A proposal from the Obama administration to limit carbon emissions might be curtailed in a legal quagmire if the required technology does not meet current standards. View original post here: Challenges Await Plan to Reduce Emissions ; ;Related ArticlesU.S. Revives Aid Program for Clean EnergyAdministration to Press Ahead With Carbon LimitsThe Texas Tribune: Texas, Where Oil Rules, Turns Its Eye to Energy Efficiency ;
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Meet Australia’s incoming prime minister, Tony Abbott, who once called climate science “absolute crap.”
In the national election held on Saturday, Australian voters faced a big choice on climate policy — a choice between fairly good and downright evil, as we explained earlier this summer.
The Aussies opted for evil.
Tony Abbott, the climate-denying politician who had pledged to kill a carbon tax and other climate initiatives introduced by the Labor Party government, will soon be the country’s prime minister. The Abbott-led conservative coalition of the Liberal and National parties (note the capital “L” in “Liberal” — that’s because it’s the name of a party, not a description of its platform) easily won an election that had been dominated by debate over climate policies.
The carbon tax has been credited with contributing to a recent drop in carbon dioxide emissions in Australia, which is one of the world’s worst per-capita CO2 polluters. But the tax is fiercely resented by the country’s powerful resources-based corporations.
Abbott’s first order of business? Repaying the mining and fossil-fuel industries that helped elect him by immediately moving to scrap that tax — just like he promised.
From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:
Prime Minister-elect Tony Abbott yesterday instructed his department to begin drawing up the legislation to dump the carbon pricing scheme, and says Federal Parliament will resume in late October or early November to deal with it. …
Mr Abbott’s spokesman — and likely minister — for the environment, Greg Hunt, says scrapping the carbon tax will be new government’s “first order of business”.
“We want to set out now to do what we said we would do, and the only people who stand between Australia and lower electricity prices are the Labor Party,” Mr Hunt said.
This won’t be as simple as Abbott would like. Although he will soon control the the House of Representatives, which is Parliament’s primary law-writing body, a newly elected gang of senators won’t take their seats for another year. The existing Senate is controlled by the Labor Party and the Green Party, which have vowed to block legislation to repeal the carbon tax.
Even when the new Senate is sworn in, Abbott will face challenges. Current projections show that his coalition will have fewer than half of the Senate seats, with the balance of power likely to be held by what The Age newspaper described as a “barnyard of minor parties, … some of them virtually unknown entities with no track record and no known policies.”
That means Abbott would need to negotiate with senators from such weird-arse parties as the Sports Party and The Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party in attempting to pass new climate legislation. Again from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:
Greens leader Christine Milne, whose party will hold the balance of power for the next 12 months, says the incoming minor party senators may still prove to be a challenge to work with.
“When the new Senate takes place, he will have to get six out of eight — if the current numbers are the ones that are returned — six out of eight of those people to vote with him at any one time and who knows where they stand on anything,” she said.
“For most of them, there is no policy platform, there is no philosophical view.”
And then there are the financial challenges. Abbott’s advisers estimate that dumping the carbon tax will leave a $AUD6 billion ($5.5 billion) hole in the federal budget during the next three to four years. The tax was not only used to pay for climate initiatives; it was part of Labor’s sweeping reform of the country’s tax system designed to reduce personal income taxes [PDF], especially for low-income earners.
The election result is a tad baffling given that Labor oversaw six straight years of rising economic prosperity amid global financial doom and gloom. So who can we blame, then, for the depressing collapse of Australian’s burgeoning climate leadership in the Asia-Pacific region?
Some pundits blame outgoing Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for losing the election — he destabilized the Labor Party by hounding former Prime Minister Julia Gillard out of the top job in the year leading up to the election, and then pushed the party further to the right. Others blame widespread resentment of Labor’s climate policies (the Associated Press described the carbon tax as “hated” in its election coverage), which is strange given that Australians voted the party in six years ago, and reelected it three years ago, on the basis of those very policies. Others blame News Limited founder Rupert Murdoch, whose Australian stable of newspapers whipped up an anti-Labor furor with biased reporting in the lead-up to the election. Murdoch, for what it’s worth, took to Twitter in a triumphant tirade to espouse his own angry theories:
Then again, we could probably just blame the Australian voters.
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy
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Australians elect climate denier who pledges to dump carbon tax
Detroit’s Petroleum Coke Piles Facebook page
A petcoke pile in June.
The Koch brothers finally took their towering piles of tar-sands oil refinery waste away from Detroit.
But where did they send the stuff? That’s a bit of a mystery.
Huge piles of petroleum coke started building up along the city’s riverfront after a refinery began processing tar-sands oil from Canada in November. Koch Carbon, an affiliate of Koch Industries, peered into the dark mass and saw, ka-ching, opportunity, so it bought up all the waste.
