Month: April 2018

From NBC news on the first Earth Day.

 

I’ve posted Alan Savory’s talk before – he advocates grazing practices that he claims can save soils and sequester carbon. He has many critics. 

Recent research, while not going as far as Savory – does support the idea at least in part.
I’m going to find out more in coming months.
Civil Eats:

There’s no denying Americans eat a lot of meat. In fact, the average U.S. citizen eats about 55 pounds of beef a year, including an estimated three hamburgers a week, and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) expects that amount to increase by about 3 percent by 2025. This heavy reliance on animal protein carries a big environmental footprint—livestock production contributes about 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with beef constituting 41 percent of that figure, thanks to the methane cattle produce in the digestion process and the fact that overgrazing can release carbon stored in soils.

Though most livestock production impacts the climate, the regenerative agriculture movement recognizes many benefits to properly managed livestock grazing, including carbon sequestration, restoring topsoil, improving ecosystem biodiversity, reducing pesticide and fertilizer inputs, and producing more nutritious food.

Yet despite the benefits of careful grazing, the question remains: Can cattle be raised, fed, and slaughtered in a way that reduces their greenhouse gas emissions to a tolerable level?

A new five-year study that will be published in the May 2018 issue of the journal Agricultural Systemssuggests that they can. Conducted by a team of researchers from from Michigan State University (MSU) and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the study suggests that if cattle are managed in a certain way during the finishing phase, grassfed beef can be carbon-negative in the short term and carbon-neutral in the long term.

The research, led by Paige Stanley, who earned a Master’s degree in 2017 from MSU and is now a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, states, “it is possible that long-term [adaptive multi-paddock grazing] AMP grazing finishing in the Upper Midwest could contribute considerably more to climate change mitigation and adaptation than previously thought.”

Rather than using the common method of continuous grazing, in which cattle remain on the same pasture for an entire grazing season, the researchers used the more labor-intensive method of AMP, which entails moving the cattle at intervals ranging from days to months, depending on the type of forage, weather, time of year, and other considerations. A herd of adult cattle on MSU grazing land served as their test population.

Continue reading “Can Grazing Be Carbon Neutral? New Evidence.”

Eclectablog:

Last week, 550 gallons of coolant containing the carcinogenic solvent benzene were released into Lake Michigan from an electrical transmission cable running under the Straits of Mackinac. It happened because a ship went through the Straits dragging its anchor.

Enbridge Energy clearly had an “oh shit!” moment since the twin gas (note: Liz Kirkwood of FLOW tells me “twin OIL pipelines is more accurate – Peter) pipelines they own that run under the Straits were just a few hundred yards away. Sure enough, after an inspection, they found three dents in the two pipelines which carry nearly 1 million gallons of petroleum per hour. The pipelines, part of Enbridge’s Line 5, are 65 years old.

As I wrote in 2015, it doesn’t take much imagination to understand the utter catastrophe that would result if this pipeline, like the Enbridge pipeline that dumped over a million gallons of tar sands crude into the Kalamazoo River in 2010, were to rupture. Imagine the scenario of this happening in February when the Straits of Mackinac are covered in eight feet of solid ice and when the only ship traffic is through a narrow channel created by a Great Lakes icebreaker. It’s no wonder that University of Michigan researchers called the Straits “the worst possible place for an oil spill in the Great Lakes.”

It’s worth noting that the Line 6B spill cost well over $1,000,000,000 (yes, that’s a BILLION dollars) to clean up.

Here’s a bit more information to freak you out, again from my 2015 essay:

For their part, Enbridge says that Line 5 is one of the “most inspected pipelines” in America. However, there is literally no plan in place to deal with a pipeline rupture that will adequately protect the Great Lakes so essentially what they are telling us is that they will know they exact moment when they begin to destroy this precious and valuable ecosystem and fresh water supply. Nearly a million gallons of oil would erupt into Lake Michigan per hour until they could get it under control.

Given that it took them 17 hours after the Kalamazoo pipeline ruptured before they notified anyone, we have no way of knowing when they would actually tell the world that they had created the most catastrophic man-made disaster in Michigan history.

This is apparently what nearly happened last week when the dragging ship anchor kertwanged off both pipelines.

In response, Gov. Rick Snyder quickly issued a sternly-worded press release “demanding that its own experts verify” Enbridge’s contention that all is well and that there is nothing to see here. He also asks could they please hurry up with the study that he “demanded” last fall from Enbridge investigating other alternatives to Line 5.

