Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 121

California Has No Idea What’s In Its Fracking Chemicals, Study Finds

A scientific assessment on the impacts of hydraulic fracturing in California found that, in large part, the chemicals used are not being identified or tracked, and it’s nearly impossible to tell how damaging the process is to California’s water supply.

The study, carried out by the California Council on Science and Technology (CCST), recommended state agencies ban the reuse of wastewater from hydraulic fracturing — or fracking — for any use that could impact human health, the environment, wildlife, and vegetation until further testing can be done.

“These are things that require diligence,” CCST’s Jane Long told ThinkProgress. “There are a lot of potential issues.”

During fracking, chemical-laced water is pumped at high pressure into shale rock formations that hold oil and gas deposits. Figuring out what to do with the water after it’s been used — and whether it is safe — has been an ongoing issue. According to the CCST assessment, the toxicity of half of the chemicals used in California fracking is not publicly available. More than half the chemicals have not been evaluated for basic tests “that are needed for understanding hazards and risks associated with chemicals.”

In terms of water contamination, no California agency has conducted a systematical study of the possible impacts, the assessment said. In fact, across all of California, only one water contamination sampling study — near a fracking site in Los Angeles County — has been done. Results of contamination studies in other regions of the country have been mixed, the report said. But since we don’t know what’s going into the chemical mix, or how it might react with other elements over time, these types of studies might not even be testing for the right things.

“Notably, most groundwater sampling studies do not even measure stimulation chemicals, partly because their full chemical composition and reaction products were unknown prior to this study,” the report said.

The lack of data also means that treated wastewater is not necessarily getting stripped of potentially harmful elements. “Treatment of produced water destined for reuse may not detect or remove chemicals associated with hydraulic fracturing and acid stimulation,” the report noted.

Water in California has always been a premium resource, and that is even more the case now, during the ongoing drought. Some oil and gas companies, such as Chevron, have been ostensibly helping out — by selling their post-fracking water to dehydrated farms.

Some tests have found high levels of acetone and methylene chloride — compounds that can be toxic to humans — in wastewater used for irrigation purposes. The tests also found the presence of oil, which is supposed to be removed from the wastewater during treatment.

Wastewater from fracking can be disposed in three ways. It can be dumped into open pits and left to “percolate” back into the ground; it can be injected into below-ground wells; or it can be reused for industrial or agricultural purposes. The CCST assessment found that none of these options are being sufficiently monitored.

“There is no ideal way to dispose of it,” said Long. “But it’s also a resource — or potentially a resource.”

She pointed out that we simply don’t know what’s been going on. “It’s kind of difficult to assume there has been groundwater contamination,” Long said, although she did note that water control boards in California have ordered the closing of some open pits due to contamination issues.

Long said the assessment tried to recommend that California make the best use of the produced water from fracking operations, but that there were practices in the state that “need more attention,” including unregulated, unpermitted open pits and improper injection wells.

In May, environmental advocacy group EarthJustice filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Center and the Sierra Club to stop the the state from allowing oil industry wastewater to be injected into clean, drinking water sources.

Long said that injected water into legally protected aquifers was “the biggest issue right now.”

The lawsuit brings up a tricky reality of fracking regulations in California: Even when they exist, regulations are often ignored or unenforced.

“In the absence of new regulations, which I’m not sure we can count on, are demands by the public to hold the agencies accountable and to study the science before they rubber stamp these activities,” said Tamara Zakim, an associate attorney with EarthJustice.

In fact, the assessment was part of a state-mandated review of the California’s fracking operations. Senate Bill 4, passed last year, ordered both the assessment and a new set of regulations from the Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR). The assessment was supposed to come out before the new regulations, but after the study was delayed, DOGGR pushed ahead with the rules, which went into effect July 1.

“Knowing that this report was coming out, knowing that it was looking into the dangers of fracking in Calfornia, the division insisted on finalizing its regulations,” Clare Lakewood, a staff attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, told ThinkProgress.

The new regulations call for much greater reporting from the oil and gas industry, but do little to curb specific activities.

“It’s really evident that those regulations are completely deficient,” Lakewood said. “The report is quite clear in the risk to health and safety and the environment.

The unknown dangers of fracking wastewater could threaten millions of people in California. The assessment found that 1.7 million people live within a mile of a fracking site. Moreover, three-quarters of all fracking operations in California. take place in shallow wells less than 2,000 feet underground. This makes California’s fracking operations particularly dangerous to groundwater.

According to the study, 2.6 billion gallons of fresh water are used each year for fracking in California.

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CaliforniaCalifornia Council on Science and TechnologyChemicalsFrackingHydraulic FracturingLawrence Berkeley National LabLBNL

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Native American Communities Get Government Boost Towards Climate Resilience

Native American communities throughout the U.S. are getting a boost to their climate resilience efforts thanks to a series of actions announced by the White House Thursday. The initiatives focus on increasing climate resilience in communities that are most vulnerable to climate-related impacts.

Under one of the new White House initiatives, the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs will provide $11.8 million in grants to help tribal communities promote climate resilience through training and technological development to prepare for the future impacts of climate change.

“We know that the risks of climate change aren’t equally shared. We know that some communities, in terms of infrastructure and readiness, have been neglected longer than others,” said Director of White House Office of Management and Budget Shaun Donovan during a climate resilience event at the Center for American Progress on Thursday. “Climate change exacerbates these existing health and socioeconomic inequities, placing children, the elderly, the sick, the poor, and some communities of color at particular risk.”

