Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 118

New Bill Seeks To Ban Oil And Gas Drilling In The Arctic

A new bill to ban oil and gas drilling in the Arctic recognizes that continued oil development will exacerbate human-caused climate change and points out that a potential spill would be devastating to the fragile Arctic environment.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) on Thursday introduced the Stop Arctic Ocean Drilling Act of 2015, which prohibits any new or renewed leases for exploration, development, or production of oil, natural gas, or other minerals in the region.

“A spill in the Arctic would be an environmental catastrophe of extraordinary proportions – and such a spill is inevitable if drilling proceeds,” Merkley said in a statement. “Drilling in the Arctic Ocean is the height of irresponsibility. We need to put it off limits, permanently.”

The Department of Interior has estimated there is a 75 percent chance of an oil spill of more than 42,000 gallons if drilling in the Arctic is developed. The Arctic region is home to one of the world’s most delicate ecosystems, with extreme and treacherous conditions. In the case of a spill, there is severely limited capacity to respond.

The Bureau of Offshore Energy Management has estimated that cleaning up a major spill in the Chukchi Sea would cost between $10 billion and $15 billion.

This past spring, five years after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico which dumped roughly 210 million gallons of oil into the gulf, BP agreed to pay $18.7 billion in fines. According to estimates from the Wall Street Journal, the spill cost BP some $53.8 billion.

But money can’t always buy mitigation. A National Wildlife Federation report issued on the fifth anniversary of the spill found at least 20 animal populations are still being impacted by the environmental devastation.

In addition to the damage of a potential oil spill, the Merkley bill puts Arctic drilling in the context of fighting climate change. The bill flatly accepts the science of anthropogenic climate change, asserting that 80 percent of of the carbon from known fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground to have an 80 percent chance of avoiding the most catastrophic effects of climate change. “Developing oil and gas reserves in the Arctic Ocean is incompatible with staying within that global carbon budget and avoiding the worst effects of climate change,” the bill says.

Back in May, the Obama administration approved controversial plans for Royal Dutch Shell to conduct exploratory drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean this summer. Two weeks later, the president took to Twitter to explain his actions, saying, “we can’t prevent oil exploration completely in [the] region,” and so it has to be done with the “highest possible standards.”

The approval to drill up to six wells in the Chukchi Sea, approximately 70 miles northwest of Wainwright, Alaska, was not given with carte blanche. Due to wildlife protection rules, the company is not allowed to bore two of its proposed wells simultaneously, effectively halving the rate the company can explore under its current plan. In Arctic exploration, time is critical, because the season is short and must be completed before sea ice forms.

But the Arctic summer may be getting longer. The region is considered to be ground zero for the effects of climate change, because it is affected even faster than middle latitudes. During “Arctic amplification,” the replacement of white snow and ice with darker water and ground means more heat absorption, which means more melting. More melting allows for more drilling and related pollution, which means more melting.

It’s not as though we don’t know that the Arctic is in trouble. In fact, the Merkley bill came on the same day the United States and four other northern countries, Russia, Canada, Denmark, and Norway, agreed to ban commercial fishing in the Arctic, pending research on how global warming is affecting fish populations.

The bill is co-sponsored by presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), as well as Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and Sen. Al Franken (D-MN).

In the current Republican-controlled Senate, however, it’s not likely the bill will get much traction.

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ArcticClimate ChangeDrillingMerkleyOilSanderswarmingWater

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Australian Officials Fear Spill After Spotting Oil Near Great Barrier Reef

Oil was spotted off the coast of Queensland, Australia on Friday, sparking fears that a spill might threaten the Great Barrier Reef.

A fisherman reported a sheen of about 1 kilometer (about .6 miles) Friday afternoon (Australia time), the Guardian reported. Officials took to helicopters and water vessels to search for the spill, and while they couldn’t locate the slick, they did spot oily patches of water south of Townsville, Queensland. In addition, officials found “oily residue” on the boat of the fisherman who reported the spill.

“We can confirm some patches of oily water have been sighted in the water south of Townsville,” an official told the Brisbane Times. The oil spots were about 3 feet in diameter, but officials didn’t say the size of the area covered by the patches.

