Tag Archives: russia

About all those oil tankers off the coast of California …

The U.S. oil market was in a tailspin when dozens of oil tankers began approaching California’s coast in late April. The vessels, some as long as three football fields, were filled with millions of barrels of oil that suddenly had no place to go.

Amid the combined effects of a price war between oil-rich states Saudi Arabia and Russia and the COVID-19 pandemic’s curbing of demand, American refineries slashed production while onshore facilities filled to the brim. As a result, U.S. oil prices plunged to negative levels for the first time in history.

Tankers are still anchored near southern California today, and as they wait, they’ve switched from running their primary diesel engines to smaller auxiliary engines. While idling doesn’t create the carbon emissions of actually transporting cargo, the fleet is still generating the equivalent daily footprint of driving roughly 16,000 passenger cars. The giant ships burn fuel to keep lights on, power equipment, and heat the large volumes of crude oil resting in their tanks. Given the turbulent economy, oil analysts say the tankers might sit in suspended animation for weeks or months.

In recent days, as many as 32 tankers were anchored near Los Angeles and Long Beach, with some vessels leaving and new ones arriving as oil very slowly trickles in and out of ports. On May 11, 18 tankers filled designated spots as if in a “truck stop parking lot” three miles offshore, said Captain Kit Louttit, who monitors port traffic for the Marine Exchange of Southern California. That is about triple the typical number of tankers in those spaces.

Tankers along the U.S. West Coast, mainly off of California, held some 20 million barrels of oil on Monday, or nearly enough to satisfy a fifth of the world’s daily oil consumption, according to market data firm Kpler. The floating supply glut should gradually clear once new deliveries from the Middle East and Asia stop arriving.

But while the idling ships remain near California, they “could pose an ongoing risk to air quality,” said Bryan Comer, a senior researcher at the environmental think tank International Council on Clean Transportation, or ICCT. “Especially because you have these ships lumped together.” The cluster, he noted, concentrates the pollution that drifts ashore.

ICCT gathers annual emissions and fuel-use data for the world’s shipping fleet. By its estimates, the largest oil tankers burn nearly 4 tons of petroleum-based fuel every day they’re at anchor. That means each ship emits more than 11 tons of carbon dioxide per day — the equivalent of driving nearly 800 passenger vehicles. Anchored tankers also emit about 15 pounds of sulfur dioxide and 8 pounds of particulate matter daily, contributing to smog and air pollution. (Those global data points hold true even off the coast of California, Comer said, despite cargo ships of all kinds having to meet some of the strictest air-quality rules in the region.)

Worldwide, shipping regulators are cracking down on sulfur pollution, which is linked to heart and lung disease — and is thought to raise the risk of dying from COVID-19. As of this past January, oceangoing vessels can burn fuel with only 0.5 percent sulfur content, a significant drop from the previous limit of 3.5 percent. However, since 2009, California has required ships sailing within 28 miles of its coastline to use lighter “distillate” fuels with just 0.1 percent sulfur content. (A similar rule now applies to most coastlines in the United States and Canada.) Still, even the cleaner-burning distillate fuel has nearly 70 times the sulfur content of on-road diesel fuel.

It’s not yet clear how the tankers will affect shipping pollution overall — especially in light of pandemic-induced disruptions across the industry. Container ships and other cargo vessels are sailing far less frequently to ports around the world as measures taken to slow the spread of coronavirus upend trade flows and squeeze consumer demand. In Los Angeles, home of the busiest U.S. container port, cargo volumes fell by 15.5 percent in the first four months of 2020, with no growth expected in the near future. Comer said researchers haven’t yet calculated the net effect of fewer trips and idling tankers on shipping-related emissions.

Much like in California, oil tankers are crowding ports in places like India, Singapore, and the U.S. Gulf Coast, serving as temporary storage units or waiting indefinitely for customers. With cities and countries on lockdown, global oil demand fell sharply in April to levels last seen in 1995, according to the International Energy Agency. Russia and Saudi Arabia only agreed last month to cut output to ease the glut.

