Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 108

Extreme Heat Leads To Deaths, Protests In The Middle East

At least 21 people have died and 66 more have been hospitalized as a major heat wave engulfs Egypt and much of the rest of the Middle East.

High humidity levels and temperatures as high as 116.6°F made conditions deadly for Egyptians in Cairo, Marsa Matruh province, and Qena province. All of those who died were over 60, according to Al Jazeera — an age group that’s among the most vulnerable to heat waves.

“There is a big rise in temperature compared with previous years. But the problem is the humidity which is affecting people more,” health ministry spokesman Hossam Abdel Ghaffar told Al Jazeera. “Long exposure under the sun is a killer.”

Egypt isn’t the only country suffering from extreme heat in recent weeks. Last month, higher than average temperatures also hit Turkey, and 100 people who tried to escape the heat by swimming in pools and lakes ended up drowning.

In Basra, Iraq, temperatures this week are supposed to stay steady around 123°F, the Guardian reports. Temperatures in the country are so high that on Thursday, the Iraqi government implemented a four-day holiday so that residents wouldn’t have to go to work in the heat. Last week, Iraqi citizens protested power outages that have made dealing with the extreme heat more difficult — in some regions, the BBC reports, it’s common to only have power for a few hours each day.

“All of the people we spoke to here say they want to see an end to rampant corruption, they want the return of basic services, they want electricity, they want to have air conditioning at a time when Iraq is experiencing a blazingly hot record heatwave and they want to have clean water,” Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Jamjoom reported from Iraq.

200 protesters in #Basra camping tonight, against corruption& lack of basic services.
#IraqiTwitter #IraqProtest pic.twitter.com/XdmiQPjftc

— Layla (ع) (@mesoscorpio) August 8, 2015

1000s gather in #Baghdad 2demand better services inc electricity as temps top 50C: http://t.co/BnC5JBpvT5 | @guardian pic.twitter.com/aZTFP3lXW9

— Jon Dean (@deanjonm) August 7, 2015

Last month, Iran likely registered the second-highest heat index on record: 165°F. The Iranian city of Bandar Mahshahr hit an actual registered temperature of 115°F, but with a dew point temperature of 90, the air felt so hot that the heat index went off the charts.

Europe, too, has been struggling with extreme heat in recent weeks. On Saturday, Warsaw, Poland set a record for highest August temperature of 97.9°F. High temperatures in Poland has forced the country to implement its first power supply cuts since the 1980s. The cuts affect industrial businesses but won’t affect residents, Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz said Monday. She urged Polish residents, however, to curb their power usage between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m.

“The situation resulting from the heat wave is serious and we have bad forecasts for the next 10 or 11 days,” Kopacz said.

Heat has claimed lives around the world this year. In May and June, an extreme heat wave in India killed more than 2,300 people and melted roads. In some regions of the country, temperatures reached as high as 122°F. In India — and in other countries with aging grids — high heat often comes with fears of power outages, as increased use of air conditioning makes it difficult for infrastructure to keep up with power demand. Pakistan, too, endured a major heat wave this summer, and lost more than 800 lives because of it.

Science has shown that climate change has the potential to make heat waves more frequent and more intense. A study published last month found that climate change doubles Europe’s risk of a heat wave. And a study published in April found that 75 percent of the Earth’s “moderate daily hot extremes” can be linked to climate change, meaning that heat events that in a non-warming world would occur in one out of every 1,000 days occur, in our modern, warming world, in four or five out of every 1,000 days.

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Climate ChangeHeat Waves

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Water Rationing In Puerto Rico Hits The Poor, Leaves Resorts Untouched

GUAYANILLA, PUERTO RICO — Pacing across the cracked earth of his family’s land as hot, dry winds shook the surrounding trees, 33-year-old Roberto Fernandez described how two years of severe drought has devastated the island.

“Last year, the pastures weren’t getting rain and weren’t able to regrow, and my livestock started getting hungry and sick,” he said. “When the animals don’t have enough food, it takes a toll on their defense system, and the tics took hold and started spreading disease. There were carcasses of adult cows everywhere. That’s when I understood the pretty shocking reality of the drought.”

Other farmers who bring produce to the organic market Fernandez set up in the nearby city of Ponce are also suffering. “Production has dwindled drastically,” he said. “We’re really deep into the problem now.”

Since the usual tropical rains fizzled out in February, the USDA has declared more than a quarter of Puerto Rico a disaster area. In July, usually one of the wettest months, the island got just 4 centimeters of rain. Now, 2.8 million residents live in a part of the country suffering either an “extreme” or “severe” drought, according to the National Drought Mitigation Center.

As the commonwealth’s reservoirs drop to their lowest levels in decades, the government has declared a state of emergency, and implemented strict rationing. Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans now have had tap water only every third day, and that tightened this past weekend, giving families water only two days a week.

“It’s been water for one day, then no water for two days,” explained Fernandez. “In the one day you have water, you fill your buckets.”

Government officials are telling residents that now is “not the time” to wash their cars, fill private swimming pools, or hose down their sidewalks and patios. Luis F. Cruz Batista, Director of Puerto Rico’s Office of Management and Budget, told local press: “The rationing affects the rich, the middle class and the poor; it affects children, adults and seniors.”

