Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 113

Remembering Jack Gibbons, The Rarest Of U.S. Science Advisors

John H. (Jack) Gibbons — renowned physicist, former presidential science advisor, and lifelong energy efficiency champion — died on July 17 at the age of 86. He was the rarest of scientists, and, I believe, the only person in U.S. history to be the chief science and technology advisor to both Congress (1979-1992) and then the White House (1993-1998).

The Gingrich Congress made it impossible for anybody to match that achievement in 1995 when they shut down the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), which Jack had previously directed for over a decade.

Former Vice President Al Gore worked with OTA when he was in Congress, and “had the privilege of working even more closely with” Gibbons when they were both at the White House. “It was Jack’s optimism and imagination that did so much to help the United States face the difficult issues of our time, including the climate crisis,” Gore told ClimateProgress in a statement. “He was utterly unique and irreplaceable.”

Gibbons was a friend and colleague. My time at the Department of Energy overlapped with his at the White House. He wrote the Preface for my 2004 book, “The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate.” One of his lines is all too prescient:

Given our current choices and policies, I am drawn to the observation that “mankind would rather commit suicide than learn arithmetic.”

Gibbons was a very prescient scientist. He had a prestigious career at Oak Ridge National Laboratory starting in 1954, ultimately becoming “the group leader in nuclear geophysics/astrophysics.”

Then in the late 1960s — years before the first oil shock woke everyone up to the need for a better energy policy — he “pioneered studies on how to use technology to conserve energy and minimize the environmental impacts of energy production and consumption.” He became the lab’s director of environmental programs in 1969.

In 1973 Gibbons was named the first Director of the Federal Office of Energy Conservation. He was a life-long champion of this most important and virtually limitless but most neglected source of cheap, pollution-free energy. In 2007, he won the Alliance to Save Energy’s first “lifetime achievement in energy efficiency” award — one of many, many awards he won during his long career.

In 1979 Gibbons was picked to direct the bipartisan U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, a position he held for 13 years. During his time, the OTA routinely produced reports on energy, the environment, health, and national security of such high quality that they became the “Bible” or “benchmark” study in the field.

In 1993, he became Bill Clinton’s science advisor and and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. I asked the current occupant of that position, John Holdren, to comment on Gibbons’ legacy:

His influence in the Clinton White House was evident in the Administration’s signing the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (which, alas, the Senate has never ratified, even though the United States has not conducted a nuclear-explosive test since 1992); in increased cooperation with the former Soviet Union to keep nuclear materials from falling into the wrong hands; in ramped-up government activity to address global climate change; in new initiatives in biomedical research; and much more.

Gibbons was instrumental in the launch of the interagency Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles with U.S. automakers. That initiative was a major factor in motivating Toyota to develop its breakthrough hybrid vehicle, the Prius, ultimately leading to a host of U.S. hybrid vehicles.

Vice President Gore explains that “Jack had a rare and uncanny ability to look at critical large-scale issues affecting our planet through scientific, technological, social and ethical lenses and present a definitive overview to help policy makers better address such issues and better anticipate future problems.”

Holdren adds that Gibbons was “a generous mentor (to me and many others); a superb motivator and manager of talented teams of colleagues; a caring friend; and just a remarkably unflappable, upbeat, good-hearted human being, with an unfailing sense of humor that kept all around him laughing with him and at ourselves. I will miss him terribly.” As will I and a great many others.

His family notes, “Donations in his honor and memory will be gratefully accepted by The Union of Concerned Scientists, Population Action International, and the Sierra Club.”

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Climate Change

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Germany Just Got 78 Percent Of Its Electricity From Renewable Sources

On Saturday, July 25, Germany set a new national record for renewable energy by meeting 78 percent of the day’s electricity demand with renewables sources, exceeding the previous record of 74 percent set in May of 2014.

According to an analysis by German energy expert Craig Morris at the Energiewende blog, a stormy day across northern Europe combined with sunny conditions in southern Germany led to the new record, the exact figures of which are still preliminary. Morris writes that most of Germany’s wind turbines are installed in the north and most of its solar panels are in the south.

If the figures hold, it will turn out that wind and solar generated 40.65 gigawatts (GW) of power on July 25. When this is combined with other forms of renewables, including 4.85 GW from biomass and 2.4 GW from hydropower, the total reaches 47.9 GW of renewable power — occurring at a time when peak power demand was 61.1 GW on Saturday afternoon. To bolster his analysis, Morris points to early figures from Agora Energiewende, a Germany energy policy firm, that have renewables making up 79 percent of domestic power consumption that day.

Renewable sources accounted for 27.8 percent of Germany’s power consumption in 2014, up from 6.2 percent in 2000. The expansion of renewables and another weather phenomenon — a relatively mild winter — led to Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions falling for the first time in three years in 2014, a 4.3 percent year-over-year drop. Greenhouse gas emissions are now down to their lowest level since 1990, according to analysts at Agora Energiewende.