The material has little commercial value in the U.S., where burning it would likely violate clean air laws unless expensive emissions-control equipment were used. But it can be sold for a decent-enough price in other countries with laxer air pollution laws. Indeed, we told you in June that ships were hauling some of the waste back to a power plant in Canada — but not enough of it to keep the piles from growing.
Detroit ordered the petcoke piles to be removed by Aug. 9. That order was ignored, so the mayor’s office issued another order, saying they had to be removed by Aug. 27. That deadline was also not met. But this week, The Columbus Dispatch reported that the waste had finally been removed from the riverfront:
A four-story mound of black, gritty refinery waste that recently was ordered off the banks of the Detroit River likely was moved to Ohio. Where? Those who know aren’t saying. …
Brad Wurfel, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, said he was told that the pile was shipped to Ohio. But he said he didn’t know where. And Koch Carbon isn’t talking.
If you happen to notice an enormous pile of black waste in your neighborhood, do let us know, won’t you?
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology
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Detroit’s dirty petcoke piles disappear, but where did they go?
What do you do when monstrous piles of dusty black carbon move into your city?
If you’re Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, you issue an order demanding that they be removed. And after that’s ignored, you issue another.
Petroleum Coke Awareness Detroit
What could be lovelier than a sunset over petcoke piles?
The city’s riverfront has been blighted by huge, uncovered piles of petroleum coke since a local refinery began processing Canadian tar-sands oil in November. Just take a look at this video of a black wall of dust being kicked up from the piles:
The petcoke can be burned for fuel, but it’s so dirty that doing so in America would violate clean air laws, so the proud owners of the revolting waste — the Koch brothers, of course — have been trying to sell it elsewhere. In June, a Canadian power plant started taking some of it, but the pile still remains. From a press release issued Tuesday by Bing’s office:
“Today, my administration informed Detroit Bulk Storage that all of the stored petroleum coke material must be moved off site by August 27,” said Mayor Bing. “DBS personnel have assured us that no new materials are being brought onto the site, and all of their activity is concentrated on offsite removal of the pet coke.” …
This move comes after Detroit Bulk Storage (DBS) failed to remove all of the material by August 9 as directed by a Correction Order issued by the City’s Buildings, Safety Engineering and Environmental Department (BSEED) last week. At that time, BSEED cited the company for being in violation of the Detroit Property Maintenance Code and/or Official Zoning Ordinance.
The Detroit Free Press reports that the Kochs had already intended to remove the mess this month:
The piles are owned by Koch Carbon and come from the Marathon Detroit Refinery. Detroit Bulk Storage is storing the pet coke on property owned by billionaire and Ambassador Bridge owner Manuel (Matty) Moroun and leased to Norfolk Southern railroad.
Koch Carbon announced last month that it is moving the piles to Ohio “to meet our shipment needs.”
Our sympathies go out to Ohioans.
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Kochs must move their massive piles of tar-sands waste, Detroit mayor says
A Barbados nut plantation.
To fight climate change, some scientists think we should vegetate the hell out of deserts. The latest such idea calls for large plantations of a hardy species of Central American tree to be planted in near-coastal desert areas and irrigated with desalinated water.
While forests soak up carbon dioxide, deserts do comparatively little to help with climate change. So should these seas of sand be planted and watered out of existence in a bid to reduce CO2 levels?
Some say yes. The approach would be like geoengineering, but rooted in a more natural system. Scientists call it bioengineering or carbon farming.
The idea of replacing deserts with forests to help the climate is not brand new. A few years ago, for example, scientists proposed planting eucalyptus trees through the Saharan and Australian deserts to help absorb carbon dioxide.
The latest suggested approach, which would involve the planting of vast orchards of Barbados nut trees, technically known as Jatropha curcas trees, was proposed Wednesday by a group of German researchers in the journal Earth System Dynamics. They say vegetating the world’s near-coastal deserts with this species, which can withstand harsh growing conditions, could provide an alternative to mechanical carbon-sequestration techniques.
The researchers crunched some numbers and determined that the carbon-farming costs would be competitive over 20 years with carbon capture and storage, an embryonic technology in which a power plant’s carbon emissions are captured and funneled underground. Carbon farming could be funded by governments through carbon taxes and through the sale of carbon allowances.
“Suitably deployed, these plants could transform unused, barren lands into long-term carbon sinks,” they write in the paper. “The carbon efficiency of this bio-ecosystem would compare favourably with all other existing processes for carbon storage and sequestration, including the cultivation of bio fuels.”
Not only would the trees soak up CO2 and deposit some of it into the soil, but their growth could influence rainfall patterns, soil quality, and regional climates, paving the way for the natural growth of other plants.
Jatropha curcas can withstand conditions that would make most plants wither, but they’re not magical. They still need water. The scientists propose desalinating water from the sea to irrigate the orchards. This is an expensive and energy-intensive way of obtaining fresh water, but the scientists incorporated that into their cost estimates.