For indigenous communities, the threat of climate change affects not only economic and natural opportunities, but tribal autonomy and cultural traditions as well. In the cool, lake-dense lands of Minnesota, the Chippewa tribes are struggling to maintain economic and cultural stability in the face of climate change. High levels of flooding prompted by rising temperatures have threatened the quality and sustainability of the wild rice and fishing industries that provide both economic stability and food security to the region.

Hotter summers, shorter winters, and diseases associated with this shift have also been connected to the devastating drop in moose populations in Chippewa country. What was once one of the greatest food staples and cultural traditions for tribes in Minnesota has become a conservationist cause, with populations dropping by almost 50 percent between 2008 and 2014.

Karen Diver is Chairwoman of Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and a member of the White House’s State, Local, and Tribal Leaders Task Force On Climate Preparedness and Resilience. She said Chippewa communities are taking steps to reintroduce alternative food sources in the quest towards working within the barriers of climate change without sacrificing traditional ways of life.

“Particular to our community is a lot around traditional food and habitat protection. One of our traditional foods is moose and there hasn’t been a moose hunt in two years due to declining populations,” Diver told ThinkProgress. “One of the things we’ve been looking at is working with the state and other stakeholders to reintroduce elk, which have more tolerance than moose with the hopes of promoting food security.”

The U.S. has a long history of under-representing and under-supporting tribal communities, and continues to conflict with communities in the Chippewa region on topics such as treaty rights and land appropriation. But Diver said the White House climate resilience task force is taking proactive steps to include communities in the conversation.

“Often, federal Indian policy is on a separate path from other jurisdictions,” said Diver, who emphasized the importance of “working interjurisdictionally to allow tribes to not only look at treaty resources inside of their region, but also working with other jurisdictions outside of their own region.”

While the quest towards climate resilience poses significant challenges, initiatives to promote sustainability adaption also offer an opportunity for employment and economic development. For the Chippewa communities, this has included employing community members in gutter installation on both private and public housing to combat increased rainfall, and employing local community members in other infrastructural sustainability projects.

“There is a remarkable economic opportunity for the American people that climate action represents. And that we have to insure that all families and communities are able to share in those benefits,” Donovan said in his opening remarks at Thursday’s event. “Take energy efficiency for example, one analysis suggests that if we achieve the President’s goal of doubling our energy productivity as a nation by 2030 we could save the U.S. economy $327 billion – billion with a B- in energy expenses net of investment costs. That’s a two percent change in the GDP of the United States of America by 2030, and that is a big deal.”

Katelyn Harrop is an intern at ThinkProgress.

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Climate ResilienceNative AmericansWhite House

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Global Seabird Populations Are On The Decline, Which Is Bad News For The Health Of The Oceans

Looks like it’s a bad time to be a seabird.

According to a recent study out of the University of British Columbia, monitored seabird populations around the world have declined 70 percent since the 1950s, an indication that there could be something seriously wrong with marine ecosystems.

“Seabirds are particularly good indicators of the health of marine ecosystems,” Michelle Paleczny, a UBC master’s student and co-author of the study, said in a press statement. “When we see this magnitude of seabird decline, we can see there is something wrong with marine ecosystems. It gives us an idea of the overall impact we’re having.”

The study linked the decline in seabird populations to a slew of factors, including over-fishing — which caused a decline in the fish the birds rely on for food — and ecological and environmental changes caused by climate change. The researchers also point to the introduction of invasive predators, plastic and oil pollution, and dangerous fishing gear as potential causes for the decline. All told, the study found that seabird populations globally have declined by 69.6 percent in the last 60 years, representing a loss of some 230 million birds.

Seabirds tend to travel long distances foraging for food, but often return to the same colonies to breed. A change in colony populations can be an indication that coastal and marine ecosystems might be off — but a drop in colony populations also can have a negative impact on the ecosystems, as seabirds eat (and are eaten) by a variety of species, and help fertilize food webs with their waste.

“Our work demonstrates the strong need for increased seabird conservation effort internationally,” Paleczny said. “Loss of seabirds causes a variety of impacts in coastal and marine ecosystems.”

The study comes just days after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service raised concern over the disappearance of tens of thousands of nesting birds from a 150-acre Florida island refuge.

Vic Doig, biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, told Reuters that the birds, which have been coming to Seahorse Key on Florida’s Gulf Coast for over 100 years, returned to the island in April only to disappear in May, leaving behind thousands of unhatched eggs.

Rare bird species like snowy egrets and tri-colored herons are among the missing birds — at times, more than 10,000 to 20,000 nesting pairs have been known to call the island home.

“When the birds are nesting there, the island is a chaotic, loud, busy place,” Doig said. “All of a sudden, it’s like a ghost town.”

Bird colonies have been known to abandon their nests in the past, but the scale and diversity of this particular case has wildlife experts mystified.

“We’ve seen a lot of abandonments in the Everglades and in some seabird colonies, but there’s never been such synchronicity involving so many species at once,” Peter Frederick, a wildlife biologist at the University of Florida, told TakePart. “Nothing seems to fit together.”

Wildlife officials don’t know what caused the birds to leave the island. They haven’t found any signs of traumatic injuries or disease, and say it would be unusual for a predator to successfully scare off so many birds over such a large area.

It’s possible, officials say, that the birds could have been spooked by an airplane, drone, or helicopter. In recent years, nighttime flights over the area have increased, and a helicopter ferry was recently put in place to take visitors to a nearby island. But the idea that such noise could be disruptive enough to cause such a large-scale abandonment, Doig said, is a long shot.

