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China, Coal. Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

by KeiraFoulds Posted on June 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Guardian

Our Climate Desk partners at the Guardian have published a beautiful—and terrifying—multimedia story from deep inside China’s coal belt. It’s the third installment in the paper’s ongoing “carbon bombs” series: investigations into giant fossil fuel projects from around the world that are super-charging global warming, or that have the potential to do so. Today’s deep-dive into China’s ravenous use of coal is eye-opening not only because it explores the long-lasting impact of burning coal on the nation’s health, but also because it illustrates the country’s outsized impact on global climate change through coal-related emissions. Here are some highlights from the Guardian story (which you should also check out for the gorgeous video and graphics):

1. “Chinese miners last year dug up 3.87bn tonnes of coal, more than enough to keep all four of the next largest users—the United States, India, the European Union and Russia—supplied for a year.” I’m always amazed by just how much coal China produces and consumes. Here’s how China’s coal production compared to other countries:

The Guardian

2. “Air pollution in China, from its factories and power stations, has got so bad that it kills over half a million people a year.” The impact of coal on China’s air is something my colleague Jaeah Lee and I witnessed first-hand when we traveled to through China for our investigation into China’s fracking boom. Potentially lethal smog stalked us everywhere we went, but especially bad was the coal belt around Shijiazhuang, where smog reaches emergency levels one out of every three days each year—twice as often as in Beijing.

If nothing is done to slash the levels of toxic smog in China’s air, some 257,000 Chinese people could die over the next decade from pollution-related diseases, according to a study released in February by Peking University and Greenpeace. According to a separate Greenpeace study, 90 percent of 360 Chinese cities surveyed failed to meet the country’s national air quality standard in the first quarter of this year. Forty percent of the cities registered air pollution levels that were twice the national standard. Toxic smog billowing from China’s coal-fired power plants is even making snowstorms in the US worse.

This video we produced during our investigation attempts to capture some of the consequences of China’s extraordinary dependence of coal and its impact on air quality and health:

3. “The fuel China dug up last year alone will produce around 9bn tonnes of carbon dioxide as it burns, more than all the coal used around the world in 1990.” Constituting 70 percent of China’s energy supply, coal has allowed China to become the world’s second-largest economy in just a few decades, hauling millions of people out of poverty. But the cost is being felt around the world in the staggering amount of carbon pollution China generates. Again, here’s a Guardian graphic showing just how much China outstrips the rest of the world in terms of carbon emissions, driven by its addiction to coal:

The Guardian

4. There was a drop in Chinese coal demand last year for the first in more than a decade. But China won’t be making permanent cuts to its coal use for years. Instead, the Chinese government has proposed slowing the growth of its coal use by 2020. That promise followed the historic climate deal between the US and China announced in November last year, in which China promised to peak its emissions around 2030.

5. The Chinese government accepted the scientific evidence for global warming years ago. This might seem like a small point, but it’s significant when you consider just how much climate denial has a grip on US politics. No such political resistance exists in China, and that means China “is pushing harder on more fronts than any other government on Earth to develop other sources” of energy, according to Atlantic China expert James Fallows, who spoke to us as part of our fracking investigation. China has an enormous amount to gain from throwing everything at solving the problem—and a lot to lose if it attempts fail, including the goodwill of its people, who are fed up with putrid air and the health impacts on their kids. The results of China’s embrace of the scientific consensus about climate change can be seen most clearly in its booming solar industry, as our peak inside one of the world’s biggest solar company reveals:

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China, Coal. Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

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EPA: Fracking Doesn’t Pose "Widespread, Systemic" Danger to Drinking Water

by RosalinSimms Posted on June 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Environmental Protection Agency today released a long-awaited draft report on the impact of fracking on drinking water supplies. The analysis, which drew on peer-reviewed studies as well as state and federal databases, found that activities associated with fracking do “have the potential to impact drinking water resources.” But it concluded that in the United States, these impacts have been few and far between.

The report identifies several possible areas of concern, including: “water withdrawals in times of, or in areas with, low water availability; spills of hydraulic fracturing fluids and produced water; fracturing directly into underground drinking water resources; below ground migration of liquids and gases; and inadequate treatment and discharge of water.”

