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California’s Camp Fire was the most expensive natural disaster worldwide in 2018

by JanaGoffage2300 Posted on January 12, 2019

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

The Camp Fire, which killed 86 people and burned the Northern California town of Paradise to the ground in November, was last year’s most expensive natural disaster worldwide, according to a report from German-based global reinsurance company Munich Re.

The fire, which was the deadliest and most destructive in the state’s modern history, tore through nearly 14,000 homes around Paradise, a rural community about an hour and half north of Sacramento.

Now the blaze holds another devastating record, according to the report released Tuesday: the costliest natural disaster in 2018. Each year the reinsurer tracks major natural catastrophes and estimates the losses incurred, including to insurers, in its natural catastrophe loss database.

Natural disasters worldwide in 2018 cost a total of about $160 billion — significantly higher than the average over the last 30 years of about $140 billion (adjusted for inflation).

The Camp Fire was the costliest last year, at $16.5 billion in losses, including $12.5 billion of insured losses. The next most expensive disaster was Hurricane Michael, which barreled through Florida in October, killing nearly four dozen people and wrecking entire communities.

“Our data shows that the losses from wildfires in California have risen dramatically in recent years,” Ernst Rauch, Munich Re’s head of climate, said in a press release. “We have experienced a significant increase in hot, dry summers, which has been a major factor in the formation of wildfires. Many scientists see a link between these developments and advancing climate change.”

The Camp Fire was just one of several record-breaking natural disasters around the world last year that were an indicator of climate change’s effects coming home to roost.

Multiple hurricanes in the U.S. last year — including Michael and Florence hitting within a month — and typhoons tearing through Japan and the Philippines were among the major catastrophes that came at a high cost in 2018, according to the Munich Re report.

The Camp Fire could come at a serious cost to power company PG&E. Dozens of Camp Fire victims have sued the utility for its alleged role in the blaze, saying it did not properly maintain its power lines. Their lawsuit points to PG&E documents that indicated a failing transmission line was in the area where the massive blaze was believed to have started.

Last month California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said the company could face charges as serious as murder or manslaughter for its alleged role in the blaze as well as other wildfires it may be connected to around the state over the past couple of years, The Sacramento Bee reported.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, President Donald Trump threatened to cut off wildfire aid to California from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He said in a now-deleted tweet that state officials had to “get their act together, which is unlikely” and improve forest management.

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California’s Camp Fire was the most expensive natural disaster worldwide in 2018

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The EPA hired GOP oppo firm because it was sick of ‘fake news’

by Mohamme6022 Posted on January 7, 2019

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

When Mother Jones first reported in December 2017 that the Environmental Protection Agency had hired a hyperpartisan GOP opposition research firm known for its aggressive tactics to handle the agency’s news-clipping work, the politically appointed flacks in the agency’s press office insisted the decision was about saving money and that the hiring had been handled through normal procurement channels. As we reported Thursday, we now know that was not the case. Internal emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that political appointees in the EPA press office demanded that career staff push through the hiring of Definers Public Affairs — best known for its work for Republican campaigns and recently for its role as Facebook’s attack dog on Capitol Hill, which included attempts to smear George Soros for his critiques of the social-media network.

Now, thanks to another batch of internal emails, we have even more evidence that the motivation for hiring Definers came from the top agency political appointees who were ticked off at the old service because it was collecting too many news clips that portrayed then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt negatively.

News clipping services are used by public relations offices both inside and out of the government to help keep track of the wide constellation of media outlets that might be talking about a topic of interest. The product they create — usually a roundup of headlines or excerpts — is an internal document designed to keep those inside the agency informed about press coverage. Liz Purchia, a press staffer in Obama’s EPA, noted that “cherry-picking the clips so you only saw the good ones” isn’t typically done, because it “doesn’t give you a realistic picture.” The collection of clippings is not usually publicly distributed.

But according to the new batch of emails, also obtained through FOIA, top EPA political staff were sick of the previous news clipping service’s propensity to include headlines that tended to make the controversial new appointee, who brought to the EPA a Rolodex of industry connections, look bad.

“Is it necessary to include all the negative headlines that go out to everyone?” complained Samantha Dravis, the agency’s associate administrator for policy, in a March 17, 2017, email to John Konkus, who now leads the EPA’s press office. “I could care less what Al Gore thinks about Scott Pruitt’s position — why is that news?? Who puts this together?”

Dravis, who previously had worked as general counsel for the Republican Attorney General’s Association, which Pruitt had run before coming to Washington, was objecting to the inclusion of a link to a PBS News Hour interview with former Vice President Al Gore from the night before, in a daily news roundup.

