iowans cast the first presidential primary votes in February, this was Sen. Bernie Sanders’ moment to show that he should be treated as a serious challenger to Hillary Clinton—and a rare chance for former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee, and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley to move out of “Who’s That Dude” terrain.

It was generally a friendly affair, with the candidates largely agreeing on the major issues. But a few fault lines popped up. Neither Sanders nor O’Malley agreed with Clinton’s suggestion that there should be a no-fly zone over Syria, and both of those upstart challengers also questioned Clinton’s commitment to challenge Wall Street.

Here were some of the debate’s best moments:

Clinton: “Save capitalism from itself.”

After quizzing Sanders on whether he is a capitalist (he identifies as a democratic socialist), moderator Anderson Cooper opened the question up to the rest of the Democratic contenders, asking if there was “anybody else on the stage who is not a capitalist?” Clinton eagerly jumped in. “I don’t think we should confuse what we have to do every so often in America, which is save capitalism from itself. And I think what Senator Sanders is saying certainly makes sense in the terms of the inequality that we have,” she said. “And it’s our job to rein in the excesses of capitalism so that it doesn’t run amok and doesn’t cause the kind of inequities we’re seeing in our economic system. But we would be making a grave mistake to turn our backs on what built the greatest middle class in this country.”

On her own political beliefs, Clinton identified as a certain brand of progressive. “I’m a progressive,” she said. “But I’m a progressive who likes to get things done.”

Sanders: “I’m not a pacifist.”

Cooper asked Sanders, a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, whether he is qualified to be commander in chief. In response, Sanders stressed his history of fighting for veterans’ benefits and his own willingness to go to war as a last resort.

“When I was a young man—I’m not a young man today—when I was a young man, I strongly opposed the war in Vietnam. Not the brave men like Jim who fought in that war, but the policy which got us involved in that war. That was my view then,” Sanders said.

“I am not a pacifist, Anderson. I supported the war in Afghanistan. I supported President Clinton’s effort to deal with ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. I support airstrikes in Syria and what the president is trying to do. Yes, I happen to believe from the bottom of my heart that war should be the last resort that we have got to exercise diplomacy. But yes, I am prepared to take this country into war if that is necessary.”

“Enough of the emails.”—Not the candidate you’d expect.

Cooper sure wanted to make a big deal about Clinton’s email scandal. Right after the first mid-debate commercial break, Cooper jumped into questioning Clinton’s email practices, wondering whether they showed a level of poor judgment that should trouble voters. After Clinton dismissed the email questions as a trumped-up Republican scandal, Sanders piped up. “Let me say something that might not be great politics, but I think the secretary is right,” Sanders said. That whole email kerfuffle? Bernie was having none of it. “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails,” he said, sharing a handshake and smile with his opponent.

Clinton’s one-word answer to the emails question.

After Clinton and Sanders both agreed that the email scandal had become a sideshow, Chafee challenged Clinton on the email issue, saying the highest ethical standards should be a prerequisite for the next president. Next, Cooper turned to Clinton.

“Secretary do you want to respond?” Cooper asked.

“No,” Clinton responded.

The audience cheered loudly.

Is Sanders tough enough on guns?

Sanders and Clinton had their biggest rumble Tuesday night over gun control. Sanders defended his votes in Congress against gun control measures. When Clinton got a chance to weigh in, she did not go easy on her rival. Cooper asked her, “Is Bernie Sanders tough enough on guns?”

“No, not at all,” Clinton responded. “Senator Sanders did vote five times against the Brady bill. Since it was passed, nearly 2 million illegal purchases have been prevented. He also did, as he said, vote for this immunity provision. I voted against it. I was in the Senate the same time. It wasn’t that complicated to me. It was pretty straightforward to me that he was going to give immunity to the only industry in America—everybody else has to be accountable, but not the gun manufacturers, and we need to be able to stand up and say enough of that, we’re not gonna let it continue.”

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Don’t blame Lincoln Chafee for his votes.