However, the report says, “We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources.”

The report considered not only the hydraulic fracturing action itself, but all of the water-related steps necessary to drill, from acquiring water to disposing of it. Here’s an illustration from the report:

EPA

The report, which the Obama administration had hoped would provide a definitive answer to a core question about the controversial drilling technique, has been five years in the making. During that time, the EPA has faced numerous battles with the oil and gas industry to procure necessary data. Even before the report was released, some scientists voiced skepticism about its findings because of gaps in the data regarding what types of chemicals were present in water supplies prior to fracking activities.

As Inside Climate News explains:

For the study’s findings to be definitive, the EPA needed prospective, or baseline, studies. Scientists consider prospective water studies essential because they provide chemical snapshots of water immediately before and after fracking and then for a year or two afterward. This would be the most reliable way to determine whether oil and gas development contaminates surface water and nearby aquifers, and the findings could highlight industry practices that protect water. In other studies that found toxic chemicals or hydrocarbons in water wells, the industry argued that the substances were present before oil and gas development began.

Prospective studies were included in the EPA project’s final plan in 2010 and were still described as a possibility in a December 2012 progress report to Congress. But the EPA couldn’t legally force cooperation by oil and gas companies, almost all of which refused when the agency tried to persuade them.

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EPA: Fracking Doesn’t Pose "Widespread, Systemic" Danger to Drinking Water

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Lindsey Graham Has an Entirely Reasonable Position on Climate Change, Sometimes

by MaribelEtheridg Posted on June 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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The story was originally published by the Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) officially entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination on Monday, he also joined an exclusive club: that of GOP candidates who have acknowledged climate change.

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Graham, who is in his third term in the Senate, has gained a reputation as one of the few Republicans who has, in the past, acknowledged the science finding that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet and has worked across the aisle on legislation to deal with it. Among the Republican presidential contenders, former New York Gov. George Pataki is the only other candidate who has been proactively engaged on climate.

But while Graham gets a lot of credit for his views on the climate, his record on the issue has been mixed and at times contradictory.

In 2009 and 2010, Graham joined with Democrat John Kerry and independent Joe Lieberman to draft legislation that would have created a cap-and-trade system to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Graham also openly embraced the issue, arguing in January 2010 that addressing climate change “is a worthy endeavor.” And he did so acknowledging that he might get some political pushback on the issue.

“I have come to conclude that greenhouse gases and carbon pollution is not a good thing,” Graham said at the time. “Whatever political push back I get, I’m willing to accept because I know what I’m trying to do makes sense to me…I am convinced that reason, logic and good business sense, and good environmental policy, will trump the status quo.”

Graham consistently made the point that addressing climate would be good for energy independence, job creation and national security.

It was all well and good for a few months. But then, just days before the trio was expected to officially introduce their climate legislation, Graham walked away from the effort, upset that Democratic leadership might move on an immigration bill before their package.

In the weeks after that, things got a little weird, with Graham saying things to reporters like:

“I’m in the wing of the Republican Party that has no problem with trying to find ways to clean up our air. We can have a debate about global warming, and I’m not in the camp that believes man-made emissions are contributing overwhelmingly to global climate change, but I do believe the planet is heating up. But I am in the camp of believing that clean air is a noble purpose for every Republican to pursue. The key is to make it business-friendly.”

He also said he would vote against the legislation he spent months helping craft.

Asked to clarify his position on climate change the following day, Graham said that the “science about global warming has changed” and that he thought it had been “oversold.”

“I think they’ve been alarmist and the science is in question,” he told reporters. “The whole movement has taken a giant step backward.”

I’d been covering the climate bill—and Graham—extensively at that time, and found it a perplexing response from someone who had, just four months earlier, argued that the Senate shouldn’t move a “half-assed bill” that lacked restrictions on carbon emissions. So I asked him again, to which he responded:

At the end of the day, I think carbon pollution is worthy of being controlled, whether you believe in global warming or not. I do believe that all the CO2 gases, greenhouse gases from cars, trucks and utility plants is not making us a healthier place, is not making our society better, and it’s coming at the expense of our national security and our economic prosperity. So put me in the camp that it’s worthy to clean up the air and make money doing so. This idea that carbon’s good for you. I want that debate. There’s a wing of our party who thinks carbon pollution is OK. I’m not in that wing.

