June 2018 – No Fricking Fracking

This Tiny California Beach Town Is Suing Big Oil. It Sees This as a Fight for Survival.

This article discusses a small California town taking on the fossil fuel industry because sea level rise will destroy their town. Imperial Beach can’t afford seawalls, so it’s trying to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate change as sea level rises and saltwater creeps in.

IMPERIAL BEACH, California—Among Serge Dedina’s first stops on a brisk morning tour of this small seaside city is a wall that separates a row of frayed apartments from wetlands known as the San Diego Bay Wildlife Refuge. Artists are dabbing finishing touches on a mural of sea birds against a flamingo-pink wall.

This splash of color is important to Dedina. It’s something he can do—his city’s leadership can do—to cheat the austerity that comes with having one of the smallest city budgets in the state. Dedina, 53, is the mayor of this oceanfront community at the southern edge of California, separated from Mexico by the estuary of the Tijuana River.

Water marks three borders around Imperial Beach. And what prosperity there is in Imperial Beach comes from the ocean and its surf. The city logo is a classic Woody station wagon with a surfboard poking out of the back. People come here for the beach and the estuary.

But with the climate crisis, the same water has become the single greatest threat to Imperial Beach’s future.

Okla. oil CEO spurred Pruitt on climate study

This article discusses how Scott Pruitt and the fossil fuel industry seem to be joined at the hip.

EPA officials and an Oklahoma oil industry executive quietly collaborated on a plan to scrutinize uncertainty in climate science.

Newly released emails show that Randy Foutch, CEO of Tulsa-based Laredo Petroleum Inc., pitched EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt last year on an academic effort to assess the accuracy of climate models. Pruitt’s staff subsequently consulted with Foutch and officials at the University of Texas, Austin, Energy Institute, where Foutch sits on an advisory board, according to emails recently released to the Natural Resources Defense Council under a Freedom of Information Act request. The effort came as Pruitt publicly played up the uncertainties in climate science and pushed a separate “red team, blue team” effort aimed at poking holes in established climate research.

Foutch sent an email to Pruitt in April 2017, suggesting the agency could help develop a study that would assess climate models that are used to make future predictions about global warming. That email was sent to Andy Miller, a career employee and EPA’s associate director for climate in the Office of Research and Development to inquire about Foutch’s idea. Miller spent months communicating directly with Foutch about climate models and the study, the emails show.

Study: Southern California’s coastal communities could lose 130 feet of cliffs this century as sea levels rise

This article discusses how Southern California will be impacted by sea level rise. It’s not just beaches and sand that are disappearing as the ocean pushes inland. Sea level rise is also eating away at California’s coastal cliffs. The question is by how much, as Californians have heavily developed and continue to build along the edge of the Pacific.

Scientists are now one step closer to projecting how these bluffs will fare this century — and the outlook is sobering. In Southern California, cliffs could recede more than 130 feet by the year 2100 if the sea keeps rising, according to a new study led by the U.S. Geological Survey.

”It’s a pretty big number,” said Pat Limber, a coastal geomorphologist and lead author of the study. “Hopefully this model will give coastal managers a broad-scale picture of how the cliffs might respond to sea level rise, so that they can start planning for the future.”

Urban trees can store almost as much carbon as tropical rainforests

This article discusses the importance of city trees – they aren’t just nice decoration–they’re a key factor in stopping climate change.

Most people would never think of London as a forest. Yet there are actually more trees in London than people. And now, new work by researchers at University College London shows that pockets of this urban jungle store as much carbon per hectare as tropical rainforests.

More than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and urban trees are critical to human health and well-being. Trees provide shade, mitigate floods, absorb carbon dioxide (CO₂), filter air pollution and provide habitats for birds, mammals and other plants. The ecosystem services provided by London’s trees–that is, the benefits residents gain from the environment’s natural processes–were recently valued at £130m a year.

This may equate to less than £20 a year per tree, but the real value may be much higher, given how hard it is to quantify the wider benefits of trees and how long they live. The cost of replacing a large, mature tree is many tens of thousands of pounds, and replacing it with one or more small saplings means you won’t see the equivalent net benefit for many decades after.

The world lost an area of tropical forest the size of Bangladesh in 2017

This article discusses how vast tracts of forests are being destroyed, and the ramifications of that for climate change.

According to new data, tropical countries lost 158,000 square kilometers (39 million acres) of tree cover in 2017 – an area the size of Bangladesh. The 2017 number is the second highest since the dataset began in 2001, and only a bit lower than the record high in 2016.
Brazil came out on top for the most tree cover lost of any tropical country, a reversal from the country’s deforestation reductions over the past 14 years. Tree cover loss also rose dramatically in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Colombia. However, Indonesia’s numbers dropped by nearly half between 2016 and 2017.
Experts attribute the upward trend in tree cover loss primarily to continued land clearing for agricultural purposes.
The new dataset was discussed at the Oslo Tropical Forest Forum, which is taking place this week in Norway.

Seymour then proceeded to cite the new set of data, published on Global Forest Watch, a forest monitoring site run by WRI.

Report: Building Coastal Resilience to Protect U.S. National Security

This article examines the linkage between US national security and sea level rise.

As the Atlantic hurricane season kicks off this month, some coastal communities in the United States and small-island nations in the Caribbean are still recovering from last year’s record-breaking damage. At the same time, the heavy rains pounding the East Coast this week are part of a long-term trend towards more severe heavy rainfall events that have led to deadly floods and threaten critical U.S. military bases. Even on sunny days, cities such as Norfolk and Manila contend with high tide or “nuisance” flooding—a phenomenon that has increased as much as nine-fold since the 1960s, according to NOAA.

