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. 

  • Scientists find vast unreported oil leak from Deepwater horizon

     

    After studying footage of the gushing oil scientists on board the research vessel Pelican, which is gathering samples and information about the spill, said that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day, or 3.4 million gallons a day. The flow rate is currently calculated at 5,000 barrels a day.

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    The vast amounts of oil pouring from the rig, which exploded on April 20 killing 11 people, is depleting the oxygen in the immediate area, raising fears that it could kill most of the sea life near the plumes. Oxygen levels have already dropped by 30 per cent near some of the plumes.

    “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said. “That is alarming.”

    News of the plumes came as the Obama Administration increased pressure on BP with a demand for “immediate public clarification” from Tony Hayward, the chief executive, over the company’s intentions about paying the costs associated with the spill. “The public has a right to a clear understanding of BP’s commitment to redress all the damage that has occurred or that will occur in the future as a result of the spill,” said Ken Salazar, the Interior Secretary.

    The company is still struggling to cap the leaking underwater oil well. Last night they were making a second attempt to insert a mile-long catheter into the leaking pipe by remote control, after a previous attempt to stem the flow by clogging a faulty seabed valve with rubbish hit a snag.

    Technicians using joysticks are operating robotic submersibles that will attempt to place a 6in (15cm) wide relief pipe into the remains of a 21in pipe that used to connect the wellhead to the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on the surface.

    The aim is to use the relief pipe to pump a mix of densely packed items such as golf balls, knotted rope and lumps of plastic into the oil well’s blowout preventer — the giant safety device that failed to work when the rig exploded last month.

    An earlier attempt to place a containment dome over the leak was abandoned after the freezing temperatures and high underwater pressure caused a build up of mushy ice that blocked the funnel intended to carry the leaking oil to tankers on the surface of the sea.

    The company is drilling a relief well that will eventually seal the leak, but that may take up to three months to complete.

  • Labor needs detente with the Greens

     

    “My seat of Melbourne has been vulnerable to the Greens since 2001. I now hold it by only 4.7 per cent . . . There are three Labor seats in my area at risk of falling to the Greens in the forthcoming Victorian State election,” Tanner, the Finance Minister, wrote.

    “Why is this happening? If the Greens had voted with Labor, the Senate would have passed the government’s climate change legislation, because two Liberals crossed the floor to vote with us. We’re now left with no legislation at all. The Greens’ political posturing took precedence over the need for action on climate change.”

    Tanner, nominally from the ALP’s Left, presents as an approachable, moderate and articulate voice for Labor (he is, in some circles, viewed as a potential leader) but his comments about the Greens tell just part of a more complex story.

    It is true that the Greens voted against the government’s emissions trading scheme legislation on the grounds that they believed its low greenhouse reduction targets squandered an opportunity to achieve more ambitious cuts. Yet it should be remembered that the government refused to negotiate with them at all.

    It was determined, instead, to win passage of its emissions legislation with the support of Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberals. Remember the timing? Rudd was insisting on having the legislated ETS bill in his pocket when he went to the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen late last year.

    To take any other path, he said at the time, would be an act of political cowardice.

    Rudd, his deputy Julia Gillard and the Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong, did not foresee (although plenty of signs were afoot) the possibility that Turnbull would be rolled and the Liberals would change their position with their leader before the Senate vote. Regardless, they have continued to blame the Liberals and to a lesser extent the Greens, for what has, effectively, been the death of the emissions trading scheme.

    It has been about a year since Rudd has had a long face-to-face meeting with Greens leader, Senator Bob Brown. Why so long? The Greens – together with one or two recalcitrant Liberal senators and perhaps independent Nick Xenophon – might have co-operated, in the right circumstances, to pass the government’s ETS bill.

    Even today, with Rudd’s environmental credentials under a cloud in the face of what promises to be a tight election, his government has been unwilling to enter good faith negotiations with the Greens over an interim carbon tax.

    “Kevin was crystal clear from the start – the Greens couldn’t be allowed any sort of ownership of the [emissions] trading scheme and the Liberals would have to support it so that they’d wear the [associated increased] costs to voters,” a Labor source said.

    It might be politically convenient for the government to blame the Liberals and the Greens for scuttling its climate change legislation but this flies in the face of the reality of legislating in a two-chamber parliament.

    Voters expect governments to push their legislation through the Senate by force of negotiation. It should be remembered that is how the Keating government attained its Mabo legislation, how the Howard government won its Goods and Services Tax and how the Rudd government has already secured the passage of numerous contentious bills including those to facilitate the 2009 economic stimulus measures.

    It will also need to negotiate the passage of its super profits tax on mining companies, its Commonwealth-state health reforms and its cigarette tax hikes.

    The next Parliament will, hypothetically, be easier for the government.