In the years since, Graham’s statements have moderated again, somewhat. And he’s managed to maintain support from groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, whose president co-hosted a fundraiser for him in April 2014. In remarks last March, Graham stated that climate change is “real, that man has contributed to it in a substantial way” and criticized the Republican Party for lacking an environmental platform. But then he added that “the problem is, Al Gore’s turned this thing into religion.”

At his official announcement on Monday, Graham alluded to climate change without mentioning the “c”-word directly. “We must have energy independence,” Graham said. “And I believe in the process it is possible to create a safe, clean environment and create well-paying jobs for Americans of all generations.”

Graham’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment about his official campaign position on climate change.

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Lindsey Graham Has an Entirely Reasonable Position on Climate Change, Sometimes

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Here’s What Osama bin Laden Wrote About Climate Change

by Shirlee47R Posted on May 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday morning, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a trove of newly declassified documents discovered during the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Among the many letters, videos, and audio recordings is an undated document apparently written by bin Laden discussing the “massive consequences” of climate change, a phenomenon he describes as having more victims than wars.

The newly released document is very similar in content and language to a recording released in 2010, in which the Al Qaeda leader expounded on climate change and criticized the international community’s lackluster relief efforts in response to flooding in Pakistan. The speech, about 11 minutes in length, was accompanied by a video compilation that included images of natural disasters and Bin Laden.

In the document, Bin Laden calls attention to the fate of Pakistani children, who, he says, had been “left in the open, without a suitable living environment, including good drinking water, which has exposed them to dehydration, dangerous diseases and higher death rates.” He also laments that “countries are annually spending 100 thousand million euros on their armies” while failing to address the humanitarian crisis in Pakistan.

This was not the only time Bin Laden spoke about climate change. In a different letter between Bin Laden and senior Al Qaeda leaders—also seized during the 2011 raid and written about by Foreign Affairs in March—Bin Laden remarked on a study about climate change and asked his associates to send it Al Jazeera. In 2010, Al Jazeera obtained an audio recording of Bin Laden criticizing the “industrial states,” the United States among them, for contributing to climate change.

Read the full text of the undated letter below:

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Letter Implications of Climate Change (PDF)

Letter Implications of Climate Change (Text)

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Here’s What Osama bin Laden Wrote About Climate Change

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When You Binge-Watch "Mad Men," You Might Be Killing the Planet

by AndersoKellett Posted on May 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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You recycle. You ride your bike to work. You bring your own bags to the grocery. You might think you’re a good environmentalist. But those cat videos, TED talks, and Netflix original series you watch to unwind might be slowly killing the planet.

That’s the word from Greenpeace’s latest Clicking Clean report, which evaluates the clean energy initiatives of many different internet companies.

While we’re used to thinking about our environmental impact in terms of how much trash we throw out, how much we drive, and how much electricity we use in our homes, the report highlights the ways that our internet usage has environmental effects that we never see.

Data center emissions account for small percentage of global emissions, Greenpeace information technology analyst Gary Cook tells us. That’s not much compared to 14 percent that goes towards agriculture or the 13 percent that goes to transportation. But data center emissions are growing by at least 13 percent per year, Cook says. And within two years, information technology in general, including manufacturing servers and other gear, is expected to account for between 7 and 12 percent of all electrical use, according the report.

Greenpeace

Data centers are expected to account for about 21 percent of that usage, mostly because of the explosive demand for streaming video. Cook explains that even though streaming can offset some emissions, such as the manufacture and delivery of DVDs or BluRay disks, the convenience of streaming is leading us to consume more content. Instead of buying a few videos and watching them again and again, we’re now binge-watching entire seasons of shows in a sitting, which ends up creating a bigger carbon footprint overall.

