EcoRadio

Category: Climate chaos

The atmosphere is to the earth as a layer of varnish is to a desktop globe. It is thin, fragile and essential for preserving the items on the surface.150 years of burning fossil fuel have overloaded the atmosphere to the point where the earth is ill. It now has a fever. Read the detailed article, Soothing Gaia’s Fever for an evocative account of that analogy. The items listed here detail progress on coordinating 6.5 billion people in the most critical project undertaken by humanity. 

  • Energy Firms Deeply Split on Bill to Battle Climate Change

     

    Some supporters of global warming legislation believe that the division in the once-monolithic oil and gas industry, as well as other splits among energy producers, could improve the prospects for the legislation.

    “It’s much harder to pass clean-energy legislation when big oil and other energy interests are united in their opposition,” said Daniel J. Weiss, climate policy director at the liberal Center for American Progress. “The companies that recognize the economic benefits in the bill can help bring along their political supporters.”

    The American Petroleum Institute trade group, dominated by major oil companies, opposes the legislation, saying it would discourage domestic exploration and lead to higher oil prices. But some natural gas companies, though longtime members of the institute, have formed a separate lobby and are working actively with the bill’s sponsors to cut a better deal for their product.

    The proposal moving through Congress would cap the emissions of greenhouse gases each year and allow companies to buy and sell permits to pollute. That approach, known as cap and trade, is meant to guarantee that emissions will decline, while providing market incentives for companies to invest in low-carbon technologies.

    The measure would effectively put a price on carbon, raising the prospect that some energy producers might have to pay more than others. For that reason, billions of dollars could be at stake in some of the most arcane language in the bill.

    Energy lobbies are using every tactic in the book to protect their industries, producing alarming studies about $5 gasoline and other steep cost increases that might result from a cap-and-trade system. They are also financing protest groups and advertising campaigns. In one case, a public relations firm working for the coal industry even sent opposition letters to Congress under forged names.

    The divisions in the energy sector mirror a split in the broader business community. Several large companies like Apple and the utility Exelon left the United States Chamber of Commerce recently over the group’s opposition to climate change legislation.

    But the biggest fights are among energy producers. They have spent more than $200 million in the first half of the year on lobbying efforts in Washington, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group, up from $174 million in the same period last year.

    “The fact that the lobbying is so fast and so furious is a positive sign that this thing is moving along,” said Mark Brownstein, a managing director at the Environmental Defense Fund and an advocate of climate legislation. “The fact that everyone is rushing to Washington tells you people believe it is real.”

    As legislation inches through Capitol Hill, onetime allies in the utility sector, like Exelon, which operates low-emission nuclear plants, and the Southern Company, a big consumer of coal, find themselves on opposite sides of the debate over renewable energy.

    Utilities that have access to hydroelectric power or operate nuclear plants tend to favor a national mandate to increase the use of renewable power, because their carbon emissions are relatively low. Many coal-dependent utilities, particularly in the Southeast and Midwest, oppose the provision because they emit more carbon and would have to buy more permits over time.

    In past energy policy debates, the oil and gas lobbies were largely united. In 2005, they won incentives for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Two years later, after Democrats had taken control of Congress, producers were unable to block a huge new mandate for alternative fuels like ethanol and biodiesel, but managed to save valuable oil industry tax breaks that some Democrats tried to end.

    Today, each energy subsector, fearing any legislation that might give it a disadvantage, is battling for favor. The gas producers, for example, have formed the American Natural Gas Alliance, which is spending heavily on advertising and lobbying to point out that gas emits roughly half the carbon dioxide of coal. The group has also helped organize its allies in Congress into a new natural gas caucus, with two dozen members.

    “These fissures are happening because a policy is increasingly seen as inevitable,” said David G. Victor, an energy expert at the University of California, San Diego. “Old coalitions are splintering and fascinating new alliances are being formed.”

    The most important fight is over whether companies have to buy pollution permits, called allowances, or whether the government hands them out free in the early years to help ease the cost of the transition.

    President Obama has said the permits should be auctioned, an approach that would cost companies tens of billions of dollars. But after fierce lobbying from electrical utilities, the House made the permits free in the first decade of the program, to help finance the transition to cleaner fuels and to shield electrical consumers from higher prices.

    Industry analysts say the utilities’ willingness to negotiate with Democratic lawmakers gained them a huge advantage when the House passed its climate bill in June. The oil and natural gas industries, by contrast, felt shunned in the House debate because they would not negotiate, these analysts say.