Konkus, who had previously worked at Republican consulting firm Jamestown Associates, replied that he agreed and that this was an ongoing problem with the news clipping service at the time, a Virginia-based company called Bulletin Intelligence that had provided news clip roundups to the EPA and a number of other federal agencies for several years.

“We had them on the phone about a week ago complaining about the tilt and they said they would change,” he wrote. “They haven’t.”

Don Benton, a White House senior adviser to the EPA, forwarded the whole chain of complaints to his counterpart at the Department of Homeland Security, a political operative named Frank Wuco. A former military consultant, Wuco once created an alter-ego Islamic terrorist character that he featured in videos and as a host for radio shows in which he warned of the danger of Islamic extremism. Benton told Wuco that a scientist had told him that Bulletin Intelligence disseminates “fake news” and suggested Wuco “look into it.” The email was sent to Wuco’s private email address. Wuco’s reply, if any, was not included in the FOIA materials.

Neither Wuco nor Benton replied to a request for comment on the email exchange.

This was early in the Trump administration, but the aggressive and overtly partisan strategy eventually carried over into the EPA’s public operations. The EPA generated even more negative headlines for itself by blocking reporters from events, trying to plant negative stories about EPA reporters in conservative outlets, scripting interviews with Fox News, and calling reporters names, like when then-spokesperson Jahan Wilcox called a reporter a “piece of trash.” The EPA’s spending on Pruitt’s travel, his security, and his soundproof phone booth were already under scrutiny when the EPA approved a contract with Definers.

Charles Tiefer, a professor of contract law at the University of Baltimore, told Mother Jones: “One of the main reasons that we have a corps of career government contract personnel is to keep the political people away from giving the taxpayer money out to political cronies.”

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The EPA hired GOP oppo firm because it was sick of ‘fake news’

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In natural disasters, a disability can be a death sentence

by keenanrobillard Posted on December 27, 2018

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

Several of the 88 people killed in the Camp Fire that devastated Butte County, California, in November had disabilities.

Their deaths were only the latest example of a tragic reality: When disaster strikes, people with disabilities are disproportionately affected. There are no statistics that show how many disabled people in the U.S. say they could easily evacuate in an emergency, but around the world, just 20 percent of disabled people say they would be able to do so. And only 31 percent said they would have someone to help them in an emergency, according to a 2013 United Nations global survey.

Surviving a disaster is a complicated process for disabled people, with barriers every step of the way. For visually and hearing impaired people, even being alerted to an emergency isn’t as simple as it is for everyone else. For physically disabled and low-mobility individuals, a quick evacuation is extremely difficult, if not impossible — especially in a natural disaster like the Camp Fire, which raged at the rate of destroying the equivalent of one football field per second.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. By inviting disabled people into conversations about disaster preparedness and response, investing in important equipment, and mandating that disaster response teams be knowledgeable on these issues, communities can reduce fatalities and offer a more humane and inclusive response to disasters.

Relying on luck

The Americans With Disabilities Act devotes chapters to emergency planning and recovery. However, states institute their own policies and codes for evacuation and emergency planning, and those policies aren’t always enforced, said Hector M. Ramirez, a Ventura County, California-based disabled man and board member of Disability Rights California.

Evacuation plans can be outdated, he said. And community members often aren’t aware of what those plans are even if they do exist. In fact, only 17 percent of disabled people were aware of their community’s emergency evacuation plan, according to the U.N. survey.

Some federal institutions, like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have created online resources about emergency preparedness and response. But disabled people are both frequently left out of developing emergency preparation plans and not made aware of the ones that are put in place, Ramirez said.

Plus, on-the-ground disaster response is often facilitated by well-meaning volunteers who might not be well-versed in the specific needs of the disabled community.

Federal, state, county, and nonprofit institutions all provide emergency response, and Ramirez said they all “need to familiarize themselves with our issues.”

And for many disabled people, getting out of their homes is only the beginning. Shelters often lack necessary equipment and medications for disabled people who do evacuate, like hearing aids, walkers, wheelchairs, or ventilators, Ramirez said. The prospect of rebuilding a home that had been built around an individual disability can also be daunting and expensive — particularly considering disabled workers typically earn significantly less than their able-bodied counterparts.

Mobility is the top issue in preparing disabled people for a disaster, said Evan LeVang, director of Butte County’s Disability Action Center. He recalled a horrifying phone call during the Camp Fire, during which a quadriplegic man was stuck in his second-floor apartment with a broken elevator. The caller said his goodbyes because he thought he was going to die.

“You could hear the propane tanks going off in the background,” LeVang said. “It was emotional.”

LeVang’s team managed to contact a first responder on the ground in the town of Paradise, and the man was saved — but there had been no system in place to make that rescue happen, other than the luck of getting through to that first responder.

