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Extreme heat? Check. Ice loss? Check. Any other records we can shatter?

by LeandroOqy Posted on April 20, 2016

Extreme heat? Check. Ice loss? Check. Any other records we can shatter?

By on Apr 20, 2016commentsShare

The world has been breaking climate records left and right. Here’s the short list:

2015 was by far the hottest year since record-keeping began in 1880, shattering the record we just set in 2014.
The first three months of 2016 have already reached new highs.
The past 11 months globally were the hottest in 137 years of records.
A record amount of the Arctic Ocean never froze this winter. And Greenland’s ice started melting at its earliest date yet.
Carbon levels in the atmosphere showed their biggest-ever annual jump last year, according to readings at NOAA’s Mauna Loa observatory.

El Niño is partly to blame for warmer-than-usual temperatures, but scientists say we wouldn’t be seeing this record-breaking streak if global warming weren’t also fueling extreme temperatures.

Looking over this list of dubious accomplishments, I wondered what climate records we haven’t shattered in the last few years. So I asked a handful of scientists what’s left to fall.

Hot, hot, hot

Though the globe as a whole has experienced record heat, there’s enough regional variation that plenty of local records remain, former White House science advisor and Woods Hole Research Center President Phil Duffy said. And extreme weather and “natural” disasters — record storms, drought, and heat waves, for instance — are bound to occur all over the map.

“The spot where record rains occur moves from one month and year to the next,” Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told me via email. “The same with wildfires. … If not where you are then somewhere not that far away, and your turn will come sooner or later.”

Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann wrote that “eventually we would expect that the all-time record for maximum daily temperature will be broken this decade or in the decades ahead in every city of the world. To date, this is only true for some percent of locations. Over time, that percent will approach 100 percent.”

Adios, ice

Scientists who study ice at the poles say there are still records standing in their field. “Some places haven’t warmed very much yet — Antarctica for instance — and so records there (in sea ice or temperature) are not falling at the same rate,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. (That’s not true in the Arctic, though, which has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the world.)

And believe it or not,  there’s still a record from 1940 that we have shattered yet: That’s the year when ice broke up in Alaska’s frozen Tanana River at its earliest date. (We know because folks like to bet on it.)

Another record the world appears to be on track for breaking around 2050: A summer when all the Arctic sea ice melts. Scientists think this hasn’t happened in 10,000 years, and even then it isn’t clear that the Arctic Ocean was completely ice-free. Ice has covered the poles for millions of years.

Altogether, it seems like there’s only one kind of record we’re in no danger of breaking anytime soon: the cold ones. The last time the planet saw a record-cold month was 99 years ago.

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Extreme heat? Check. Ice loss? Check. Any other records we can shatter?

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Soy boom threatens Brazil’s climate goals

by MyrtisPrendergas Posted on April 20, 2016

Soy boom threatens Brazil’s climate goals

By and on Apr 19, 2016comments

Cross-posted from

The ConversationShare

Brazil’s economy is teetering on the edge of collapse. The country’s political regime has been rocked by recent corruption scandals, and impeachment proceedings are encircling the nation’s leaders. And yet things couldn’t be much better for Brazil’s soybean farmers.

At the beginning of the last decade, Brazil emerged as a major soybean exporter. Today, Brazil produces about one-third of the global supply and earns more from soybean exports than from any other commodity.

Although soybean production is generating revenues for Brazil, it could spell trouble for the nation’s widely lauded environmental commitments.

Brazil is the first emerging economy that has pledged to make absolute reductions in its greenhouse gas emissions – that is, reductions from the level that it emitted at a specific point in time (2005), not from an estimate of what it will emit at some future time. Its climate plan calls for cutting emissions by more than 40 percent by 2030, with most of its emission reductions to come through avoiding deforestation. By 2030, Brazil has pledged to restore 12 million hectares of carbon-absorbing forest and eliminate illegal deforestation.

As social science researchers who study environmental change in the Amazon and the Brazilian savanna known as the Cerrado, we have seen the country’s agricultural sector grow rapidly in once-marginal regions. We believe that over the next several years, with Brazil’s soybean sector thriving and its political establishment in crisis, the nation’s commitment to slowing climate change will be severely tested.

Why economic downturns are good for soy farmers

Tough economic times for Brazil can mean boom times for soybean farmers. Soybean prices in Brazil generally depend on two factors: the global price for soybeans, and the value of the local currency (the real) against the U.S. dollar.

Obviously, a high global price for soybeans means more money for farms. However, the importance of the local currency is even more critical for farmers’ bottom lines. Commodities like soybeans are priced in dollars but purchased in local currency, so when the Brazilian real is weak, farmers receive more value (in local terms) for their harvest and earn higher profits.

This dynamic creates a paradoxical relationship between Brazil’s agriculture sector and the national economy: When the economy struggles, farmers reap big profits. In the early 2000s, when the real fell to one-third of its value over a three-year period, soybean profits jumped to stratospheric levels.

In response, farmers converted an area equivalent to the size of Indiana to soybean production. In some areas cropland prices nearly tripled.

Brazil’s current economic collapse is once again creating windfall conditions for soybean farmers. Over the past year and a half, the cracks in the country’s economy have become rifts and the real has lost more than one-third of its value. The further the currency falls, the higher soybean prices rise. From 2011 to 2016, soybean prices increased by 70 percent, peaking in January 2016.

Percent change in soybean prices, and the value of Brazil’s currency, since 2011. Soybean prices in Brazil have surged to near-record levels, even as prices, in terms of U.S. dollars, have declined.

ESALQ/USP

In local terms, we estimate that the value of this year’s harvest will be more than one-third larger than the harvest just two years ago. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that this year Brazil will produce nearly as many soybeans as the United States, an output that was unthinkable even just a few years ago.