    For example, oil companies complained that their mandated purchase of emissions permits would amount to a tax to be used to clean up dirty coal plants.

    “There was an inherent flaw when Congress set off down the road of favoring one fuel source over another,” said J. Larry Nichols, chairman of Devon Energy, an independent oil and gas company, and also chairman of the American Petroleum Institute. “You knew there had to be a feeding frenzy among various competing fuels trying to protect themselves.”

    Half of the nation’s electrical power is generated by burning coal, and emission limits are a long-term threat to the business. The coal industry, through a group it finances called the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, is running a campaign to persuade the public that coal is affordable, abundant and can be cleaned up thanks to still-distant technology that would capture carbon emissions and store them underground.

    Some coal executives aim to scuttle legislation in the Senate by continuing to cast doubts on the science of climate change.

    “A lot of coal-using utilities seem to be on the wrong side of this issue,” said Don L. Blankenship, the chief executive of Massey Energy, the largest producer of Appalachian coal, who has called climate legislation a hoax and a Ponzi scheme. “How can they be so confident that man is changing the world climate?”

    John Broder reported from Washington, and Jad Mouawad from New York. Clifford Krauss contributed reporting from Houston.

  • US headed for massive decline in carbon emissions

     

    The U.S. has ended a century of rising carbon emissions and has now entered a new energy era, one of declining emissions. Peak carbon is now history. What had appeared to be hopelessly difficult is happening at amazing speed.

    For a country where oil and coal use have been growing for more than a century, the fall since 2007 is startling. In 2008, oil use dropped 5 percent, coal 1 percent, and carbon emissions by 3 percent. Estimates for 2009, based on U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) data for the first nine months, show oil use down by another 5 percent. Coal is set to fall by 10 percent. Carbon emissions from burning all fossil fuels dropped 9 percent over the two years.

    Beyond the cuts already made, there are further massive reductions in the policy pipeline. Prominent among them are stronger automobile fuel-economy standards, higher appliance efficiency standards, and financial incentives supporting the large-scale development of wind, solar, and geothermal energy. (See the data.)

    Efforts to reduce fossil fuel use are under way at every level of government—national, state, and city—as well as in corporations, utilities, and universities. And millions of climate-conscious, cost-cutting Americans are altering their lifestyles to reduce energy use.

    For its part, the federal government—the largest U.S. energy consumer, with some 500,000 buildings and 600,000 vehicles—announced in early October 2009 that it is setting its own carbon-cutting goals. These include reducing vehicle fleet fuel use 30 percent by 2020, recycling at least 50 percent of waste by 2015, and buying environmentally responsible products.

    Electricity use is falling partly because of gains in efficiency. The potential for further cuts is evident in the wide variation in energy efficiency among states. The Rocky Mountain Institute calculates that if the 40 least-efficient states were to reach the electrical efficiency of the 10 most-efficient ones, national electricity use would be reduced by one-third. This would allow the equivalent of 62 percent of the country’s 617 coal-fired power plants to be closed.

    Actions are being taken to realize this potential. For several years DOE failed to write the regulations needed to implement appliance efficiency legislation that Congress had already passed. Within days of taking office, President Obama instructed the agency to write the regulations needed to realize these potentially vast efficiency gains as soon as possible.

    The energy efficiency revolution that is now under way will transform everything from lighting to transportation. With lighting, for example, shifting from incandescent bulbs to the newer light-emitting diodes (LEDs), combined with motion sensors to turn lights off in unoccupied spaces, can cut electricity use by more than 90 percent. Los Angeles, for example, is replacing its 140,000 street lights with LEDs—and cutting electricity and maintenance costs by $10 million per year.

    The carbon-cutting movement is gaining momentum on many fronts. In July, the Sierra Club—coordinator of the national anti-coal campaign—announced the 100th cancellation of a proposed plant since 2001. This battle is leading to a de facto moratorium on new coal plants. Despite the coal industry’s $45 million annual budget to promote “clean coal,” utilities are giving up on coal and starting to close plants. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), with 11 coal plants (average age 47 years) and a court order to install over $1 billion worth of pollution controls, is considering closing its plant near Rogersville, Tennessee, along with the six oldest units out of eight in its Stevenson, Ala., plant.

    TVA is not alone. Altogether, some 22 coal-fired power plants in 12 states are being replaced by wind farms, natural gas plants, wood chip plants, or efficiency gains. Many more are likely to close as public pressure to clean up the air and to cut carbon emissions intensifies. Shifting from coal to natural gas cuts carbon emissions by roughly half. Shifting to wind, solar, and geothermal energy drops them to zero.