According to ICCT’s Comer, some of these stranded vessels pose pollution concerns beyond air quality. Certain tankers burn dirty bunker fuel — a byproduct of the petroleum refining process — and use “open-loop” scrubbers to reduce the ship’s sulfur output in line with regulations. The scrubber systems mix water with exhaust gas, filter it, then dump the resulting washwater — an acidic mixture that contains carcinogens like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metals that can harm marine life. ICCT estimates that large vessels emit nearly 40 tons of scrubber washwater every hour.

This particular problem doesn’t apply to California, where state regulators prohibit scrubber use. And while anchoring so many massive tankers could raise the risk of collisions and spills, Capt. Louttit said that every vessel’s movement is monitored and planned in advance to prevent such a catastrophe. The U.S. Coast Guard also flies helicopters over California’s San Pedro Bay to ensure the vessels aren’t leaking oil or dumping trash or sewage.

The California Air Resources Board, or CARB, which monitors air quality in the state, said that given the tankers’ “fairly low” power needs while idling, their emissions “are not likely as high as” when the ships are at berth and running pumps to load crude oil onto ships or shore. Nevertheless, storing the excess crude at sea doesn’t come without some environmental cost.

“We are experiencing a unique and extraordinary situation,” CARB spokesperson Karen Caesar said about the tankers. “We are closely monitoring the situation and tracking these ships.”

Originally from:

About all those oil tankers off the coast of California …

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Anker, Aroma, FF, GE, ONA, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on About all those oil tankers off the coast of California …

Poll: Democrats are getting worried about climate change. Republicans? Not so much.

Climate change is scoring some major points with Democrats — polling points, that is. That’s according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center that found the growing, year-round effects of our warming planet have not gone unnoticed by the members of at least one of the two major U.S. political parties compared to even six years ago.

Since 2013, the portion of Democrats who consider climate change a “major threat” has risen by 26 percentage points — a whopping 84 percent of Democrats surveyed this year are worried about it. That increase was even bigger among people who identify as liberal Democrats — 94 percent consider rising temperatures a major threat to the nation now, up 30 points from 2013.

Meanwhile, across the aisle, Republican opinions on the matter remain relatively unchanged. A little more than a quarter of GOPers consider climate change a major threat. Between 2013 and 2019, the share of conservative Republicans who consider climate change a major threat has risen only a few percentage points, an uptick Pew called “not statistically significant.”

There is one spot of good news: a different survey conducted by Amsterdam-based polling group Glocalities shows concern about the effect of human behavior on the environment is rising among young Republicans. Sixty-seven percent of Republican voters aged 18 to 34 are worried about the damage humans cause the planet, up 18 percent since 2014.*

But despite some movement among young Republicans on this issue, the Pew poll shows that climate change remains incredibly divisive. The concern gap between the two parties on climate is wide even when compared to other politically charged issues. Democrats and Republicans have more common ground when discussing the threat posed by Russia’s power and influence — one of the most divisive issues of the 2016 presidential election.

That may be because GOP leaders have remained impressively steadfast in their opposition to virtually any kind of climate action since the early ‘90s. The party that produced much of America’s environmental conservation policy throughout the 20th century has since stood by President Trump as he has worked to dismantle the building blocks of that legacy. It’s no wonder a measly 27 percent of Republicans are worried about climate change — unless you happen to live in Florida, there is little daylight between party leadership and base on this issue.

Conversely, as rank-and-file Democrats grow increasingly preoccupied with rising temperatures, their party leaders are still clapping on the one and the three. The Democratic establishment is only now fumbling to set up some kind of comprehensive response to the crisis, thanks in no small part to pointed encouragement from a certain freshman representative from New York. But despite Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez et al.’s efforts, the Democratic National Committee just voted not to hold a climate-themed debate. It’s not the first time the party has ignored the outspoken opinions of much of its progressive base: Last year, the same committee decided to reject donations from fossil fuel companies, only to reverse its decision a couple months later.