Soybeans are generating valuable foreign exchange, new investment capital and high-wage jobs, all of which Brazil critically needs. As the farm sector’s economic clout increases, so does its political influence. Earlier this year during Carnival celebrations in Rio de Janeiro, in a procession seemingly transplanted from a U.S. state fair, dancers dressed as cotton, corn and soybeans paraded through the streets and were “harvested” by a giant float in the shape of an agricultural combine.

Brazil’s agriculture lobby is gaining ground as President Dilma Roussef’s Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party) disintegrates in a wave of corruption scandals. We believe government support for enacting new environmental regulations and enforcing existing environmental laws is already fading.

Forests at risk

After the international community and Brazil’s domestic environmental groups denounced large-scale deforestation in the Amazon in the early 2000s, the government adopted a battery of reforms to reduce forest losses.

Enormous new forest reserves were created and indigenous reserves were expanded. New environmental regulations were enacted to inhibit clearings for cattle pastures and soybean farms. Private agribusinesses worked with environmental advocacy groups, intervening in the soybean and cattle supply chains to discourage land clearing, especially for soybean production.

Evidence suggests that these measures worked. Deforestation fell from nearly 30,000 square kilometers in 2004 to less than 5,000 square kilometers in 2012. But next year the incentive to clear land will be greater than it has been in a decade. Windfall profits from this year’s soybean harvest will give landowners both the incentive to purchase or clear land and the capital that they need to do so.

Early signs of a new wave of deforestation in the Amazon are already appearing. Late last year the Brazilian government released data that showed a 16 percent increase in tree destruction over 2014 levels. The largest increases in forest loss were recorded in Brazil’s leading soybean-producing state, Mato Grosso.

The next several years could well pose a breaking point for Brazil’s economy, which currently is being held together by the country’s booming agriculture sector. In turn, further expansion of agriculture could derail Brazil’s climate commitments.

For most of this decade Brazil has received tremendous acclaim for its environmental actions. Brazil also stands ready to sign the climate change agreement negotiated late last year in Paris. But the country’s ability and will to follow through on those commitments has never been in such doubt.

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Soy boom threatens Brazil’s climate goals

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Soy boom threatens Brazil’s climate goals

This week’s deadly flooding in Houston is just the beginning

by ShanelVwzzrgzaa Posted on April 19, 2016

A scene from 2015’s disastrous floods in Houston. REUTERS/Lee Celano

This week’s deadly flooding in Houston is just the beginning

By on Apr 19, 2016commentsShare

Houston is in the throes of a flood that is, according to recent headlines, “historic,” “deadly,” and “unprecedented.”

None of that is hyperbole. As of Tuesday, the floods had killed at least six people, destroyed miles of homes and highways, and displaced hundreds of residents. More than 17 inches of rain had fallen in Texas’ Harris County since the previous morning, according to ABC News. And it wasn’t over yet: The National Weather Service issued flood warnings into late Tuesday night. (Meanwhile, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner helpfully commented that there was “nothing you can do” in the face of “a lot of rain coming in a very short period of time.”)

Flooding has become an annual hazard in the city, which sits at just 43 feet above sea level. Unfortunately, it’s very likely that the situation will only worsen.

For starters, when floodwaters begin to recede, they bring their own set of hazards and dangers. A spokesperson for the American Red Cross noted the extreme toxicity of floodwater, reports ABC News, which constitutes a sludge of debris from cars, houses, and infrastructure — not to mention overflow from contaminated waterways like Texas’ Blanco River. The rising waters also disrupted wildlife — officials warned that aggressive snakes washing up on people’s properties were a risk factor. During cleanup, Houstonians will be exposed to a Pandora’s Box of mold and airborne toxins that could aggravate asthma or respiratory illness.

Plus, Houston is woefully underprepared for natural disasters, as an investigation by ProPublica and Texas Monthly revealed in March. The investigation, which relied on predictive meteorological models, found that the near-miss of Hurricane Ike in 2008 was a relative blessing for the city that no one should bank on occurring again. According to scientists interviewed for the project, the odds of Houston’s “perfect storm” happening in a given year exceed that of being killed in a car crash or by a firearm — both of which are fairly common occurrences in the U.S.

According to ProPublica, Houston is the fourth-largest American city and a major industrial hub that contains the country’s largest refining and petrochemical complex, NASA’s Johnson Space Center, the Houston Ship Channel, and multiple rapidly expanding residential areas. If the storm hits at the wrong spot, all of those place would be at risk of being underwater or severely damaged by flooding. That’s a scenario that would halt supply chains all over the country and wreak havoc on the American economy.

But experts told media outlets this week that there was no way that Houston could prepare in time. “Could we have engineered our way out of this?” said Rice University engineer Philip Bedient, quoted in the Guardian. “Only if we started talking about alterations 35 or 40 years ago.”

Bedient went on to say that the best that Houston could hope for for was a good warning system. NASA might want to get on that — if only certain presidential candidates wouldn’t get in its way.

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This week’s deadly flooding in Houston is just the beginning

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, ProPublica, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This week’s deadly flooding in Houston is just the beginning

Congress passed around the blame for Flint’s lead crisis. John Oliver gives it right back to them.

by ArethaTrott1085 Posted on April 18, 2016

Congress passed around the blame for Flint’s lead crisis. John Oliver gives it right back to them.

By on 18 Apr 2016commentsShare

America’s best Brit John Oliver took a brief pause from skewering presidential candidates Sunday to skewer Congress’ response to the Flint lead-poisoned water crisis. As Oliver points out, the crisis is hardly Flint’s alone: 2,000 municipal water systems in all 50 states show elevated levels of lead, which can contribute to brain damage, developmental difficulties, and lower IQs in children.