This trend extends to other industries as well. For example, according to the report, publishers now consume more energy as a result of their data center usage than they did through their use of printing presses.

There is good news in the report. Amazon, which hosts Netflix’s streaming service, and which has long been the tech industry’s renewable energy straggler, has finally pledged to go green. Apple has continued to adopt more green energy since Greenpeace singled out the company in 2011. In its latest report, the organization gave Apple “A” ratings in all four categories that it tracks: energy transparency; renewable energy commitment; energy efficiency; and renewable energy deployment and advocacy.

In fact, most major consumer-facing internet companies are now working towards using nothing but renewables. Business-to-business companies, such as colocation providers that rent data center space, are lagging behind, though Equinix, one of the largest in the country, has pledged to switch to all-renewable power. But any company seeking to ramp up its use of renewables is likely to run into a common problem: They need more electricity to meet rising demand for their services than they can get in a renewable form from utilities.

According to the report, many energy utilities, which generally have monopolies in their areas, only offer coal-generated power, or only sell renewable energy at a premium, despite renewable energy becoming as cheap, if not cheaper, than coal power in some cases.

That’s a big problem in Virginia, which sees as much as 70 percent of global internet traffic pass through its borders every day, and North Carolina, another hotbed for data centers.

Companies can seek more renewable power by building new data centers in states where more renewable energy is available, such as Iowa and Oregon, but Cook says it’s unrealistic to expect companies to move all of their existing data centers out of Virginia and North Carolina. That means these companies will need to work with activists and policy makers to pressure utility companies into making changes, he says.

“The IT sector has been very disruptive figuring out how to change pieces of the economy,” he says. “If the industry works together it can resist the economic power of the energy sector.”

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When You Binge-Watch "Mad Men," You Might Be Killing the Planet

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Is Bernie Sanders the Best Candidate on Climate Change?

by MerriPaling0 Posted on May 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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

The Democratic presidential primary race got its second major candidate recently, and its first true climate hawk: Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, self-described democratic socialist. Sanders has one of the strongest climate change records in the Senate. In fact, according to rankings released by Climate Hawks Vote, a new super PAC, Sanders was the No. 1 climate leader in the Senate for the 113th Congress that ended in January.

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Is Bernie Sanders the Best Candidate on Climate Change?

Climate Hawks Vote measures leadership, not just voting records, tabulating actions like bills introduced, speeches given, and so forth. In the 112th Congress, Sanders ranked third behind Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.). In the last Congress, he edged out Whitehouse by one point.

“Sanders is very much among the top leaders,” says R.L. Miller, founder of Climate Hawks Vote. “He has a record of really strong advocacy for solar in particular.” Miller notes that distributed solar, which enables everyone with a solar panel to create their own energy instead of relying on a monopolistic utility company, fits especially well with Sanders’ democratic socialist philosophy. It’s bad for corporations and good for regular folks who get to own the means of production.

Here are some of the highlights from Sanders’ climate and clean energy record:

In 2013, along with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Sanders introduced the Climate Protection Act, a fee-and-dividend bill. It would tax carbon and methane emissions and rebate three-fifths of the revenue to citizens, then invest the remainder in energy efficiency, clean energy, and climate resiliency. The bill, of course, went nowhere (even if it had advanced in the Democratic-controlled Senate, it would have been DOA in the Republican-controlled House), but it shows that Sanders supports serious solutions and wants to keep the conversation going.
Also in 2013, Sanders introduced the Residential Energy Savings Act to fund financing programs that would help residents retrofit their homes for energy efficiency. This bill didn’t become law either.
In 2012, Sanders introduced the End Polluter Welfare Act, to get rid of special tax deductions and credits for coal, oil, and gas producers. As he wrote in Grist at the time, “It is immoral that some in Congress advocate savage cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security while those same people vote to preserve billions in tax breaks for ExxonMobil, the most profitable corporation in America.” The bill didn’t pass.
In 2010, Sanders authored a bill to spread distributed solar throughout the country, the very literally named “10 Million Solar Roofs & 10 Million Gallons of Solar Hot Water Act.” As Grist’s David Roberts explained, it would “provide rebates that cover up to half the cost of new systems, along the lines of incentive programs in California and New Jersey.” The bill didn’t pass.
In 2007, he cowrote with then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) the Green Jobs Act, which allocated funding for clean energy and energy efficiency research and job training. This did pass, as part of a big 2007 energy bill.
Also in 2007, with Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), he cosponsored the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program, to help states and local governments pay for efficiency and clean energy programs. It was also passed as part of the 2007 energy bill, and both the block grant program and the green jobs program got a funding infusion from the 2009 stimulus package.

