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As anti-plastic movements sweep the globe, change doesn’t always come easy

by DannyBurden771 Posted on December 23, 2018

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

Australia’s two largest supermarket chains made waves earlier this year when they announced plans to ban single-use plastic bags in stores across the country. Environmentalists hailed the move, which according to new figures released this month, may have saved more than 1.5 billion bags from going into overstuffed kitchen drawers or landfills in less than six months.

The National Retail Association, a nonprofit group that represents the grocery industry, said in early December the entire country has seen an astonishing 80 percent drop in single-use plastic bags since Coles and Woolworths implemented the bans in July. The two supermarkets, which together own more than 60 percent of the grocery market in Australia, have each said they’ve kept more than 700 million plastic bags out of circulation this year.

But despite the good news, the proposal didn’t happen without some controversy.

Angry shoppers prompted outbursts in checkout lines in several Coles stores and the supermarket giant backflipped just weeks after implementing its ban amid vehement complaints. Coles stores quickly said they would provide heavier-duty, reusable bags for free for the foreseeable future, after some media outlets dubbed the phenomenon “bag rage.”

The reversal, however, created an even bigger outcry among environmental groups who claimed the chain had only increased the plastic problem by making single-use bags more durable and resistant to breaking down. The supermarket quickly backflipped again, saying it would provide those reusable bags for free for a short time before charging customers for them once more.

Both supermarket chains now provide several types of heavy-duty plastic bags for purchase that shoppers can pay for at a cost of about 11 cents apiece, or upwards of several dollars for nicer versions that double as coolers or are made of jute.

Some have worried that the more durable bags have only replaced cheaper single-use plastic bags, but both supermarket chains said they had seen a large uptick in customers bringing in their own bags in the five-month period since the old bags were phased out.

Both Coles and Woolworths declined to say how many new reusable bags they’ve sold. The 1.5 billion figure shared by the NRA doesn’t take into account any multi-use plastic products that have been handed out in their place. But Coles said the retailer was “delighted to see customers grow more accustomed to bringing” bags from home, a sentiment echoed by Woolworths.

“The majority of our customers are forming new habits by bringing their own shopping bags into stores,” a Woolworths spokesperson told HuffPost in an email. “This is reflected at the check out where we are seeing less and less transactions from customers having to buy new bags.”

Greenpeace Australia, which was heavily critical of Coles during its double-backflip on the ban, said the end of single-use plastic sales was a “great step in the right direction.” It also noted that on top of the grocery bans, every state in Australia has its own ban on plastic bags or one about to go into effect, except New South Wales (where the country’s largest city, Sydney, lies).

Zoë Deans, a campaigner at the environmental group said Greenpeace knew “people were happy to bring reusable bags with them” after an initial adjustment period, but said the change can take time.

“Switching to reusable bags can take a bit of adjustment, and our recommendation is to keep some in your car, by your front door, in your desk — make sure they’re accessible so you don’t forget them,” Deans told HuffPost. “We’d love to see supermarkets encouraging and trusting consumers to do so.”

Single-use plastic bags are produced en masse, but difficult to recycle. Australia has a population of just 25 million, but Coles and Woolworths estimated before the ban the chains used some 3.2 billion bags apiece for customers’ groceries.

The products can easily wind up in waterways, and a 2018 report by the Ocean Conservancy found plastic grocery bags to be the fifth most common item gathered during environmental clean-ups. Stories of animals who gorged to death on plastic have regularly appeared in the news, including a whale found with more than 80 bags in its stomach.

Bans or restrictions on plastic bags are now in effect in more than 40 countries, according to The New York Times.

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As anti-plastic movements sweep the globe, change doesn’t always come easy

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CBO dismisses costs of global warming, posing hurdle for climate legislation

by LynwoodKroll1 Posted on December 21, 2018

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

In a baffling repudiation of the federal government’s own scientists, the Congressional Budget Office last week said that climate change poses little economic risk to the United States in the next decade.

The statement, which went so far as to highlight dubiously positive effects of rising global temperatures, poses a potential hurdle for future legislation to curb surging greenhouse gas emissions, experts said, and amounts to textbook climate change denial.

Buried on page 292 of a 316-page report titled “Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2019 to 2028,” the CBO said: “Many estimates suggest that the effect of climate change on the nation’s economic output, and hence on federal tax revenues, will probably be small over the next 30 years and larger, but still modest, in the following few decades.”

“That’s just completely false,” Gary Yohe, an environmental economist at Wesleyan University, said by phone Wednesday. “There are no references to these ‘many estimates,’ and the following part of the paragraph cherry-picks.”

The report — first noted on Twitter by investigative reporter David Sirota — goes on to tout positive effects like “fewer deaths from cold weather” and “improvements in agricultural productivity” as some of “the more certain effects of climate change on humans over the next several decades.”

The stunning remarks directly contradict the National Climate Assessment, which found that, by 2100, crop damage, lost labor, and extreme weather will cost the U.S. economy upward of $500 billion a year. That’s “more than the current gross domestic product of many U.S. states,” according to the report, drafted by researchers at 13 federal agencies.