Without any substantial leads, Doig told Reuters that officials will simply have to wait and see if the birds return next year.

Regardless of what made the birds in Florida disappear, birds in general are expected to face major challenges in the coming years. According to a 2014 report released by the Audubon society, about 21 percent of North America’s bird species are at risk of losing more than half or all of their habitat by 2050 due to climate change, and nearly half of all species are threatened by climate change to some extent. And the National Wildlife Federation has warned that climate change will likely cause a mismatch between bird migrations and the ecosystems they depend on for food and shelter, as earlier springs could cause migratory birds to take off before the food sources they depend on become available.

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The House’s Refusal To Remove The Confederate Flag Is An Awkward Victory For The EPA

House Republicans were forced to pull a controversial spending bill on Thursday because too many lawmakers wanted to preserve the Confederate flag in National Parks and cemeteries.

The obvious story there was that many Republicans in Congress still have an attachment to a symbol of slavery and oppression, as evidenced by their refusal to condemn the controversial flag. But the less obvious story was that this spending bill — which the Environmental Protection Agency considered to be a disaster — was essentially defeated. That bill would have cut the agency’s funding by $718 million and prohibited some landmark environmental regulations, including the Obama administration’s proposed rules to tackle climate change and protect drinking water.

If the bill passed, it probably wouldn’t have become law (Obama had promised to veto it). But it could have served as a jumping off point for negotiations with the Obama administration about what the EPA’s budget would be for the next fiscal year, according to Lukas Ross, a climate and energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth. If it passed, House Republicans could have proven that there was momentum and political will to impose steep cuts and restrictions on the EPA.

Now, Ross said, the effort “looks like it’s dead.”

“This was the only opportunity [House Republicans] had to go on record against the Clean Power Plan, to go against the water rule,” he told ThinkProgress on Thursday. “The fact that they failed to do that is a pretty searing indictment of [House Speaker John Boehner’s] ability to get things done.”

Still, the situation is a little awkward. The EPA actively rallied against the House appropriations bill, so this would seem like a win for the agency. But it also seems distasteful to gloat about an environmental win when it only happened because too many Republican lawmakers wanted to preserve a symbol of slavery.

As might be expected, then, EPA spokesperson Enesta Jones declined to comment on the spending bill’s failure. But she did point ThinkProgress to comments EPA administrator Gina McCarthy’s made on Tuesday, wherein she harshly condemned the appropriations bill. In those comments, McCarthy said the bill would have had “far reaching consequences for the agency’s ability to ensure protection of public health and the environment.”

“To put it very simply, if the agency does not have enough money to operate and is further constrained by far reaching policy riders, the protection of public health and the environment on which Americans rely will be comprised,” McCarthy said.

The spending bill does indeed appear to be in jeopardy. According to a report in the Hill, the bill “does not appear to have the support to make it off the House floor,” as most Democrats and some Republicans were already opposed.

But even if the EPA seems hesitant to declare victory outright, not everyone has shared that restraint. Following the spending bill’s failure on Thursday, Friends of the Earth’s Ross issued the following statement:

“Apparently the only thing that matters more to House Republican leadership than sacrificing American’s air and water is defending the legacy of slavery. We can only hope that this bill stays dead and buried.”

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Study: We’re Already In The ‘Worst Case Scenario’ For Sea Level Rise

A major new analysis on the impact melting polar ice sheets could have on sea level rise has given rise to some worrisome conclusions.

Researchers found that sea levels increased some 20 feet during three warming periods of 1.8 to 3.6°F (1 to 2°C) that took place at different interglacial periods over the past three million years. The study’s findings mean that the planet could be in for major sea level rise even if warming is kept to 2°C — a limit that the world is set to exceed without major action on climate change.

The ice sheets appear to be out of equilibrium with the climate based on what’s happened in the past.

Published in the journal Science, the review compiled more than 30 years of research from scientists around the world to show that changes in the planet’s climate and sea levels are closely linked. It found that even a small amount of warming can lead to significant sea level rise.

Andrea Dutton, a geochemist at the University of Florida, led the study. She told ThinkProgress that her team looked at periods of time that took place 125,000, 400,000, and three million years ago in order to get a range of possibilities, as no one will be a perfect analog to the warming period the Earth is experiencing now.

“What’s important to note is that the ice sheets appear to be out of equilibrium with the climate based on what’s happened in the past,” she said.

Last year was the warmest on record — a record that 2015 is on pace to break. The International Energy Agency recently warned that temperatures could jump by as much as 7.7°F (4.3ºC) by 2100 — more than double the amount that caused sea level to rise 20 feet in previous eras. Global average temperatures have already risen almost 1.8°F (1ºC) since the 1880s.

Modeling sea level rise is notoriously challenging, and Dutton said one of the biggest questions for policymakers is how fast sea levels will rise. While glacier melt and thermal expansion of the oceans could account for about three feet of rise, Dutton said anything else will come from the polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

“Estimates say we could get multiple meters of sea level rise within thousands of years, centuries, or even decades,” said Dutton. “That’s a lot of uncertainty.”

It’s not just about timescale either. It’s about trying to determine if the rise will be gradual or if it will jump abruptly. While Dutton said “it won’t happen overnight” the real point is considering long-term commitments to mitigating greenhouse gases and preventing numerous climate-related catastrophes, including sea level rise.