In response to this disaster, Congressional Republicans Rep. Mark Meadows (NC), Rep. Tim Walberg (MI), and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (UT) all have said that is it shocking — just shocking — that federal regulators could let something like this happen in the United States.

How does something like this happen in the United States?

As Oliver explains, it happens in part because of representatives like Meadows, Walberg, and Chaffetz, who voted to cut funding for government programs dedicated to cleaning up lead pollution.“You would think that our members of Congress would be onboard with doing more to fight lead poisoning.” Oliver said. Well, they aren’t, and Congress has only done its best to cut funding to other organizations that protect public health, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Watch Oliver explain above.

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Congress passed around the blame for Flint’s lead crisis. John Oliver gives it right back to them.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, hydroponics, Jason, Keurig, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Congress passed around the blame for Flint’s lead crisis. John Oliver gives it right back to them.

Atlantic coastline sinks as sea levels rise

by DarellWells9 Posted on April 16, 2016

Atlantic coastline sinks as sea levels rise

By on 16 Apr 2016comments

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

The 5,000 North Carolinians who call Hyde County home live in a region several hundred miles long where coastal residents are coping with severe changes that few other Americans have yet to endure.

Geological changes along the East Coast are causing land to sink along the seaboard. That’s exacerbating the flood-inducing effects of sea-level rise, which has been occurring faster in the western Atlantic Ocean than elsewhere in recent years.

New research using GPS and prehistoric data has shown that nearly the entire coast is affected, from Massachusetts to Florida and parts of Maine.

Land subsidence and sea-level rise are worsening flooding in Annapolis, Md., and elsewhere along the East Coast.

Chesapeake Bay Program

The study, published this month in Geophysical Research Letters, outlines a hot spot from Delaware and Maryland into northern North Carolina where the effects of groundwater pumping are compounding the sinking effects of natural processes. Problems associated with sea-level rise in that hot spot have been — in some places — three times as severe as elsewhere.

“The citizens of Hyde County have dealt with flooding issues since the incorporation of Hyde County in 1712,” said Kris Noble, the county’s planning and economic development director. “It’s just one of the things we deal with.”

On average, climate change is causing seas to rise globally by more than an inch per decade. That rate is increasing as rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trap more heat, melting ice and expanding ocean waters. Seas are projected to rise by several feet this century — perhaps twice that much if the collapse of parts of the Antarctic ice sheet worsens.

Ocean circulation changes linked to global warming and other factors have been causing seas to rise much faster than that along the sinking mid-Atlantic coastline — more than 3.5 inches per decade from 2002 to 2014 north of Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, a recent study showed.

The relatively fast rate of rise in sea levels along the East Coast may have been a blip — for now. The rate of rise recorded so far this century may become the norm during the decades ahead. “Undoubtedly, these are the rates we’re heading towards,” said Simon Engelhart, a University of Rhode Island geoscientist.

Engelhart drew on data from prehistoric studies and worked with two University of South Florida, Tampa scientists to combine it with more modern GPS data to pinpoint the rates at which parts of the Eastern seaboard have been sinking.

Their study revealed that Hyde County — a sprawling but sparsely populated farming and wilderness municipality north of the Pamlico River — is among the region’s fastest-sinking areas, subsiding at a little more than an inch per decade.

Taken together, that suggests the sea has been rising along the county’s shorelines recently at a pace greater than 4.5 inches per decade — a globally extraordinary rate. Similar effects are playing out in places that include Sandy Hook in New Jersey and Norfolk in Virginia, the analysis shows.

Climate Central

Gloucester Point, Va., which is home to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, was also found to be sinking at a similar rate. Scientists there have been “noticing impacts,” said Carl Hershner, a wetlands expert who has worked at the institute since 1971. “Flooding in our boat basin is one piece of evidence.”

An inventory of wetlands and shorelines is being developed by the institute that may help reveal the impacts of subsidence and sea-level rise locally. “There’s rather compelling evidence of marshes losing area,” Hershner said.

The main cause of East Coast subsidence is natural — the providential loss of an ice sheet. Some 15,000 years ago, toward the end of an ice age, the Laurentide Ice Sheet stretched over most of Canada and down to modern-day New England and the Midwest. Its heavy ice compressed the earth beneath it, causing surrounding land to curl upward.

Since the ice sheet melted, the land beneath it has been springing back up. Like a see-saw, that’s causing areas south of the former ice sheet to sink back down, including Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina.

The data suggests that some land in coastal Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, on the other hand, is rising slightly, although not quickly enough to keep up with the global rate of sea-level rise.

The study shows that subsidence is occurring twice as fast now than in centuries past in a hot spot from Fredericksburg, Va. south to Charleston, which the scientists mostly blame on groundwater pumping.

“If you draw down your aquifer, the land above the aquifer kind of collapses,” said Timothy Dixon, a University of South Florida professor who helped produce the study. “If that happens to be on the coast, that can also increase your flood potential.”

Rates of land subsidence, according to new study.

Karegar et al.

In areas south of Virginia, groundwater levels appear to have been recovering this decade as well pumping has been reduced, slowing the subsidence problem. Virginia says it’s working on the problem.

“In most places, you wouldn’t notice it; it wouldn’t matter,” said Jack Eggleston, a U.S. Geological Survey scientists who has researched the effects of groundwater pumping on the region’s topography. “But in terms of practical effects and practical problems, it does matter when you’re right on the shoreline.”

The compounding problems of land subsidence and sea-level rise have been pronounced in states where legislatures led by conservative majorities have been reluctant to discuss sea-level rise and have been dismissive of the science behind climate change.

The Tar Heel State’s legislature drew criticism from climate scientists and others in 2012 over a new law that barred state officials from basing regulations on sea-level rise projections until mid-2016.