But the rationing has not hit everyone equally. As poor islanders fill up buckets and bathtubs on the few days they have water, the pools, fountains, and showers of the coastline’s hotels and resorts remain untouched.

“The most affected residents have been those with the fewest resources,” San Juan academic and activist Jose Rivera told ThinkProgress. “But in the hotels and the majority of condominiums, like the one I live in, the rationing either isn’t being done at all, or they’re only partially implementing it. So far, the population has remained calm, but I expect this inequality of sacrifices to eventually provoke protests.”

Rivera added that when public schools reconvene this month, the water rationing will disrupt class schedules and the school breakfast and lunch programs. This will especially harm more than half of Puerto Rican children living in poverty.

For Fernandez, the water rationing policy is a symbol of deeper problem. “I see it as such as parallel of government policy in general,” he said. “The government puts more value into those from abroad than they are concerned about the local situation and the well-being of the public.”

[image error]

Fernandez’ dog Martes paces the cracked, dry land on his farm.

CREDIT: Alice Ollstein

A particularly harsh El Niño that began in March — a recurring weather phenomenon characterized by warm ocean temperatures — is fueling Puerto Rico’s drought, and shows no signs of letting up. Some studies indicate that climate change caused by increased carbon pollution in the earth’s atmosphere can increase the frequency and severity of El Niño events. Scientists have noted that Puerto Rico and its Caribbean neighbors are in one of the most vulnerable regions in the world when it comes to climate change.

The drought comes at a time when the Puerto Rican government is least able to cope with it. Facing a massive $73 billion debt crisis that some officials call “unpayable,” the commonwealth went into default at the beginning of August by missing a major loan payment to its bondholders.

With the state government crippled by debt, the federal government is extending low-interest emergency loans to farmers hurt by the drought, and setting up desalination plants to help prevent Puerto Rico’s reservoirs from completely drying up.

The fiscal crisis and the drought are intertwined in another way: for decades Puerto Rico has put off spending money on fixing and strengthening its infrastructure, including water reservoirs and aqueducts, so much of the little water left is being lost due to cracks and leaks.

[image error]

Drip irrigation in the newly planted papaya field saves water at Fernandez’ drought-stricken farm.

CREDIT: Alice Ollstein

For now, residents have to get creative.

In the cities, those hit by the rationing have bought or made cisterns for their homes to store up water, and have rigged up grey-water systems to reuse shower water for other purposes.

Out in the countryside, farmers like Fernandez are trying their best to use as little water as possible, to prevent the underground aquifers from running dry.

“What comes out my kitchen sink goes right back into the earth and waters my plants. My shower is the same. And I don’t have a flushing toilet, I have a composting toilet,” he told ThinkProgress. “I’m only using one one-hundredth of my well’s capacity, and what little water I do use for my plants gets recycled back into the land, into the aquifer itself.”

Tucked amid an overgrown patch of his farm, a solar powered pump draws water from the ground and pumps it uphill to where Fernandez has planted fields of papaya, eggplant, tomatoes, and leafy greens. A drip irrigation system delivers water directly to the roots, preventing evaporation.

Thanks to these measures, Fernandez’ farm is on track to survive the drought. But his fellow small farmers have not been so lucky, and their crop and livestock losses hurt both the morale and the bottom line of the local economy. “When I feel that the movement is suffering, I suffer as well,” he said.

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Climate ChangeClimate DroughtDebtDroughtPuerto Rico

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Scotland Bans Genetically Modified Crops

In a move that has garnered praise from environmentalists and sharp criticism from farmers, Scotland announced Sunday that it would move to ban the growing of genetically modified crops throughout the country.

“Scotland is known around the world for our beautiful natural environment — and banning growing genetically modified crops will protect and further enhance our clean, green status,” Richard Lochhead, Scotland’s Rural Affairs Secretary, said in a statement.

The move further distances Scotland from the policies of the United Kingdom, which has been slowly softening its stance on GMO crops. Currently, no genetically modified crops are grown anywhere in the United Kingdom, though some are imported for use in animal feed and food products. According to the Guardian, that could change soon — ministers in London, supported by scientific bodies, the National Farmers Union, and agribusiness, have announced plans to begin the cultivation of genetically modified crops like maize and oilseed rape throughout England.

Only a single GMO crop — a type of genetically modified maize known as MON 810 — is grown commercially in the European Union, mainly in Spain. In January, the European Union passed a law that allows member states to individually opt out of growing GMOs within their borders, even if the crop is approved by the larger EU governing body. So far, Germany, France, Belgium, Poland, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Greece, and Luxembourg have enacted full or partial bans on the cultivation of GMOs within certain regions or throughout the country as a whole.

The EU isn’t alone in its restrictive stance on GMOs — as of 2013, at least 26 countries around the world had total or partial bans on genetically modified crops, including China, India, Mexico, and Russia. In the United States, GMO bans are often considered the discretion of local government — municipalities in Hawaii, California, and Oregon have enacted bans.

A broad array of scientific bodies, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Medical Association, the European Commission, and the Royal Society of Medicine all say that genetically modified crops are no more a threat to public health than conventionally-bred crops.