This made 2014 a big year for Germany’s renewable energy transition, known as Energiewende, which requires the phasing out of nuclear energy by 2022 and reducing greenhouse gases at least 80 percent by 2050. The government also wants the at least double the percentage of renewables in the energy mix by 2035.

In response to the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in Japan in 2011, Germany decided to shutter its nuclear power operations, causing the country to rely more on coal as it transitions to renewables. Currently coal still accounts for some 44 percent of the country’s power generation.

In 2014, Germany had nine nuclear power plants with a total output of 12,702 megawatts, making up nearly 18 percent of the country’s electricity demand. In order to eliminate nuclear power by 2022, many worry that Germany will have to turn to fossil fuels like coal and oil to help bridge the transition to renewables, causing a spike in greenhouse gas emissions.

Osha Gray Davidson, author of Clean Break, a book about Germany’s transition to clean energy, told TakePart that for such a large industrialized country to get 28 percent of its power from renewable sources is “pretty amazing,” and that Germany is a good model for the United States.

“Manufacturing accounts for much more of the German economy than the American economy, and they have 80 million people — much larger than a country like Denmark, which gets more of its power from renewables but has a much smaller industrial base, and has a population of five and a half million people,” he said.

Currently, the United States gets about 13 percent of its energy demand from renewable sources, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

As more and more wind turbines and solar panels come online there is a major technology push to create better forecasting software and to increase the efficiency and enhance the location of these forms of power. IBM and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recently announced that they are working on a producing solar and wind forecasting that’s at least 30 percent more accurate than conventional methods.

“There is good reason to believe that with better forecasts, it might be possible to push solar’s energy contribution up to 50 percent [by 2050],” IBM Research Manager Hendrick Hamann recently said about the United States. “As we continue to refine our system in collaboration with the DOE, we hope to double the accuracy of the system in the next year. That could have a huge impact on the energy industry — and on local businesses, the economy and the natural environment.”

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EnergiewendeGermanyRenewable EnergySolar PowerWind Power

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New Report From Anti-Poverty Group Debunks Claim That Coal Is Good For Poor People

The coal industry and its supporters often argue that coal is still a relevant energy source because it’s cheap, and cheap electricity reduces energy poverty.

But on Tuesday, Oxfam Australia directed an entire report to Australia’s government, saying that for the one billion people living without electricity, coal is more expensive than renewable energy sources.

“Renewable energy is a cheaper, quicker, and healthier way to increase energy access,” the report states. “Coal is ill-suited to meeting the needs of the majority of the people living without electricity.”

Despite the coal industry’s contention, the cost of infrastructure, fuel, and maintenance makes coal a more expensive way to bring power to developing nations than installing wind or solar — even without considering the health and environmental effects.

The report, from a branch of one of the oldest and most-respected development organizations, also found that using coal hurts people living in poverty by exacerbating climate change and polluting the air. Through case studies, the report shows the benefits of renewable energy development around the world, including in South America, India, and China. Saying Australia is being left behind on this important transformation, the group urged the government to move both its domestic and international policies toward renewable energy.

Under the leadership of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the Australian government has exhibited climate denialism and pro-coal policies.

Last fall, Abbott called coal “good for humanity” at an event for a new coal mine. “Coal is vital for the future energy needs of the world,” he said.

He was echoing an industry narrative that says coal helps people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford electricity. The coal industry has even launched a campaign to promote the message that coal helps lift people out of poverty.

“In developing countries, far too many people live without light or heat for their homes or access to life-saving medical technologies. And in developed nations, too many people are being forced to choose between paying power bills and buying prescriptions or food,” Advanced Energy for Life, funded by coal giant Peabody, says.

This theory has been roundly criticized. And, in fact, pro-renewable and efficiency programs have been shown to decrease electricity bills in developed nations. Across the globe, 85 percent of people who live without electricity are located in rural areas. For many people, microgrids, not giant power plants, represent the most economical, efficient, and clean way to turn the lights on, according to the International Energy Agency.

Of course, no report on coal and poverty would be complete without recognizing not only coal’s impacts on climate change, but also climate change’s out-sized impact on the global poor.

“Burning coal is the single biggest contributor to climate change. As such, it is creating havoc for many of the world’s poorest people,” Oxfam Australia writes in the report.

The group points out that extreme weather, including heat, floods, droughts, and cyclones, affect vulnerable communities in particular. In addition, coal pollution is thought to cause more than 100,000 premature death each year in India alone, Oxfam reported.

“Increasing coal consumption is incompatible with protecting the rights and interests of poor communities in developing countries,” the report concludes.

The part of the report that addresses climate change might not worry Abbott. The prime minister has been outspoken in his rejection of the science of climate change, and he has implemented the policies to prove it. In 2014, Australia became the first nation to repeal a carbon tax. Abbott’s government has also killed the government-funded climate change commission, abandoned emissions targets, and directed a public university to hire a climate denier to head a “climate consensus center.”