“People always talk about the year 2100 when they talk about sea level rise,” she said. “It’s not going to stop then; it will keep rising after. It’s important to realize the decisions we make today will influence that trajectory.”

Sea level rise of 10 or 20 feet could impact hundreds of millions of people living in coastal areas around the world. Many major urban centers — New York City, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bangkok — would be overcome by the elevated seas. The authors of the study point out that most of Florida has an elevation of 50 feet or less, and Miami averages just six feet about sea level. Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, has some 15 million residents all inhabiting the low-lying coastal delta.

Climate Central put together a graphic illustrating the countries with the most people living on land that would be impacted by a 20-foot rise in global average seal levels. In Vietnam, some 36 percent of the population, or 32 million people, would be impacted; In Egypt, 15 percent, or 12 million people, would suffer the direct consequences; In Brazil, 6 percent, or 11 million people, would have to relocate. Overall, Climate Central determined the land on which more than 375 million people currently live would be usurped by water.

The worst case scenario is the one we are already on.

When sea levels rise, there are other corollary impacts, including storm surge, erosion and inundation, according to Anders Carlson, an Oregon State University glacial geologist and paleoclimatologist, and co-author of the Science study.

Carlson also said that we are starting to see these changes already.

“It takes time for the warming to whittle down the ice sheets,” he said. “But it doesn’t take forever. There is evidence that we are likely seeing that transformation begin to take place now.”

Carlson told ThinkProgress that “we are nearing one degree Celsius warming,” and that the “worst case scenario is what we are already on.”

Recent studies have shown that both the Greenland ice sheet and West Antarctic Ice Sheet have seen massive increases in ice loss in just the past five years. The rates of losses far exceed even those imagined a few years ago. Furthermore, there is evidence that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun an irreversible process of collapse, in part because it is melting from underneath.

For now the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are contributing less than a millimeter a year to sea level rise, but they have the potential to add 20 feet and 200 feet to ocean levels, respectively, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise unabated. The higher greenhouse gas emissions get, the more Arctic sea ice melts, which allows the oceans to gather more heat. Dwindling sea ice in the Arctic Ocean creates large areas of relatively dark ocean surface that reduce the albedo, or reflectivity, of the polar region. More open water causes the Earth to absorb more of the sun’s solar energy rather than reflect it back into the atmosphere.

As the temperature warms in the Arctic regions, more permafrost also melts, thus adding to the greenhouses gases already in the atmosphere and eventually turning the Arctic from a carbon sink to a carbon source. It has been estimated that defrosting permafrost could add up to 1.5°F to total global warming by 2100. Permafrost covers nearly a quarter of the land surface of the northern hemisphere.

If and when significant sea level rise happens, it won’t be uniform across the globe. It will rise at different rates in different places due to changes in gravitational fields as the polar ice melts, according to Sutton.

“It’s not like turning on the tap,” she said. “There would be a gravitational effect depending on whether the changes came from the north or south. Lots of times you hear about the global average, but it’s also important to try and understand what’s going to happen in your own backyard.”

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AntarcticaClimate ChangeGlobal WarmingGreenlandPolar Ice MeltSea Level Rise

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Obama Permanently Protects More Than One Million Acres Of Public Lands

Early Friday, President Obama announced that he will designate three new national monuments, permanently protecting more than one million acres of public lands. He designated pristine wilderness landscapes in Nevada as Basin and Range National Monument, scenic mountains in California as Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, and a fossil-rich site in Texas as Waco Mammoth National Monument.

With these designations, President Obama is adding to the 16 national monuments he has already created with his authority under the Antiquities Act, setting aside “more public lands and waters than any administration in history.” Both Democratic and Republican presidents have used their authority under the law to designate national monuments, many of which have later become some of the country’s most iconic national parks such as the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, and Arches National Park.

A diverse array of groups praised the announcement, emphasizing that the new monuments were a response to years of local support and advocacy to permanently protect these sites.

“By creating these three new national monuments, President Obama is continuing his commitment to preserving America’s treasured places and cementing his well-deserved place in conservation history,” Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters told the Hill. “The president acted in response to the overwhelming support expressed by local communities and stakeholders across the country for protecting these places of extraordinary environmental, historic, and scientific value.”

The new Basin and Range National Monument in Nevada is unique for its pristine valleys of wilderness and wildlife habitat, and significant cultural and historical sites, including ancient artwork dating as far back as 4,000 years. The monument also includes a modern art piece, entitled ‘City,’ which is composed of a series of sculptures created over decades in the desert by artist Michael Heizer.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) told the Washington Post earlier this week that for him, “the most beautiful [part] of nature, [is] the desert” and that “there’s no place in America that represents what I think is beauty more than this Basin and Range.”

The other two monuments established today will also permanently protect unique historic and scenic sites, and promise to bring significant economic revenue for surrounding communities. The Waco Mammoth National Monument in Texas will preserve a site which is home to the remains of 24 mammoths, and which already attracts more than 20,000 visitors every year.

The Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument is known as a prime recreational destination and one of the most biologically diverse areas in California. A report released earlier this month found that designation of the area as a national monument has the potential to generate more than $26 million for the surrounding community over the next five years.

“I applaud the president, because his historic action will preserve this magnificent area for generations and boost the local economy,” Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) told the Associated Press early Friday.

Although the President’s action to protect the three sites was strongly supported by local communities, elected officials, faith advocacy organizations, conservation groups and many more, a few Republican members of Congress continue to attack the Antiquities Act and attempt to undermine the president’s authority to designate new national monuments.

