Tag Archives: climate desk

Is Your Local Fracking Company Breaking the Rules? You’ll Probably Never Know

by toman38ybt Posted on April 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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One of the biggest differences between fracking and other kinds of industrial development is that fracking often occurs extremely close to towns and homes. That’s because oil and gas wells take up far less space than open-pit coal mines and cement factories. One 2013 analysis estimated than at least 15.3 million Americans have a gas well within a mile of their home.

So you might think that data on the performance records of oil and gas companies—how often they have spills, or exceed air pollution standards, etc.—would be readily available to locals who have an immediate stake in knowing about what’s going on in their backyard.

Not so, according to a new study from the Natural Resources Defense Council and the FracTracker Alliance, a nonprofit that collects data on the gas industry.

Thirty-six US states have active oil and gas operations. But according to the report, just three of these states have readily accessible databases that the public can use to see which drilling companies have been cited for violating environmental rules or other standards. What’s more, the records that do exist paint a disturbing picture.

“There are two main issues,” said NRDC senior analyst Amy Mall. “One is that this information is extremely hard for the public to get. The second is that they’re violating the law a lot.”

The report points out that in Ohio and Arkansas, for example, violations are not published in an online database. Texas and North Dakota, meanwhile, charge citizens for access to violation data. (A spokesperson for the North Dakota Industrial Commission clarified that records can be accessed on the department’s office lobby computer for free. Otherwise, a home subscription to that database costs $175 per year, or requests can processed by the department for $25 per hour.)

In other words, fracking companies are operating in many cases with a disturbing lack of transparency.

“It’s a dirty window that somebody needs to clean,” Mall said.

In Colorado, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania—where public data is available—the NRDC identified hundreds of violations and alleged violations issued to dozens of companies. The citations cover everything from spills to improper drilling techniques. (Violations can also be issued for problems of lesser public concern, such as an incorrectly sited road sign at a drilling site.) The actual number of reported violations likely understates the true scope of the problem, Mall said, since in many cases the number of reported spills is higher than the number of violations issued. Mall blamed the discrepancy on inadequate and under-staffed state enforcement agencies.

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Is Your Local Fracking Company Breaking the Rules? You’ll Probably Never Know

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The Arctic Just Set Another Frightening Record

by Barney69Iujua Posted on March 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Ever year around the end of February, after a long winter, Arctic ice reaches its maximum extent. This year that happened around Feb. 25, when it encompassed 14.54 million square kilometers of ice around the North Pole.

Sound like a lot? It’s not. Really, really not. This year’s maximum extent was the lowest on record.

Ice extent (area covered at least 15 percent by ice) for 2015 (solid blue line) compared with 2012 (dashed) and the average from 1981–2010 (black line). Diagram by the NSIDC

The plot above shows the situation. The solid line shows the average ice extent over the year (measured from 1981–2010) and the gray area represents a statistical measure of random fluctuations; anything inside the gray is more or less indistinguishable from the average (in other words, an excursion up or down inside the gray area could just be due to random chance).

The dashed line was the extent in 2012, when unusual conditions created the lowest minimum extent in recorded history. The solid blue line is 2015 so far. As you can see, it’s already reached maximum, and it’s well below average. It’s also outside the gray zone, meaning it’s statistically significant. It’s the earliest the peak has been reached as well. Both these facts point accusingly at global warming—more warmth, and shorter winters.

We have to be careful here, because individual records can be misleading. The trend is what’s important. However, the trend is very, very clear: Ice extent at the North Pole is decreasing rapidly over time. Note that this record low extent is about 1 percent lower than the previous record…which was last year.

Here’s a NASA video describing this year’s low maximum:

The implications of losing Arctic ice are profound. First, high latitudes are more affected by warming; the temperature trends in the extreme north are twice what they are at lower latitudes.

Melting ice does contribute to sea level rise, though not as much as melting glaciers on land. The bad news: Those glaciers are melting faster than ever. This has a second effect that may prove just as disastrous, too. All that fresh water dumped into the salty ocean changes the way the water circulates around the world. This circulation is one of the key ways warmth gets redistributed around the planet. Disrupting this cannot possibly be good news for us. You can read more about this at RealClimate, and climatologist Michael Mann discussed it in a recent interview.