“There’s a strong level of denial about the existence of the problem,” said Pricey Harrison, a Democrat in the North Carolina assembly who opposed the bill. “You can’t talk about climate change, you can’t talk about sustainability if you want any legislation to move.”

To help win support for the bill from Democrats, it was amended to require the state to refine sea-level rise projections that were first published in 2010. After lawmakers approved the legislation, then-Gov. Bev Perdue, a Democrat, allowed it to become law without her signature.

The refined sea-level rise projections were finalized and published by an independent science panel last month, warning of heavy impacts on coastal communities.

The science panel report concluded that tides could rise by six to 11 inches over 30 years in northern parts of the state if greenhouse gas pollution rates continue, or an inch less than that if they’re substantially reined in. The estimate included projections for land subsidence and rising seas. In the state’s southeast, the panel projected a rise of four to nine inches.

Even without future warming, high tide flooding is already getting worse along the East and Gulf coasts, where subsidence and erosion are rife. The problems become most plainly clear during king tides.

King tide flooding in Beaufort, N.C. in the fall of 2015.

King Tides

“We can have up to four-foot tides,” said Christine Voss, a University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill ecologist involved with a project that’s documenting the effects of king tides. “People are noticing that these flooding events are occurring more frequently, and perhaps with greater depth of inundation.”

Although the state is barred from basing any regulations on the new projections before the summer, the estimates are available for counties and local cities, which are not directly affected by the 2012 law.

During the decades ahead, those local planners will be grappling with the profound global crisis of sea-level rise — along with natural and human-caused factors that intensify its damages.

By late century, global sea-level rise could be so rapid as to make the local effects of subsidence seem trivial, particularly if current pollution levels continue, which recent research has shown could trigger runaway melting in Antarctica.

“Rates of local subsidence may be important now,” said Andrew Ashton, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist who researches changes in coastal environments. “But they’d be swamped by sea-level rise for most projections by mid-century.”

The challenges that lie ahead threaten to swamp towns, farms, and wilderness areas, and to do so more quickly along the Eastern seaboard than in other regions.

For most of the coastline, adapting to the rapid changes ahead may require expensive projects — private and public works that construct or improve coastline defenses, such as seawalls, marshes, and oyster beds, or that relocate homes and infrastructure out of harm’s way.

For some communities, that will mean confronting problems that had nary been imagined. For others, it may involve finding news ways to cope with old threats.

“We’re very active and very conscious about our water and where it pumps to, where it drains to,” said Noble, of Hyde County. “It’s just a way of life here.”

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Atlantic coastline sinks as sea levels rise

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We pass the popcorn for the greatest climate hits of the Bernie-Hillary smackdown

by Addie04W39252 Posted on April 15, 2016

We pass the popcorn for the greatest climate hits of the Bernie-Hillary smackdown

By on 15 Apr 2016commentsShare

What do Gristers do after the two remaining Democratic candidates for president spend a substantial chunk of time debating climate and energy issues? Pour a drink and obsess over the whole thing in an online chat, of course. The following transcript has been lightly edited.

Scott Dodd (executive editor): Wow, nine Democratic debates in and we got a whole — what, 15 minutes devoted to the most important issues affecting the future of human civilization? Was anybody surprised we got even that much?

Ben Adler (politics reporter): I was optimistic that they would ask some questions about climate change because it’s been a hot issue recently.

Scott: “Hot!” Ba dum ching.

Ben: Then I got pessimistic as they asked about the most unimportant campaign trivia during the first segment. So I was sort of half surprised when it finally happened.

Rebecca Leber (news editor): The funny thing is it didn’t even kick off with a particularly insightful question. Just Wolf Blitzer asking Clinton about Sanders’ attacks, and then “What are his lies?” But it got better. I felt like the moderators just let the candidates go at each other, only pushing back occasionally. By far the best moderation on climate we’ve seen in any of the debates.

Scott: Yeah, it often seems like the moderators focus on things only the political press really cares about, as opposed to the real issues. But I guess that’s a good question: We in the Grist offices were glued to our screens for the climate and energy stuff, but do voters care?

Clayton Aldern (senior fellow): I think this is something that Ben has touched on a good amount — that climate tends to rank reasonably low on the priority list across both parties, albeit more highly on the Democratic side of things. My understanding is that climate tends to be one of the issues that people love to harp on, but not one with which they vote.

Ben: Most voters form an opinion of which candidate they prefer based on broader themes and find proof in the issues to support them. It’s not what you say about the issues, it’s what the issues say about you. And climate doesn’t rank in the first tier.

Scott: Sanders compared them to 9/11 and WWII in terms of importance.

Ben: I appreciated that analogy. In general, it feels like your average liberal, and increasingly your average moderate and sometimes even conservative, realizes that climate change is a terrifying long-term threat. They support a transition to clean energy, but have no sense of immediate urgency. Sanders is trying to convey the urgency with which it should be treated.

Clayton: I think this is the first time we’ve seen anyone deploy that kind of rhetoric — the “enemy” rhetoric — for the security threat argument.

Rebecca: There are so many ways climate change can fit into the broader discussion, and not as a niche issue the political press usually treats it as. Sanders’ comments on combating an “enemy” got at that larger framework we’re usually missing.

Scott: So for those of us who do really care about climate, did we hear anything new last night from the candidates?

Rebecca: We got a sense of two different philosophies: Clinton pushing what Obama has already accomplished and how to expand on that, and Sanders wanting to go much further, condemning the status quo, by banning fracking and whatnot. I don’t think voters have heard much that would give them a sense of the candidates’ two visions before last night. Probably because previous debates mostly ignored it.

