Articles include: Making way for wildlife; Biden suspends drilling in the Arctic Refuge; imagining life after highways; methane emitters; where solar & wind power are needed; Study: heat deaths & climate change; Trump denial; airlines & GHGs; Norwegian environmental base.
Tag: national parks
Yale Climate Connections, March 12, 2021
Articles include: Biden’s executive orders on climate have broad public support ; Details behind Biden’s ’30 by 30′ U.S. lands and oceans climate goal ; Hard-hitting video explains the origins of climate change ‘polarization’ ; Lab-grown chicken approved for sale in Singapore ; How Indigenous people in the Amazon are using drones to protect rainforests ; Severe drought could make Yellowstone’s Old Faithful geyser less faithful ; Pennsylvania poet Art Zilleruelo grapples with coal’s legacy
The Daily Climate, March 11, 2021
Articles include: Saguaro cactuses are under threat because of climate change; Warming oceans mean smaller baby sharks struggle to survive; Food systems responsible for ‘one third’ of human-caused emissions; Bitcoin rise could leave carbon footprint the size of London’s; The economic case for restoring abandoned oil wells; Summer could last six months by 2100, study finds; As oil prices rise, executives aim to keep them high; Between a black rock and a hard place; Utah agency reverses course, pulls back energy leases in original Bears Ears monument; LAW: Big Tobacco had to pay $206B. Is Big Oil next?
Interior Department halts seismic surveys for oil in Alaska’s Arctic refuge
Arctic Today: Interior Department halts seismic surveys for oil in Alaska’s Arctic refuge. The company proposing to survey parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain missed a deadline for its plan to protect polar bears.
lans for seismic surveys to help find oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge have fizzled due to a lack of protection for polar bears, according to a brief statement Saturday from the Department of the Interior.
The Kaktovik Inupiat Corp (KIC), the Alaska Native-owned company that applied for permission to conduct the survey, failed to do the required work to identify polar bear dens in the region that would be surveyed, Interior spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz said in an emailed statement.
The likely demise of the seismic plan is the latest in a series of setbacks that have deflated the decades-long ambition to convert the refuge into an oil-producing frontier.
Alaska’s oil production has been waning since the late 1980s, when the state produced more than 2 million barrels of crude per day. Now its output is roughly 500,000 bpd.
Former President Donald Trump pushed tax legislation that passed in 2017 and would have allowed for drilling in ANWR, and the federal government held a lease sale in the last days of his presidency.
DeSmogBlog, January 28,2021
Articles include: Pause on Drilling on Federal Lands; LNG-by-Rail Safety Concerns; Scenes from a Locked-Down Washington D.C.; Alberta Inquiry; Cheaper Solar Power; Climate Disinformation Database: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Trump’s Four-Year Drilling Binge Has Done Irreparable Damage
New Republic: Trump’s Four-Year Drilling Binge Has Done Irreparable Damage. Although the recent auction of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge drilling rights flopped, Biden’s team will have a tough time rolling back a strategy designed to survive a Democratic White House.
Last week, amid the chaos of the Capitol riot, the Trump administration proceeded with plans to sell off chunks of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the gas and oil industry’s highest bidders. The plan had been in the works for years, and while Congress was still under siege by fervent Trump supporters, the Bureau of Land Management opened the auction—with embarrassing results.
Only two private bidders took the plunge. Mark Graber, the head of an Alaska-based company that successfully bid on a 50,000-acre tract, told the Anchorage Daily News that he wasn’t surprised at dearth of investors. “It’s absolutely the poorest time to do this sale,” he said, referring to 2020’s dismal returns for extractive industries. However, Graber noted, with a Biden administration coming in, the chance to secure a lease might not come around for another four years. The state-owned development corporation Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority brought the total number of bidders up to three.
The lack of initial interest, with only 11 of the 22 offerings sold, was immediately hailed as a victory for ANWR conservationists and the affected Alaska Native populations, as well as a political victory for President-elect Joe Biden—one less Day One headache to worry about.
Yellowstone science forecasts climate change crunch for amphibians
Billings Gazette discusses Yellowstone science forecasts climate change crunch for amphibians.
Mention Yellowstone National Park and amphibians aren’t likely to leap to mind. Yet the frogs, toads and salamanders that live in the 3,500-square miles of protected landscape are indicators of the park’s health, as well as environmental changes.
There are four species of amphibians native to Yellowstone: the boreal chorus frog, Columbia spotted frog, Western tiger salamander and Western toad. Of these four, chorus frogs and spotted frogs inhabit more niches in the park.
Understanding these small species’ habitat requirements and life cycles can help scientists comprehend the complications of climate change in a temperate, relatively protected ecosystem like Yellowstone. Such knowledge can also point to the interrelationship of amphibians to other species, like pond-building beavers.
Report: Coal Plants Are Closing while Canada’s Allowing Coal Mining – 2 articles
Vox discusses After decades of activism, the Navajo coal plant has been demolished. The largest coal plant in the western US has come down. Now cleanup begins. The Salt River Project (SRP), majority owners and operators of NGS, decided to close the plant in 2017 due to rising operating costs. Scott Harelson, a spokesperson for SRP, told me, “Natural gas prices had been low for a long period of time and are much lower than coal. So the plant was out of market, essentially.” The move to close the coal plant is a part of a broader shift to renewable energy taking place across the US and around the world. According to a report by the International Energy Agency, electricity-generating renewables will have grown roughly 7 percent in 2020, despite the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. This shift has been driven in part by concerns over climate change — but also by increasing questions about the potential health impacts of fossil fuels.
The Narwhal discusses Alberta is planning new mountaintop-removal coal mines. Here’s what that looks like. Debate has swirled as Alberta opens up a large swath of the Rocky Mountains’ eastern slopes to new coal mining. B.C.’s Elk Valley offers a preview of what may come next. It wasn’t just First Nations that were upset by the announcement. Conservation groups, already worried about the loss of protected lands as the UCP government moved to de-list dozens of parks and recreation areas, warned the decision would put more landscapes in jeopardy. Then came the ranching community,
Canada Gives BP Okay to Explore in Marine Conservation Area
Hakai Magazine discusses how Canada Gives BP Okay to Explore in Marine Conservation Area. How protected is a marine refuge, really, if oil drilling is allowed?
Earlier this month, the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board accepted a bid from oil company BP to explore for oil and gas in an area that includes part of Atlantic Canada’s largest marine conservation area.
The move to open part of the Northeast Newfoundland Slope Closure marine refuge to oil and gas exploration has alarmed conservation groups. It has also highlighted how the confusing variety of approaches that Canada is using to reach its marine conservation goals can result in wildly varying levels of protection.
Tongass National Forest – 2 articles
The Washington Post discusses Trump to strip protections from Tongass National Forest, one of the biggest intact temperate rainforests. President Trump will open up more than half of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging and other forms of development, according to a notice posted Wednesday, stripping protections that had safeguarded one of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforests for nearly two decades.
National Geographic discusses An ancient forest in Alaska loses environmental protections. The Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, sustains Indigenous communities. A rollback of federal protections puts more than half of it at risk.