Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 107

It’s Not A Pipe Dream: Clean Energy From Water Pipes Comes To Portland

It’s a renewable energy source, but hydropower has its pitfalls. Its dams can kill fish and other marine life and majorly disrupt habitat, and they can also end up emitting significant amounts of greenhouse gases — a side effect that many of hydro’s fellow renewable energy sources, including wind and solar, don’t share.

But there’s one place with near-constant running water that can be tapped for energy without causing environmental problems: cities’ drinking water pipes. LucidEnergy, a Portland, Oregon-based startup that launched in 2007, is starting to capture the energy of water pipes, beginning with a pilot project in Riverside, California and now with a full-scale project in Portland.

Gregg Semler, president and CEO of LucidEnergy, said his team originally went into the business of hydropower by looking at ways to capture energy from streams. But they soon realized that it was difficult to predict the flow of a stream, and that generating hydropower could be environmentally degrading. Pipes, on the other hand, are existing-man made infrastructure, so equipping them to be power producers doesn’t present any environmental concerns. They also pump water daily at a fairly constant rate, which allows for a consistent flow of energy.

“What’s really interesting about Lucid is this is a new source of energy that’s never really been tapped into before,” Semler said. “You take the best of hydroelectricity and put it in the pipe.”

You take the best of hydroelectricity and put it in the pipe

The project touts itself as environmentally low-impact. But it could also help safeguard cities’ hydropower sources against drought, Laura Wisland, senior energy analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said. In California, for instance, the historic four-year drought has lowered snowpack levels and depleted reservoirs, leading to a decline in hydropower production in the state. To account for this decline, the state shifted over to natural gas — a move that cost Californians $1.4 billion more for electricity between 2011 and 2014 than in typical years, according to a Pacific Institute report.

But even in a drought, cities work hard to keep drinking water running through the pipes, Wisland said — a fact that better insulates Lucid’s system against drought.

“We are less vulnerable to variations in the ability to generate this type of hydropower than we are with projects with large dams that need to be full,” she said. “I live in California, and we’re having a drought, and our ability to develop hydropower is much more limited than it has been in the past…I don’t think you’d see the same level of variability with this type of hydro power; there’s a more constant supply of power.”

LucidEnergy tested out the project in Riverside with funding from the Department of Energy. Semler said he targeted Riverside because he knew the city was “really progressive in terms of energy efficiency.”

“We went to them, and they liked the idea. It was a relationship right off the bat,” he said.

In Riverside, the electricity generated from the pipes is used to power street lights. Portland’s project has a bit more heft to it: it produces, according to Semler, an average of 1,100 megawatt-hours of electricity a year. That’s enough for about 150 homes.

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CREDIT: Lucid Energy

The system is installed in 50 feet of Portland water pipes, in sections where the water flows downward due to gravity. There are four sections of pipe, and each has a generator on top and a 42-inch turbine that spins as the water flows inside. According to the company, up to four units of the so-called LucidPipe can be installed “in a standard 40-foot” section of water pipe, and one mile of 42-inch diameter pipeline has the potential to produce more than 3 megawatts of electricity.

In Portland, the turbines were installed by replacing a section of existing pipe with Lucid’s pipe, and bolting that new pipe to the existing water system in a process “sort of like Legos,” Semler said. But he also said there’s a market for the technology in cities that are building new networks of water pipes — cities that may have more need of water due to an influx of residents, for instance. In those cities, the new sections of pipe could incorporate Lucid technology.

A lot of cities around the world are dealing with aging infrastructure and facing questions about how to replace it, said Amy Nagy, business development coordinator at the Portland Development Commission, which worked with Lucid to get the project off the ground in Portland. As cities go through and make improvements to their infrastructure, she said, they could be looking into whether they could get a dual purpose out of it.

“Water pipes deliver clean water, and LucidPipe adds an additional benefit of clean energy production, and producing revenue that the city can go back and reinvest,” she said.

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CREDIT: Sherri Kaven/Lucid

Semler is already looking at expanding the system to other cities. Johannesburg, South Africa announced earlier this year that it would be employing the technology in its water system. And Semler said he’s gotten interest from cities in China, Brazil, Canada, and Mexico. A city interested in LucidPipe must first agree to adopt the system, and then go about securing private capital. Portland’s project cost about $1.7 million, which was paid for by private investors. It’s expected to produce $2 million worth of energy over 20 years. The revenue generated from the energy goes partly to Portland, partly to Lucid, and partly to the third-party investor. Those private investor own the project in Portland, Semler said, so the system works similarly to solar panel leasing.

“The challenge in getting cities to agree to the project,” Semler said “is a lot of cities don’t have the capital to put in pipelines.”

Still, he said, he has high hopes for the idea.

“Mostly what cities do is they try to keep infrastructure viable. We see LucidPipe as a tool that water agencies can use to bring private capital into building out new water infrastructure projects, or to reduce operating costs,” he said. “There’s been a lot of investment over the last 10 years in solar, wind, and biogas — we see same thing happening with our product.”

If cities can get ahold of the capital, the LucidPipe system could spread. Wisland said she thinks the idea has “tremendous potential” and said that, in general, the idea was “a no-brainer.”

“It’s not going to be generating as much power as a large scale solar farm,” she said, “but its part of a growing trend of taking advantage of existing infrasturcture. We have water pipes all over the country, so I think it just makes sense.”

Wisland said that one barrier that could prevent the system from being used in all water pipes is the fact that, with hydropower, there needs to be some pressure to move the water. So the pipes would be best used in gravity-fed systems, or other systems where there’s a possibility to create a little pressure.