Scott: Ben, going back to Wolf’s first question to Clinton about her campaign donations from fossil fuel interests, which you wrote about this past week: Is that the kind of trivial stuff that just gets the candidates yelling at each other, or does it matter?

Ben: I think that to a certain segment of Sanders supporters, the fossil fuel dollars become one of those points that they glom onto because it reinforces their sense of Clinton as in hock to corporate interests. But I doubt any voters who were undecided between the candidates would choose Sanders when they find out Clinton has a handful of lobbyist donors who have fossil fuel corporations as clients. If you weren’t already a Sanders voter, why would that push you over? And that connects to my critique of that whole issue, which is that an enviro voter deciding between Clinton and Sanders should — and probably does — care more about their policy stances than their donors.

Scott: So then Rebecca, to your point about different philosophies, how much daylight is there really between Clinton and Sanders on climate and energy issues — and where are those major differences, if any?

Rebecca: Well, there were some surprising and not surprising differences highlighted yesterday — for one, Clinton repeating that natural gas is a “bridge fuel” and we “want to cross that bridge as quickly as possible.” Sanders certainly doesn’t agree it’s a bridge fuel. Also, Clinton not quite answering whether she supports a carbon tax and Sanders not quite answering how to make up for nuclear energy (which he wants to phase out) were easy-to-miss but important nuances. But on the basic point — do they think climate change is a problem that needs solving? — they agree.

Clayton: Clinton’s comment about natural gas as a bridge fuel — and bear in mind, she largely made the argument with respect to Europe, by which I assume she’s referring to Eastern Europe — is remarkably similar to the World Bank’s position on gas. If you’re looking for anything that epitomizes the “establishment” (read: incrementalist) approach to energy policy, it’s probably that.

Rebecca: True, Sanders and Clinton have different audiences in mind.

Ben: Yeah, Clinton is concerned about the general election and swing voters, Sanders isn’t. My strong suspicion is that Clinton doesn’t want to back a carbon tax because she fears being attacked for it in the fall. “Clinton would raise your electricity bills. You’d pay more to fill up your car,” etc.

Rebecca: Yes. I was confused at first (“baffled” was the word I used on Twitter) why Clinton didn’t come out and say she supports a carbon tax. A bunch of journalists on Twitter had a lot of smart things to say, basically that she has her eye on the general and doesn’t want to feature in an attack ad saying the word “tax” on endless loop. I think the same audiences apply for fracking — Clinton is thinking about the general; Sanders is thinking about his base.

Ben: I asked her campaign chair, John Podesta, about this in the spin room after the debate, and Jen Palmieri, a Clinton spokeswoman. They both said, essentially, that Clinton doesn’t support a carbon tax because she has other means of getting us to, in Podesta’s words, “deep decarbonization.” So they deny that it’s a political calculation, but I think it is — why open herself up to attacks with a policy proposal that won’t pass anyway?

Clayton: Clinton is all about the realm of political possibility — what can get through Congress, what offers the path of least resistance, etc. The bridge fuel argument says, “Let’s at least do better than coal.” Sanders doesn’t buy that argument, and says we need drastic change if we actually want to solve the climate crisis. (This is, of course, largely representative of their approaches to their campaigns more generally.)

Ben: Yeah, Sanders doesn’t care about any of that. He just endorses the optimal policy because he’s got to win a bunch more Dems to win the nomination, and that’s how he could do it.

Scott: So that seems to bring us to the place where Sanders struggled the most on energy last night, when the moderators challenged him on his all-out opposition to fracking, and whether that means we’d just have to go back to relying more on coal and nuclear. How do you think he came out there?

Rebecca: Oof, not good, though I don’t think it will matter to his supporters. He basically didn’t answer, only pointed to his 10 million rooftop solar initiative. This was as much a non-answer as Clinton’s was on a carbon tax.

Clayton: I mean, we have him saying, “We have got to lead the world in transforming our energy system, not tomorrow, but yesterday.” He’s right about that, but he also needs to deliver concrete policy solutions.

Scott: It was interesting how much Clinton tied herself to the Obama climate legacy — a legacy that, just a few years ago, many enviros considered a mixed bag at best. Is that a sign of how far the president has come on climate?

Rebecca: Well, this has been a broader strategy for her. She’s been tying herself to Obama’s legacy left and right. So I think it’s because he’s just very popular among Democrats, at about 87 percent approval rating. But maybe how far he’s come on climate is one of the reasons he’s so popular among Dems.

Clayton: I dunno. Clinton name-dropped Obama a lot, but she also softened the language she used on that front a bit. Compare last night’s “I worked with President Obama to bring China and India to the table for the very first time” to October’s “literally hunting for the Chinese.”

Ben: I agree with Rebecca. The other thing is that Clinton is trying to hint at is political feasibility. She’s trying to point out to Dem voters that they aren’t the whole electorate, that Republicans are suing to stop Obama’s Clean Power Plan, for instance, and that just protecting Obama’s progress will be enough of a challenge, and that more aggressive policies might run into legal challenges, or cost Democrats elections in swing states. But she doesn’t spell all that out, and I’m not sure why. It makes her sound timid instead of pragmatic.

Scott: This takes us beyond last night’s debate and looking ahead toward the general election: Do you think we’ve just hit the high-water mark for discussion of these issues?

Clayton: Well the nominee sure as hell isn’t going to have a more substantive conversation about energy policy with Trump.

Rebecca: I think this is the last engaging debate on climate we’ll see. Once we get to the general, whoever the Democratic nominee is will just have to highlight climate denial, not get into policy details of the what and how.

Scott: That’s depressing, isn’t it?

Rebecca: If you care about this issue, you get used to it.

Clayton: She said, depressed.