As usual, the GOP has succeeded in keeping its base in line. If Democratic leaders are out of step with their army, maybe it’s time they adjusted their messaging to match the scale of the crisis.

*This post has been updated to include the survey from Glocalities, published Thursday.

Original post: 

Poll: Democrats are getting worried about climate change. Republicans? Not so much.

Posted in Accent, alo, Casio, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Prepara, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Poll: Democrats are getting worried about climate change. Republicans? Not so much.

The future of food: droughts, wrecked crops, and empty plates

Subscribe to The Beacon

More droughts. More punishingly hot days killing farm workers and livestock. More allergen-spewing weeds. More crop-wrecking storms. And ultimately, more hunger.

According to the recently released National Climate Assessment, global warming is already making farming in the United States more difficult, and it’s likely to get worse. A steep decline in U.S. harvests would spur a worldwide crisis, because grains, oils, and meat from the United States ship to every continent. It would increase pressure to clear rainforests around the equator and the boreal forests of Canada and Russia to grow food. Falling yields would also drive up food prices, making it harder for the poor to afford meals.

“Food security, which is already a challenge across the globe, is likely to become an even greater challenge,” the report’s authors wrote.

The short-term outlook doesn’t look so scary. Climate change means a longer growing season, and conditions might actually improve in places like the Dakotas, where cold weather currently limits farming. Warming should also boost wheat and barley harvests. But rising temperatures and CO2 concentrations will also “enable ragweed and other plants to produce allergenic pollen in larger quantities,” for more months out of the year. And in the long term, harvests of all food crops, including wheat, are expected to decline unless farmers take unprecedented steps to adapt.

Radical adaptation could improve harvests and help solve the larger climate problem. Crops can suck carbon dioxide out of the air and store it in the soil. The report notes that “agriculture is one of the few sectors with the potential for significant increases in carbon sequestration.”

What would radical adaptation look like? The corn belt might move north from Kansas to Saskatchewan with the weather. Farmers could synch planting times and fertilizer application with precise weather forecasts. Governments might pay farmers for locking up carbon in their fields instead of maximizing profits. They could also provide the funding necessary for scientists to breed climate-adapted crops and animals.

In short, there are plenty of ways that agriculture can provide hope in place of worry. But without action, there’s going to be misery in farm country, according to the report. By 2050, climate change could shrink Midwestern harvests all the way down to the size they were during the farm crisis of the 1980s, when a surge of foreclosures led many farmers to take their lives. And with our global food market, misery in farm country would mean misery around the world.

Link to original:

The future of food: droughts, wrecked crops, and empty plates

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The future of food: droughts, wrecked crops, and empty plates

The Perfect Theory – Pedro G. Ferreira

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Perfect Theory

A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity

Pedro G. Ferreira

Genre: Physics

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: February 4, 2014

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


“One of the best popular accounts of how Einstein and his followers have been trying to explain the universe for decades ” ( Kirkus Reviews , starred review).   Physicists have been exploring, debating, and questioning the general theory of relativity ever since Albert Einstein first presented it in 1915. This has driven their work to unveil the universe’s surprising secrets even further, and many believe more wonders remain hidden within the theory’s tangle of equations, waiting to be exposed. In this sweeping narrative of science and culture, an astrophysicist brings general relativity to life through the story of the brilliant physicists, mathematicians, and astronomers who have taken up its challenge. For these scientists, the theory has been both a treasure trove and an enigma.   Einstein’s theory, which explains the relationships among gravity, space, and time, is possibly the most perfect intellectual achievement of modern physics—yet studying it has always been a controversial endeavor. Relativists were the target of persecution in Hitler’s Germany, hounded in Stalin’s Russia, and disdained in 1950s America. Even today, PhD students are warned that specializing in general relativity will make them unemployable.   Still, general relativity has flourished, delivering key insights into our understanding of the origin of time and the evolution of all the stars and galaxies in the cosmos. Its adherents have revealed what lies at the farthest reaches of the universe, shed light on the smallest scales of existence, and explained how the fabric of reality emerges. Dark matter, dark energy, black holes, and string theory are all progeny of Einstein’s theory.   In the midst of a momentous transformation in modern physics, as scientists look farther and more clearly into space than ever before, The Perfect Theory exposes the greater relevance of general relativity, showing us where it started, where it has led—and where it can still take us.  

