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What if air conditioners could help save the planet instead of destroying it?

by AlejandPressley Posted on May 5, 2019

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

Earth’s climate is full of terrifying feedback loops: Decreased rainfall raises the risk of wildfires, which release yet more carbon dioxide. A warming Arctic could trigger the release of long-frozen methane, which would heat the planet even faster than carbon. A lesser-known climate feedback loop, though, is likely mere feet from where you’re sitting: the air conditioner. Use of the energy-intensive appliance causes emissions that contribute to higher global temperatures, which means we’re all using AC more, producing more emissions and more warming.

But what if we could weaponize air conditioning units to help pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere instead? According to a new paper in Nature, it’s feasible. Using technology currently in development, AC units in skyscrapers and even your home could get turned into machines that not only capture CO2, but transform the stuff into a fuel for powering vehicles that are difficult to electrify, like cargo ships. The concept, called crowd oil, is still theoretical and faces many challenges. But in these desperate times, crowd oil might have a place in the fight to curb climate change.

The problem with air conditioners isn’t just that they suck up lots of energy but that they also emit heat. “When you run an air conditioning system, you don’t get anything for nothing,” says materials chemist Geoffrey Ozin of the University of Toronto, coauthor on the new paper. “If you cool something, you heat something, and that heat goes into the cities.” Their use exacerbates the heat island effect of cities — lots of concrete soaks up lots of heat, which a city releases well after the sun sets.

To retrofit an air conditioner to capture CO2 and turn it into fuel, you’d need a rather extensive overhaul of the components. Meaning, you wouldn’t just be able to ship a universal device for folks to bolt onto their units. First of all, you’d need to incorporate a filter that would absorb CO2 and water from the air. You’d also need to include an electrolyzer to strip the oxygen molecule from H2O to get H2, which you’d then combine with CO2 to get hydrocarbon fuels. “Everyone can have their own oil well, basically,” Ozin says.

The researchers’ analysis found that the Frankfurt Fair Tower in Germany (chosen by lead author Roland Dittmeyer of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, by the way, because of its landmark status in the city’s skyline), with a total volume of about 200,000 cubic meters, could capture 1.5 metric tons of CO2 per hour and produce up to 4,000 metric tons of fuel a year. By comparison, the first commercial “direct air capture” plant, built by Climeworks in Switzerland, captures 900 metric tons of CO2 per year, about 10 times less, Dittmeyer says. An apartment building with five or six units could capture 0.5 kg of CO2 an hour with this proposed system.

Theoretically, anywhere you have an air conditioner, you have a way to make synthetic fuel. “The important point is that you can convert the CO2 into a liquid product onsite, and there are pilot-scale plants that can do that,” says Dittmeyer, who is working on one with colleagues that is able to produce 10 liters (2.6 gallons) a day. They hope to multiply that output by a factor of 20 in the next two years.

For this process to be carbon neutral, though, all those souped-up air conditioners would need to be powered with renewables, because burning the synthetic fuel would also produce emissions. To address that problem, Dittmeyer proposes turning whole buildings into solar panels — placing them not just on rooftops but potentially coating facades and windows with ultrathin, largely transparent panels. “It’s like a tree — the skyscraper or house you live in produces a chemical reaction,” Dittmeyer says. “It’s like the glucose that a tree is producing.” That kind of building transformation won’t happen overnight, of course, a reminder that installing carbon scrubbers is only ever one piece of the solution.

Scaling up the technology to many buildings and cities poses yet more challenges. Among them, how to store and then collect all that accumulated fuel. The idea is for trucks to gather and transport the stuff to a facility, or in some cases when the output is greater, pipelines would be built. That means both retrofitting a whole lot of AC units (the cost of which isn’t yet clear, since the technology isn’t finalized yet), and building out an infrastructure to ferry that fuel around for use in industry.

“Carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuels from electricity can help solve two of our biggest energy challenges: managing intermittent renewables and decarbonizing the hard-to-electrify parts of transportation and industry,” says David Keith, acting chief scientist of Carbon Engineering, which is developing much larger stand-alone devices for sucking CO2 out of the air and storing it, known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS. “While I may be biased by my work with Carbon Engineering, I am deeply skeptical about a distributed solution. Economies of scale can’t be wished away. There’s a reason we have huge wind turbines, a reason we don’t feed yard waste into all-in-one nano-scale pulp-and-paper mills.”

Any carbon capture technology also faces the sticky problem of the moral hazard. The concern is that negative emissions technologies, like what Carbon Engineering is working on, and neutral emissions approaches, like this new framework, distract from the most critical objective for fighting climate change: reducing emissions, and fast. Some would argue that all money and time must go toward developing technologies that will allow any industry or vehicle to become carbon neutral or even carbon negative.

This new framework isn’t meant to be a cure-all for climate change. After all, for it to be truly carbon neutral it’d need to run entirely on renewable energy. To that end, it would presumably encourage the development of those energy technologies. (The building-swaddling photovoltaics that Dittmeyer envisions are just becoming commercially available.) “I don’t think it would be ethically wrong to pursue this,” says environmental social scientist Selma L’Orange Seigo of ETH Zurich, who wasn’t involved in this research but has studied public perception of CCS. “It would be ethically wrong to only pursue this.”