Ben: I actually think it’s possible general election debate moderators will ask about climate change because they like issues where the candidates disagree. They never ask about abortion in the Democratic primary debates, for example, because the candidates are both pro-choice. But I don’t think it will be nearly as serious a conversation about climate policy.

Scott: So let’s try to end on a high note: Anything last night that made you LOL — like you couldn’t believe that was coming out of a candidate’s mouth?

Ben: Nothing funny, but I was excited to see Sanders ask Clinton directly about a carbon tax. I wish debates were more direct interaction between candidates rather than each offering canned answers filled with irrelevant talking points to the moderators. They’re usually more like simultaneous interviews than actual debates.

Rebecca: Clinton burned Sanders pretty hard: “I don’t take a back seat to your legislation that you’ve introduced that you haven’t been able to get passed.”

Clayton: Re: Sanders not releasing his tax returns, she also said, “Well, you know, there are a lot of copy machines around.” Which was worth a small handful of lulz.

Scott: I was convinced Wolf was going to end the climate conversation after the first question, just like the moderators have in so many previous debates this election cycle. So the fact that it went on as long as it did and we got so much from the candidates on the issue made me smile.

Ben: I loved how rowdy the audience was. That was NY representing.

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Republicans in Congress try to paperwork the EPA to death

by RoyalOShaughness Posted on April 15, 2016

Republicans in Congress try to paperwork the EPA to death

By on 15 Apr 2016commentsShare

In news that should surprise absolutely no one, an investigation shows the Republican-controlled Congress has it out for the Environmental Protection Agency. Its method: Annoying it to death.

Bloomberg BNA analyzed documents requests sent to the EPA and found that in just 2015, Congress sent the agency 884 letters requiring a response, 60 document requests, and one subpoena. In response, the EPA’s staff had to provide Congress with over 276,000 pages of documents.

All this paperwork impedes the EPA’s ability to do its job, according to Jeffrey Lubbers, a professor of administrative law at American University. Lubbers told Bloomberg BNA that the “EPA is probably one of the few agencies that gets this many. Because agencies have to take these requests very seriously, they have to spend a lot of time on them.”

The irony here is that after Congress flooded the EPA with requests, it criticized the agency for acting slowly. This isn’t entirely surprising from a Senate led by Mitch McConnell, who is currently urging states to refuse to work with the EPA on complying with President Obama’s Clean Power Plan. McConnell is hardly alone in his disregard for the EPA. “If [the EPA] actually acted in a responsible way, they wouldn’t get all these letters,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) told Bloomberg BNA. “These letters are all generated by their irresponsible actions.”

As to what these “irresponsible actions” are, Barrasso didn’t say. Maybe he’ll request more documents to get to the bottom of it.

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A climate hawk’s guide to New York’s Democratic debate

by ShermanFrancisc Posted on April 14, 2016

Bernie and Hillary debate in Flint, Michigan, March 6, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Young

A climate hawk’s guide to New York’s Democratic debate

By on 14 Apr 2016 5:00 amcommentsShare

Less than a week to go before the New York primary, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will hold their ninth debate on Thursday on both their home turfs — Brooklyn. Though the environment hasn’t cropped up in many of the previous debates, it’s looking as though it will be on the table during this one with CNN and NY1. Last weekend, Sanders held climate rally for activists in upstate New York and he’s taken plenty of opportunities to go after his opponent on hydraulic fracturing. And on Wednesday, the day before the debate, Clinton released a plan to fight for climate and environmental justice.

With Clinton currently polling ahead of Sanders by double-digit margins and Sanders coming in from a seven-state winning streak, you can expect a tussle. But if you haven’t been keeping up — in this election season’s circus, we wouldn’t blame you — here are the climate fireworks to watch for in the debate:

Fracking: Sanders’ camp pointedly brought fracking into the fray in a state that’s banned the practice outright, highlighting Clinton’s record of supporting the natural gas industry. When it comes to fracking, Clinton favors local control and stiffer regulations, as opposed to the straight-up national ban that Sanders has called for.

How would Sanders stop fracking? Grist spoke to the Sanders campaign in February to get the details. (Hint: He says he doesn’t need Congress.)

Environmental justice: The water crisis in Flint, Mich., has featured heavily in the Democratic primary, as Rebecca Leber writes. Clinton released a plan on Wednesday to tackle lead poisoning, which includes establishing a Presidential Commission on Childhood Lead Exposure, directing more money to the Superfund budget, and requiring federal agencies to come up with environmental justice plans. It has some overlap with Sanders’ past proposals and calls for environmental justice.

Fossil fuel donations: Clinton recently snapped at a Greenpeace activist at a rally in Purchase, N.Y., who challenged Clinton to reject fossil fuel donations in her campaign. Clinton lost her cool, replying that she was “sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me.” Ben Adler has the context on whether Clinton’s donors matter more than her policy positions.

Fuel extraction: Clinton and climate activists have genuine disagreements when it comes to fossil fuels, as Grist pointed out last week. For starters, Clinton supports some extraction on public land. (Sanders doesn’t.) Clinton in the past has also supported natural gas as a “bridge” between fossil fuels and clean energy.

Clinton has come out against offshore drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic, while Sanders opposes offshore drilling. Sanders supports a bill that would ban fossil fuel extraction on national land, ban offshore drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic and stop new leases for drilling in the Gulf.

Nuclear energy: One major difference between Sanders’ climate plan and views held by some environmentalists: nuclear energy. Sanders opposes nuclear across the board, while enviros tend to favor keeping it in the mix to street clear of coal and oil.

Ben Adler took a deep dive into Sanders’ stance on nuclear power last month, and found that while it may “not be the best idea from a climate perspective,” it’s also not “the shallow hippie caricature that his critics describe.”