Officials are planning to take aircraft out again Saturday morning to search for evidence of a spill in the ocean, islands, and coastline.

It’s not yet known where the oily patches have come from or whether they’ll impact the Great Barrier Reef. But the reef — which is the world’s largest coral reef system and its “biggest single structure made by living organisms” — is facing multiple environmental threats, major oil spill or none. Last year, scientists warned the Australian Senate that the reef was in the worst state it’s been in since record keeping began, due in part to coastal development and dredging. The dredging has been occurring as Australia expands its ship ports along its coast, development which entails dredging — or digging up — the sea bed. The waste produced by the dredging has been smothering coral reefs.

The Australian government unveiled a plan earlier this year that seeks to improve the health of the Great Barrier Reef, in part by banning the dumping of dredging waste. The ban, however, won’t apply to the reef’s entire world heritage area, which means that under the plan, dumping could still occur close enough to threaten it.

In addition, environmentalists in Australia point out that the plan doesn’t provide steps to protect the reef from the impacts of climate change and rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Those include ocean acidification that can, at certain levels, make it difficult for coral to build its skeleton and for young shellfish to build their shells, and that can have wide-ranging effects on fish. They also include warming oceans that can cause coral bleaching, a process in which corals expel the algae living in them and become more susceptible to death.

“This plan allows for massive coal port expansions and barely deals with climate change, despite the Australian government’s own scientists saying climate change is the number one threat to the Reef,” Greenpeace campaigner Jessica Panegyres said in a statement in March.

Earlier this month, the United Nations’ World Heritage Committee decided not to list the Great Barrier Reef as “in danger,” but said it would monitor the reef’s condition over the next four years.

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Great Barrier ReefOceanOil Spill

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Pipeline Spill In The Heart Of Canada’s Tar Sands Industry Leaks 1.3 Million Gallons Of Oily Emulsion

An pipeline spill in Alberta, Canada has leaked some 1,320,000 gallons, or 31,000 barrels, of emulsion — a mixture of bitumen, produced water, and sand — south of Fort McMurray, a hub for Canada’s tar sands mining and refining industry.

The leak, which was discovered Wednesday afternoon, is the largest pipeline spill in the province in 35 years, when a 54,000 barrel oil spill became Canada’s worst-ever pipeline incident.

Nexen Energy, the pipeline operator, and the Alberta Energy Regulator, have not yet identified the cause of the leak, which has been contained. At this point there are no reports of injuries to wildlife or contamination of nearby bodies of water. The spill covered some 170,000 square feet, of four acres, mostly along the path of the pipeline.

Bitumen is a combination of viscous tar sands crude oil and liquid chemicals like benzene that dilute the crude so it can be piped to refineries. Produced water is water used during the process of oil or gas extraction that can contain hydraulic fracturing chemical additives and naturally occurring substances and is not suitable for irrigation or drinking. It must be stored in tanks or pits before being treated and disposed.

In a statement about the spill, Greenpeace communications officer Peter Louwe said the leak is “a good reminder that Alberta has a long way to go to address its pipeline problems, and that communities have good reasons to fear having more built.”

“New pipelines would also facilitate the expansion of the tarsands — Canada’s fastest-growing source of carbon emissions — and accelerate the climate crisis even more,” he said.

Greenpeace and other environmental organizations have fought hard to prevent the Keystone XL pipeline from being built, which would transport up to 830,000 barrels of Canadian tar sands oil per day down to Gulf Coast refineries. While Obama vetoed legislation approving the construction of the pipeline in February, it is still under review by the State Department — as it has been for more than six years.

Meanwhile, Alberta is not the only place where oil spills are demanding attention. Halfway around the world in Australia, a potential oil spill was found on Friday along the Great Barrier Reef. The Reef, an especially delicate ecosystem and World Heritage Site, has come under multiple stressors in recent years, including development, fossil fuel export, and climate change.

Authorities are still investigating the cause and extent of the spill.