One potential charm of this AC carbon-capture scenario, though, is that it attempts to address a common problem faced by CCS systems, which is that someone has to pay for it. That is, a business that captures and locks away its CO2 has nothing to sell. AC units that turn CO2 into fuel, though, would theoretically come with a revenue stream. “There’s definitely a market,” Seigo says. “That’s one of the big issues with CCS.”

Meanwhile, people will continue running their energy-hungry air conditioners. For sensitive populations like the elderly, access to AC during heat waves is a life or death matter: Consider that the crippling heat wave that struck Europe in August 2003 killed 35,000 people, and these sorts of events are growing more frequent and intense as the planet warms as a whole. A desert nation like Saudi Arabia, by the way, devotes a stunning 70 percent of its energy to powering AC units; in the near future, a whole lot of other places on Earth are going to feel a lot more like Saudi Arabia.

So no, carbon-capturing AC units won’t save the world on their own. But they could act as a valuable intermittent renewable as researchers figure out how to get certain industries and vehicles to go green.

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What if air conditioners could help save the planet instead of destroying it?

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The town that extended ‘smart growth’ to its water

by EpifaniaKabu0 Posted on May 4, 2019

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

As with so many towns in the West, the history of Westminster, Colorado, can be told through its water supply.

The turning point in that history was the hot, dry summer of 1962. Westminster was already embroiled in a debate over where to source its water when a drought choked the small city, forcing officials to impose a sprinkler ban. Soon enough, residents noticed that the water trickling from their taps was slightly discolored and didn’t smell right. The desperate city had started drawing water from the Kershaw Ditch, a pool it had recently abandoned over treatment issues.

Although the city said the water was “safe, but stinky,” fed-up local mothers were convinced it would make their children sick and raised hell. In what became known as the “Mothers’ March,” more than 100 women gathered at city hall to protest the city’s water management. City-council meetings were disrupted by protesters who would shout questions through open windows, and the mothers flogged petitions on street corners. They attracted enough attention that Dan Rather did a segment on the protests for CBS News.

The events of that summer ensured that water would become Westminster’s defining issue for years to come, until the city struck a deal with local farmers to share water from the artificial Standley Lake. But even with its supply settled, Westminster continued to focus on taming demand, most recently with a conservation and planning approach that’s become a regional model for managing growth without straining resources.

“Starting from such an uncomfortable place, we’ve kept our eyes on the prize,” said Stu Feinglas, who retired last year as Westminster’s senior water-resources analyst. “Sustainable development and sustainable water.”

Feinglas, who started with the city in 2001 (as another drought gripped northeast Colorado), approached the problem holistically, with a data-driven approach that has become influential for other cities in the West. By merging the city’s land-use plans with water data, Feinglas and colleagues ensured that Westminster wouldn’t run dry, even as its population boomed from less than 10,000 at the time of the water protests to 113,000 today. The surrounding county was even water-healthy enough to support Colorado’s first two water slides as part of the Water World theme park.

The state’s population is expected to keep growing — as much as 70 percent by 2040. At the same time, climate change is fueling persistent droughts. In 2018, parts of nine Western states, including Colorado, were in severe or extreme drought, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Conservation measures have helped many Western cities decouple population growth from water use, but that approach often puts the burden on businesses and residents to be more efficient. Taking a demand-focused approach to water from the earliest stages of planning is still rare, said Erin Rugland, a junior fellow at the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy in Phoenix.

“There’s always been a way to engineer around it,” Rugland said. “It’s been feasible to find a new supply. But I think we’re starting to reach a turning point.”

The recent sustained drought — which has left the critical storage facilities Lake Powell and Lake Mead at their lowest levels since they were being filled — has cemented the idea that Western states are going to have to try to do more with less water. On April 8, Congress approved a seven-state Drought Contingency Plan, which lays out shared cuts if supplies continue to stay low.

The plan builds on 2007 guidelines that helped manage the early years of the drought; now states, tribes, agriculture groups, and cities are negotiating a new set of guidelines set to take effect in 2026. Previous agreements have hit agriculture hard, since the industry is by far the biggest water user in the West, but most everyone agrees that the 2026 guidelines will require some sacrifices from cities, even as they grow as economic engines.

That’s where Feinglas thinks his approach — which current Westminster officials are sticking with — needs to become the norm.

Using Westminster’s comprehensive plan, which zones parcels for general use like multifamily housing or retail, Feinglas made a rough estimate of how much water each type of building would use. Then the city built GIS software that overlays water resources and infrastructure over the comprehensive plan — making it easy to see, for example, how much water a proposed strip mall might use.

It’s a step up from the typical water-per-capita measure that most cities rely on, which doesn’t reflect the fact that denser developments are typically more water-efficient than a single-family house with a green lawn. It also, Feinglas said, helps planners guide developers to smarter construction, even previewing what their water rates and tap fees might be.

“We didn’t want public works to determine how the city developed. We wouldn’t be the ones to say no,” Feinglas said. “What we could do is show how much water we have and ask them to be creative and make their development work with that.”

That meant city planners could identify where it might make more sense to zone for multifamily housing, or see where new pipes might be necessary. Developers could amend their permits to include more low-flow toilets or water recycling. On rare occasions, proposals have been scrapped because they’d need more water than the city could supply. Essentially, Westminster is planning for the worst, making sure that another drought won’t force anyone to turn off the taps.

