Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 125

July 2, 2015

This Startup Wants To Fix The Way The World Eats, One Genetically Engineered Cow At A Time

On the surface, James West and Warren Gill might not seem like the most natural pair to team up in an effort to overhaul the way the world eats.


West, an associate professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, has spent most of his career working with human diseases — particularly lung diseases — and genetic engineering.


Gill, a professor as well, is less interested in human health. Born on a Tennessee cattle farm, Gill has worked as a rancher and cattle specialist for over three decades, managing his family farm since 2000 and serving as department chair of the Middle Tennessee State University agriculture department for the past eight years.


In 2012, out of the blue, Gill received a phone call from West, asking for a meeting. West came into Gill’s office at MTSU and explained the research he was doing with genetic engineering, like editing genes to give animals the same diseases as humans and using bio-markers to find both beneficial and deleterious genes. Gill was intrigued, and the two set out working together to create a gene test for copper deficiency — something that has long plagued cattle herds throughout Tennessee.


The next year, Gill attended a conference in Orlando, where he heard other farmers and cattle ranchers talk about the impact of climate change on livestock. It had been nearly two years since the summer of 2011 — a particularly hot summer where heat waves claimed the lives of thousands of cattle across the Midwest. Ranchers and farmers were beginning to think about raising cattle in warmer climates, and wondering what could be done to strengthen their herds against rising temperatures.


Can you make me a white Angus?

They had been trying to increase heat tolerance through traditional breeding methods, by breeding animals with lighter coats, or by crossing heat-tolerant breeds with especially productive breeds like Angus, but weren’t having much luck.


When Gill got back to Tennessee from the conference, he asked West a question.


“Can you make me a white Angus?”


West thought about it for a minute. A cautious person, he didn’t want to promise Gill something he couldn’t deliver.


But after a few days of researching, West came back with an answer.


“I think we can do it,” he told Gill, and Climate Adaptive Genetics — the project to genetically engineer a heat-tolerant, high-performance Angus — was born.


How Do You Double Meat Production Without Doubling Resources?
[image error]

Black angus is one of the most popular, productive breeds of beef cattle, but it’s also not very heat tolerant.


CREDIT: Shutterstock



Forty years ago, beef ruled the American diet, with each person eating an average of 91 pounds of beef a year in 1976. Over the last four decades, however, despite the influx of low-carb and Paleo diet fads, beef consumption in the United States has steadily declined. In 2012, the average American consumed just 52 pounds of beef a year, down 43-percent from the 1976 high.


But while beef consumption in the United States has fallen, global beef consumption is on the rise. People that live in developing countries tend to eat much less meat and animal products than those in developing countries, but as the global economy continues to grow — spurred by advances in technology, trade liberalization, and population growth among other factors — meat consumption in developing countries continues to rise.


To environmentalists, an increasing demand for meat is a huge problem, because meat production has a huge environmental footprint. Ruminants, like cows, digest food by first fermenting it in a specialized stomach, a process that helps extract nutrients from tough plants but also releases methane as a byproduct. Methane is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas, some 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over a 100 year period. Globally, the livestock sector is responsible for 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and cattle produce 65 percent of the livestock sector’s emissions.


The livestock sector is responsible for 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s not just cow gas that is responsible for those emissions — there’s the fossil fuel burned throughout in the supply chain, the methane released from cow waste stored in temporary pits or lagoons, the carbon lost when vast forests are felled to make way for livestock grazing. There’s the soil degradation that comes from grazing — since 1945, the United Nations Environment Program estimates that 20 percent of the world’s grazing lands have become degraded. And, in an increasingly water-scarce world, there’s the strain livestock production places on water resources, using eight percent of the world’s freshwater.


But livestock production is also economically beneficial, especially for poor communities. According to the FAO, livestock production creates livelihoods for 987 million poor people living in rural areas — roughly 36 percent of the world’s poor. In 2014, Slate’s Laura Anderson took a look at what might happen if everyone suddenly stopped eating meat. There would be instant good news: the decline in antibiotic-resistant infections, a surge in the availability of new land, a sharp drop in livestock-related greenhouse gases. But there would also be negative impacts: a decline in economic security for farmers who don’t have an alternative to livestock, and a drop in food security.


