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Exxon Has 25 Billion Barrels of Fossil Fuel and Plans To Extract it All

by alka24 Posted on April 2, 2014

Mother Jones

ExxonMobil has 25.2 billion barrels worth of oil and gas in its current reserves, it’s going to extract and sell all of it, and isn’t expecting any meddling climate regulations to get in the way.

That’s the main takeaway of a report the company released this week to its investors, examining the risk that greenhouse gas emissions rules in the US and worldwide might pose to its fossil fuel assets. Exxon made headlines a couple weeks back when it promised to issue the report after facing pressure from shareholders led by Arjuna Capital, a sustainable wealth management firm.

If stricter limits on carbon pollution or high carbon taxes force energy companies to keep their holdings buried underground, the thinking among environmental economists goes, it could topple the companies’ value and leave investors holding the bag. The result, economists warn, would be a collapse of the so-called “carbon bubble.”

Some big energy companies (including Exxon) have already nodded to this problem, by building a theoretical carbon price into their projected balance sheets. But this report is the first time a large oil and gas company has published a detailed assessment of its own climate risk exposure, according to the New York Times.

The report doesn’t present a very optimistic view of the prospects for aggressive climate action by world leaders.

“We are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become ‘stranded’,” the report says. “Stranded assets” is a term climate economists use to refer to fossil fuel reserves that could be stuck in the ground if countries around the world implement sufficiently stringent carbon regulations to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels—a threshold agreed to at the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen. The amount of carbon humans can release without exceeding this limit—roughly 485 billion metric tons of carbon beyond what we’ve already emitted—is often called the “carbon budget.”

Exxon’s report suggests that its planners don’t believe serious carbon limits will be on the books anytime soon, leaving the company free to burn through its reserves of oil and gas. That’s a disconcerting vision to come just on the heels of Sunday’s new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which predicted a nightmarish future if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t slowed soon.

“The reserves are going to be able to turn into money, because they’re assuming there isn’t going to be a policy change,” said Natural Resources Defense Council Director of Climate Programs David Hawkins. “They’re definitely saying that no matter how bad it gets, the world’s addiction to fossil fuels will be so overwhelming that the governments of the world will just suck it up and let people suffer.”

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Exxon Has 25 Billion Barrels of Fossil Fuel and Plans To Extract it All

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When Shirley Temple Black Was a Vietnam War Hawk on the Campaign Trail

by TraceeZerangue Posted on February 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Shirley Temple Black, the beloved 1930s child movie-star who reinvented herself in later years as an American diplomat, died Monday at her Woodside, California, home at the age of 85.

She was tremendously successful on the international stage as a film star (she is ranked as number 18 on the American Film Institute’s list of top female screen legends), but found less success in national politics. In 1967, Black mounted an unsuccessful campaign to represent California’s 11th congressional district. (Superstar Bing Crosby was on her campaign’s finance committee.) A Republican, Black ran on an anti-racism, anti-crime, pro-war platform.

Here’s an excerpt from an Associated Press story from October 1967 that demonstrates how hawkish on Vietnam the one-time Bright Eyes star was:

As for the war in Vietnam, Mrs. Black said: “President Johnson should rely more on the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff than on the advice of Defense Secretary (Robert S.) McNamara.”

“Obviously, civilians make the policy. But after the policy is made, that’s the time you bring in the key military leaders, in order to form the strategy and tactics of how to achieve your goals.”

Aligning herself with the hawks in the debate over what to do in Vietnam, Mrs. Black said she thought U.S. forces should mine the approaches to Haiphong, the principal port, to cut off military supplies from Red China and the Soviet Union.

(Mining that Vietnamese port is something the Nixon administration ended up doing in 1972 during Operation Pocket Money.)

Well, Shirley Temple didn’t win. She lost the Republican nomination to Paul McCloskey, a Korean War vet who strongly opposed US military involvement in Vietnam. “I will be back,” she told supporters at the time of her defeat. “This was my first race and now I know how the game is played. I plan to dedicate my life and energies to public service because I think my country needs it now more than ever.”

Black indeed came back, but perhaps not in the way she initially imagined. In 1968, she went on a European fundraising tour for the Nixon presidential campaign. In 1969, President Nixon appointed her to the five-member delegation to the UN General Assembly, where she earned praise for speaking out on issues such as environmental problems and refugee crises. She later served as US ambassador to Ghana from 1974 to 1976, President Gerald Ford’s chief of protocol for the State Department from 1976 to 1977, and ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1989, serving there during the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.

