Month: July 2020

Fortune:

When Royal Dutch Shell warned it will write down up to $22 billion in assets in the second quarter on Tuesday, it became the largest of an expanding group of companies to face a reckoning over the brutal economics of oil and gas as the coronavirus pandemic has warped global demand. 

The record write-down for the company also provided an initial signal of what’s to come, as the world’s largest non–state-owned oil and gas company faces an even larger challenge: its own transition away from fossil fuels, in a bid to dramatically reduce its emissions. 

In April, the Anglo-Dutch giant announced it would target net zero emissions by 2050, in order to align with the Paris Agreement. Its write-down announcement on Monday comes just two weeks after British energy giant BP, the world’s second largest non–state-owned energy company, said it expected to write down roughly $17.5 billion worth of assets. BP made the same commitment to cut emissions in February, then the first major oil company in the world to do so. 

“The impairment Shell has announced is about more than an accounting technicality, or an adjustment to near-term price assumptions. It’s about fundamental change hitting the entire oil and gas sector,” said Luke Parker, vice president of corporate analysis at consultancy Wood Mackenzie, in a note on Tuesday.

“Within this write-down, Shell is giving us a message about stranded assets, just like BP did a few weeks ago.”

The two threads behind the massive write-downs—shorter-term price assessments and longer-term climate strategy—are difficult to separate. 

In the nearer term, the decline in global energy demand owing to worldwide lockdowns and economic crises has rocked oil and gas prices, and forced companies to reassess their price forecasts—and therefore, which of their projects will still be profitable.

That reassessment has accelerated a spate of write-downs that had in fact begun months before the pandemic arrived. The U.S. shale sector in particular went into the crises struggling under the weight of sky-high debt levels and a glut of gas that had sent global prices spiraling downward. 

In the first quarter, as the crisis was only beginning to take hold, shale companies alone wrote off $38 billion in assets, according to Rystad Energy, an Oslo-based consultancy. Analysts estimate those write-downs have only picked up steam, with Deloitte predicting in a report earlier this month that write-downs could hit at least $300 billion beginning in the second quarter.

Not just write downs, but bankruptcies.
New York Times asks if taxpayers will be left holding toxic assets.

But don’t worry, the executives are in good shape.

New York Times:

The day the debt-ridden Texas oil producer MDC Energy filed for bankruptcy eight months ago, a tank at one of its wells was furiously leaking methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. As of last week, dangerous, invisible gases were still spewing into the air.

By one estimate, the company would need more than $40 million to clean up its wells if they were permanently closed. But the debts of MDC’s parent company now exceed the value of its assets by more than $180 million.

Continue reading “Bankruptcies Ripple Oil/Gas – Leaving Taxpayers with Toxic Mess”

Medal of Freedom recipient Rush Limbaugh: Americans should “adapt” to coronavirus, like pioneers who “had to turn to cannibalism” https://t.co/QudCS7zPZb pic.twitter.com/FfmDattqlb

— Media Matters (@mmfa) July 14, 2020

UPDATE: Oh crap, it’s only been a few weeks, but I just remembered Alex Jones talked about eating his neighbors as well.

New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Parts of the United States saw record levels of high-tide flooding last year as rising seas brought water further into coastal homes and infrastructure, government scientists reported Tuesday.

The increase in high-tide flooding along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts since 2000 has been “extraordinary,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported, with the frequency of flooding in some cities growing fivefold during that time. That shift is damaging homes, imperiling the safety of drinking water, inundating roads and otherwise hurting coastal communities, the agency said.

“Conditions are changing, and not just in a few locations,” Nicole LeBoeuf, acting assistant administrator for NOAA’s National Ocean Service, which compiled the report, said during a call with reporters. “Damaging floods that decades ago happened only during a storm now happen more regularly, even without severe weather.”

NOAA defines high-tide flooding, also called sunny-day or nuisance flooding, as water rising more than half a meter, or about 20 inches, above the normal daily high-tide mark. The frequency of that flooding has increased because of rising sea levels, which were roughly 13 inches higher nationally last year than in 1920, the agency reported.

The number of days with high-tide flooding set or tied records in 19 places around the country last year, including Corpus Christi, Texas, which recorded 18 days of flooding; Galveston, Texas (18 days); Annapolis, Md. (18 days); and Charleston, S.C. (13 days). The place with the greatest number of recorded flood days was Eagle Point, Texas, in Galveston Bay; it reported high-tide flooding on 64 days, or almost one day out of five.

Those numbers represent huge jumps in a short period of time. In 2000, Corpus Christi had just three days of tidal flooding; Charleston had just two. The report notes that Charleston recorded just 13 days of high-tide flooding in the more than 50 years that measurements were first kept — the same number that occurred last year alone.

Continue reading “Tide Comes in, Tide Goes Out, Nobody Knows Why..”

I was lucky enough to work with Jill Pelto and her Dad, senior glaciologist Mauri Pelto, during their annual glacier survey in 2012.

I profiled Jill’s work as an artist in the video below, as one of 4 creative climate communicators. (her segment starts at about 2 minutes in)

Time:

For this week’s special issue, “One Last Chance,” we turned the cover over to a young artist and scientist who painstakingly created a vibrant landscape of key global climate change indicators.

Maine artist Jill Pelto, 27, who incorporates scientific research and data into her watercolor paintings, often in the field, weaves visual narratives that reveal the benefits and costs of human impacts on this planet.