At the other pole, Antarctic land ice is melting at a fantastic rate, and the slight increase in sea ice is not even coming close to making up for it. Deniers love to point at the sea ice, but that comes and goes every year and is roughly stable; the land ice is melting away at huge rates. Claiming global warming is wrong because Antarctic sea ice is increasing is like pointing toward a healing paper cut on your finger when your femoral artery has been punctured.

Arctic ice is like the fabled canary in a coal mine; it’s showing us very clearly what we’re in for. And what’s headed our way is a warmer planet, an even more disrupted climate, and a world of hurt if we do nothing about it.

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The Arctic Just Set Another Frightening Record

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Today’s Epic Solar Eclipse Captured In Beautiful Photos

by ElizabeDevore Posted on March 20, 2015

Mother Jones

This morning, Europe and parts of Africa and Asia experienced a rare solar eclipse. The last time such an event of this significance took place was back in 1999. That this eclipse also happened to fall on the spring equinox was an even more of a unique phenomenon that last occurred in 1662. Despite early reports predicting that heavy clouds would block a proper glimpse, eager residents, tourists, and astronomers gathered across the continent to witness the eclipse. Here are some of the images that were captured:

Sarajevo, Bosnia Amel Emric/AP

Svalbard, Norway Haakon Mosvold Larsen/AP

Greenwich Observatory, London Rex Features/AP

Skopje, Macedonia Boris Grdanoski/AP

Those in the higher Arctic regions were lucky enough to experience a total solar eclipse. But residents in the Faroe Islands—previously touted as one of the more impressive locations to view the event—were reportedly disappointed by the thick clouds, according to the Guardian. Berlin, on the other hand, boasted clear skies.

And to complete the occasion, here’s British Member of the European Parliament Roger Helmer, who used the event to drop in some apparent climate denial. (Helmer has previously asserted that “the relationship between global temperature and atmospheric Co2 levels is hugely open to question.”)

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Today’s Epic Solar Eclipse Captured In Beautiful Photos

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Obama Administration Reveals New Federal Rules on Fracking

by HeribertoMcConn Posted on March 20, 2015

Mother Jones

On Friday, the Obama administration put forth the first major federal standards regulating hydraulic fracturing—the oil and gas extraction technique commonly referred to as fracking. The regulations will, among other things, require companies working on public lands to reveal which chemicals they used in their drilling processes. But as the New York Times notes, the impact of the new rules will be limited since most fracking in the United States takes place on private land. From the Times story:

The regulations, which are to take effect in 90 days, will allow government workers to inspect and validate the safety and integrity of the cement barriers that line fracking wells. They will require companies to publicly disclose the chemicals used in the fracturing process within 30 days of completing fracking operations.

The rules will also set safety standards for how companies can store used fracking chemicals around well sites, and will require companies to submit detailed information on well geology to the Bureau of Land Management, a part of the Interior Department.

Environmentalists aren’t exactly thrilled with the new regulations; many were instead calling for the government to ban fracking on all public lands.

“This fracking rule is merely a continuation of Obama’s harmful all-of-the-above energy policy that emphasizes natural gas development over protection of public health and the environment,” said Friends of the Earth’s Kate DeAngelis in a press release. “This country needs real climate leadership from President Obama, not weak regulations that do nothing to stop the devastating impacts of climate disruption.”

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Obama Administration Reveals New Federal Rules on Fracking

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California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

by eG8kJ4fQ7z Posted on March 13, 2015

Mother Jones

This story was originally published by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

By now, the impacts of California’s unchecked groundwater pumping are well-known: the dropping water levels, dried-up wells and slowly sinking farmland in parts of the Central Valley.

But another consequence gets less attention, one measured not by acre-feet or gallons-per-minute but the long march of time.

As California farms and cities drill deeper for groundwater in an era of drought and climate change, they no longer are tapping reserves that percolated into the soil over recent centuries. They are pumping water that fell to Earth during a much wetter climatic regime—the ice age.

Such water is not just old. It’s prehistoric. It is older than the earliest pyramids on the Nile, older than the world’s oldest tree, the bristlecone pine. It was swirling down rivers and streams 15,000 to 20,000 years ago when humans were crossing the Bering Strait from Asia.

Tapping such water is more than a scientific curiosity. It is one more sign that some parts of California are living beyond nature’s means, with implications that could ripple into the next century and beyond as climate change turns the region warmer and robs moisture from the sky.