Following the fall of communism, Black continued to serve in Prague—and found a creative method of mocking those who remained committed communists:

Needling any Communists who may be watching, Black sometimes appears on her home’s balcony in a T-shirt bearing her initials, STB, which also was the acronym of the now-disbanded Czech secret police. Asked what STB agents are doing these days, she replied, “Most of them are driving the taxis you ride around in.”

Now, here’s a photo of a young Shirley Temple posing with a signed photo of President Franklin D. Roosevelt:

Globe Photos/ZUMA

…and here’s one of an older Shirley Temple with co-star Ronald Reagan (decades later, she would serve during the Reagan administration as a State Department trainer):

face to face/ZUMA

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When Shirley Temple Black Was a Vietnam War Hawk on the Campaign Trail

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Today’s USDA Meat Safety Chief is Tomorrow’s Agribiz Consultant

by Apollinaryial Posted on December 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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Deloitte Touche is one of the globe’s “big four” auditing and consulting firms. It’s a player in the Big Food/Ag space—Deloitte’s clients include “75% of the Fortune 500 food production companies.” The firm’s US subsidiary, Deloitte & Touche LLP, has a shiny new asset to dangle before its agribusiness clients: It has hired the US Department of Agriculture’s Undersecretary for Food Safety, Elisabeth Hagan. She will “join Deloitte’s consumer products practice as a food safety senior advisor,” the firm stated in a press release. The firm also trumpeted her USDA affiliation:

“Elisabeth will bring to Deloitte an impressive blend of regulatory level oversight and hands-on experience, stemming from her role as the highest ranking food safety official in the U.S.,” said Pat Conroy, vice chairman, Deloitte LLP, and Deloitte’s U.S. consumer products practice leader.

Last month, Hagan announced her imminent resignation from her USDA post, declaring she would be “embarking in mid-December on a new challenge in the private sector.” Now we know what that “challenge” is. It’s impressive that Deloitte managed to bag a sitting USDA undersecretary—especially the one holding the food safety portfolio, charged with overseeing the nation’s slaughterhouses. Awkwardly, Hagan is still “currently serving” her USDA role, the Deloitte press release states. I’m sure the challenge of watchdogging the meat industry while preparing to offer it consulting services won’t last long. The USDA has not announced a time frame for replacing Hagan.

Hagan won’t be the only member of Deloitte’s US food-safety team with ties to the federal agencies charged with overseeing the food industry. You know those new poultry-slaughter rules that Hagan’s erstwhile fiefdom, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, keeps touting, the ones that would save Big Poultry a quarter-billion dollars a year but likely endanger consumers and workers alike, as I laid out most recently here? Craig Henry, a director within Deloitte’s food & product safety practice, served on the USDA-appointed National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection, which advised the FSIS on precisely those rules, as this 2012 Federal Register notice shows.

Then there’s Faye Feldstein, who serves Deloitte as a senior adviser for food safety issues, the latest post in what her Deloitte bio call a “33-year career in senior positions in the food industry and in federal and state regulatory agencies.” Before setting up shop as a consultant, Feldstein served a ten-year stint at the Food and Drug Administration in various food-safety roles. Before that, she worked for 12 years at W.R. Grace, a chemical conglomerate with interests in food additives and packaging.

Apart from Hagan’s new career direction, some food-safety advocates have offered praise for her tenure at USDA. They point out that, under her leadership, the FSIS cracked down on certain strains of E. Coli in ground beef, an an important and long-overdue move explained in this post by the veteran journalist Maryn McKenna. On his blog, Bill Marler, a prominent litigator of food-borne illness cases on behalf of consumers, called Hagan “one of the very best who has ever held that position,” adding that she’ll be “sorely missed.”

But if the USDA does make good on its oft-stated intention to finalize those awful new poultry rules, I think Hagan will be remembered most for pushing them ahead, to the delight of the poultry industry and the despair of worker and consumer-safety advocates.

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Today’s USDA Meat Safety Chief is Tomorrow’s Agribiz Consultant

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Is Driving the New Smoking?

by nortom23 Posted on September 13, 2013

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Is Driving the New Smoking?