In the United States, upgrading a dated pipeline system has become one of the few bipartisan environmental issues in the 114th Congress. At a recent House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing, Democrats and Republicans took the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) to task for failing to implement several provisions of a pipeline safety law. A recent 105,000-gallon oil spill along the southern coast of California near Santa Barbara — a stronghold of the environmental movement — has galvanized elected officials into addressing the issue.

Politicians differ on what the solution should be. While environmentalists and politicians concerned with the impacts of climate change would like to see a reduction in oil and gas production alongside any upgrades, many Republicans want to build more new pipelines — including the Keystone XL.

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AlbertaBitumenGreenhouse Gas EmissionsOilTar Sands

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Hottest June Puts 2015 On Track For Hottest Year On Record By Far

NASA reported Wednesday that this was the hottest June on record (tied with 1998). And it’s now all but certain 2015 will be the hottest year on record, probably by a wide margin — as what increasingly appears to be one of the strongest El Niños in 50 years boosts the underlying global warming trend.

Climate expert Dr. John Abraham amended this NASA chart to show how the first six months of 2015 compares to the annual temperatures of previous years:

[image error]

The gap between 2015 and all other years seen in that chart is likely to grow because the El Niño that NOAA announced a few months ago has been growing stronger — and it is projected to grow even stronger and last the entire year. The rising ocean temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, which are characteristic of an El Niño, just keep rising.

“Confidence continues to grow that this El Niño will be one of the stronger El Niños over the past 50 years,” AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Brett Anderson said Thursday.

El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) junkies should be following the Twitter feed of the International Research Institute (IRI) for Climate & Society, where you will learn “Last week’s NINO3.4 temps were ~+1.5. If that level holds for the month of July, the #ElNino will be considered a strong event” and “#ElNino forecast is off the charts! Both dynam & stats models calling for stronger event than last month.” You’ll also see this:

Odds of El Niño at about 100 percent through winter according to update @climatesociety & @NOAA forecast: pic.twitter.com/uGdNBr8HLl

— Brian L Kahn (@blkahn) July 16, 2015

There is a greater than 85 percent chance that the current El Niño lasts through May. As AccuWeather’s Anderson explains, “El Niño typically reaches its peak during the December through February period.”

If this pattern plays out, then 2016 would likely top whatever temperature record 2015 sets — again, possibly by a wide margin. After all, the blowout temperature year in the 1997/1998 super El Niño was 1998.

If you look at the NASA temperature chart closely, you may notice that they have updated a lot of their temperatures going back for decades. NASA explains what they did here — essentially they started using better sea surface temperature data from NOAA. As a result of this update to higher quality and “substantially more complete input data,” the ongoing human-caused global warming has become even clearer to see.

Bottom Line: The warming trend that made 2014 the hottest calendar year on record is continuing. As some climate scientists have said, it’s increasingly likely we’re witnessing the start of the long-awaited jump in global temperatures.

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Climate ChangeGlobal WarmingTemperature

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One Congressman’s Fight To Keep Fracking Waste Out Of Drinking Water

The fracking industry has a water problem. Wastewater from fracking has been linked to drinking water contamination, and earthquakes.

But obviously oil and gas companies can’t dump fracking water into our public water treatment system, right?

Wrong.

In fact, that ability is the subject of a current Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposal. The Effluent Limitations Guidelines and Standards for Oil and Gas Extraction would ban fracking wastewater from being treated at publicly owned water treatment plants. The comment period for the proposal ends Friday.

“It’s crazy that highly toxic, radioactive wastewater can be treated like bathwater,” Rachel Richardson, the director of Environment America’s Stop Drilling program, said on a call Thursday. Richardson and her group have collected 30,000 signatures showing support for making the proposal into a rule under the Clean Water Act.

Even after treatment, wastewater from fracking remains salty — meaning it has chemical compounds like bromides. When bromide is treated with chlorine, as the water would be in a sewage treatment plant, for instance, it turns into trihalomethane — which is linked to bladder cancer, miscarriages and stillbirths.

How to deal with wastewater from fracking — an extraction method in which producers inject large volumes of chemical-laced water into the ground, releasing pockets of oil and gas — has become a hot-button issue for many environmentalists. As the industry has boomed in recent years, more and more water needs to be contained or treated.