Wisland also pointed to the environmental benefits of the system. Any time a hydroelectric system is put in a place that isn’t the natural environment, it avoids the damage caused to ecosystems and the organisms that live in them. Still, hydropower makes up about 6 percent of the U.S.’s electricity generation — almost as much as all other renewables combined — and if there are ways to increase that percentage without posing harm to the environment or increasing greenhouse gas emissions, it makes sense to take advantage of those methods.

“Hydropower is an extremely important part of our existing electricity portfolio and will continue to be so,” Wisland said. “Most people think the era of large dam building in the U.S. is over — we really do need to be turning our efforts over to ways to improving efficiency and finding more creative, non-traditional ways to generate hydropower electricity. As we think about reducing emissions in electricity sector, we can’t take hydro off the table.”

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Drinking waterHydropowerPortland

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A Fireball Exploded In This Man’s Face, And Now He’s Suing The Nearby Fracking Operation

A Texas man is suing a group of fracking companies after burns from a methane explosion near his house allegedly hospitalized him for a week, burned his family, and caused permanent damage.

Cody Murray, 38, and his father, wife, and four-year-old daughter were all burned by a “fireball” after methane built up in his pump house and exploded when Murray entered the shed to check on a water issue. The lawsuit, filed last week against EOG Resources, Fairway Resources LLC, and three subsidiaries of Fairway, alleges the methane was from the defendants’ fracking wells just 1,000 feet from Murray’s house, which sits 35 miles outside Fort Worth.

“At the flip of the switch, Cody heard a ‘whooshing’ sound, which he instantly recognized from his work in the oil and gas industry, and instinctively picked his father up and physically threw him back and away from the entryway to the pump house,” the complaint states. “In that instant, a giant fireball erupted from the pump house, burning Cody and [his father], who were at the entrance to the pump house, as well as Ashley and A.M., who were approximately twenty feet away.”

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Cody Murray received burns on his back, face, and arms after an explosion near his well.

CREDIT: Courtesy Murray family

Murray, who was closest to the blast, was burned on his arms, back, neck, and face and spent a week in intensive care after the accident last August. He is still unable to drive due to damage to his hands, the lawsuit states, and subsequently lost his job, which required several hours of driving each day. His father, wife, and daughter were also hospitalized, according to the lawsuit.

“It’s a very sad case. It’s terrible,” said trial lawyer Christopher Hamilton, who filed the suit in Dallas.

Hamilton told ThinkProgress there are two issues that have historically prevented successful cases being brought against fracking companies. First, it’s difficult to determine that the methane (or other contamination) was directly caused by fracking.

Methane, a flammable greenhouse gas, is a major component of natural gas, but it also occurs naturally in the ground — a fact that has protected companies from lawsuits. Images of flammable tap water in Pennsylvania and Texas have raised alarm for years, but plaintiffs affected by the contamination were unsuccessful in establishing cause. New methods, though, have enabled scientists to track isotopes and determine where in the ground methane came from, Hamilton said, making it easier to establish causation.

“Rigorous scientific testing, including isotope testing, has conclusively demonstrated that the high-level methane contamination of the Murrays’ water well resulted from natural gas drilling and extraction activities. The high levels of methane in the Murrays’ well were not ‘naturally occurring,'” the complaint states.

The second issue in fracking cases is that it’s often difficult to directly connect physical damages to contamination, such as in the case of long-term exposure. For instance, another case in Texas that alleged fracking had caused nosebleeds and asthma was thrown out last summer. In Oklahoma, it took a state Supreme Court decision to uphold citizens’ rights to sue fracking companies over earthquakes.

In this case, though, there are “serious, catastrophic and likely permanent injuries that indisputably occurred due to methane,” Hamilton said.

The isotope-tracking science could open up a new avenue for litigation against fracking. Proponents of fracking claim that the extraction method — wherein thousands of gallons of chemical-laced water is pumped at high pressure into shale underground, loosening deposits of oil and gas — is perfectly safe. And in Texas, where Murray lives, fracking has experienced a huge, state-supported boom. Texas even passed legislation last year preventing towns and cities from banning fracking.

“This is a potentially landmark case,” Hamilton said. “I think this needs to set off an alarm for industry that they need to be casing these wells properly — in the way that scientists have been telling them for decades.”

In fact, methane leaks have been repeatedly linked to fracking operations. Satellite observations have shown that methane is leaking around fracking hotspots at such a high rate that there is no climate benefit in switching from coal to natural gas power, despite the fact that natural gas burns cleanly.

And methane leaks aren’t the only danger posed by fracking operations. Researchers from the University of Texas, Arlington tested water samples collected over the past three years from wells near fracking operations and found elevated levels of heavy metals such as arsenic. Their findings, released this summer, show elevated levels of 19 different chemicals including the so-called BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene and xylenes) compounds. Heavy metals are toxic to humans, and BTEX compounds are considered carcinogenic.

A spokesperson for EOG Resources declined to comment on the case, citing company policy.

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casecausationChris HamiltonExplosionFrackingisotope trackingLawsuitMethaneMurrayTexas

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Shell’s Drilling Plans Expose Just How Unprepared The U.S. Is For A Melting Arctic

As Shell moves forward with its plans to drill in remote Arctic waters, the U.S. Coast Guard is being forced to divert resources — including a national security ship normally used for monitoring drug trafficking — to ensure that the oil and gas company sticks to its safety and environmental requirements.

“That for me is the opportunity cost,” Admiral Paul Zukunft, commandant of the Coast Guard, told Reuters in an interview last week. “It means you do less somewhere else in order to supplement activity in the Arctic.”