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Burning Trees for Energy and Capturing CO2 Could Reverse Global Warming

by czwcqtpj Posted on July 11, 2013

Mother Jones

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The story first appeared on the Guardian website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Global warming could be reversed using a combination of burning trees and crops for energy, and capturing and storing carbon dioxide underground (CCS), according to an analysis by scientists. But experts cautioned that trying such an approach after temperatures had passed dangerous levels could be problematic, as climate change reduced the number of trees available for “bioenergy”.

The bioenergy and CCS method was the most cost-effective way of tackling carbon emissions, said the team at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, publishing their research in the journal Environmental Research Letters on Thursday. Such an approach could offset and even reverse other emissions from fossil fuels, they claimed.

The lead author of the study, Prof Christian Azar, said it could help bring temperatures down even if they rose above the 2C level that world leaders have agreed to avoid: “Even if current political gridlock causes global warming in excess of 2C, we can reverse the temperature trend and reach targets later. This means that 2C targets, or even more ambitious targets, can remain on the table in international climate negotiations.”

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Burning Trees for Energy and Capturing CO2 Could Reverse Global Warming

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Climate Change Could Mean Seven Times As Many Katrinas

by Unacoomt Posted on March 18, 2013

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Batten down the hatches, East Coasters: A new study argues that for every one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees F) of global warming, the US Atlantic seaboard could see up to seven times as many Katrina-sized hurricanes.

That’s the conclusion of Aslak Grinsted, a climatologist at Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, who led an effort to match East Coast storm surge records from the last 90 years with global temperatures. His results, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that the strongest hurricanes are likely to become more commonplace with only half the level of warming currently projected by scientists.

Red represents hurricane projections with one degree (C) global warming; blue represents no warming. The gap between these lines suggests that a warmer climate will produce more frequent hurricanes; the gap is widest at the top, meaning the biggest increase will be with the biggest storms. Courtesy PNAS

“There is a sensitivity to warming, and it is surprisingly large,” Grinsted said.

The study compiled storm surge measurements from tide gauges at six locations on the East and Gulf Coasts, filtering out the effects of seasonal cycles, daily tides, and overall sea level rise to isolate the impact of storms. Next, these records were stacked against both global temperatures and a series of other climatic factors, like natural water temperature cycles and regional rainfall. The result? Global temperatures turned out to be one of the best predictors for hurricane activity. Using computer models, Grinsted found that a one-degree (C) rise in global temperatures could multiply extreme hurricane frequency by two to seven times.

When it comes to extreme weather, hurricanes are among the most costly events—and also among the least understood. Most of our understanding of the link between hurricanes and climate change traces to a research paper released in 2010 that argued that hurricanes worldwide could become up to eleven percent more intense by 2100; Grinsted’s research adds the wrinkle that the biggest storms, in addition to becoming bigger, are likely to happen more often. That is, in the US: Grinsted said exact projections would likely differ for other coastlines across the world.

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Climate Change Could Mean Seven Times As Many Katrinas

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NASA Scientists Are Turning LA Into One Big Climate-Change Lab

by pitery Posted on March 1, 2013

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This story first appeared on The Atlantic Cities website as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Southern California’s Mount Wilson is a lonesome, hostile peak—prone to sudden rock falls, sometimes ringed by wildfire—that nevertheless has attracted some of the greatest minds in modern science.


City 2.0: Buy the Ebook

George Ellery Hale, one of the godfathers of astrophysics, founded the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1904 and divined that sunspots were magnetic. His acolyte Edwin Hubble used a huge telescope, dragged up by mule train, to prove the universe was expanding. Even Albert Einstein made a pilgrimage in the 1930s to hobnob with the astronomers (and suffered a terrible hair day, a photo shows).

Today, Mount Wilson is the site of a more terrestrial but no less ambitious endeavor. Scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and elsewhere are turning the entire Los Angeles metro region into a state-of-the-art climate laboratory. From the ridgeline, they deploy a mechanical lung that senses airborne chemicals and a unique sunbeam analyzer that scans the skies over the Los Angeles Basin. At a sister site at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), researchers slice the clouds with a shimmering green laser, trap air samples in glass flasks, and stare at the sun with a massive mirrored contraption that looks like God’s own microscope.