The environmental ramifications of genetically modified crops are less cut-and-dry than the public health questions, but studies have shown GMOs to be both potentially beneficial and detrimental to the environment, based largely on the way they are used. Insecticide-resistant crops allow farmers to spray more targeted insecticides, cutting down on unintended consequences to outside food webs. Herbicide-resistant crops, on the other hand, can encourage farmers to overuse sprays like Roundup, leading to the promulgation of herbicide-resistant weeds. But herbicide-resistant crops also encourage farmers to till their soil less (to deal with weeds), saving the greenhouse gas emissions associated with tilling machinery and encouraging soil health.

Despite the potential benefits and the scientifically accepted safety of genetically modified crops, the European public is generally opposed to their use in agriculture. A 2011 report looking at public attitudes towards science and science policy in the UK found that genetically modified crops were one of the most contentious areas of public opinion, on par with nuclear power and the use of animals in research. In the same survey, 59 percent of those questioned said that they felt “not informed” about GMOs.

In announcing the ban on GMOs, the Scottish government cited potential consumer backlash as a driving factor behind the decision.

“Scottish food and drink is valued at home and abroad for its natural, high quality which often attracts a premium price, and I have heard directly from food and drink producers in other countries that are ditching GM because of a consumer backlash,” Lochhead said. “The Scottish Government has long-standing concerns about GM crops – concerns that are shared by other European countries and consumers, and which should not be dismissed lightly.”

According government numbers, the entire Scottish food and drink industry supply chain employed 360,000 workers in 2009. The industry contributes £14 billion (about $22 billion) to the country’s economy — food and drink exports exceeded £1 billion for the first time in 2015, with whiskey and salmon among the most valuable commodities.

Environmentalists praised Scotland’s decision to ban GMOs from the country, a move that they argue will help preserve the country’s image of producing high-quality goods.

“If you are a whiskey producer or breeding high-quality beef, you ought to be worried if you don’t want GM but it is going to come to a field near you and you were worried that there was going to be some contamination,” Richard Dixon, director of Friends of the Earth Scotland, told the Guardian. “It is certainly in Scotland’s interests to keep GM out of Scotland.”

The move garnered criticism from the National Farmers Union of Scotland (NFUS), whose chief executive Scott Walker told the Guardian that the government was basing its policies on unsubstantiated claims.

“Other countries are embracing biotechnology where appropriate and we should be open to doing the same here in Scotland,” he said. “Decisions should be taken on the individual merits of each variety, based on science and determined by whether the variety will deliver overall benefit. These crops could have a role in shaping sustainable agriculture at some point and at the same time protecting the environment which we all cherish in Scotland.”

Andrew McCornick, vice-president of the NFUS, also criticized the ban, telling the Scotsman that he feared it would make Scottish farmers less competitive if farmers elsewhere — especially in the UK — use GM crops.

“There is going to be one side of the Border in England where they may adopt biotechnology, but just across the River Tweed farmers are not going to be allowed to,” McCornick said. “How are these farmers going to be capable of competing in the same market? It is certainly won’t be delivering a level playing field with other countries.”

The ban would cover the already-approved genetically modified maize grown throughout the EU, as well as six other crops currently awaiting approval. The ban would not cover GMOs used in laboratory research. It’s unclear whether the ban will impact animals raised on genetically modified feed, which is one of the primary uses for GM crops imported to the UK.

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Abandoned Mine Leaks Millions Of Gallons Of Bright Orange, Toxic Water Into A Colorado River

Three million gallons of bright orange wastewater has spilled from an abandoned mine in Colorado, after Environmental Protection Agency efforts to contain the mine’s toxic water went awry last week.

According to the EPA’s onsite coordinator, a team was working to “investigate and address contamination” at a nearby mine when they unexpectedly triggered the spill from the Gold King Mine, which is still pumping 500 gallons of contaminated water per minute into the Animas River, near Silverton, Colorado.

Mine waste from the Gold King Mine filling the Animas River at Bakers Bridge heading down river to Durango. pic.twitter.com/LOiTulZteA

— jerry mcbride (@jerryphotog) August 6, 2015

The EPA has been trying for years to get some areas around Silverton declared a Superfund site — a designation which would direct federal funds toward cleanup — but the agency has been met with local resistance.

The mountains of Colorado are riddled with more than 23,000 abandoned mines, according to the Colorado Geological Survey, and prior to 1977, mining companies could just walk away from the sites, leaving behind dangerous situations.

When a mine is dug, eventually, it will hit water, geologists say. Water then seeps into the abandoned mine, slowly filling it and dissolving toxic metals, such as arsenic and lead, which occur naturally in the surrounding rock. Mines, like the one the EPA was trying to address, then leak the water into nearby waterways. But since mines tend to be connected via underground water, stopping a leak in one place meant addressing the potential for overflow at Gold King.

“It was known that there was a pool of water back in the [Gold King] mine, and EPA had a plan to remove that water and treat it, you know, slowly. But things didn’t go quite the way they planned and there was a lot more water in there then they thought, and it just kind of burst out of the mine,” Peter Butler with the Animas River Stakeholders Group told local NPR affiliate KUNC.

According to the the EPA, the previous contamination meant that water in the river was already “likely toxic to all trout species, with the exception of brook trout. Brook trout living in this reach… are likely stressed much of the year.”

Butler said he thought the EPA was doing a “reasonable” job, but the agency has been roundly criticized for its handling of the spill.