“What I see going on is a future disaster. You are removing water that’s been there a long, long time. And it will probably take a long time to replace it. We are mining water that cannot be readily replaced,” said Vance Kennedy, a 91-year-old retired research hydrologist in the Central Valley.

Despite such concern, the antiquity of the state’s groundwater isn’t a well-known phenomenon. It has been discovered in recent years by scientists working on water quality studies and revealed quietly in technical reports.

Groundwater is crucial to California. In an average year, nearly 40 percent of the state’s water comes from underground sources. In the current extended drought, it’s more than half. Eighty percent of California residents rely to some degree on groundwater. Some towns, cities and farming operations depend entirely on it.

Groundwater is like a bank account. You want to balance the debits and credits, not draw down the principal. But California has been depleting its groundwater principal for generations, pumping more than nature can replenish. So, too, has the United States as a whole. The biggest overall user is agriculture.

“If we continue irrigating at the increasing rates that we are in the US, the bottom line is that can’t be sustained,” said Leonard Konikow, a retired US Geological Survey hydrogeologist in Virginia. “That can’t go on forever.”

A new article by Konikow in the journal Groundwater estimates that nearly 1,000 cubic kilometers—about twice the volume of Lake Erie—was depleted across the United States from 1900 to 2008. That’s enough to contribute to rising sea levels, along with melting glaciers and polar ice.

“That really surprised a lot of people,” Konikow said.

The pace of depletion has jumped dramatically since 2000. And Konikow identified one area that appears to have the most serious depletion problem in the nation—California’s agricultural powerhouse, the Central Valley, especially its more arid southern portion.

How long the bounty can last is anyone’s guess. As wells are drilled deeper, pumping costs soar. Water quality can suffer. In some areas, the earth itself is starting to sink as deep aquifers are pumped to historic low levels.

That problem is known as subsidence, and it’s a big deal. As the land sags, it is harming water delivery canals, damaging wells and buckling pavement.

“The rates of subsidence we are seeing are about a foot per year in some areas. They are just phenomenal,” said John Izbicki, a research hydrologist with the US Geological Survey.

The last time this happened, during a binge of overpumping in the 20th century, one part of the valley sank 28 feet and damages topped $1.3 billion (in 2013 dollars), according to the California Water Foundation.

But that’s not all: As those deep aquifers are pumped, they suffer structural damage and no longer hold as much water as before. To visualize what happens, imagine a kitchen sponge.

“You take it out of the package and it’s all nice and fluffy,” said Bryant Jurgens, a research hydrologist with the US Geological Survey. “After a month of use, it starts to shrink. When you wet it again, it doesn’t ever quite get as big as it originally was. That’s exactly what happens to the aquifer.”

And some of that water, as it turns out, is quite ancient. If you bottled it, you could label it the provenance of the Pleistocene—a geological epoch that lasted from about 2.5 million to 12,000 years ago.

The landscape was much different back then. Yosemite Valley was a river of ice. Mastodons and other now-extinct creatures roamed the West Coast. To the east and south, lakes stretched for miles across terrain we now call desert.

All water, in a sense, is ancient. It’s been cycling through clouds, rivers, forests and oceans for millions of years. But in recent decades, scientists have found ways to determine roughly when precipitation fell to earth and percolated into the surface, becoming groundwater.

They do it by testing water for the presence of certain compounds that decay slowly over time, such as carbon-14, a radioactive isotope that also is used to estimate the age of ancient civilizations and human ancestors.

There is no point-and-click website that reveals the age of groundwater in the state. To access the information, you must wade through a tangle of studies compiled by the US Geological Survey as part of a state-funded public drinking water-quality monitoring program.

The jargon in those studies is so thick it is nearly incomprehensible. But deep in the scientific sediment are nuggets worth sharing with friends—a sentence here, a table there. They show water pumped from some deep public supply wells in the valley is 10,000 to more than 30,000 years old. Similar ages also have been reported in many desert basins, including Coachella Valley and Owens Valley, a major source of drinking water for Los Angeles.

What that means for the future is uncertain. Even though many areas pump more water than is recharged naturally, there is still more groundwater to be pumped.

“We are withdrawing from a fairly large bank account,” said Tom Myers, a hydrogeologic consultant in Reno, Nevada, who has worked in Southern California. “But we are withdrawing from it a lot faster than we are putting back in. The problem is we don’t know how close it is to empty.”