When Chafee was asked why he voted to repeal Glass-Steagall—the Depression-era law separating commercial and investment banking that was overturned in 1999—the former senator couldn’t muster more than ¯_(ã&#131;&#132;)_/¯ to explain his vote. Chafee tepidly said he didn’t really know what he was voting for since he’d just arrived in the Senate, after being elevated to the post by Rhode Island’s governor after his father had passed away. “I think we all get some takeovers,” he said sheepishly.

Clinton defends Planned Parenthood.

Clinton deftly turned a question about big government into a takedown of the Republican Party’s attempts to defund Planned Parenthood. CNN moderator Dana Bash questioned Clinton’s support for a paid family leave policy by saying critics call it another expensive government program.

“When people say that—it’s always the Republicans or their sympathizers who say, ‘You can’t have paid leave, you can’t provide health care.’ They don’t mind having big government to interfere with a woman’s right to choose and to try to take down Planned Parenthood. They’re fine with big government when it comes to that. I’m sick of it,” she said. The crowd applauded and she kept going.

“You know, we can do these things. We should not be paralyzed—we should not be paralyzed by the Republicans and their constant refrain, ‘big government this, big government that,’ except for what they want to impose on the American people.”

Watch:

Sanders would legalize weed. Clinton still doesn’t want to take a stance.

Nevada is set to vote on legalizing recreational marijuana in 2016. CNN’s Juan Carlos Lopez asked Sanders if he would vote to approve the initiative if he were a Nevada resident. Sure, Sanders replied. “I think we have to think through this war on drugs that has done an enormous amount of damage.”

What about Clinton? She’s still in a wait-and-see mode, happy to watch as states conduct their own experiments without legalizing weed nationwide, at least for now (though she is in favor of laws in favor of medical marijuana). Considering it another issue that she might be evolving on.

What’s the greatest security threat?

Each candidate described what they believe is the greatest security threat to the United States. For Chafee, it is the turmoil in the Middle East, which he says began with the Iraq War. O’Malley said a nuclear Iran; Clinton said nuclear proliferation; Webb mentioned China, cyber warfare, and the Middle East. But Bernie Sanders ran away with the question: climate change.

“The scientific community is telling us that if we do not address the global crisis of climate change—transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to sustainable energy—the planet that we’re going to be leaving our kids and our grandchildren may well not be habitable,” he said. “That is a major crisis.”

Jim Webb: I killed a dude, what have these chumps done?

Cooper lobbed one last, seemingly lighthearted question at the candidates before their closing statements: Which person are you proudest to have made an enemy of? Chafee said the coal lobby, O’Malley said the NRA, Sanders listed Wall Street, and Clinton touted how much Republicans hated her.

But Jim Webb. Ohhhhh boy. He turned nostalgic, looking back on his tour in Vietnam, during which he won a Navy Cross in a true act of heroism. But his method of boasting about that was…awkward. “I’d have to say the enemy soldier that threw the grenade that wounded me,” Webb said, with a smile creeping onto his face, “but he’s not around to talk to.”

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The 10 Best Moments of the Democratic Debate

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Can We Give Electricity to Everybody and Still Stop Climate Change?

by tfem31x Posted on October 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by the Atlantic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last week, the vast majority of the world’s prime ministers and presidents, along with the odd pontiff and monarch, gathered in New York to sign up to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Across 169 targets, the SDGs declare the global aspiration to end poverty and malnutrition, slash child mortality, and guarantee universal secondary education by 2030. And they also call for universal access to modern energy alongside taking “urgent action to combat climate change.”

These last two targets are surely important, but they conflict, too: More electricity production is likely to mean more greenhouse-gas emissions. The UN squares that circle by using a definition of modern energy access that involves a pitifully low level of electricity consumption. But that does a disservice to both those worried about development and those concerned by climate change. Poor people are going to have to consume a lot more energy if they are to enjoy a lifestyle that those in the West take for granted—and that is going to take environmental pragmatism in the short term and a revolutionary change in the technology of electricity production in the long term.