During the last election, when Liberal (what Americans would call Conservative) Abbott took the reins after six years of Labour leadership, the country’s economy had suffered huge setbacks. The global slowdown in 2008 opened the doors to Abbott’s 2013 win. In 2013, Australia was exporting 300 million tons of coal, three times as much as it was 25 years prior.

So despite the broad support from Australia’s public for renewable energy, Australia’s overall emissions were — and are — quite high.

“The greenhouse emissions from our coal exports nullify any planned emission reductions within Australia, many times over,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported at the time.

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AustraliacarbonClimate ChangeCoalemissionsOxfamPovertyTony Abbott

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The Science Of Why You Are So Upset About Cecil The Lion

The brutal killing of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe by an American dentist has been met with a torrent of anger worldwide. Many celebrities, including Judd Apatow, Mayim Bialik, Olivia Wilde, and Ricky Gervais, have weighed in to express their disgust. The deceased lion was trending on Twitter.

In a now-viral video of Tuesday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel was so upset he nearly broke down in tears.

Intuitively, the uproar over the lion’s murder makes sense. The story is awful.

But it does raise a tricky question: Why, exactly, are people so upset about the death of this specific animal?

To answer this question, ThinkProgress consulted Ernest Small, a Ph.D with the Canadian government who specializes in biodiversity. Small has recently published two peer-reviewed papers on the topic of why humans favor some animals over others.

People don’t like most species of animals

Small writes that “most humans are… not just ignorant of but indifferent to almost all of the species on the planet.” In fact, people are “biophobic” meaning they are “slightly to extremely negative towards the majority of species they encounter.”

For example, “Amphibians are the most threatened of the groups of vertebrate animals with perhaps one-third of species on the verge of extinction.” But most people don’t really know or care about it because “most are unattractive.”

“A memorable Grimm’s fairy tale required a young girl to kiss a toad to find her Prince Charming, reflecting the disgust that most people have for these species,” Small writes.

Similarly, “the majority of the world’s threatened species are insects, but except for butterflies and bees, most are usually perceived very negatively.”

Instead, even most “animal lovers,” reserve their positive feeling about animals to those that “have characteristics valued by the human psyche.”

The animals that people do like

According to Small, “the public, politicians, scientists, the media and conservation organisations are extremely sympathetic to a select number of well-known and admired species, variously called flagship, charismatic, iconic, emblematic, marquee and poster species.” If you are curious about what animals qualify, just visit a zoo. Most, if not all of the animals there are “very useful, very attractive, or very entertaining.”

The kind of species that are favored by humans vary but certain characteristics are particularly helpful:

The most universally admired physical characteristic is size: huge creatures elicit great respect, whereas the majority of species, which are small, tend to be ignored. Glamorous appearance is critical for sympathetic attention, and there are numerous features such as colour and impressive architecture that contribute to what makes a species attractive.

There is a name for these kind of animals: “charismatic megafauna.” These animals “are usually at least the size of a large dog, and generally larger than a man. They are mostly very photogenic.”

Why Cecil generates so much emotion

“You can’t get much more charismatic than a lion,” Small noted in an interview with ThinkProgress. “Here we are as humans getting very excited about charismatic animals. We never think about all the pain we cause to billions of sentient creatures.”

Another helpful feature of Cecil: he has a name. Many of the traits we admire in animals are those that bear some similarity to humans. Lions already have plenty of human-like qualities, forward facing eyes and a strong parent-child bond for example. An actual human name is icing on the cake.

“We are blind to so much suffering that goes on with so many animals yet so cognizant of this,” Small said.

Despite studying the issue extensively as an academic, Small isn’t immune from the same feeling everyone else has about Cecil’s death. “I was disgusted frankly. If there was a lynch mob I’d probably join it,” he said, acknowledging the irony.

Selective outrage, Small posits, is human nature and is not limited to the animal world. For example, “If we see a baby being treated cruelly. If we see a wino or a bum who is in obvious need of help we tend to look the other way. It’s just our nature.”

The consequences

Favoring a small number of animal species and ignoring most others is not without its advantages. The use of iconic animals is extremely important to the fundraising efforts of conservation groups. “Save-the-Tiger campaigns are popular, and have attracted considerable funds,” Small notes. In 2010, Leonardo di Caprio donated $1 million to save tigers. Funding like this can enable conservations of large areas of land that can end up benefiting more species than just tigers.

Small argues that we don’t need to “suppress” our empathy to animals like Cecil, but rather “moderate our prejudices with understanding for the value of all species, for the long-term welfare of humanity and our planet.”

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Cecil The LionJimmy KimmelZimbabwe

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It’s Not Just Cecil: Here Are 3 Other Vulnerable Species Threatened By Poaching

The internet is awash with heartbreak after learning that Cecil, one of Zimbabwe’s most well-known and well-loved lions, was shot and killed by an American hunter this month.

The 13-year old African lion, who sported an iconic black mane and a GPS collar, was reportedly lured out of his sanctuary in Hwange National Park, a protected area where visitors ofter gathered to observe him. After team of hunters tracked Cecil for two days, he was allegedly shot by a man from Minnesota — a dentist named Walter J. Palmer, who reportedly paid $54,000 for the hunt, which he believed to be legal. Cecil was then beheaded, and “his corpse was left to rot in the sun.”