The EPA’s initial response underestimated — by two million gallons — how much water was going to be released, and critics said the agency was trying to suggest that the additional toxins weren’t a big deal. “Due to current and longstanding water quality impairment associated with heavy metals there are no fish populations in the Cement Creek watershed and populations in the Animas River have historically been impaired for several miles downstream of Silverton,” the EPA said in a statement on Aug. 5.

Environmental groups called foul on this response, saying that just because animal populations are already affected does not mean that increased toxins aren’t a serious problem.

“Endangered species downstream of this spill are already afflicted by same toxic compounds like mercury and selenium that may be in this waste,” Taylor McKinnon, a spokesperson for the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “These species are hanging by a thread, and every new bit of toxic exposure makes a bad situation worse. EPA’s downplaying of potential impacts is troubling and raises deeper questions about the thoroughness of its mine-reclamation efforts.”

The toxic mineral flow in the Animas River made it to Durango city limits after dark on Thursday night. pic.twitter.com/v6fJJWUBev

— jerry mcbride (@jerryphotog) August 7, 2015

The Governor of New Mexico, Susana Martinez, told USA Today that her state learned about the spill from Southern Ute Tribe officials.

“It’s completely irresponsible for the EPA not to have informed New Mexico immediately,” she said.

The spill of bright orange water had reached New Mexico as of Sunday.

The EPA apologized on Friday for its response. “Our initial assessment of it was not appropriate in that we did not understand the full extent of what we were looking at,” said Shaun McGrath, the regional administrator for the EPA, at a public meeting.

“Some of our earlier comments may have sounded cavalier about the public-health concern and the concern for wildlife,” McGrath said. “I want to assure you that the EPA absolutely is concerned.”

The Navajo Nation has declared a state of emergency, and local farmers are not able to irrigate or water livestock with water from the river.

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Animas RiverColoradoColorado RiverEPAgold mineKing GoldminesNavajo NationNew MexicoSpilltoxins

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Want To See A Candidate Asked About Climate Change? Look To Canada.

Last Thursday night there were actually three debates held for candidates seeking to lead large North American nations, not two.

The main event, the primetime Republican primary debate which had 24 million viewers, featured zero questions about energy or the environment, no mentions of climate change, and barely a mention of energy for two solid hours. The smaller so-called “kids table” debate featured one question, directed at Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), framed to find out how Republicans could ever trust him based on his record of working, for a time, with Senate Democrats on 2010’s failed cap-and-trade bill.

But there was a third debate, held less than 300 miles to the northeast, wherein candidates were asked almost a dozen questions about energy and the environment. They expressed a variety of viewpoints about energy production and climate mitigation, while never doubting mainstream climate science.

Yes, Canada, America’s friendly neighbor to the north, will soon be deciding whether to give current Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper another term. He has been in power since 2006, and some prognosticators think there is more of a chance than in past elections that he could lose. Maclean’s magazine hosted the first of potentially six federal debates Thursday night in Toronto.

Harper squared off against Green Party leader Elizabeth May, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau and NDP leader Tom Mulcair in advance of the country’s federal election in October, which will decide which party controls Canada. For much of the debate, Harper’s rivals attacked him for steering his country into recession for a second time.

Harper admitted that his country may be headed into a small recession, though he argued it was largely limited to the energy sector.

The debate (complete transcription here) then moved into an entire section devoted to the environment. Here are three main issues they covered in detail:

[image error]

CREDIT: Macleans debate screenshot

Keystone XL and tar sands oil

If the Keystone XL pipeline is a big political issue in the United States, it is even more so in Canada. Paul Wells, the political editor of Maclean’s magazine, moderated the debate and first asked Harper why energy exports had stalled. Harper said they had not, and when asked about the Keystone XL pipeline, he said he was “very confident, looking at the field, that whoever is the next President I think will approve that project very soon in their mandate.” Harper and Liberal Party leader Trudeau support the pipeline, while the other two candidates oppose it.

Wells asked Harper if Obama would have approved Keystone had been a price on carbon in Canada four years ago. “Absolutely not,” Harper replied. “The President has never said that to me. On the contrary, the President’s said that he will — he’s told me what factors will influence his decision. It will be his own evaluation of the United States’ best interests.” He noted that the United States had no limits on its greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector.

Liberal leader Justin Trudeau attacked Harper for not exporting oil fast enough.

“Mr. Harper continues to say oh, we can’t do anything on the environment because we’ll hurt the economy,” Trudeau said. “And not only has he not helped our environment, but he’s actually slowed our economy.” Trudeau explained that Harper can’t get exports to market, including tar sands oil, “because there is no public trust anymore.” Harper, Trudeau said, needs to convince communities and work with First Nations to keep developing natural resources.

Trudeau said that oil sands would be “an important part of our economy for a number of years to come,” but that Harper had turned them “into the scapegoat around the world for climate change.”

The other two candidates based their opposition to Keystone XL on an argument for more Canadian jobs.

“Mr. Harper and Mr. Trudeau both agree with Keystone XL, which represents the export of 40,000 jobs,” said NDP leader Tom Mulcair. “I want to create those 40,000 jobs here in Canada.” He evinced a more process-oriented, critical view of other oil and gas export projects.