Originally posted here: 

The Perfect Theory – Pedro G. Ferreira

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Perfect Theory – Pedro G. Ferreira

Surge in marine refuges brings world close to protected areas goal

Subscribe to The Beacon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow this link – 

Surge in marine refuges brings world close to protected areas goal

Posted in alo, Anchor, Brita, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Surge in marine refuges brings world close to protected areas goal

Carbon prices could save us … if we actually start using them

Ahh, carbon prices. Those pesky, politically fraught penalties governments slap on pollution and the polluters who emit it. Carbon taxes and pricing schemes could be our golden ticket out of climate change, but a new report shows just how far we have to go to put an effective price on carbon.

Welcome to the carbon price gap, the distance between a country’s current CO2 price and the low-end benchmark of an effective carbon tax (around $35). Earth is on track to warm more than 2 degrees C, a threshold at which ice sheets collapse at breakneck speeds, small island nations drown, and natural disasters pummel coastal regions.

At their current rate, carbon prices won’t overlap with the actual cost of carbon pollution until 2095. We simply don’t have that kind of time. The report, titled Effective Carbon Rates 2018, shows that the carbon price gap is closing at a “snail’s pace.” The carbon pricing gap for a group of 42 countries surveyed in the study dropped from 83 percent in 2012 to an estimated 76.5 percent this year. We’re talkin’ 6.5 percentage points in six years.

This is how much more each country needs to tax emissions to meet their Paris goals and keep warming under 2 degrees C (the numbers are based off data from 2015, but the authors point out that, unfortunately, nothing has changed too much in the years since):

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

See? Pretty dismal. The countries that have the most work to do — Russia, Indonesia, Brazil — pollute a lot and have made virtually zero effort to price carbon. The countries with the smallest carbon gap — Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Norway — are nearly there. As you can see, most countries assessed in this report have a long way to go.

Here’s the good news: There are ways to close the gaps faster. China’s new emissions plan could reduce the country’s gap from 90 to 63 percent in the next few years. A handful of countries including the U.K., India, and South Korea implemented a variety of tactics to make some real headway on pricing emissions between 2012 and 2015.

And let’s not get bogged down with the percentages, says Jesse Jenkins, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School with a decade of experience in the energy sector. “How do we make the most impact in the least costly way within the political constraints that we face in each country?” Jenkins says. In other words, closing the gap requires a custom-built approach.

And there are even more reasons to be optimistic that carbon pricing, in addition to other sustainability initiatives, could help us stave off the worst effects of global warming. California has one of the only economy-wide carbon pricing policies in the U.S. The Golden State appears to have a paltry carbon price — about $20 per ton — but its other green initiatives actually make it pretty competitive compared to other global winners in sustainability.

“The magnitude of the carbon price itself is not a sufficient proxy for how effective climate policy is across the whole context,” Jenkins says. “It’s one piece of the overall effort.”

Visit source:  

Carbon prices could save us … if we actually start using them

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Carbon prices could save us … if we actually start using them

Greenland, the land of ice and snow, is burning

This is going to sound weird, but there’s a wildfire right now in west Greenland. You know, that huge island of mostly ice? Part of it is on fire.

There’s been nothing even close to this since reliable satellite-based fire detection records began in Greenland in 2000. Very small wildfires can evade satellite detection, and old-timer scientists who have worked in Greenland for decades say that micro-fires there aren’t necessarily uncommon.

This week’s fire, however, is on another level.

“This is the largest wildfire we know of,” says Stef Lhermitte, a satellite expert at Technische Universiteit in Delft, Netherlands, who did some of the initial mapping of the fire. “For a lot of people, it’s been a bit of discovery on the go.” The fire was first spotted by a local aircraft on July 31.