There were plenty of “heroic acts” in Paradise during the fire, but LeVang said the disabled community shouldn’t have to solely rely on individual acts of heroism to survive.

For now, though, he said, the unfortunate reality is that disabled people may be left to do their own emergency planning.

‘Disabled people need to be part of the planning’

Some communities have taken steps to support disabled people, but there’s still a tremendous need for wider inclusion.

In 2007, the city of Oakland implemented a Functional Needs Annex to its Mass Care and Shelter plan, ensuring that disabled community members weren’t left out in an emergency. The annex is updated every few years to stay relevant to the community, and initial reports show the program helped identify more accessible shelters and more accessible alert notification systems. Kentucky has updated its disaster alerts systems by incorporating community training and committing to notifying disabled people in-person at the onset of a disaster. Arizona’s state health department purchased equipment to meet the needs of 1,000 disabled people in an emergency.

These are small and important steps, but “planning for this level of natural disasters hasn’t really begun,” Ramirez said. And until it does, the disabled community will continue to suffer — especially, Ramirez said, as climate change makes these incidents more frequent and more severe.

“I think it’s really important for us to ask [ourselves]: Can we really afford to not be doing this, knowing what we know now?” Ramirez asked.

Systemic change certainly needs to happen, but advocates like Ramirez and LeVang also want to encourage able-bodied people to show up for their disabled friends, family, neighbors, and loved ones whenever there’s an emergency.

“Always ask people if they need help,” he said, noting that not every disability is apparent. “Recognize that that’s going to be a transitional phase. There’s going to be need for support on the long term, a continuum of care.”

Ultimately, inclusion — on both a systemic and individual level — matters most.

“I really think it’s important that people with disabilities be at the table making some of the decisions that impact our lives,” Ramirez said, “because when it doesn’t happen … a lot of the work falls short.”

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There’s a greater risk of ‘domino effect’ with planet’s tipping points, study says

by SuzanneForwood Posted on December 22, 2018

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

Policymakers have severely underestimated the risks of ecological tipping points, according to a study that shows 45 percent of all potential environmental collapses are interrelated and could amplify one another.

The authors said their paper, published in the journal Science, highlights how overstressed and overlapping natural systems are combining to throw up a growing number of unwelcome surprises.

“The risks are greater than assumed because the interactions are more dynamic,” said Juan Rocha of the Stockholm Resilience Center. “The important message is to recognize the wickedness of the problem that humanity faces.”

The study collated existing research on ecosystem transitions that can irreversibly tip to another state, such as coral reefs bleaching and being overrun by algae, forests becoming savannahs, and ice sheets melting into oceans. It then cross-referenced the 30 types of shift to examine the impacts they might have on one another and human society.

Only 19 percent were entirely isolated. Another 36 percent shared a common cause, but were not likely to interact. The remaining 45 percent had the potential to create either a one-way domino effect or mutually reinforcing feedbacks.

Among the latter pairings were Arctic ice sheets and boreal forests. When the former melt, there is less ice to reflect the sun’s heat so the temperature of the planet rises. This increases the risks of forest fires, which discharge carbon into the air that adds to the greenhouse effect, which melts more ice. Although geographically distant, each amplifies the other.

By contrast, a one-way domino-type impact is that between coral reefs and mangrove forests. When the former are destroyed, it weakens coastal defenses and exposes mangroves to storms and ocean surges.

The deforestation of the Amazon is responsible for multiple “cascading effects” — weakening rain systems, forests becoming savannah, and reduced water supplies for cities like São Paulo and crops in the foothills of the Andes. This, in turn, increases the pressure for more land clearance.

Until recently, the study of tipping points was controversial, but it is increasingly accepted as an explanation for climate changes that are happening with more speed and ferocity than earlier computer models predicted. The loss of coral reefs and Arctic sea ice may already be past the point of no return. There are signs the Antarctic is heading the same way faster than thought.

Co-author Garry Peterson said the tipping of the west Antarctic ice shelf was not on the radar of many scientists 10 years ago, but now there was overwhelming evidence of the risks — including losses of chunks of ice the size of New York — and some studies now suggest the tipping point may have already been passed by the southern ice sheet, which may now be releasing carbon into the atmosphere.

“We’re surprised at the rate of change in the Earth system. So much is happening at the same time and at a faster speed than we would have thought 20 years ago. That’s a real concern,” said Peterson. “We’re heading ever faster towards the edge of a cliff.”

The fourth most downloaded academic research of 2018 was the Hothouse Earth paper, which considered how tipping points could combine to push the global climate into an uninhabitable state.