Shell’s newest push to expand its drilling operations in the Arctic comes at a time when the future of the region is in flux — the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of world, and the extent of the Arctic’s sea ice continues to shrink, so much so that National Geographic had to redraw its latest atlas map of the Arctic Ocean to account for the low extent of sea ice.

As outlined in a recent Department of Defense report, a melting Arctic presents the United States with number of opportunities — for tourism, natural resource exploitation, and military activities — but those opportunities aren’t without their downsides. The remoteness of the Arctic, combined with erractic weather and scarce resources, makes Arctic operations “expensive and dangerous for military forces that are unprepared for the austere operating environment,” the DoD said.

Such conditions are partially what drove Shell from the Arctic during its last attempt at drilling in the region, in 2012. On December 29, a Coast Guard helicopter had to rescue 18 Shell workers from an oil rig caught in a storm that exhibited sustained winds of 57 miles per hour and swells 30 feet high.

To monitor and protect against such incidents this time around, the Coast Guard is deploying five ships to the Arctic. It has also set up a helicopter based in Deadhorse, Alaska, meant to support Shell’s drilling operations. According to Reuters, the helicopter at that base would normally be used for search and rescue in the Kodiak, which has seen an uptick in recreational activity in recent years.

But even as traffic is increasing in the Arctic (according to the U.S. Coast Guard, twice as many vessels now navigate in or through the Bering Strait as in 1998) the United States’ Arctic infrastructure continues to lag behind — especially in the area of icebreakers, highly specialized ships that allow for Arctic exploration and rescue operations. Russia, which currently lays claim to some 463,000 square miles of Arctic land and sea, has a fleet of 27 large-scale icebreakers, some nuclear-powered. The United States has just one heavy polar icebreaker — and it’s already more than 40 years old. Though the United States technically does have two additional icebreakers, one is a heavy icebreaker that is currently disabled and the other is a medium icebreaker intended mainly for scientific expeditions. Shell, for its part, has two icebreakers as part of its Arctic support fleet.

The Coast Guard is responsible for handling any oil spills that happen in U.S. coastal waters — meaning if there’s an oil spill during Shell’s Arctic drilling operation, the Coast Guard will be in charge of conducting year-round emergency monitoring and response, something difficult to do in icy waters without proper ice-breaking equipment. In a report released last year, the National Research Council found that the United States lacks the infrastructure to properly handle an Arctic oil spill. In its assessment of Shell’s current Arctic drilling plans, the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) concluded that there was a 75 percent chance of one or more large spills occurring.

Still, despite unpredictable Arctic conditions and a resource-scarce Coast Guard, Shell is attempting to convince regulators that restrictions preventing them from drilling deeper than 3,000 feet below the Chukchi Sea should be lifted, according to E&E News. Ann Pickard, Shell’s Executive Vice President, is reportedly “unfazed” by reports chiding the company for failing to assess the risks associated with Arctic drilling.

“I enjoy the challenge,” Pickard recently told Bloomberg of drilling in extreme environments. Of the extreme Arctic weather, she said it’s no different — and perhaps better — than other places where Shell drills, like the North Sea. “We know how to operate in places where there’s challenging weather,” she said.

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Arctic DrillingClimate ChangeRoyal Dutch Shell

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China’s Air Pollution Is Traveling To The United States

China’s air pollution is traveling across the Pacific Ocean and into the United States, according to a new study.

The study, published this week in Nature Geoscience, found that ozone, which can contribute to respiratory problems when inhaled, has been making its way from China to the western United States. In China, according to the study, ozone levels in the troposphere — the lowest level of the earth’s atmosphere — went up by about 7 percent between 2005 and 2010.

“The dominant westerly winds blew this air pollution straight across to the United States,” lead researcher Willem Verstraeten of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute said in a statement. “In a manner of speaking, China is exporting its air pollution to the West Coast of America.”

The movement of this ozone pollution into the United States has offset about 43 percent of the western region’s efforts to reduce ozone emissions, the study found. The federal government implemented policies that decreased the production of nitrogen oxides — which, when in contact with volatile organic compounds and sunlight, form ozone — by 20 percent in the western U.S., Agence France-Presse reports. Still, the region didn’t see a major decrease in air ozone levels, and this study might point to the reason why.

This isn’t the first time China has been identified as the source of U.S. air pollution. Last year, a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that pollution blown across the ocean from China can account for 12 to 24 percent of sulfate concentrations on the West Coast. In 2006, the study found, pollution blown in from China caused Los Angeles, California to experience an extra day of unhealthy smog levels.

But that study also found that China’s manufacturing for export sector contributed to 36 percent of the country’s emissions of sulfur dioxide, a pollutant that, like ozone, can exacerbate respiratory problems. Manufacturing for export was also responsible for 27 percent of its nitrogen oxide emissions, 17 percent of its black carbon and 22 percent of its carbon monoxide. Since the United States is among China’s top trading partners, that means that the country plays a role in these manufacture for export emissions. The United States has also exported much of its manufacturing to China, which means that the creation of products designed by U.S. companies happens there and not in the U.S.

China — especially major cities like Shanghai and Beijing — is known for its severe air pollution. In 2013, off-the-charts air pollution in Shanghai cancelled flights and forced children and the elderly to stay indoors. For a week, air quality levels in the city remained at “heavily” and “severely” polluted, and visibility was severely limited by smog. And last October, many of Beijing’s marathoners needed masks and sponges to complete the race.

However, Beijing’s air quality might be improving a bit — a study from Greenpeace found that air pollution fell by 13 percent over the first quarter of 2015. That study also found that particulate levels fell by 31 percent in Hebei province, which neighbors Beijing. The study’s results may mean that China’s efforts to reduce pollution in certain regions are working: regions where new pollution controls weren’t implemented where generally more polluted over the course of the quarter, according to the study.