In October the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change determined that unabated global warming beyond 2.3 degrees F above preindustrial levels would cause $54 trillion in damage and that the world is likely to hit that average temperature increase unless world governments halve emissions by 2030.

In a lengthy statement to HuffPost, the CBO referred to three of its own past reports, including one that said, “Even under scenarios in which significant climate change is assumed, the projected long-term effects on GDP would tend to be modest relative to underlying economic growth.”

“Although CBO has not undertaken a full analysis of the budgetary costs stemming from climate change, it has recently analyzed the potential costs of future hurricane damage caused by climate change and coastal development,” read an excerpt from one report highlighted in the statement. “All told, CBO projects that the increase in the amount of hurricane damage attributable to coastal development and climate change will probably be less than 0.05 percent of GDP in the 2040s.”

The agency’s report attributed differing climate predictions to “the imperfect understanding of physical processes and of many aspects of the interacting components (land, air, water, ice, and all forms of life) that make up the Earth’s climate system.”

In an as-yet-unpublished study shared with HuffPost, Yohe calculated that hurricane damage alone totaled $2.9 trillion from 1998 to 2018. Of that, he found $2.25 trillion (about $107 billion per year) could be attributed to climate change. That sum is up from $900 billion ($45 billion per year) from 1978 to 1997.

The CBO finding could delay efforts to pass long-overdue climate legislation in the next few years and provide ammunition to combat any such measures for lawmakers who have long denied the scientific realities of global warming on ideological grounds.

“Anybody writing legislation is going to have to understand that using budgetary effects is not necessarily going to get you a long way to getting passage,” said Mark Harkins, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute.

The CBO, established as Congress’ official budget scorekeeper in 1974, may be identifying a “difference between the impact on the budget and the economy,” said Stan Collender, a federal spending expert who runs the website The Budget Guy.

“If CBO said it, it’s serious and credible,” he said, adding that the assessment “decreases the political imperative” for sweeping climate policies like the Green New Deal that Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a Democrat from New York) and more than 40 other Democrats have vowed to champion in the next Congress.

But some say the CBO increasingly poses an obstacle to policies needed to curb global warming and halt worsening poverty, in the name of misplaced concerns about the national deficit. Among them is Stephanie Kelton, an economist at Stony Brook University and a proponent of modern monetary theory, the concept that, under a currency like the dollar, a government can print as much money as it wants without fear of going bankrupt.

When the CBO found that Republican tax cuts to the rich and corporations would inflate the national deficit, the GOP attacked the nonpartisan agency, and the White House claimed the CBO’s math “doesn’t add up.” While objecting to the GOP’s tax cut for the wealthy in an era of climate crisis, Kelton lauded the political will to challenge the traditional debt calculus.

“Everyone’s got to stop being so freaking deferential to the CBO,” she said by phone. “Republicans weren’t afraid to call them out and say their numbers were wrong. They dismissed it. I just think Democrats need to stand up when it comes time.”

Federal efforts to combat climate change should be met with the kind of seemingly unlimited bipartisan support that exists for military spending to defend the country from foreign threats, Kelton said, calling the CBO report “out of step with what the scientific community and others are telling us.”

“You’ve got to figure out a way around the CBO,” she said. “If they’re going to become an obstacle, you either have to go around or through or you remove the obstacle.”

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CBO dismisses costs of global warming, posing hurdle for climate legislation

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Want clean air in 2019? Let’s talk climate change

by IsabellCroft Posted on December 20, 2018

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For years, air quality and climate change have been like star-crossed lovers — inextricably linked, but never quite finding their way to each other in environmental policy and dialogue. Well in 2018, the two finally got hot and heavy thanks to several landmark reports and climate calamities literally taking our breath away. People seem to see that it makes sense to tackle air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions together.

Especially on the local level, failing to take air quality into consideration has left some glaring holes in our climate action strategies. Take, for instance, California’s cap-and-trade system, a climate solution touted by some environmentalists. Although California managed to reduce its carbon emissions overall for the state, its carbon trading market ended up concentrating contaminants in the “fenceline” neighborhoods that were already facing the most pollution.

From a public health perspective, according to Lara Cushing, the lead author of a study on the environmental equity of carbon trading, getting the most good out of emissions reductions “means prioritizing emissions reductions from sources that also release a lot of health-damaging pollutants.”

The effect climate change has had on air quality hasn’t headlined much in the past. But that changed after this year’s blazing wildfires sent California’s greenhouse gas gains up in smoke. On top of that, record-breaking heat waves have sped up the production of ozone pollution — a trend that will likely continue thanks to global warming predictions. The behemoth 4th National Climate Assessment dedicated 27 of its more than 1,500 pages to air quality.

“Early on when we were talking about climate, the old iconic polar bear disappearing became sort of the focus,” says Janice Nolan, assistant vice president of national policy at the American Lung Association. What’s changing now, she says, is that “people are seeing that this is a human health impact.”