More than 1.3 billion people across the planet have no access to electricity. Many of those who do have access suffer brownouts, blackouts, and other forms of limited supply. Absent electricity, people use less efficient and more harmful substitutes: Kerosene lamps are often behind burn injuries and deaths around the world, and working under those lamps is as bad for your health as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. That’s why the arrival of power lines can be so transformative. Electrification in northern El Salvador was associated with a 78-percent increase in time studying and in class among school-age children and a 25-percentage point increase in the likelihood of households operating a business. These businesses made on average $1,000 a year—not bad in an area where local incomes are around $770 per person.

Recognizing the development impact of electricity access, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has championed the idea of “modern energy access” for all, involving universal electricity and clean cooking fuels like natural gas. The IEA claims that the additional electricity consumed by the newly connected (alongside the gas used in clean cooking) would add just 0.7 percent to global greenhouse-gas emissions in 2030. In large part that’s because the organization suggests energy for all would add just 1.1 percent to global energy demand.

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Can We Give Electricity to Everybody and Still Stop Climate Change?

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Obama’s power plant rules could cut your electricity bill

by FeliciaStill Posted on July 24, 2015

Obama’s power plant rules could cut your electricity bill

By on 24 Jul 2015commentsShare

What will happen to your electric bill after the Obama administration starts limiting CO2 emissions from power plants? It could come down quite a bit, a new report finds — if your state leaders are smart.

Republican lawmakers have claimed that residential electricity bills will rise by up to $200 annually under Obama’s Clean Power Plan, based on a study put out in May 2014 by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. While the study has been widely discredited, opponents of Obama’s plan continue to cite it.

Now, a report by consulting firm Synapse Energy Economics suggests that state compliance with the plan — paired with investment in renewables and energy efficiency initiatives — could actually lead to big reductions in what Americans pay for power. The key? Early action.

Two of the report’s authors lay out the logic in EcoWatch:

By investing in high levels of clean energy and energy efficiency, every state can see significant savings with a total of $40 billion saved nationwide in 2030 … However, consumers will typically see the largest savings in states that build renewable resources early. Under the Clean Power Plan, these first movers will profit by becoming net exporters of electricity to states that are slower to respond. States that keep operating coal plants well into the future will tend to become importers after those plants retire, and energy consumers in those states will miss out on substantial benefits of clean energy and energy efficiency.

According to the report, if two-thirds of consumers participate in energy efficiency programs, electricity bills could be $35 cheaper per month than a “business-as-usual” scenario would predict for 2030. In fact, bills would be cheaper than they were in 2012, write the authors. The firm projects that the $35 savings would leave household electric bills at an average of $91 per month in 2030. (The EPA also expects household electric bills to drop under the plan, but the agency estimates they would be $8 lower per month.)

Keep in mind, though, that Synapse’s $35 figure is averaged across the U.S. as a whole. Since electricity prices already vary widely around the country, and the Clean Power Plan will be implemented differently by different states, the projected savings are subject to some massive variance. North Dakota residents, for example, could save $94 per month if their leaders are aggressive with renewable energy and efficiency.

But so far six governors have said they won’t draw up strategies for implementing the Clean Power Plan — so don’t expect early action from their states. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wrote an op-ed in March calling for states to defy the Obama administration over the power plant rules.

While the Synapse report wasn’t funded by a group with an obvious financial interest in the outcome (like, say, the corporate-backed Chamber of Commerce), it was supported by a group with a viewpoint: the Energy Foundation, “a partnership of major foundations with a mission to promote the transition to a sustainable energy future.” Which is something we can get behind.

Source:
A Clean Energy Future: Why It Pays to Get There First

, EcoWatch.

Climate rule to bring lower energy bills, report says

, The Hill.

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Watch out, Arctic: Shell is coming for you again

by NestorBaile Posted on February 13, 2015

Watch out, Arctic: Shell is coming for you again

By on 13 Feb 2015 11:33 amcommentsShare

Even as Shell is talking a good talk about climate change, it is pushing ahead with plans to drill in the Alaskan Arctic as early as this summer. The company suspended operations there in 2012 after a series of minor disasters. Its contractor was hit with eight felony counts and fined $12 million late last year.