The authors of the new paper say their work goes beyond climate studies by mapping a wider range of ecological stress points, such as biodiversity loss, agricultural expansion, urbanization, and soil erosion. It also focuses more on what is happening at the local level now, rather than projecting geo-planetary trends into the future.

“We’re looking at things that affect people in their daily lives. They’re things that are happening today,” said Peterson. “There is a positive message as it expands the range of options for action. It is not just at an international level. Mayors can also make a difference by addressing soil erosion, or putting in place social policies that place less stress on the environment, or building up natural coastal defenses.”

Rocha has spent 10 years building a database of tipping points, or “regime shifts” as he calls them. He urges policymakers to adopt a similar interdisciplinary approach so they can better grasp what is happening.

“We’re trying to connect the dots between different research communities,” said Rocha. “Governments also need to look more at interactions. They should stop compartmentalizing ministries like agriculture, fisheries, and international relations and try to manage environmental problems by embracing the diversity of causes and mechanisms underlying them. Policies need to match the scale of the problem.”

“It’s a little depressing knowing we are not on a trajectory to keep our ecosystem in a functional state,” Rocha continued, “but these connections are also a reason for hope; good management in one place can prevent severe environmental degradation elsewhere. Every action counts.”

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Ryan Zinke is resigning, and the internet’s reaction is priceless

by RudyLeroy388 Posted on December 15, 2018

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Ryan Zinke is resigning, and the internet’s reaction is priceless

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Here’s a way to fight climate change: Empower women

by LaraeMcDonagh Posted on December 9, 2018

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

“Gender and climate are inextricably linked,” said environmentalist and author Katharine Wilkinson on stage at TEDWomen last week, a gathering of women thought leaders and activists in Palm Desert, California.

Women, she says, are disproportionately affected by climate change. When communities are decimated by floods or droughts, tsunamis or fire, the most vulnerable among them suffer the most. Because women across the world have fewer rights, less money, and fewer freedoms, in those moments of extreme loss, women are often hit the hardest. “There’s greater risk of displacement, higher odds of being injured or killed during a natural disaster. Prolonged drought can precipitate early marriage, as families contend with scarcity. Floods can force last-resort prostitution as women struggle to make ends meet. These dynamics are most acute under conditions of poverty,” she says.

With several new reports painting an increasingly bleak picture of the state of the world’s climate, Wilkinson is delivering her message at a time when leaders on the global stage are looking for solutions. As thousands of people gather this week at a major climate summit known as COP24, Wilkinson is making a plea to open people’s eyes to one fact: Women’s rights are Earth’s rights. “In my experience, to have eyes wide open is to hold a broken heart every day,” she says.

But she has hope. Though women feel the effects of climate the most, they also represent an opportunity. “To address climate change, we must make gender equity a reality. And in the face of a seemingly impossible challenge, women and girls are a fierce source of possibility,” Wilkinson says. She and her team at the nonprofit Project Drawdown have been studying the real-world steps people can take to fix climate change, resulting in a best-selling 2017 book highlighting the top 100 solutions to reverse warming.

Her argument is that if women are empowered in three distinct ways, the downstream effects on the environment will make a huge difference in the fight for climate change. She argues that if women were treated more equally professionally, they’d have fewer kids and the land they farm would be more efficient, all of which would help save the planet.

“Women are the primary farmers of the world,” Wilkinson says. They produce 60 to 80 percent of the food in lower-income countries, she says, on small plots. These farmers are known as “smallholders.”

Yet due to local laws and entrenched biases, women farmers are given fewer resources and support from their governments, and they have fewer rights to their own land. For example, in some countries women are not allowed to own their own land, which makes it impossible for them to use the land as collateral for a loan to buy farming equipment. In other places, women are are not able to borrow money without a man’s signature. These restrictions hamper their ability to run their farms efficiently, leading to lower yields.

This is a problem not just for their earning potential, but for the Earth. Every year, humans clear-cut forests to create more agriculture land to grow crops to feed the world’s growing population. In turn, this deforestation increases the rate of climate change.

Instead of clear-cutting new land, why not work to make the existing farms run by women more efficient? “Close that gap and farm yields rise by 20 to 30 percent,” says Wilkinson. “Support women smallholders, realize higher yields, avoid deforestation, and sustain the life-giving power of forests.” If women’s farms yielded as much on average as farms run by men across the world, it would stop approximately 2 billion tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere between now and 2050. “That’s on par with the impact household recycling can have globally,” she says.

Besides addressing inequality in agriculture, Wilkinson says giving women access to high-quality voluntary reproductive health care would have tremendous benefit for the climate.