In fact, Richardson’s group maintains that the water safety issue is so great that fracking should be banned altogether. “We recognize that there is no safe or sustainable way to deal with this waste,” she said.

And while no company is currently using the public wastewater system, there is nothing to stop them. Environmentalists and policymakers are concerned the oil and gas companies will increasingly turn to the public water treatment system for disposal, especially as they face increased pressure on current disposal methods, such as pumping wastewater into underground wells, which has been linked to earthquakes.

Congressman Matt Cartwright (D-PA) joined the call Thursday, offering his support to the EPA proposal and pledging to reintroduce legislation that will close environmental loopholes for oil and gas companies.

“The rule proposed by the EPA is not going to comprehensibly protect us,” Cartwright said. “It is finally time to treat the oil and gas industries as we do every other industry.”

Under the so-called “Halliburton Rule” — the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act — oil and gas companies are exempt from multiple environmental protection regulations, including the Safe Drinking Water Act, Clean Water Act, and Clean Air Act.

Cartwright’s legislation is part of a larger package, known as the “frack pack” that seeks to close loopholes in environmental regulation of oil and gas activities. H.R. 1175 would allow the EPA to require states to permit fracking runoff and other effluents. The EPA is currently prohibited from requiring that type of oversight.

Cartwright acknowledged that new clean water legislation will be difficult to usher through the current Congress, but he said he is “very confident” that the fracking industry will see greater environmental regulation.

“It’s off the charts how much people care about clean water in our district,” he said. “Ultimately, the will of the people wins out.”

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CartwrightClean Water ActEnvironment AmericaEnvironmental Protection AgencyEPAFrackingHalliburton RuleRCRARegulationWastewaterWaterwater disposalwater treatment

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One Simple Way To Get Fresh Food To People Who Can’t Afford It

For the last three years, Sasha Purpura has been a Robin Hood of sorts, taking food from the wealthy and giving it to the impoverished. But she isn’t stealing these items. Instead, she and her colleagues have successfully convinced industry titans and private educational institutions in Massachusetts to donate their excess food to the homeless.

Through the aptly named Food for Free program, Purpura has diverted more than 2 million pounds of leftover food from restaurants and cafeterias to homeless shelters and food pantries in the state. Within that time, the nonprofit has expanded its operations, forming partnerships with nearby Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other businesses in its 12 partner cities.

Each week, Food for Free representatives leave the headquarters in Cambridge and collect nearly 2,500 pounds of fresh and frozen produce — including meat, cheese, vegetables, and other items that can no longer be sold.

“We have a tremendous opportunity to capture as much of that as possible and solve food insecurity in this area,” Sasha Purpura told ThinkProgress. “Our work has allowed some of the agencies we work with to include nutritious food [in their offerings], which is critical because their clientele usually can’t access that. We want to keep this up until that gap is filled or all needs are met. We want to make sure that everyone has access to fresh, healthy food.”

We want to make sure that everyone has access to fresh, healthy food.

Data from the Envrionmental Protection Agency designates food scraps as the second largest source of waste in the United States, with leftovers accounting for nearly a fifth of landfill space. American consumers and businesses often throw away items, particularly fruits, because of cosmetic issues, like blemishes or small deformities in shape. Other developed nations grapple with similar problems. The total value of food wasted globally stands at nearly $400 billion — enough money to feed all of the world’s 870 million hungry people, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Food for Free counts among a host of food recovery programs in the United States that allow restaurants, cafeterias, and other food preparers to give their excess food to the homeless advocacy organizations. In 2011, Bay Area college student Komal Ahmed founded Feeding Forward, a program that coordinates the donation of excess food prepared on 140 campuses to local homeless shelters. The Food Recovery Network has taken similar steps in transferring leftover food from colleges to those who need it the most. Even the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has done its part, launching its Food Recovery Challenge — a call to organizations and businesses to donate excess food, purchase less produce, and compost

With food insecurity afflicting more than 49 million Americans — nearly one out of 10 people — and food banks experiencing shortages in recent years, local food recovery programs have supplemented dwindling food supplies in homes and shelters across the country. In turn, providers of those services have forged relationships between private businesses and local agencies.