But now Shell is moving forward again, with what looks like a newly reaffirmed go-ahead from the Department of the Interior (DOI). One clear sign of its intent: The company has leased a port on the Seattle waterfront where it can base its Arctic operations.

On Thursday, the DOI released a revised environmental impact statement for drilling in the Chukchi Sea — which Shell won the rights to do in 2008. The report found that there’s a 75 percent likelihood that the operations will result in one or more large spills — that means more than 1,000 barrels — during the 77-year lease. The report also forecast 260 smaller spills.

This revised DOI report follows a court ruling that found that, back in 2008, the department lowballed the amount of oil Shell would be able to extract from the lease. Lowballing the amount of oil that could come out of the ground also meant lowballing the amount of damage the efforts to extract it could cause.

But despite the new environmental impact statement, and the strong likelihood of a spill, the department will likely allow drilling operations to move forward following a public comment period. The environmental groups that brought the suit don’t see this as a victory.

“There is no such thing as safe or responsible drilling in the Arctic Ocean,” said Marissa Knodel, a climate campaigner with Friends of the Earth. “Shell’s record of recklessness and the federal government’s own environmental analysis show that approval of Lease Sale 193 would be unsafe, dangerous and irresponsible.”

Greenpeace’s John Deans said the decision “will drastically undermine [Obama’s] recent proposals to protect parts of the Arctic, including the Alaska Wildlife Refuge, from oil drilling.”

Shell’s plans come, ironically, as the company is saying it will now engage seriously on climate, and is pushing other oil companies to do the same. Its recent decision to work with activist shareholders who are demanding that climate change factor into management decisions appears to be a first step in that direction.

“I’m well aware that the industry’s credibility is an issue,” said Shell CEO Ben van Beurden in a speech on Thursday. “Stereotypes that fail to see the benefits our industry brings to the world are short-sighted. But we must also take a critical look at ourselves.”

At the moment, however, it doesn’t look like the company’s plans to salvage its climate-related “credibility” extend to cancelling its designs on the Chukchi Sea — one of its more dangerous operations, and one that inspires quite a bit of ire in its critics.

Besides the danger that drilling poses to Arctic environments, there’s the contribution it would make to climate change. A recent study found that if the world hopes to avoid 2 degrees Celsius or more of global warming, 80 percent of the world’s untouched fossil fuel reserves would have to stay in the ground — including all of the oil left in the thawing Arctic.

But people who believe that will happen, van Beurden says, aren’t clued in to reality. “For a sustainable energy future, we need a more balanced debate,” he said. “‘Fossil fuels out, renewables in’ — too often, that’s what it boils down to. Yet in my view, that’s simply naive.”

If policymakers agree with that line of thinking, we’ll be in for some catastrophic warming.

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Now that China and the U.S. have a climate deal, will India step up next?

by SusannahGiles Posted on November 14, 2014

Going for a hat trick?

Now that China and the U.S. have a climate deal, will India step up next?

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14 Nov 2014 2:48 PM

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Now that China and the U.S. have a climate deal, will India step up next?

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In the wake of news that China and the U.S. have struck a deal behind closed doors to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the world’s third largest emitter, India, is asking itself where it stands on the issue of emission caps, and whether it should be ready with a commitment for the U.N. climate conference in Paris in late 2015.

In past conversations about an international plan to tackle climate change, India often got lumped in with China. It has a similarly large, billion-plus population and a similarly growing appetite for fossil fuels. In the past, the two countries have together resisted emissions caps. So for India especially, China’s new commitment to peak its emissions by 2030 is a game changer.