“The Green Party opposes every single one of the pipelines that are proposed,” Green Party Leader Elizabeth May said. “Every single one of these raw bitumen, unprocessed oil pipeline schemes is about exporting Canadian jobs.”

International climate commitments

Wells asked Harper if Canada would meet its target he had set in Copenhagen: reduce emissions 17 percent by 2020, compared to 2005 levels. A Canadian government watchdog warned late last year that without new policies, it would fail to do so.

“I believe we will, but we now are focusing on a 2030 target,” Harper replied. “That’s what every country is doing. We’ve set a target in concert with our international partners, 30 percent over 20 – of 2005 levels by 2030.”

This is actually weaker than the U.S. target: pledging to drop emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. Harper skipped an important U.N. Climate Summit in New York City last year that U.S. President Barack Obama attended.

Green Party leader May made the case that Harper’s climate record was “litany of broken promises”:

…You committed in 2008 not to export unprocessed oil, bitumen, to countries that have weaker emissions standards than Canada. That would obviously include China, the destination point for Enbridge and Kinder Morgan, which only the Green Party on this stage opposes. It makes no sense to export unprocessed oil to countries with poor environmental records.

You also committed to bring in a North America-wide cap-and-trade program working with partners. … And you also personally went to Copenhagen. It wasn’t a previous promise from Jean Chretien; you were in Copenhagen and committed to what was, I hate to say, a very weak target. But we are not going to come anywhere near it by 2020. And there’s just no credibility at this point. Canada needs to take action.

We’re having a summer of extreme drought, raging wildfires, and really severe weather through all of our seasons. Canadians want action. Canada needs to take action so that we can defend ourselves from the changing global climate and from the impacts economically here at home.

It’s unclear whether May will be permitted to participate in future federal election debates, due to minimal Green Party representation in Parliament despite respectable-yet-small showings in nationwide election results.

The debate moved on to regulating the oil and gas sector. Harper said he wanted to work with the United States and Mexico to integrate the sector in North America, but hadn’t found willing partners.

Trudeau said Obama was actually ready for an energy partnership when the president took office, but nothing had happened since then.

“When Obama just announced recently landmark legislation moving forward on climate change action, Canada is nowhere to be found,” Trudeau continued. “That’s why the Liberal Party is proposing that we work again on a continental model, work with the United States and Mexico to address both energy and the environment in a comprehensive way.”

Cutting Canadian carbon emissions

Political debates about cleaning up carbon pollution sound different in Canada than the United States. A lot of it gets focused on particular infrastructure projects, and the whole emphasis is just different.

“Mr. Harper thought that by gutting our environmental laws, somehow he could get our energy resources to market better,” said NDP leader Tom Mulcair. “How’s that working out, Mr. Harper?

“Canadians across the country want a clear, thorough, credible environmental assessment process,” Mulcair continued. “Canada can be a leader around the world. We can play a positive role. But with Mr. Harper, we’ve got the worst of all worlds.”

Mulcair argued that Harper had gotten the balance between resource extraction and the environment wrong. “He’s gutted our environmental legislation, and he knows that that’s hurting jobs in our resource sector, it’s hurting our economy, and frankly, it’s hurting Canada’s international reputation,” Mulcair said. He argued he would, as Prime Minister, “make polluters pay for the pollution they create.”

Harper tried to take credit for cutting coal use in Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Nova Scotia. Trudeau refuted him, pointing out that “it was the Ontario government that worked very hard to do that, and you were blocking them at every turn.”

The Prime Minister said that his was “the first government in history to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while also growing our economy.” Trudeau bit back that “nobody believes [him].” Emissions went down due to the global financial crisis slowing economies in general around the world. And May pointed out that emissions would have been a lot higher nationwide if Ontario had not shut down its coal plants and British Columbia hadn’t put a carbon tax in place.

Harper said later on that “a carbon tax is not about reducing emissions. It’s a front. It is about getting revenue for governments that cannot control.”

Compared with a U.S. political debate about energy, the Canadian debate contained surprisingly few mentions of renewable energy. Trudeau and Mulcair listed clean tech or green tech investment as priorities, but otherwise renewable energy was absent from the debate — wind and solar never came up. This is partially due to the fact that 60 percent of Canada’s electricity comes from hydro power. With nuclear and renewable energy, close to 80 percent of Canada’s electricity generation does not emit greenhouse gases.

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CanadaLindsey GrahamRepublican DebateStephen Harper

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Ohio Governor Kasich: Do Nothing On Climate Change Because It’s An Unproven Theory

Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) is the rare GOP presidential candidate who has acknowledged that climate change is a real problem requiring us to “protect” the “creation that the Lord has given us.” But just days after earning plaudits for his relatively moderate-sounding approach in Thursday’s GOP presidential debate, Kasich adopted a climate-change denialist approach on Sunday.

On NBC’s Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd called Kasich one of the “big winners of Thursday’s debate,” and praised him for an “impressive performance for the supportive crowd” in his home state and read a Time magazine quote comparing him to Pope Francis.

Kasich distanced himself from the Pontiff on economic issues and environmental ones. “I think that man absolutely affects the environment, but as to whether, what the impact is… the overall impact — I think that’s a legitimate debate.”

He then added: “We don’t want to destroy people’s jobs, based on some theory that is not proven.”