It seems straightforward, and more or less mirrors what cities have been doing for years to align transportation and transit demand with new construction. But only a handful of other cities — notably Flagstaff, Arizona — have made it work.

“It requires operating between the silos of water management and planning, two disciplines that don’t have a lot of common language,” Rugland said. “Efforts for collaboration would have to be on top of day-to-day duties.”

Also, water data isn’t always easy to come by, especially on a lot-by-lot basis that breaks it down by business type. It’s even tougher for cities that draw their water from multiple sources, who may keep data in different forms (California, for instance, had to pass a law in 2016 requiring that the various state and local agencies be able to share their water data).

More states and cities are trying to make the water-land link. Colorado’s Water Plan calls for 75 percent of citizens to live in communities that have integrated water conservation into land use by 2025, and the state’s water conservation board has guidance to help local governments (the Keystone Policy Center has also held a dialogue with state and local partners). Arizona has a law that requires local jurisdictions to include available water supply and demand as part of a comprehensive plan, but not necessarily to make the link to planning (government cuts reduced state oversight for those comprehensive plans, as well). New software tools, like Razix Solutions, offer off-the-shelf guidance for local officials.

Ultimately, Feinglas said, the model requires city departments to talk to each other and plan for the worst, even if it means some short-term pain. “We know water is valuable, especially now,” Feinglas said. “The last thing you want is to lose your economy because you can’t supply your citizens.”

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The town that extended ‘smart growth’ to its water

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A tale of two Washingtons: How Jay Inslee aims to take his climate plan nationwide

by JoelCarlile5 Posted on May 3, 2019

On a recent spring evening in Seattle, a crowd of nearly 1,000 gathered for a glimpse at one of the Democratic Party’s rising stars. When Washington Governor Jay Inslee bounded on stage, the audience let out a gasp, and collectively rose to its feet to offer a standing ovation.

Inslee was actually there to introduce Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat who narrowly missed becoming the first black woman to be elected governor of a state. “I speak on behalf of 7 million Washingtonians in welcoming Stacey Abrams to the great state of Washington,” Inslee proclaimed, inviting his colleague from the South to join him at the lectern.

Like Abrams, Inslee hopes his star is on the rise. It’s been more than two months since he jumped into a then-crowded, now-overflowing Democratic presidential primary with one major item on his agenda: climate change.

In some respects, Inslee’s decision to run as the climate candidate couldn’t come at a more opportune time. Recent polling shows warming is the No. 1 issue for Democratic voters. And Inslee is in the midst of signing a slew of bills into law that will make Washington a national leader on climate.

Outside of his home state, however, crowds would likely be less moved to standing Os if Inslee unexpectedly appeared in front of them. He is currently polling at 1 percent. When I brought that fact to his attention, he quipped, “Solid!” But that level of support is barely enough to qualify for the dozen primary debates that will commence this summer.

More importantly, though, candidates with higher name-recognition are beginning to encroach on the ground he’s staked out. In 2016, it would have been easy for Inslee to set himself apart as a climate champion — presidential candidates spent a total of 5 minutes and 27 seconds discussing the issue. In 2019, the topic is a top-tier primary issue.

Already, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker have released climate-related policy proposals focusing on public lands and environmental justice, respectively. This week, former Texas Representative Beto O’Rourke unveiled what was at the time the most comprehensive climate change plan of the bunch, aiming for net-zero emissions by 2050.

On Friday, Inslee came out with his own “100% Clean Energy for America Plan,” the first plank of a wider platform called the “Climate Mission.” It includes many of the positions that are gaining consensus among 2020 hopefuls: no drilling on public lands, re-enter the Paris climate agreement, ban highly polluting hydrofluorocarbons, and end tax breaks for fossil fuel companies, among other policies.

Where Inslee stakes out some new territory is with the three-pronged, central portion of his plan: Within a decade, he wants to eliminate pollution from new cars, new buildings, and our energy grid. Under the broader Climate Mission, he aims to get America to net-zero pollution by 2045 — five years sooner than Beto’s plan.

It’s an ambitious timeline, but by the time the debates roll around, Inslee expects to have a list of accomplishments in Washington that he can point to as evidence that his agenda could scale nationally. “Talk doesn’t cut it,” he told Grist. “You have to be able to actually do things, and frankly, I’m the only candidate in this race who has actually achieved results.”

Three climate-related measures proposed in Washington state — two of which Inslee will sign into law next week — appear to serve as mini-models for what he could push for if he landed in the White House.

Building efficiency

One of the bills the governor expects to sign soon will require new buildings in Washington to adhere to efficiency standards. The bill directs the state to develop efficiency standards that will ratchet down energy use over the next decade. The bill also includes incentives for existing buildings to be retrofitted to comply with the new standards. San Francisco and New York are in the midst of passing similar requirements, but Inslee says his is the first to include the retrofit component.

His presidential climate plan works much the same way. In it, he advocates for a national Zero-Carbon Building Standard by 2023 for new commercial and residential buildings, and notes that future proposals will include a plan to retrofit existing buildings. “It is a big deal because it is not romantic,” Inslee said, referring to building efficiency. “It’s the single most cost-effective, money-in-the-bank job creator of all the things we do.”