Cecil’s death and the resulting outrage appear unprecedented. But the circumstances of his death are far from unique. Across Africa and Asia, endangered and vulnerable animals are illegally hunted — either for the goods their bodies provide, or, like Cecil, purely for sport.

In all these cases, the impacts stretch beyond the killing of one animal. In Cecil’s case, the International Fund for Animal Welfare noted that was the dominant male in his pride. That may cause a ripple effect, the organization said, “Because he no longer can protect his pride from rogue lions … meaning, in all reality, these hunters’ actions may lead to the deaths of many African lions, which are a species threatened with extinction.”

So, with Cecil and African lions in mind, here are three vulnerable species threatened further by poaching.

African Rhinos
[image error]

In this photo taken Monday, Oct. 13, 2014, a white Rhino from Kube Yini Private Game Reserve in KwaZulu-Natal is captured and moved to a truck after its partner was killed by poachers near the town of Hluhluwe, South Africa.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Robin Clark

African rhinos, both black and white, are hunted prolifically both for their horns and for the thrill. Some of this hunting is legal, with proceeds going back to conservation efforts. In fact, the U.S. government recently approved two American citizens’ requests to bring home the black rhinos they killed in Namibia.

Still, much of the hunting of white and black African rhinos is not legal. “The African rhino is under serious threat from poachers who have intensified their search of rhino for their horns since 2007, driven by growing market demands in Asia,” says Joseph Okori, the head of the World Wildlife Fund’s African Rhino Program, on the WWF website.

According to National Geographic, there are about 4,000 to 5,000 black rhinos left in the world, a huge decrease from the approximate 70,000 in the 1960s. The WWF says that even though recent conservation efforts have been successful, the continent is still losing hundreds of rhinos each year to poaching. “Continued poaching could see Africa’s rhinos slide over the brink, into extinction,” the organization states.

African Elephants
[image error]

In this Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2014 photo, an activist inspects one of two dead Sumatran elephants allegedly snared and killed by poachers for their tusks, in Tebo district of Jambi province on Sumatra island, Indonesia.

CREDIT: AP Photo

Illegal poaching is a “crisis” for African elephants, according to a recent report in the Guardian. Despite a 46-country treaty to control imports of illegal ivory, poachers have killed 100,000 African elephants in just three years, according to a recent study. Poaching is also problem for Asian elephants, though less so, as only the male species have tusks.

Though illegal poaching is one of the largest problems facing the African elephant, the species is also subject to trophy hunting by wealthy people. Like African lions and white rhinos, African elephants are allowed to be hunted for a price, a portion of which is supposed to go to conservation efforts. But as National Geographic has pointed out, some critics say that the legally hunted animals can find their way into the black market, and that the funds that are supposed to be used for conservation sometimes are co-opted by corruption.

The WWF estimates that if conservation action “is not forthcoming, elephants may become locally extinct in some parts of Africa within 50 years.” The Obama administration recently restricted ivory trade into the U.S. to combat the problem.

Pangolins
[image error]

Two rescued pangolins sit in a basket during a news conference in Bangkok, Thailand, Thursday, June 7, 2012. Thai customs rescued 110 pangolins worth about $35,500 that they say were to be sold outside the country as exotic food.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

IFL Science has called the pangolin “The world’s most-traded, least-known mammal … poached 82 times more than rhinos and a whopping 1,000 times more than tigers.” Indeed, the armadillo-like animal is is believed to be the most trafficked animal in the world. As ThinkProgress has pointed out in the past, they are killed because of the widespread belief that they have powerful medical benefits in Traditional Chinese Medicine, though there exists no medical evidence supporting these beliefs.

It’s unknown how many pangolins are left in the world, but scientists say they are shrinking fast due to intense illegal poaching. As CNN reported, the most conservative estimates are that 10,000 pangolins are trafficked illegally each year — though one advocacy group estimates those numbers could be anywhere from 116,990 to 233,980 per year.

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CecilCecil The LionelephantsEndangered SpeciesIllegal HuntingPoachingRhinos

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What Walter Palmer Did Wasn’t Hunting

Two men will face charges in a Zimbabwe courtroom on Wednesday that they took bribes from an American dentist to guide him on an illegal hunt of a beloved local lion. But Walter Palmer, the Minneapolis dentist who shot the lion, faces no charges — and may have doomed hunters’ hopes to be seen as agents of conservation rather than destruction.

Palmer’s killing of a male lion named Cecil might never have come to light were it not for the GPS collar the animal wore, which allowed academics at Oxford to track down the carcass and discover the hunters. Since then, the local outfitters who took Palmer on the hunt have been charged, and Palmer has released a statement laying full blame for the illegality of the hunt on his guides.

The story has sparked vast outrage at Palmer and at trophy hunting more generally – and the proper role of trophy hunters in conserving rapidly-dwindling big game species in sub-Saharan Africa is less clear-cut than it might seem.