What’s striking about the Greenland fire is that it fits a larger trend of rapid change across the northern reaches of the planet. A 2013 study found that across the entire Arctic, forests are burning at a rate unseen in at least 10,000 years.

By American standards, the Greenland fire is small, covering around 1,200 acres (about two square miles) — about the size of midtown Manhattan. The massive Lodgepole Complex wildfire that scorched eastern Montana in July — the largest fire in the country this year — was more than 200 times bigger. But for Greenland, a fire of this size is so unusual that even scientists who study the huge island don’t really know what to make of it.

The Danish meteorological service (Greenland is technically an autonomously governing part of Denmark) said it has no experts who specialize in Greenland fire. The European Commission has tasked its Emergency Management Service with a rapid mapping of the region of the fire, in part to help local officials assess the risks to public health. Mark Parrington, a meteorologist with the European government, said on Twitter that he “didn’t expect to be adding Greenland into my fire monitoring,” adding that he may need to recalibrate his air pollution models to account for the smoldering way that fire tends to burn in permafrost soil.

Riikka Rinnan, an ecologist at the University of Copenhagen, said her research team had started work earlier this summer on how potential fires could impact Greenland’s tundra, but didn’t expect one so soon. Jessica McCarty, a satellite data expert at Miami University in Ohio, said she’s planning to have one of her students construct what might be the first-ever comprehensive history of fires in Greenland.

And yes, as you might expect, climate change probably made this whole thing more likely.

“Everything we know suggests that fire will increase in the Arctic,” climate scientist Jason Box, whose work focuses on Greenland, told me. “It’s fair to say that it’s part of the pattern of warming. We should see more such fires in Greenland.”

Though west Greenland, where the fire is burning, is a semi-arid region, rainfall and temperatures there have been increasing, helping to foster more dense vegetation. Box says this is part of the “shrubification” of the entire Arctic as temperatures warm and the growing season lengthens. Denser vegetation is making large fires more likely, in combination with the simultaneous tendency for longer and more intense droughts and the rise in thunderstorm likelihood due to erratic weather patterns.

Box says he saw a fire in west Greenland back in 1999. “It’s pretty interesting for Greenland, people don’t think about it as a place where that’s possible — nor did I until I saw it with my own eyes.” Once he realized he was watching a wildfire, he said, “It was like, what the heck? What is going on?”

What set off this blaze? The scientists I spoke with aren’t sure. The primary cause of Arctic wildfires is lightning, but a lightning storm in Greenland would have been news. Thunderstorms typically need warm, humid air for fuel, and both are in short supply so close to the world’s second largest ice sheet.

According to John Kappelen, a Danish meteorologist, the region surrounding the fire has had well below average rainfall since June, making wildfire more likely.

“This time of year, everybody’s going out and picking berries and fishing and hunting,” says Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish meteorological service who conducts frequent fieldwork in Greenland. Maybe someone in the area set a fire that grew into the big blaze. Greenland’s second largest town, Sisimiut, with a population of 5,500, is about 90 miles away.

Mottram says that if the fire is burning in peatland, it could rage for weeks. If the winds shift, soot from the fire could be transported up to the ice sheet, where it might speed local melting in the coming years by darkening the surface of the ice, helping it to absorb more energy from the sun. This is something that scientists like Box and Mottram are spending their careers studying, but up to now, they thought that virtually all the soot that’s making the bright white ice darker was transported there from Canada or Russia. Now, a new source may be emerging.

Should wildfires like this one increase in frequency, we may have just witnessed the start of a new, scary feedback loop.

Jump to original: 

Greenland, the land of ice and snow, is burning

Posted in alo, American Standard, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Hagen, Jason, LAI, ONA, Oster, Paradise, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Greenland, the land of ice and snow, is burning

Two Dakota Access protesters say they purposely damaged the pipeline.

Climate change is rapidly altering the region, and less sea ice means more ships are lining up to traverse its remote waters. “It’s what keeps us up at night,” Amy Merten, a NOAA employee, told the New York Times. “There’s just no infrastructure for response.”