So we know Sanders is dedicated to climate action and clean energy. Looking forward, though, it’s unclear how Sanders will differentiate his climate and energy proposals from Clinton’s. Clinton, like President Obama, firmly supports regulating carbon emissions domestically and getting strong international agreements to reduce emissions globally. While it is certainly true that Sanders has made more of an issue of his support for the same, it is not necessarily an issue on which Clinton needs to be pushed leftward. Many climate hawks love the fee-and-dividend approach that Sanders supports, but the truth is that no big climate-pricing bill will pass in the next few years, no matter who’s president, because the Republicans will continue to control the House. And Clinton already supports the kind of strong executive action that Obama is taking to curb CO2 emissions from power plants.

One way Sanders could set himself apart as the greenest candidate would be to propose clamping down on domestic fossil fuel extraction, especially on federal lands and waters—something a president could move on without congressional approval. Sanders has not spoken up about the extraction issue in general, but he could call for a moratorium on fossil fuel leasing offshore or on federal land. That would please climate activists, who are already expressing concern that Clinton isn’t committed to keeping dirty fuel sources in the ground. “What we really need,” says Miller, “is someone to advocate for closing down the Powder River Basin”—an area in Montana and Wyoming that’s a huge source of coal mined from federal land—”but no one is really willing to come out and say that, so instead they come out for higher prices on coal leases. Sanders has not.”

In an interview with the Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent, Sanders called for a progressive climate agenda that includes a carbon tax and investments in renewables, energy efficiency, and alternative transportation—but he made no mention of restricting fossil fuel development. Here is what he offered:

A tax on carbon; a massive investment in solar, wind, geothermal; it would be making sure that every home and building in this country is properly winterized; it would be putting substantial money into rail, both passenger and cargo, so we can move towards breaking our dependency on automobiles. And it would be leading other countries around the world.

Bill McKibben, who founded 350.org and has led the fight to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, says he is confident Sanders understands the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Sanders has opposed Keystone, while Clinton has avoided taking a position on it. “He’s been the most consistent and proactive voice in the entire Keystone fight,” writes McKibben in an email. “Everything that’s been needed—from speeches on the floor to legislation to demands that the State Department change its absurd review process—he and his staff have done immediately and with a high degree of professionalism…On climate stuff he’s been the most aggressive voice in the Senate, rivaled only by Sheldon Whitehouse. He understands it for the deep, simple problem it is: that we can’t keep burning this stuff.” (Full disclosure: McKibben is a member of Grist’s board of directors.)

One area where Sanders indisputably differs from Clinton is trade. Clinton, like her husband and Obama, has been an ardent supporter of free trade agreements. Some environmentalists worry that these agreements—like NAFTA, CAFTA, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that is currently under consideration—give polluting companies too much power to undermine environmental regulations in signatory nations. As secretary of state, Clinton supported the TPP, although as a candidate her campaign advisors say she hasn’t made up her mind on it. Sanders is one of the most skeptical members of the Senate on trade agreements and he is currently helping to lead the charge against the TPP.

To describe Sanders’ challenge against Clinton as uphill would be too generous. It’s more like climbing Mt. Everest—without oxygen or a guide. But by bringing attention to some of these issues, he may raise awareness and draw Clinton out. Sanders’ office declined to comment for this story, citing an overwhelming number of interview requests following announcement of his candidacy. That speaks to the megaphone a presidential campaign can grant a candidate, especially in a nearly empty field. Sanders is sure to use it for worthy causes. Will keeping fossil fuels in the ground be one of them?