“Curbing growth of our human population is a side effect,” she says — one that would reduce global emissions. Do that by making birth control and medical care more available to women across the world.

And do it by educating women. Wilkinson notes that more than 130 million women worldwide are denied access to school. Yet the more education a woman attains, the fewer children she has. From a conservation perspective, empowering women to have smaller families is an objectively positive outcome. “The right to go to school effects how many human beings live on this planet,” says Wilkinson.

With these three changes — empowerment of women farmers, increased global access to family planning, and the right to an education — Wilkinson and her team at Project Drawdown predict that by midcentury, improving gender equality could equal 1 billion fewer people on Earth.

“Gender equity is on par with wind turbines and solar panels and forests,” Wilkinson says, adding, “This does not mean women and girls are responsible for fixing everything. But we probably will.”

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Here’s a way to fight climate change: Empower women

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Trump wants to ramp up coal. Spain has found a way to quit it.

by yettavlamingh21 Posted on December 6, 2018

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

Villablino, Spain — When the shutters come down on the last 10 privately owned pits in northwest Spain’s once mighty coal industry later this month, there will be tears and trauma in the region where the country’s mining unions were born.

There is also a fragile hope that a better, cleaner future could follow — but a barely hidden warning that the despair that propelled Trump to power in the U.S. lurks in the wings if it does not.

Spain’s uneconomic coal industry has been killed by a pincer movement: cheaper imports from developing countries on one flank and falling renewable energy prices on the other, fanned by binding E.U. targets to reduce emissions and a dawning awareness of coal’s climate and other environmental costs.

Industry shutdowns are painful, especially in sectors like coal mining which go back generations. The risk is unemployment and social dislocation. But this one may play out differently: in a “just transition” deal — brokered by unions and a new leftwing government — that could have implications for other coal-producing countries, including the U.S.

Spain plans to support laid-off miners and their communities by plowing $285 million over a decade into compensation payouts, retraining for low-carbon jobs and environmental restoration work in pit communities. The aim is to ensure a safety net to catch those whose jobs will disappear as the economy shifts to a low-carbon one. Politicians and union officials say the deal will ensure both environmental and social protection as the economy shifts away from coal.

However, on the ground in Spain, there is suspicion about this promised new future from workers who have watched an industry, identity, and way of life dying around for them for some two decades. More than a thousand miners and contractors will be laid off around Christmas, a third of them in the northern region of Castilla y León, home to Villablino, and there is concern over whether new jobs will materialize.

“New jobs are a utopia in our country,” says Salvador Osario, a 47-year-old miner from Castilla y León who took early retirement after 20 years of digging coal. “The miners are alone. No one wants to support us. Not the left- or the right-wing parties. Even the unions are divided.”

Salvador Osario, 47, is a retired miner in the Castilla y León region of northern Spain.Arthur Neslen / HuffPost

The valleys of Castilla y León once thrummed to the sound of the coal industry, and relics from its retreat are everywhere. Pit shafts litter the hillsides and monuments to miners are sprinkled around town squares. Diner cafes have stickers of miners on the doors, and coal train statuettes outside.

Coal workers here have a brave history of fighting fascism during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. In the early 1960s, miners in Villablino formed Spain’s first clandestine union, the Confederacion Sindical de Comisiones Obreras (CCOO), which continued the fight against the dictator General Franco.

Spain’s coal industry employed more than 100,000 miners back then. That number had fallen to 45,000 by the late 1980s — nearly half of them in Castilla y León — and it continued to drop. More than 5,000 still worked in the northwest mines of Castilla y León, Asturias, Aragón, and Palencia at the start of this century. Next year, there will be none.

A monument to coal miners in Villablino, Spain.Arthur Neslen / HuffPost

The dying embers of Spain’s coal industry may leave a sad legacy for the miners, but coal needs to be phased out if we are to keep temperature increases below the levels at which we’ll see catastrophic climate change, climate scientists say. Coal emits more carbon dioxide than any other fossil fuel, as well as deadly toxins such as sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and particulate matter, which are responsible for more than 20,000 deaths each year in Europe alone.

“The deal is a way forward for many problems that will appear and we are committed to it,” said Mariano Sanz Lubeiro, CCOO’s confederal secretary, from his Madrid office.

This sentiment is echoed by Teresa Ribera, Spain’s minister for the ecological transition. “We have worked hard to restore trust in regions that have suffered a long restructuring process, negotiating and coming up with social protection measures that the unions could accept,” she told HuffPost. “Now we have to deliver. Climate ambition and social protection have to go hand in hand if we want to succeed.”

“The objective we have is that the miners will be offered a [green-collar] job. We will have to register all of them. Instead of one year, it may take one year and three months, but that is very much the plan,”Laura Martin-Murillo, a government negotiator, said.