100-percent clean energy

Inslee also expects to sign a 100-percent clean electricity bill into law next week. It would eliminate use of coal power in his state by 2025 and require utilities to achieve 100 percent clean electricity generation by 2045. The law will also incorporate some of the environmental justice elements that Green New Deal advocates are championing. For instance, his bill would require that utilities take into consideration the social cost of carbon — the environmental and social damage inflicted per ton of emitted carbon. That’s another first nationwide, by the way. “It makes utilities potentially work on a performance-based system,” Inslee said, which means utilities will have incentives beyond profits for shareholders. “That’s a fundamental change.”

The national version of that bill looks similar on a slightly different timeline: It calls for retiring the U.S. coal fleet by 2030, and 100 percent carbon-neutral power by the same year (100 percent renewable electricity by 2035). And it includes a comparable switch to a performance-based system for the nation’s utilities, as well as measures that safeguard front-line communities against price hikes and pollution.

Clean vehicles

There are currently fewer than 43,000 electric cars on the road in Washington, but Inslee believes the state is still on track to meet his target of having 50,000 electric vehicles on its streets by 2020. The governor helped set up an electric vehicle charging system along his state’s highway system in 2018. He also pushed for a clean fuel standard that would have resulted in the emissions reductions equivalent to taking one-in-five cars off the road, but when that failed in the legislature, he changed course and tried to pass a state-wide cap on carbon emissions by executive action instead. It’s currently tied up in the state’s Supreme Court. “That would be the cherry on top if we got that,” he said.

His presidential plan is a bigger lift. It aims for zero emissions from new passenger cars, medium-duty trucks, and buses by 2030. That means that 100 percent of new lightweight and medium-duty cars sold in America would have to be zero emission within roughly 10 years. Inslee also aims to take a version of his low carbon fuel standard — the one that failed in his state — and apply it on a federal level. The same goes for a new nationwide EV charging system.

While Inslee’s on a bit of a roll of late, he hasn’t always had success with his climate initiatives. The governor presided over multiple carbon tax initiatives that failed both in the Washington legislature and at the voting booth. In a recent poll conducted by the New York Times, Inslee indicated he was undecided about implementing a carbon tax should he become president.

“If one thing is not working, you go to plan B, and that’s what we’ve done,” he told Grist. He added that if all of the recent climate bills he’s been championing manage to pass, it’ll have roughly the same CO2 savings as a carbon tax would have anyway.

While the legislation being passed in Olympia burnishes Inslee’s bona fides, working against him on the national stage is the prominence of the Green New Deal. Being pushed by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, it’s quickly become a reference point for the climate conversation on the left. Many of Inslee’s fellow 2020 hopefuls have lined up behind the ambitious resolution — even though there’s no concrete policy tied to it yet.

When O’Rourke unveiled his surprisingly bold climate plan earlier this week, spokespeople for the Sunrise Movement, one of the main groups championing the Green New Deal, attacked his proposal. They criticized it as not aggressive enough and said that “the United States should do much more.” They argued that the 2050 goal post was insufficient and that the U.S. should shoot for net-zero domestic emissions by 2030 instead, a target widely considered impossible. (They’ve since walked back their criticism, calling O’Rourke’s plan “a great start.”) Compared to Beto’s plan, Inslee’s proposal is only five years closer to what Green New Dealers are demanding.

The question remains as to whether the Green New Deal will survive the primary season as the gold standard for climate action among Democrats, or if stances will soften heading into the general election. Back in 2007, Inslee co-authored a book called Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy, which outlined a climate action plan very similar to the Green New Deal.

When I pressed him for a position on the proposal championed by progressive rock star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others, the normally folksy Inslee seemed irritated. He’d heard this question many times before. “I support the Green New Deal, is that what you’d like to hear?” he asked, lifting his palms toward the ceiling in a hopeless gesture. “I support the Green New Deal.”

Honestly, it’d be hard for him not to back ambitious climate goals, given the sole focus of his platform. But if the climate candidate wants his star to rise above a crowded field, he has to hope that his longtime clean-energy evangelism and the most ambitious plan to tackle warming (so far) carries more weight than just being another hopeful willing to embrace the Green New Deal.

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A tale of two Washingtons: How Jay Inslee aims to take his climate plan nationwide

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The House passes a climate bill for the first time in a freaking decade

by LamarMcLendon Posted on May 2, 2019

On Thursday, the newly Democratic House came out swinging by passing a climate bill for the first time in … let me just check my notes here … a decade. Better late than never?

The Climate Action Now Act (H.R. 9) passed through the legislative chamber mostly along party lines, with a few Republican exceptions. The bill is aimed at reaffirming American commitment to the Paris agreement, a global climate accord that President Trump unceremoniously tried to ditch six months into his presidency.

The bill has little chance of passing the Republican-controlled Senate, a fact the Democratic leadership is acutely aware of. Rather, the act serves as a direct rebuke to Trump’s handling (or mishandling) of all things climate, and stands as a reminder to the rest of the world that at least one political party in the U.S. is still committed to taking climate action.