    That is because, barring a complete collapse in the Green vote, Brown’s party is almost assured of winning the balance of Senate power in its own right. Sure, the Greens would like to knock off Tanner, Plibersek and Albanese – but balance of Senate power is arguably more critical.

    If Labor is returned, if the Liberals remain opposed to an ETS and if whoever happens to be leading Labor in 2012 wants to have another go at emissions trading, the Greens will hold the key.

    It would seem to make sense, therefore, for Labor to begin building a more constructive relationship with the Greens.

    In his post-budget speech to the National Press Club last week, Swan made it clear his government would do what was expected of it by attempting to negotiate the resources super profits tax through the Senate. In the same breath he uttered the Labor mantra that the Liberal Party was responsible for the postponement of emissions trading.

    Governments can blame oppositions all they like for stalling their agendas. But in the end it is the government, not the opposition, that seeks re-election on the back of its legislative achievements.

    Towards the end of last week it appeared that the prime minister was displaying new conviction on climate change.

    “We’ve been frustrated domestically, politically, frustrated internationally by the lack of progress there, but we will not be deterred, we will progress this matter and we will achieve the best possible means of bringing down our greenhouse gas reductions, greenhouse gas levels in the future,” he declared.

    “And the bottom line is this . . . there is no way you can stare in the mirror in the future and say that you have passed up the core opportunity to act on climate change. I will not do that.”

    Pick up the telephone, Kevin. And call Bob Brown.

    Source: smh.com.au

  • Oil industry failed to heed blowout warnings

     

    And yet the risks posed by deep-sea operations – and specifically the potential impact of the failure of key systems – have long been understood. In 2000, the US Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) published a report warning that there were several difficulties connected with deep-water well control, that experience in this area was “limited” and with many rigs having very high oil production rates, a blowout could be “a potential show-stopper” for deep-water drilling in general. That may yet prove to be the case.

    Environmental waiver

    Four years later, a report prepared for the MMS by a team at Texas A&M University in College Station warned that while drilling technology had advanced, safety technology had stagnated – and highlighted blowout control as a particular concern.

    Then in 2008, a Society of Petroleum Engineers report warned that the hydraulic rams used in many BOPs to shut off oil flow may lack the capacity to cut through the high-strength drills used in deep-sea operations. The report’s authors included people employed by Transocean and BP – the companies that own and lease Deepwater Horizon respectively.

    Despite these reports, in 2009, the MMS granted BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling operation a “categorical exclusion” from all environmental reviews under the US National Environmental Policy Act. Such exclusions are meant for projects where, if any problems occur, environmental damage is likely to be minimal or non-existent. Until this month’s spill, the MMS had granted hundreds of such waivers each year to drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico.

    “It is unfortunately a very common practice and in this case it had catastrophic results,” says Kierán Suckling, executive director of the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity.

    Stopping a blowout

    The BOP is a massive stack of high-pressure valves, in this case weighing 400 tonnes, that sits on the sea floor and is designed to stop an uncontrolled release of oil or gas from a well during the initial drilling. At the bottom of the device are shear valves or rams designed to cut through the drill pipe and block off any oil flowing inside the pipe or through the surrounding well casing. Higher up the stack, annular rams are clamped onto the outside of the drill pipe, to reduce oil flow by tightening the ring-shaped space between the outer well casing and the inner drill pipe.

    The BOP beneath Deepwater Horizon had a number of mechanisms to activate both sets of rams, including a manual emergency shut-off on the drilling platform 1500 metres above the sea floor. It also came with sensors that would automatically activate the rams in the case of a rapid increase in well pressure. Additional sensors in the pipe running from the sea floor to the drilling platform were designed to activate the rams if pipe and platform ever separated.

    “We don’t know why it didn’t work,” says BP spokesman William Salvin. “We know automatic systems did not close it, we know workers hit the manual switch before evacuating the rig, and we have been trying since hours after the incident to activate the blowout preventer [using remotely operated vehicles] and that has not been successful.”

    Containment dome

    With the BOP failing, the options open to BP are limited. Other steps to stem the flow of oil are both slow and unproven. The approach that BP is trying at the moment is to cover the well head with a containment dome – a 12-metre-tall steel box with a funnel-shaped top leading to a relief pipe to channel the oil to the surface. Such domes have been deployed in shallow waters, but never previously at such depths.

    One of the challenges is the intense water pressure. “Navy submarines, for example, are crushed at 900 metres. We are working at 1500 metres; this is a very difficult technological challenge,” Salvin says. BP’s initial attempts this week have been confounded, the company says, by a build-up of methane hydrate crystals blocking the relief pipe.

    BP’s next fallback is a relief well, which it started drilling last week. Eventually this should intersect the original well near its origin, some 4000 metres below the sea floor, and then be used to flood it with mud and concrete to stop the uncontrolled flow. However, it could take up to three months to complete the job.

