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First CO2 rise in four years puts pressure on Paris targets - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...science-environment-41941265 climate world glove co2 Crisis
shared by anonymous on 13 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Global emissions of CO2 in 2017 are projected to rise for the first time in four years, dashing hopes that a peak might soon be reached.
  • The main cause of the expected growth has been greater use of coal in China as its economy expanded. Researchers are uncertain if the rise in emissions is a one-off or the start of a new period of CO2 build-up.Scientists say that a global peak in CO2 before 2020 is needed to limit dangerous global warming this century.
  • "With global CO2 emissions from human activities estimated at 41 billion tonnes for 2017, time is running out on our ability to keep warming well below 2 degrees C, let alone 1.5C."The most important element in causing this rise has been China, which is responsible for around 28% of the global total. Emissions there went up 3.5% in 2017, mainly because of increased coal use, driven in the main by a growing economy.
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  • Europe also saw a smaller decline than expected, falling by 0.2% compared with 2.2% over the last 10 years.One common theme around the world is continued use of gas and oil
  • "The climate will not let us wait until 2020 when the Paris agreement comes into force," said Nicaragua's chief negotiator, Paul Oquist."Climate change is happening now and it's vital that immediate actions to cut emissions become a feature of this summit."
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North Dakota coal sector sees opportunity in electric vehicles - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...dakota-ev-coal fossil fuel denial interest economic dependence Culture politics history
shared by Javier E on 13 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • Carbon capture has been a popular idea within the coal, oil and gas sectors for years now. The technology is not out of reach. Plenty of pilot projects have been launched. But so far no one has been able to make it a paying proposition. A pioneering $7.5 billion carbon capture power plant in Mississippi was razed with dynamite on Oct. 9 after its owners wrote it off as an 11-year-old economic failure. North Dakota hopes to break through that last barrier, for both coal and oil.
  • “True wealth is created by a partnership between man and earth,” said Bohrer. If Project Tundra can show that stuffing carbon dioxide back into the earth is economically feasible, he said, “it’s opening the door for a CO2 economy. It gives the lignite industry a way to survive.”
  • His group has launched a promotional campaign called Drive Electric North Dakota, which sponsors promotional events, conducts public attitude surveys and lobbies for EVs in the state capital. It has been an uphill struggle so far, but the idea is that the electricity needed to charge cars and trucks can’t all come from unreliable wind or solar, and this will give coal a way to stay in the mix and help keep the grid in fine tune. “The more demand we have in North Dakota,” Bohrer said, “the easier it is to soak up our domestically produced electricity.”
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  • Not only is the process still prohibitively expensive, research has shown that so far it hasn’t been very effective. A 2019 study at Stanford University found that current carbon capture projects miss well more than half of the carbon dioxide in emissions.
  • Project Tundra’s managers hope they can achieve a significant breakthrough, aiming to capture 90 percent of the CO2 once they have the project in operation. Essentially, the carbon dioxide would be absorbed out of the “flue gas,” or exhaust, by amine-based solvents, which would be pumped to a regeneration unit that would heat the solvents and free the CO2 again, in a pure form. Then it would be condensed and pumped to natural caverns deep underground.
  • For now the project is still in the design and engineering phase, together with financial analysis. Equipment at the site has been used to test the process; now the results are being analyzed. If the pieces fall into place and the project gets a green light from regulators and company officials, construction could get started as early as next year.
  • “This carbon sequestration project really gets us excited,” he said. “It gives coal a role in stabilizing the grid.” He added: “If there are better solutions than coal out there, so be it. We just believe those solutions don’t exist.”
  • There are warning signs, nonetheless. Even though the price of oil has bounced back after the disastrous months when the pandemic struck last year, and production at existing wells is humming along, there’s little new drilling in the Bakken. The number of rigs has fallen from 55 in early 2020 to 23 today.
  • Her attitude about the coal-powered electricity she uses in her car is that it’s not great, it’s probably on the way out, it’s better than using gasoline.“Gas is a continuous circle of energy wastage,” she said. “You have to use energy to extract it, you have to use energy to transport it, you have to use energy to refine it, you have to use energy to transport it back.
  • Kathy Neset moved to the Bakken with a degree in geology from Brown University in 1979 and built a successful oil-field consulting company on the vast, windswept jumble of low hills and ridges, once good only for cattle raising. She understands perfectly well that electric cars are coming, yet she has faith that new uses for petroleum will keep the oil sector in business.
  • “Do we blow away like tumbleweeds? Or do we evolve?” she said in an interview at her gleaming office building in Tioga, N.D. “This is an industry that has a history of adopting, evolving and changing with the nation. I don’t see oil going away in any of our lifetimes. It’s our way of life. Where we lose out on transportation we will gain on new technologies.”
  • Destiny Wolf, 39, an upbeat advocate for electric vehicles, also feels the stigma of driving a Tesla — in her case a Model 3.Oil workers, Wolf said, see electric vehicles as an attack on their livelihoods. “You know, sitting there at a red light, they drive up, roll down their windows, they start yelling and cursing at me,” she said. “If that’s your existence, it’s really sad.”
  • Neset said she believes that investment firms, especially those that have signed on to corporate governance protocols that embrace environmental and social goals, “just don’t want to put their capital into new drilling until we figure out a way to handle this in a clean way.”
  • “In rural America there is very little you can do without that [oil],” Ness said. “We just don’t have opportunities here. It enables us to build schools, rather than close schools.”
  • Charles Gorecki, CEO of an incubator at the University of North Dakota called the Energy and Environmental Research Center, is promoting a plan similar to the coal industry’s Project Tundra. But it would go further — he envisions the injection of carbon dioxide into deep caverns as a way of enhancing the extraction of more oil. More carbon would go into the ground than would come out of it as petroleum, he said. North Dakota could even import carbon dioxide from other states.