Watch the video:

Though Kasich had previously indicated that he believed in climate science, he had also made clear that he didn’t want to do much about it.

In a later segment, Todd noted that while the “mainstream media” had been highly positive about Kasich’s debate performance, NBC’s polling showed no bump for him among GOP primary voters.

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climateClimate ChangeClimate Change DeniersElection 2016John Kasich

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Shell Just Broke Up With ALEC Over Climate-Change Denials

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) just lost another high-profile member.

Oil and gas giant Shell has announced that it will not renew membership to ALEC, a Koch-funded organization that does not support action against climate change.

“We have long recognized both the importance of the climate challenge and the critical role energy has in determining quality of life for people across the world,” the Dutch and British company said in a statement provided to Responding to Climate Change. The company said ALEC’s position was “clearly inconsistent” with its own.

ALEC has fought pro-renewable energy legislation and does not accept that there is anything that the United States can do to help combat global warming. “Climate change is a historical phenomenon and the debate will continue on the significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions,” the group says in its policy position.

Taking a stand on climate change comes at an odd time for Shell, which has been under fire this summer for its plans to do exploratory drilling in the Arctic Sea. Hundreds of protesters delayed a Shell oil rig from leaving Seattle in June, after the Obama administration approved the company’s permit application. Shell has plans to drill in two places in the Chukchi Sea this summer to explore the viability of developing the area for oil extraction.

This plan is, of course, directly at odds with any plan to prevent the continued warming of the planet. Not only does the burning of oil and gas contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, drilling in the Arctic has also been uniquely shown to increase risk to the climate, due to the release of black carbon and methane during the drilling process.

“It’s a bad sign for the climate denial movement that ALEC’s rhetoric is too extreme even for a cynical exploitative corporation like Shell,” Greenpeace spokesperson Travis Nichols, said in a statement provided to ThinkProgress. “It’s also clear that Shell’s ill-conceived Arctic drilling plan is causing a PR panic, but this move won’t fix Shell’s bad name. It’s completely absurd for Shell to claim it wants to confront climate change while engaging in this destructive plan to drill in the Alaskan Arctic.”

Still, some environmentalists applauded Shell’s announcement Friday. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), in particular, has been pressuring companies to leave ALEC. UCS has been meeting with Shell employees for over a year and gathered more than 130,000 signatures on a petition to the company, a UCS rep said.

“We’re happy that they’ve responded to scientists and investors who have been urging Shell to sever its ties with ALEC,” said Angela Anderson, director of UCS’s Climate and Energy Program, in a statement provided to ThinkProgress. “It’s simply untenable for companies to ask policymakers to adopt a carbon price while supporting groups that fight climate and clean energy policies and spread misinformation about climate science. If other fossil fuel companies want to be taken seriously when they say they support action on climate change, they should do the same.”

UCS had also been working with oil and gas giant BP, which announced in March that it would leave ALEC. BP did not give a reason for the departure.

Several high-profile technology companies, including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Yelp have also discontinued membership in the group. Those companies — which rely on a large amount of electricity for data servers — were outspoken that ALEC’s position on the climate was untenable.

UPDATED: This article has been updated to include comments from Greenpeace.

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India Could Plateau Coal Use By 2025-2030, Leading Politician Says

Heading into the December global climate talks in Paris, India’s leaders continue to assert they will not announce when their greenhouse gas emissions will peak.

One leading Indian politician, however, former Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh, recently said that the country could plateau emissions starting in 2025 or 2030. Ramesh, a former self-described “economic hawk,” called this goal “doable and necessary for India.”

For many years, India had been teaming up with China in international climate negotiations to argue that the rapidly developing countries did not need to take major early action to constrain emissions since the rich countries were responsible for the vast majority of cumulative emissions. This argument has become progressively weaker as the reality of human-caused climate change made the dangers of inaction more and more obvious — and as the price of renewable power just kept dropping.

The big game changer, though, was the U.S.-China climate deal announced last November. The United States committed to a 26 to 28 percent reduction in carbon pollution by 2025 compared to 1990 levels — and China for the first time committed to peak in carbon pollution by 2030, if not sooner.

At the same time, China announced it would “increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 20% by 2030.” That requires China to build another 800-1,000 gigawatts of nuclear, wind, solar, and other zero-carbon power generation by 2030 — “more than all the coal-fired power plants that exist in China today and close to total current electricity generation capacity in the United States. Shortly thereafter, China added that it would peak in coal use by 2020.

Certainly India is not in the same development stage as China and many other countries, as this World Resources Institute chart makes clear:

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Yet, China’s impressive carbon-free energy target raises the following question: If China can build that much carbon-free power, over the next 15 years, why can’t India do, say, even half as much in the same time? After all, China’s commitment alone guarantees a continuation of the remarkable price drop in renewable power, a key driver of the ongoing global boom.

India is itself seeing price drops continue. BloombergBusiness reported just a few days ago that “India’s Largest Solar Power Auction Brings Further Drop in Costs.” A Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst explains, “This year’s weighted average bid price is likely to … be about 15 percent lower than the 2014 average.”