And many areas also recharge aquifers with surface water imported from elsewhere.

“There are places where you could be pumping very old groundwater and there is sufficient recharge to the system—so it’s not necessarily a problem,” said Miranda Fram, a research chemist with the US Geological Survey. “But in many cases, it is. It’s mining old groundwater that’s not being replenished.”

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California Is Drilling for Water That Fell to Earth 20,000 Years Ago

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Beer Brewers Unite to Call for Action on Climate Change

by FaustinIllingwo Posted on March 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared at the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A group of 24 brewers from across the country have come together to cut greenhouse gas emissions from their operations and call for strong national action to address climate change.

The breweries, which include Smuttynose Brewing Company, Guinness and Allagash Brewing Company, have signed onto the Climate Declaration organized through the sustainable business group Ceres. The declaration pledges that each company will take its own action to reduce emissions from its business, and will also support political action at the national level.

Jenn Vervier, director of strategy and sustainability at New Belgium Brewery, which is based in Fort Collins, Colorado, said action on climate change makes a lot of sense for the brewery because it uses a lot of energy in heating, cooling and transportation, and uses a lot of water. Rising emissions, too, are expected to have negative effects for the beer industry because it relies on the cultivation of barley and hops, which are sensitive to changes in the climate.

New Belgium Brewery has already installed 300 kilowatts of solar at its brewery in Colorado, and it capture methane generated in its operations, which it then burns to generate 15 percent of its electricity.

Vervier said the advocacy for national climate action also makes sense for brewers. “Even if we were to be ourselves climate neutral, it’s such a small drop in the bucket,” she said. “It’s going to take a cleaner grid to lower the emissions from manufacturing.”

Julia Person, sustainability manager at the Craft Brew Alliance, which owns the brands Redhook, Widmer Brothers and Kona, said the commitment to addressing their impact also has clear economic benefits. The company lowered its greenhouse gas emissions 8 percent in 2014, she said, which saved it more than $250,000 in energy costs. It has also reduced the amount of water needed to produce a gallon of beer to 3.5 gallons—much lower than the craft brewery average of 6 to 8 gallons, Person said.

“It’s good for business, it’s not just good for the environment,” said Person. “We’re lowering our operating costs. It’s doing the right thing and having a benefit.”

Also signing the declaration: Aeronaut Brewing Company, The Alchemist, Aspen Brewing Company, Brewery Vivant, Bouy Beer Company, Chuckanut Brewery and Kitchen, Deschutes Brewery, Fort George Brewery and Public House, Fremont Brewing Company, Georgetown Brewing Co., Guinness, Hopworks Urban Brewery, Ninkasi Brewing Company, Odell Brewing, Rockford Brewing Company, Smuttynose Brewing Company, Snake River Brewing Co., Standing Stone Brewing Co., and Wet Dog Café & Brewery.

The brewers hope that their advocacy reaches consumers, too. “Beer is near and dear to people’s hearts. It’s part of people’s everyday activity,” said Vervier of New Belgium. “I think when people see their favorite brands speaking out, it gives them courage to speak out. I think it makes it relatable for people.”

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Beer Brewers Unite to Call for Action on Climate Change

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Scott Walker Is the Worst Candidate for the Environment

by CyrilLackvyfr Posted on March 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Scott Walker is killing it with Republicans. The Wisconsin governor is one of his party’s rising stars—thanks to his ongoing and largely successful war against his state’s labor unions, a fight that culminated Monday with the signing of a controversial “right-to-work” bill.

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Attention GOP Candidates: Winter Does Not Disprove Global Warming

Now (for the moment, anyway), he’s a leading contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. At the Conservative Political Action Conference a couple weeks ago, he polled a close second to three-time winner Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), beating the likes of Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush by a significant margin.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that none of the prospective GOP presidential candidates are exactly champions of the environment. Probably the least bad is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who at least acknowledges that climate change is real and caused by human activity. Walker just might be the worst. He hasn’t said much about the science of global warming. (In the video above, you can watch him tell a little kid that his solution to the problem will center on keeping campsites clean, or something.) But his track record of actively undermining pro-environment programs and policies while supporting the fossil fuel industry is arguably lengthier and more substantive than that of his likely rivals.