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Is Bernie Sanders the Best Candidate on Climate Change?

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Obama OKs Shell’s Plan to Drill for Oil in the Arctic

by JulianeBurchfie Posted on May 11, 2015

Mother Jones

Royal Dutch Shell cleared a major hurdle this afternoon when the Obama administration announced conditional approval for the company’s application to drill for oil in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s North Slope. The decision came after a few months of public comment on Shell’s exploration plan, which was roundly condemned by environmental groups and several North Slope communities.

Shell’s plan involves drilling for oil in a patch of ocean called the Burger Prospect. The drilling is slated to take place this summer when sea ice is at its lowest. In anticipation of this decision, two massive oil drilling ships owned by Shell are en route to a temporary dock in Seattle; from there, they are scheduled to press on to the Arctic.

If the ships make it to the planned site, it will be the first attempt Shell has made to drill in the Arctic (an area believed to hold massive subterranean reserves of oil and gas) since its disastrous effort in 2012. Back then, Shell faced a year-long series of mishaps as it tried to navigate the icy waters, culminating in a wreck of the Kulluk, one of its main drilling ships. For many environmentalists, that botched project was a sign that Shell is ill-equipped to handle Arctic waters.

Moreover, today’s decision underscored what many describe as an inconsistency in President Barack Obama’s climate change policy: Despite his aggressive rhetoric on the dangers of global warming, and a suite of policies to curb the nation’s carbon footprint, Obama has also pushed to expand offshore oil and gas drilling. Earlier this year, he announced a plan to limit drilling permits in some parts of the Arctic while simultaneously opening a vast new swath of the Atlantic ocean to drilling.

Allowing Shell to forge ahead with its Arctic ambitions flies in the face of the president’s own climate agenda, said Franz Matzner, associate director of government affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“It’s a total mystery why the Obama administration and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell are continuing down this path that is enormously risky, contradicts climate science, and is completely unnecessary to meet our energy goals,” Matzner said. “It’s a dangerous folly to think that this can be done.”

Before Shell can start drilling, it still needs to secure a few final federal and state permits, including one that requires Shell to demonstrate how it plans to protect ocean life during drilling and in the case of a spill. Those decisions are expected within the next month or so.

A spokesperson for Shell told the New York Times: “Before operations can begin this summer, it’s imperative that the remainder of our permits be practical, and delivered in a timely manner. In the meantime, we will continue to test and prepare our contractors, assets and contingency plans against the high bar stakeholders and regulators expect of an Arctic operator.”

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Obama OKs Shell’s Plan to Drill for Oil in the Arctic

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These Scientists Just Lost Their Lives in the Arctic. They Were Heroes.

by KimberlyHollins Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Early last month, veteran polar explorers and scientists Marc Cornelissen and Philip de Roo set out on skis from Resolute Bay, a remote outpost in the patchwork of islands between Canada and Greenland. Their destination was Bathurst Island, a treacherous 70-mile trek to the northwest across the frozen sea, where they planned to document thinning Arctic sea ice just a few months after NASA reported that the winter ice cover was the lowest on record.

It wasn’t hard to find what they were looking for, according to a dispatch Cornelissen uploaded to Soundcloud on April 28.

“We’re nearing into the coast of Bathurst,” he said. “We think we see thin ice in front of us…Within 15 minutes of skiing it became really warm. In the end it was me skiing in my underwear…I don’t think it looked very nice, and it didn’t feel sexy either, but it was the only way to deal with the heat.”

His next message, a day later, was an emergency distress signal picked up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. According to the Guardian, a pilot flying over the spot reported seeing open water, scattered equipment, and a lone sled dog sitting on the broken ice. By last Friday, rescuers had called off the search. The pair are presumed to have drowned, victims of the same thin ice they had come to study. Cornelissen was 46; de Roo had just turned 30.

Yesterday, Cold Facts, the nonprofit with whom the pair was working at the time, dispatched a snowmobile expedition to attempt to recover their belongings. You can follow their progress on Twitter here. The dog, Kimnik, was found a few days ago and is doing fine, the group said.