Illinois Representative Sean Casten, a Democrat with a background in renewable energy (and a background as a contributing writer to Grist), was tapped by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to preside over the House debate of the bill. He believes the bill serves a three-pronged purpose: restore America’s emissions reduction obligations, re-establish the nation’s trustworthiness on the international stage, and start the ball rolling on going even further than the Paris agreement.

“Reducing CO2 is kind of addictive,” he told me on the phone. “Every time that any country or any region has committed to reducing CO2, it has always been done faster and cheaper than they thought it was going to.”

This bill is the first step in a larger climate agenda in the climate-conscious House, Casten said. Before Democrats can get the ball rolling, though, they need to do some damage control: “We are unfortunately in this Congress playing defense against the damage done by the last two years of the Trump administration,” he said. “Maybe in the not-too-distant-future, depending on what Senate does, we can sit at the big kid’s table again at international climate negotiations.”

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The House passes a climate bill for the first time in a freaking decade

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Renewable energy outpaced coal in April for the first time ever

by AngelinCathcart Posted on May 2, 2019

In April, renewables outpaced coal in energy production in the U.S. for the first time — ever. And it looks like the trend could continue through the end of May. Is even our energy sector getting KonMari-ed?

Coal is typically our second largest source of energy after natural gas. That changed this spring: Renewable energy, like hydro, solar, wind, and geothermal, is projected to exceed coal-powered energy by 325,000 megawatt hours per day in April, and by 32,000 megawatt hours per day in May, according to a new report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

EIA

This landmark win for clean energy is, however, short-lived. By June, these same projections estimate coal will reclaim its No. 2 position. Coal-powered plants undergo seasonal cycles of output that often result in a slow spring period as plants close for maintenance to prepare for the more demanding summer. Coincidentally, spring also sees hydro power spike in energy production. The IEEFA estimates that it will be a few years still before renewables can consistently surpass coal in energy production.

The growth of renewable technology over coal reflects the ascent of natural gas to energy dominance. In April 2015, natural gas saw its moment in the spotlight as it outpaced coal for the first time. After a few fluctuations, by the beginning of 2018, natural gas became the uncontested primary energy source. So that’s a good indicator for renewables.

“Coal’s proponents may dismiss these monthly and quarterly ups and downs in generation share as unimportant,” the IEEFA report concluded. “But we believe they are indicative of the fundamental disruption happening across the electric generation sector.”

With over 100 U.S. cities committed to clean energy, and with the price of solar and wind falling by 90 percent and 70 percent, respectively, in the last decade, the future’s looking bright — and powered by renewables.

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Renewable energy outpaced coal in April for the first time ever

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Climate experts to New York: Go green or go home

by ShielaTressler Posted on May 2, 2019

Thirty-five scholars, policy experts, and researchers from across the country are urging New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and state lawmakers to commit the state to zero net emissions by 2040 by the end of this year’s legislative session in June.

In a letter sent to Cuomo and state Senate leaders on Monday, these experts laid out how and why New York state is uniquely positioned to achieve this goal and serve as a model for other state, national, and international policies.

The thinking behind the letter: New York finally has the support it needs to pass strong climate legislation, so lawmakers should strike while the iron is hot.

“Now that the Senate has flipped to Democratic control and is led by advocates of climate action as well, this seems a perfect time to enact a new law,” said Michael Gerrard, a signee and professor at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

Cuomo has a track record of talking big, and sometimes acting big, on climate. He famously banned fracking in New York state, and was one of President Trump’s most fiery critics over the plan to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement. But Cuomo’s critics point out that he has been slow to condemn the Williams pipeline, which would bring fracked gas from Pennsylvania into the state.

With the exception of the pipeline, things are already looking greener in New York. The state Senate just passed a landmark package of bills on Tuesday, amending the state constitution to guarantee a right to clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment for all. They’re also in the process of considering the Climate and Community Protection Act (CCPA), a progressive measure that would mandate a totally carbon-neutral economy by 2050 and institute a handful of equity provisions. Plus, New York City just passed its own Green New Deal, and Mayor Bill de Blasio has pledged to take the New York real estate industry to task over its emissions.

The letter proposes a two-pronged approach to reaching zero net emissions by 2040: Decarbonizing the energy sector first, and only then buying offsets for some of the most challenging sources of emissions to eliminate, such as those from agriculture, flying, and cement production.

“Achieving zero net emissions, rather than zero direct emissions (which means not emitting any CO2 at all), is ambitious, consistent with the scientific recommendations of the IPCC, and provides greater flexibility to meet climate goals at lower cost,” the letter reads.

The experts say decarbonizing electricity is the “linchpin” to achieving zero emissions, not only because energy is one of the biggest emissions culprits, but also because carbon-neutral energy is essential for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the industrial, heating, and transportation sectors. They advocate for using all possible forms of carbon-free energy. “The legislation should focus on achieving key ends (carbon-free electricity) rather than specifying a limited set of means (specific technologies),” they write.

Michael Davidson, a signee and research fellow at Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, said he is excited to see what New York state passes. The resulting legislation be a guide for other states looking to uphold the Paris Agreement, and it could inform the national discussion about how to decarbonize the economy, he said.

“We hope that the leaders in Albany will now sit down and hammer out a deal that works for everyone,” said Gerrard. “The differences seem quite bridgeable.”