“He really has gone after every single piece of environmental protection: Land, air, water—he’s left no stone unturned,” said Kerry Schumann, executive director of the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters. “It’s hard to imagine anyone has done worse.”

Here’s a rundown of Walker’s inglorious history of anti-environmentalism.

Attacking Obama’s climate agenda: Walker is a key figure in the GOP’s battle against President Barack Obama’s flagship climate policy—the proposed Environmental Protection Agency rules that are designed to reduce the carbon footprint of the nation’s electricity sector 30 percent by 2030. The rules will likely require states to retrofit or shutter some of their coal-fired power plants. That could be a big deal in Wisconsin, which gets 62 percent of its power from coal.

In a letter to the EPA in December, Walker said the plan would be “a blow to Wisconsin residents and business owners.” He cited an analysis from his state’s Public Service Commission that predicted household electric bills would skyrocket. They won’t, necessarily, since the state has a lot of options—including boosting renewables and energy efficiency—that it could use to meet its EPA carbon target without jeopardizing the power grid. But rather than preparing for the new rules, Walker seems bent on stonewalling them. In January he announced that his new attorney general was already preparing a lawsuit against the EPA, a move that was lauded by the Wisconsin director of the Koch Brothers-backed group Americans for Prosperity. Walker has also signed a pledge, devised by Americans for Prosperity, that he will oppose any legislation relating to climate change—presumably a cap-and-trade plan or a carbon tax—that would result in a “net increase in government revenue.”

Indeed, Walker has close ties to Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who made a fortune in fossil fuels and who for years poured money into groups that cast doubt on the science of climate change. They own paper factories and a network of gasoline supply terminals in Wisconsin, and they have an interest in the state’s trove of “frac sand” (more on that below). Koch Industries gave $43,000 to Walker’s 2010 election campaign, and just after he took office, the Kochs doubled their lobbying force in Madison. In 2011 and 2012, David Koch and Americans for Prosperity spent $11 million backing Walker’s agenda and his successful effort to avoid being recalled.

Turning off clean energy: As much as he apparently supports fossil fuel development, Walker has taken steps to put the brakes on clean energy. Last month, he released a budget proposal that would drain $8.1 million from a leading renewable energy research center in the state. That same budget, however, would pump $250,000 into a study on the potential health impacts of wind turbines. (Wind energy opponents have long suggested that inaudible sound waves from turbines can cause insomnia, anxiety, and other disorders, although independent research has repeatedly found these claims are more connected to NIMBYism than legitimate medical concerns.) Walker’s budget would also cut $4 million in state subsidies for municipal recycling programs. That, at least, is an improvement over his first budget as governor, which proposed to eliminate recycling subsidies altogether.

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Scott Walker Is the Worst Candidate for the Environment

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Yet Another Oil Train Disaster

by BridgetYGFX Posted on March 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Another day, another oil train derailment. Early Saturday morning, a Canadian National Railway train carrying Alberta crude derailed outside the tiny town of Gogama in northern Ontario. Thirty-eight cars came off the tracks, and five of them splashed into the Mattagami River system. The accident caused a massive fire and leaked oil into waterways used by locals—including a nearby indigenous community—for drinking and fishing. No one was injured, but according to CN Railway’s Twitter feed, fire fighters were still suppressing fires earlier today. People in the area, including members of the Mattagami First Nation, have been complaining of respiratory issues from the smoke.

This oil train derailment was the second in three days in Canada and the fifth in three weeks in North America. An oil train derailed last week near Galena, Illinois. The oil boom in Canada and the United States has resulted in a dramatic increase in the use of these trains, and derailments now appear to be the new normal.

After the 2013 derailment and explosion of an oil train killed 47 people in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, many pointed to old, unsafe DOT-111 tanker models as a main reason for the disaster and others like it. But at least four of the five recent incidents have involved newer, and theoretically safer, CPC-1232 models.

Environmental and safety advocates say oil-by-rail needs even more stringent safety measures, but they have been slow coming. The US government reportedly balked at creating national standards to limit the amount of potentially explosive gas in tankers carrying oil from North Dakota. And the White House Office of Management and Budget has said it will need until May to finalize rules proposed by the Department of Transportation last summer that would slow down crude-by-rail deliveries and require tankers to have insulated steel shells. The CPC-1232 tankers that derailed in Galena did not have these shells. I asked the Canadian National Railway Company if the tankers involved in Saturday’s derailment had these shells. The company didn’t directly answer that question. In an email, it stated: “The tank cars involved were CPC 1232 tank cars. The exact specifications will be information gathered as part of the ongoing investigation.”

