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Jane Goodall Just Called Out Republicans on Climate Change

by EvelyneCuriel Posted on December 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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At the major climate summit in Paris on Monday, renowned conservationist Jane Goodall called for Republicans in Congress to back down from opposing an international agreement on climate change.

“Success at the Paris climate summit would be a binding agreement to limit carbon,” she said, in a briefing with reporters. But “a binding agreement isn’t much use unless it leads to actions and implementation. So there has to be a commitment to go back to your nation and follow through.”

Asked whether that will happen in the United States, Goodall said “it depends on who the next president is, doesn’t it?” All of the leading Republican presidential candidates—most recently (and colorfully) Chris Christie—have said they would walk back President Barack Obama’s climate agenda. Most of them reject mainstream climate science, as well. The Democratic candidates have all taken the opposite position, wanting to push action on climate change beyond what Obama has been able to achieve.

This week, diplomats from nearly every nation on Earth are huddled in Paris to finalize a sweeping global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change. Prior to the summit, Obama offered a commitment from the US to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by a third by 2025. That commitment is backed by regulations based on existing US law—the Clean Air Act—but the commitment itself is unlikely to be legally binding internationally. Last week in Paris, Obama said that other parts of the agreement should be binding, including a requirement that countries periodically revisit and possibly strengthen their carbon reduction targets.

But at the same time—back in Washington, DC—Republicans in Congress have taken steps to sabotage the Paris negotiations, passing legislation to block key parts of Obama’s climate agenda. (Those resolutions will almost certainly remain symbolic, as they face a guaranteed veto from the president.)

Obama’s statements notwithstanding, the US delegation in Paris could present obstacles to achieving a strong agreement as the talks move into their second and final week. One of the biggest issues on the table is international finance; i.e., how wealthy, high-polluting countries such the US should help pay for climate change adaptation and clean energy in vulnerable developing countries. As Ben Adler reported last week for Climate Desk partner Grist:

Presumably the Obama administration would like to offer more climate finance, but it cannot without congressional authorization. Asking Republicans for foreign aid to solve a problem they claim doesn’t even exist would be like asking them to pay for gay weddings. Instead, the Obama administration has to fight with Congress just to make sure the GOP doesn’t strip what little climate finance the US has pledged, around $500 million per year until 2020, from the budget.

To Goodall, who spent more than 50 years studying chimps in Tanzania, these lawmakers are letting short-term politics obscure the bigger picture. They need to “just sit down, and forget about politics,” she said. “Think about your children, and revisit your belief.”

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Jane Goodall Just Called Out Republicans on Climate Change

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If ISIS Had a Bomb That Could Put the East Coast Underwater…

by IsobelAult4 Posted on December 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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

On the first of my two flights this weekend, I sat next to a defense contractor from Kentucky. He was on his way to Fairbanks, Alaska, for a project that sounded at once too mundane and too secretive to ask him to explain. The forecast up there was calling for temperatures to dive past 20 degrees below zero. He told me he planned to go straight from his next plane to a heated bus to the project to his heated hotel. Then he asked me where I was going.

“Paris,” I told him.

He mulled this over. “Well, you be careful,” he finally offered, reassuringly.

I knew what he meant. It had been a little more than two weeks since 130 people were killed in simultaneous attacks on restaurants, a concert hall, and France’s national soccer stadium, followed by police raids against the jihadists said to be responsible. So, like my seatmate, when most Americans think of Paris right now, they think of ISIS cells and flag-waving solidarity.

But I wasn’t coming to Paris to cover terrorism. I was coming to cover something that all of us have heard a lot less about in recent weeks, but whose stakes are far more important: a last-ditch effort by the world’s leaders to stop the most dangerous effects of climate change.

If that sounds like an exaggeration, you haven’t read the science. Earth’s average temperature has risen about 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.53 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late nineteenth century. We’re already seeing heat waves, forests burning, intensified droughts and hurricanes, and glaciers melting away before our eyes. As we start nearing a 2-degree increase, what once sounded like dystopian science fiction starts becoming reality: rising seas wiping out whole nations and parts of major cities, mass food shortages, and feedback loops we don’t even understand yet spiraling out of control. Without major action, we’re on track for anywhere from a 4 to 6 degree increase by the end of this century.

