Month: July 2018

A dozen fires and explosions at Colorado oil and gas facilities in 8 months since fatal blast in Firestone

This article discusses how new pipeline rules are being proposed in Colorado, but they don’t deal with fatalities from oil and gas industry fires and explosions.

At least a dozen explosions and fires have occurred along Colorado oil and gas industry pipelines in the eight months since two men were killed when a home blew up in Firestone, a Denver Post review of state records found. Two of those explosions killed workers.

The state has not taken any enforcement action in the April 17 Firestone deaths, saying there is no rule — and none is proposed — covering oil and gas industry accidents that lead to fatalities.

Colorado oil and gas industry regulators have responded to the Firestone disaster by proposing modifications of existing rules — to be hashed out in meetings next month — for pipelines under well pads that they call “flowlines.”

So Much Fracking Gas! A Ballot Initiative to Protect Coloradans

This article discusses the Sierra Club ballot initiative in Colorado to not allow fracking wells closer than 2,500 feet from where people live and work.

TAKE ACTION: Sign the petition to expand ‘buffer’ zones around schools and homes where fracking should not occur!

This map, which shows where fracking wells are located in Colorado, has more dots than a cup of Dip ‘n Dots’ “Ice Cream of the Future”. Currently, Colorado has approximately 50,000 active oil wells and 20,000 abandoned wells.

Dr. Beth Ewaskowitz, PhD in Neuroscience and Pharmacology, is a mother in Erie, Colorado. When she looked at the map, which shows both closed and active wells, she found 156-158 wells within a 1 mile radius of her home, her child’s school, and the recreation center where her son spends most of his free time. “And I looked at that, and I went, oh my god. You know they are around, but they paint them beige so you don’t really notice them.”

Colorado is blessed with a wealth of natural resources. Unfortunately, extraction of oil and natural gas can be dangerous. Fracking, a common method of extraction, is a process involving twenty-nine additives, many of which are known or possible human carcinogens like lead, benzene, and formaldehyde.

Oil Industry Plans to Keep Workers Safe—by Firing Them and Having Robots Do Their Jobs

This article discusses how the fossil fuel industry plans to ensure worker safety – by replacing workers with robots.

The oil and gas industry is finally acknowledging how dangerous employment can be for its workers after years of touting the sector as a beacon of worker safety. This sudden honesty about the dangers of working in the oil patch coincides with the industry’s new solution to greatly improve the safety of those workers — which is to fire them and replace them with robots.

Similar to oil executives’ fondness for saying their motivation for getting developing countries hooked on fossil fuels is to “lift people out of poverty,” this sudden concern for safety appears more like marketing spin to obscure the fact that the industry’s favorite pitch for new oil and gas infrastructure (Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!) no longer holds up to scrutiny.

Perhaps the most bizarre example of this occurred this June at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) annual conference, which featured a panel called “Technological progress in U.S. tight oil production.” (“Tight oil” refers to oil from shale formations that require horizontal drilling and fracking.) One of the panelists was Stephen Ingram, Vice President of Technology Solutions and Innovation, for oil field services company Halliburton.

Ingram made the following argument for why the industry was shifting toward automation:

“The most unsafe act that we provide as a service company to our employees is getting them to location today. So we’re engineering out the safety issues. Where we are focused right now is not on removing people from location because it derives a lower cost, it’s because the worst thing that we can physically do for our employees right now is drive them from the district camp to the well site. If you ever go out to Midland, Texas, you’re putting your life in your own hands driving up and down the highway.”

The Big Apple Loses to Big Oil as Judge Dismisses Climate Liability Suit

This article discusses the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by NY State against the fossil fuel industry. It is the second such dismissal in favor of the fossil fuel industry.

A federal judge ruled on Thursday in favor of a motion by five big oil companies to dismiss a lawsuit brought against them by New York City, which demanded they pay the costs of adapting the city’s infrastructure to climate change, The New York Times reported.

The ruling comes nearly a month after a federal judge in San Francisco dismissed a similar case brought by the cities of Oakland and San Francisco.

In his decision Thursday, Judge John F. Keenan of United States District Court for the Southern District of New York echoed the reasoning of Federal Judge William Alsup when he dismissed the San Francisco and Oakland case.

While both judges acknowledged the reality of climate change, they thought that crafting policy around it was too large an issue for the courts to settle.

“Global warming and solutions thereto must be addressed by the two other branches of government,” Keenan wrote in his decision.

But environmentalists pointed out that fossil fuel companies like the defendants had done everything in their power to stop the other branches of government from acting.

 

Study: Antarctic Melt Accelerates Sea Level Rise—and the Likelihood of Climate Migration

This article discusses how sea level rise will affect millions of people – forcing them to migrate away from where they currently live.

While renewable energy is on a roll — setting records in Europe over the last few months, and racking up impressive numbers in capacity buildout in 2017, it’s easy to forget what is happening behind the scenes.