“It has been a tumultuous year, but underlying currents of positive action are surfacing rapidly,” says Pelto, whose watercolor and colored pencil piece is titled Currents. “It depicts a critical grouping of global climate data dictating our present and future action. The reality of this data may be frightening, but there are messages for hope within.”

“This year, the impact of the novel coronavirus will lead to a reduction in global CO2 emissions, and renewable energy consumption will continue to increase,” adds Pelto, who holds bachelor’s degrees in both Studio Art and Earth and Climate Sciences from the University of Maine. “It is critical we leverage these trajectories as a sign of our collective potential to support local environmental action for global change today. This includes addressing the disproportionate effects of climate change on marginalized peoples.”

Continue reading “Glacier Artist on Time Cover”

The last 12 months are tied for the warmest 12 month period since records began in the mid-1800s, according to new data from @CopernicusECMWF.

And while the climate doesn't care when the year starts or ends, 2020 has a reasonable chance of being the warmest year on record. pic.twitter.com/dmXZGLW8ak

— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) July 7, 2020

With June data in, I predict a 3 out 4 chance of a new annual record in 2020, which is only slightly reduced if we see a significant (< -0.7) La Niña develop. pic.twitter.com/AoK0MBrU2J

— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) July 13, 2020

Continue reading “2020 Just Keeps on. Likely Temperature Record this Year”

Recognizing a historic inflection point, now is the time to front load climate and energy policy in the inevitable economic rebuilding of America, and the world.

Are we going to just go back to doing things the way we did before? Seems less and less likely.

Axios:

Europe, long the most progressive continent when it comes to tackling climate change, is doubling down on this ambition to revive pandemic-ravaged economies.

Why it matters: The European Union is the world’s third-largest emitting region after the U.S. and China, but it’s not just that. These plans will push global corporate behavior and prod other governments by creating either templates to follow or protectionist battles (or both).

Where it stands: European nations account for three-quarters of the green stimulus funding announced as of early June, according to a BloombergNEF report. 

• Other countries are not being nearly as aggressive in this space, despite mounting calls from the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and International Energy Agency.

Driving the news: Three different areas of Europe’s policy push are especially worth watching for their global implications. Many of these proposals come from the region’s Green Deal plan it unveiled late last year.

1. The proposed recovery package itself, which will showcase to what degree $825 billion in clean-energy funding — especially for electric vehicles, hydrogen and energy efficiency — creates jobs and cuts emissions.
2. Forthcoming standards on methane emissions and finance, which will affect virtually all oil and gas companies and countries seeking investments from them.
3. To what degree Europe pushes forward with a border tax on imported goods from nations without similar climate policies.

“We’re keenly watching it,” Ilmi Granoff, who directs the finance program at the California-based ClimateWorks Foundation, said of these actions by Europe. “It may take different forms in different jurisdictions, but I do think it’s a bellwether for how we understand a truly mobilized climate policy.”

The intrigue: The role of natural gas in addressing climate change, controversial for years, is coming to a head in Europe, which will draw more attention to the topic around the world.

• The European Commission is set to release a strategy soon to cut emissions of methane, the primary component of natural gas and a potent greenhouse gas. 
• The commission is also set to decide by year’s end on whether natural gas (and other types of energy sources and technologies) is considered sustainable and worthy of investment by European governments and institutions.
• Experts say it’s unlikely natural gas will be included, considering that the European Investment Bank already said late last year it would stop funding all fossil-fuel projects by next year.

Meanwhile, Democrats mounting plans for a US combined Climate/Covid Response.

Continue reading “Combining Climate and Covid Responses”

Why, in a warmer world, we may be checking our shoes more often before we put them on, and shaking out those linens.

Climate change is making spiders more aggressive.
Key phrase: “hunt in packs”.

Inverse:

In the most uncomfortable piece of climate crisis-related news yet, a team of scientists believe that the increasing tropical cyclones may be changing the temperament of a “super abundant” spider. As the storms continue to increase in tandem with the planet’s temperature, some of our eight-legged friends are starting to get more aggressive, report scientists in a paper published Monday in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Specifically, these findings refer to a species of group-dwelling spiders called Anelosimus studiosus. They’re “hardly majestic,” lead study author Jonathan Pruitt, Ph.D., an associate professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, tells Inverse, but they happen to have very intricate social lives. Along the Gulf Coast, the spiders form multi-female groups that hunt in packs, dwell in group webs, and sometimes rear each other’s children. But the climate crisis may be shifting these old spider traditions toward a less interconnected lifestyle.

In the paper, Pruitt and his team show that hurricanes are actually changing the social and behavior dynamics of these spider colonies. The aggressive spiders in the colonies are well-equipped to handle the chaos, but the less aggressive ones are not. That inequality, he explains, may reshape life in the colony.

“There’s a behavioral tipping point when very very aggressive colonies stop working together, start killing each other, and the group wisely disbands,” he says. “Combine hurricane increases with global warming and I think you could get something like that.”

The species as a whole will fare just fine, he says, in case you’re worried about losing even more animal and insect species to climate change. But the spiders are a good example of the way incomprehensibly large events — say, increases in large storms — can cause minute but significant changes too, like the behavior of a five-millimeter-long spider.

Continue reading “Climate Change into the Spider-Verse”