What that action will look like—and exactly how much destruction the world is willing to accept—is what is supposed to be determined at this conference.

That the build-up to these negotiations to assure humanity’s continued survival on Earth were overshadowed in the US by the latest battle between jihadists and everyone else, the interminable presidential primary, Thanksgiving, the college football playoff draw, and on and on tells you a lot about how we got to this point. If ISIS had a bomb that could put much of the East Coast underwater, torch millions of acres of forest, and threaten the entire world’s food supply, I’d like to think that stopping them would be a national obsession that would eclipse everything else.

But ISIS is a foreign enemy that we can fight and probably defeat without most of us having to sacrifice anything; even the fight itself can make us feel good about ourselves. Climate change is a vague, horrifying threat that affects everything. (Don’t forget that Syria’s civil war, the conflagration that turned ISIS into an international force, was also fueled in part by a drought sparked by climate change.)

Moreover, it’s a threat in which we ourselves are the problem, which means that stopping it will require that we change how we live in more ways than most people are comfortable imagining. And everyone is implicated. The fact that nearly everyone at this conference burned tanks full of jet fuel to get here is not lost on the organizers—they offered everyone attending a carbon offset to pay into, even though carbon offsets have been repeatedly shown not to work.

Still, if the first day has been any indication, most of the world’s governments are taking the threat seriously, or at least feel the need to look like they are. Previous climate conferences have been known for slow starts; some journalists and officials told me they’d learned the hard way not to bother coming until toward the end. But this time, no fewer than 150 heads of state showed up for the morning’s opening session, including President Barack Obama, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Obama has reportedly met with Putin. Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas shook hands. (Putin apparently blew off Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.) John Kerry is floating around somewhere. While I was sitting off to one side, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Bill Gates walked by, each mostly unnoticed by people rushing between other meetings in the hall.

Despite all the heavyweights, and constant reminders in speeches and press coverage of the recent attacks, the security at this conference center next to a minor Paris airport does not feel all that overwhelming. Beyond the football fields’ worth of metal detectors and X-ray machines at the entrance, and a healthy complement of lightly armed security throughout the complex, it was easier to get here and move around than during similarly high-powered events at the UN’s New York headquarters, or to walk around landmarks on any given day in post-9/11 Washington. It will be telling in the coming days to see if the easy mingling helps with the negotiations.

There are plenty of people who think this conference will not be serious enough. UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres has been saying for months that she expects the Paris deal to fall far short of holding global temperature increases to 2 degrees. Thousands of demonstrators joined hands in Paris Sunday in defiance of a ban on rallies, to protest what one organizing group said would be “false solutions” in an agreement that would be “obsolete before it is signed.” Police fired tear gas to clear the Place de la République, and at least 280 people were arrested. One grassroots group emailed a press release at midday to call the as-yet-non-existent accord “a crime against vulnerable communities.”

And it’s true that the event has a everyone’s-chamber-of-commerce kind of atmosphere. The main hall feels more like Epcot than a political summit, with countries setting up pavilions to promote their climate initiatives. Mexico’s booth, done in faux-Aztec stonework, flashed pictures of waterfalls and rainforests alongside the same multicolored logo it uses on tourism posters. India’s featured an electronic waterfall that spat out designs such as climate-justice phrases and a human face that may or may not have been Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Indonesia, which is currently on fire thanks in large part to deforestation to produce palm oil, had a video screen proclaiming the environmental benefits of…palm oil.

But however mitigated the expectations, however low the attention, this is the climate conference we’ve got. The agreements that get made here over the next two weeks will likely do more than any others to decide what kind of planet we, and everyone born after us, gets to live on. I’ll be here for the duration, keeping an eye on things. À bientôt.

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If ISIS Had a Bomb That Could Put the East Coast Underwater…

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All those toxic chemicals in the ocean? Birds are pooping them back on shore

by VioletMata Posted on November 30, 2015

All those toxic chemicals in the ocean? Birds are pooping them back on shore

By on 30 Nov 2015commentsShare

You know all that pollution that we’ve been dumping into the oceans for decades? All the plastic, DDT, PCBs, mercury, etc. that we’ve been shamelessly washing away like the memories of too many tequila shots and poor decisions? Well, like those tequila shots the next morning, it looks like it’s all coming back up.