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Climate experts to New York: Go green or go home

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How Linda Garcia risked everything to keep Big Oil out of her community

by katiewalthall34 Posted on May 1, 2019

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

Every time Linda Garcia’s cellphone pings, she wonders if it will be another death threat. The environmental activist has been targeted by anonymous callers for five years since taking on Big Oil to save her community from environmental devastation.

Garcia lives in Fruit Valley, the kind of close-knit place where everybody knows everybody. The low-income community in Vancouver, Washington, sits just across the river from Portland, Oregon, and is home to a thousand households. It also has a severe air pollution problem. In 2013, when Garcia, 51, first heard of a plan to put a massive fossil fuel transportation hub on the edge of her neighborhood, Fruit Valley was suffering the worst air quality in the city. Parents were regularly warned to keep children indoors to protect them from the dark industrial smog that descended across the river.

Goldman Environmental Foundation

Concerned about how the new development might exacerbate the problems, Garcia, who was secretary of the Fruit Valley Neighborhood Association, started asking questions. She was skeptical of dubious claims being made by executives from Texas-headquartered oil company Tesoro (as it was then called) and elected officials about impressive job creation and minimal environmental risks.

“They made it sound amazing — jobs, jobs, jobs — which in a low-income community like Fruit Valley that was still recovering from the recession sounded great … But most of it turned out to be slick PR,” Garcia told HuffPost.

The deeper Garcia dug, the bleaker it looked: She believed the mega-terminal would have devastating consequences — health, environmental, and social — for the community and across the region.

The project would be North America’s largest oil terminal. The plan was to transport up to 11 million gallons of oil every day halfway across the country on mile-and-a-half-long trains from fracking fields in North Dakota through the Columbia River to the industrial Port of Vancouver, where the proposed terminal would be located less than a mile from most Fruit Valley residents. The oil would then be loaded onto ocean tankers at the terminal and shipped to Asia, where rapidly rising energy demands are enticing U.S. fossil fuel companies.

The oil company’s environmental and safety track record rang alarm bells for Garcia, especially the death of seven workers at one of its refineries in nearby Anacortes in 2010. In 2016, as the community continued its fight, the Department of Justice and Environmental Protection Agency fined Tesoro $10.4 million for air pollution violations relating to six refineries and $720,000 for alleged safety breaches at Anacortes refinery.

The more Garcia chipped away at the project’s marketing veneer, the more worried she got, which motivated her to organize the community to oppose the oil giant and forestall environmental devastation. Over the course of her long campaign against the terminal, she kept up the momentum — despite multiple death threats that continue even today.“I didn’t give up; I’m not backing down. I am doing the right thing, that’s who I am,” she said.

Six years later, the Tesoro-Savage terminal is dead in the water and Garcia is the recipient of one of the world’s most prestigious environmental awards.

It was her steely determination that stood out to the committee, which awards the annual Goldman Environmental Prize to six grassroots environmentalists, one from each inhabited continent, in recognition of their leadership and efforts to protect the natural environment at significant personal cost. (This year’s other winners come from Chile, Liberia, North Macedonia, Cook Islands, and Mongolia.)

“Despite personal risks, political and legal obstacles in her path, and challenges with her own health, Linda demonstrated steady leadership throughout a long campaign — and didn’t stop until the terminal was defeated,” said Goldman prize spokesman Ilan Kayatsky.

Garcia was relentless. Through the neighborhood association, she met with company and council officials and organized public meetings to share information with friends, neighbors, and local businesses about the terminal.

Goldman Environmental Foundation

She also works with the Washington Environmental Council — a nonprofit that focuses on sustainability and climate action throughout Washington state — which helped her garner support from outside environmental groups like Columbia Riverkeeper and the Sierra Club. As the community got educated and organized, the company stopped turning up at public meetings.

In response, the community got political, voting out two of the three elected port authority commissioners who had twice voted for the mega-terminal despite widespread public opposition and growing concerns about safety.

Garcia testified as a community witness at public hearings and city council meetings, using general safety reports published by the federal agency PHMSA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) and experience from similar projects to argue that the daily procession of rail and river traffic would threaten fish and wildlife species, and cause harmful air and water emissions damaging to human health.

The community was also deeply concerned about the risk of accidents and spills especially following the Lac-Megantic disaster in Quebec in July 2013, when a 14-car oil train derailed and killed 47 people in a fiery explosion. And in June 2016, as the battle heated up, a Union Pacific train carrying 3 million gallons of oil derailed in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area in Oregon — the same area the Tesoro-Savage railway would pass through.

The company accused activists of using “scare tactics,” claiming the trains would be safe and the project would bring jobs and economic growth to the community.

As Garcia gained prominence as a key leader in the community resistance, the death threats started. In addition, she suffered a life-threatening illness during the campaign and would often travel directly from chemotherapy to council meetings to testify on behalf of Fruit Valley residents.

“I was fighting for my own life and the lives of others … I knew that the second the terminal went online we’d be living with 24/7 toxic fumes that would exacerbate or cause conditions people could die from,” she said. “This kept me motivated.”