China has been making efforts to cut down on its air pollution and curb some of its greenhouse gas emissions. Last year, the country announced a target of peaking its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, and promised to increase the share of energy it gets from non-fossil fuel sources to about 20 percent by the same year. The country also pledged to cap its coal use by 2020.

The study points out that the findings mean that pollution control efforts in a single country may not be enough to improve air quality there.

“We conclude that global efforts may be required to address regional air quality and climate change,” the authors write.

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Air PollutionChina

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Study: Fracking In The Delaware River Basin Would Threaten Health Of 45,000

Encompassing the longest free-flowing river in the eastern United States, the Delaware River Basin also happens to sit partially on top of the Marcellus Shale, the second largest gas field in the world. To date, a moratorium put in place by the Delaware River Basin Commission has kept gas companies out of the Delaware River Basin — but environmental groups worry that without a permanent ban, the basin could be opened to fracking at a moment’s notice.

Now, a new study seeks, for the first time, to quantify the environmental impact of opening the Delaware River Basin to fracking — and what natural gas extraction could mean for the communities that call the region home.

The Delaware River, which begins its flow from springs tucked away in New York’s Catskill Mountains, winds for nearly 400 miles before emptying into the Delaware Bay and, eventually, the Atlantic Ocean. Along the way, its watershed drains an area of 12,800 square miles, and supplies drinking water for nearly 20 million people — more than 5 percent of the country — along the East Coast.

We are perpetually on the precipice of drilling and fracking coming to our watershed

The Delaware River Basin — which encompasses parts of Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York — also happens to contain part of the Marcellus Formation, a rock formation that extends 95,000 square miles from West Virginia to New York. The Marcellus Formation is made up of shale, and inside of that shale sits vast reserves of natural gas — untapped for centuries, until a technology known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, made extracting the natural gas possible.

Until now, the portion of the Marcellus shale that is contained within the Delaware River Basin has been off limits to fracking, stalled by a moratorium put in place by the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC). But that moratorium is only temporary — and with natural gas companies eying potential reserves beneath the basin, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, an advocacy group aimed at preserving the health of the Delaware River, commissioned CNA, an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research firm to take a look at what could happen to the region if the Delaware River Basin is opened up to fracking.

“We are perpetually on the precipice of drilling and fracking coming to our watershed,” Delaware Riverkeeper Maya van Rossum told ThinkProgress. “There’s constant pressure. We have never felt confident that we could just sit idly by and count on this moratorium holding.”

Looking at a scenario where both the Delaware River Basin moratorium and the New York State fracking ban are reversed, CNA used statistical analysis to understand where fracking wells would likely go within the basin. Using statistical tools, researchers analyzed the locations of current wells within the interior of the Marcellus Shale. They looked at site-specific qualities, like slope, distance from roads, distance from pipelines, and how far the shale is from the surface, to paint a picture of where wells are currently located. They then used mapping layers to look for areas in the Delaware River Basin that matched those conditions. From their analysis, they determined that up to 4,000 new fracking wells could be created in the Delaware River Basin if the moratorium were to be lifted.

The group then looked at the environmental impacts that these wells could have on the region, breaking those impacts into the categories of land, water, and air. In terms of land, the largest impact of fracking in the Delaware River Basin, CNA found, would be changes in land use — specifically, the conversion of forested ecosystems into roads, wells, and pipelines for extracting and exporting the gas. For each well, CNA found that an average of 17 to 23 acres of direct land cover changes would occur — and 75 percent of all land changes would be due to pipeline building. For the complete Delaware River Basin, under the scenario put forth by CNA, a total of 18 to 26 square miles of land would be converted to serve the fracking wells — the equivalent of building as many as 840 Walmart Supercenters in the area.

The loss of land would degrade forest ecosystems, CNA found, causing forest cores — the areas inside of the forests that typically house the highest density and diversity of species and store the most carbon — to become fragmented and turn into more vulnerable forest edges. Overall, a scenario where 4,000 new fracking wells are constructed within the Delaware River Basin would lead to a 5 to 10 percent decrease in forest cores, along with a 2 to 8 percent gain in forest edges.

The study also looked at how fracking would impact local watersheds and streams within the Delaware River Basin (though it did not consider the larger downstream implications on the Delaware River itself).

You cannot make shale gas extraction safe for the environment and communities

“Water is central to the process of hydraulic fracking, for chemical mixing, for fracking itself, and then a significant amount of that water can come back as produced water,” Paul Faeth, Director of Energy, Water and Climate research at CNA, told reporters on a press call, adding that each fracking well uses around 4.5 million gallons of water for its extraction operations. CNA found that the impact on the region’s water resources — of water pulled from streams to serve the needs of fracking companies — varies greatly based on each stream’s flow, and is much lower in years with a great deal of precipitation than in drought years. At most, however, CNA found that fracking could reduce stream flows by up to 70 percent, while potentially raising the amount of dangerous contaminants, like barium, 500 percent compared to background levels.

Additionally, the study found that the construction of fracking wells — and subsequent extraction of natural gas — could have significant health impacts for the communities directly neighboring the wells. Researchers looked at one county in particular — Wayne County, which would likely see the most well development — and found that up to 30,000 residents could be impacted by emissions of nitrous oxide, mostly from compressors gathering gas and taking it to market. If the whole basin is taken into account, another 15,000 residents in other counties could also face air quality issues.

“To see that in one county, 60 percent of the population have their health impacted by drilling and fracking in their communities, that is really alarming,” van Rossum said. But she also said that the study’s findings didn’t surprise her.