These folks are the foot soldiers in an ambitious, interagency initiative called the Megacities Carbon Project. They’ve been probing L.A.’s airspace for more than a year, with the help of big-name sponsors like the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Keck Institute for Space Studies, and the California Air Resources Board. If all goes well, by 2015 the Megacities crew and colleagues working on smaller cities such as Indianapolis and Boston will have pinned down a slippery piece of climate science: an empirical measurement of a city’s carbon footprint.

If that doesn’t sound like something Einstein would scarf down energy bars and hoof up a mountain to check out, give it time. It promises to be a groundbreaking development in the worldwide fight against global warming.

Part of the Megacities team at the CLARS facility in Pasadena. Left to right: Thomas Pongetti, Riley Duren, Eric Kort, Stan Sander. John Metcalfe

Historically, researchers have tried to understand anthropogenic global warming by looking at it from the big picture—first across the planet, then by regions and countries. But two things happened in the past few years that turned their frame of reference. First, they realized that the emissions of a large landmass are extremely difficult to measure. The signal from fossil fuels gets tangled up in a bunch of other things, such as byproducts from the natural ecosystem and agriculture.

Second, they encountered a rash of enthusiasm-killing gridlock in the United States government, with the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks ending in a muddle and a 2010 cap-and-trade bill dying in the Senate. It became clear to environmental stakeholders that if any policy was going to happen on cutting emissions, it was going to be at the scale of states and cities.

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NASA Scientists Are Turning LA Into One Big Climate-Change Lab

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In a blow to Republican rhetoric, China announces plan for a carbon tax

by anjunonstennyao Posted on February 20, 2013

In a blow to Republican rhetoric, China announces plan for a carbon tax

By Philip Bump

When Marco Rubio says that America “is a country, not a planet,” he’s saying that we don’t need to bother cutting pollution because we’re not the worst offenders. If China, which burns nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined, isn’t trying to limit its pollution, why should we? Rubio’s wording may be unique, but his rhetoric isn’t — it’s a key argument for the Republican Party. As long as China’s emitting unchecked carbon pollution, why can’t we?

Premier Hu Jintao meets with President Obama.

Well, so much for that argument. From Xinhua, the official press agency of the Chinese government:

China will proactively introduce a set of new taxation policies designed to preserve the environment, including a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, according to a senior official with the Ministry of Finance (MOF).

The government will collect the environmental protection tax instead of pollutant discharge fees, as well as levy a tax on carbon dioxide emissions, Jia Chen, head of the ministry’s tax policy division, wrote in an article published on the MOF’s website. …

China is among the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gas and has set goals for cutting emissions. The government has vowed to reduce carbon intensity, or the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of economic output, by 40 to 45 percent by 2020 in comparison to 2005 levels.

China’s Ministry of Finance has considered a carbon tax before, with the aim of having it in place by 2012. Some suggested that the timing of that proposal, on the heels of the disastrous Copenhagen climate conference, was meant to blunt criticism over China’s role in scuttling those talks. It’s hard to see what similar politics might be at play in this case, although at least one climate-change-denial site suggests that the move is a feint to encourage America to act on a carbon tax first.

Fat chance of that. Republicans may be using China’s pollution as an excuse to resist increasing the cost of carbon emissions, but if China implements a carbon tax, pollution apologists will just point instead to India. If India acted on carbon, they’d point to the economy. The goal isn’t to offer sincere critique; it’s to delay internalizing the cost of carbon pollution for their allies in the fossil fuel industry.

If Marco Rubio is lucky, that delay will last until after the 2016 primaries. If he’s got any goal in mind, it’s that.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Obama to Nominate REI CEO as Secretary of Interior

by greenenergy4 Posted on February 6, 2013

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According to numerous reports, President Obama will announce on Wednesday that he is nominating Recreational Equipment Incorporated CEO Sally Jewell to serve as the next Secretary of Interior. Jewell, as Washington State native, is certainly a nontraditional pick for a job typically given to Western politicos, and the selection is drawing interesting responses.

(Full disclosureâ&#128;&#148;I’m an REI junkie. The flagship store in Seattle is basically my happy place. You can get many products that are made with recycled materials or made in the US, and you can return anything. OK, end of disclosure.)

Environmental groups issued excited press releases about the selection, noting that Jewell and REI have partnered with both Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation on programs to promote the outdoors. “Whether it’s been through her work to get more kids outside or her accomplishments in building a business that recognizes the passion Americans have to explore the outdoors, Sally Jewell has demonstrated that she knows just how important our wild places are to our national legacy and our economy,” Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said in a press release.