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A climate hawk’s guide to New York’s Democratic debate

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No new lead crises in 5 years? Clinton has a plan

by VeroniqCollier Posted on April 13, 2016

Hillary Clinton addresses the National Action Network’s 25th Annual Convention in New York City. REUTERS/Mike Segar

No new lead crises in 5 years? Clinton has a plan

By on 13 Apr 2016commentsShare

The day before a Democratic presidential debate in New York, Hillary Clinton rolled out an environmental justice plan that calls for eliminating lead as a major public health threat within five years.

She would have her work cut out for her, as Flint, Mich.’s lead-poisoning crisis has shown. As Clinton reminded her audience today in a speech on racial justice at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network conference: “There are a lot of Flints across our country where children are exposed to polluted air, unhealthy water and chemicals that can increase cancer risk.”

Studies show that some 500,000 U.S. children under the age of 5, who are predominantly black and Latino, have high levels of lead in their bloodstreams. This is primarily because of lead-based paint in old buildings, but also stems from contaminated soil and drinking water. When it comes to water contamination, we don’t even know where most of the problematic pipes are concentrated; best guesses range from 3 to 10 million lead service lines in America. Nor do we have consistent reporting on concentrated areas of lead paint in homes.

Despite the myriad challenges, Clinton insisted Wednesday: “If we put our minds to it, it can be done.”

Her plan calls for:

A Presidential Commission on Childhood Lead Exposure and a task force charged with finding and fixing 50 other Flints around the country.
Directing all federal agencies to develop plans on environmental justice and ensure that the Justice Department prosecutes environmental crimes as heavily as other crimes.
More funding — specifically, up to $5 billion in federal dollars — to replace lead paint in homes and contaminated soils in school yards.
Federal incentives through her Clean Energy Challenge (something Clinton proposed previously) so that states have a reason to exceed federal standards for lead reduction and other types of pollution.
Funds to replenish the Superfund budget to clean up over 450,000 polluted sites around the U.S.
An update the Lead Disclosure Rule and Safe Water Drinking Act to improve lead inspections, and the need for more infrastructure spending to fix water and transportation-related pollution.

A number of these proposals would require Congress to cough up more funding for infrastructure and transportation, as well as for Congress to amend laws. And a few of them overlap with proposals from Bernie Sanders, who has also called for more funds for Superfund sites and would direct agencies to develop clear priorities on environmental justice. Sanders, too, has highlighted the “unequal exposure of people of color to harmful chemicals, pesticides and other toxins in homes, schools, neighborhoods and workplaces” on his campaign website.

Flint has featured heavily in the Democratic primary and was the site of a Clinton-Sanders debate in March. With a week to go before New Yorkers vote, environmental justice is back in the national spotlight. But the intertwined problems of pollution, poverty, and racism won’t be fixed in just a handful of debates.

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No new lead crises in 5 years? Clinton has a plan

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Global leaders are very worried about water shortages

by Kyle994337 Posted on April 13, 2016

A woman walks with donkeys carrying water gerry cans in Yemen’s volatile province of Marib. REUTERS/Ali Owidha

Global leaders are very worried about water shortages

By on 12 Apr 2016commentsShare

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

Secret conversations between American diplomats show how a growing water crisis in the Middle East destabilized the region, helping spark civil wars in Syria and Yemen, and how those water shortages are spreading to the United States.

Classified U.S. cables reviewed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting show a mounting concern by global political and business leaders that water shortages could spark unrest across the world, with dire consequences.

Many of the cables read like diary entries from an apocalyptic sci-fi novel.

“Water shortages have led desperate people to take desperate measures with equally desperate consequences,” according to a 2009 cable sent by U.S. Ambassador Stephen Seche in Yemen as water riots erupted across the country.

On Sept. 22 of that year, Seche sent a stark message to the U.S. State Department in Washington relaying the details of a conversation with Yemen’s minister of water, who “described Yemen’s water shortage as the ‘biggest threat to social stability in the near future.’ He noted that 70 percent of unofficial roadblocks stood up by angry citizens are due to water shortages, which are increasingly a cause of violent conflict.”

Seche soon cabled again, stating that 14 of the country’s 16 aquifers had run dry. At the time, Yemen wasn’t getting much news coverage, and there was little public mention that the country’s groundwater was running out.

These communications, along with similar cables sent from Syria, now seem eerily prescient, given the violent meltdowns in both countries that resulted in a flood of refugees to Europe.

Groundwater, which comes from deeply buried aquifers, supplies the bulk of freshwater in many regions, including Syria, Yemen, and drought-plagued California. It is essential for agricultural production, especially in arid regions with little rainwater. When wells run dry, farmers are forced to fallow fields, and some people get hungry, thirsty and often very angry.

The classified diplomatic cables, made public years ago by Wikileaks, now are providing fresh perspective on how water shortages have helped push Syria and Yemen into civil war, and prompted the king of neighboring Saudi Arabia to direct his country’s food companies to scour the globe for farmland. Since then, concerns about the world’s freshwater supplies have only accelerated.

It’s not just government officials who are worried. In 2009, U.S. Embassy officers visited Nestle’s headquarters in Switzerland, where company executives, who run the world’s largest food company and are dependent on freshwater to grow ingredients, provided a grim outlook of the coming years. An embassy official cabled Washington with the subject line, “Tour D’Horizon with Nestle: Forget the Global Financial Crisis, the World Is Running Out of Fresh Water.”

“Nestle thinks one-third of the world’s population will be affected by fresh water scarcity by 2025, with the situation only becoming more dire thereafter and potentially catastrophic by 2050,” according to a March 24, 2009, cable. “Problems will be severest in the Middle East, northern India, northern China, and the western United States.”