Below are Twitter pictures of Saturday’s derailment in northern Ontario.

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Yet Another Oil Train Disaster

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Report: Florida Banned State Workers From Saying “Climate Change”

by JessRTFdyxsu Posted on March 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Officials with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the agency in charge of setting conservation policy and enforcing environmental laws in the state, issued directives in 2011 barring thousands of employees from using the phrases “climate change” and “global warming,” according to a bombshell report by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting (FCIR).

The report ties the alleged policy, which is described as “unwritten,” to the election of Republican governor Rick Scott and his appointment of a new department director that year. Scott, who was re-elected last November, has declined to say whether he believes in climate change caused by human activity.

“I’m not a scientist,” he said in one appearance last May.

Scott’s office did not comment on Sunday, when contacted by the Guardian. A spokesperson for the governor told the FCIR team: “There’s no policy on this.”

The FCIR report was based on statements by multiple named former employees who worked in different DEP offices around Florida. The instruction not to refer to “climate change” came from agency supervisors as well as lawyers, according to the report.

“We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change’, ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability,'” the report quotes Christopher Byrd, who was an attorney with the DEP’s Office of General Counsel in Tallahassee from 2008 to 2013, as saying. “That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors in the Office of General Counsel.”

“We were instructed by our regional administrator that we were no longer allowed to use the terms ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ or even ‘sea-level rise,'” said a second former DEP employee, Kristina Trotta. “Sea-level rise was to be referred to as ‘nuisance flooding.'”

According to the employees’ accounts, the ban left damaging holes in everything from educational material published by the agency to training programs to annual reports on the environment that could be used to set energy and business policy.

The 2014 national climate assessment for the US found an “imminent threat of increased inland flooding” in Florida due to climate change and called the state “uniquely vulnerable to sea level rise.”

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Report: Florida Banned State Workers From Saying “Climate Change”

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Netanyahu and Obama Agree: Global Warming Is a Huge Threat

by Chadwick15O Posted on March 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, at the invitation of House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). The speech has caused a considerable flap, with Democrats criticizing it as an unprecedented affront to President Barack Obama.

But while the president and Netanyahu might have vastly different visions for how to deal with the threat posed by Iran, they do seem to agree on one thing: the threat posed by climate change. Over the past few months Obama has repeatedly emphasized the dangers associated with global warming. In his State of the Union address in January, he said that “no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations” than climate change. And in a recent national security document, Obama called climate change an “urgent and growing threat.” Despite GOP protestations to the contrary, Obama’s concerns are legitimate: New research released yesterday, for example, found that man-made climate change was a key factor in the Syrian civil war.

It seems Bibi had the same thought as early as 2010, when his cabinet approved a wide-reaching plan to reduce Israel’s carbon footprint. At the time, the prime minister said that “the threat of climate change is no less menacing than the security threats that we face.” From the Jerusalem Post:

At the UN Copenhagen Climate Summit in December 2009, Israel pledged to reduce emissions by 20 percent from a “business as usual” scenario by 2020.

“The recent dry months, including the driest November in the history of the state, are a warning light to us all that the threat of climate change is no less menacing than the security threats that we face. I intend to act determinedly in this field. In a country that suffers from a severe water shortage, this is an existential struggle,” Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said at the cabinet meeting.

Israel doesn’t face the kind of political resistance from climate change deniers that is all too common in the United States, said Gidon Bromberg, Israel director of EcoPeace Middle East. But the country is struggling to meet its carbon emission and renewable energy targets because government spending is so heavily concentrated on defense, he said.

“They’ve given the issue a great deal of lip service,” he said, “but in practice none of these targets have been met.”

Still, Israel has been at the forefront of developing seawater desalination technology to confront drought. The country has the biggest desal plant in the world, and last year Netanyahu signed a deal with California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) to share research and technology for dealing with water scarcity.

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Netanyahu and Obama Agree: Global Warming Is a Huge Threat

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Hagen, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Netanyahu and Obama Agree: Global Warming Is a Huge Threat