Month: October 2017

Stupid is as stupid does.

The Hill:

William Wehrum, an energy industry attorney and former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official, has been tapped to fulfill one of the agency’s most consequential roles.

President Trump formally nominated Wehrum Thursday to be the EPA’s assistant administrator for air and radiation, where he would oversee a massive portfolio concerned with air pollution, climate change, auto regulation and more.

If confirmed by the Senate, Wehrum would become one of the most powerful people at the 15,000-person agency behind Administrator Scott Pruitt.

He would be responsible for the bulk of a massive deregulatory push by the Trump administration that involves rolling back or potentially revising rules on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, methane emissions from the oil and natural gas sector, ozone pollution and mercury, among other rules. Most of the regulations were written by the Obama administration.
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Wehrum’s detractors point to what they see as industry-friendly regulatory actions that he took during the Bush administration, some of which were later overturned in court.

Wehrum has also expressed doubt that the EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, despite the Supreme Court’s 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision stating otherwise.

He helped write a rule to limit mercury pollution from power plants, but it allowed companies to trade pollution credits. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned it in 2008, saying that the EPA should have used a more stringent section of the law.

“When Bill Wehrum was at the EPA before, time after time, he was in a leadership role in efforts to weaken clean air protections. And time after time, these attempts were thrown out in court,” said David Baron, an Earthjustice attorney who specializes in air pollution.

“There’s little question he can be expected to fully carry out the Trump-Pruitt agenda of dismantling the clean air and climate protections that have been developed over the last administration, and really the last 40 years of the Clean Air Act,” he said.

Mike Danylak, spokesman for Environment Committee Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), said the chairman welcomes Wehrum’s nomination.

“Chairman Barrasso knows that Administrator Pruitt needs his full leadership team in place at the EPA in order to ensure America has clean air, land, and water. The committee looks forward to considering Mr. Wehrum’s nomination as well as the other recently nominated assistant administrators of the EPA.”

 

In July, I camped with Asa Rennermalm‘s team at the Greenland ice edge.
During that time I focused on documenting their work in measuring melt both on and off the ice sheet, and have since produced profiles of each of the young researchers, and what they are learning, four in total. Above is the first.

Asa and I will be cooperating on a presentation to educators at this year’s American Geophysical Union conference. More on that to come.

Rutgers University:

The Greenland ice sheet is melting, and it’s important for the hundreds of millions of people who live near sea level to know how it’s melting, and how fast the meltwater reaches the ocean and affects sea levels.  That’s why Asa Rennermalm, a professor of geography at Rutgers University-New Brunswick’s School of Arts and Sciences., spends time in Greenland each summer.

The current picture of that process, as expressed in computer models, has some big gaps, Rennermalm said. “The current (computer) models do not represent streams on the ice sheet surface at all,” she said. “They assume meltwater instantaneously escapes to the ocean. Our work aims to understand the role of these streams in the overall ice sheet surface mass balance and ice sheet dynamics.”

So last summer, as she has for the past 10 summers, Rennermalm and two graduate students, Rohi Muthyala and Sasha Leidman, spent two weeks trying to quantify how much water flows from the Akuliarusiarsuup Kuua River, which drains meltwater from the Russell Glacier in southwestern Greenland.

Continue reading “This Year’s Fieldwork: Profiling Greenland Researchers”

Puerto Rico and the Caribbean are not the only places that may be forever changed by a harsh new climate reality.

Above, Journalist Keith Scheider reflects on global observations of increasing climate fueled extremes, including India.

India Environmental Portal:

Socioeconomic challenges continue to mount for half a billion residents of central India because of a decline in the total rainfall and a concurrent rise in the magnitude and frequency of extreme rainfall events. Alongside a weakening monsoon circulation, the locally available moisture and the frequency of moisture-laden depressions from the Bay of Bengal have also declined. Here we show that despite these negative trends, there is a threefold increase in widespread extreme rain events over central India during 1950–2015. The rise in these events is due to an increasing variability of the low-level monsoon westerlies over the Arabian Sea, driving surges of moisture supply, leading to extreme rainfall episodes across the entire central subcontinent.