Rep. Cresent Hardy (R-NV), in particular, criticized the president’s plans to protect Nevada’s Basin and Range area, after leaking the plans for the new national monument in May. In a press release, Rep. Hardy said that he was “appalled and deeply concerned about the national security implications” of the proposal because it would overlap with the airspace of military training grounds.

Despite Rep. Hardy’s concerns over national security, Department of Homeland Security officials and others have continued to emphasize that protections for public lands and wildlife do not inhibit national security operations. According to the Center for Western Priorities, the congressman’s concerns for national security are “explicitly undermined in the draft monument proclamation that he leaked.”

In addition to his initial attacks on the new monument, Rep. Hardy attached an amendment to the Department of the Interior’s appropriations bill on Tuesday as the latest in a series of attacks from congressional Republicans in a “No More National Parks” campaign. The amendment, which narrowly passed in the House on Wednesday, undermines the president’s use of the Antiquities Act by blocking the use of federal money for national monument designations in specific counties in a number of Western states.

Congressional Republicans pulled the House Interior bill from the floor on Thursday over a provision that would ban the display of the confederate flag on public lands, and have not indicated when they plan to pick up the spending bill again.

Claire Moser is the Research and Advocacy Associate with the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress. You can follow her on Twitter at @Claire_Moser. Annie Wang is an intern with the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress.

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Barack ObamaNational MonumentsPublic Lands

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Oil Company Exxon Knew About The Scientific Reality Of Climate Change In 1981

“Pope Francis blasts global warming deniers,” the Washington Post wrote last month. The Pope’s climate encyclical focused on the immorality of climate inaction — which makes the immorality of knowingly spreading disinformation for the purpose of delaying action all the more base.

Now the Union of Concerned Scientists has disclosed an email revealing that Exxon understood the scientific reality of climate change as far back as 1981. “Other companies, such as Mobil, only became aware of the issue in 1988, when it first became a political issue,” Exxon’s former in-house climate expert, chemical engineer Leonard S. Bernstein wrote last year. The 30-year veteran of Mobil and Exxon explained:

Exxon first got interested in climate change in 1981 because it was seeking to develop the Natuna gas field off Indonesia. This is an immense reserve of natural gas, but it is 70% CO2. That CO2 would have to be separated to make the natural gas usable.

And yet despite a growing understanding of the scientific reality of climate change in the 1980s and 1990s, Exxon became one of the biggest funders of scientists and think tanks and others who do little but deny and cast doubt on the scientific understanding of human-caused global warming.

As recently as February 2015, a New York Times exposé revealed that a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who routinely casts doubt on widely accepted climate science had “accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers.” This included funding from ExxonMobil and “at least $230,000 from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.”

In the book and film “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming,” historians and journalists show that this misinformation and disinformation campaign goes all the way back to the tobacco industry’s campaign to cast doubt on claims that cigarette smoking is bad for your health — and that in some cases it involves the same exact people.

The Times documented back in 2009 that the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), an anti-action lobbying group backed by fossil fuel industries, ignored its own climate scientists during the 1990s while spreading disinformation about global warming. An internal report stating that the human causes of global warming “cannot be denied” was ignored by GCC leaders. The GCC led an “aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.” Yet the final draft of a 1995 “Primer on Climate Change Science” written by the GGC’s own scientific experts revealed that those experts “were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.”

Those experts explained: “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied.” And after a long analysis of “Are There Alternate Explanations for the Climate Change Which Has Occurred Over the Last 120 Years?” they conclude: “The contrarian theories raise interesting questions about our total understanding of climate processes, but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change.”

The Times reported that the GCC “was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others” with a budget totaling nearly $1.7 million in 1997 alone. Ultimately, the Times notes, “The coalition, according to other documents, later requested that the section of the primer endorsing the basics of global warming science be cut.”

The tobacco industry knew of the dangers of smoking and the addictive nature of nicotine for decades, but its CEOs and representatives publicly denied those facts. In the same way, many of those denying the reality of human-caused climate change have long known the actual science.

Over the years, fossil fuel company executives have funneled tens of millions of dollars into this disinformation campaign. The top funder was ExxonMobil for a long time. But the company was overtaken years ago by Koch Industries, run by billionaires Charles and David Koch, who spent more than $48.5 million from 1997 to 2010 to fund disinformation. From 2005 to 2008, the Kochs outspent Exxon-Mobil well over 2-to-1 in funding the climate denial machine.

In February, the New York Times revealed that over the previous ten years, Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon had accepted more than a million dollars from fossil fuel interests, including Exxon-Mobil and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, “while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers.” During this period, Soon advanced a repeatedly debunked theory arguing that humans are not the primary cause of global warming. The Times explained:

Though he has little formal training in climatology, Dr. Soon has for years published papers trying to show that variations in the sun’s energy can explain most recent global warming. His thesis is that human activity has played a relatively small role in causing climate change.

The New York Times then explains that “many experts in the field say that Dr. Soon uses out-of-date data, publishes spurious correlations between solar output and climate indicators, and does not take account of the evidence implicating emissions from human behavior in climate change.” Gavin A. Schmidt, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies explained that solar variability probably is responsible for at most 10 percent of recent global warming, whereas human-caused greenhouse gases are responsible for the overwhelming majority of it. He added, “the science that Willie Soon does is almost pointless.”