That leaves food security and livestock specialists with a conundrum: for environmental reasons, we can’t keep producing cattle the way we’ve been doing it, and while we can work to reduce the consumption of animals, we can’t cease cattle production completely. To meet increasing demands of population growth, agricultural production is actually going to need to grow by 60 percent by 2050, while enduring higher temperatures, competing for less land, and facing demands that the industry consume fewer natural resources.


The livestock industry is a driving factor in climate change — but can it adapt to a changing climate?


Finding — And Preserving — The Right Gene

Irene Hoffman, who leads the Animal Genetic Resources Branch of the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization, thinks it can. The key, she says, is using genetic resources to make livestock more efficient — not just more productive, but better at maintaining productivity in extreme environments.


“Most of the breeds that are really the high-output breeds that we see today, they come from temperate areas,” Hoffman told ThinkProgress. “If you breed an animal, like we have done, to have a high performance, this brings with it some physiological changes. A body can only do so much with dealing with stress and high performance. That means, naturally, if you dedicate a lot of your body energy into the production of one product, other body functions reduce.”


The breeds that dominate the U.S. cattle markets — Angus and Herefords — belong to a subspecies of cattle known as Bos taurus. They’re productive breeds, effective at converting feed to muscle mass and exhibit vigorous growth from birth onwards. But that productivity comes at a price, as they’re not well-adapted to living in hot, humid conditions.


In tropical areas, cattle belonging to the subspecies Bos indicus are more widely used. Popular Bos indicus breeds like the Brahman or Nelore are useful for ranchers in hotter parts of the world because they are more heat-tolerant than their Bos taurus counterparts, but they take longer to reach puberty and yield less meat, milk, and offspring than a Bos taurus.


[image error]

Brahman, a breed of Bos indicus cattle, is heat resistant but not very productive.


CREDIT: Shutterstock



But outside of the big names — the Angus and Brahmans of the commercial livestock world — are some 800 recognized breeds of cattle. Most of these are local breeds that are often better suited to the environment, whether through heightened heat tolerance or increased disease resistance.


But local breeds are disappearing, as the livestock industry has long been dominated by systematic breeding that places preference on a few traits at the expense of many. According to the FAO, up to 30 percent of global livestock breeds have populations below 1,000 and are at risk of extinction — and some local breeds could go extinct without anyone knowing if they possess genetics that might be especially good for climate adaptation.


“We can only do genetic improvement on traits we measure,” Alison Van Eenennaam, an animal genomics and biotechnology cooperative extension specialist with UC Davis’ Department of Animal Science told ThinkProgress. “We keep great track of traits that are important economically, like weaning weight and marbling. Where we don’t have good databases is, for example, resilience. How do you measure that? How do you rank that?”


A few places around the world are trying to tackle that issue head on, by creating genetic databases and genebanks in order to categorize and preserve the traits of rapidly disappearing livestock breeds. In 1987, the FAO launched its Domestic Animal Diversity Information System, meant to compile information about specific breed traits around the world. As of 2013, the database contained information about 12,345 breed populations from 182 countries around the world. But that information tends to skew in favor of breeds from developed countries — in developing countries, research about livestock traits tends to be less advanced, making it more difficult to correctly categorize traits, or know what traits might be useful in different environmental scenarios.


“For developing countries, we are very much at the descriptive state. We only know that these animals perform under extremely harsh environments with very high temperatures and not enough feed and not much water and they still produce something,” Hoffman said. “That’s a very indirect way of measuring performance.”