As well as work in solar or wind energy, she also believes there will be jobs in biomass, making energy from organic matter such as wood pellets or agricultural waste. They are also thinking about labor-intensive work such as retrofitting buildings to be more environmentally friendly.

But miners on eligible contracts will have to live on social benefits until an environmental restoration plan kicks in next autumn, at the earliest. Those who claim the retirement offer will take home around $20,000 a year on average.

This community has been here before. When the last round of closures happened 20 years ago, the miners affected felt it was not a just transition.

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Anxiety is clear in the bleary eyes of Rolando Prieto Perez, 43, an electrician in the century-old La Escondida pit who has just come off a night shift when I meet him in the Villablino CCOO office.

“We’re suffering from depression,” he says wearily. “We have the blues. The situation is unpredictable and our futures look bleak. Sometimes we just feel confused.”

Rolando Prieto Perez, 43, a miner.Arthur Neslen / HuffPost

Prieto Perez is a few years too young to qualify for early retirement, and while the government is registering all miners for new jobs, these could arrive at any time between March 2019 and March 2020: months, if not years, after the mine closures.

Stuck between the beneficiaries of the post-war boom and the clean energy transition, Prieto Perez says he is part of “the unlucky generation.”

Mining is “part of the DNA of this region and its people,” says Sanz Lubeiro, CCOO’s confederal secretary. “That is why its loss has been so traumatic for the community.”

“If the transition is not done right,” he added, “we are preparing the ground for populism which blames climate action or technology or migrant workers,” he says.

There are signs that this may already be beginning in Villablino. “I don’t support this climate change idea,”Prieto Perez says. “I consider this news very manipulated. The government only speaks about global warming, but they want to close the mine for [economic] reasons.”

Omar Garcia Alvarez, a local miners leader, claims that if every miner were guaranteed a job in clean energy, there would be no problem with closing the mines. But “there is no ecological transition,” he says. “We don’t believe in the deal because we don’t trust the government.”

Miners Salvador Osario and Omar Garcia Alvarez look through a window in derelict mine.Arthur Neslen / HuffPost

He notes that the $285 million will have to be split between four regions over 10 years — giving Castilla y León only 6 million euros (or $6.8 million) a year with which to heal its wounds.

Just 39 years old, Garcia Alvarez was forced to quit his pit job last August by spinal injuries caused by his job. He now speaks with a sense of romanticism about the industry and the solidarity it produced.

“All people have a right to defend their jobs,” he says when asked what he thinks about U.S. coal miners, who are facing their own struggle. “I don’t agree with Donald Trump’s politics, but if he supports the miners, it is very good news for them.” Appalachia’s miners are widely thought to have helped Donald Trump win in Kentucky.

Yet Trump’s promises to bring back coal haven’t been fulfilled. “Across the USA you can see the devastation already caused in communities that have lost livelihoods that were dependent on [fossil fuel] corporations who made the decision to exit,” said Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, the world’s largest trade union confederation.

Burrow said Spain’s scheme should be a model for countries such as the U.S. to achieve their own just transition away from fossil fuels. “We need urgent climate ambition to save the planet — and humanity itself,” she said. “But if you don’t negotiate with working people, if plans are not transparent and communities don’t have trust in their futures, then resistance to climate action is absolutely a risk.”

Clean air and a climate-safe future mean little when you can’t put food on the table right now, says Brad Markell, the executive director of the industrial union council of AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the U.S.

“There is no question that people in coal mining regions and around coal-fired generation plants thought that Trump was going to save them. He said he would and they thought it was worth taking a chance on him,” he said.

Markell would not comment on the gamble’s wisdom, despite mounting evidence that miners are now suffering from it. But he questioned whether a deal like Spain’s would translate to the more cutthroat U.S. labor market, where it could involve a 50 percent pay cut on a fossil fuel worker’s hourly rate. Starting pay in the U.S. solar sector can be as low as $15 an hour.

“It would be to everyone’s benefit if the new jobs created in the clean energy sector were high paying — and made available to people losing their jobs — but they won’t be, because in the USA, you’re on your own. That’s how things work here. We have a general deficit of working-class power and until we are able to reclaim that, it will be difficult to achieve economic justice.”

The Spanish government will this month outline how its just transition strategy will be rolled out nationally across all industries, including the car industry.

The issue is also taking center stage at the U.N. climate summit in Katowice which started this week, with Poland trumpeting a just transition for weaning countries off fossil fuels. Critics, however, say the aim is to mask international divisions over emissions-cutting obligations and targets, and divert attention from Poland’s own lack of climate ambition.

