Month: October 2019

PENNSYLVANIANS TELL EPA, WE NEED MORE CONTROLS ON METHANE, NOT LESS

This article discusses a fight between Pennsylvania residents and the EPA about methane emissions.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) heard testimony in Dallas on Thursday about its plan to rollback rules for methane emissions. Methane is a major contributor to climate change.

The proposed rule would eliminate Obama-era regulations for oil and gas companies to detect and fix methane leaks at well pads, pipelines and other infrastructure.

Dale Tiberie is a retired coal miner who lives within 500 feet of a fracked well in Washington County, the most heavily fracked county in Pennsylvania with more than 1,800 deep shale gas wells. Tiberie traveled to Texas with the environmental group Earthworks to testify at the hearing.

Has the wind been taken from the sails of Europe’s renewable future?

This article discusses whether the wind has been taken from the sails of Europe’s renewable future. Europe is a world leading region for wind energy. Yet there are storm clouds on the horizon for the renewable sector, with opposition growing across the continent, despite ongoing growth in some countries.

WindEurope, a Brussels-based association that promotes the use of wind power in Europe, has released a new report which emphasizes the significant uncertainty over how much wind energy capacity will grow in Europe up to the year 2023.

Putting its emphasis on the extent to which European governments implement ambitious National Energy & Climate Plans (NECPs) — the framework by which EU nations now have to plan their climate and energy objectives — the report warns that if these plans are unambitious, then Europe will install much less wind power than it otherwise could.

The new science fossil fuel companies fear

This Politico article discusses the new science fossil fuel companies fear. Researchers can now link weather events to emissions – and to the companies responsible. A string of lawsuits is about to give “attribution science” a real-life test.

Richard Heede spent a decade digging through “disheveled, dusty” tomes in libraries around the world searching for the answers he thought could help save humanity.

The Norway-born academic’s task was direct, but far from simple: Find out how many greenhouse gases the world’s fossil fuel companies, cement-makers and other industrial giants had pumped into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. A geographer by training, he tagged library visits onto work trips to pore over annual company and shareholder reports. (“Nobody had seen them for decades,” he recalled.) He painstakingly traced mergers and acquisitions as companies morphed and amalgamated. He enlisted volunteers across the globe.

AS THE WORLD’S GARBAGE PILES UP, CONTROVERSY OVER WASTE-TO-ENERGY INCINERATION CONTINUES

This article discusses garbage being burned to create energy. Should countries and cities generate energy by burning trash?

Facing streets choked with trash, the Indian city Bengaluru is considering constructing five plants that will burn garbage to produce energy. And as garbage from around the world piles up in Indonesian ports — more than a year after China severely restricted its imports of waste from other countries — Indonesia’s president has asked cities in his country to build similar facilities, called waste-to-energy plants, in a bid to beat the growing mass of garbage. Countries like Vietnam and the Philippines are looking to Japan, home to nearly 400 such plants, for assistance in developing their own waste-to-energy infrastructure.

Garbage from homes, schools and businesses around the globe amounted to some 2 billion metric tons (2.2 billion tons) in 2016, disproportionately discarded by people in North America, Europe and Central Asia. Some projections say that number will reach 3.4 billion metric tons (3.7 billion tons) in 2050. Meanwhile, global energy demand climbed 2.3% last year, the quickest pace in a decade. In that context, many countries see an alluring solution in technologies that turn trash into fuel.

The Return of the ‘Blob’: Hawaii’s Reefs Threatened by Marine Heat Wave

This NY Times article discusses how Hawaiian coral reefs are threatened by the oceans warming.

Both marine heat waves are “super unusual,” according to Andrew Leising, a research oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Nearly every other marine heat wave NOAA has recorded in 40 years of satellite monitoring shrinks in comparison.

“The event in ’14-15 was maybe eight to 10 times the size of Alaska. And the current event we’re having is nearly that big,” Dr. Leising said. “And then, everything else is sort of an even further distant third or fourth.”