In October 2014, the Smithsonian itself put out a climate statement, which makes clear that such a view is simply anti-scientific. The Smithsonian explains, “Scientific evidence has demonstrated that the global climate is warming as a result of increasing levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases generated by human activities.” Amazingly, the newly uncovered documents show that “Dr. Soon, in correspondence with his corporate funders, described many of his scientific papers as ‘deliverables’ that he completed in exchange for their money.” The Smithsonian repeatedly signed off on contracts with Southern Company Services — a coal company and long-time funder of science denial — requiring the Smithsonian to provide the coal utility “advanced written copy of proposed publications … for comment and input.”

Yet the fossil fuel industry has known for two decades that the solar variability explanation for recent climate change is untrue. As far back as 1995, the scientific and technical advisers to the Global Climate Coalition wrote in their draft primer:

[The] hypothesis about the role of solar variability and [Pat] Michaels’ questions about the temperature record are not convincing arguments against any conclusion that we are currently experiencing warming as the result of greenhouse gas emissions. However, neither solar variability nor anomalies in the temperature record offer a mechanism for off-setting the much larger rise in temperature which might occur if the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases were to double or quadruple.

So the fossil fuel industry has known for a long, long time that human-caused climate change was a very real threat based on well-documented science. It has callously disregarded that reality to spread falsehoods and thwart action.

The Pope ends his encyclical calling on God to “Enlighten those who possess power and money that they may avoid the sin of indifference, that they may love the common good, advance the weak, and care for this world in which we live. The poor and the earth are crying out.”

If indifference to the dangers of climate inaction by the rich and powerful is a sin, what would the Pope say about a company that’s fostering lies in order to spread indifference among the public, the media, and policy-makers?

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Moose Targeted For Protection After 60 Percent Decline

Bullwinkle’s brethren are on the decline.

Two environmental groups filed a petition Thursday to put the Midwestern moose — which roams Minnesota, North Dakota, Michigan, and Wisconsin — on the endangered species list, citing climate change as a leading cause of population decline.

In the most dramatic instance, the moose population in Minnesota has dropped nearly 60 percent in the past decade, the Center for Biological Diversity and Honor the Earth’s petition states.

“Rising temperatures and decreasing snowfall put moose at increased risk of overheating, which leads to malnutrition and lowers their immune systems, while ticks and other pathogens thrive in a warming climate,” the groups said in a statement. The group did not find that the species has been subject to over-hunting. In fact, Minnesota canceled its moose hunt two years ago, and other states have already either banned it or limited hunting licenses.

If the petition is successful, the moose will be eligible for the protections offered by the Endangered Species Act, including habitat conservation and population recovery plans.

Moose are cold-weather creatures, and warmer winters along the northern United States are not only bad for them — they are good for moose parasites. Brainworm and winter ticks were responsible for nearly half the moose deaths recorded by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources in the winter of 2013-2014.

Ticks have largely been blamed for the devastation of moose in the Northeast, as well. Warmer winters mean ticks aren’t killed off. In New Hampshire, moose bearing as many as 150,000 ticks were found to waste away and die, according to the Washington Post.

“It’s a pretty tough way to go,” Kristine Rines, a wildlife biologist and moose project leader for the state’s Fish and Game Department, told the paper. “There’s no question that climate plays a huge part in this. If we had winters that lasted as long as they used to, we might not be having this conversation.”

Overall, the American moose population — the same type found in New Hampshire, and a different subspecies from the Midwestern moose — is listed as stable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). It’s a species that’s also known as the Siberian Elk, and is found across Canada, northern Russia, and parts of northern China. Even in Maine, the moose population is doing well, largely due to Maine’s more northerly location and increased cultivation of pine forests, according to the Wildlife Management Institute. But as warmer winters creep north, the American moose in the lower 48 could be a thing of the past.

The moose is not alone in its struggle against climate change. A 2014 report pointed to 1,400 animals that are endangered by climate change — roughly 12 percent of all endangered species. Some, like the moose, are threatened by warming habitats. The sea otter, for instance, is threatened by climate change-exacerbated toxic algal blooms. Others, such as the sage grouse, are threatened by drought and loss of habitat.

“If we don’t protect them, moose could be lost forever from the North Woods,” Collette Adkins, a biologist and attorney who works in the Center’s Minneapolis office, said in a statement. “Growing up in Minnesota, I loved seeing moose during family vacations up North. It’s a tragedy that today kids like my own only know this symbol of the North Woods as stuffed toys in tourist gift shops.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service must issue a finding on the petition within 90 days. If it finds the listing may be warranted, the agency will undergo a 12-month review process on the status of the Midwestern moose.

Since 2007, 55 of the 56 petitions requesting an individual species to be listen as endangered were found to have substantial information, triggering the comprehensive review, a Fish and Wildlife spokesperson told ThinkProgress.

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1.3 Billion Africans Don’t Have Electricity. Akon Has A Plan To Cut That In Half.

It’s “a no-brainer.”

That’s how hip-hop and R&B artist and producer Akon described using solar energy to bring power to hundreds of millions of Africans.

The Missouri-born Senegalese American had just trekked to Mali from an inaugural meeting in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) with top West African leaders to talk about renewable energy solutions.

“Africa needs to be sustainable for a long time and be a crutch for the rest of world instead of the other way around,” Akon told ThinkProgress in a phone interview. “A stable Africa helps the world.”