Here’s the rub: When we dump chemicals into the ocean, they get absorbed by microbes, which then get eaten by fish, which then get eaten by bigger fish and other animals until, over time, these chemicals accumulate in those larger animals.

Fulmars — seabirds that live in northern Canada — are one such animal. And according to Mark Mallory, a biologist at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, these fulmars eventually bring our discarded chemicals back on land … in the most disgusting way possible. Here’s more from Smithsonian:

[Mallory’s] studies found that fulmars are like the great cleaners of the ocean, ingesting a lot of plastic as well as chemicals that sometimes adhere to plastic. When the birds get back to Cape Vera, they vomit or defecate onto the cliffs, and the contaminants are then washed down into the freshwater pools beneath.

The nutrients from the fulmar guano bring algae and moss but also attract small midges and other aquatic insects — a tasty snack for snow buntings, largely terrestrial birds that will feed the bugs to their chicks.

Unfortunately for those adorable little snow buntings, their tasty snacks are also filled with chemicals, and thus, the game of pass-the-pollutant continues.

“We may think of the Arctic as this remote, pristine region, but it’s not,” adds Jennifer Provencher, a graduate student in eco-toxicology at Carleton University in Canada who frequently collaborates with Mallory. Provencher has found plastic and chemicals in the stomachs and livers of the thick-billed murres that live on the cliffs of Coats Island in the north of Hudson Bay. She has also found that great skuas can ingest plastic from preying on northern fulmars.

The winged predators aren’t the only things with an appetite for small birds. Provencher says that the Inuit in northern communities also eat murres. … That means the junk we dump into the oceans could be coming back to affect human health.

Veronica Padula, a researcher who studies seabirds off the Alaskan coast, told Smithsonian that she’s found significant concentrations of phthalates — chemicals used to make plastics flexible and harder to break — in kittiwakes, horned puffins, and red-faced cormorants. She says that these chemicals ultimately get into the birds’ reproductive tissue and perhaps even into their eggs, which could then infect egg-eaters like eagles and foxes.

And in case you’re still not convinced that our pollution is coming back to haunt us, a recent study found that three species of Canadian water fowl that humans hunt for food contained plastics and metals in their stomachs.

“It’s actually quite scary, especially when you start looking at what these chemicals do,” Padula told Smithsonian. “You kind of want to find a bunker and hide.”

You probably also wanted to find a bunker and hide the morning after that alcohol-soaked rager. But deep down, you knew that you were getting exactly what you deserved. That wasn’t your first rodeo, and, still, you downed those shots like a freshman at welcome week.

Likewise, bird shit laced with toxic chemicals is exactly what we deserve now — we had our rocky initiation at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and here we are again. So what say we cut back on the pollution, buy some fancy beers and play this drinking game to Planet Earth like grownups?

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Seabirds Are Dumping Pollution-Laden Poop Back on Land

, Smithsonian.

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Watch this insanely cool simulation of deep Antarctic water

by maciao85 Posted on November 24, 2015

Watch this insanely cool simulation of deep Antarctic water

By on 24 Nov 2015commentsShare

We begin with Raijin, the Shinto god of thunder, lightning, and storms.

No, seriously — that’s what Australian researchers named the supercomputer that they used to make this incredibly detailed simulation of what’s going on at the bottom of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. That cold, dark abyss — no, not that one — may seem remote and hard to understand, but it’s actually a key player in Earth’s response to climate change.

It should come as no surprise that the surface water around Antarctica is very cold. What might be more surprising is that it’s also very salty. That’s because, when sea ice forms, it rejects salt back into the surrounding water. The resulting cold, salty water is very dense and thus cascades down to the bottom of the ocean, where it spreads out. Here’s more from a press release about why this matters:

The movement of this dense water is vital. It is the most oxygenated water in the deep ocean and its extreme density and coldness drive many of the significant currents in the major ocean basins connected to the Southern Ocean.

The distinctly different densities of water that move around Antarctica also make it important in regards to climate change. Because the most dense water forms near the surface, close to Antarctica before descending to the ocean floor, any warming that occurs near the surface can be drawn down into the deep ocean.

Importantly, this drives more heat and more carbon into the deep ocean that would otherwise have returned to the atmosphere.