  • “There is an enormous amount of space to store CO2,” he said. “What we need to do is make it an economically attractive option. The goal is to reduce carbon emissions. It should be by any and all means.”
  • A new state body called the Clean Sustainable Energy Authority is charged with promoting clean-energy technologies — with the understanding that the energy being talked about is from coal, oil or natural gas. Carbon capture is one idea; another is hydrogen-powered vehicles, using “blue” hydrogen from natural gas.
  • “Even if we transition to all electric vehicles and hydrogen vehicles, North Dakota will have a part to play,” said Joel Brown, a member of the CSEA. “I think of it as a moonshot for the state of North Dakota.”
  • In the history of the Bakken, 3 billion barrels of oil have been pumped out. Brown said 30 billion to 40 billion more barrels is still in the ground and recoverable.
  • “We have to make that Bakken barrel just a little bit cleaner than every other barrel in the world,” said Ron Ness, head of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, a trade group. “You look at the standard American family and the affordability of the combustion engine, and I think gasoline is going to be around for a long time.”
  • North Dakota went from being the 10th-largest oil-producing state in 2005 to the second in 2015.
  • Watford City is in McKenzie County, which between 2010 and 2019 was the fastest-growing county in the United States, according to census figures. In the late 1990s, said Steve Holen, the school superintendent, people thought the county would soon have nothing but bison and nursing homes. Oil changed all that, and residents are reluctant to let that go.
  • So the oil sector, too, is putting its chips on carbon capture.
  • Consequently, there’s a widespread conviction in the Bakken that electric vehicles will never amount to much. “It’s a cultural challenge,” said Neset. “I’m not sure how many of these cowboys and cowgirls are going to want to jump in an electric car.”
  • A question about EVs that was put to a Bakken Facebook group elicited scathing, vulgar responses. “Let the retirees living in Florida, Arizona and California buy them. I am from North Dakota, give me a gas guzzling ‘truck,’” wrote one.
  • “Anyone that supports electric over gas and works in the Bakken is a hypocrite. Your job revolves around oil. No oil = No job for most. Easiest math I have ever done,” wrote another.
  • “Never, ever, ever,” wrote a third.But there are signs this hostility to electric is cracking.
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The state of the climate in 2021 - BBC Future - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...-climate-change-in-five-charts climate-change
shared by xaviermcelderry on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reached record levels in 2020, hitting 417 parts per million in May. The last time CO2 levels exceeded 400 parts per million was around four million years ago, during the Pliocene era, when global temperatures were 2-4C warmer and sea levels were 10-25 metres (33-82 feet) higher than they are now.
  • The past decade was the hottest on record. The year 2020 was more than 1.2C hotter than the average year in the 19th Century. In Europe it was the hottest year ever, while globally 2020 tied with 2016 as the warmest. Record temperatures, including 2016, usually coincide with an El Niño event (a large band of warm water that forms in the Pacific Ocean every few years), which results in large-scale warming of ocean surface temperatures. But 2020 was unusual because the world experienced a La Niña event (the reverse of El Niño, with a cooler band of water forming). In other words, without La Niña bringing global temperatures down, 2020 would have been even hotter.
  • Nowhere is that increase in heat more keenly felt than in the Arctic. In June 2020, the temperature reached 38C in eastern Siberia, the hottest ever recorded within the Arctic Circle. The heatwave accelerated the melting of sea ice in the East Siberian and Laptev seas and delayed the usual Arctic freeze by almost two months
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  • The World Economic Forum launched a campaign this year to plant one trillion trees to absorb carbon. While planting trees might help cancel out the last 10 years of CO2 emissions, it cannot solve the climate crisis on its own, according to Waring.
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The Arab Oil Embargo and Bad Energy Policy's 50th Birthday - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...policys-50th-birthday-c4762cd4 energy policy WSJ skeptic green history 1973 oil embargo
shared by Javier E on 24 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • The “second wave” of electric-vehicle buyers isn’t materializing, the Journal reported this week
  • To lure the first wave took thousands of dollars in taxpayer handouts to each buyer and thousands more in subsidies to encourage companies to build the EVs in the first place. And these buyers were the enthusiasts. How much more will have to be piled on the table to lure those customers who aren’t bewitched by EV cultural and technological appeal and care about having a useful car at an affordable price?
  • But this was always understood. In the fantasy life of greens, the next step would be to ban the sale of new gasoline cars altogether. Except Americans vote: Politicians who don’t get the votes of Americans don’t get to make policy, including the policy of denying them the choice to buy gasoline-powered vehicle
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  • At some point, too, the public might look up and notice that subsidizing EVs is having no effect on climate or CO2.
  • the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Arab oil embargo in the latest edition of New Atlantis: “The worst effect was on U.S. energy policy. Whereas the embargo lasted about five months, the toll on U.S. policy has lasted five decades and counting.”
  • the 50-year-old fuel-economy regime devolved into a convoluted set of political trade-offs serving—as the Biden administration recently admitted—no legitimate cost-benefit goal. Boondoggles from synfuels to corn ethanol were launched in the 1970s to honor the false god of energy independence, though thanks to the still-functioning genius of the free-market system the U.S. nevertheless blundered into true energy security with the help of fracking.
  • The words “energy transition” are redundant. The energy economy is always transitioning. The transitions are additive. Wind, hydro and biomass all existed before fossil fuels arrived
  • Energy’s uses are unlimited. This is why, unless the world improbably adopts a carbon tax, the effect of green-energy subsidies (aside from enriching their backers) is largely to stimulate increased energy consumption rather than reduce CO2. This effect is already apparent in the numbers.