Akon joined five prime ministers representing Benin, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, and Togo who gathered in the Ivory Coast’s economic capital of Abidjan for the West African Energy Leaders Group — a conference for business and political leaders working to develop strategies to address the region’s energy crisis.

“Because of the [lack of infrastructure] in Africa, we need more financial institutions to be a part of it, and partner with people who have a vision for Africa as well,” Akon said.

More than 1.3 billion Africans have no access to electricity; and only 5 percent living in sub-Saharan Africa have electricity.

[image error]

Two men install rooftop solar panels in Mali.

CREDIT: DAGENCY

Those staggering figures prompted the certified platinum recording artist to launch the Akon Lighting Africa (ALA) initiative in 2014, which aims to bring solar power to nearly half — 600 million — of the Africans who live without power.

So far, ALA has provided solar street lamps, micro-generators, charging stations, and home kits to 14 countries — Benin, Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Guinea, Kenya, Namibia, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone.

The lack of power “stopped us from doing the things we need to do,” he said. “There wasn’t enough electricity to pull from,” to get Africa on par with the rest of the world developmentally, and solar was “the biggest and quickest solution.”

Global prices for solar modules have significantly dropped over the last decade, hitting a record low in 2014. ALA works with a $1 billion credit line from a Chinese solar system provider, allowing countries to pay back the debt over time.

“We want to empower the people to develop their own opportunities,” Akon said. “[But] before you empower people you have to educate them. So we developed the university,” which focuses on solar energy delivery and maintenance, “so they can [eventually] invent technology of their own.”

Instead of dropping technology on unsuspecting villages, ALA also teaches citizens how solar power works and how to install arrays through an educational training program called the Solar Academy.

“In every village we go to, we want to keep that village sustainable,” and promote entrepreneurship, Akon said. “The involvement of the rest of the world will be key. It will have to be started by Africans, but the technology the world has to offer has to be shared.”

The July meeting was the first of its kind, focusing on partnerships between private companies and state agencies. “There’s no way around: The government and investors are going to have to come together to work this out.”

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Village members gather near a newly installed solar street lamp.

CREDIT: DAGENCY

ALA isn’t the first solar energy project Africa has seen. For example, Mali-based Practical Small Projects focuses on water sanitation, health care, education and solar energy in West Africa. But Akon’s celebrity coupled with an aggressive mission to make solar energy production a work trade and a widely self-sustaining energy source with public-private partnerships, makes the project unique.

Since starting the project in 2014, media attention has warmed governments to the idea of investing in renewable energy sources. Ivory Coast Prime Minister Daniel Kablan Duncan echoed those sentiments during the meeting, saying independent energy companies are the key to developing Africa’s power grid, largely because of their financial capabilities.

“African states must carry out deep structural and sectoral reforms, notably the liberalization of the electricity sector,” Duncan said, adding that companies would shoulder the bulk of expenses because of “the often considerable investments that are virtually impossible for state budgets alone to finance.”

Duncan also said Africa holds 15 percent of the world’s population but only consumes 3 percent of the global electricity, greatly hindering the continent’s economic development.

“There are only so many institutions you can call on,” Akon said. “There are regulations and different laws [to abide by], and two or three countries may conflict. But ultimately it’s all coming together.”

The project has a unifying effect, he said, and focusing on solar has been a catalyst for providing a significant part of the globe closer to what’s available in Western societies.

Only 17 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa is online, and barely half could afford enough data to support texting and emails, according to Facebook’s 2015 connectivity report. Additionally, Sub-Saharan Africans with access to cell phones often have to travel to a charging station and pay $91 for the access, when many live on just a few dollars a day.

Akon hopes to expand ALA to 11 more countries by the end of the year, and all of Africa by 2020.

“We just really want to be the generation of execution and be in a position where you deliver. And when you deliver, it’s put out into the world and continued.”

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Bumblebees Are Getting Trapped In A ‘Climate Vise’ As Hotter Temperatures Shrink Habitats

The effects of global warming are shrinking the geographic home range of North American and European bumblebees, and the insects appear unable to adapt to the changing conditions — a troubling discovery for an important group of pollinators critical to the world’s food supply.

Unlike other animal species, the bees are not migrating northward where it is cooler, and their failure to do so is prompting dramatic losses of bumblebee species from the hottest areas across two continents, according to a study published Thursday in Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“Global warming has trapped bumblebee species in a kind of climate vise,” said Jeremy Kerr, professor of biology at the University of Ottawa and one of the study authors. “For species that evolved under cool conditions, like bumblebees, global warming might be the kind of threat that causes many of them to disappear for good.”

For species that evolved under cool conditions, like bumblebees, global warming might be the kind of threat that causes many of them to disappear for good

This could prove disastrous for the planet’s ecosystems and for the human agriculture enterprise, as bees — including bumblebees and honeybees — are vital pollinators of crops and wild plants. Their decline is especially worrisome, given that bees are responsible for pollinating an estimated one-third of the food that humans eat.

“Anyone who has eaten a tomato should thank a bumblebee,” Kerr said. “Bumblebees are essential pollinators for tomatoes and contribute to pollination for many other species, like clover — great for livestock, for instance — strawberries, blueberries, cherries, different kinds of nuts, sunflowers, and the list goes on and on.”

Kerr and his colleagues found that bumblebees have not shifted their geographical ranges toward the polar region or higher elevations in response to increasing temperatures, resulting in range losses of up to 300 kilometers (about 186 miles) in both North America and Europe. It’s a finding that raises disturbing questions about the bees’ ability to survive if the planet continues to warm.