Cargo ships and cruise liners are already setting sail, and the Trump administration is clearing the way for oil rigs to join them.

Canada, the U.S., and Russia have an agreement to help each other during emergencies, but the U.S. only has two functional heavy icebreaker ships, and rescue efforts would likely have to rely on other commercial ships being nearby.

To top it all off, the head of the Coast Guard, Paul Zukunft, says the U.S. is unprepared to deal with an Arctic oil spill. Zukunft pointed out the difficulty in cleaning up the Deepwater Horizon spill, which had much more favorable conditions.

“In the Arctic, it’s almost like trying to get it to the moon in some cases, especially if it’s in a season where it’s inaccessible; that really doubles, triples the difficulty of responding,” the head of the Navy’s climate change task force told Scientific American.

See more here: 

Two Dakota Access protesters say they purposely damaged the pipeline.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, oven, PUR, Ringer, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Two Dakota Access protesters say they purposely damaged the pipeline.

Democrats Are Setting Their Sights on "Putin’s Favorite Congressman"

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) won his first election to the House of Representatives in 1988 with 64 percent of the vote. He’s been reelected 13 times since then. And even though he walloped his most recent challenger by nearly 17 percentage points, some Democrats now think that this could be the final term for the Southern California conservative Politico has dubbed “Putin’s favorite congressman.

Protesters, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, assemble outside Rohrabacher’s office every Tuesday at 1 p.m. “He has been our congressman for a long time,” laments Diana Carey, vice chair of the Democratic Party of Orange County. “But because the district was predominantly Republican, my view is he’s been on cruise control.” Thanks to changing demographics in Orange County and newly fired-up liberal voters, Carey doesn’t think Rohrabacher’s seat is safe anymore.

Recently, Rohrabacher has been swept up in the scandal over the possible collusion between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia. Like Trump, Rohrabacher, who claims to once have lost a drunken arm-wrestling match with Vladimir Putin in the 1990s, believes the Russian government is being unfairly demonized. (During the 1980s, Rohrabacher was a staunch anti-communist who hung out with the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan.) He has shrugged off allegations of Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election by pointing out that the United States is guilty of similar actions. In May, the New York Times reported that in 2012 the FBI warned Rohrabacher that Russian spies were trying to recruit him. Two days earlier, the Washington Post reported on a recording from June 2016 in which House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” (McCarthy assured Rohrabacher the remarks were meant as a joke.)

In a 2016 conversation with Republican House members, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” Washington Post

But of all the issues where Rohrabacher and Trump align, Russia may be the least pressing concern for the constituents who are rallying against him. So far, Rohrabacher has voted in line with Trump’s positions more than 93 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight, including voting in favor of the GOP health care bill that would effectively end Obamacare. Rohrabacher pushed hard for the bill, warning his GOP colleagues that letting Trump’s first major legislative effort die would stunt the president’s momentum. “If this goes down,” he said in March, “we’re going to be neutering our President Trump. You don’t cut the balls off your bull and expect that’s he’s going to go out and get the job done.” Health care is a hot-button issue in the 48th District, Carey says. “I’ve had conversations with people who are absolutely beside themselves, scared that they’re going to lose coverage.”

While Rohrabacher won his last race in a near-landslide, his district went for Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. She won by a slim margin, but it was enough for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) to flag the district as a top target to flip in 2018. If the Democrats hope to best Rohrabacher in the midterms, they have a lot of work to do, says Justin Wallin, an Orange County-based pollster who runs an opinion research firm. “I don’t think Dana has carved out a position as a fire-breathing supporter for any political personality except for Ronald Reagan,” says Wallin, referring to Rohrabacher’s early days working in the Reagan White House. “He tends to align quite naturally with that district in his perspectives, his persona, and his political views. His district views him as being independent, and when Dana takes a position on something that seems to be outside the mainstream, that can actually buttress his favorable regard.”