And categorizing traits is just one step — after a useful trait is identified, it still needs to be preserved. That’s where places like the National Animal Germplasm Program come in. Started in 1999, the NAGP is like a seed bank for livestock; throughout the halls of its repository in Fort Collins, Colorado, are hundreds of thousands of samples from about 25,000 animals around the world — frozen semen, embryos, ovaries, and tissue that could be used to reconstitute livestock populations or simply lend a useful gene to an intrepid breeder.


If you breed an animal, like we have done, to have a high performance, this brings with it some physiological changes.

West and Gill didn’t have to go to the frozen halls of Fort Collins or search the FAO’s database to find the genetic traits they needed for their white Angus — they just had to cross the Tennessee border and head to an Alabama farm, where a breeder had a few of the white-haired Silver Galloway cattle they needed.


But Gill worries that, with the disappearance of local and heritage breeds, finding the right traits to create a robust cow might become more and more difficult.


“What if somebody had done away with the Silver Galloway? We’d have been stuck,” he said. “Thank goodness for the people that were wise enough to keep these around. Who knows what’s going to be important in 50 to 100 years.”


Creating A Climate-Adapted Cow

For a long time, Bos taurus’s poor performance under heat stress wasn’t a pressing issue for the livestock industry. Large commercial operations have been able to mitigate heat stress issues through things like fans, sprinklers, and building shade structures. In places like South Dakota that might see periods of extreme heat for only a brief period of time, measures like these can often be enough to keep cattle safe from heat stress, Joe Cassady, head of animal science at South Dakota State University, told ThinkProgress.


In places like Texas or Louisiana, however, where heat and humidity happen more frequently, external measures might not be enough — and, if climate change brings increasingly long stretches of heat to the American Midwest, external management might not be enough there, either. In 2011, one of the hottest summers on record sent temperatures rocketing across the Central and Eastern United States, causing the death of thousands of cattle. To make matters worse, during periods of extreme heat, people tend to use more power. This places excessive strain on the grid that can lead to power outages, shutting off things like sprinklers and fans.


Heat tolerance in cattle is an incredibly complicated matter. Scientists and ranchers have an idea of traits that can contribute to heat tolerance — metabolic rates, ability to shed their coats, hair color — but there is no silver bullet. “Physiologically, there are no completely isolated reactions to heat,” researcher W. Bianca wrote in 1961, “because of the relationships existing between the various body processes.” Several independent studies, however, have managed to link heat tolerance — at least in part — to the the color of a cow’s hair. A 2011 study in Australia, for example, found that cattle with tan and white-colored coats had significantly lower body temperatures, even while in full sunlight without shade, than black and red-haired counterparts.


The laws of physics do not cease to exist in cattle.

Part of what makes an Angus so heat intolerant is its black hide and black hair, which trap heat like a dark shirt on a hot summer day. “The laws of physics do not cease to exist in cattle,” Cassady said. “Black absorbs sunlight to a greater degree than other cattle, so black hided black haired cattle are going to be more susceptible to heat stress.”


So when Warren Gill asked James West to make him a white Angus, he wasn’t just interested in aesthetic properties — the two believe that through gene editing, they can create an Angus with a white, slick coat and a protective black hide that would allow ranchers in tropical areas to raise productive Angus cattle in warmer climates.


“That ought to increase the point at which Angus begin to feel heat stress from 75 degrees [Farenheit] to 90 degrees,” West told ThinkProgress. “It makes the cattle more comfortable, it reduces the need for water, and it reduces the need to clear land.”


And, perhaps best of all in West’s estimation, gene editing could create a heat-tolerant cow much more quickly than traditional breeding. To create a white-haired, black-hided Angus, West and Gill simply take skin cells from a champion Angus and alter its DNA, adding the genetic traits of a slick coat from an African cattle and white coat from a Scottish Silver Galloway cattle. To edit the DNA, they use a technique known as “transcription activator-like effector nuclease” — TALEN, for short — which damages existing DNA and uses the DNA that has the intended change — in this case, the white hair of the Silver Galloway — to repair the damage. The skin cell is then turned into an embryo, through cloning, and implanted into a female cow and carried to term.