Janet Barsorian, the kitchen manager at Lowell Transitional Living Center (LTLC), told ThinkProgress that the additional boxes of food have helped her staff feed more than 100 people who enter the facility every week. Borsorian told ThinkProgress that doing this work without Food for Free would be a huge undertaking, especially during the winter when officials can’t refuse admission to homeless families trying to escape the frigid weather.

“Before we teamed up with Food for Free, we would only serve food a hot breakfast a couple times during the week. We only had sandwiches, salads, soups, and mac and cheese sometimes,” Barsorian, an LTLC employee of more than 15 years, said. “Now we have different ethnic foods and our people think it’s amazing. Depending on what they pick up, we could get anything. This is like comfort food for some of our homeless because they may have not eaten in a long time. Nutrition is important to those who aren’t feeling too well.”

This is like comfort food for some of our homeless because they may have not eaten in a long time.

Reducing food waste through recovery programs also poses great benefits for the environment. Once discarded food decomposes, it releases methane — a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide — into the atmosphere. Food waste counts as the third largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions In the United States and other developed nations, consumers exacerbate the issue by purchasing more food than they plan to eat. A report compiled by the Waste and Resources Action Program in the United Kingdom in February said that, if left unabated, consumer food waste will cost $600 billion annually.

While the concept of food recovery emerged 30 years ago, the fervor among the private sector magnates to serve the less fortunate increased in the mid-1990s — around the time that then-President Bill Clinton signed the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act into law. The legislation protects donors and recipients of leftover food from liability as long as both parties ensure that their donation programs incorporate safe food handling and storage.

To meet the standards outlined in the law, and meet an increasing demand for fresh food, Food for Free has employed the food preservation technique of flash freezing, during which employees store produce to temperatures below water’s freezing point. The process wipes out any chance of bacteria growing on leftovers. However, Food for Free’s innovative transportation system and the aforementioned legal protections haven’t sufficed in convincing some potential partners in joining the food recovery movement.

But Purpura has remained relentless in turning some food vendors around, even compelling them to tweak their purchasing habits.

“I’ve reached out to some organizations and they told me they don’t have waste. I know that’s not true,” Purpura said. “They may not understand the level of waste they have and it does them a disservice to not acknowledge this. For the others, when we picked up the food, it was the first time they had direct insight on how much they wasted. This enabled them to improve their internal service.”

Tags

Food DesertsFood InsecurityHomelessnessPoverty

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Government Proposes New Rules Aimed At Protecting Streams From Coal Mining

The Interior Department announced a new proposed rule Thursday that tackles the water pollution associated with coal mining — particularly mountaintop removal mining.

The proposed rule, which is now subject to a 60-day public comment period, will protect about 6,500 miles of streams across the U.S. from the impacts of coal mining, according to the Interior Department. Up until now, mining companies had been operating under rules that were written in the 1980s. “A lot has changed since then” in terms of technology and scientific understanding of coal mining’s environmental impact, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said in a press call Thursday.

The rule seeks to protect water sources from coal mining pollution in a few ways. First, if finalized, it would identify practices that pose the most risk to streams, drinking water, and forests and prohibit companies from engaging in those activities. It would also require more monitoring of stream health by coal companies, and lay out ways to gather pre-mining data on streams, so that an accurate baseline on stream health can be determined. The rule would also mandate that companies restore streams and land affected by mining to a condition that allows them to support the same level of life that they had before mining. That means replanting land alongside streams with native vegetation.

The goal of the rule, according to the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, is to “better protect streams, fish, wildlife, and related environmental values from the adverse impacts of surface coal mining operations and provide mine operators with a regulatory framework to avoid water pollution and the long-term costs associated with water treatment.” The agency also said that the rule would have “minimal impacts on the coal industry or electricity prices.”

The agency also hopes to clear up any industry confusion about mining regulations.