Two Democrats have announced bids to run against Rohrabacher. One is first-time candidate Harley Rouda, a businessman and attorney who gave $9,200 to Republican congressional candidates and nothing to Democrats between 1993 and 2007. The other is Boyd Roberts, a Laguna Beach real estate broker who has vowed to work to impeach Trump and who finished last among five candidates running for a school board seat in Hemet, California, in 2012. Both are attacking Rohrabacher over his sympathetic stance toward Russia. “The district will vote Rohrabacher out because i think there is something with the Russia thing. I think I can raise money off it,” Roberts told the Los Angeles Times. In an online ad, Rouda calls Rohrabacher “one of the most entrenched members of Washington’s establishment” and vows to get “tough on Russia” if he is elected.

“They’re both kind of waving the flag of the Russia thing, and I just don’t think that’s gonna get them over the line,” says Wallin. Carey declined to comment on either candidate, though she says a third challenger will be announcing a bid this summer. Meanwhile, the DCCC hasn’t thrown its backing behind anyone yet. “Barring something dramatic happening, I’d say he is far more safe than a number of other districts in the area,” says Wallin.

Yet Carey thinks that so long as the Democrats continue organizing with the same intensity they’ve shown so far, they can turn the district blue. “We have a lot of folks who said they never paid attention before, a lot of no-party-preference people who are really concerned about democracy,” she says. When asked whether people in the district continue to be engaged, she responds, “So far I think the energy is staying. I tell people, ‘This is not a sprint, it’s a marathon.’ But I think as long as Trump keeps tweeting, we’ll keep having interest!”

Read article here: 

Democrats Are Setting Their Sights on "Putin’s Favorite Congressman"

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Democrats Are Setting Their Sights on "Putin’s Favorite Congressman"

Trump Has No Idea What He Just Did or the Backlash That Awaits

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The negotiations leading up to the Paris climate accord involved years of delicate diplomacy and thousands of voices offering guidance. President Donald Trump’s handling of the decision to leave was the polar opposite.

Despite claiming that he’s been “hearing from a lot of people,” Trump doesn’t appear to have any more detailed knowledge of climate change or the 2015 deal now than when he first pledged to cancel it on the campaign trail. The “lots of people” he’s heard from include a disproportionate number of climate change deniers, even though there are far more leaders in industry and on both sides of the aisle advocating for the US to remain in the agreement. They have argued that the Paris deal is important to the US, not just for its environmental merits, but also so that the country is not excluded from the rest of the world, both economically and politically.

His months of hints and delays on a decision have drawn more than one comparison to The Bachelor reality show, but one with the highest of stakes. He recently went to the strongest US allies at the G-7 without a clear answer, leading the G-6 to isolate the US when it issued its communiqué that reaffirmed the agreement. As Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent noted, Trump’s nationalist case to exit Paris “does not allow space for recognition of what the Paris deal really is, which is constructive global engagement that serves America’s long term interests, as part of a system of mutually advantageous compromises.”

Trump doesn’t have any sense of the backlash that’s coming for him and the US now that he’s kickstarted the process of pulling out, which won’t be official for another three years. Two factors will especially hurt the US: First, the world has been dealing with the US as an unreliable partner on climate change for more than two decades, and leaders still well remember the other times the US reversed course on its promises; second, the world has never been more aligned in favor of action, making climate change a much bigger factor in the US relationship with its allies in non-climate related issues—from trade to defense to immigration—than it once was.

Trump officials might have taken note of the consequences of US inconsistency with the 1997 Kyoto climate treaty. President Bill Clinton signed the treaty, which had binding targets, but never submitted it to the Senate for ratification. In 2001, Bush officials declared Kyoto dead and withdrew the US from the agreement. International backlash ensued. Some in the Bush administration, which like Trump’s was split on how to handle Kyoto, came to regret how it was handled for the damage it did to the standing of the US in the world.

“Kyoto—this is not talking out of school—was not handled as well as it should have been,” Bush’s Secretary of State* Colin Powell said in 2002. “And when the blowback came I think it was a sobering experience that everything the American president does has international repercussions.”