But members of Congress from states heavily involved in energy development were much more cautious. “The livelihoods of Americans living and working in the West rely on maintaining a real balance between conservation and economic opportunity,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). “I look forward to hearing about the qualifications Ms. Jewell has that make her a suitable candidate to run such an important agency, and how she plans to restore balance to the Interior Department.”

Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), chairman of the Public Lands and Environmental Regulation subcommittee of the Natural Resources Committee, said he has “reservations” about the Jewell appointment, including concerns that REI has “intimately supported several special interest groups and subsequently helped to advance their radical political agendas” (i.e., Sierra Club and NWF).

Before coming to REI, Jewell worked as an engineer for Mobil Oil and a banker. See Sarah van Schagen’s Grist profile of Jewell from 2007 for more.

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The U.N. climate conference wraps up, and now all of our problems are solved

by Myrna Posted on December 10, 2012

The U.N. climate conference wraps up, and now all of our problems are solved

By Philip Bump

There are pretty good odds that the atmosphere already contains enough greenhouse gases to push global temperatures more than 2 degrees C higher by the end of the century, an increase broadly understood to mean catastrophic effects across the globe. If the atmosphere isn’t yet at that point, the amount that we’d have to curb our pollution to prevent it becomes steeper and less realistic by the day.

Which is why the United Nations — having previously eradicated from the world the scourges of war, poverty, inadequate medical care, and hunger — holds annual meetings during which it consistently and efficiently ratchets down the levels of greenhouse gas emissions from all of the nations of the world. Every schoolkid, no matter his or her nation of origin, has a photo of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon over the bed, dreaming of one day attaining that most-powerful position on Earth.

This year’s annual meeting, held in Doha, Qatar, wrapped up over the weekend. Two weeks ago, we offered a fairly cynical preview of what to expect from the United Nations’ gathering. Our prediction for its ineffectiveness was almost too optimistic.

As in previous years, participants (limited to a fairly small group of people with credentials given by the U.N.) spent 13 days, 23 hours, and 59 minutes of the two weeks arguing loosely about funding issues and then spent a furious 60 seconds developing a face-saving and ineffective agreement that will, at the very least, ensure that they will be able to expense plane tickets to next year’s meeting. (If this is an exaggeration, it is a slight one.) The last-minute agreement, as described by Reuters:

Almost 200 nations extended on Saturday a weakened U.N. plan for fighting global warming until 2020, averting a new setback to two decades of U.N. efforts that have failed to halt rising world greenhouse gas emissions.

The eight-year extension of the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012 keeps it alive as the sole legally binding plan for combating global warming. But it was sapped by the withdrawal of Russia, Japan and Canada, so its signatories now account for only 15 percent of global greenhouse emisions. …

A package of decisions, known as the Doha Climate Gateway, would also postpone until 2013 a dispute over demands from developing nations for more cash to help them cope with global warming.

All sides say the Doha decisions fell far short of recommendations by scientists for tougher action to try to avert more heatwaves, sandstorms, floods, droughts and rising sea levels.

In summary: The main victory from the meeting was that the Kyoto Protocol (remember the Kyoto Protocol?) will limp forward, with fewer signatories. Yaaayyyyy. But then, as Mother Jones put it: “it’s something.” It seemed for much of the process that even a tiny victory would slip through participants’ fingers; that Kyoto was plucked from the recycling bin is better than nothing and not much else. And as for providing economic support to developing nations that want to build in systems for fighting carbon pollution? We’ll talk to you next year in London.

hydropower

Neither this press conference nor the elegant COP18 branding could stem rampant carbon pollution 🙁

A columnist at The Guardian suggests that there may be one other cause for optimism.

Doha reaffirms that [a replacement to Kyoto] must aim to achieve the UN goal of limiting global warming to 2C. [Ed. – You know, if possible.] And it sets in train a process to review countries’ emissions targets, with the aim of closing the “emissions gap” between current pledges and the reductions needed to meet that goal. The deal creates a new mechanism to compensate the countries worst hit by climate change for the loss and damage it causes. A single negotiations platform has been established to achieve the new agreement, with a deadline for completion of 2015.

This is a much bigger deal than most commentators, and most governments, have realised.

But!

The last time there was a negotiating deadline was 2009, in Copenhagen.

That turned out poorly.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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