Extreme weather events like these not only endanger the billions of people who live along the world’s coastlines, it also undermines our national security, write the editors of a new report, “Building Coastal Resilience for Greater U.S. Security,” released this week by the Hoover Institution, the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and the Woodrow Wilson Center.

The report is based on a series of discussions that focused on policy options to the challenges faced by coastal regions. Three of the report’s editors—Alice Hill, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution; Katharine Mach, a senior research scientist at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences; and Roger-Mark De Souza, president and CEO of Sister Cities International—answered questions on the report’s assessment of security risks from sea-level rise and extreme weather.

How Calgary is preparing for drought brought on by climate change

This article discusses how Calgary is preparing for drought caused by climate change.

When Calgarians think of water-related crises, flooding is often top of mind. But this summer, this city is beginning the process of planning for the opposite: drought.

“The last few summers have been warmer and drier than normal, and we’re also forecast for a warmer, drier summer this year,” said Harpreet Sandhu, a watershed strategy team lead with the City of Calgary.

“We haven’t had an issue over the last bit and we don’t anticipate any issues, but it’s just being proactive.”

Southern Alberta is no stranger to the long stretches of parched ground and cloudless skies brought by the occasional drought — one severe dry spell in Western Canada in 2001-02 cost the Canadian government $5.8 billion.

But with the effects of climate change rapidly encroaching, making such extreme weather more normal, Calgary wants to be ready. In May, it began the process of seeking bids for a consultant to help it redesign its water management systems to better manage drought events.

Could Proposed Mission Statement Changes Shake NOAA’s Climate Focus?

This article discusses how the Trump Administration is attempting to change the focus of NOAA’s mission.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is the foremost U.S. agency focusing on weather, climate and oceans, reassured reporters Monday that it would not shift its focus away from climate change and conservation after a presentation last week suggested it might do exactly that, USA Today reported.

Last week, acting NOAA head Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet spoke at a Department of Commerce summit and proposed removing “climate” from NOAA‘s current mission statement and replacing its directive “to conserve and manage coastal and marine ecosystems and resources” with one “To protect lives and property, empower the economy, and support homeland and national security,” the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) reported Sunday.

“This is a shocking change in the mission of one of the nation’s premier scientific agencies,” director of the Center for Science and Democracy at UCS and former NOAA scientist Andrew Rosenberg said.

But in a statement reported Monday by USA Today, Gallaudet said the proposal did not signal a shift in the work NOAAwould do, saying the proposal “was not intended to exclude NOAA‘s important climate and conservation efforts, which are essential for protecting lives and the environment. Nor should this presentation be considered a final, vetted proposal.”

The first bullet point in NOAA‘s mission statement currently reads,”To understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans and coasts.” The proposal would have changed it to, “To observe, understand and predict atmospheric and ocean conditions.”

The New York Times pointed out that NOAA, which is part of the Department of Commerce, has its mission and budget defined by Congress, and making any major changes might require congressional approval.

Derailed Oil Train Spills 230,000 Gallons of Tar Sands in Flooded Iowa River

This article discusses a spill in Iowa of tar sands oil. On June 22, a train carrying Canadian crude oil derailed in northwestern Iowa, releasing an estimated 230,000 gallons of oil into a flooded river. As a result of the derailment, over 30 rail tank cars ended up in the water, with 14 cars confirmed to have leaked oil.

To put the size of this spill in perspective, an Enbridge pipeline that leaked in Michigan in July 2010 released roughly 1,000,000 gallons of tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River. Cleanup for this spill, one of the largest inland oil spills on record, took years and more than $1 billion.

Like the Kalamazoo River spill, the train that derailed in Iowa was carrying tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada.

This crash, near Doon, Iowa, also is the first one involving the new, safer DOT-117R tank cars that promised to make oil safer to transport by rail. The accident reveals that these tank cars are not foolproof, considering the nearly quarter million gallons of oil released from them into an Iowa river.

Study: Energy Efficiency and Technology Squeeze the Carbon Bubble

This article discusses how and why the carbon bubble will burst with or without government action, according to a new study. That will hurt people who invest in fossil fuels.

As energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies improve and prices drop, global demand for fossil fuels will decline, “stranding” new fossil fuel ventures — likely before 2035, according to the study in Nature Climate Change, “Macroeconomic impact of stranded fossil fuel assets.”

Researchers from Cambridge University and elsewhere found technological advances will strand fossil fuel assets regardless of “whether or not new climate policies are adopted,” but that “the loss would be amplified if new climate policies to reach the 2°C target of the Paris Agreement are adopted and/or if low-cost producers (some OPEC countries) maintain their level of production (‘sell out’) despite declining demand.”

That could “amount to a discounted global wealth loss of US$1–4 trillion,” and Russia, the U.S., and Canada could see their fossil fuel industries nearly shut down, the report says.

The best way to limit these negative impacts is to divest from fossil fuels and speed up the transition to a diversified, energy-efficient, clean-energy economy. Investing tax dollars to expand fossil fuel development and infrastructure, including pipelines, is irresponsible and incompatible with Canada’s Paris Agreement commitments, putting everyone at economic risk, and leaving us with polluted air, water and land, and increasing climate impacts and healthcare bills.