Below, ICYMI, Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon describes increases in  extreme rains in and around Texas.

 

Some things make just make sense.
Distributed, resilient, renewable energy is one of them. That’s why it can’t be stopped.

Reuters:

BARRANQUITAS, Puerto Rico (Reuters) – While his competitors wait for diesel to restart generators knocked out by Hurricane Maria, flower grower Hector Santiago is already back in business because of solar panels powering his 40-acre (16.2-hectare) nursery in central Puerto Rico.

The U.S. territory is in a near blackout, its electricity grid shredded by the storm that slammed into the island on Sept 20. But Santiago’s decorative plant and poinsettia nursery, set amid the jagged peaks of the Barranquitas farming area, has kept working thanks to the $300,000 he invested in 244 solar panels six years ago.

“Everybody told me I was crazy because it was so expensive. Now I have power and they don‘t,” said Santiago, whose flowers are sold in Puerto Rico, at outlets like Costco, and throughout the Caribbean.

While Santiago’s nursery was considerably damaged during the storm, many plants were destroyed and the roofs of some greenhouses blew off, he was able to regroup quickly, with electricity to keep pumping water from his two wells.

Continue reading “Resilient Solar Shines in Extremes”

Have a good time.

While the President excoriates disaster victims for “throwing the budget out of whack”, Big Fossil keeps getting its palms greased.

Nature-Energy:

Countries in the G20 have committed to phase out ‘inefficient’ fossil fuel subsidies. However, there remains a limited understanding of how subsidy removal would affect fossil fuel investment returns and production, particularly for subsidies to producers. Here, we assess the impact of major federal and state subsidies on US crude oil producers. We find that, at recent oil prices of US$50 per barrel, tax preferences and other subsidies push nearly half of new, yet-to-be-developed oil investments into profitability, potentially increasing US oil production by 17 billion barrels over the next few decades. This oil, equivalent to 6 billion tonnes of CO₂, could make up as much as 20% of US oil production through 2050 under a carbon budget aimed at limiting warming to 2 °C. Our findings show that removal of tax incentives and other fossil fuel support policies could both fulfil G20 commitments and yield climate benefits.

Inside Climate News:

Government subsidies to American energy companies are generous enough to ensure that almost half of new investments in untapped domestic oil projects would be profitable, creating incentives to keep pumping fossil fuels despite climate concerns, according to a new study.

The result would seriously undermine the 2015 Paris climate agreement, whose goals of reining in global warming can only be met if much of the world’s oil reserves are left in the ground.

The study, in Nature Energy, examined the impact of federal and state subsidies at recent oil prices that hover around $50 a barrel and estimated that the support could increase domestic oil production by a total of 17 billion barrels “over the next few decades.”

Using that oil would put the equivalent of 6 billion tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere, the authors calculated.

Taxpayers give fossil fuel companies in the U.S. more than $20 billion annually in federal and state subsidies, according to a separate reportreleased today by the environmental advocacy group Oil Change International. During the Obama administration, the U.S. and other major greenhouse gas emitters pledged to phase out fossil fuel supports. But the future of such policies is in jeopardy given the enthusiastic backing President Donald Trump has given the fossil fuel sector.

The study in Nature Energy focused on the U.S. because it is the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels and offers hefty subsidies. The authors said they looked at the oil industry specifically because it gets double the amount of government support that coal does, in the aggregate.

Written by scientists and economists from the Stockholm Environment Institute and Earth Track, which monitors energy subsidies, the study “suggests that oil resources may be more dependent on subsidies than previously thought.”

Motherboard:

‘Zombie oil’ that ought to stay in the ground is kept alive thanks to federal and state governments in the US feeding it billions of dollars. This is oil consumers don’t need, and that oil companies therefore wouldn’t touch without these subsidies, a new analysis published in Nature Energy reveals.

Subsidies are not cash handouts. They’re a mix of tax breaks, tax credits, and regulations that forego government revenue, transfer liability, or provide services at below-market rates. Another significant subsidy takes the form of uncompensated government costs for fixing roads damaged by heavy fracking trucks. Governments justify these as supporting economic growth and job creation.