Even the World Health Organization got in on the air quality action in 2018, releasing a child environmental health report this October with an entire section dedicated to the benefits of cleaner air for health and the climate. “Actions to reduce air pollution will benefit child health, not only by avoiding direct effects but also by reducing emissions of certain greenhouse gases and thus mitigating climate change and its effects on health,” it read.

And last but certainly not least on the big, scary study list, the U.N.’s special climate report released this year spelled out the case for finding solutions that target both climate change and air pollution: “Focusing on pathways and policies which both improve air quality and reduce impacts of climate change can provide multiple co-benefits.”

These reports sound like a lot of sad news, but the great thing about this newfound attention to the pairing between climate action and clean air policies is that it’s super efficient, since carbon and the crap that makes it harder to breathe are often released at the same time.

The two solutions actually make each other better when they’re together. Awwww.

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Want clean air in 2019? Let’s talk climate change

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Lisa Murkowski’s new plan for the Arctic gets a little help from … Santa Claus?

by ThurmanFried Posted on December 17, 2018

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Ho ho ho! It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas … for industries that stand to benefit from a melting Arctic. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, introduced something called the Arctic Policy Act last week, and she’s getting a boost from Old Saint Nick.

The bill is a new and improved version of the Arctic Research and Policy Act of 1984, which the senator says needs updating to keep up with the changing Arctic. It’s not lost on anyone that vanishing ice means more economic opportunities for Alaska. And Murkowski has been fighting hard to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling. Thanks to President Trump, that dream could soon become reality.

As part of the senator’s new bill, the president would appoint nine members to the Arctic Research Commission. Seven of those members would be indigenous residents and researchers, and two would be industry representatives. (Looks like this is one list you can get on whether you’re naughty or nice.)

Speaking of Christmas, Murkowski tried to highlight the opportunities for Arctic commerce by invoking the holiday spirit. “I think Santa had this figured out a long time ago,” she said during a Senate floor speech. “Even Santa understood the geo-strategic position of the Arctic.”

Baby, it’s warm outside! Especially in the Arctic, which is warming at a rate double the rest of the planet.

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Lisa Murkowski’s new plan for the Arctic gets a little help from … Santa Claus?

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Welcome to the Eocene, where ice sheets turn into swamps

by WillardFuerst Posted on December 11, 2018

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Our current rate of warming will quickly lead us back to a climate that predates the evolution of modern humans, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That kind of rapid change has no direct comparison in all of Earth’s multi-billion year history.

“The only thing that comes to mind is a meteorite impact,” says co-author Jack Williams, a paleoecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The researchers analyzed the current, near-past, and near-future climates for every part of the planet, and then compared them to what likely existed during similar warming periods of the distant past. The results were shocking, even to Williams.

“We are creating a geological-scale climate event,” Williams says. “These things don’t happen that often, and we don’t know how humans will do through it.”

Without rapidly reducing emissions, we’ll quickly go back to a climate similar to somewhere between the Pliocene and Eocene — geological epochs that occurred about 3 million, and about 56 million years ago, respectively. Both would have hellish consequences and likely reshape human civilization permanently.

During the Pliocene period, global temperatures were about 2-4 degrees Celsius warmer than today and sea levels eventually stabilized about 60 feet higher than current levels. It was a world largely inconsistent with natural ice formation.

By 2030, under a business-as-usual scenario, Pliocene-like conditions become the closest match for most land areas, according to the study. Under a moderate climate action scenario, like the lax pledges of the Paris Agreement, that could be extended out to 2040. Only a drastic, economy-wide makeover within the next decade, consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C, would avoid the transition.

“This is coming up pretty fast,” Williams says.

An even more worrying period in Earth history was the Eocene, about 56 million years ago. The warmest part of this period — the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum — lasted around 200,000 years and was one of the warmest times in Earth history. The 8 degrees C-warmed world triggered a deep-sea mass extinction event and rainstorms so intense they scoured away the land surface at a continent scale. Humans are currently releasing carbon into the atmosphere at approximately 50 times the rate of the volcanic eruptions that led to the Eocene warm period.

According to Williams and his team, the Earth could tip toward Eocene-like conditions in just 120 years, based on current emissions trajectories. Millennials’ grandchildren would likely still be alive. Over the long haul, such conditions would be consistent with Greenland transforming from a mile-thick ice sheet to a marshy swamp, similar to Louisiana or Florida.

In 250 years from now on our current path, about 9 percent of the Earth’s land surface — mostly in East and Southeast Asia, northern Australia, and the coasts of the Americas — would transform into climates beyond the Eocene with no known precedent in all of Earth history, at least since life first formed.

But with rapid, near-term emissions reductions, those kinds of unprecedented and unknown climates can be almost entirely avoided, Williams says. Understanding the urgency and the scale of the choices currently facing humanity requires “balancing hope and despair,” he says.