    State governments are getting behind renewables big time. Thirty-four states have adopted renewable portfolio standards to produce a larger share of their electricity from renewable sources over the next decade or so. Among the more populous states, the renewable standard is 24 percent in New York, 25 percent in Illinois, and 33 percent in California.

    While coal plants are closing, wind farms are multiplying. In 2008, a total of 102 wind farms came online, providing more than 8,400 megawatts of generating capacity. Forty-nine wind farms were completed in the first half of 2009 and 57 more are under construction. More important, some 300,000 megawatts of wind projects (think 300 coal plants) are awaiting access to the grid.

    U.S. solar cell installations are growing at 40 percent a year. With new incentives, this rapid growth in rooftop installations on homes, shopping malls, and factories should continue. In addition, some 15 large solar thermal power plants that use mirrors to concentrate sunlight and generate electricity are planned in California, Arizona, and Nevada. A new heat-storage technology that enables the plants to continue generating power for up to six hours past sundown helps explain this boom.

    For many years, U.S. geothermal energy was confined largely to the huge Geysers project north of San Francisco, with 850 megawatts of generating capacity. Now the United States, with 132 geothermal power plants under development, is experiencing a geothermal renaissance.

    After their century-long love-affair with the car, Americans are turning to mass transit. There is hardly a U.S. city that is not either building new light rail, subways, or express bus lines or upgrading and expanding existing ones.

    As motorists turn to public transit, and also to bicycles, the U.S. car fleet is shrinking. The estimated scrappage of 14 million cars in 2009 will exceed new sales of 10 million by 4 million, shrinking the fleet 2 percent in one year. This shrinkage will likely continue for a few years.

    Oil use and imports are both declining. This will continue as the new fuel economy standards raise the fuel efficiency of new cars 42 percent and light trucks 25 percent by 2016. And since 42 percent of the diesel fuel burned in the rail freight sector is used to haul coal, falling coal use means falling diesel fuel use.

    But the big gains in fuel efficiency will come with the shift to plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars. Not only are electric motors three times more efficient than gasoline engines, but they also enable cars to run on wind power at a gasoline-equivalent cost of 75 cents a gallon. Almost every major car maker will soon be selling plug-in hybrids, electric cars, or both.

    In this new energy era carbon emissions are declining and they will likely continue to do so because of policies already on the books. We are headed in the right direction. We do not yet know how much we can cut carbon emissions because we are just beginning to make a serious effort. Whether we can move fast enough to avoid catastrophic climate change remains to be seen.

    • This article was shared by our content partner Grist, part of the Guardian Environment Network

  • A fairer formula for emission targets

    sitive, the fundamental problem of how to divide up necessary greenhouse gas reductions between developed and developing countries remains. And with the Copenhagen UN climate summit less than two months away, breaking this deadlock between the major developed and developing economic powers will be essential for progress towards the goal of forging a comprehensive global climate treaty.

    The 2C target requires that cumulative greenhouse gas emissions, expressed as carbon dioxide equivalents, do not exceed about 1,600bn tons over the next four decades. Developing countries want national emissions allowances to be allocated on the basis of equity of per capita emissions. Developed countries argue that this approach would subject them to politically and economically unacceptable emissions restrictions, and that the lack of binding emissions targets for developing countries would frustrate efforts to meet the 2C climate goal.

    A realistic compromise that can break the deadlock is possible, based on a less strict version of the per capita emissions equity principle. The compromise, which we term “progressive convergence”, would involve developed countries agreeing to make an early start on emissions reductions and developing countries committing never to exceed the average per capita emissions of developed countries – a commitment that India in fact has indicated that it would be willing to make.

    The net result will be a progressive convergence of nations to a declining per capita emission rate. To meet the 2C goal, the developed countries’ reduction targets must be sufficiently stringent, but not so stringent as to be politically or economically unacceptable.

    Consider, for example, carbon dioxide emissions from the consumption of fossil fuels. If the G8 countries as a bloc were to adopt the emissions targets similar to those in the Waxman-Markey bill that was passed by the US House of Representatives in June, their average annual per capita energy-related carbon dioxide emissions would decline from about 13 tons currently to less than two tons by 2050.

    Under the progressive convergence principle, other countries would be allowed to increase their emissions until their per capita emissions equalled that of the G8 bloc, and thereafter be required to mirror the declining per capita emissions of the G8 bloc.