In a blog post on the website of the European Space Agency, Cornelissen was remembered by former colleagues as “an inspirational character, an explorer and a romantic. He had fallen in love with the spellbinding beauty of the poles and had made it a personal mission to highlight the magnitude of the human fingerprint on this last wilderness.”

It’s not clear whether the ice conditions the pair encountered were directly attributable to climate change, according to E&E News:

That the region had thin ice is evident. Perhaps the ice had been thinned by ocean currents that deliver warm water from below, or by the wind, which could generate open water areas. It is difficult to know. Climate change may have played a role, or it may not have…the impacts of the warming on ice thickness regionally can be unpredictable, ESA scientist Mark Drinkwater said.

Still, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as anywhere else on Earth. We rely on the work of scientists like these to know exactly what is happening there and how it will affect those of us who choose to stay safe in warmer, drier places. Their deaths are a testament to the dedication and fearlessness required to stand on the front lines of climate change.

Rest in peace, guys.

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These Scientists Just Lost Their Lives in the Arctic. They Were Heroes.

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The Keystone Pipeline Just Lost Big in a Shocking Canadian Election

by MichaelMaddock Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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

American environmentalists are frustrated that our adorable neighbor to the north is surprisingly retrograde on climate change. The reason is that Canada has a Conservative government. Right-leaning governments almost always have worse records on environmental protection, but this is especially so in present-day Canada because Prime Minister Stephen Harper hails from, and draws a lot of support in, the interior province of Alberta.

Oil-rich Alberta—home to notorious tar-sands operations—is just north of Idaho, and has the politics to match. The right-leaning party has been in power there for 44 years. But not anymore.

On Tuesday, the lefty New Democratic Party (NDP) won the provincial elections on a platform that promises to diversify Alberta’s fossil fuel-dependent economy. The NDP campaigned on criticism of the Conservatives for being too close to the oil industry and a pledge to tax more oil profits. From The Wall Street Journal:

The longtime ruling party of Canada’s energy-rich Alberta province lost its four-decade hold on power on Tuesday, ushering in a left-leaning government that has pledged to raise corporate taxes and increase oil and gas royalties.

The Alberta New Democratic Party swept enough districts to form a majority, taking most of the seats in both the business center of Calgary and the provincial capital of Edmonton, according to preliminary results from Elections Alberta.

Canada has a multi-party system. The three biggest are the Conservative Party, which is the largest right-of-center party; the Liberal Party, which is center-left and roughly equivalent to mainstream US Democrats; and the NDP, which is like the left wing of the Democratic Party. So this election result is shocking, like Dennis Kucinich being elected governor of Alabama. For historical reasons, the Alberta Conservative Party is oxymoronically known as the Progressive-Conservatives, but this doesn’t mean they are any more moderate than other Conservatives. The Alberta NDP is moderate compared to the NDP of, say, liberal green-minded British Columbia. But the election result is still a paradigm shift with potentially major environmental implications.

The Journal reports:

“We need to start down the road to a diversified and resilient economy. We need finally to end the boom-and-bust roller coaster that we have been riding on for too long,” NDP leader Rachel Notley, who is expected to succeed Jim Prentice as Alberta’s premier, said at a news conference.

The NDP has long been a marginal force in Alberta’s traditionally conservative politics, but recent public opinion polls showed its popularity surging. In the campaign, Ms. Notley attacked Mr. Prentice for reinstating provincial health-care premiums and being too cozy with oil-patch interests.

In a move that spooked some energy company executives during the campaign, Ms. Notley raised the specter of increasing royalties levied on oil and gas production, although she said that her party would only consider that once crude-oil prices recovered from recent lows.

She also signaled her party wouldn’t support a proposed Enbridge Inc. crude-oil pipeline, called the Northern Gateway, which would connect Alberta’s oil sands with a planned Pacific coast terminal in British Columbia, telling a local newspaper that “Gateway is not the right decision.”