“We’ve been talking about these challenges for years and there’s not been much measurable progress in stabilizing our greenhouse emissions,” Williams says. “We’ve built our cities and our societies for the current climate.” As a scientist and a concerned citizen, he said that observing the nations of the world not taking urgent action is like watching “a slow-motion train wreck.”

The challenge, according to Williams, is that “our options narrow as time goes forward.” The longer we wait to institute radical changes in society, the more likely the climate will become radically and irreversibly different, during the lifetimes of people alive today.

Talking about the choice we currently face as a civilization is perhaps the most important thing that any of us can do. The choice between a liveable world and a world completely unknown in all of Earth history, as Williams and his colleagues uncovered, is one of the starkest talking points yet.

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Welcome to the Eocene, where ice sheets turn into swamps

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Global carbon emissions are on the rise, but don’t let that dash your hopes

by ClaraAgosto Posted on December 6, 2018

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Carbon dioxide, that invisible, earth-warming gas you keep hearing about, is anticipated to hit an all-time high in 2018. Emissions are expected to rise by 2.7 percent this year, according to new research. That’s compared to a 1.6 percent rise in 2017 and a plateau between 2014 and 2016.

What’s behind this disturbing shift? A rise in coal usage, particularly in India and China, as well as the United States’ continued dependence on oil and gas. That’s according to two studies published Wednesday by the Global Carbon Project, a group of 100 scientists from around the world. Unveiled the same week as the United Nations climate change conference in Poland, the new research puts in sharp perspective just how far the world still needs to go to address carbon emissions, even with renewables booming.

“The growing global demand for energy is outpacing decarbonization for now,” Corinne Le Quéré, a French-Canadian climate scientist and lead author of the research, said in a statement. “This needs to change, and change quickly.”

There’s a lot a stake with this spike in emissions. Most recently, the United Nations IPCC climate report warned of a societal and ecological collapse if we don’t keep the world below 2 degrees C warming. When it comes down to it, climate change means the loss of lives — as emissions go up, we’ll see more intense heatwaves, hurricanes, and wildfires.

It all sounds pretty grim, but some of the same researchers behind these reports found things to be optimistic about. Le Quéré, along with former U.N. climate office head Christiana Figueres and other climate experts, authored an analysis in Nature of the Global Carbon Project’s findings. What we’ve achieved so far, they write, seemed “unimaginable a decade ago.” Here are the roses among the thorns:

  1. “If current trends continue, renewables will produce half of the world’s electricity by 2030.”

The future is renewable. This isn’t just a hopeful thought — it’s already poised to be. The cost of solar has dropped a whopping 80 percent in the past decade, and renewables are now cheaper than coal. We already have a lot of the systems in place to shift the world away from gas and oil. Worldwide, more than half of new capacity for generating electricity is renewables.

Developing countries are leading the way on this one; in many, renewables account for the majority of new power generation. Now, the world’s developed nations (the largest polluters) need to catch up.

  1. “Big batteries will spread beyond utilities.”

Renewables have some issues to work out — namely, how to keep delivering power even when clouds cover the sun and the wind stops blowing. The good news is that batteries offer a promising solution for beautiful, continuous power storage. They’ve certainly come a long way from the tiny, forgotten devices scattered about the catch-all drawer in your kitchen: Battery technology is quickly improving, and the price of battery storage is anticipated to halve by 2030.

Advances in battery technology have led to demand for electric vehicles, and many car manufacturers are shifting over. The transition to batteries will allow “developing regions to leapfrog the need for fossil-fuel power plants and conventional distribution grids, just as mobile phones overtook landlines,” according to the commentary.

  1. “Most U.S. citizens live in a jurisdiction that still supports the Paris goals.”

National governments in key countries like Brazil and the United States threaten to undermine global progress on climate change. The good news is that local governments and businesses are stepping up their game. After President Trump announced his intent to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, thousands of city officials promised to stick with the country’s original goals.

As the Nature analysis notes, “globally, more than 9,000 cities and municipalities from 128 countries, representing 16 percent of the world’s population, have reiterated their commitment to the Paris Agreement.” On top of that, more than 6,000 companies around the world have committed to the climate agreement, and 1,400 companies have factored a price on carbon into their business plans.

As global leaders now meet in Poland to determine how to hold onto a quickly destabilizing world, the task at hand is clear — at least in the abstract. The commentary states that the transition to renewables is “an economic imperative and an ecological necessity” and calls upon leaders to “accelerate that momentum and keep everyone on board.”

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Global carbon emissions are on the rise, but don’t let that dash your hopes

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The good, the bad, and the ridiculous: How media covered the National Climate Assessment

by KaseyStallworth Posted on December 3, 2018

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Right-wingers’ efforts to derail media coverage of the National Climate Assessment backfired not once, but twice.

First, the Trump administration tried to bury the National Climate Assessment by releasing it on Black Friday, but that tactic bombed. It turns out that “Trump tries to bury a new climate report” is a much sexier headline than “Scientists release a new climate report.”