    Our calculations, using emission projections by the US Energy Information Agency, indicate that the non-G8 European OECD bloc would hit the per capita emissions of the G8 bloc and have to commence emissions reductions around 2025. Developing economies such as Mexico and Brazil would commence reductions around 2040-2045. Per capita emissions in China would converge with the G8 around 2030, while India’s per capita emissions would not converge until around 2050, owing to its much lower per capita emissions today and projections of smaller emission growth rate and continued increase in population through 2050.

    In this scenario, cumulative energy-related carbon dioxide emissions between 2010 and 2050 would total about 1,200bn tons, leaving about 400bn tons for non-energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. To keep these emissions below 400bn tons, complementary reductions in emissions from deforestation and land use change, as well as other greenhouse gases, will also be necessary. After 2050, emissions reductions will still be needed, but with all the major nations now on an equal per capita carbon footing.

    The common perception that climate goals can be met only if large developing economies such as China and India commit to immediate emissions reductions, or if developed countries adopt draconian measures, is incorrect. Early action by developed countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, coupled with a commitment by developing countries to adhere to the progressive convergence framework, can be the basis of an agreement that is consistent with both the “common but differentiated responsibility” principle of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the goal of not exceeding a 2C increase in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels.

  • Copenhagen negotiaing text: 200 pages to save the world

     

    Running to some 200 pages, the draft agreement is being discussed for the first time this week as officials from 190 countries gather in Bangkok for the latest round of UN talks. There is only one short meeting after this before they meet in Copenhagen aiming to hammer out a final version.

    The draft text consolidates and reorders hundreds of changes demanded by countries to the previous version, which saw it balloon to an unmanageable 300 pages. It has no official status yet, and must be formally approved before negotiators can start to whittle it down. Here, we present key, edited sections from the text and attempt to decipher what the words mean.

    The text includes sections on the traditional sticking points that have delayed progress on climate change for a decade or longer.

    • How much are rich countries willing to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, and by when?

    • Will large developing nations such as China make an effort to put at least a dent in their soaring levels of pollution?

    • How much money must flow from the developed world to developing countries to grease the wheels and secure their approval? How much to compensate for the impact of past emissions, and how much to help prevent future emissions?

    According to the UN rules, for a new treaty to be agreed, every country must sign up – a challenging requirement. The new treaty is designed to follow the Kyoto protocol, the world’s existing treaty to regulate greenhouse gases, the first phase of which expires in 2012. Because the US did not ratify Kyoto, the climate talks have been forced on to awkward parallel tracks, with one set of negotiations, from which the US is excluded, debating how the treaty could be extended past 2012. This new text comes from the second track, which lays out a plan to include all countries in long-term co-operative action.

    Behind the scenes, pessimism about the Copenhagen talks is rising. Despite references in the text to a global goal and collective emission cuts of 25-40% by 2020 for rich countries, many observers believe there is little chance such an approach will succeed.

    Stuart Eizenstat, who negotiated Kyoto for the US, said: “Copenhagen is more likely to be a way station to a final agreement, where each country posts the best that it can do… The key thing is let’s not go into Copenhagen with all the same kind of guns blazing like we did in Kyoto.”

    A top European official told the Guardian: “We’ve moved on from the idea that we can negotiate on targets. That’s naive and just not the way the deal will be done. The best we can get is that countries will put in what they want to commit to.”

    Once all the carbon offsets – buying pollution credits instead of cutting emissions – and “fudges” are taken into account, the outcome is likely to be that emissions in 2020 from rich countries will be broadly similar to those in 1990, he said. “That’s really scary stuff.”

     

  • Aectic to be ice-free in summer in 20 years

     

    Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge, said cargo ships would no longer need to rely on special ice-breaking vessels to cross from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the Northwest Passage. The route would be ice-free for months every year, cutting more than 4800km from the normal journey from East Asia to Europe via the Suez canal.

    “The North Pole will be exposed in 10 years. You would be able to sail a Japanese car carrier across the North Pole and out into the Atlantic,” Professor Wadhams said. “The ice will retreat to a zone north of Greenland and Ellesmere Island by 2020 and that area will be less than half the present summer area. The change in the Arctic summer sea ice is the biggest impact global warming is having on the physical appearance of the planet.”

    This month, the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, which is part of the University of Colorado, said Arctic ice coverage was the third-lowest since satellite records began in 1979. The coverage was greater than in 2007 and last year largely because of cloudy skies during late summer. Each of the past five years has been one of the five lowest years.