  • another ’70s legacy: our least-useful professors invoking big-oil stereotypes in pursuit of political goals.
  • Witness a New York Times op-ed this week combining adventurous antitrust reasoning with tired anti-Exxon tropes, claiming a proposed oil merger represents a “direct threat to democracy” by somehow blocking a solution to climate change that voters apparently crave even though it doesn’t exist.
  • Exxon controls less than 3% of the world’s oil and gas, most of which are in the hands of governments. The U.S. is responsible for less than 15% of global CO2 emissions.
  • What older Americans remember as the oil crisis was a product of domestic price controls, imposed by people in the Nixon administration who knew better.
  • Along the way, the country did manage to remove lead from gasoline and mandate catalytic converters, which improved air quality, showing that rational, economical policy outcomes are still possible amid the vast politicized waste that “energy policy” has otherwise become in the last 50 years.
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Opinion | Why guilt shouldn't be the basis for climate change policy - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...equity-guilt-legitimate-policy climate justice responsibility international history politics policy
shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • Countries agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels
  • who should transition first? What should determine each nation’s ambition? These efforts will be expensive. Who should pick up the tab?
  • The “Global Stocktake” from Dubai, like statements from earlier conclaves, got around these questions with the standard diplomatese:
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  • Countries’ commitments should reflect “equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities in the light of different national circumstances and in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty.”
  • It’s indisputable that poor nations should be allowed to develop and to eradicate poverty. Countries, obviously, can contribute to the global effort only to the extent of their capabilities
  • equity brings up a different, more slippery matter. What’s the just allocation of responsibility? What’s fair?
  • Countries, it turns out, have rather different takes on this question, potentially complicating efforts to make progress against climate change.
  • Consider the intended “nationally determined contributions” to battle climate change that various countries announced after the climate summit in Paris in 2015
  • One interesting study examined the notions of justice underpinning each national proposal. They were all over the map.
  • Critically, none of those experts considered the consequences of applying their logic to all countries across the board.
  • The aggregate notions of fairness did not add up to a solution. The countries that claimed responsibility for a small share of global emissions actually accounted for about a quarter of the total. Countries with per capita emissions ranging from 0.5 tons of carbon dioxide to 25 tons of CO2, roughly five times the global average, used this variable to justify modest plans.
  • The idea of an equitable and just distribution of responsibility might seem essential to achieve the shared goal of preventing a climate catastrophe
  • I can’t put precise odds on members of Congress accepting that the United States must bear one-fourth of the worldwide burden to cut greenhouse gas emissions because of the actions of long-dead Americans who had no idea they were causing damage. But the probability is quite low.
  • It seems only fair that countries such as the United States, which accounts for about a quarter of the greenhouse gases emitted by humanity since before the Industrial Revolution, should bear a much bigger share of the burden than, say, Brazil, which accounts for only 1 percent of historical emissions.
  • The United States, moreover, is quite rich and was made that way largely thanks to abundant and cheap fossil fuel.
  • Yet parsing how equity is to be achieved can get complicated
  • Should the goal be to equalize emissions per person, which today tilt heavily toward rich countries? (The United States emits some 18 tons per person; for India, the number is less than 3.
  • Or should we first cut emissions associated with the production of luxury goods and services that are mostly consumed in rich countries? Shouldn’t the emissions from producing the made-in-China toy you bought on Amazon accrue to the United States, where it is being played with?
  • They are in tension with the strategies championed by most rich countries, which are more sympathetic to the idea that historical emissions should be grandfathered in — not counted against them — and that they should be reduced in the future wherever reducing them is cheapest, which happens to be mostly in the developing world.
  • Many countries cannot afford the necessary mitigation pathways, either because they don’t have the resources to finance the new technologies needed to abandon fossil fuels, or because the resources they have are best deployed toward, say, buying air conditioning units or otherwise raising the standard of living.
  • There are essential truths that the world must acknowledge:
  • These countries are likely to face the gravest risks from climate change — whether measured in devastated crops, destroyed communities or people’s lives. Rich nations owe it to the world to ensure that resources and technologies are available for sufficient mitigation, adaptation and disaster relief
  • — not because they emitted a lot of greenhouse gases in the past, but because the task of preventing climate change and limiting its damage cannot be avoided, and they can afford it.
  • Many defended the fairness of their offer by pointing out that they accounted for a “small share” of global greenhouse gas emissions; others referred to their low per capita emissions. Many based their arguments on their vulnerability to climate change.
  • Consider the political ramifications of some climate justice arguments.
  • And that’s even without pointing out that China, today, emits more than double the amount of greenhouse gases the United States does.
  • Or consider how one research paper apportioned the remaining emissions budget — the greenhouse gases that can still be emitted in the future without breaching the warming ceiling (which in this estimate was set at 2 degrees Celsius)
  • It calculated nations’ responsibility for emissions starting only in 1992, when the world became aware of climate change, and assumed that each citizen of the world is entitled to the same budget since then. On this basis, it concluded that the United States would be entitled to 4.4 percent of the remainder, less than a fifth of its historic share.
  • That is fair. But it is also only 50 billion tons, or roughly nine years’ worth of emissions, at the nation’s current rate. I can’t imagine an administration that agreed to this surviving for long
  • The argument from guilt — built on the assumption that rich nations’ past development and emissions have incurred a moral debt to the rest of the world — will likely short-circuit the best case for action.
  • Better to draw on a different moral principle: to expect results from nations according to their capabilities and to assist them according to their needs. That frame could allow the job to get done.