Garcia and the other campaigners convinced the city council to appeal the project at the state level, and in late 2017, the Washington Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council (the state agency responsible for sanctioning new projects) recommended against the oil terminal on the grounds it posed significant, unavoidable harm to the environment and community. In January 2018, Governor Jay Inslee denied the necessary permits. It was over, Fruit Valley had defeated Big Oil.

Fruit Valley’s triumphant resistance was remarkable, but not isolated.

The Pacific Northwest, a politically progressive region that identifies strongly with the environmental movement, has for almost a decade been under siege by the fossil fuel industry as it eyes the lucrative Asian energy market.

The plan of energy companies was to turn the picturesque Pacific Northwest into a fossil fuel highway for the next 50 years by expanding refineries and building terminals, trains and pipelines to transport millions of tons of coal (from the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming), oil (extracted by fracking in North Dakota), liquefied natural gas (from the Montney Formation in western Canada), and petrochemicals.

In total, 30 or so infrastructure projects were destined for communities in the region, including federally protected Indian tribal territories. If constructed, the combined capacity could be at least five times greater than the massive (and massively maligned) Keystone XL pipeline, according to analysis by Sightline Institute, a sustainability and energy think-tank, bringing huge pollution and climate implications.

But the region’s response was to unite. The coordinated opposition movement, known as the Thin Green Line, has beaten back all but four of the proposed projects (two relatively small expansion projects were sanctioned; two other battles are ongoing).

The unity took work. At first, communities and tribes took on the projects individually, until it became clear that the threat was regional, said Eric de Place, a researcher at Sightline Institute, which coined the term “Thin Green Line” to describe the commonality of the threats. Local and state organizations — including Garcia’s Washington Environmental Council — formed a coalition that spearheaded three campaigns: Power Past Coal, Stand Up to Oil, and Power Past Fracked Gas.

“Regional coordination stopped the industry being able to pit communities against each other, as together our negotiating bottom line was no, not one ton, not one community, just no,” de Place said.

The coalition pooled resources to investigate the economic, environmental and safety risks, which in turn helped persuade diverse sectors including tourism and commerce that it was in their interest to resist the fossil fuel corridor. Together, they turned out thousands of people to every public meeting, in every community, to take on the company executives and local officials.

“It was aggressive activism,” said de Place. “Our hard-line stance made it clear to elected officials that this was a binary issue and taking any money from coal or oil would be a political death sentence. This might not work everywhere, but it worked here.”

It’s noteworthy that the Pacific Northwest’s coordinated resistance has targeted transport and infrastructure projects, not the actual oil fields and coal mines. By disrupting the only economically viable transport options, they have made the intended extraction of millions of tons of coal economically unviable. “Find the weakest point in the supply chain, and go after it, that’s what we showed was possible,” said de Place.

The region’s opposition strategies and successes have served as rallying points for the larger climate movement and “keep it in the ground” campaign (which advocates against further fossil fuel burning), said Hilary Boudet, associate professor of sociology at Oregon State University’s School of Public Policy.

But, she warned, with huge profits at stake, Big Oil isn’t giving up. “A proposal’s defeat in one location doesn’t necessarily mean that fossil fuel export won’t happen somewhere else … The Trump administration has been very vocal about its policy of ‘energy dominance,’ which includes fossil fuel export,” Boudet said. Local and state-level politics are crucial to opposing this, she added.

As Garcia’s personal story shows, things can get ugly. At times, community leaders, especially tribal leaders, have been attacked as anti-development, anti-jobs, even anti-American for trying to protect their corner of the planet. But staying united has been their key to prevailing.

Garcia said: “There’s a tremendous sense of responsibility in our communities to take care of the planet so that it can be passed on to our children, and their children. We need more people to speak out, stand up, and form armies of resistance.”

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How Linda Garcia risked everything to keep Big Oil out of her community

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Dakota Access company bought up dozens of anti-pipeline URLs

by lindseytemple Posted on April 28, 2019

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

Texas-based pipeline giant Energy Transfer Partners went on a website-buying spree after months of fierce public protest over its Dakota Access Pipeline, nabbing dozens of URLs it expected pipeline opponents might use to target the company’s other projects.

The damage-control effort is related to several ongoing operations, including the company’s $4.2 billion Rover natural gas pipeline in Ohio, the $670 million Bayou Bridge Pipeline in Louisiana, and the Trans-Pecos and Comanche Trail pipelines in West Texas.

Energy Transfer Partners purchased at least 102 anti-pipeline websites between January and June 2017, according to a list compiled by the nonprofit Climate Investigations Center and shared with HuffPost.

Those domain names, purchased mostly through web hosting company GoDaddy, include addresses like “energytransfer.sucks,” “stopetppipelines.net,” “antiroverpipelinealliance.org,” “bayoubridgeresistance.com,” “gulfresidentsagainstbayoubridgepipeline.org,” “nocomanchetrailpipeline.org,” and “nowahatranspecospipeline.org.”

Energy Transfer Partners spokeswoman Alexis Daniel told HuffPost this website buying is “standard brand management practice for our company before we begin any major project in order to protect the brand of the project.”

“During the time we had multiple projects under construction or beginning construction, all of which have been successfully completed and are operating today,” Daniel said in an email.

She did not respond to questions about whether the effort was motivated by protests on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota or for how long the company plans to hold on to the sites.

Kert Davies, director of the Climate Investigations Center, called the company “paranoia incorporated.”