“The rule would make it clear which requirements apply to which types of streams, and how to determine what types of streams are present,” Janice Schneider, assistant secretary for land and minerals management at the Interior, said. “Because of this clarity, companies can better prepare and plan.”

The rule has been long-awaited by those concerned about the impacts mountaintop removal mining has on the environment and the communities that live nearby. Schneider said on a press call Thursday that the agency spent multiple years working on the rule because “we wanted to get this right.” Jewell added that the proposal “was subject to a very robust open public process.”

The agency will hold listening sessions in coal-heavy states to discuss the rule in the coming months.

Mountaintop removal mining has long been known to cause major environmental damage, especially to streams. The process, which involves blasting away the top part of a mountain to get to the coal seams underneath, creates excess rock and soil. That rock and soil waste often contains heavy metals, and is often dumped into streams and valleys, clogging up streams and killing the organisms that live in them. In 1999, Chief U.S. District Judge Charles H. Haden II wrote about the environmental harm inflicted upon streams from mountaintop removal mining.

“The normal flow and gradient of the stream is now buried under millions of cubic yards of excess spoil waste material, an extremely adverse effect,” the judge wrote. “If there are fish, they cannot migrate. If there is any life form that cannot acclimate to life deep in a rubble pile, it is eliminated. No effect on related environmental values is more adverse than obliteration.”

In the last two decades, mountaintop removal mining has buried nearly 2,000 miles of Appalachian streams and destroyed 500 mountains.

In recent years, mountaintop removal has been on the decline in the United States. But the practice still creates problems for communities that live near mining operations. A report published in April by environmental group Appalachian Voices found that these operations are encroaching on local communities, who are having to deal with the noise and water and air pollution that comes along with the operations. Long-term exposure to dust from mountaintop removal has been linked to an increased risk of lung cancer, and residents who live nearby mountaintop removal operations have called on the White House to do more to protect them from water pollution.

Environmental groups weren’t totally happy with the new rule, with several saying that, though the proposal does take some steps forward, they wished it had gone further to protect streams from mining impacts. The Sierra Club said in a statement that the proposal weakened a previous rule that prohibited mining activities within 100 feet of streams in Appalachia.

“Appalachian communities rely on the rivers and streams covered by these protections, and today’s proposal doesn’t adequately safeguard those communities,” Sierra Club Beyond Coal Senior Director Bruce Nilles said in a statement. “We need the federal government to create thoughtful stream protections that ban valley fills and ensure an end to this destructive practice.”

Center for American Progress Visiting Senior Fellow David J. Hayes, who served as Deputy Secretary of the Interior from 2009 to 2013, said in a statement that the proposed rule “addresses key defects in the current rules.”

“With a variety of alternatives outlined in the proposed rule, the public and all stakeholders now have an opportunity to weigh in and ensure that the final rule has the type of strong and clear protections that local communities have a right to expect from our government,” he said.

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Mountaintop RemovalPollutionWater Pollution

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This Massive Utility Wants More Renewable Energy Because Corporations Are Demanding It

In June, Alabama Power, one of the country’s largest electricity providers, filed a petition with the state’s Public Service Commission to add up to 500 megawatts of renewable energy over the next six years. The utility, which serves over 1.4 million customers in Alabama, cited customer demand as a primary reason for adding all this renewable energy — specifically corporate customers.

“This program was driven by conversations with customers looking to meet renewable mandates pushed down from their headquarters,” said Tony Smoke, Alabama Power vice president of marketing, in a statement announcing the request. “As a service provider, our focus is to make sure we are providing customers access to choices they want.”

Large companies demand a lot of power, especially those in the technology sector running things like data centers. As these companies become more aware of their impact on climate change and develop updated policies, they can drive change at the local level through implementing a sustainable corporate culture. Alabama Power’s move into renewables is just one example of how this can happen.

The World Wildlife Fund and the World Resources Institute launched something called the Corporate Renewable Energy Buyers’ Principles in 2014 to help large renewable energy buyers like Walmart, Intel, IKEA, Target, and GM, get access to the power they need. The program now includes some 34 companies demanding over 20 million megawatt hours of renewable energy to meet their near-term goals.