“What the study confirms is what we have always said, which is that the harm that is inflicted by shale gas extraction is far reaching, wide ranging, short term and long term,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if you reduce, to a certain extent, one harm or another. You cannot make shale gas extraction safe for the environment and communities.”

Anthony Ingraffea, professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University who was not involved with the CNA study, called the study “timely and exhaustive.”

“The epoch of anecdotes is over,” he told reporters on a press call. “We now have hard scientific evidence of the harmful impacts of fracking development.”

The study adds to a growing body of scientific literature looking at the potential impacts of fracking, on both a regional and national scale. According to Ingraffea, 580 different scientific studies have looked into fracking, with 80 percent of those published since January 1 of 2013. Earlier this year, the EPA released its long-awaited draft assessment on the impact fracking has on water pollution, concluding that while the process has several key vulnerabilities, there is no evidence of widespread, of systematic impacts on the United States’ drinking water.

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Australia Offers ‘Vastly Inadequate’ Emissions Reduction Pledge, Critics Say

Politicians and environmentalists in Australia are criticizing the country’s new carbon reduction pledge, saying it doesn’t go far enough to protect Australia from the impacts of climate change.

In the pledge, announced Tuesday in advance of December’s United Nations climate change summit in Paris, the country says by 2030 it will reduce emissions between 26 and 28 percent compared to 2005 levels — significantly less than other developed nations. The United States, for instance, pledged cuts between 26 and 28 percent compared to 2005 levels by 2025. The European Union, which has submitted one of the most aggressive reduction pledges to the UN, has promised to cut emissions at least 40 percent compared to 1990 levels by 2030. And Switzerland has committed to a 50 percent reduction in emissions compared to 1990 levels by 2030.

Tim Flannery of Australia’s Climate Council, an independent group that publishes research on how climate change impacts the country, said Tuesday’s announcement falls short.

“These targets are vastly inadequate to protect Australians from the impacts of climate change and do not represent a fair contribution to the world effort to bring climate change under control,” he said.

Opposition leaders in Australia were also quick to criticize the pledge.

“Countries to which we often compare ourselves — like the U.S. and the United Kingdom, Germany, countries like that — all have targets in an equivalent time frame into the 40 per cent range, so 41 percent for America, 48 percent for the U.K., mid-40s for Germany,” Australian Opposition environment spokesman Mark Butler told the ABC.

The announcement was also criticized because the pledge is in terms of a 2005 benchmark, when much of the world — aside from the U.S. and Canada — is using 2000 levels. In Australia, greenhouse gas emissions were about 9 percent higher in 2005 than they were in 2000.

According to the Guardian, Australia’s Climate Change Authority has recommended that the country’s “fair share” of carbon reductions would be 40 to 60 percent over 2000 levels by 2030, which would be equal to a 45 percent to 63 percent reduction over 2005.

In the run up to the UN summit, many of the world’s countries are preparing emissions reduction pledges — known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). Reducing carbon emissions is seen as the best way to keep global warming below 2°C, a level generally agreed-upon to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. INDCs are expected to play one part in the overall climate reduction strategy, but many developing nations will likely need assistance transitioning to clean technologies, such as wind and solar.

“So far, based on INDCs that have come out and what we expect we know we’re going to get about halfway to 2 degrees under the best-case scenario,” Rebecca Lefton, Director of Policy and Research at Climate Advisers, told ThinkProgress in the spring. “Which is not surprising, because this is just what countries can do unilaterally with self-financed pollution targets.”

Last year, under Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Australia became the first country in the world to abolish an existing carbon tax. Australia is one of the largest carbon emitters per capita. It also has a significant coal industry, which Abbott has called “good for humanity.”

Abbott — who in 2009 reportedly called the science behind climate change “crap” but has since claimed he takes the issue “very seriously” — told the ABC that the pledges were “responsible.”

“We are not leading, but we are certainly not lagging,” he said. “It’s environmentally responsible because it’s more than comparable with what other countries are doing. It’s economically responsible because it doesn’t depend upon a great big new tax on everything, or a massive overbuild of renewable capacity in the next few years.”

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AustraliaCarbon Emissionscarbon pledgesclimate chanceCOPGreenhouse GasespledgeUnited Nations

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Ex Machina: No Techno-Fix For Irreversible Ocean Collapse From Carbon Pollution

A new study finds there is no “deus ex machina” way to prevent a catastrophic collapse of ocean life for centuries if not millennia — if we don’t start slashing carbon pollution ASAP.

The Nature Climate Change study examined what would happen if we continue current CO2 emissions trends through 2050 and then try to remove huge volumes of CO2 from the air after the fact with some techno-fix. The result, as co-author John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, put it, is “we will not be able to preserve ocean life as we know it.”

A “Deus ex machina” — literally “God from the machine” — originated in Greek tragedy (and comedy) where a machine (like a crane) delivers actors who play gods to the stage to magically resolve all of the dramatic problems. Today it means, “a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved by the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability or object.”

Geo-engineering is a classic last-minute techno-fix or deus ex machina offered by some to the (solvable) problem of human-caused global warming. It does this either by blocking sunlight (e.g. with mass injection of sulfate aerosols) or by post-facto carbon dioxide removal (CDR).

As we reported in February, the whole notion is so dubious, so fraught with obvious danger, that even the staid National Academy of Sciences felt compelled to eviscerate the whole idea in two separate reports. Indeed, the reports were on “climate intervention,” since the Academy panel rejected the term “geoengineering.” Why? Because “we felt ‘engineering’ implied a level of control that is illusory,” explained Marcia McNutt who led the report committee.