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A CO2 Warning Etched in Stone and Sediment - NYTimes.com - 0 views

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/...ng-etched-in-stone-and-sedimen global warming carbon environment biological crisis
shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 12 - Cached
  • A comprehensive new review of research on episodes of carbon-driven disruption of ocean and climate conditions over the last 300 million years shows the power of a big pulse of carbon dioxide to profoundly affect the environment.The review, which is being published in the journal Science on Friday, concludes that the human-driven buildup of carbon dioxide under way now appears to be far outpacing past natural events, meaning that, for ocean chemistry particularly, the biological implications are potentially enormous — and laden with the kind of uncertainty that is hard to see as a source of comfort.
  • The beauty of looking in the rock record is you don’t have to run a computer model to see what’s going to happen. You see the whole thing. When you put say 2,000 gigatons [billion tons] or thereby of carbon into the atmosphere rapidly a certain number of things happen. It gets hot. The oceans get acid. They run short of oxygen and as a result quite a number of animals become extinct. And in the rock record what you see subsequently is the extinction event is recorded, and you see the draw-down over a period of 100,000 or 200,000 years of the carbon from the atmosphere, which is manifested on the floor of the ocean as a development of a carbon-rich mudstone. It’s just a very fine-grained rock. It’s just a stinking black mud laid down on the floor of the ocean.
  • The people who are saying to us, we’re carrying out an experiment with Earth and we don’t really know the outcome, well that sounds dramatic but strictly speaking it’s not true. Earth itself has run the experiment several times — 183 million years ago, something very comparable.The fascinating thing that seems to be emerging is, as we look at … the 1,000-year timescales going back to 183 million years, other past warming events where we get these black mudstones, we find that whatever the starting conditions, amazingly you get the same outcome. Every time you pull this particular carbon trigger at a certain rate and dump it into the atmosphere, that’s what you get.
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  • We’re not trying to set out the climatological arguments. We’re not judging the merits or demerits of those. We’re saying here’s an independent line of argument. And I’d have to say that if I have to save my life by winning an argument with oil men in a bar in Midland, Tex., on this topic, I would go in with some lumps of black mudstone from the ancient rock record, I’d go in with the established figures on our present input of carbon dioxide, and I’d say which bit of this observational science do you guys quarrel with, and why?
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Sea Levels Are Already Rising. What's Next? - 0 views

www.nationalgeographic.com/...l-water-will-come-jeff-goodell sea level Florida climate change
shared by Javier E on 15 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • A new category of the dispossessed now exists—“climate refugees.” Which countries are particularly at risk—and should the rest of the world be held financially accountable for them?
  • The countries that are most vulnerable are places like Bangladesh, India or West Africa. Globally, 145 million people live 3 feet or less above high tide. Small island states, like the Marshall Islands, may not only have to move to escape the rising seas, they’re going to lose their entire cultures as their nations are literally going to be under water. The central paradox is that the people who are going to suffer most, like the Marshall Islanders or people in Bangladesh, are those who have done the least to contribute to this problem. These are not the people who are driving around in SUVs and dumping CO2 into the atmosphere!
  • The last time the CO2 levels in the atmosphere were as high as they are today, sea levels were 20-30 feet higher. But even if we all turn in our cars and ride skateboards to work, because of the heat that’s already in the ocean, sea levels are going to continue to rise.
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  • How fast that will happen is hard to say. But a place like Miami is going to go underwater. There is no stopping that. There’s only trying to think about how we reinvent Miami to live with water.
  • But you can’t do anything like that in Miami or South Florida. There’s no real technological fix for rising seas there other than elevating structures or retreating.
  • In Florida, you also have a geology of porous limestone that makes it difficult to build sea walls around places like Miami and Miami Beach because the water will just come through underneath and flood from below. In the Netherlands they’ve built the dikes to keep the water out. In New Orleans, which was flooded severely during Hurricane Katrina, they have also built big dikes.
  • Much of your book focuses on Florida. Why is that state at such risk from sea-level rise? The vast majority of south Florida is less than six feet above high tide. That risk is exacerbated by the fact that it’s on a hurricane track, so you get these storm pulses that come through every year.
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Why I'm (slightly) less pessimistic about global warming - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-88fe-f9f77a3bcb6c_story.html global warming carbon dividend tax crisis
shared by Javier E on 23 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • As a starting point, I’ve accepted the prevailing scientific view that man-made greenhouse gases contribute to global warming.
  • ut I’ve been routinely pessimistic and skeptical that we can do much about it. That is, we can’t easily control the forces that worsen global warming.
  • We have yet to discover or create some low-cost fuel that would replace fossil fuels
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  • Still, we should do something. We need to learn how much, if at all, we can influence emissions.
  • Politics is present-oriented.
  • Most nations aren’t willing to scrap the energy status quo — the very basis of modern civilization — before having a practical substitute
  • a “carbon dividend” plan. This would be a good start.
  • That’s a standard carbon tax. What defines the “carbon dividend” plan is that all the money collected would be rebated to households.
  • Under one proposal, the government would slap a $43 tax on each ton of CO2. That would equal about 38 cents on a gallon of gasoline
  • It would raise about $180 billion in the tax’s first year, he says. If the “dividend” — the tax rebate — were distributed evenly, that would be about $1,400 per household.
  • Without the tax, projected CO2 emissions would be 5.4 billion metric tons in 2035. With the tax, the total would be 3.6 billion metric tons, a 33 percent decline
  • the initial increase in gasoline prices of 38 cents a gallon is within normal market fluctuations. The rebate would sweeten the tax. Consumers who cut fossil fuel use would come out ahead.