The fact is, Line 5 is simply a shortcut for moving Canadian oil to another part of Canada. Instead of going through Canada, it detours through Michigan:

Image courtesy of For Love of Water (FLOW)

A 2015 report from For Love of Water (FLOW) details that alternatives DO exist and that Line 5 is not “vital energy infrastructure”, despite claims otherwise. According to a fact sheet published by the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, Line 5, which transports synthetic crude, natural gas liquids, sweet crude, and light sour crude, does not have a federally approved emergency response plan at the Straits. It has already leaked over 1 million gallons of oil in the past 50 years.

Continue reading “Near Miss at Line 5. Great Lakes Crown Jewel at Risk”

At the 2016 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco, 20+ thousand earth scientists were in a pretty bleak mood following the election of the most science-hostile administration in history.

California Governor Jerry Brown brought them to their feet with a stem-winder of a speech that was defiant and resolute.  California, if necessary, had the intellectual and economic power to resist the anti-science agenda, and if the Administration tried to turn off the satellites that collected vital information – “…we’ll launch our own damn satellite.”

Well, it wasn’t California, but some determined Greens have decided to do exactly that.

New York Times:

Tom Ingersoll, a longtime satellite entrepreneur, admits being startled by a call he received last year: A nonprofit foundation wanted to build a satellite and launch it into orbit to help fight climate change. “I thought, ‘Wow, that’s kind of crazy.’”

In February, he signed on as the project’s manager, after having taken a long look at the technologies required. “It’s hard, but we could probably pull it off,” he said.

Now the rest of the world can decide for itself. On Wednesday, Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund, announced plans for MethaneSAT, an orbital eye in the sky that could monitor industrial methane leaks all over the planet.

Methane remains one of the thorniest climate problems. It is the major component of natural gas, which produces half the carbon dioxide of coal when burned to run electric plants. But when methane leaks, it is a potent greenhouse gas that traps more than 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide in its first 20 years in the atmosphere. By some estimates, human-caused emissions of methane are thought to be responsible for about a quarter of the warming being experienced today.

But figuring out where methane emissions are coming from is a major challenge. The colorless, odorless gas has proved difficult to measure at the source of leaks without nearby access to the sites. Early attempts by the Environmental Protection Agency to determine the scope of the problem significantly underestimated emissions.

Methane leaks are relatively inexpensive to fix, and stopping leaks allows energy companies to sell more gas. The International Energy Agency has estimated that as much as 50 percent of the 84 million tons of methane emitted by the oil and gas industry every year — from leaky wells and pipes and other causes — “can be mitigated at no net cost, because the value of the captured methane could cover the abatement measures.”

Continue reading “Greens Launching Their Own Damn Satellite”

Washington Post:

The Atlantic Ocean circulation that carries warmth into the Northern Hemisphere’s high latitudes is slowing down because of climate change, a team of scientists asserted Wednesday, suggesting one of the most feared consequences is already coming to pass.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation has declined in strength by 15 percent since the mid-20th century to a “new record low,” the scientists conclude in a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Nature. That’s a decrease of 3 million cubic meters of water per second, the equivalent of nearly 15 Amazon rivers.

The AMOC brings warm water from the equator up toward the Atlantic’s northern reaches and cold water back down through the deep ocean. The current is partly why Western Europe enjoys temperate weather, and meteorologists are linking changes in North Atlantic Ocean temperatures to recent summer heat waves.

The circulation is also critical for fisheries off the U.S. Atlantic coast, a key part of New England’s economy that have seen changes in recent years, with the cod fishery collapsing as lobster populations have boomed off the Maine coast.

Some of the AMOC’s disruption may be driven by the melting ice sheet of Greenland, another consequence of climate change that is altering the region’s water composition and interrupts the natural processes.

This is “something that climate models have predicted for a long time, but we weren’t sure it was really happening. I think it is happening,” said one of the study’s authors, Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “And I think it’s bad news.”