The panel warned of the huge risks with the more invasive strategies to reduce the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth: “There is significant potential for unanticipated, unmanageable, and regrettable consequences in multiple human dimensions from albedo modification at climate altering scales, including political, social, legal, economic, and ethical dimensions.”

[image error]

CREDIT: Wikipedia

This is commonly known as the Frankenstein’s monster problem, where your advanced techno-creation turns against you. The modern retelling of that story this year was a poignant sci-fi thriller, appropriately titled “Ex Machina.” Spoiler alert: It doesn’t end well for the techno-geek who tries to play God and create an “artificial intelligence.”

“There is no substitute for dramatic reductions in the emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases to mitigate the negative consequences of climate change, and concurrently to reduce ocean acidification,” the Academy panel concluded, a point the new study on acidification underscores.

The paper looked at the impact on the ocean ecosystem of acidification combined with “increasing temperatures and decreasing concentrations of dissolved oxygen in the sea.” As the news release notes, “Earlier in Earth’s history, such changes have led to mass extinctions.”

Indeed, a 2010 study showed that humans are acidifying the oceans 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred. And a 2015 study in Science concluded that the Permo-Triassic extinction 252 million years ago — considered the “the greatest extinction of all time” — happened during the time when massive amounts carbon dioxide were injected into the atmosphere, first slowly and then quickly (driven by volcanic eruptions). The researchers found that “during the second extinction pulse, however, a rapid and large injection of carbon caused an abrupt acidification event that drove the preferential loss of heavily calcified marine biota.” How bad was this extinction? Besides killing over 90 percent of marine life, it wiped out some 70 percent of land-based animal and plant life.

As discussed a year ago, when the world’s leading scientists and governments released the final “Synthesis” report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they made clear that it is the long-term irreversibility of climate change that makes it so immoral. For every scenario they looked at — other than the one that keeps total warming below 2°C — the IPCC warns:

A large fraction of anthropogenic climate change resulting from CO2 emissions is irreversible on a multi-century to millennial time scale, except in the case of a large net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere over a sustained period.

And this new study now aims directly at the IPCC’s one (tiny) exception. “Large net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere over a sustained period” won’t help large parts of the ocean stave off catastrophic long-term destruction. Again, there is no deus ex machina that will save us if we shun the one strategy we know will work (slashing carbon pollution).

As co-author Ken Caldeira, a climate and geo-engineering, expert told me: “Our paper shows that emitting CO2 today and taking it out sometime later is not the same as never emitting it at all.” The changes in large parts of the ocean, “may be reversible on the time scale of many thousands of years, but if these changes cause extinctions they will produce changes that are not reversible.’

And these changes are likely to cause mass extinction. But, hey, what’s wrong with playing God and deciding that a couple more decades of unsustainable carbon pollution from homo sapiens is better than the relatively super-cheap actions needed to avoid massive species loss (and catastrophic sea level rise and all those other irreversible impacts)?

That always works out well.

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Climate ChangeGeoengineeringOcean Acidification

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Judge Throws Out Permit For Fracking Exploration In Wetlands

A Louisiana district court judge on Monday threw out — at least temporarily — a permit for fracking exploration in wetlands about an hour outside New Orleans.

The judge ruled that a division of the Department of Conservation failed to adequately consider the environmental impacts of the permit, including the implications of a nearby fault line. The Department of Natural Resources (DNR) will have to reevaluate the permit application for Helis Oil and Gas.

“They didn’t go through the environmental impact analysis that we said they had to do,” said Lisa Jordan, deputy director of the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic and the attorney representing Abita Springs on the case.

Jordan told ThinkProgress the environmental review of the permit was “boilerplate” and did not truly evaluate the potential costs of contamination to fresh water in the area. Abita Springs, a place known for its pristine water and that’s home to Abita Brewing Company, is located in St. Tammany Parish.

Jordan said the DNR usually rubber-stamps permits like these. “It was really big in the sense that this was the first oil and gas drilling and certainly fracking [permit] where a judge said you still have to do all these things,” she said.

Abita Springs, as well as the parish and a community group, have been fighting the plan to frack there for over a year. There are currently other ongoing legal actions. One suit, which claims the permit violates local zoning laws, has resulted in a cease and desist order. The town of Abita Springs has also sued the Army Corps of Engineers for failing to hold adequate public meetings. There will be a hearing on that issue in October. Both the state and the Army Corps must grant approvals for drilling in wetlands to occur.

The wetlands in St. Tammany Parish are the sole source of drinking water for miles around, and residents are concerned that fracking — and the accompanying wastewater disposal — will put the waters at risk of contamination. St. Tammany Parish is the fastest growing parish in the state, Jordan said, prized for its “safe, quiet, clean” environment.

Louisiana has long been an oil and gas state, but fracking comes with additional concerns, and any development in wetlands can be problematic. Wetlands are natural buffers to the effects of climate change, including both flooding and drought. In addition, they are important to regional biodiversity and erosion control. Louisiana loses a football field’s worth of land every hour, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Part of the loss of land is due to oil and gas development.

Jordan said the industry expects — and the state provides — special treatment.

“It’s oil and gas, and oil and gas reigns supreme,” she said.

But Greg Beuerman, a spokesman for Helis Oil, said Monday’s ruling is just another delay, and DNR will have to simply provide more information.

“We continue to believe that it’s not a question of ‘if’ it’s going to happen, but ‘when’ it’s going to happen,” Beuerman told the Times-Picayune.