In late July, CleanTechnica ran an excellent two-part series, “How Solar Power Is Transforming India’s Energy Market.” China’s solar market is accelerating rapidly, adding perhaps five gigawatts this year and seven to 10 gigawatts next year, well on its way to the government target of 100 gigawatts of solar by 2022. The recent drop “brings utility-scale solar in India to a point where it may no longer need government support.”

India also has a renewable target of “60 GW wind, 10 GW biomass and 5 GW small scale hydro” by 2022. As I reported after my visit to China, it’s clear that China is beating its even more aggressive renewable targets — and it’s now a widely held view in the Beijing climate community that China will peak its carbon dioxide emissions around 2025. China may already have peaked in coal.

It is entirely possible that India will not commit to an absolute CO2 target before the Paris climate talks end. Even so, the commitments by all the other top global emitters should be enough to make a deal possible — and at that point the pressure on India will increase greatly. If not at Paris, then I would expect India to make such a commitment some time in the foreseeable future — due not just to global pressure, but also the ongoing price drops in renewables and the growing reality that dangerous climate change is already here.

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New Zealand Pledges An End To Coal By 2018

It appears that New Zealand is finally ready to throw their domestic coal habit into Mount Doom — by 2018, the country will cease to use coal as a source of domestic energy production.

“Historically coal has played an important role in ensuring the security of New Zealand’s electricity supply, particularly in dry years where our hydro-lake levels are low,” Simon Bridges, New Zealand’s Energy and Resources Minister, said in a statement. “But significant market investment in other forms of renewable energy in recent years, particularly in geothermal, means that a coal backstop is becoming less of a requirement.”

Bridges’ statement comes on the heels of the country’s largest electricity and gas retailer, Genesis Energy, announcing its intentions to shut down the last of their two coal-fired boilers at the Huntly Power Station, located south of Auckland, by December of 2018.

“Its closure marks the end of coal-fired power generation in New Zealand,” Bridges said, noting that the closure of the plants would also help New Zealand significantly reduce its carbon emissions. Energy is New Zealand’s second-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions (behind agriculture), accounting for 39 percent of the country’s emissions in 2013. Of the 81 million tons of greenhouse gases emitted by New Zealand in 2013, the Huntly site released 2.3 million tons. At its peak, the site accounted for five percent of New Zealand’s total greenhouse gas emissions, according to Radio News New Zealand.

New Zealand has more than 15 billion tons of known coal reserves in the ground, and says that more than half of those resources are probably recoverable. In 2013, New Zealand extracted 4.6 million tons of coal, exporting a little less than half of it — mostly to Asia, where it’s used to power steel manufacturing. Nearly two-thirds of New Zealand’s coal comes from just two mines — Rotowaro in the Waikato (about 63 miles from Auckland) and Stockton on the West Coast.

But coal use in New Zealand has been on the decline in recent years, accounting for just five percent of consumer energy demand in 2013 (oil made up the largest share, accounting for 46 percent of demand). 2013 also saw a six percent drop in coal production, largely due to Solid Energy — the country’s leading coal producer — scaling back its mining operations in two mines in the Waikato region of the country. Increasingly, coal in that region is becoming more difficult to locate and more expensive to mine, limiting the nation’s ability to rely on the resource for its energy supply.

Instead, New Zealand has turned to renewable energy in recent years, particularly geothermal energy, which has more than doubled in the past decade. In 2014, for the first time in the country’s history, geothermal generation provided more electricity than gas — 16.3 percent of New Zealand’s total electricity versus 15.8 percent.

According to a statement by Bridges in March of this year, electricity generated from renewables is at a 20-year high in New Zealand, accounting for 79.9 percent of all electricity generated. Bridges told the New Zealand Herald that “New Zealand’s share of renewable electricity generation is the fourth largest in the world,” and that the country aims to have 90 percent of its electricity produced by renewable resources in 2025.

In Thursday’s statement, Bridges painted Genesis Energy’s decision to shutter the coal-fired power plants as an opportunity, noting that with the advance notice, the country would have ample time to deploy more geothermal and renewable resources to avoid energy shortages.

“New Zealand’s abundant energy resources give us a renewable energy advantage that we need to make to the most of,” Bridges said. “This decision creates further opportunities to do that.”

The government has not said whether the shuttering of the coal-fired power plants will impact the amount of coal extracted and exported from the country, however. Genesis Energy has announced that it intends to end its contract with Solid Energy, which supplied the coal for the Huntly power plants, in the middle of next year. Half of Solid Energy’s annual coal production, historically, has been used for domestic energy, while the other half is exported.

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Coal’s War On America

Coal stocks are falling. Coal companies are declaring bankruptcy at an astonishing rate. Is there, really, a war on coal?

If there is, it isn’t being waged by the White House. Despite the administration’s recently released Clean Power Plan, which will push utilities to transition to clean energy, coal was already on its way out — being killed as much by innovations in the power sector and a growing realization that coal is literally killing people, as by policy.

But you wouldn’t know it from the coal industry’s rhetoric. The coal industry — and its legislative supporters — are heavily invested in a campaign to convince Americans that their 80,000 mining jobs are the bedrock of the country’s economy.

In the Powder River Basin, the top companies control hundreds of subsidiaries. And those companies give a lot of money to keep pro-coal legislators in office. Arch Coal — which declared bankruptcy earlier this month — was one of the three top coal mining contributors to political campaigns, according to Sourcewatch. From 2009 to 2011, the company spent roughly $2 million a year on lobbying efforts. More recently, Arch invited presidential candidate Jeb Bush to speak at a closed-doors meeting with coal executives.