“Climate plays a strong role in affecting where species are found,” Kerr said. “That’s why there aren’t palm trees in the Arctic, for example. When climate changes, the limitations on species’ ranges drop, and they can move to new areas that might have been too cold in the past.”

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CREDIT: Dylan Petrohilos

There are at least two key processes — population growth and the ability to disperse — that determine how quickly species do this, Kerr said.

“Species do better when they can grow their populations very quickly,” he said. “Also, if they can move a long way, they have a better chance of keeping up with shifting climatic conditions. Bumblebees are pretty good dispersers, but we suspect that they may have a very hard time growing their populations quickly enough in the uncertain, northern climates to get properly established. The result is that over the last 35 years or so, the general trend is that they have been stuck along their northern frontiers.”

To investigate bumblebees’ responses to climate change, Kerr and his colleagues first generated a database of geotagged observations of 67 European and North American bumblebee species from 1901 to 2010. They compared changes in individual bee species’ northward movements in recent decades, against baseline bumblebee activity from 1901 to 1974, when the climate was cooler.

To their surprise, bumblebees in recent, warmer decades didn’t shift their ranges north. Simultaneously, bumblebee populations disappeared from the southernmost and hottest parts of their ranges, with bumblebees in those locations moving to higher, cooler elevations, where possible.

Increasingly frequent weather extremes, like heat waves, can hit bumblebee species hard

The researchers also evaluated the roles of factors besides climate change — like land use and pesticide application — in causing bumblebee range losses and found no significant correlation.

“Bumblebee disappearances from warm, southern areas are just as likely when there is no pesticide use and little agriculture,” Kerr said. “But we know that increasingly frequent weather extremes, like heat waves, can hit bumblebee species hard, and climate change poses threats that are already being felt.”

David Inouye, professor emeritus of biology at the University of Maryland, studies the impact of climate change on the environment but was not involved in the study. He said he believes the research provides important new insights into the challenges climate change poses for pollinator species.

“If additional work supports their conclusion, the outlook is not good for this important group of pollinators,” he said. “We know from long-term census data in the Colorado Rocky Mountains that some bumblebee species are moving up in altitude in response to the change climate, but perhaps the shorter distances involved for queens to fly facilitates this kind or response, in contrast to the long-distance movements required to change latitudinal distributions.”

Berry Brosi, assistant professor of environmental sciences at Emory University, who also was not involved in the study, agreed.

“While changing climate has moved bumblebees’ southern range boundaries northward, they have not been able to compensate for this by a northward expansion of their northern range limits,” he said. “There have been some well-documented range contractions in bumblebee species, but this study is the first to my knowledge to show that these range contractions are geographically biased, and have not included concomitant expansions into areas that would seemingly provide good habitat. This finding is troubling, as it implies a lack of resilience of bumblebee communities to climate change.”

Pollinators and plants already appear stressed by climate change. As science is increasingly showing that having a diverse group of pollinators is important for both crops and wild plants, Brosi said that knowing about how climate change will affect bumblebees and other pollinators is particularly important.

“Plants and the animals that pollinate them rely on different environmental cues to tell them when to bloom for plants or emerge from overwintering from pollinators,” he said. “These mis-matches in timing are already throwing some plants and pollinators off. If bumblebees and other important pollinators cannot fluidly change their geographic ranges to keep pace with climate change, that could have further negative implications for the pollination of crops and wild plants.”

[Bumblebees] matter intrinsically; they are beautiful and enrich the world we live in, and they matter practically in terms of food security and the economics of agriculture

Society must try to find ways to mitigate the damage by helping these species establish new colonies, Kerr said.

“In northern and cooler areas, we need to have a thoughtful, international discussion about whether we should be helping bumblebee species establish colonies in areas further north, called ‘assisted migration,'” he said. “This would help bumblebee species maintain their geographical ranges and might lower the risk of their extinction. In southern, warm areas, we need to identify and protect places which have cooler microclimates and better water availability.”

Wild bumblebees should not be confused with managed honeybees, although both are important players in pollination. In recent years, honeybees have been suffering major losses, partially due to the still mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) but also from stressors like varroa mites. Bumblebees, on the other hand, seem unaffected by CCD, Kerr said.

“Bumblebees have a different kind of colony that is way smaller and that usually doesn’t last more than one year,” he said. “They are always being renewed by new queens at the end of each year. So, the underlying biology with bumbles is a bit different.”

James P. Strange, a research entomologist with the Department of Agriculture’s agricultural research service, believes it is unlikely that climate threats to bumblebees will have a damaging impact on the food supply at this point, given that some species are still doing well.

“That doesn’t mean that it is not an ecological tragedy, but we will still be eating blueberries in the future,” he said.

Still, the threat that climate change presents to bumblebees is alarming, Kerr said.

“Bumblebees matter in many ways,” he said. “They matter intrinsically; they are beautiful and enrich the world we live in, and they matter practically in terms of food security and the economics of agriculture. We need the bees, and not just honeybees. We need wild bees at least as much and maybe much more, because wild bees keep wild plants producing fruits and seeds.”

Furthermore, “pollination is an ecosystem service we need to keep,” Kerr added. “Losing bumblebee species from some areas means we are losing options to secure food production. We should not be cavalier about the life support systems we rely on. There is no backup plan if ecosystem services are impaired by our own disregard for our well-being.”

Marlene Cimons, a former Los Angeles Times Washington reporter, is a freelance writer who specializes in science, health, and the environment.

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