    “It may take a number of tries but you can do it,” says Ken Arnold, an oil industry consultant based in Houston, Texas. He adds that a GPS tracking device, as well as acoustic and magnetic field sensors, can be mounted behind the drill bit of the relief well to help pinpoint the existing well.

    What next?

    So what more could have been done to prevent such a disaster in the first place? Adding a second BOP or placing a containment dome above the BOP – ready to deploy in case of failure – may have helped. But these could make rigs more complex and more vulnerable to human error, Arnold warns. “Rushing to add more tests or redundancies on the system may be the wrong thing to do.”

    Suckling doubts that any deep-sea drilling can be safe. “Government and the oil industry have said for many years these wells are safe, but all technology eventually fails and if the cost to mitigate that failure is prohibitively expensive, you don’t go forward,” he says. “Are we willing to put entire ecosystems and the economies of several states at risk? I’d say no.”

    Cleaning up the mess

    BP and federal officials are employing a variety of clean-up techniques to limit the environmental impact of the massive oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

    One of the primary tools is the use of dispersants, which work much like the detergents in washing-up liquid used to break down grease. The key ingredient being used in the Gulf of Mexico is a sulphonate, a surfactant that binds to both water and oil, reducing the surface tension of the oil. Solvents, including propylene glycol and 2-butoxyethanol are also being used to increase the dispersant’s ability to mix with the oil. With help from the ocean’s natural wave action, the reduction in surface tension allows large surface slicks to separate into individual droplets that eventually sink to the sea floor.

    “It’s a trade-off,” says Carys Mitchelmore of the University of Maryland’s Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons. “Dispersants take oil off the surface and keep it away from wetlands and other sensitive shoreline habitats where it can cause contamination for years.” But the suspension of tiny droplets in the water column and their eventual build-up on the sea floor can create problems for filter feeders such as mussels and oysters, corals and shrimp larvae.

    “Fish can ingest oil particles that then stick to their gills. It’s like coating our lungs in oil: they aren’t going to breathe too well and we wouldn’t either,” Mitchelmore says.

    Since the spill began, clean-up crews have deployed over a million litres of dispersant on the surface and are now testing the chemicals on the sea floor at the source of the leak. Dispersant application at such depths has never been tried before and researchers are unsure how well it would mix with oil in the cold, high-pressure environment at that depth and in the rising oil plume.

    “Dispersants need wave action, typically. This is a forceful plume but I have no idea how well that process will work,” Mitchelmore says.

  • Scientists: emissions-based climate deal ‘not possible’

    Scientists: emissions-based climate deal ‘not possible’

    Ecologist

    12th May, 2010

    Current climate policy of emissions targets and trading will not suceed and should be replaced by a ‘politically attractive’ one based on providing cheap, non-carbon energy, says new paper

    An international agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions is doomed to failure and must be replaced by a drive towards low-cost green energy, says a group of academics and lobbyists.

    Writing in a paper funded in part by the London School of Economics (LSE), the authors, who included University of East Anglia professor Mike Hulme and ‘sceptical environmentalist’ Ted Nordhaus, said the collapse of the Copenhagen talks showed that it was not possible to have a ‘climate policy that has emissions reductions as the all encompassing goal’.

    The paper argues for a change of tack based on government investment in non-carbon energy innovation, such as more efficient solar technology, funded by a ‘small’ hypothecation tax – where the revenue is dedicated to a specific purpose. The ultimate aim, say the authors, is to make green energy cheaper than using fossil fuels.

    ‘As long as the technology and price gap between fossil fuels and low-carbon energy remains so wide, those parts of the world experiencing rapid economic growth will deepen their reliance on fossil fuels,’ says the paper, pointing out that both India and China had made clear they would not accept externally imposed constraints on their rate of economic growth, and most of this growth continues to be driven by expansion in the use of fossil fuels.

    ‘The bottom line is that there will be little progress in accelerating the decarbonisation of the global economy until low carbon energy supply becomes reliably cheaper and provides reliability of supply,’ says the paper.

    Copenhagen failed

    Lead author Professor Gynn Prins, who is an adviser to a charity chaired by climate change sceptic Lord Lawson, said environmentalists had to accept the current top-down climate policy of targets and trading was not working and that the Mexico summit later this year would only compound the failure.

    ‘Rather than being a discrete problem to be solved, climate change is better understood as a persistent condition that must be coped with and can only be partially managed more – or less – well. It is just one part of a larger complex of such conditions encompassing population, technology, wealth disparities, resource use, etc.

    ‘Hence it is not straightforwardly an ‘environmental’ problem either. It is axiomatically as much an energy problem, an economic development problem or a land-use problem, and may be better approached through these avenues than as a problem of managing the behaviour of the Earth’s climate by changing the way that humans use energy.’