At the time of that meeting, government officials from Syria and Yemen already had started warning U.S. officials that their countries were slipping into chaos as a result of water scarcity.

By September 2009, Yemen’s water minister told the U.S. ambassador that the water riots in his country were a “sign of the future” and predicted “that conflict between urban and rural areas over water will lead to violence,” according to the cables.

Less than two years later, rural tribesmen fought their way into Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and seized two buildings: the headquarters of the ruling General People’s Congress and the main offices of the water utility. The president was forced to resign, and a new government was formed. But water issues continued to amplify long-simmering tensions between various religious groups and tribesmen, which eventually led to a full-fledged civil war.

Reveal reviewed a cache of water-related documents that included Yemen, Nestle, and Saudi Arabia among the diplomatic documents made public by Wikileaks in 2010. Thomas Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times, found similar classified U.S. cables sent from Syria. Those cables also describe how water scarcity destabilized the country and helped spark a war that has sent more than 1 million refugees fleeing into Europe, a connection Friedman has continued to report.

The water-fueled conflicts in the Middle East paint a dark picture of a future that many governments now worry could spread around the world as freshwater supplies become increasingly scarce. The CIA, the State Department, and similar agencies in other countries are monitoring the situation.

In the past, global grain shortages have led to rapidly increasing food prices, which analysts have attributed to sparking the Arab Spring revolution in several countries, and in 2008 pushed about 150 million people into poverty, according to the World Bank.

Water scarcity increasingly is driven by three major factors: Global warming is forecast to create more severe droughts around the world. Meat consumption, which requires significantly more water than a vegetarian or low-meat diet, is spiking as a growing middle class in countries such as China and India can afford to eat more pork, chicken, and beef. And the world’s population continues to grow, with an expected 2 billion more stomachs to feed by 2050.

The most troubling signs of the looming threat first appeared in the Middle East, where wells started running dry nearly 15 years ago. Having drained down their own water supplies, food companies from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere began searching overseas.

By buying land in America’s most productive ground for growing hay, which just happens to be a desert, Saudi Arabia’s largest dairy company now can grow food for its cows back home — all year long.U.S. Geological Survey/NASA Landsat

In Saudi Arabia, the push to scour the globe for water came from the top. King Abdullah decreed that grains such as wheat and hay would need to be imported to conserve what was left of the country’s groundwater. All wheat production in Saudi Arabia will cease this year, and other water-intensive crops such as hay are being phased out, too, the king ruled.

A classified U.S. cable from Saudi Arabia in 2008 shows that King Abdullah directed Saudi food companies to search overseas for farmland with access to freshwater and promised to subsidize their operations. The head of the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh concluded that the king’s goal was “maintaining political stability in the Kingdom.”

U.S. intelligence sources are quick to caution that while water shortages played a significant factor in the dissolution of Syria and Yemen, the civil wars ultimately occurred as a result of weak governance, high unemployment, religious differences, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in addition to water shortages.

For instance, the state of California has endured a record drought without suffering an armed coup to overthrow Gov. Jerry Brown.

But for less stable governments, severe water shortages are increasingly expected to cause political instability, according to the U.S. intelligence community.

In a 2014 speech, U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said food and water scarcity are contributing to the “most diverse array of threats and challenges as I’ve seen in my 50-plus years in the intel business.

“As time goes on, we’ll be confronting issues I call ‘basics’ resources — food, water, energy, and disease — more and more as an intelligence community,” he said.

These problems are not just happening overseas, but already are leading to heated political issues in the United States. In the western part of the country, which Nestle forecast will suffer severe long-term shortages, tensions are heating up as Middle Eastern companies arrive to tap dwindling water supplies in California and Arizona.

Almarai, which is Saudi Arabia’s largest dairy company and has publicly said it’s following the king’s directive, began pumping up billions of gallons of water in the Arizona desert in 2014 to grow hay that it exports back to the Middle East. Analysts refer to this as exporting “virtual water.” It is more cost-effective to use the Arizona water to irrigate land in America and ship the hay to Saudi Arabia rather than filling a fleet of oil tankers with the water.

Arizonans living near Almarai’s hay operation say their groundwater is dropping fast as the Saudis and other foreign companies increase production. They are now worried their domestic wells might suffer the same fate as those in Syria and Yemen.

In January, more than 300 people packed into a community center in rural La Paz County to listen to the head of the state’s water department discuss how long their desert aquifer would last.

Five sheriff’s deputies stood guard at the event to ensure the meeting remained civil — the Arizona Department of Water Resources had requested extra law enforcement, according to county Supervisor Holly Irwin.

“Water can be a very angry issue,” she said. “With people’s wells drying up, it becomes very personal.”

Thomas Buschatzke, Arizona’s water director, defended the Saudi farm, saying it provides jobs and increases tax revenue. He added that “Arizona is part of the global economy; our agricultural industry generates billions of dollars annually to our state’s economy.”

But state officials admit they don’t know how long the area’s water will last, given the increased water pumping, and announced plans to study it.

“It’s gotten very emotional,” Irwin said. “When you see them drilling all over the place, I need to protect the little people.”

After the meeting, the state approved another two new wells for the Saudi company, each capable of pumping more than a billion gallons of water a year.

Back in Yemen in 2009, U.S. Ambassador Seche described how as aquifers were drained, and groundwater levels dropped lower, rich landowners drilled deeper and deeper wells. But everyday citizens did not have the money to dig deeper, and as their wells ran dry, they were forced to leave their land and livelihoods behind.

“The effects of water scarcity will leave the rich and powerful largely unaffected,” Seche wrote in the classified 2009 cable. “These examples illustrate how the rich always have a creative way of getting water, which not only is unavailable to the poor, but also cuts into the unreplenishable resources.”

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Global leaders are very worried about water shortages

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