In her 2011 memoir, then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice detailed the reaction Bush faced in meetings with European leaders. Because of the way the administration handled the abrupt withdrawal, “we suffered through this issue over the years: drawing that early line in the sand helped to establish our reputation for ‘unilateralism.’ We handled it badly.” Rice called it a “self-inflicted wound that could have been avoided.”

US withdrawal also shifted the power dynamics across the world and gave Russia, which signed the agreement, greater leverage in international affairs. Russia’s ratification became pivotal to the treaty entering into force, and in turn, it used its ratification to gain Europe’s backing to enter the World Trade Organization, even while the US still had outstanding concerns. President Vladimir Putin noted in 2004 that the “EU has met us halfway in talks over the WTO and that cannot but affect positively our position vis-a-vis the Kyoto Protocol.” Paris has already met the threshold needed to go into effect, but Russia is still pursuing a similar role and reaffirmed its commitment to the Paris accord today, seasoned with some light trolling: “Of course the effectiveness of implementing this convention without the key participants, perhaps, will be hindered,” a Kremlin spokesperson told CNN. “But there is no alternative as of now.”

We’re decades away from the Kyoto treaty now, but many experts expect a US exit from Paris not to weaken the world’s resolve in addressing climate change as much as it will create a power vacuum other countries might be eager to fill. Andrew Light, a senior fellow with the World Resources Institute, says it is “definitely going to hurt the US with respect to other countries sitting down and negotiating on anything the US is interested in.” Light, who was a State Department climate official in the Obama administration, argued, “We’re creating a vacuum in parts of the world where we have very clear security interests, not just climate, but security in North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. It creates an opening that China, the EU, and even India can step in and fill.”

Conservatives have issued similar warnings.

In a New York Times op-ed earlier this month, George Shultz, a former Cabinet member of the Reagan and Nixon administrations, and Climate Leadership Council’s Ted Halstead wrote, “Global statecraft relies on trust, reputation and credibility, which can be all too easily squandered. The United States is far better off maintaining a seat at the head of the table rather than standing outside. If America fails to honor a global agreement that it helped forge, the repercussions will undercut our diplomatic priorities across the globe, not to mention the country’s global standing and the market access of our firms.”

It’s little surprise that Trump’s own secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, agrees, preferring the US to retain a seat at the table.

To find the kind of momentum it eventually gained to enter into force in record time, negotiators in Paris had to bridge differences between developing and industrialized nations. “One of the great achievements of Paris, but sometimes overlooked, is it gave a very strong signal that climate change is no longer an isolated area of diplomacy,” Light says. For example, climate change and renewable energy became building blocks in the US relationship with India, leading eventually to a bilateral commitment on climate change in the run-up to Paris.

While the US retreats, other nations are going to be building bridges with China as it curbs its sizeable greenhouse gas footprint. That’s already happening: This week, the EU and China engaged in a climate summit where they signaled their “highest political commitment” to Paris, just as Trump pulls out. This will also not help the US president in his much-vaunted fight against terrorism. He’s losing goodwill not just with Europe, but with partners in developing nations that stood to benefit from the $3 billion commitment the US had made to climate finance—another commitment that Trump won’t deliver on. That means losing one of the main ways the US has built friendly relationships with countries that can otherwise be fraught with tension. Former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy offers China as an example: “The South China Sea. Human rights. Trade. Currency manipulation. When U.S.-China relations are discussed we often ascribe these issues some level of tension. However, our countries’ cooperation has historically been more cordial and productive in one area: environmental protection.”

Union of Concerned Scientists’ Director of Strategy and Policy Alden Meyer, a longtime expert on the UN climate process, compared the US to the cartoon character Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip, always taking away the football from Charlie Brown at the very last moment. The rest of the world is likely to become weary of the US constantly taking away the ball when it comes time to negotiate tough issues like trade and terror, which Trump has sought to champion.

Or as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres put it this week, countries all over the world have only two options on climate: “Get on board or get left behind.”

* Corrected

See the original article here – 

Trump Has No Idea What He Just Did or the Backlash That Awaits

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump Has No Idea What He Just Did or the Backlash That Awaits