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AbitaAbita SpringsCourtDepartment of Natural ResourcesenvironmentalFrackingLouisianaOil and GasSt. Tammany ParishTulaneWater

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Why The ‘Most Trusted’ Professionals’ Union In The Nation Endorsed Bernie Sanders

National Nurses United has chosen Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) as its preferred candidate for president, dealing a blow to other candidates who had sought the union’s endorsement — namely, Hillary Clinton.

NNU announced its decision on Monday at an event in Oakland, California. The group, which represents approximately 185,000 nurses and is the largest of its kind in the country, said Sanders’ policies “align with nurses from top to bottom.” Specifically, the group cited his support for the Affordable Care Act and Medicare, and his desire to fight climate change.

The endorsement is Sanders’ first from a national union, and while it’s not expected to bring in large amounts of cash to his campaign, it is at least somewhat important. NNU has thousands of members in early primary states like New Hampshire and Iowa, and Sanders’ two biggest Democratic rivals — Clinton and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley — had also competed for the endorsement. Nurses are also consistently rated the “most trusted” professionals in the country, with the vast majority of Americans giving them high ratings of honesty and ethics.

But why did Sanders secure union members’ votes over Clinton or O’Malley? In the minutes following the announcement, Buzzfeed News reported that the Keystone XL pipeline was “the deciding factor,” noting Clinton’s now-infamous refusal to say whether she would approve the controversial project. Conversely, Sanders has staunchly opposed the pipeline for the same reasons NNU has, saying a spill would exacerbate health problems like asthma and nosebleeds.

However, NNU spokesperson Martha Wallner said the decision to choose Sanders ran deeper than Keystone XL. In a phone interview, Wallner said all three candidates had competed for the endorsement by filling out a seven-question survey about issues that aligned with NNU’s values — and only Sanders scored a 100 percent. O’Malley scored 86 percent, and Clinton scored just 43 percent, she said.

“We want it all,” Wallner said. “It goes far beyond just Keystone XL.”

ThinkProgress reviewed a copy of each candidates’ answers to the survey, and the resulting scorecard created by the NNU Executive Council. Clinton answered “no commitment” on four out of seven issues. One of those was, of course, in response to whether she would oppose the Keystone XL pipeline. But Clinton would also not commit to supporting “a publicly administered, single-payer, universal healthcare system,” nor would she commit to supporting legislation to impose a .5 percent tax on Wall Street speculation. She also would not commit to publicly opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which nurses oppose because they say it allows pharmaceutical companies to block distribution of cheaper generic medications.

“She’s just been vague,” Wallner said. “Sanders has taken clear positions on the areas that we care about.”

O’Malley supported nearly all of NNU’s preferred policies, but would not commit to supporting a law that would require minimum, specific nurse-to-patient ratios at all times in all U.S. hospitals, a policy which nurses say would prevent chronic understaffing. O’Malley also added a caveat to his support for a single-payer healthcare system — he said he was for it, but would not specifically commit to federal legislation.

Clinton also added caveats to a number of union issues she said she would support. For example, she said she would “work to establish” minimum nurse-to-patient ratios, but would not fully commit to a federal policy. She also said she would support giving collective bargaining rights to employees in the Veterans Health Administration, but would not specifically commit to the VA Employee Fairness Act, which, among other things, gives collective bargaining rights to employees in the Veterans Health Administration.

In all, on the questionnaire, the three Democratic candidates only fully agreed on one thing — opposing right-to-work laws. Those laws allow union-represented workers to opt out of paying union fees, meaning they can benefit from collective bargaining without paying dues. Sanders, O’Malley, and Clinton all said they would veto a national right-to-work law should Congress pass one.

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Bernie SandersHillary ClintonMartin O'MalleyNational Nurses UnitedNurses

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Massive Coal Company Fights To Preserve Loopholes, Ability To Rip Off Taxpayers

The Obama Administration and a group of lawmakers recently took the first steps in more than thirty years toward reforming the federal government’s coal program. Standing in their way, however, is a giant new coal company with a business model that depends on bending the rules, dodging royalty payments, and spending big to win powerful political allies.

Most Americans have never heard of Cloud Peak Energy, the third largest coal company in the United States. A 2009 spinoff of the British-Australian mining company Rio Tinto, Cloud Peak only owns three mines, but these mines are among the biggest in the United States. All three are on taxpayer-owned public lands in the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming, where strip-mining costs are low, production is high, and federal policies are favorable.

In recent months, Cloud Peak has emerged as the most vocal critic of the Obama Administration’s efforts to modernize the federal coal program. The company argued that a proposal to prevent selling coal to its own subsidiaries is “completely unjustified and is a thinly veiled effort to inhibit the mining of federal coal,” and attempting to orchestrate an elaborate campaign to block it. Cloud Peak’s assertions about the proposal’s financial impacts have been so extreme that even Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal company, downplayed Cloud Peak’s claims to analysts and investors.

Cloud Peak has also distinguished itself in recent months by claiming to stand on stronger financial footing than its biggest rivals, with CEO Colin Marshall predicting an almost 700 percent increase in coal exports and an increased share of the domestic power generation market for Powder River Basin.

A Climate Progress review of Cloud Peak’s financial records, investor disclosures, and political contributions found that the company’s fierce defense of status quo federal policies and its financial bullishness are no coincidence. As a corporation, Cloud Peak is structured to exploit loopholes in the federal coal program, and the company is doggedly determined to preserve its special breaks.

Here are the three principal tactics that Cloud Peak uses to game the system, shortchange taxpayers, and undercut its competitors:

1. Selling coal to its own subsidiaries to dodge royalty payments.

In 2012, a Reuters investigation found that coal companies in the Powder River Basin are exploiting a loophole in federal royalty policy that is likely costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in lost revenues each year. In short, the loophole allows mining companies to sell coal to their own subsidiaries, pay a royalty on an artificially low price, and then export the coal to Asia where their subsidiaries sell it for several times the price.