Legislators are listening. In 2012, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing titled “Coal is a Cornerstone of Our Economy.” From 2012 to 2013, the coal industry lost another 10 percent of its mining jobs — about 8,000 people. That same year, the solar industry gained 23,000 jobs. (These jobs aren’t exactly one to one, since the solar count includes accountants and lawyers who work in the industry, but it does show a significant trend). Perhaps even more tellingly — in cornerstone terms — the economy as a whole improved from 2012 to 2013.

Coal companies, by nature, are heavily invested in continuing to mine coal. But their insistence that politicians back them up on this might be worse for miners than simply transitioning to other industries. In an oft-used metaphor, a lot of wagon makers went out of business when the car was invented, but that doesn’t mean we should still be using horses.

That’s not to say that miners are not suffering. Miners, here, are caught between a rock and a hard place. Time and again when talking about their jobs, miners say it’s difficult and dangerous. But it’s also the only option. Places that have more heavily invested in renewable energy sources have reaped the benefits of the accompanying jobs. In an era when large companies control much of the industry, miners are not the ones who benefit from their hard work, but they don’t benefit from regional economic dependence on an industry that is fast falling out of modern times.

Many miners who see their livelihoods falling away in the modern era are angry about the situation — and at the companies themselves.

“If you believe for one minute that [coal companies] give a damn for the regular people, just sit across from their lawyers in a workman’s compensation case or watch this video on ABC News clip about how they bribe doctors to deny black lung cases,” wrote Nick Mullins at The Thoughtful Coal Miner.

The coal industry has a dismal track record on protecting its people. Coal miners are twice as likely to miss work with injury or illness as the general public, according to the Department of Labor. For decades, accidents killed thousands of miners in America each year. As the number of miners has gone down, so have fatalities, but eight coal miners have already been killed in the United States this year.

Mullins is enthusiastic about moving his community away from mining.

“I don’t want to hear people say there are no options, that coal is all we’ve got,” Mullins wrote. “There are a lot of options, including my favorite, creating jobs in various building trades to upgrade infrastructure and make it more efficient. If we can spend billions of dollars fighting wars overseas for oil, we can spend a few billion paying people good wages to upgrade the infrastructure of Appalachia and the nation, and to fix the damage that’s already been done.”

It’s likely that Obama had this idea in mind when he proposed putting a billion dollars towards environmental projects in mining country — employment-heavy projects like replanting trees that would offer the areas an economic boost.

Because it’s not just the miners who suffer. Coal has become a lightning rod for the environmental community for good reason. Coal-fired power plants have been responsible for environmentally devastating pollution. “Coal plants are one of the largest sources of man-made mercury pollution in the U.S. Every year 300,000 infants are born at risk for developmental defects because of their mother’s exposure to toxic mercury pollution,” the Sierra Club says on its website. The group recently announced that its “Beyond Coal” campaign has helped shut down 200 coal-fired power plants. (There are about 500 plants still operating).

Across the United States, coal-fired power plants are also responsible for a more than three-quarters of the carbon emissions from the electricity sector. Curbing carbon emissions is widely accepted as the only way to avert the ever-increasing threats posed by human-caused climate change, so for many people, moving away from coal is a moral imperative.

Coal companies, though, are pushing a different narrative — one in which they are all that stands between prudent state regulators and Obama-initiated rolling blackouts.

The Clean Power Plan “will burden Americans with increasingly high-costs for an essential service and a less reliable electric grid for delivering it,” the National Mining Association said in a statement. The association has also come up with cost predictions that differ wildly from the EPA analysis. A report prepared for the group and other mining interests found that the proposed plan would cost Americans $479 billion. The EPA found that — including health costs — the plan will save money.

Many utilities are already transitioning away from coal on an economic basis. The surge in wind and solar has pushed prices down for those technologies, and the natural gas boom has encouraged transition, as well.

For instance, Kentucky, a heavily coal-powered state, is well on its way to compliance with the CPP, the Washington Post reported. In the next two years, five of the state’s coal-

fired power plants are scheduled to close or switch to natural gas , either because of aging equipment or to save money, state officials say. Closing these five plants will reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector by 16 percent below 2012 numbers. The state has also begun federal programs to transition its economy to other industries.

Despite this, Kentucky joined efforts to delay and stop the rule. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has directly called for his state to avoid submitting the required plan.

“Don’t be complicit in the administration’s attack on the middle class,” McConnell wrote in an op-ed in the Lexington Herald-Leader. “Refusing to go along at this time with such an extreme proposed regulation would give the courts time to figure out if it is even legal, and it would give Congress more time to fight back. We’re devising strategies now to do just that.”

McConnell’s language is not far from what the coal companies are saying.

Deck Slone, Arch Coal’s senior vice president of strategy and public policy, also issued a statement telling states not to go along with the plan.

“We urge states to contest the rule vigorously and to defend their longstanding authority to manage their electric power systems in the way they deem most cost-effective, prudent, and wise,” Slone said.

Unfortunately for miners, cost-effective, prudent, and wise seems to point away from coal.

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