In Villablino, Eduardo Gonzalez Menazas, 60, a retired miner turned environmental activist, agrees that a just transition is “fundamental, very necessary, but at the moment too slow.”

He estimates only around 30 percent of his fellow miners believe that global warming is a problem and that saddens him, he said. In his spare time he plants trees around deserted mines. Menazas has noticed that the valley’s climate is already warming, with less snow and bird species such as the capercaillie nesting higher up.

“All people in Spain are responsible for this disaster,” he said.

“The energy transition has to be just because miners also need help from the government,” Gonzalez Menazas said. “In this area, there are no choices for people and that is also a problem. The transition has to be for everyone.”

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Trump wants to ramp up coal. Spain has found a way to quit it.

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David Attenborough’s dire climate warning: ‘Our greatest threat in thousands of years’

by GayAbdullah Posted on December 5, 2018

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

David Attenborough, the famed naturalist and conservation advocate, issued a dire warning for the world during a speech at the United Nations’ annual climate summit on Monday: Act now, or the natural world, humanity included, may soon collapse.

“Right now we’re facing a man-made disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change,” Attenborough, 92, said. “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”

The comments came at the beginning of a two-week climate conference in Katowice, Poland, where emissaries from nearly 200 nations are meeting to determine how the world can dramatically scale back greenhouse gas emissions to abide by the landmark Paris climate agreement and, by doing so, stave off the worst effects of climate change.

“The world’s people have spoken. Their message is clear: Time is running out,” Attenborough said Monday. “They want you, the decision-makers, to act now. They’re behind you, along with civil society represented here today.”

The conservationist is serving in the “People’s Seat” during the conference, a role in which he will present comments from members of the public affected by climate change to the dignitaries and officials present at the summit.

The U.N. released a dire report in October that warned of severe, climate-related effects by as early as 2040 unless there is dramatic action to curb global emissions. The effects would include a mass die-off of coral reefs and an increase in extreme weather events. The world is working to implement the commitments made under the Paris Agreement but is still far off track from preventing catastrophic levels of warming.

At the same time, U.S. President Donald Trump has regularly denied the existence of climate change and its links to humanity. Following the White House release last month of a sweeping, 1,656-page report that warned of a bleak future for the country, Trump alluded that he was too intelligent to believe in the phenomenon. He has also moved to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris pact.

The U.N. has urged world leaders to unveil ambitious efforts to tackle emissions, calling this month’s summit the most important in years.

“Climate change is running faster than we are, and we must catch up sooner rather than later, before it is too late,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, said at the beginning of the event. “For many people, regions, and even countries, this is already a matter of life or death.”

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Surge in marine refuges brings world close to protected areas goal

by OVZBerndwnfro Posted on November 23, 2018

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

A record surge in the creation of marine protected areas has taken the international community close to its goal of creating nature refuges on 17 percent of the world’s land and 10 percent of seas by 2020, according to a new U.N. report.

Protected regions now cover more than five times the territory of the U.S., but the authors said this good news was often undermined by poor enforcement. Some reserves are little more than “paper parks” with little value to nature conservation. At least one has been turned into an industrial zone.

More than 27 million square kilometers of seas (10.4 million square miles, and 7 percent of the total) and 20 million square km of land (7.7 million square miles, or 15 percent of the total) now have protected status, according to the Protected Planet report, which was released on Sunday at the U.N. biodiversity conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

Almost all of the growth has been in marine regions, most notably with the creation last year of the world’s biggest protected area: the 2 million square kilometer (almost 800,000 square miles) Ross Sea reserve, one-fifth of which is in the Antarctic. The no-fishing zone will be managed by New Zealand and the U.S.

“We have seen an enormous expansion in the past two years. There is now more marine protected area than terrestrial, which nobody would have predicted,” said Kathy McKinnon of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. “I think we’ll continue to see a substantial increase, I’d guess, to at least 10 percent in the near future.”

The U.N. convention on biological diversity says it has received national commitments for an additional 4.5 million square kilometers of land and 16 million square km of oceans to be given protected status in the next two years. This would put it on course to achieve one of the key aims of the 2010 Aichi biodiversity targets.

“This is the target with the most progress. In an ocean of bad news about biodiversity loss and eco-destruction, it is important to highlight that progress, though we still have a lot more to do to ensure not just the quantitive target but the effectiveness of the management,” said Cristiana Pașca Palmer, the head of U.N. Biodiversity.

The creation of protected areas has not been enough to halt a collapse of species and ecosystems that threatens civilization. Since 1970 humanity has wiped out 60 percent of mammal, bird, fish, and reptile populations, with a dangerous knock-on impact on food production, fisheries, and climate stability.