Then climate deniers fanned out on TV networks to spread lies and deceptive talking points about the report, but they got far more criticism than they expected, and that criticism kept climate change in the news.

Overall, the report got loads of media coverage in the days after it was released. The quality was decidedly mixed — some good, some awful — but the good coverage appears to have outweighed the bad.

The good

At least 140 newspapers around the country featured the National Climate Assessment on their front pages the morning after it was released, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. That included The New York Times and The Washington Post, which have teams of climate reporters, and also smaller papers all over the U.S., including 20 in California. Some highlighted the ways that climate change is affecting their regions, like the Portland Press Herald in Maine:

MSNBC aired some strong segments. In one, host Ali Velshi mocked President Donald Trump’s claim that his “gut” told him the report is wrong. Then Velshi interviewed climate scientist Brenda Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a co-author of the assessment, who explained the report’s findings and how scientists arrived at them.

CNN served up some highly questionable coverage (more on that below), but it also did some good interviews with climate scientists and with three senators who are serious about addressing the climate crisis. CNN took a novel approach to real-time fact-checking when the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, lied about the report during a press briefing. The network showed live video of Sanders, paired alongside a text bar labeled “Facts First” that corrected some of her false claims:

All of the Sunday morning political talk shows discussed the report on the weekend after it was released. It was the first time this year that every one of them addressed climate change on the same day. That’s how rarely they cover the crisis.

The bad

Unfortunately, we would have been better off without some of that Sunday show coverage — particularly the segments that gave airtime to rabid climate deniers. One of the worst ran on NBC’s Meet the Press and featured Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank supported by the Koch brothers. She employed a favorite denier line — “I’m not a scientist” — and then proceeded to spout pure nonsense about the globe is getting cooler.

Egregious drivel about climate change also cropped up on CNN’s State of the Union, which asked not one but two climate deniers to weigh in on the report. Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa, offered a bland, lukewarm serving of climate denial: “Our climate always changes and we see those ebb and flows through time.”

Former Republican Senator Rick Santorum one-upped Ernst by praising the Trump team’s attempt to bury the report and claiming that the scientists who wrote it were “driven by the money.”

Santorum was roundly mocked on Twitter for making such a completely bananas claim. Many of the climate scientists who worked on the report were not paid at all for their efforts, and professors working in the field don’t earn more than their colleagues in other disciplines. You might have thought the widespread mockery would discourage other deniers from following suit, or at least discourage CNN from giving them a platform. You would have been wrong.

The following Monday, CNN hosted two more right-wingers who made the same ridiculous claim that climate scientists were in it for the money: Tom DeLay, who resigned as Republican House majority leader in 2005 after being convicted of money laundering and conspiracy, and Stephen Moore, a Trump-loving “economist” who’s worked for Koch-funded groups.

Then on Tuesday morning, CNN seemed like it was trying to redeem itself. It ran one segment in which CNN political analyst John Avlon fact-checked and thoroughly debunked the claim that scientists are getting rich by studying climate change, and another in which climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe explained that she and the other co-authors of the National Climate Assessment were paid “zero dollars” for their efforts.

But a few hours later, the bonkers claims were back. Both Santorum and Moore returned to CNN to repeat the lie that scientists are driven by a multi-billion-dollar climate change industry that has manufactured a false crisis. CNN’s Anderson Cooper found time to air Santorum’s warmed-over lie on his show, but failed to air an interview that he had conducted with Hayhoe. Cooper’s Hayhoe interview was only posted online.

Oh, and CNN also failed to note that Santorum, Moore, and DeLay have all received copious amounts of cash from the fossil fuel industry.

The backlash to the bad

Other media outlets bashed CNN and NBC for featuring climate deniers, leading to even more more coverage of climate change and the National Climate Assessment, mostly for the good.

The New York Times published a fact-checking piece titled, “The Baseless Claim That Climate Scientists Are ‘Driven’ by Money,” which cited and debunked statements made by Santorum and DeLay. PunditFact, a project of the fact-checking site PolitiFact, looked into Pletka’s claims and labeled them “false.”

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The New York Times’ media columnist Jim Rutenberg published a story titled “News Networks Fall Short on Climate Story as Dolphins Die on the Beach,” which highlighted the false claims made by Pletka and Santorum and put them in the context of how climate change has hit Florida. The Washington Post‘s media columnist Margaret Sullivan then tweeted Rutenberg’s story.

Climate scientist Hayhoe published an op-ed in The Washington Post that debunked the myths propagated on CNN by Santorum and DeLay, among others.

WNYC’s On the Media hosted yours truly in a conversation about coverage of the National Climate Assessment, including the problem of featuring climate deniers on air.

Politico‘s Morning Media daily newsletter, written by media reporter Michael Calderone, highlighted problems with press coverage of the National Climate Assessment on four different occasions after the report came out.

The ABC News political analyst Matthew Dowd was just one of many influential media figures who tweeted their disapproval of segments that featured climate deniers:

The fact that some members of the media screwed up their coverage so royally meant that others kept reporting on the story longer than they might have otherwise.