Palmer took an unsporting and incompetent approach to Cecil, according to reports. The dentist and his guides reportedly used bait to lure the animal out of the park land where it would have been illegal to shoot him and used a spotlight to illuminate Palmer’s shot.

Hunting ethics revolve around swift killshots that do not cause suffering. Cecil was still alive more than a day and a half after Palmer’s initial, well-lit bow-and-arrow shot failed to kill.

“I think it’s an abomination, for a number of reasons,” lifelong hunter, journalist, and author Jonny Miles told ThinkProgress. “On the specifics of the hunt, with baiting, with using lights, and also killing a lion that has a pride – all of it just adds up to an incredibly unethical, unscrupulous way of going about this.”

Hunters pride themselves on having the patience and skill to fell an animal immediately with a single shot. “An ethical hunter is one who seeks out the best possible shot that results in the quickest possible kill,” Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation (RMEF) public relations director Mark Holyoak told ThinkProgress. Holyoak wouldn’t discuss the reports about Palmer’s hunt, but stressed the more general importance of being swift and sure.

Attempting a shot that’s beyond your own skill level is abhorrent to many, because it puts the personal glory of a long-range kill over the imperative to honor your prey by adhering to the principles of “fair chase.” The reported details of Palmer’s hunt do not match those principles.

“This is much closer to assassination than hunting,” Miles said, adding that a bad shot is “the most traumatic thing that can happen in a hunt.” For him and many other hunters, it’s imperative to eat what you kill. Antlers make a nice trophy, but “the trophy aspect is subordinate to the experience, to the knowledge required and the knowledge gained, to the very ancient relationship that you are experiencing with an animal that you are hunting for food.”

“Hunting shouldn’t be about ego,” he said. “It should be the opposite. It should be about awe at the natural world.”

If the dentist’s approach to hunting is not representative of the best practices of the hunting community, his incompetent and illegal killing of Cecil may not be a fair gauge for the overall relationship between trophy hunting and conservation of the rapidly-dwindling lion population. With other species of game, hunters play a vital role in maintaining a healthy population – and in conserving wilderness spaces that might otherwise be encroached by development and pollution.

Just 20,000 African lions survive today, down from a population of about half a million in the middle of the 20th century. Killing a single lion in 2015 is mathematically equivalent to murdering 400,000 of the planet’s roughly eight billion people. And because Cecil’s six cubs will likely be killed by the next male to take over the pride, Palmer’s wayward arrow and days-later mercy shot may be as devastating to the lion population as the death of three million people would be to humanity.

There are two main competing strategies for bringing the lion population onto a sustainable path. Each relies on putting a clear, consistent, and high economic value on the lives of lions and other big game animals that are threatened by poaching. To convince a shepherd he’s better off not killing the lion that’s eaten a dozen of his animals in the past year, conservationists have to put resources in his hands that are tangibly worth more than the value he’s lost to the lion’s appetite.s

All sides agree about that strategic goal. The question is how to achieve it.

Trophy hunters argue that the best way to win minds is to put a very high price on a license for hunting lion, and use the money that big game enthusiasts spend on the licenses to furnish development resources in the relevant communities. But while trophy hunting licenses do generate significant raw sums of revenue for the governments that sell them, almost none of that cash ever makes it to the communities that are supposed to benefit, according to a 2013 analysis by Economists At Large. The review found that just 3 percent of hunting company revenues actually reach the communities adjacent to hunting ground. “The vast majority of their expenditure does not accrue to local people and businesses, but to firms, government agencies and individuals located internationally or in national capitals,” the study found.

Other conservationists insist that the hunters’ logic doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, and advocate for almost absolute preservation of lion lives. The resources required to persuade locals to tolerate lions should come from eco-tourism, they argue, which provides a steady trickle of money that will add up to more over the course of the lion’s life than any one-time money shower from selling a hunter a license. (Licenses can cost as much as $70,000, but even that high-end price values the life of one of a rare and dwindling animal species at about the same as a nice BMW sedan.) The Obama administration has thrown some weight behind this point of view recently by making it all but impossible to trade elephant ivory in the United States – a move that cracks down on trophy hunting in favor of the eco-tourism approach.

In a lengthy 2008 dissertation, Hassanali Thomas Sachedina analyzed the breakdown of the revenue flow from hunting licenses further and found both that there is too little money actually coming into local governments from the licenses. What does come in generally gets spent on “political expediencies” rather than actual community development work.

One Tanzanian villager explained the problem on the ground succinctly to Sachedina: “They are finishing off the wildlife before we’ve had a chance to realize a profit from it.”

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AnimalsBiodiversity

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It’s Now Way Easier For Small Businesses To Go Solar

In the past, small and medium-sized businesses that wanted to install solar panels were, for the most part, forced to buy them — meaning that companies that didn’t have enough money upfront to pay for the panels weren’t able to go solar. Now, that’s changing.