Protected areas are important refuges from this wave of extinctions but many are underfunded and poorly policed. Only one in five have provided management assessments to the U.N., which has raised questions about the viability of the rest.

Naomi Kingston, of U.N. environment world conservation monitoring center, said: “There is a race to deliver on Aichi target 11. It is fantastic that countries are coming with more ambition, but not if it is just a number without substance.

“Some areas that have been reported to us as protected areas have been completely built over. We need datasets to define which areas are paper parks and which are real.”

Developing nations have better reporting standards because many are obliged to provide regular assessments in order to qualify for funds from the Global Environment Fund. By contrast, many wealthier nations devote few resources to monitoring.

Discussions will focus on a new, more flexible category for community land that is used by locals for both agricultural production and wildlife conservation. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, this is a model that has often helped improve biodiversity because residents – often from indigenous communities – live closely with nature and have an interest in protecting it.

For example in Namibia, the area designated as protected was doubled through the recognition of community conservancies as part of the national protected areas estate. Kingston said the biodiversity of the region also improved.

“It’s a real success story that shows how a government working with the community can deliver on conservation, governance and equity,” she said. “We need to move the narrative away from designating areas and then putting a fence around them, and to instead work more with communities who have been protecting wildlife for generations.”

There are still considerable problems, including communication weaknesses, dubious classification and national competition for ever scarcer resources. China does not share maps of its protected areas and will not allow the other data it submits to be used publicly. The U.K. has publicly committed to a goal of classifying 30 percent of oceans as protected, but some of the marine conservation zones in its own waters provide very limited protection for biodiversity. Britain has also approved fracking in a national park, contrary to IUCN guidelines that extractive activities are incompatible.

China, Russia, and Norway also caused disappointment and anger this year by blocking plans to create a huge new reserve in the Antarctic that would have been a sanctuary for whales and other species.

To keep up with shifts in designations, the U.N. and its partners have launched a live report that tracks changes in protected areas and land use. In future, they hope to overlap this map with satellite images and data on land use to measure how well conserved the areas are.

Regardless of their effectiveness, conservation experts say halting the decline of the natural world needs not just protection but a rethink of what it means to coexist with other species.

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Surge in marine refuges brings world close to protected areas goal

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Science returns to the House

by BerniecWhittle Posted on November 10, 2018

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

The Democratic control of the House means science will get higher billing in the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, which, despite its name, has been run by Republican science deniers since 2011.

Former Texas Rep. Ralph Hall was chair for two years before Lamar Smith (R-Texas) took over in 2013. Hall was like a warm-up for Smith’s reign, telling the National Journal in 2011,“I don’t think we can control what God controls” when it comes to climate and accusing scientists of manipulating their evidence. Smith took his chairmanship to new lengths, using subpoena power against scientists in an attempt to uncover a smoking gun in what he referred to as the “extreme climate agenda.”

The committee would have been in for major changes next year no matter what party controlled the House, because the 70-year-old Smith announced his plans to retire earlier this year.

There will be radical changes coming, according to Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat who is a ranking member of the committee and likely to become the next chair. A former chief psychiatric nurse, she would be the first House science committee chair with a STEM background since the 1990s, according to Washington Post reporter Sarah Kaplan.

Johnson has already laid out her priorities for the future of the committee should she become chair. They include “defending the scientific enterprise from political and ideological attacks, and challenging misguided or harmful Administration actions.” Another priority will be to acknowledge climate change is real “and working to understand the ways we can mitigate it.” And, lastly, she called to “Restore the credibility of the Science Committee as a place where science is respected and recognized as a crucial input to good policymaking.” Democrats would have the power to investigate the Environmental Protection Agency’s changes to its scientific advisory boards and its use of science in regulatory policy, for starters.

That agenda will be a sharp break from Smith’s priorities. Smith regularly called hearings to investigate a debunked “pause” in global warming, a myth manufactured by skeptics, and laid the rubric for the EPA’s radical science overhaul that would have effectively stripped scientific reports from being considered in rulemaking.

I wrote a year ago about how Smith and his committee had become a polarizing force in the scientific world:

A change in House rules gave Smith new subpoena powers in 2015, unusual for the House science committee, and he has since issued 24 subpoenas, more than any other chair in the House during that time, with some going beyond the committee’s traditional jurisdiction over federal science research. Smith has convened a number of hearings to attack climate scientists, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Paris climate deal, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He helped to popularize the myth that global warming had paused, holding a hearing during which he demanded NOAA documents and redactions on its study refuting the idea.

Eighteen candidates with STEM backgrounds also won seats Tuesday, some of whom will bolster the House’s new ranks of science advocates.

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Science returns to the House

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