  • The tax has another advantage. It decentralizes decision-making to individual companies and people
  • None of this has changed my long-standing skepticism that, without some major technological breakthrough (safer nuclear power?), it will be exceedingly hard to halt the increase in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. The required changes in lifestyle and economic activity are simply too great.
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'Both sides' of the climate change debate? How bad we think it is, and how bad it reall... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...it-is-and-how-bad-it-really-is climate change denial science
shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • “Society’s combustion of fossil fuels and industrial processes like steelmaking and agriculture have released greenhouse gases at rates much faster than at any other time in the geological past.” To ram the message home he concluded: “The evidence is abundant: global warming is indisputable. The planet will survive. Many species may not.” Just ponder that: many species will not survive.
  • Just how lacking the LNP’s climate change policy is in anything approaching substance was revealed this week when its latest auction under the “emissions reduction fund” bought cuts equivalent to only 0.01% of Australia’s annual greenhouse gas pollution.
  • This week in the Monthly, ANU climate scientist Dr Joëlle Gergis wrote that, while in 2013 scientists had estimated that a doubling of CO2 levels from pre-industrial levels (which we’re on track to do by 2060) would lead to a temperature increase of between 1.5C to 4.5C, now as scientists continue to get more data, their models suggest the temperature increase is more likely to be between 2.8C and 5.8C.
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  • That’s scary because all efforts at the moment are assuming if we reduce emissions by 45% by 2030 we can limit warming to 1.5C. That might now be rather too optimistic
  • Add into the mix came further news this week that glaciers appear to be melting 10 to 100 times faster than expected.
  • OK, here’s both sides of the debate – for well over 40 years scientists have been researching and testing evidence that climate change is occurring due to CO2 emissions. They have found conclusive evidence that there is a link and that on the current path by 2100 global temperatures will likely reach 3C above pre-industrial levels.
  • The other side is that they have kept researching and testing the data, and sorry, they were wrong – it’s even worse than they thought.
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Electric cars produce less CO2 than petrol vehicles, study confirms | Environment | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...petrol-vehicles-study-confirms crisis
shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Electric vehicles produce less carbon dioxide than petrol cars across the vast majority of the globe – contrary to the claims of some detractors, who have alleged that the CO2 emitted in the production of electricity and their manufacture outweighs the benefits.
  • Across the world, passenger road vehicles and household heating generate about a quarter of all emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. That makes electric vehicles essential to reducing overall emissions, but how clean an electric vehicle is also depends on how the electricity is generated, the efficiency of the supply and the efficiency of the vehicle.
  • Scientists from the universities of Exeter, Nijmegen and Cambridge conducted lifecycle assessments that showed that even where electricity generation still involves substantial amounts of fossil fuel, there was a CO2 saving over conventional cars and fossil fuel heating.
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  • In countries such as Sweden, which gets most of its electricity from renewable sources, and France, which is largely powered by nuclear, the CO2 savings from using electric cars reach as high as 70% over their conventional counterparts.In the UK, the savings are about 30%. However, that is likely to improve further as electric vehicles grow even more efficient and more CO2 is taken out of the electricity generating system.
  • “The idea that electric vehicles or heat pumps could increase emissions is essentially a myth,” said Florian Knobloch of Nijmegen University in the Netherlands, the lead author of the study. “We’ve seen a lot of disinformation going around. Here is a definitive study that can dispel those myths.”
  • Mike Childs, head of science at Friends of the Earth, said: “Electric vehicles and heat pumps are absolutely critical for meeting climate goals so it’s good to see this favourable report. In the UK, both technologies will continue to make big carbon savings alongside our switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy to power the electricity grid.”
  • “Where the UK is dragging its feet is supporting the necessary rapid rollout of electric cars and heat pumps as well as the infrastructure to support them,” he said.
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Fact-Checking the Vice-Presidential Debate - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...fact-check-harris-pence-debate politics us pandemic debate economics trump policy
shared by lmunch on 08 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Mr. Pence deployed a number of misleading or inaccurate arguments. He mischaracterized the White House event at which many officials appear to have been infected with the virus, overstated the likelihood that a vaccine will be in widespread distribution by the end of the year and exaggerated the impact of the limited travel ban imposed on China.
  • Ms. Harris overstated some of her arguments. She said the manufacturing sector is in a recession when it is not. She suggested that if elected, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. would repeal Mr. Trump’s tax cuts on Day One, a step that would actually require a time-consuming effort to pass new tax legislation in Congress — and in any case Mr. Biden has only proposed rolling back portions of the Trump tax cuts.
  • “The president said it was a hoax.”— Ms. HarrisThis is misleading. Ms. Harris is taking Mr. Trump’s comments out of context. He was speaking about the Democrats’ criticism of his administration’s response to the pandemic and comparing it to the “impeachment hoax,” not the virus itself.“Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue,” Mr. Trump said at a February rally in South Carolina. “They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning, they lost, it’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax,” he continued.
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  • “The United States has reduced CO2 more than the countries that are still in the Paris climate accord. But we’ve done it through innovation, and we’ve done it through natural gas and fracking.”— Mr. PenceFalse.
  • “The care the president received at Walter Reed Hospital by the White House doctors was exceptional. And the transparency that they’ve practiced all along the way will continue.”— Mr. PenceFalse
  • “Because of a so-called trade war with China, America lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs. Farmers have experienced bankruptcy because of it. We are in a manufacturing recession because of it.”— Ms. HarrisThis is exaggerated.