SolarCity announced Tuesday that it was starting to offer a leasing plan for small and medium-sized businesses. That’s a corner of the solar market that, so far, has been neglected, SolarCity Chief Executive Officer Lyndon Rive told ThinkProgress. And it’s a big corner — according to SolarCity, 99 percent of all businesses in the U.S. are small or medium-sized, a designation typically reserved for companies with fewer than 500 employees.

Until now, it’s been too expensive and too difficult for companies like SolarCity to find ways to finance solar arrays for smaller businesses. Under SolarCity’s new program, the company plans to use its own solar installers — instead of subcontractors — to put in the system, which SolarCity estimates will reduce the cost of installation by around 30 percent. The company has come up with a lightweight solar panel mounting design that allows businesses to fit 20 to 50 percent more solar panels on their roofs and takes takes just a few days to install, rather than two to three weeks.

SolarCity is also taking advantage of the Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) program, which helps finance private renewable energy installations. With the help of PACE, SolarCity pays the upfront cost for the solar system and small businesses pay off the cost over time on their property tax bills. Still, though the system does open up the market for small businesses that can’t afford the upfront costs of solar, it’s still likely a better deal for a business that can afford it to pay for its own system and earn tax credits itself, as ThinkProgress pointed out earlier this year.

SolarCity is planning to start offering the program to businesses in California, then expand across the country next year. According to the company, the new program will allow small and medium-sized businesses that go solar to pay 5 to 25 percent less than they typically do for electric bills. Rive said the company has had a “tremendous amount of interest” from small and medium-sized businesses over the last few years, so he expects the new program to be successful.

“I’m convinced this is going to be a massive turning point in the solar sector,” he said. “The solar sector has neglected a massive market and now that market can be addressed.”

He also linked the new program to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s new climate plan, which she released Sunday. The plan aims to tackle climate change in part by installing half a billion solar panels by 2021 — a 700 percent increase from the current rate of installation.

If Clinton does become president, the way to achieve that goal is to “open up more segments, and this small business segment has the potential to be larger than the commercial segment,” Rive said.

The U.S. solar industry has been booming in recent years. Last year, residential solar installations beat commercial installations for the first time — a spike in personal solar systems that is being driven mainly by middle-class Americans. And politicians besides Clinton — including other presidential candidates — have caught on to solar’s appeal. Democratic candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders introduced legislation earlier this year that aims to make it easier for low-income Americans to get access to solar power. And Martin O’Malley, another Democratic candidate, introduced a plan earlier this month that aims to have the country powered by 100 percent renewable energy by 2050.

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SolarSolarCity

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The West Is Still On Fire

Just in time for peak tourist season, Montana’s Glacier National Park is on fire. As of Tuesday, some 3,200 acres of the park were engulfed by wildfire, which began a week ago and caused park officials to shut down three separate campsites throughout the park as well as close off the St. Mary Visitor Center. As of Wednesday, the wildfire was 56 percent contained, and portions of the park that were previously closed have been reopened to the public — but firefighters are still working to contain the remaining portion of the fire. According to NPR, travel companies associated with the park earn 90 percent of their revenue between June 20 and August 20.

The Glacier National Park fire is just another example of the disruption the 2015 wildfire season has already caused for Western states. Plagued by high temperatures, low snowpack, and continued drought, states from Alaska to California are in the midst of one of the earliest and most prolific fire seasons on record. As of Tuesday, 34,995 large fires had burned over 5,569,671 acres in 2015 — almost 2 million acres above the 10-year average.

In Alaska alone, fires of all sizes have burned nearly 5 million acres, paving the way for the state’s worst fire season ever. Alaskan wildfires are particularly concerning because the state sits on vast tracts of permafrost — permanently frozen soil and water that contains more carbon than is currently contained in the atmosphere. Wildfires burn away the top layer of earth, whether that’s trees, brush, leaves, or other material that rests on a forest floor. But in Alaska, increasingly powerful fires not only strip away the top layer of organic material — they also burn organic matter underground, removing the protective layer of trees and pine needles that insulates the permafrost from the sun’s rays. Without that protective layer, heat from the sun has a much easier time turning permafrost from frozen organic matter to soupy organic matter that can release dangerous greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide and methane, into the atmosphere.

Alaska has undergone rapid climatic changes in the past 50 years, warming by more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit. But it has also seen a marked increase in the length and intensity of its fire season — something that climate scientists worry could hasten the melting of Alaska’s permafrost, and, in turn, exacerbate climate change.

Drought conditions in Washington have made the state so hospitable to fire that its Olympic Peninsula — which contains one of the best remaining examples of a temperate rain forest — has been battling a rare wildfire since late May. The Paradise Fire currently burning in Olympic National Park, which is normally one of the wettest places in the United States, isn’t expected to be contained until late-September. According to the Washington Post, the fire is already the largest in the park’s history.

In Northern California, a fire in Nevada County has burned over 2,000 acres, threatening about 1,800 homes. Firefighters told local news Wednesday that they had the fire 40 percent contained, but the fire is just one of six that firefighters in Northern California are currently fighting. California has seen an especially quick start to its fire season, with fire crews telling CBS News that they have responded to about 1,100 more incidents this year than by this same time last year.