Nature – Observed fingerprint of a weakening Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation:

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC)—a system of ocean currents in the North Atlantic—has a major impact on climate, yet its evolution during the industrial era is poorly known owing to a lack of direct current measurements. Here we provide evidence for a weakening of the AMOC by about 3 ± 1 sverdrups (around 15 per cent) since the mid-twentieth century. This weakening is revealed by a characteristic spatial and seasonal sea-surface temperature ‘fingerprint’—consisting of a pattern of cooling in the subpolar Atlantic Ocean and warming in the Gulf Stream region—and is calibrated through an ensemble of model simulations from the CMIP5 project. We find this fingerprint both in a high-resolution climate model in response to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, and in the temperature trends observed since the late nineteenth century. The pattern can be explained by a slowdown in the AMOC and reduced northward heat transport, as well as an associated northward shift of the Gulf Stream. Comparisons with recent direct measurements from the RAPID project and several other studies provide a consistent depiction of record-low AMOC values in recent years.

Continue reading “More Evidence, Implications – North Atlantic Circulation Slows”

Can we get back to “Don’t be Evil”?

Fast Company:

You have to see Apple’s Reno, Nevada, data center from the inside to truly understand how huge it is. It’s made up of five long white buildings sitting side by side on a dry scrubby landscape just off I-80, and the corridor that connects them through the middle is a quarter-mile long. On either side are big, dark rooms–more than 50 of them–filled with more than 200,000 identical servers, tiny lights winking in the dark from their front panels. This is where Siri lives. And iCloud. And Apple Music. And Apple Pay.

Powering all these machines, and keeping them cool, takes a lot of power–constant, uninterrupted, redundant power. At the Reno data center, that means 100% green power from three different Apple solar farms.
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Now Apple says it’s finished getting the rest of its facilities running on 100% green power–from its new Apple Park headquarters, which has one of the largest solar roofs on the planet, to its distribution centers and retail stores around the world. Though the 100% figure covers only Apple’s own operations–not those of of the suppliers and contract manufacturers which do much of the work of bringing its ideas to life–it’s also convinced 23 companies in its supply chain to sign a pledge to get to 100% renewable energy for the portion of their business relating to Apple products.
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The overarching goal of Apple going 100% green is, of course, is to reduce harmful emissions from dirty fuels. The company says it’s reduced its greenhouse gas emissions (CO2e) by 58% since 2011, preventing 2.2 million metric tons of CO2e from entering the atmosphere. But Apple’s own progress as measured by the numbers isn’t the only point. In places where it has facilities, the company has often been a catalyst, working with local utilities and regulators to build new solar or wind farms that pump new green power onto the public grid. Jackson told me Apple especially likes to do this in markets where the majority of the existing energy comes from ecologically unfriendly sources like coal or oil. “It’s an approach that’s really important because you’re growing the clean energy market around you,” she says.

Former Vice President Al Gore, the author of An Inconvenient Truth and a member of Apple’s board since 2003, believes the company is sending a message that ecological responsibility can be good business. “It is proving the business case that well-managed companies can reduce the greenhouse gases that are causing the climate crisis while simultaneously reducing their energy costs,” he said in a statement to Fast Company. “Its efforts are transforming the way the tech sector uses power, both domestically and around the world.”

Continue reading “100: Apple, Google, All Renewable, All the Time”

So many now it’s hard to keep track.
Inside Climate News helps.

Inside Climate News:

The storm of litigation could have a broad impact if it succeeds in holding fossil fuel companies accountable for the kinds of damages they foresaw decades ago, said Harold Koh, a professor of international law at Yale Law School who served as senior legal adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“The industry has profited from the manufacture of fossil fuels but has not had to absorb the economic costs of the consequences,” Koh said. “The industry had the science 30 years ago and knew what was going to happen but made no warning so that preemptive steps could have been taken.

“The taxpayers have been bearing the cost for what they should have been warned of 30 years ago,” Koh added. “The companies are now being called to account for their conduct and the damages from that conduct.”

Following is a summary of the major legal battles pitting Exxon and the oil and gas industry against American states and cities, and environmentally inspired young people against the government.

This timeline will be updated as events unfold.

The attorneys general of New York, Massachusetts and the U.S. Virgin Islands launched investigations of Exxon in 2015 and 2016. Prosecutors want to see if the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how such risks might hurt the oil business.

The investigations drew a quick, fierce response from Exxon. The company went on the legal offensive to try to shut down the probes, employing an army of aggressive, high-priced lawyers and a strategy of massive resistance. The attorney general of the Virgin Islands capitulated and ended his investigation just three months after issuing subpoenas.

Since then, Exxon has been waging a relentless fight though state and federal courts to impede investigations by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey. It sued Schneiderman and Healey in federal court to block the investigations, but the judge rejected Exxon’s claims that the investigations are politically motivated. Legal battles also spilled into the courts of both states; all the way up to the supreme courts of New York and Massachusetts.