  • “On Day 1, Joe Biden will repeal that tax bill.” — Ms. HarrisThis is false
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A 20-Year Low in U.S. Carbon Emissions - NYTimes.com - 0 views

green.blogs.nytimes.com/...ar-low-in-u-s-carbon-emissions global warming carbon US policy
shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 12 - Cached
  • When shale gas is taken from the earth, researchers suggest, “fugitive methane” – a far potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide — can escape into the atmospheres through fissures in the ground. “We may be reducing our CO2 emissions, but it is possible that we’re actually increasing the greenhouse gas problem with methane emissions,” he said.
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New Study: Burn it All (Fossil Fuel), Lose it All (Antarctic Ice and Today's Coasts) - ... - 0 views

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/...ntarctic-ice-and-todays-coasts global warming carbon Antarctica
shared by Javier E on 12 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • The modeling study is far more a thought experiment than a prediction, given that, even in China, there is every indication that the world’s coal, particularly, will not all be exploited.
  • the loss of the entire Antarctic ice sheet would take millenniums, but up to 100 feet of sea level rise could result within 1,000 years, with the rate of the rise beginning to increase a century or two from now. That finding meshes with the 2014 paper on the “collapse” of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
  • In interviews, scientists said that such long-term risks raise profound moral questions for people of today. “What right do we have to do things that, even if they don’t affect us, are going to be someone else’s problem a thousand years from now?” asked Ian Joughin, an ice sheet expert at the University of Washington who was not involved in the new research. “Is it fair to do that so we can go on burning fuel as fast as we can?”
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  • he and the other authors acknowledged the challenge in gaining traction, even with such findings, given the deep-rooted human bias toward immediate gratification and the development and energy gaps that mean today’s poorer nations have few affordable choices other than fossil fuels. See my recent look at India’s argument for expanded coal use.)
  • It’s real important to think about these long time scales. Essentially, what our study shows is that the changes that we bring upon within the next decades can really change the face of the Earth for thousands of years to come.
  • Another aspect to it that really pushes it into our century, or even our decade, is that we are emitting the carbon now and it stays in the atmosphere for a long time and the temperature remains high even longer than the carbon remains high.
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Emissions by Makers of Energy Level Off - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...akers-of-energy-level-off.html global warming CO2 emissions
shared by Javier E on 14 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Carbon dioxide emissions from the world’s energy producers stalled in 2014, the first time in 40 years of measurement that the level did not increase during a period of economic expansion, according to preliminary estimates from the International Energy Agency.
  • The research suggests that efforts to counteract climate change by reducing carbon emissions and promoting energy efficiency could be working, said Fatih Birol, the agency’s chief economist and incoming executive director. “This is definitely good news,” he said
  • Dr. Birol noted that many nations have promoted energy efficiency and low-carbon energy sources like hydroelectric, solar, wind and nuclear power. China, he noted, has worked to reduce carbon emissions as part of an intensive effort to limit environmental damage from economic development. That China appears to be successfully moving down that path, he said, portends well for the deal struck with the United States in November. China committed in that agreement to turning around its growth in carbon emissions by 2030, or earlier if possible, while increasing the share of non-fossil fuels in energy production to 20 percent of its menu.
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The Kids Want Communism | e-flux - 0 views

www.e-flux.com/...the-kids-want-communism kids communism politics
shared by kirkpatrickry on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Spectres are haunting Earth—the spectres of anti-communism. From Wahhabism to neoliberalism, overproduction to debt, the disastrous “war on terror” to the genocide of the welfare state, and from cold war game theory to cybernetics’ networked offspring, the internet—these are all anti-communist projects that came back to haunt us. In this apocalyptic climate, where CO2, ISIS and HFT (High Frequency Trading) stand for the self-annihilation of this civilization on a cultural, economic, political and biological level, we propose The Kids Want Communism. This ongoing clandestine and public series of events marks ninety-nine years to the October Revolution.
  • “Communism” might sound like an irrelevant term for many people today, but more than any other word in our political vocabulary, communism is the radical negation of the current regime which celebrates exploitation and inequality. It is a cosmos that was devoured by the black hole that is 1989–91. This cosmos includes many communisms; an epic reestablishment of property-free communities, communal indigenous societies, real-existing socialism with its achievements and crimes, the long history of anti-Fascist resistance, egalitarian mysticism, the dialectic abolition of capitalism through its internal dynamics, the uncharted, un-exploitable pockets of resistance that cannot be appropriated by capitalism, the already present humane solidarity and camaraderie shared by people everywhere and the political proposal of the emotion called “love.”
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Tackle climate or face financial crash, say world's biggest investors | Environment | T... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...h-say-worlds-biggest-investors climate change investor warning environment crisis economics politics policy
shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • Global investors managing $32tn issued a stark warning to governments at the UN climate summit on Monday, demanding urgent cuts in carbon emissions and the phasing out of all coal burning. Without these, the world faces a financial crash several times worse than the 2008 crisis, they said.
  • The investors include some of the world’s biggest pension funds, insurers and asset managers and marks the largest such intervention to date. They say fossil fuel subsidies must end and substantial taxes on carbon be introduced.
  • “The long-term nature of the challenge has, in our view, met a zombie-like response by many,” said Chris Newton, of IFM Investors which manages $80bn and is one of the 415 groups that has signed the Global Investor Statement. “This is a recipe for disaster as the impacts of climate change can be sudden, severe and catastrophic.”
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  • Investment firm Schroders said there could be $23tn of global economic losses a year in the long term without rapid action. This permanent economic damage would be almost four times the scale of the impact of the 2008 global financial crisis
  • Lord Nicholas Stern, of the London School of Economics said: “The low-carbon economy is the growth story of the 21st century and it is inclusive growth. Without that story, we would not have got the 2015 Paris agreement, but the story has grown stronger and stronger and is really compelling now.”