Cloud Peak appears to be the biggest benefactor of this loophole and is its most staunch defender. Cloud Peak has created a network of at least 31 domestic subsidiaries through which it markets and sells its coal.

A Climate Progress review could find no public record of any of Cloud Peak’s subsidiaries paying federal royalties, suggesting that the company indeed pays royalties on the price at which the parent company sells coal to its subsidiaries. In a 2013 filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Cloud Peak appeared to confirm that it is widely engaged in self-dealing, acknowledging that if the government were to prohibit companies from paying royalties on the price at which the coal is sold to subsidiaries, it would reduce their profits. “If the federal government were to materially alter the method for valuing royalty payments for our non-arms’ length sales, our profitability and cash flows could be materially adversely affected,” reads the Cloud Peak disclosure.

But how much money are taxpayers losing as a result of Cloud Peak’s exploitation of this royalty loophole? The federal government, unfortunately, will not release mine-level information about a company’s royalty payments, making it nearly impossible to conduct a thorough independent audit. Because Cloud Peak’s production is nearly exclusively from federal lands, however, one can estimate how much it might be underpaying taxpayers based on the company’s annual reports and aggregated royalty information from the federal government.

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CREDIT: Dylan Petrohilos

In 2013, for example, Cloud Peak reported to its investors that it sold 89.1 million tons of coal for a total price of $1,136,318,000. Cloud Peak records show that it purchased 1.5 million tons of that coal from third parties, and Montana officials say that Cloud Peak produced 3.6 million tons from state lands, meaning that approximately 94 percent of the coal that Cloud Peak sold in 2013 was from surface mines on federal lands and therefore subject to a 12.5 percent royalty rate.

Climate Progress estimates that — based on Cloud Peak’s own disclosures — Cloud Peak should have paid at least $133,909,529 in federal royalties. The federal Office of Natural Resources Revenue, however, reports that Cloud Peak paid only $120,674,727 in royalties in 2013 — a potential underpayment of more than $13 million. Cloud Peak’s underpayment of royalties in 2013 may in fact have been higher. If one were to estimate Cloud Peak’s royalty liabilities based on revenues from federal lands as opposed to just the cost of product sold, it appears that Cloud Peak may have shortchanged taxpayers by roughly $44 million.

With over $13 million a year on the line — and perhaps much more — it is no wonder why Cloud Peak is adamantly opposed to the federal government’s proposal to stop self-dealing and prevent royalty dodging.

2. Winning exclusive deals to buy publicly-owned and tribally-owned coal for pennies on the ton.

In a major energy policy speech in March, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell observed that “most Americans would be surprised to know that coal companies can make a winning bid for about a dollar a ton to mine taxpayer-owned coal.” Indeed, two of Cloud Peak’s competitors bought massive amounts of taxpayer-owned coal in the Wyoming portion of the Powder River Basin in 2011 and 2012 for between $1.10 and $1.35 per ton.

Cloud Peak, however, has bought its most promising coal prospects in the Powder River Basin for even less than a dollar per ton. The federal government received only between $0.85 and $0.88 per ton on leases sold at Cloud Peak’s Antelope mines in Wyoming. At Cloud Peak’s Spring Creek Mine in Montana, the federal government received only $0.18 per ton from its most recent lease sale in 2007.

Cloud Peak is paying even less for the rights to mine tribally-owned coal. In 2013, Cloud Peak signed an agreement with the Crow Tribe to gain the exclusive option to mine approximately 1.4 billion tons of tribally-owned coal. If Cloud Peak exercises its option to mine the lands, the company says it will pay the Crow Tribe $0.08 to $0.15 per ton for the mining rights — approximately one-tenth of the price that Cloud Peak’s competitors have been paying in the Wyoming portion of the Powder River Basin.

3. Buying influence through campaign contributions.

Cloud Peak protects its loopholes and special breaks through aggressive lobbying and hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions. Since 2010, Cloud Peak Energy has invested more than $1.3 million on lobbying and $177,000 in campaign contributions to Members of Congress and Federal candidates, according to campaign finance data from OpenSecrets and FEC reports. The biggest beneficiary of Cloud Peak’s largesse was Senator Steve Daines, who has received $16,000 from Cloud Peak’s PAC since 2012.

Cloud Peak’s big spending on political contributions has likely helped win support for its priorities in Congress. Senator Daines and Rep. Ryan Zinke have been vocal proponents of the Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point — a proposed coal export terminal in Washington State that would help Cloud Peak increase its export of Powder River Basin coal to Asian markets. Rep. Zinke, who has taken $4,500 from Cloud Peak during the past year, also tried to quietly pass a legislative rider to block the Obama Administration from closing the loophole that Cloud Peak is exploiting — a move that provoked blowback from editorial writers in Montana.

Cloud Peak’s influence appears to go even deeper in local politics. Cloud Peak, for example, spent $50,000 on a Whatcom County council race in Washington state — the county in which the Gateway Pacific Terminal will be located. An investigation by the Billings Gazette also found that more than a dozen elected officials sent suspiciously similar letters asking the Interior Department to delay its efforts to close the loophole on coal royalties. The form letter was circulated by Cloud Peak Energy.

Nidhi Thakar is the Deputy Director of the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress. You can follow her on Twitter at @NidhiJThakar. Matt Lee-Ashley is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress. You can follow him on Twitter at @MLeeAshley.

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CoalPowder River BasinRoyalties

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