Extreme weather gets all the headlines: the wildfires in Canada and Sweden, the flooding in Japan, the heatwaves in Canada and the U.S. But what are called the slow onset climate change events are inexorably moving forward.

Let’s start with sea level. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) recently published a report called Underwater, which examined more closely the impact of future sea level rise on coastal cities in the U.S. The UCS took as their baseline that global mean sea levels would rise about 2 meters between 2010 and the end of the century — a projection judged as being very likely in several reports published last year.

The UCS report looked at the impact on coastal communities of chronic inundation due to sea level rise — defined as a zone experiencing at least 26 floods a year. By the end of the century, the UCS analysis shows that as many as 2.4 million of today’s residential properties and about 107,000 commercial properties, worth roughly $1.07 trillion, would be at risk of chronic flooding.

Kids around the world are suing governments over climate change—and it’s working

This article discusses how young people are suing to stop climate change. Nobody could have predicted the kids would get this far.

Back in 2015, a group of 21 young Americans decided to sue the US government over climate change. In Juliana v. US, the plaintiffs argue that the government has violated “the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property” by adopting policies that promote the use of fossil fuels—despite the knowledge that carbon dioxide emissions are a primary cause of global warming.

That might sound like an extreme claim. But in the years since, the lawsuit has kept succeeding against all odds. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on July 20 denied the Trump administration’s attempt to dismiss the suit (pdf), and the case remains set for trial 0n October 29. “With the Ninth Circuit again ruling in our favor, we are going strong,” 12-year-old plaintiff Avery M. said in a statement (pdf). “The federal government is trying to block our path but we are persevering. We are optimistic and have the courage to keep standing up for our constitutional rights.”

Clean energy is getting really, really cheap – as demand rises, prices go down.

This article discusses how the price of renewable energy is continually dropping, easily competing with fossil fuels.

Fields of solar panels and hilltop wind turbines are an increasingly common sight nationwide. And as demand for clean energy grows, costs are falling fast.

Chris Namovicz is with the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Namovicz: “As you manufacture more and as you install more, the manufacturers and the installers learn to do things more efficiently. For solar generation, install costs have come down 40 to 50 percent in the last five years for which we have data.”

The systems are also getting more efficient.

Namovicz: “For wind, in particular, the productivity of the turbines has improved quite a bit over the last five, 10, 15 years, and so that helps reduce the total cost to own and operate the system.”

Climate change science comeback strategies

This article attempts to convey how to steer the climate change debate with people adamantly resistant to accepting climate science. (Part I).

Staircase wit. L’esprit de l’escalier. It’s the way the perfect response in an uncomfortable conversation comes cruelly late, occurring only after the crux moment has long since passed, and you’re descending the stairs on your way home.

Why didn’t I think of that? you ask, kicking yourself for temporarily forgetting how carbon isotopes show that fossil fuels are indeed the source of the CO2 buildup in the atmosphere.

As the American culture war flares up like a SoCal heat wave, many feel understandably helpless watching misinformation accelerate throughout society. But even as you hit “enter” on a witty post correcting the spelling and grammar of someone who suggests scientists are incompetent, at some level you probably know this doesn’t improve the situation. Lobbing talking points back and forth typically only entrenches deeply held positions, a process known as belief polarization.

The Energy 202: Republicans can’t agree on this climate deal brokered by Obama

This article discusses how Republicans are attempting to reconcile the reality of climate change.

Republicans are happy to see the Trump administration do away with most of the climate policies of the previous president — or at least try to. But conservative politicians and activists are deeply divided over whether to cement into law a hard-fought international agreement on a set of little-known greenhouse gases.

The tiff concerns a multilateral effort to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs. That class of organic compounds, which are used in but also leak from air conditioners, pose a dual threat to the planet: They erode Earth’s protective ozone layer and amplify the greenhouse effect.

In President Barack Obama’s final full year in office, his administration negotiated an amendment to the landmark Montreal Protocol attempting to curtail their use. But conservatives are divided about whether they should ratify the changes to the treaty now that they are in charge.

Heat waves can be deadly for workers and will drain the US economy

This article discusses the impact that global warming will have on the health of people and the world’s economy.

As temperatures surge around the world, many cities and countries are breaking heat records. Massive wildfires have ignited in Europe and the United States amid the scorching weather, destroying thousands of acres of wilderness. Hundreds have died this year between the heat and fires.

But the recent hot weather is dangerous in more subtle ways, and is an ominous signal of what increasing average temperatures and climate change portend for some of the most vulnerable who must endure the heat to earn a living. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 15 million people in the United States have jobs that require them to be outdoors at some point, and rising temperatures are already proving dangerous for them.

In Georgia, Miguel Angel Guzman Chavez, a 24-year-old farmworker, died of heatstroke while working the field last month when the heat index reached 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Earlier this month, 52-year-old Cruz Urias-Beltran was found dead in a cornfield in Nebraska after temperatures topped 100°F. Postal worker Peggy Frank died in her mail truck near Los Angeles on July 6, when the temperature reached 117°F. She was 63.