It took Raijin seven hours to process every one second of this nearly four-minute animation. According to Andy Hogg, a professor of earth sciences at Australia National University and lead researcher behind the simulation, it was well worth the computing power: “Being able to actually see how the bottom water moves in three dimensions rather than just looking at numerical, two-dimensional outputs has already opened new areas for scientific research,” he said in the press release.

Personally, my favorite part of the simulation comes at the 3:05 mark, where it looks like South Africa is blowing smoke rings. But really, the whole thing is pretty cool and will surely help scientists understand this largely mysterious part of the world. It seems only fitting that such a simulation would come from Raijin, a deity who in Japanese mythology is both feared and respected for his control over nature.

Japanese mythology also says that children should cover their belly buttons during thunderstorms, lest Raijin eat their tummies. Do with that what you will.

Source:

Big data reveals glorious animation of Antarctic bottom water

, ARC Center of Excellence for Climate System Science.

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Smith Island Is Sinking Into the Chesapeake Bay Thanks to Climate Change

by Myrna Posted on November 3, 2015

By century’s end, it will be “almost completely under water.” A seagull perches on an experimental erosion barrier constructed by the US Army Corps of Engineers just offshore from Smith Island in 1998. Roberto Borea/AP Twelve miles off the coast of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Tim Marshall and I knife through the salty, choppy waters of the Chesapeake Bay in an aging white fishing skiff. It’s a clear, bright August morning, and Marshall, slugging cans of Diet Coke, steers us straight for the approximately 4,500 acres of tidal marsh that make up the federal Martin National Wildlife Refuge. To our backs is Smith Island, the last inhabited offshore island on the Maryland side of the Chesapeake. Marshall pilots us to the outer banks of the wildlife refuge, where the horizon is nothing but the blue waters of the Chesapeake and a faint speck in the distance—the remains of Holland Island, whose 360 residents fled rising waters and eroding soil in 1922, and which serves as a constant reminder to the people living on Smith Island that they might be frogs in a pot of slowly boiling water. Smith Island too is disappearing, its land eroding as it submerges into the Chesapeake. Smith Island comprises the wildlife refuge and a stretch of islands directly south, where roughly 280 residents live in three small villages about 5 feet above sea level. But erosion nips away at Smith Island’s banks at a rate of roughly 2 feet each year, and a 2008 report predicted that by 2100 Smith Island will be “almost completely under water as the Bay’s average level goes up nearly one-foot.” Read the rest at Newsweek. See original article here:   Smith Island Is Sinking Into the Chesapeake Bay Thanks to Climate Change ; ; ;

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Smith Island Is Sinking Into the Chesapeake Bay Thanks to Climate Change

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Leo DiCaprio is already turning the Volkswagen emissions scandal into a movie

by NatishaConnah Posted on October 13, 2015

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio speaks on stage during the Global Citizen Festival. John Taggart/Reuters

Leo DiCaprio is already turning the Volkswagen emissions scandal into a movie

By on 13 Oct 2015commentsShare

Americans may not be very good at avoiding environmental devastation, but we are phenomenal at profiting from it.

Remember that Volkswagen scandal? The one where every nostalgic flower child’s favorite car company betrayed the world by cheating on emissions tests, dumping hundreds of thousands of secret pollutants into an already toxic atmosphere, and causing millions in healthcare damages? I’m guessing you do, because it literally just happened. And yet, Hollywood is already all over it.

Paramount just acquired the rights to a book about the scandal that has yet to be written, Variety reports. And, of course, our good friend and noted Earth lover Leo DiCaprio is already on board to produce, along with Jennifer Davisson Killoran. No other big names are attached to the film yet, but one can only hope that wood nymph Shailene Woodley shows up as a duped Volkswagen owner ready to let her inner rage monster out, and Werner Herzog flexes his acting muscles as a heartless Volkswagen executive. Throw in a little Rosario Dawson as a badass environmental activist, and you’ve got yourself a blockbuster hit.

Teasing aside, it’s actually pretty cool that Hollywood wants to immortalize this travesty. When Grist spoke with veritable film buff and environmental activist Narayana Angulo earlier this summer, he bemoaned the lack of narrative films about environmental issues. There are plenty of documentaries out there, he said, but not much in the way of feature films.