    The authors argue a policy of investment in low-cost green energy would be politically attractive and have the contingent benefit of decarbonisation.

    ‘It is now plain that it is not possible to have a ‘climate policy’ that has emissions reductions as the all-encompassing goal. However, there are many other reasons why the decarbonisation of the global economy is highly desirable.

    ‘Therefore, the Paper advocates a radical reframing – an inverting – of approach: accepting that decarbonisation will only be achieved successfully as a benefit contingent upon other goals which are politically attractive and relentlessly pragmatic.’  

    Useful links
    The Hartwell paper in full

  • Flannery blasts PM over ‘ breach of faith’ on climate

     

    “I could go to the Prime Minister now and say, ‘Look, why don’t we put some policies together to address climate change effectively,’” Professor Flannery said.

    “And even if he accepted them, I wouldn’t have any faith that he would actually deliver on them because we’ve already seen this breach of faith.

    “That’s the fundamental problem: it’s not the delay of the climate thing, as bad as that is, it’s the breach of faith with the electorate that’s the problem.”

    Professor Flannery says the effects of climate change are already apparent around Australia but the Government has not done enough to deal with it.

    “They need to deliver on their policies, they really do,” he said.

    “And we have seen nothing from this Government to deliver as far as I can see effectively on any environmental issue.

    “So it’s been very deeply disappointing, I think, for me to see all of this happen and it does have moral implications.

    “I mean trust is the basis of all of our transactions and in politics it’s particularly important.”

    Tags: climate-change, government-and-politics, the-budget, australia, nt, darwin-0800

  • Renewables cash welcome, but will not create jobs or drive industry

    Renewables cash welcome but will not create jobs or drive industry

    Canberra, Wednesday 12 May 2010

    The $652 million increased investment in renewable energy in last
    night’s Federal Budget will be welcomed by an industry starved of
    support, but will not provide any long-term certainty for a serious
    expansion in renewable energy.

    The Greens will pursue in the Senate the systemic policies we need,
    including an effective price on polluters and a feed-in tariff for all
    sources of renewable energy, which will do far more than piecemeal
    subsidies for a few government-chosen projects is no substitute for.

    “This investment is a drop in the ocean compared to the billions that
    would have been invested every year if the government had been willing
    to work with the Greens to get a levy on polluters,” said Australian
    Greens Deputy Leader, Senator Christine Milne.

    “Being serious about harnessing our sun, wind, ocean and biomass power,
    and creating tens of thousands of jobs in those sunrise industries,
    means putting in place the economy-changing policies that will deliver
    it, and the Greens will be pursuing those policies in the Senate.

    “Piecemeal subsidies will just see Australia importing technologies from
    overseas to build a handful of plants, not creating long-term jobs in
    manufacturing and installation. This is the result of driving innovation
    offshore over many years.

    “To do that, we need a higher renewable energy target, a feed-in tariff,
    loan guarantees, an industry development plan, R&D funding and a real
    price on carbon that will ensure that emissions reducing activities are
    competitive instead of channelling funds back to the pockets of the
    polluters.”

    The short-list of projects to be funded by Solar Flagships and the
    Renewable Energy Development Program, released last night after the
    Budget, has bypassed options for baseload solar power with thermal
    storage technology in favour of hybrid coal-solar projects that are
    being leap-frogged around the world.

    “Putting Martin Ferguson in charge of funding renewables programs is
    like putting the fox in charge of the hen house.

    “It is no wonder that Martin Ferguson has chosen to turn a blind eye to
    the baseload solar with storage options that have the potential to
    seriously challenge coal’s dominance in Australia.

    “Minister Ferguson’s priorities quite explicitly lie with protecting the
    coal companies, even when he is supposed to be funding renewable energy
    projects.

    “Doubtless, many of the projects funded are worthy of investment, but
    the fact that there were 52 applications for Solar Flagships – many from
    global leaders in the business – shows that what is necessary is a
    systemic program to give these companies the support they need to all
    start investing in Australia.

    “Imagine the jobs boom and the tremendous benefits for clean air and the
    climate if all those 52 applications were competitive thanks to a
    feed-in tariff or loan guarantee.

    “The Greens will be pursuing these policies in the Senate to give the
    renewable energy sector what it needs to boom in this sunny country.”

    Tim Hollo
    Media Adviser
    Senator Christine Milne | Australian Greens Deputy Leader and Climate
    Change Spokesperson
    Suite SG-112 Parliament House, Canberra ACT | P: 02 6277 3588 | M: 0437
    587 562
    http://www.christinemilne.org.au/| www.GreensMPs.org.au
    <http://www.greensmps.org.au/>

    PROTECTING THE CLIMATE IS A JOB FOR EVERYONE