Earlier this summer it was announced that Alabama’s old Widows Creek coal-fired power plant would close in October, and shortly thereafter be converted into a Google data center powered by 100 percent wind and solar energy. While Alabama Power’s announcement wasn’t in response to Google moving into the state, it is part of the broader conversation going on about how to give large customers like Google and other corporate entities what they want.

“We’ve got customer interest in renewables, and particularly in solar right now,” said Nick Sellers, Alabama Power vice president of regulatory and corporate affairs. “It’s usually those customers that are under some sort of a mandate, either a government mandate or a corporate mandate.”

According to Alabama Power, much of the 500 megawatts of renewable energy — which is enough to serve about 100,000 homes — will come from solar power. While the utility already has some 1,600 megawatts of hydro power available and 400 megawatts of wind from Kansas and Oklahoma, large-scale solar development is an entirely new direction for the company.

The proposal would allow Alabama Power to build its own renewable energy projects of up to 80 megawatts each or to purchase generation from other sources.

“This is the beginning of what we would like to see as a long-term change in how Alabama produces and uses energy,” said Tammy Herrington, Executive Director of Conservation Alabama. “Alabama Power is signaling their commitment to renewable energy, and we look forward to working with them to expand this program to make our state a leader in solar energy.”

The statewide conversation around renewable energy in Alabama is not so straightforward. Alabama is one of 12 states suing the EPA over its proposed Clean Power Plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions from the utility sector, of which three-quarters of the emissions are from coal. Nationwide, the Clean Power Plan aims to cut carbon emissions from the power sector by 30 percent from 2005 levels, but it offers different targets and flexible approaches on a state-by-state basis.

According to the EPA’s proposed plan, Alabama will be required to cut power sector emissions by 27 percent by 2030, with about two-thirds of this coming from conversions of coal-fired power plants to natural gas and additional renewables. The remaining third would come from demand reduction and increased efficiency in coal plants.

The finalized Clean Power Plan will be released later this summer and it could be even more stringent, especially when it comes to efficiency and renewables.

Alabama Power, which is a subsidiary of the much larger utility Southern Company, has been criticized previously for its lack of investment in solar power. Georgia Power, which is also owned by Southern Company, has more than 900 megawatts of solar capacity installed already, about two percent of its total production.

Southern Company is the third largest utility in the country and the third biggest coal user, according to a new report on utility-sector emissions from the sustainability group Ceres. The report found that five large utilities — Duke, AEP, Southern, NRG, and MidAmerican — generate 25 percent of the power sectors CO2 emissions. It also found that Southern has seen about a 27 percent decline in emissions since 2000.

Another example of large customer interest driving local change is in Georgetown, Texas, a conservative city that recently decided to go 100 percent renewable in part as a business decision to attract renewable energy-conscious customers like Apple, Google, and Facebook.

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AlabamaAlabama PowerRenewable EnergySolar PowerUtility

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How Climate Change Could Threaten The Nutrition Of Millions

The world already has a hard time properly allocating crucial nutrients to its 7.125 billion residents — and a new study published in The Lancet Wednesday suggests that global warming is only going to increase that challenge.

According to the World Health Organization, zinc deficiency currently impacts a little more than thirty percent of humans across the globe. An important mineral found in shellfish, red meat, seeds, legumes, and cereal grains, zinc helps the immune system function properly, aids in the creation of proteins and DNA, and plays a crucial role in development and growth in infants. A lack of zinc in the diet can cause diarrhea, exacerbate malaria and pneumonia, and lead to death. In fact, zinc deficiency is estimated to cause more than 450,000 deaths in children under the age of five each year, accounting for 4.4 percent of global childhood deaths.

New research, led by Samuel Myers, a senior research scientist at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, suggests that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere will only make global zinc deficiency worse, putting some 138 million people at risk of malnutrition by the year 2050.