Researchers say they think that climate change strongly influenced the original blob’s creation.

Study: Ocean acidification can cause mass extinctions, fossils reveal

This The Guardian article discusses how ocean acidification can cause mass extinctions, fossils reveal. Carbon emissions make sea more acidic, which wiped out 75% of marine species 66m years ago.

Ocean acidification can cause the mass extinction of marine life, fossil evidence from 66m years ago has revealed.

A key impact of today’s climate crisis is that seas are again getting more acidic, as they absorb carbon emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas. Scientists said the latest research is a warning that humanity is risking potential “ecological collapse” in the oceans, which produce half the oxygen we breathe.

The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analysed sediments that Henehan encountered by chance, during a conference field trip in the Netherlands. The sediments, which straddle the moment of the impact, lie in caves that were used by people hiding from the Nazis during the second world war. “It was so lucky,” said Henehan.

Study: Massive reorganization of life across Earth’s ecosystems

This article discusses a study that finds massive reorganization of life across Earth’s ecosystems.

  • A new study pulls together data from 239 studies that looked at more than 50,000 biodiversity time series.
  • The research reveals that almost 30 percent of all species are being swapped out for other species every 10 years.
  • The scientists found that the reorganization and loss of species are happening much more quickly in some environments than in others, a finding that could help inform future conservation.

Life is reshuffling itself at an unsettling clip across Earth’s surface and in its oceans, a new study has found.

The research, published Oct. 18 in the journal Science, drills into data from 239 studies that looked at changes in biodiversity over time. It reveals that almost 30 percent of all species are being swapped out for other species every 10 years.

Can Climate ‘Test Cases’ Move Forward? It’s Up to Supreme Court

This Bloomberg article discusses whether climate ‘Test Cases’ can move forward? It’s up to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court is set to decide soon whether to greenlight state-court proceedings for several cases in which state and local government officials seek to hold oil companies accountable for their role in climate change.

Industry lawyers have filed three emergency requests that urge the justices to stall cases from Rhode Island, Baltimore, and Colorado municipalities, all part of a pack of state and local governments using public nuisance law against energy companies.

The Supreme Court won’t immediately consider the core legal issues. The justices will look at a procedural element: whether state-court action in the climate cases should advance while federal appeals courts decide whether that’s where they belong.

Still, the Supreme Court’s decision could shape the foundations of the burgeoning area of climate liability law.

Report: The world’s ecosystems are being fundamentally transformed in the human era

This Washington Post article discusses how the world’s ecosystems are being fundamentally transformed in the human era.

Brightly colored corals are supplanted by dark, undulating seaweeds. Familiar fish species vanish — to be replaced by unknown strangers, or nothing at all.

Pushed to the brink by warming oceans and human threats, “the places that we used to recognize as coral reefs no longer look the same,” said Gabby Ahmadia, director of ocean science at the World Wildlife Fund.

It’s a metamorphosis unfolding in ecosystems around the globe.

A sweeping survey published this week looked at tens of thousands of species counts from the past few decades and found that the world’s ecosystems are rapidly reorganizing. On average, more than a quarter of all plant and animal species within an ecosystem are being replaced every decade — probably the result of local extinctions, the introduction of invasive species and migrations motivated by climate change.

This Alaskan Forest Eats a Ton of Carbon. Trump Wants to Cut It Down.

This Vice article discusses how an Alaskan forest, as the entire state of West Virginia, is in jeopardy of being cut down.

The Trump administration just declared open season on the biggest temperate rainforest in the world, which naturally stores about half the amount of carbon the U.S. releases every year. If that forest disappears, experts say much of that carbon could wind up in the atmosphere and warm the planet.

On Tuesday, the Forest Service revealed a plan that, if enacted next year, could let developers build roads and chop down trees in more than half of the Tongass National Forest in southeastern Alaska. The 17-million acre forest, which is bigger than the entire state of West Virginia, has been protected from development since 2001. It’s also remarkably biodiverse and home to robust populations of salmon, bears, moose, and deer.