So good for you, Paramount. Way to recognize that it doesn’t make sense to just make sequels, prequels, and remakes until our eyes fall out and the world ends, while the actual end of the world is providing SO MUCH free material. And hey — most people will eventually just be going to the movies for the hopped up A/C, anyway. Perhaps by that point, they’ll find comfort in watching more attractive people conquer what, in their own lives, have become insurmountable problems.

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Leonardo DiCaprio to Produce Movie on Volkswagen Scandal

, Variety.

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New Dietary Guidelines Won’t Include Sustainability

by TahliaCJVchx Posted on October 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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When the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines are released later this year, they’re sure to make waves in the nation’s food economy. Updated every five years, the rules—the government’s official line on what Americans should eat to stay healthy—inform decisions on everything from agricultural subsidies to government food assistance programs to school lunch.

But there’s one thing the new guidelines won’t touch: the health of our environment.

In a statement posted Tuesday on the USDA website, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwel announced that the guidelines will not include recommendations about how to choose foods with the lightest impact on the planet. The dietary guidelines, they wrote, are not “the appropriate vehicle for this important policy conversation.”

The decision came despite the fact that in its February report, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee—the team that reviews scientific and medical evidence and offers advise on what should be included—highlighted the ties between environmental impact and healthy eating. “Access to sufficient, nutritious, and safe food is an essential element of food security for the US,” the report stated. “A sustainable diet ensures this access for both the current population and future generations.”

As my colleague Maddie Oatman noted when the committee released its recommendations, those ideas didn’t go over well with Big Ag backers. Industry groups sent letters to Secretary Vilsack arguing that environmental impact is outside the scope of the Dietary Guidelines and spent millions of dollars trying to dissuade the USDA from including sustainability in its update.

Director of the Earth Institute Jeffrey Sachs, who is a Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, called Tuesday’s announcement a “shameful abnegation of political responsibility,” after heralding the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee report as a key breakthrough.

“For US government officials to suggest that this chapter should be deleted would be to argue for deleting science itself; a shameful abnegation of political responsibility in the face of lobbying pressure,” he said in a press release. “Secretaries Burwell and Vilsack will be remembered for whether they stand up for science or for corporate lobbies.”

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New Dietary Guidelines Won’t Include Sustainability

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Mealworms munch on Styrofoam without dying, shock scientists

by SungKincheloe2 Posted on October 5, 2015

Mealworms munch on Styrofoam without dying, shock scientists

By on 5 Oct 2015commentsShare

Polystyrene foam, aka the devil’s clamshell, aka the indestructible insulator, aka green public enemy No. 1 (or maybe 500 — environmentalists have a lot of enemies), may have finally met its match: mealworms. (Polystyrene and “Styrofoam” are regularly — and incorrectly — used interchangeably. Styrofoam is a kind of polystyrene, but not the kind you’re thinking of.)

That’s right. It turns out, those squirmy little grubs are more than just a hot menu item for entomophagy enthusiasts. They, too, have quite an appetite, and according to the Environmental News Network (ENN), that appetite happens to include Styrofoam and other forms of polystyrene:

While this diet doesn’t sound remotely healthy for the worms, researchers have yet to identify any adverse effects. In comparison studies, mealworms that ate exclusively Styrofoam were equally as healthy as those that ate a more standard diet of bran. Researchers are currently in the process of verifying that families of worms that consume only plastic are still healthy generations from now. Additionally, they want to confirm that predators that eat mealworms remain healthy after consuming worms that eat Styrofoam.

Styrofoam and other polystyrene foam are poisonous to a lot of animals, so mealworms’ ability to digest them came as quite a surprise to scientists. “There’s a possibility of really important research coming out of bizarre places,” Stanford researcher Craig Criddle said in a press release. “Sometimes, science surprises us. This is a shock.”

Half of the Styrofoam that mealworms eat turns into carbon dioxide, but half of whatever mealworms usually eat turns into carbon dioxide, ENN reports. The other half of the Styrofoam turns into “non-toxic poop pellets” that are safe to use as fertilizer. So as long as the mealworms remain healthy, and everything that eats the mealworms remains healthy, then this seems like a win-win-win.

Still, we’re not about to have a bunch of mealworm factories breaking down all the world’s polystyrene into piles and piles of poop pellets. One hundred mealworm can only eat between 35 and 39 milligrams of Styrofoam in a day, according to the press release. That means it would take thousands of mealworms to eat through just a penny’s weight of the stuff.