Climate change is expected to increase both the length of fire season and the number of large fire events seen each year. But a longer fire season could also make climate change worse, releasing carbon stored in forests into the atmosphere, hastening climate change that in turn makes wildfires worse.

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The post The West Is Still On Fire appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Why Are Hundreds Of Thousands Of Salmon Dying In The Northwest?

Each year, around July 1, thousands of sockeye salmon pass the Columbia River’s Bonneville Dam on their way to their spawning grounds in northern Washington and Canada. Centuries ago, sockeye salmon runs could be as large as three million fish. Last year — in the largest run since the construction of the Bonneville Dam in 1938 — 645,100 sockeye made the trip from the Pacific through the Columbia River.

But this year — with snowpack levels throughout the Pacific Northwest historically low and temperatures historically high — sockeye salmon are in trouble. Out of the more than 507,000 salmon that have passed through the Bonneville Dam, some 235,000 have died — a number that Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife fisheries manager John North told Reuters is unprecedented.

“We’ve never had mortalities at this scale,” North said.

The water temperatures in the Columbia River are nearing lethal levels for salmon

Temperatures at parts of the Columbia River are some five to seven degrees warmer than average. At the Bonneville Dam last week, water temperatures exceeded 72 degrees, about five degrees above the 10-year average for that spot according to the Seattle Times.

“The water temperatures in the Columbia River are nearing lethal levels for salmon, which is a little inconvenient if you’re a salmon trying to come into the Columbia River and migrate,” Teresa Scott, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s drought coordinator, told ThinkProgress. “It’s a matter of fish being caught in those warm waters and not being able to deal with them.”

Sockeye salmon typically thrive in water that is between 40 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Mark Ahrens, manager of Spring Creek National Fish Hatchery in the Columbia River Gorge. When water creeps up to the mid 50s and into the 60s, he told ThinkProgress, it creates a more challenging environment for sockeye. Warm water holds less dissolved oxygen, making it more difficult for fish to breathe. High water temperatures also stimulate the fishes’ metabolism, causing them to burn through crucial energy stores faster than usual and leaving little energy for the last legs of their journey.

But warm water doesn’t just create a less hospitable environment for fish — it also creates an ideal breeding ground for microscopic foes. According to Scott, the fish found dying near the Bonneville Dam have been exhibiting signs of a serious infection.

“It gives a leg up to all the pathogens that they’re evolved and adapted to be able to fight off with normal immune system function,” Ahrens explained. “Bacteria, pathogens, and viruses get more and more effective at doing their jobs when the water gets warmer, and fish less so.”

Ritchie Graves, a fisheries biologist at NOAA, told the Associated Press that up to 80 percent of this years’ returning sockeye population could die as a result of the above-average temperatures.

This year marked some of the Pacific Northwest’s lowest snowpack levels on record, with levels in Washington just 16 percent of normal and levels in Oregon at 11 percent of normal. The latter marked the the lowest snowpack level seen in the state since 1992. Despite normal rainfall amounts throughout the two states, both have declared drought emergencies, in 23 Oregon counties and statewide in Washington.

The region is also coming off of a historically warm end to June and beginning of July, when temperatures soared into the 90s and 100s for days at a time. The warm air temperatures combined with particularly low water flows to create what Scott described as a “perfect storm of conditions.”

“These are completely anomalous circumstances,” Scott said. “The convergence of the really high temperatures that we didn’t know were coming our way combined with the low flows because of the low snowpack, I know it surprised me. We’re doing, as an agency and a group of state agencies, everything we can to get out in front of these impacts, but we can’t make the water cooler in the Columbia River.”

It’s a situation that, Ahrens says, has little precedent for fish managers out West.

…certainly this is a wake up call and a dress rehearsal for what fishery managers years from now will be dealing with on a regular basis

“There is no norm anymore,” he said. “We’re seeing a very different environment and a challenge that we haven’t seen fish have to face before.”

Historically, if the main migration paths became too warm, sockeye would divert their migration to smaller tributaries in search of relief. This year, low water levels and high temperatures mean that relief is hard to come by.

On a case by case basis, Ahrens says, management officials can choose to pull fish out of warm water and transport them to cooler waters, or release cooler waters from reservoirs to bring down the river temperature. But those are dramatic, expensive measures, sometimes costing as much as $500,000 for a few months of cold water relief for the fish.

Ahrens describes one of the season’s “success stories” at the Warm Spring National Fish Hatchery in Central Oregon, where Fish and Wildlife officials moved 160,680 salmon to the Little White Salmon National Fish Hatchery, in the Columbia River Gorge, in order to save them from water temperatures that were exceeding 70 degrees Fahrenheit in the daytime.

“We do very well with what we have, in terms of a budget, but there’s not an endless source of money to combat these issues,” Ahrens said. “We have to live within our budgeted means.”

In Washington, where the state legislature appropriated money for a drought response, Scott says that available technology — not budget constraints — are the primary issue.