Fox opts for footwear coverage

Meanwhile, the folks over at Trump’s favorite network were living in their own universe, as usual. Fox News gave the National Climate Assessment very little airtime. A few straight-news segments covered it, but the most popular Fox shows didn’t. CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter pointed out that on the day of the report’s release, Fox spent more time discussing the shoes of Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat from New York, than it did discussing climate change.

Considering what Fox’s top personalities would have been likely to say about the report had they bothered to cover the National Climate Assessment, it’s probably just as well that they kept quiet.

Lisa Hymas is director of the climate and energy program at Media Matters for America. She was previously a senior editor at Grist.

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The good, the bad, and the ridiculous: How media covered the National Climate Assessment

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Video games consume more electricity than 25 power plants can produce

by TommyM18obifynm Posted on December 1, 2018

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

A few years ago, Evan Mills’ 14-year-old son Nathaniel wanted to get into gaming. To juice up the experience, he wanted to build his own computer like more and more gamers do. Mills is an energy expert, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, so he struck a deal with his son: “I’ll bankroll it if you help me measure the hell out of it and let’s see how much energy this is really going to use.” His son agreed, and they “went at it,” Mills recalls. “We had a power meter and all the tools. And when the results came in — it was jaw dropping.”

“I’m looking at the power ratings, and I’m like, ‘What? This graphics card uses 300 watts? That one uses 500 watts? Is this a typo? This is way out on the fringes.’” In time, the father-and-son team hardly paid attention to the games themselves, instead focusing on their watt meter and switching out hardware and games to see which configurations would make the electricity readings spike or fall.

In 2015, they released a research paper that got picked up by PC Gamer and other outlets, and Mills landed a $1.4 million grant from the California Energy Commission to continue the research. Last week, Mills released another report, titled “Green Gaming: Energy Efficiency without Performance Compromise,” that builds on his years looking into a relatively untouched field of study. Gaming’s “plug load” was long overlooked in part because it fell into the miscellaneous category of non-appliances whose energy consumption was either not understood or assumed to be less significant.

To fill in the blanks, Mills’ research team created a gaming lab with 26 different systems, a host of displays, and all manner of consoles and virtual reality equipment. Over two years, they tested 37 popular games in eight different genres, including Call of Duty: Black Ops, Skyrim, and FIFA17. But it was clear early on that gaming’s energy consumption, Mills says, “is not trivial.”

So just how big is gaming’s environmental footprint? Globally, PC gamers use about 75 billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year, equivalent to the output of 25 electric power plants. (And that doesn’t include console games.) In the United States, games consumes $6 billion worth of electricity annually — more power than electric water heaters, cooking appliances, clothes dryers, dishwashers, or freezers. As the report concludes, “video gaming is among the very most intensive uses of electricity in homes.” And more power means more greenhouse gas emissions: American gamers emit about 12 million tons of carbon dioxide annually — the equivalent of about 2.3 million passenger cars. Games are rated for things like sex and violence, Mills points out, but games and gear are “silent on their carbon footprint.”

What’s more, games’ impact could balloon as their market keeps expanding. “This isn’t the domain of 15-year-old boys anymore,” Mills says. “This is something that two-thirds of American households are engaged in. And what does it mean for the population? It’s a lot of energy and a lot of carbon.” Within five years, the electricity demand for gaming in California could rise by 114 percent, according to the report.

Some of gaming’s energy demand is driven by emerging technologies like virtual reality and higher-resolution connected displays. Cloud-based gaming, in which graphics processing is conducted on remote servers, is especially energy intensive, increasing overall electricity use by as much as 60 percent for desktop computers and 300 percent for laptops.

Luckily, it’s not all doom and gloom. “There is the potential to save a lot of energy with very little effort and little to no effect with the quality or experience,” says Jimmy Mai, a computer technician and one of the project’s principal testers. An avid gamer, Mai’s job was to set up the equipment every day and then play the games, diving into some titles he’d always wanted to explore, like League of Legends, World of Tanks, and The Witcher III (“a beautiful game,” says Mai, who jokes that this was “sort of a dream project”). Gaming equipment “is constantly being revised, becoming more energy efficient, and becoming more powerful in some cases,” Mai says. Mills notes that by simply changing out the lab’s graphics cards and power supply units, his team could reduce its energy consumption by 30 to 50 percent—with no reduction in the games’ performance.

The researchers found that gaming’s electricity demand could fall by 24 percent in the next five years if gamers shifted toward more efficient equipment and change their playing habits. Mills and his colleagues have created a website that outlines steps gamers can take to save energy. For example, there’s a huge range in how much energy different gaming systems use — anywhere from 5 kWh per year (very little) to 1,200 kWh per year (equivalent to leaving a 60-watt lightbulb on for more than two years straight.) Simply switching to a more efficient power supply unit can realize a 13 percent energy savings. And if that’s not enough incentive, the report shows how saving energy will also save gamers money. The annual electricity bill for a “power-sipping Nintendo Switch” can be as little as $5, while a “high-end desktop system run by an extreme gamer” can run up to $400 or more.