The real benefit of this research will come when scientists figure out what combination of gut bacteria give mealworms this ability to digest what we humans find so difficult to break down in a cheap and efficient way. Maybe then we’ll be able create giant mealworm gut factories that do break Styrofoam down into piles and piles of poop pellets!

But that’s just the beginning. Criddle and his colleagues also plan to look at whether mealworms and other insects can digest other kinds of plastics, including microbeads and polypropylene — a material commonly used in textiles and car components.

In the mean time, hip entomophagists take note: For your next underground supper club, consider serving polystyrene-fed mealworm tacos with a side of cricket fries and ant salad. Just remember: Skip the home-brewed beer — you don’t want alcohol clouding the natural high that your diners will get from eating a (questionably) sustainable protein source and ridding the Earth of the devil’s clamshell.

Source:

Could Mealworms Help Solve our Styrofoam Waste Problem?

, Environmental News Network.

Plastic-eating worms may offer solution to mounting waste, Stanford researchers discover

, Stanford University.

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Mealworms munch on Styrofoam without dying, shock scientists

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Angry Obama Blasts Congress for Failing America on Guns

by HoracioBittner Posted on October 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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At a press conference Thursday, President Barack Obama was visibly frustrated with a lack of action from Congress to prevent mass shootings like the one that happened today at Umpqua Community College in Oregon.

“It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun,” Obama said.

He recalled an interview in which he said that America is the only country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings regularly. Hours later, there were reports of a shooting at a Lafayette, Louisiana, movie theater.

He continued: “We spend over $1 trillion on preventing terrorism…yet we have a Congress that prevents us from even collecting data on how to reduce gun deaths.”

Original source – 

Angry Obama Blasts Congress for Failing America on Guns

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Shell Just Scrapped Its Arctic Drilling Plans for "the Forseeable Future"

by EthelChutqbor Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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And just like that, it was over.

After years of botched attempts, mountains of red tape, billions of dollars, and countless face-offs with protestors, Royal Dutch Shell announced today that it is pulling the plug on all oil and gas exploration in the Arctic ocean “for the forseeable future.” From the press release:

Shell has found indications of oil and gas in the Burger J well, but these are not sufficient to warrant further exploration in the Burger prospect. The well will be sealed and abandoned in accordance with U.S. regulations.

“The Shell Alaska team has operated safely and exceptionally well in every aspect of this year’s exploration program,” said Marvin Odum, Director, Shell Upstream Americas. “Shell continues to see important exploration potential in the basin, and the area is likely to ultimately be of strategic importance to Alaska and the US. However, this is a clearly disappointing exploration outcome for this part of the basin.”

There was always a chance this could happen. Given the sky-high costs of drilling and transporting oil in the Arctic, making the venture profitable required a complex soup of numbers to all fall in Shell’s favor, particularly how much oil there really was down there and how much Shell could expect to sell it for. (No amount of gas would likely be profitable.) The press release skimps on details, but it blames “the Burger J well result, the high costs associated with the project, and the challenging and unpredictable federal regulatory environment in offshore Alaska.” It also says that Shell is locked into paying $1.1 billion in existing contracts.

Thanks to climate change and the loss of Arctic sea ice, many energy experts have been increasingly bullish on the prospects for Arctic oil exploration. The area could theoretically have the potential to outstrip the Middle East, but as of now it’s now largely untapped. The decision today is a heavy blow to future offshore drilling projects in the Arctic, said Robert Dillon, spokesperson for Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who has been one of the biggest congressional proponents of offshore oil drilling.

“It’s certainly a disappointment,” he said. “It’s now becoming more and more questionable whether there’s going to be offshore activity at all. A lot of uncertainty of how we go forward in Alaska.”

The decision was also a major win for environmental groups, many of whom have made Shell’s Arctic exploration a central focus of their campaigns over the last year.

“It’s proof positive that it’s time to stop going to the ends of the Earth to search for dangerous, costly fossil fuels,” said Franz Matzner, director the Beyond Oil initiative at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s not safe, it’s not what the science demands if we’re serious about climate change, and Shell just proved that it doesn’t make any sense.”

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Shell Just Scrapped Its Arctic Drilling Plans for "the Forseeable Future"

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