  • A key demand of the Global Investor Statement is to phase out coal-fired power stations across the world
  • Dozens of nations will affirm their commitment to end their coal burning on Thursday
  • the UN summit has seen US, Chinese and Japanese financial institutions cited as leaders in providing nearly $500bn in backing for new coal plants since the Paris agreement was signed.
  • The French president Emmanuel Macron’s botched attempt to increase fuel taxes and the gilets jaunes protests that followed were a model of how not to do it, said observers in Poland.
  • “It failed to take people along with them, accompanying the policy with social measures to allow citizens to embrace the opportunities of the transition and ride out the challenges,
  • They also want an end to subsidies for coal, oil and gas, which the IMF rates at $5tn a year and which the G20 has been promising to tackle for a decade. This measure alone could cut global CO2 emissions by 10% by 2030, according a UN report released in time for the Poland summit.
  • The investors said current national pledges to cut carbon would lead to a catastrophic 3C of global warming and that plans must be dramatically increased by 2020
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Opinion | France's Combustible Climate Politics - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...llow-vests-climate-change.html climate change france
shared by Javier E on 07 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • None of this is to say that the world should give up. Beyond nuclear power, we need to be placing medium-sized bets on potentially transformative technologies not funded by regressive taxes or industrial subsidies, and not dependent on future breakthroughs that might still be decades off, if they happen at all. Let thousands of climate-startups bloom — and let markets, not governments, figure out which ones work.
  • Bret There are many practical solutions to this most difficult problem and heaping facile criticism on a selected set to disparage the lot is not helping Paul Hawkin's Project Drawdown ranks 100 solutions in order of impact on reducing CO2 based on the input of scientists https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank Why don't you use your political acumen and prominent voice to contribute positively by ranking them by political sale-ability to the the persuadable right wing and other opponents so something can get done? For your kids...
  • To have a diagnosis is not to have a cure, and bad cures can be worse than the disease. Those who think otherwise are also living in denial
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  • PaulNJ10h ago
  • CLParisDec. 6
  • But a long history of climate policy failures might also cause climate activists and the politicians they support to be more humble about their convictions, more sensitive to the human effects of their policy, and more willing to listen to criticism.
  • JDec. 6Times PickSo Stephens' position is that nothing can be done, so we should do nothing? He may be right; but future generations would curse us for not even trying to address the problems that will imperil not only their way of life but possibly their lives. I am weary of the trope that "we can't instantly and painlessly solve climate change, so we should not even try." Let's begin with a carbon tax and by removing the myriad tax subsidies for fossil fuels. Let's commit to reaching meaningful international agreements, rather than backing out of the few that now exist. Let's try ANYthing other than denying the consensus of 97% of climate scientists and whistling past the proverbial graveyard.
  • CEABurnetDec. 6Times PickWhile getting old is not for wimps, there are some times that being old is just fine. This is one of those moments. Currently at 62, I will likely be dead by the time the worst climate change effects make life as we know it very difficult to sustain. That is small comfort when thinking about the fate of our children and grandchildren, who will have to survive in a world besieged by more frequent and severe storms, droughts, and wild fires. And if we think the swelling migrant masses are a problem for Europe and the US, just wait until water becomes more scarce and crops fail to appear in Africa and South and Central America. No wall or amount of “safe” tear gas will be able to contain them.
  • Climate change policy, by its nature, can't work on a national level. The taxes imposed by the government were meant to make up for a budget shortfall caused by repealing a wealth tax (ISF). Taxing the poor and working classes to pay for a reduction in taxes on the wealthy is probably not a good way to charm the vast majority of French people into supporting your neoliberal "reforms"
  • While solutions to the climate change problem are difficult and complex, the fact remains that inaction is not the answer. And it will take not only governments and politicians to do something, but the collaboration of all of us. Instead of saying we love our children and grandchildren let’s do something about it. But obviously, we do not have the will to do it. Want proof? Consumers in the US are shunning fuel efficient passenger cars and opting for gas guzzling trucks. We are just like the lemmings marching steadily, and apparently willingly, to the edge of the cliff
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Farms aren't tossing perfectly good produce. You are. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...perfectly-good-produce-you-are farm food waste recycling
shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • f food waste were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest emitter of CO2, after China and the United States. In our nation alone, we throw away some 63 million tons of food a year, even as 40 million Americans are considered food insecure.
  • “Approximately 20% of organic and conventional produce in the U.S. never leaves the farm just because it looks a little different. . . . We think that’s crazy.”
  • advocates are getting the problem exactly backward. Less than 20 percent of total food waste happens at farms and packinghouses, where the ugly-produce movement works its magic, according to ReFED, a nonprofit dedicated to researching food waste policies.
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  • The vast majority of waste — more than 80 percent — is generated by homes and consumer-facing businesses like grocery stores and restaurants.
  • The hype surrounding this movement is inflated by the public’s ignorance of the food supply chain.
  • Despite the dramatic anecdotes about truckloads of landfilled crops, little of farm waste is due to merely “cosmetic” blemishes. Much of it is bruised or weeping goods that can quickly break down and rot the entire crate. With many crops, misshapen produce knocks against its neighbors during transit, poking holes and jeopardizing entire bins. “Drops” (produce that’s fallen on the ground) are left behind because otherwise they tend to cause food-poisoning outbreaks. Farms till excessively damaged produce back into the soil along with the crop’s stems and leaves, recycling their nutrients.
  • North America’s packinghouses discard about 1 percent of the produce that enters their doors, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization — usually because it’s straight-up rotten.
  • For the most part, ugly-produce initiatives are simply gentrifying second-grade produce that was already being eaten — just not, perhaps, by upscale shoppers. It’s the food equivalent of Lyft “inventing” a bus.