Awareness can have an impact, too, says Mills. Even though this entire project began with his son, its findings turned him off from gaming. “When my son saw the carbon footprint, he did lose his interest,” Mills says. For others, like Mai, who often worked in the gaming lab by day and still fired up his own system at night, giving up on gaming isn’t going to happen. (“Jimmy is going to go out in a wooden box gaming,” Mills says.) We’ll just have to find a way to enlist them in the massive multiplayer quest to save the planet.

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Video games consume more electricity than 25 power plants can produce

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Trump administration’s climate report raises new questions about nuclear energy’s future

by LGYJaymeknbiym Posted on November 30, 2018

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

Call it the nuclear power industry’s thirst trap.

The United States’ aging fleet of nuclear reactors ― responsible for one-fifth of the country’s electricity and most of its low-carbon power ― has never been more necessary as policymakers scramble to shrink planet-warming emissions. Yet the plants are struggling to stay afloat, with six stations shut down in the last five years and an additional 16 reactors scheduled to close over the next decade. So far, new coal- and gas-burning facilities are replacing them.

The nuclear industry blames high maintenance costs, competition from cheaper alternatives and hostile regulators concerned about radiation disasters like the 2012 Fukushima meltdown in Japan. But the country’s most water-intensive source of electricity faces what could be an even bigger problem as climate change increases the risk of drought and taxes already crumbling water infrastructure.

That finding, highlighted in the landmark climate change report that the Trump administration released with apparent reluctance last Friday, illustrates the complex and at times paradoxical realities of anthropogenic, or human-caused, warming. It also stokes an already hot debate over the role nuclear energy should play in fighting global warming, a month after United Nations scientists warned that carbon dioxide emissions must be halved in the next 12 years to avoid cataclysmic climate change leading to at least $54 trillion in damage.

The report ― the second installment of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated update on the causes and effects of anthropogenic warming from 13 federal agencies ― devoted its entire third chapter to water contamination and depletion. Aging, deteriorating infrastructure means “water systems face considerable risk even without anticipated future climate changes,” the report states. But warming-linked droughts and drastic changes in seasonal precipitation “will add to the stress on water supplies and adversely impact water supply.”

Nearly every sector of the economy is susceptible to water system changes. And utilities are particularly at risk. In the fourth chapter, the report’s roughly 300 authors conclude, “Most U.S. power plants … rely on a steady supply of water for cooling, and operations are expected to be affected by changes in water availability and temperature increases.”

For nuclear plants, that warning is particularly grave. Reactors require 720 gallons of water per megawatt-hour of electricity they produce, according to data from the National Energy Technology Laboratory in West Virginia cited in 2012 by the magazine New Scientist. That compares with the roughly 500 gallons coal requires and 190 gallons natural gas needs to produce the same amount of electricity. Solar plants, by contrast, use approximately 20 gallons per megawatt-hour, mostly for cleaning equipment, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group.

Nuclear plants are already vulnerable to drought. Federal regulations require plants to shut down if water in the river or lake that feeds its cooling drops below a certain level. By the end of the 2012 North American heat wave, nuclear generation fell to its lowest point in a decade, with plants operating at only 93 percent of capacity.

The availability of water is one problem, particularly for the majority of U.S. nuclear plants located far from the coasts and dependent on freshwater. Another is the temperature of the water that’s available.

Nearly half the nuclear plants in the U.S. use once-through cooling systems, meaning they draw water from a local source, cool their reactors, then discharge the warmed water into another part of the river, lake, aquifer, or ocean. Environmental regulations bar plants from releasing used water back into nature above certain temperatures. In recent years, regulators in states like New York and California rejected plant operators’ requests to pull more water from local rivers, essentially mandating the installation of costly closed-loop systems that cool and reuse cooling water.

In 2012, Connecticut’s lone nuclear power plant shut down one of its two units because the seawater used to cool the plant was too warm. The heat wave that struck Europe this summer forced utilities to scale back electricity production at nuclear plants in Finland, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland. In France, the utility EDF shut down four reactors in one day.

“Already they’re having trouble competing against natural gas and renewable energy,” said John Rogers, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Add onto that high water temperatures, high air temperatures and drought. It’s just another challenge.”

But water has yet to pose an existential crisis. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that it considers climate change when reviewing applications for nuclear plants’ construction or operation permits and that it has never rejected one over concerns about dwindling cooling water resources.

“For plants on lakes and rivers, the basic consideration will continue to be whether or not the water level in that body is high enough to meet the conditions of the license,” said Scott Burnell, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “To this point, there have been no indications in the NRC’s analyses to suggest that plants would have to deal with the potential for the water bodies to no longer be able to fulfill their function.”

If or when that situation arises, a plant would have to propose a plan to maintain the requirements of the license, likely by reducing water intake and cutting electricity production, he said.