The researchers arrived at that conclusion through a meta-analysis of a variety of different data sets. They first looked at zinc consumption in 188 countries under ambient CO2 concentrations, based on data from the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Then, they looked at data from previous experiments that grew crops under varying CO2 concentrations to see how their nutrient makeup was impacted — those experiments showed reduced levels of key nutrients, including zinc, when crops like wheat, barley, rice, and soy are grown in high concentrations of CO2.

The researchers then looked at how much zinc humans need to be healthy, and what sources people in different countries tend to get their zinc from. Finally, they compared that information — how many people need a threshold amount of zinc from various crops — to how those crops might look grown under higher concentrations of carbon dioxide. In the end, they found that some 138 million people were likely to be at risk of zinc deficiency by 2050, with Africa and South Asia bearing the brunt of the changes (nearly 48 million of the estimated malnourished would live in India alone).

It’s known that the consequences associated with climate change will most heavily impact the poor, but this study widens those consequences beyond sea-level rise and natural disaster response. When climate change impacts the nutrients of crops, it’s the world’s poor that are most likely to become malnourished. Those in wealthy countries can supplement their nutrients with animal products, but those in poor countries are often more dependent on plant-based nutrients.

“It’s very clear that there’s this weird inversion where the wealthiest people are putting the most carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the poorest people are experiencing the most vulnerability to this effect,” Myers told the Washington Post.

In their analysis, Myers and his colleagues didn’t account for changing global diets in the face of climate change. It’s possible, the study allows, that as global CO2 concentrations increase, global diets could shift in a way that exacerbates nutrient deficiency, as agricultural production struggles to keep up with population growth, water scarcity, and land degradation.

The study also didn’t take into account population growth, meaning that the 138 million people that Myers and the other researchers estimate could face nutrition shortages is almost certainly an underestimate.

“We all know that there are going to be something like another two to three billion people sharing the planet with us by 2050,” Myers told the Washington Post. “And so if you just scale the effect, it would be much higher numbers [of affected people].”

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Senate Rejects Effort To Teach Kids About Climate Change In School

A effort to increase kids’ scientific knowledge of climate change failed in the Senate on Wednesday, after one senator expressed concern that the measure would result in a lot of “wasted paper.”

Put forth by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), the measure would have created a competitive grant program for public school districts to “develop or improve” climate change education curricula. It was put forward as an amendment to a bill to reform No Child Left Behind, the controversial federal education policy implemented under former President George W. Bush.

Markey argued that the grant program would help equip the next generation to deal with the effects of human-caused climate change, a burden they are likely to bear.

“The children of our country deserve the best scientific education they can get on this topic,” he said. “They are the future leaders of our country and our world. They must be equipped for this generational science.”

The Republican author of the reform bill, however, opposed the amendment on the grounds that it gave the federal government too much power in guiding what kids are learning.

“If you like Washington, D.C., getting involved in Common Core in your state, you’re going to love this amendment,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN).

If the amendment passed, Alexander argued that kids would be subject to frequently changing curricula regarding climate change depending on the president at the time. If the next president is a Republican, for example, he or she may choose to remove climate education entirely from federal education guidance. That would result in textbooks that are constantly changing, Alexander said — which is, ironically, bad for the environment.

“Just imagine what the curriculum on climate change would be if we shifted from President Obama to President Cruz and then back to President Sanders and then to President Trump,” he said. “There would be a lot of wasted paper, writing and rewriting textbooks.”

Markey’s amendment failed by a vote of 44-53. The vote fell mostly on party lines, but two Republicans — Sens. Kelly Ayotte and Mark Kirk — voted for it, and three Democrats — Sens. Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Manchin, and Jon Tester — voted against it.

Of course, the amendment’s failure does not mean schools are not allowed to teach the science of climate change — just that the federal government won’t provide incentives for schools that do. What public schools can and can’t teach is most often the decision of states, many of which have policies regarding climate education. So far, 13 states have adopted the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) as guidance, and those standards recommend climate change education begin in middle school.

Other states have resisted efforts to include climate science in public school curricula. Last year, Wyoming rejected the NGSS after the state’s Board of Education chariman said he did not “accept, personally, that [climate change] is a fact.” That rejection was reversed earlier this year, and the state now is free to adopt those standards if it wants.

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