  • The most effective ways to tackle that
  • boil down to the old mantra to reduce, reuse and recycle.
  • The single biggest source of U.S. food waste, accounting for 43 percent of the problem, is our own homes
  • Most of all, we should sync our shopping habits with our eating habits. Affluent shoppers waste the most produce because of how much of it they buy and then trash
  • The most important behavioral change consumers can make to address food waste isn’t to buy certain kinds of produce. It’s to actually eat what we bring home.
  • Homes, food service and grocery stores generate 7.8 million tons of food waste per year that can’t be salvaged, accounting for 12 percent of the problem. This waste needs to be recycled. The Environmental Protection Agency says that the United States composts only 5 percent of its food waste. (Compare that with 15 percent in the European Union.)
  • Biochar — made by heating inedible food and other organic waste until it becomes inert, odorless, nutrient-rich charcoal — could be a very effective way to recycle food waste, but it’s underutilized, because the equipment to do it at municipal scale is so new. Like composting, biochar can be used as a fertilizer, returning food waste’s nutrients back to the soil. Unlike composting, it can handle food waste that’s mixed with general nonhazardous trash — no need for costly separate collection and handling. Biochar also sequesters carbon for centuries.
  • But the infrastructure — donation matching software, cold storage and refrigerated trucks — to handle large donations of eggs, dairy, meat, bread and produce is still being built. Funding more food bank infrastructure, educating potential donors about liability laws, creating more donation tax incentives and standardizing food safety regulations would recover up to 996,000 tons of food, or 1.7 billion meals, per year, according to ReFED.
  • For certain crops like berries, tomatoes, leafy greens and cucumbers, farms can take advantage of state and federal funds that would help them switch from open-field to hoophouse or greenhouse methods. Already common in East Asia and Europe, these methods boost yields and dramatically reduce how much of the crop is too damaged to leave the farm
  • As long as we eat fresh food instead of shelf-stable nutrient bars, perishability is part of the bargain. The only way to completely eliminate food waste is to abolish fresh food. Beyond that, all we can do is manage the waste.
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Germany's AfD turns on Greta Thunberg as it embraces climate denial | Environment | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-as-it-embraces-climate-denial germany denial climate change AfD politics
shared by Javier E on 14 May 19 - No Cached
  • While climate change barely got a mention on its social media channels when the AfD was first founded in 2013, it mentioned the topic on its channels about 300 times in 2017-18, and that has tripled over the past year to more than 900, with its main focus on Greta.
  • The party, whose members have been seen handing out climate change denial leaflets at school climate strikes, has ratcheted up its anti-Thunberg rhetoric ahead of the EU parliamentary elections this month. Its candidates have made comparisons between the Swedish teenager and a member of a Nazi youth organisation and called for her to seek treatment for what Maximilian Krah, an AfD candidate for the EU elections, called her “psychosis”.
  • It has also been repeatedly claimed on AfD’s Facebook page that she is the leader of a climate movement cult. Posts on the page make repeated use of terms such as “CO2Kult” (CO2 cult), “Klimawandelpanik” (climate change panic) and “Klimagehirnwäsche” (climate brain washing)
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  • “The AfD has been denying human-made climate change on its social media pages since 2016, and while it has not shifted its position it is clear that the party decided to communicate it more frequently.
  • “The fact that many mainstream politicians from across the political divide in Germany supported a 16-year-old female activist who was virtually unknown until a few months ago, allowed the party to present belief in climate change as irrational, hysteria, panic, cult-like or even as a replacement religion. Attacking Greta, at times in fairly vicious ways, including mocking her for her autism, became a way to portray the AfD’s political opponents as irrational.”
  • Promotional materials for the event cite Greta as someone placed on the frontline of climate activism “by PR professionals seeking to bedevil the plant-nutrient carbon dioxide” and describe the AfD as “the only party in Germany not willing to back the supposed climate consensus”.
  • “We are experiencing a shift to the right on social media and in society. In a short period of time, the new right has established its own counter-society on climate issues. With troll armies, agitating magazines and the support of climate sceptics like EIKE, it has created its own sphere that is massively underestimated.”
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CO2 levels: Carbon dioxide hit the highest level in human history - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ts-highest-level-human-history global warming history
shared by Javier E on 14 May 19 - No Cached
  • these are just data points. But taken together with so many indicators of an altered atmosphere and rising temperatures, they blend into the unmistakable portrait of human-induced climate change.
  • Near the entrance to the Arctic Ocean in northwest Russia, the temperature surged to 84 degrees Fahrenheit (29 Celsius). Meanwhile, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eclipsed 415 parts per million for the first time in human history.
  • In Koynas, a rural area to the east of Arkhangelsk, it was even hotter on Sunday, soaring to 87 degrees (31 Celsius). Many locations in Russia, from the Kazakhstan border to the White Sea, set record-high temperatures over the weekend, some 30 to 40 degrees (around 20 Celsius) above average.
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  • Data from the Japan Meteorological Agency show April was the second warmest on record for the entire planet.
  • Saturday’s carbon dioxide measurement of 415 parts per million at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory is the highest in at least 800,000 years and probably over 3 million years. Carbon dioxide levels have risen by nearly 50 percent since the Industrial Revolution.
  • The clip at which carbon dioxide has built up in the atmosphere has risen in recent years. Ralph Keeling, director of the program that monitors the gas at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, tweeted that its accumulation in the last year is “on the high end.”
  • Eighteen of the 19 warmest years on record for the planet have occurred since 2000, and we keep observing these highly unusual and often record-breaking high temperatures.
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