    Professor Wadhams, who was on board the submarine supervising sonar measurements of the ice, said Mr Hadow’s findings confirmed the underlying trend was towards increasingly thin and patchy ice cover.

    Mr Hadow and his two team members spent 73 days between March 1 and May 7 this year walking 450km across the Arctic while taking measurements. They drilled 1500 holes and found the average thickness of ice floes was 1.8m. This was too thin to have survived the previous year’s summer melting and indicated the ice had been formed in open sea during the winter.

    Mr Hadow said future expeditions to the Arctic in summer would need to change their techniques and equipment to cope with more frequent stretches of open water. “A hundred years ago, explorers used dogs to haul sledges and then we went through the stage of people hauling sledges,” he said. “Now we have people wearing immersion suits and needing to swim, with the sledge floating. I foresee a time when the sledge will become more of a canoe.”

    Martin Summerkorn, climate change adviser to the WWF Arctic Program, said the loss of sea ice predicted by the study would have profound consequences beyond the polar region.

    Without ice to reflect sunlight, the Arctic Ocean would warm faster, resulting in the release of greenhouse gases stored in the Arctic permafrost soils. These soils contain twice as much carbon as is in the atmosphere.

    Mr Summerkorn said the warming of the Arctic surface waters would accelerate the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, speeding up the sea-level rise.

    “This could lead to flooding affecting one quarter of the world’s population and extreme global weather changes,” he said.

  • Bangkok climate talks end in recrimination

     

     

    With just five days of negotiating time now left before the concluding talks in Copenhagen in December, delegates said it appeared a weak deal was the most likely outcome, and no deal at all was a possibility.

     

    However, President Obama’s expected visit to Oslo to receive the Nobel peace prize in the middle of the climate talks raised hopes that he would make the short journey to Copenhagen to galvanise governments.

     

    “World leadership is now vital if the talks are not to fail completely. It is inconceivable that Obama could now ignore the climate change talks,” said one diplomat.

     

    The citation for the prize specifically mentions the president “now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting”.

     

    However, China, India, Brazil and other major developing countries lined up with environment and development groups to condemn both the US and EU for demanding a brand-new climate agreement.

     

    This would bring the US aboard an agreement but in the eyes of most countries would mean the effective end of the Kyoto protocol and possibly allow countries to set their own targets and timetables for cuts.

     

    “It’s irresponsible to even contemplate the idea of discarding the Kyoto protocol. It’s the lifeblood of any future agreement. It is the only legally binding agreement that gives the certainty of moving rapidly to addressing the climate concerns of billions of people,” said said Di-Aping Lumumba, Sudanese chair of the G77, a group of 130 developing countries.

     

    “Developed countries have a massive leadership deficit. It’s now up to their leaders to intervene and give a direction to the negotiations rather than waste everyone’s time,” he said.

     

    Shyam Saran, Indian special envoy on climate change, said: “The EU must change its position. There have been inadmissible attempts to abandon the Kyoto protocol. This would mean rewriting the key principles. This is not what we agreed by consensus.”

     

    But the EU and UN brushed off concerns. “We are not killing Kyoto,” said Anders Turesson, chair of the EU working group in the negotiations. “We want to preserve the contents [of the protocol]. The only way to do that is to find a new home for it in a new single legal instrument.”

     

    “This is trying to build something bigger and better than Kyoto. The fear is that there would be a race to the bottom. It is the opposite,” he said.

     

    Yvo de Boer, executive director of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted there were now “serious” problems. “The spirit remains constructive and we have seen advances in Bangkok, but there is a strong fear that there is an attempt to kill the Kyoto protocol. That is causing great dissatisfaction,” he said.

     

    Environment and development groups accused the EU and US of holding poor countries to ransom. “The rift between rich and poor has intensified because rich countries have not put serious money on the table to help poor countries adapt to escalating impacts of climate change,” said Oxfam senior climate adviser Antonio Hill. “The US has been silent on the scale of finance it will commit to.”

     

    “Both the US and the EU have tried to shift the burden on to developing countries, arguing that they should even pay towards the costs of adapting to climate change despite their minimal contribution to the problem,” said Tom Sharman, ActionAid’s head of climate change. The only bright spot in the negotiations was Norway’s decision to increase its emissions reduction target to 40% on 1990 levels by 2020, he said.

     

    “The EU has only increased developing country mistrust and the US is trying to impose its own domestic limitations on the world. It’s time for President Obama to be the climate leader he says he is,” said Martin Kaiser, Greenpeace International climate policy adviser