“Even with infinite money you can’t be everywhere at once,” Scott said. “I wouldn’t say budget constraints are the big problem. It’s how quickly the conditions are converging on us.”

Both Oregon and Washington have responded to the salmon deaths by closing some portions of streams and rivers to recreational fishing and cutting back on allowed fishing hours throughout most of the states’ rivers. According to Scott, Washington has chosen to close upwards of 30 streams for catch and release fishing because it puts too much stress on the fish. Both Washington and Oregon have also closed off sturgeon fishing upstream of the Bonneville Dam, after reports showed an increased sturgeon mortality due to drought conditions.

Earlier this month, Idaho declared an emergency due to the mass sockeye deaths in the Columbia. The Snake River sockeye — which has been listed under the Endangered Species Act since 1991 — ends its migration in central Idaho’s Redfish Lake. Officials were concerned that warm Columbia River temperatures would prevent the endangered fish from reaching the lake, so fisheries managers trapped the sockeye near the last dam on the Snake River and trucked the fish to a hatchery. According to a KTVB Idaho report, emergency measures for the Snake River sockeye will continue through the end of spawning season, in October.

But as climate change threatens to alter the way water is managed throughout the West — with high temperatures and low snowpack becoming more and more common — officials are viewing this year’s crisis as a potential window into the future.

“There’s no doubt on the part of our climatologists that say that these are the kinds of conditions that we will see in the future,” Scott said. “We are mounting short term responses this year, and anticipating a recovery from these conditions in the near term, but certainly this is a wake up call and a dress rehearsal for what fishery managers years from now will be dealing with on a regular basis.”

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Climate ChangePacific NorthwestSalmon

The post Why Are Hundreds Of Thousands Of Salmon Dying In The Northwest? appeared first on ThinkProgress.

How Propane Could Completely Undermine One State’s Ban On Fracking

A group in New York may have found a way to get around the state’s so-called ban on fracking.

Tioga Energy Parters, LLC, applied earlier this month to conduct propane fracking — a process similar to hydraulic fracturing, but that injects propane gas, not water, into shale formations to loosen the deposits of oil and natural gas underground. The state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) will review the application and determine whether a full environmental impact statement (EIS) is necessary.

“It’s not a loophole. That ban does not apply to us,” Adam Schultz, a lawyer for the company, told ThinkProgress. Schultz said the permit application is going through the permitting process.

New York environmentalists rejoiced when a state moratorium on fracking became an out-and-out ban earlier this year, but the law applies only to high-volume hydraulic fracturing — defined as extraction that uses 300,000 gallons or more of water per well, Schultz said. Propane fracking uses no water. It also injects a lower volume of fluid into the shale.

It was not immediately clear who makes up Tioga Energy Partners, LLC — the company does not appear to have a website or previous projects — but Schultz said the group had “a great amount of experience and expertise with waterless fracking technology.”

The application seeks to develop oil and gas on land owned by a group of farmers in Tioga County, in central New York, over part of the Marcellus Shale — the largest natural gas field in the United States.

“This application has the support of the community and has the official support of the town of Barton,” Schultz said.

Last summer, before the hydraulic fracturing ban was finalized, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that municipalities had the right to use local zoning laws to prohibit oil and gas development.

Deborah Goldberg, a lawyer for Earthjustice who represented the towns in that case, said she thinks it is unlikely that the permit will result in oil and gas development. For one, she said, it would be “fantastically expensive.” She also thinks the DEC would likely require an EIS.

“The legal standard is if there is a possibility of a significant environmental impact, they have to do an environmental impact statement,” Goldberg told ThinkProgress.

On Monday, Earthjustice, as well as the Natural Resources Defense Council and Frack Action, sent a letter to the DEC, asking officials to consider expanding the ban to include propane fracking.

“LPG fracturing returns polluting products to the surface that must be properly handled and disposed, in this case, flammable gases that would have to be collected in pressurized tanks or flared — a step generating air emissions and leaks that can harm public health and safety,” they wrote.

Proponents of propane fracking say it wastes less water (it doesn’t use any) and is safer than hydraulic fracturing, but the process is still not widespread in the United States. In propane fracking, the propane returns to the surface and is recaptured as gas.

“As required by law, we will review the permit,” Tom Mailey, a DEC spokesman, said in a statement provided to ThinkProgress. “DEC will follow the mandates in the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA), which could include requiring an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).”

Whether or not this application goes through, it’s unclear whether New York would become a hotbed of oil and gas development, despite its significant resources. In its earlier review of hydraulic fracturing, the DEC found that the economic benefits would be “clearly lower than initially forecast.”

Already, more than 150 New York cities and towns have implemented local bans on fracking. Those bans and moratoria apply to propane fracking, as well, since they are generally constructed as zoning regulations that prohibit any kind of oil and gas development.

“Any place that doesn’t want the risk of propane fracking could pass a ban,” Goldberg said.

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BartonDECFrackingNew YorkNew York StatePropaneTiogaTioga Energy Partners

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