Oil from the trees is already used extensively for biofuel, and the scientists say that after an orchard had been growing for a few years it would produce nuts and leaves that could be burned to provide some of the power needed for desalination.
The idea seems worthy of further investigation — although it wouldn’t be much good for the tortoises and other wildlife that revel in the world’s deserts.
Here’s a graphic from the paper that helps explain the proposal:
Earth System DynamicsClick to embiggen.
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Should we turn deserts into carbon-sucking tree plantations?
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Five years in, BC’s carbon tax has successfully reduced greenhouse gas emissions in a stable economy. Hobolens/Flickr Carbon emissions have an unavoidable cost. When we burn fossil fuels and release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it increases the greenhouse effect. The resulting climate change has costs, for example by causing more extreme weather. More frequent and intense heat waves and droughts can damage crops, causing food prices to rise, more intense floods can cause more property damage, etc. Lacking a price attached to carbon emissions in the marketplace, we’re effectively putting those costs on a credit card. We may not immediately see the costs, but they keep building up. In fact they’re building up with interest, because the costs of climate damage are higher than the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. When we put a price on carbon in the marketplace, consumers can see the costs associated with greenhouse gas emissions and adjust their consumption in an informed manner without continuing to build up that climate credit card debt. To keep reading, click here.
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Can a Carbon Tax Work Without Hurting the Economy? Ask British Columbia
The climate is a hot topic in Australia.
The land down under has its political priorities the right way up.
While Barack Obama and Mitt Romney avoided discussing climate change during the 2012 U.S. presidential race, a federal election campaign in Australia is being dominated by debate over climate policy. From The Australian newspaper:
The 2013 election now may come down to policy differences rather than popularity, or the lack of it. And it seems two of the three issues that have dominated Australian politics for 15 years will once again define this election: climate change and asylum-seekers. …
[O]n climate change the difference is fundamental. It’s the carrot v the stick; paying to encourage emission abatement v charging companies that emit.
The climate debate has blown up in Australia in recent days following news that the governing party plans to change its approach to carbon pricing. The weekend announcement is still dominating headlines and air time. This gets wonky, but it’s the wonky nature of the political debate that makes the nation’s preoccupation with it so fascinating:
Having been attacked for the high price of carbon allowances, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd plans to dump the government’s fixed-price approach to charging power plants, airlines, and the like for the privilege of releasing greenhouse gases. If Rudd’s Labor Party retains power in this year’s election (date still uncertain), Rudd will replace that approach next year with a floating price for carbon emissions based on the market rate in Europe — which currently is very low.
Such a policy change might not sound like the kind of thing that would provoke political vitriol or front-page stories, but provoke them it has. And here’s what’s even weirder: Before Rudd took over last month from Julia Gillard as Labor’s leader and prime minister, the government had already planned to make that same carbon-pricing switch — just in 2015 rather than in 2014. So we’re talking about a one-year change in climate policy that is dominating political discourse.
Rudd’s proposal would slash the carbon price by about three quarters, saving polluters “several billion dollars” in one year — a move that Labor hopes will be seen as helping to ease rising electricity prices, albeit at the expense of the climate. The announcement is also helping Rudd spin Labor’s carbon “tax” into a carbon “market.”
Tony Abbott, Rudd’s main challenger and leader of the Liberal Party (which is actually the conservative party, probably because Australia is upside down), once described climate science as “crap.” And he thinks Rudd’s latest idea is, well, also crap. “Just ask yourself what an emissions trading scheme is all about,” Abbott said to reporters on Monday. “It’s a so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one.”
Still, Abbott wants everybody to know that he is willing to do a little something about climate, despite clearly not wanting to. He is proposing to replace carbon pricing with a “direct action plan” to reduce the country’s emissions by 5 percent by 2020 — but the plan is lighter on detail than a cloud of carbon dioxide. The main thing anybody knows about it is that the government would fund $AUD3 billion ($2.75 billion) worth of projects designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions during the coming years.
It sure is nice to know that Australians are so preoccupied with the ins and outs of climate policy. Must be the heat.
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Powerful, but not climate friendly.
Major airlines have come up with yet another way of imposing delays upon the world.
Under international pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, most members of the International Air Transport Association have agreed on a proposal for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions — but the plan lacks details, aims low, and would sit on the tarmac until 2020 or later.
Aviation is an awfully energy-intensive way of getting around; the industry accounts for an estimated 2 percent of global carbon emissions.
The European Union has wanted to require airlines that operate in its territory to join the E.U. emissions-trading system, but after the U.S. and other countries threw a tantrum, the E.U. agreed in December to hold off for one year. So airlines and other opponents of the E.U.’s plan are rushing to put together an alternative.