Continue reading “Zombie Oil: Fossil Fuels Still Need Subsidies”

If this is a preview of how we’ll be adapting to climate change disasters, it does not bode well.

President Trump’s assessment: Not enough people dead yet to make this a catastrophe.

Only missing: a Tee Shirt cannon.

 

Take 5 minutes for this.

I bagged a terrific interview with Jørgen Peder Steffensen of the Niels Bohr Institute, at his field office in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, this past July.  I started by asking Dr. Steffensen about implications of Greenland melt for sea level, but he wanted to move in another direction. The potential for abrupt climate changes, triggered by human caused warming and melting of Greenland ice.

Steffensen, it turns out, is a history buff, and that makes him all the more concerned.

I touched on this topic a few years ago in interviews with Mike Mann,  Stefan Rahmstorf, and Jason Box, in relation to their study of the North Atlantic current – see below.

Continue reading “New Video: Inside the Experiment – The Climate Does not always Play Nice”

More confirmation that if you want to stay ahead of the curve, keep watching these videos.  Most recent vid started out talking about trends toward electrification of road travel throughout the world.  A week after I posted, China announced they are looking at banning combustion engine autos.
Arguments about how the Trump administration will try to weaken CAFE standards are now moot. China is the elephant in every room.

Inside Climate News:

A coalition of global corporations, including Unilever, Ikea and shipping giant DHL, launched a global campaign today to accelerate the shift to electric vehicles and away from gas- and diesel-powered transportation—which generates almost a quarter of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions worldwide and has been the fastest growing emissions source.

Since more than half of the cars on the road belong to companies, the new EV100 coalition could have a major impact. It aims to do for EVs and electric car charging infrastructure what coalitions such as the RE100 are already doing to encourage corporate purchasing of clean energy (and thus motivating development of new solar and wind power).

EV100’s goal is to send a signal to automakers that there is mass demand for electric vehicles before 2030, when current forecasts suggest global uptake will start to really ramp up.

“We want to make electric transport the normal,” said Helen Clarkson, CEO for The Climate Group, the international nonprofit spearheading the effort.

Government pressure is already adding to that signal in Europe and Asia: France and the UK have given automakers a 2040 deadline to end the sale of new gas-powered cars; China recently indicated it would set its own deadline; India has suggested it is moving toward 100 percent electric vehicles; and Chancellor Angela Merkel hinted last month that Germany may follow suit. Automakers have been responding by expanding their EV fleets, as showcased at last week’s Frankfurt Motor Show.

Los Angeles Times:

Auto buyers have yet to show much love for electric cars.

Sales of the Tesla Model S and Model X have stalled at around 25,000 per quarter. The company has yet to prove it can make and sell the lower-priced Model 3 in large numbers, saying Monday that it had produced only 260 of the cars through Sept. 30. Chevrolet sells only a few thousand Bolt EVs a month, despite rave reviews. Electric cars total only about 1% of total passenger vehicles sold in the U.S.

Yet on Monday, auto giant General Motors announced it will begin selling two new all-electric vehicles in the next 18 months, and will have at least 20 new zero-emission electric vehicles in its lineup by 2023.

The announcement follows similar plans revealed by major automakers around the world.

Volkswagen Group, which last year was the world’s top automaker, has said it will offer 80 new electric vehicles by 2025, and will electrify its entire fleet by 2030.

Mercedes-Benz similarly promised to make all its cars available with electric drive trains by 2020, while Volvo and Jaguar have stated they will eventually stop building cars that run only on gasoline or diesel fuel.

“This latest event by GM regarding ‘all electric’ is further proof of a rapidly changing industry, whether the consumer wants it or not,” said Rebecca Lindland, analyst at Kelley Blue Book.

If the consumer doesn’t want it, at least not to date, who does?

China, India, France, the United Kingdom and California. All are reviewing plans to severely limit or ban regular gas and diesel engines between 2030 and 2040. Although details are scarce, automakers need to get ready. Continue reading “Age of EVs is Here. We Know Because China Just Said So.”