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There are ways to make nuclear plants more efficient with water. Closed-loop systems already cool 40 percent of the country’s reactors. For more than a decade, regulators and industry players have been discussing the feasibility of air-cooled condensers, which use electricity generated by the plant to power air conditioners that cool reactors without water. But the technology siphons roughly 7 percent of the power produced by the plant and has yet to be installed at any U.S. nuclear station, according to the industry-funded Nuclear Energy Institute.

Another approach is to use recycled water. To cool its three reactors, the Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona sources most of the 20,000 gallons it uses per minute from reclaimed sewage from a treatment plant near Phoenix — a technique hailed in 2016 as “a feat of engineering” amid a drought.

Breakthroughs like that could make nuclear an attractive option for powering solutions to water scarcity in the years to come, such as desalinating brackish or saltwater and moving it to drought-parched regions.

“That’s energy intensive,” said Matt Wald, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute. “If you want to do that without adding carbon emissions, you’re likely to look at nuclear power as a way to do that.”

That, however, gets to the heart of the biggest question looming over the nuclear industry: Is it, given the radioactive waste it produces, clean energy?

For the growing number of states and municipalities pledging to use 100 percent renewable energy by the middle of the century, the answer is maybe.

Hawaii became the first state to adopt a 100 percent renewable electricity rule in 2015, pledging to quit gas and coal by 2045. The law makes no mention of nuclear, probably because the archipelago state has no reactors and requires a minimum two-thirds vote from both houses of the legislature to approve the construction of a nuclear plant or radioactive waste site.

The 100 percent clean electricity bill that California passed in August mandates that the state generate 60 percent of its electricity from renewables like wind and solar by 2030. But it gives regulators another 15 years after that to complete the overhaul with energy sources considered nonrenewable, including nuclear power, large hydropower dams, and gas-fired power plants that capture and store emissions.

A statute that Atlanta passed in June to get the city to 100 percent clean electricity by 2035 is vague, listing nuclear as a source of clean energy but vowing to get all its power from renewables.

For the Sierra Club, the environmental giant making a huge push to get cities and states to go all renewable, nuclear power is “a uniquely dangerous energy technology for humanity” and “no solution to climate change.”

“There’s no reason to keep throwing good money after bad on nuclear energy,” Lauren Lantry, a Sierra Club spokeswoman, said by email. “It’s clear that every dollar spent on nuclear is one less dollar spent on truly safe, affordable, and renewable energy sources like wind, solar, energy efficiency, battery storage, and smart grid technology.”

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Trump administration’s climate report raises new questions about nuclear energy’s future

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Trump doesn’t ‘believe’ his own administration’s climate report

by Sheree9799 Posted on November 27, 2018

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President Trump has read “some” of the Fourth National Climate Assessment — a comprehensive report released by his own administration that looks at the effects of climate change on the U.S. — and he says he doesn’t “believe it.” As in he can’t believe how bad the impacts are going to be? No, he simply doesn’t believe it.

Putting our differences aside for a second, this is actually kind of a baller move. Not only did Trump move up the date of the report’s release from December to the day after Thanksgiving (climate change vs. Black Friday mall sale stupor, anyone?) he made zero apologies about choosing to live in his own version of reality. Life’s a beach when you choose not to believe in inconvenient things! Check it out: You tell me I have to go into work the Monday after Thanksgiving? I don’t believe it. They did surgery on a grape? I don’t believe it.

The Commander in Chief didn’t give us many more details (like, you know, why), but the gist of the situation is that he thinks the climate assessment is a bunch of baloney. (Let the record again show that the report was composed by his own administration.) And it wasn’t even the only climate report his administration released on November 23. Another report, this one from the U.S. Geological Survey, found that nearly a quarter of the country’s carbon emissions come from fossil fuels produced on federal lands.

Here’s what Trump did say:

Did he … did he literally shrug? Regardless of how blasé Trump was about a report that basically portends widespread chaos, destruction, and economic distress for the country, his reaction is pretty damn believable. The man has spent a good portion of his tenure as president dismantling what’s left of United States climate policy:

He wants to replace Obama’s landmark Clean Power Plan with a “Dirty Power Plan” that seeks to prop up the dying coal industry.
His administration announced plans in August to freeze fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks for the next eight years, despite findings that those regulations would have reduced emissions and saved lives.
He rolled back an Obama-era rule that curtailed methane leaks on public lands, calling it “unnecessarily burdensome on the private sector.” Methane, by the way, is in the short term many times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Those are just three examples of the Trump administration’s climate policies! There are many more. And as much as I would hope that this climate report or this one or this one might change his mind, at this point, it looks unlikely.

If President Trump believed some of his other rhetoric, then he might see that making America great requires protecting the regions now facing imminent and catastrophic climate change. But alas, the America Trump wants isn’t “America the Beautiful,” it’s America with the most beautiful, “clean” coal. Those spacious skies and amber waves of grain might not look so pretty after 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

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Trump doesn’t ‘believe’ his own administration’s climate report

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