On Monday, most members of the airline association agreed on a system. From The Guardian:
[The airlines] said there should be a single global “market-based mechanism” — such as emissions trading — that would enable airlines to account for and offset their emissions.
But they did not agree to a global limit on greenhouse gas emissions from air travel, or set out in detail how governments should implement a market-based mechanism to cover all airlines. …
[G]reen campaigners pointed out that Monday’s IATA resolution could allow airlines simply to buy cheap carbon credits to offset their emissions, rather than make real reductions.
Carbon credits are currently at rock bottom prices because of a glut on the market, and because companies covered by the EU’s emissions trading system were awarded far more free permits than they needed.
Bill Hemmings, aviation manager at the green campaigning organisation Transport & Environment, said: “The IATA resolution represents a welcome departure from their historical position that better air traffic control, better planes and biofuels alone can solve the problem.
“However, it kicks the ball in the long grass, until after 2020, and sets out a string of unworkable conditions. It rules out the EU emissions trading scheme as a stepping stone, [and rules out] the raising of revenues and impacts on traffic volume, which are inherent to any market-based measure.”
Airlines hope their proposal will lay the groundwork for an international agreement on aviation emissions. From Reuters:
The decision is designed to offer governments a basis for negotiation after United Nations talks failed to resolve a stand-off between the European Union and a broad flank of other countries over an issue with cross-border implications.
Airlines have been racing to avert a trade war after the European Union suspended an emissions trading scheme for a year to give opponents time to agree on a global system.
So far, little progress has been made in the UN effort to craft an agreement to lower emissions from international air travel, raising doubts that a September target date can be met.
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Part one of a series on America’s first climate refugees. Richard Sprenger/The Guardian Sabrina Warner keeps having the same nightmare: a huge wave rearing up out of the water and crashing over her home, forcing her to swim for her life with her toddler son. “I dream about the water coming in,” she said. The landscape in winter on the Bering Sea coast seems peaceful, the tidal wave of Warner’s nightmare trapped by snow and several feet of ice. But the calm is deceptive. Spring break-up will soon restore the Ninglick River to its full violent force. In the dream, Warner climbs on to the roof of her small house. As the waters rise, she swims for higher ground: the village school which sits on 20-foot pilings. Even that isn’t high enough. By the time Warner wakes, she is clinging to the roof of the school, desperate to be saved. To keep reading, click here. Original link: One Family’s Great Escape ; ;Related ArticlesIt Doesn’t Matter If We Never Run Out of Oil: We Won’t Want to Burn It AnymoreWe Just Passed the Climate’s “Grim Milestone”Cutting Carbon Dioxide Isn’t Enough ;
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“Del Boca Vista is underwater, thanks to you!”
We already told you that carbon dioxide could pass a daily average of 400 parts per million (ppm) sometime this May — an atmospheric concentration not seen in human history, and generally a sign that we’re passing into the climatological period known as “the gnashing of teeth.” The New York Times now reports that we’ve Usain Bolted past that milestone:
Scientific monitors reported that the gas had reached an average daily level that surpassed 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.
The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.
The front-page story then trots out a sad-face-mask Greek chorus of credible climate scientists whose responses justifiably run the parental gamut between “I’m not mad at you — just disappointed” and “get out of my house.”
“It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading.
Translation: “Get into college? Not with those grades.”
Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. “It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds,” he said.
“How can you live like this? I didn’t know your room could even get that dirty.”
“It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster,” said Maureen E. Raymo, a Columbia University earth scientist.
“I don’t know why your father and I even try anymore.”
“It takes a long time to melt ice, but we’re doing it,” Dr. Keeling said. “It’s scary.”
“You do great when you apply yourself to something — like those damn videogames.”
“If you start turning the Titanic long before you hit the iceberg, you can go clear without even spilling a drink of a passenger on deck,” said Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at the Pennsylvania State University. “If you wait until you’re really close, spilling a lot of drinks is the best you can hope for.”
“I told you to take the dog out, but it’s too late. Now you have to clean up the carpet.”
“If you’re looking to stave off climate perturbations that I don’t believe our culture is ready to adapt to, then significant reductions in CO2 emissions have to occur right away,” said Mark Pagani, a Yale geochemist who studies climates of the past. “I feel like the time to do something was yesterday.”
“This is the last time I’m going to tell you. I’m going to Moe’s.”
The worst part is there are more do-not-pass-go milestones to come: Hourly readings above 400 ppm started last month, daily averages are reaching 400 ppm now, and it’s likely a monthly average above 400 ppm will arrive in the near future. Unless we can stop blasting through carbon thresholds, Science is poised to be very disappointed in us for the foreseeable future. Go to your room.
Carbon Dioxide Level Passes Long-Feared Milestone, The New York Times
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CO2 crosses dreaded 400 ppm milestone, and science is very disappointed in you
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