“Every one of ETPs recent pipeline projects has created major scandal and controversy across the country — from North Dakota to Pennsylvania to Louisiana,” Davies told HuffPost via email. “This preemptive GoDaddy website effort shows that ETP is pretty self conscious and paranoid about their social license. When a company buys the .sucks website for their own name, you know they have problems.”

Energy Transfer Partners created most of the anti-pipeline webpages on January 19, 2017, days after President Donald Trump — a former shareholder in the company — took office and a week before he signed an executive order to push the 1,172-mile Dakota Access project forward. The Obama administration had halted construction the month before in response to growing and at times violent Standing Rock protests.

The company secured a number of other URLs on February 23, 2017, the day law enforcement led what The Guardian described as a “military-style takeover” of the Standing Rock occupation and arrested holdout protesters. That day, Energy Transfer Partners submitted final edits to its permit application with state regulators in Ohio, with whom it had a cozy relationship, to begin construction of its Rover pipeline, as HuffPost previously reported.

Construction of the Rover pipeline began in March 2017. Within weeks, a pair of spills related to the project released more than 2 million gallons of drilling fluid into Ohio wetlands. That project became fully operational late last year.

Last month, after years of protest and legal challenges from property owners and environmentalists, Energy Transfer Partners announced the completion of the Bayou Bridge pipeline. The 160-mile crude oil line cuts through Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin, the largest swamp in the U.S., and ties into the Dakota Access Pipeline.

From its first day in office, the Trump administration, which has close ties to Energy Transfer Partners, has prioritized boosting domestic fossil fuel production in a quest for so-called “energy dominance,” rolling back numerous regulations to benefit the oil and gas industry. Trump signed a pair of executive orders earlier this month to speed up oil and natural gas pipeline construction.

Meanwhile, Democratic presidential candidates and current Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have vowed to ban new coal, oil, and natural gas leases on federal land if elected to the White House in 2020.

The United Nations warned in a report late last year that world governments have just 12 years to halve global carbon emissions to avoid catastrophic global warming that would bring $54 trillion in damages.

Continued – 

Dakota Access company bought up dozens of anti-pipeline URLs

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Why Science Does Not Disprove God – Amir Aczel

by Myrna Posted on April 28, 2019

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Why Science Does Not Disprove God

Amir Aczel

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: April 15, 2014

Publisher: William Morrow

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


The renowned science writer, mathematician, and bestselling author of Fermat's Last Theorem masterfully refutes the overreaching claims the "New Atheists," providing millions of educated believers with a clear, engaging explanation of what science really says, how there's still much space for the Divine in the universe, and why faith in both God and empirical science are not mutually exclusive. A highly publicized coterie of scientists and thinkers, including Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, and Lawrence Krauss, have vehemently contended that breakthroughs in modern science have disproven the existence of God, asserting that we must accept that the creation of the universe came out of nothing, that religion is evil, that evolution fully explains the dazzling complexity of life, and more. In this much-needed book, science journalist Amir Aczel profoundly disagrees and conclusively demonstrates that science has not, as yet, provided any definitive proof refuting the existence of God. Why Science Does Not Disprove God is his brilliant and incisive analyses of the theories and findings of such titans as Albert Einstein, Roger Penrose, Alan Guth, and Charles Darwin, all of whose major breakthroughs leave open the possibility— and even the strong likelihood—of a Creator. Bolstering his argument, Aczel lucidly discourses on arcane aspects of physics to reveal how quantum theory, the anthropic principle, the fine-tuned dance of protons and quarks, the existence of anti-matter and the theory of parallel universes, also fail to disprove God.

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Why Science Does Not Disprove God – Amir Aczel

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Einstein’s Shadow – Seth Fletcher

by Myrna Posted on April 27, 2019

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Einstein’s Shadow

A Black Hole, a Band of Astronomers, and the Quest to See the Unseeable

Seth Fletcher

Genre: Astronomy

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: October 9, 2018

Publisher: Ecco

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


A NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICE Einstein’s Shadow follows a team of elite scientists on their historic mission to take the first picture of a black hole, putting Einstein’s theory of relativity to its ultimate test and helping to answer our deepest questions about space, time, the origins of the universe, and the nature of reality Photographing a black hole sounds impossible, a contradiction in terms. But Shep Doeleman and a global coalition of scientists are on the cusp of doing just that.  With exclusive access to the team, journalist Seth Fletcher spent five years following Shep and an extraordinary cast of characters as they assembled the Event Horizon Telescope, a virtual radio observatory the size of the Earth. He witnessed their struggles, setbacks, and breakthroughs, and along the way, he explored the latest thinking on the most profound questions about black holes. Do they represent a limit to our ability to understand reality? Or will they reveal the clues that lead to the long-sought Theory of Everything? Fletcher transforms astrophysics into something exciting, accessible, and immediate, taking us on an incredible adventure to better understand the complexity of our galaxy, the boundaries of human perception and knowledge, and how the messy human endeavor of science really works. Weaving a compelling narrative account of human ingenuity with excursions into cutting-edge science, Einstein’s Shadow is a tale of great minds on a mission to change the way we understand our universe—and our place in it.  

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Einstein’s Shadow – Seth Fletcher

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