Key Events:

Nov. 4, 2015: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman issues first Exxon subpoena.

Feb. 29, 2016: Schneiderman announces formation of AGs United for Clean Power coalition.

April 4, 2016: Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker issues subpoena to Exxon and the Competitive Enterprise Institute in a climate change investigation.

April 13, 2016: Exxon sues to block enforcement of Virgin Islands subpoena.

April 19, 2016: Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey serves Exxon with civil investigative demand (similar to a subpoena).

June 15, 2016: Exxon goes to federal court in Texas to block Healey’s civil investigative demand.

June 16, 2016: Exxon goes to state court in Massachusetts to block Healey’s civil investigative demand. Continue reading “Reckoning: Fossil Fuel Lawsuits Popping Up All Over”

Move over, Quinoa.

Ellen Abrams, University of Michigan:

Agriculture is responsible for 70 percent of global freshwater consumption, in large part due to our prevailing agricultural model based on monoculture of annual crops. This strategy requires annual tilling, which damages soil health and lowers its water absorption capacity. Annual crops also have more feeble root systems, which are more water-intensive because they are less capable of drawing water from existing moisture in the soil.

Switching to perennial crops that do not require annual replanting or tilling would solve these problems, but industrial agriculture is deeply entrenched. Luckily, decades of perennial crop research has led to some promising innovations, including Kernza, a perennial wheatgrass developed by the Land Institute. Plovgh (pronounced “plow”) is a perennial grain company that the Land Institute has partnered with to commercialize Kernza. So far, they have had great success. Patagonia Provisionswas the first to take a product using Kernza to market, with its beer, called Long Root Ale. Other Kernza products have hit the market since, including a Kernza pasta, but the next big step is the 2019 launch of Kernza-based General Mills products under the Cascadian Farm brand.

Cascadian Farms:

Cascadian Farm, a pioneer in the organic food movement, and parent company General Mills today announced their work with The Land Institute (TLI) to help commercialize organic Kernza, a perennial grain (intermediate wheatgrass) and wild relative of annual wheat, whose deep roots show promise to increase soil health, carbon sequestration, water retention and enhance surrounding wildlife habitat. The sweet- and nutty-tasting grain lends itself particularly well as an ingredient for cereal and snacks.

Cascadian Farm has agreed to purchase an initial amount of the perennial grain which allows TLI to arrange with farmers to plant on commercial-scale fields versus the test sized plots currently being grown.

“From our earliest days, Cascadian Farm has had a deep commitment to creating a positive relationship between food and the land where it is grown,” said Carla Vernón, vice president of Cascadian Farm. “Now, 45 years since our inception, we are excited to incorporate the perennial grain Kernza® into our foods and our organic farming. We believe in the potential of this grain to make a positive ecological impact. And, this helps us live up to the expectation that our consumers have for Cascadian Farm and continue to be a pioneer in organic farming and land stewardship.”

In addition, General Mills approved a $500,000 charitable contribution to the Forever Green Initiative at the University of Minnesota in partnership with The Land Institute, to support advanced research to measure the potential of Kernza to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with food production, determine best management practices for sustainable production, and increase Kernza yields through breeding. Continue reading “For Drawing Carbon Down, Perennial Grains”

Before there was the Apple II, there was Teapot Apple 2.

Things that current events have me pondering.

Wiki:

The Civil Defense Apple-2 shot on 5 May 1955 was intended to test various building construction types in a nuclear blast. An assortment of buildings, including residential houses and electrical substations, were constructed at the site nicknamed “Survival Town”. The buildings were populated with mannequins, and stocked with different types of canned and packaged foods. Not all of the buildings were destroyed in the blast, and some of them still stand at Area 1, Nevada Test Site. A short film about the blast, referred to as “Operation Cue”, was distributed by the Federal Civil Defense Administration. The houses are still standing at 37.04476°N 116.07416°W, at the east and west ends of the road loop. They are stops on the Nevada National Security Site(NNSS) tour.

From declassified documents dated February to May 1956, the Apple-2 shot, as part of Operation Teapot Project 35.5 “Effects of Nuclear Explosion on Records and Records Storage Equipment” was staged on the Nevada Test Site to determine the effects of nuclear explosions on various types of records and record storage equipment ^[10]