Now that China has changed course, Indian policymakers are expected to try and distance their country from China in these discussions about carbon emissions. India still pollutes far less than China on the whole, the argument goes, and far less than countries like the U.S. and Australia per capita. At the same time, roughly a third of the country’s 1.2 billion people lack electricity, and the country’s carbon budget needs room to allow them to get it. An editorial in The Times of India argues today:

For [the] agreement to be implemented it is imperative that the US takes the lead in climate change mitigation. That’s not only because the US is among the highest per capita as well as historical emitters, but also because, more than any other country, it has the resources and innovative capacity to develop green technology. That said, the US-China deal also puts pressure on India to commit to emission caps of its own. India should accept the challenge while also decoupling itself from China.

Given that India’s share of global carbon emissions last year was only 7% compared to China’s 28% and the US’s 14%, and that India is the lowest per capita emitter among major economies, New Delhi has a strong case for pitching for different standards.

India’s official thinking on climate change is a policy advanced by Manmohan Singh, who served as the country’s prime minister until earlier this year. Back in 2007, he declared at a G-20 summit in Germany that India’s per capita emissions will never exceed the average per capita emissions for developed countries. Right now, that affords India quite a bit of elbow room. If the U.S. and the European Union pull off the cuts they’re talking about, India would have a bit less leeway, though some in the Indian government believe that even then the country could continue increasing its emissions for 15 or 20 years beyond the 2030 cap China’s agreed to, and still be below the developed world’s per capita average.

Global Carbon Project

via

Vox

So emissions cuts, at the moment, don’t seem to be a policy priority for India. Here’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s environmental minister, Prakash Javadekar, in an interview with The New York Times immediately after the September U.N. Climate Summit in New York:

“What cuts?” Mr. Javadekar said. “That’s for more developed countries. The moral principle of historic responsibility cannot be washed away.” Mr. Javadekar was referring to an argument frequently made by developing economies — that developed economies, chiefly the United States, which spent the last century building their economies while pumping warming emissions into the atmosphere — bear the greatest responsibility for cutting pollution.

Mr. Javadekar said that government agencies in New Delhi were preparing plans for India’s domestic actions on climate change, but he said they would lead only to a lower rate of increase in carbon emissions. It would be at least 30 years, he said, before India would likely see a downturn.

But there are also signs that India is looking for another path forward. Though the country’s coal use is increasing, it aims to double the amount of energy it gets from renewables by 2020. The new prime minister has shown a predilection for sustainable energy, particularly solar. Earlier this month, he reconstituted an almost-defunct panel tasked with guiding how the country deals with climate change adaptation and mitigation. On that panel is Rajendra K. Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which recently advised that tackling poverty and tackling climate change are not mutually exclusive — in fact, it is difficult to do the former without doing the latter.

And the Modi administration has dropped hints that its position going into the U.N. Lima climate conference in a few weeks has not yet been finalized. “We are consulting experts, former negotiators, and civil society organisations in order to craft our position in Lima,” one government source told India’s Economic Times. So there may yet be room for cautious optimism that the third-biggest polluter will soon step forward with its own timeline for peaking and reducing emissions.

And if it doesn’t? A recent U.N. report modeled a way in which the world could avoid 2 degrees Celsius of warming while India’s emissions continue to grow as it hooks its impoverished people up to the grid. But for that to happen, China would have to stick to its commitment to let emissions peak at 2030, and the wealthier major polluters — the U.S., the E.U., Japan, and Russia — would have to take big steps to shift their sources of energy. Don’t bet on all that happening on schedule.

Regardless, the U.S.-China deal unexpectedly thrust India into the hot seat. Now, whether India likes it or not, the world will be watching closely — first, at the G-20 meeting in Brisbane this week, then at Lima next month and in the run-up to Paris next year — to see what steps it might take to turn down the temperature.

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National Briefing | South: Louisiana: Plan Reached to Clear Explosives

by Myrna Posted on October 29, 2014

Fifteen million pounds of abandoned M6 propellant at Camp Minden will be burned in trays holding shallow layers of the powder, the Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday. View this article:  National Briefing | South: Louisiana: Plan Reached to Clear Explosives ; ; ;

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National Briefing | South: Louisiana: Plan Reached to Clear Explosives

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