Notley also doesn’t support plans for Keystone XL, and pledged to stop spending taxpayer dollars to push the pipeline in Washington, DC. (She does support two other tar-sands pipeline projects, though.) And she wants Alberta to get more serious about climate change, as the Globe and Mail reports:

Another focus, according to Ms. Notley’s platform, will be bolstering the province’s reputation on climate change as previous governments have resisted establishing tougher targets for carbon reduction from the oil sands and other industries.

The NDP triumph in Alberta may put political pressure on the Harper government, which is facing a federal election this fall. The province’s voters sent the message that they want more protection for the environment and less pandering to oil interests. This couldn’t happen at a better time, as environmentalists are nervously awaiting Canada’s proposal for carbon emission reductions heading into the UN climate negotiations to be held this December in Paris. Will Harper now make a more significant climate commitment? We’ll all be watching to see.

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The Keystone Pipeline Just Lost Big in a Shocking Canadian Election

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California’s Fire Season Is Shaping Up to Be a "Disaster"

by EricPlayfair Posted on April 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Monday, 200 firefighters evacuated an upscale residential neighborhood in Los Angeles as they responded to a wildfire that had just broken out in the nearby hills. Ninety minutes later, the fire was out, with no damage done. But if that battle was a relatively easy win, it belied a much more difficult war ahead for a state devastated by drought.

California is in the midst of one of its worst droughts on record, so bad that earlier this month Gov. Jerry Brown took the unprecedented step of ordering mandatory water restrictions. Snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is currently the lowest on record for this time of year. And the outlook for the rest of the year is bleak: The latest federal projections suggest the drought could get even worse this summer across the entire state (as well as many of its neighbors):

NOAA

That’s a very bad sign for California’s wildfire season. After several years of super-dry conditions, the state is literally a tinderbox. “The outlook in California is pretty dire,” said Wally Covington, a leading fire ecologist at Northern Arizona University. “It’s pretty much a recipe for disaster.”

To date this year, the overall national tally of wildfires has actually been below average: 14,213 fires across 309,369 acres, compared to the 10-year average of 20,166 fires across 691,776 acres, according to federal data. After a peak in 2006, early year wildfire activity in the last few years has been somewhat stable:

But in California, the trend looks very different. The tally of fires so far this year is 967—that’s 38 percent higher than the average for this date since 2005. The number of acres burned is up to 4,083, nearly double the count at this time last year and 81 percent above the average since 2005:

And here again, the outlook for the rest of the summer is grim. Just look at the overlap between the map above and the map below, which shows that most of California is at above-average risk for fires this summer:

NIFC

This is all costing California taxpayers a lot of money. According to Climate Central, California typically spends more money fighting wildfires than the other 10 Western states combined, totaling roughly $4 billion over the last decade. That’s partly due to the state’s size and vulnerability to big wildfires, and also to the close proximity of high-value urban development to easily ignited forests and grasslands. (Wildfires in the Alaskan wilderness, by comparison, can grow much bigger but cost much less, because without homes or towns nearby, they’re often allowed to simply burn out.)

California burned through its $209 million firefighting budget in just a few months of this fiscal year; back in September, Brown had to pull an additional $70 million from a state emergency fund. A spokesperson for the state’s department of finance said the wildfire budget has since been increased to $423 million. (Running way over budget on wildfires isn’t unique to California; the federal government routinely underestimates how much wildfires will cost and ends up having to fight fires with funds that are meant to be spent preventing them.)

Scientists have long predicted that an increase in both the frequency and severity of wildfires is a likely outcome of global warming. The Obama administration’s National Climate Assessment last year cited wildfires as one of the key threats posed to the United States by climate change. Longer periods of drought mean wildfire “fuels” like grass and trees will be drier and easier to burn; at the same time, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means these same fuels will accumulate more quickly. And there’s a feedback loop at play: Deforestation caused by wildfires contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, meaning that the increasing threat of wildfires will make climate change worse.

When it comes to wildfires, Covington said, “with increased climate change, there’s a train wreck coming our way.”

For a more detailed explanation of the link between climate change and wildfires, watch the original Climate Desk video below:

Excerpt from:  

California’s Fire Season Is Shaping Up to Be a "Disaster"

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