“What we’re doing here is not something you couldn’t do with breeding, but it would be a 40 or 50 year breeding project,” West said. In contrast, gene editing could create a slick, white-haired champion Angus in a single generation.


Gill thinks about it in slightly different terms, recalling his grandfather, who was a master horse breeder.


“He was always looking for those traits that made the horse better for pulling, or running, or a gentle ride. Essentially we’re not doing anything different. We’re trying to find those traits that help the animals, improve the quality of animals life, and make things a little easier for animals and humans,” he said. “We can just do it a little quicker than my grandfather could do it.”


So How Close Are We To Certified (White) Angus Beef?

If today’s estimates are right, in 50 to 100 years, the world will be both hotter and more crowded — and ranchers will be pushed to producing more livestock with fewer natural resources.


That’s a challenge that West thinks the livestock industry can — and should — tackle.


“We’ve got to be able to produce the protein that people want without tearing up the planet to do it,” West said. “The only way to make that work, without destroying the rest of the wild spaces on the planet, is to be able to produce twice as many animals on the same land, and the only way you can do that is by improving the animals themselves.”


But Gill and West still have a number of hurdles to jump through before they see their dream of a white Angus become a reality. First, there’s actually implanting the embryos, which will happen simultaneously in labs in the United States and Brazil.


If that goes according to plan, and 270 days later two white Angus calves are born, the cattle will face another unprecedented obstacle: obtaining approval from the FDA, which has never approved a genetically engineered animal. The FDA released its regulatory guidelines for genetically engineered animals in 2009, before gene editing showed real commercial potential — as such, it’s unclear if the FDA’s existing guidelines even cover gene editing.


Gene editing, while more precise than other genetic engineering techniques like gene guns, still isn’t one-hundred percent foolproof. Michael Hansen, a senior scientist with the Consumers Union — the policy arm of Consumer Reports — worries that gene editing can lead to off-target consequences, where sequences of DNA identical to the sequence that the scientist wants to replace are also unintentionally deleted during the editing process. Hansen told ThinkProgress that it’s impossible to know what consequences would occur when unintentionally deletion and replacement happens during gene editing, because it’s so specific to the particular DNA sequence being edited.


We’ve got to be able to produce the protein that people want without tearing up the planet to do it.

Another hurdle — perhaps the most important — will be proving that a white-haired, slick-coated Angus really does have better heat tolerance than a black Angus would. West and Gill are confident, but other animal scientists worry that the solution might be too simple.


“Transgenesis works best if few, very well known genes are involved. Changing the color of a breed … is relatively easy and has been done by conventional breeding, as most colors follow simple Mendelian genetics,” Hoffman said. “However, climate change adaptation in general involves many traits and genes that influence morphology, physiology and behavior of the animal; they are more difficult to select for.”


Van Eenennaam is also skeptical that white hair is the only thing necessary to make cow more tolerant to heat.


“Conceptually, I’m not sure that having black fur isn’t the only thing that makes [an Angus] less heat tolerant,” she said.


Gill and West acknowledge that there are undoubtedly a complex mix of factors that make one cow more heat tolerant than another, but say that it’s important to start making changes somewhere.


“At this point, we are focusing on hair color, skin color, and hair length, knowing perfectly well that there are many factors involved in climate adaptability,” Gill said. “We will take those into consideration as time goes on, but you gotta crawl before you run.”


But even if West and Gill can successfully implant the edited embryos, obtain FDA approval, and prove that the white Angus truly is more heat tolerant, they’d likely face an uphill battle for consumer acceptance, at least in the United States. To qualify as — one of the most recognized brands of beef in the country — a cow either has to trace its DNA back to Angus parentage, or be at least 51 percent black — raising some question as to whether or not West and Gill’s white Angus could technically qualify as a certified Angus. Even if it does qualify, the public might be wary of an animal created through gene editing, even when those genes come from the same species (West initially wanted to use a gene for white hair from a Leghorn chicken, but thought better of it).


West and Gill hope that gene editing will be more readily accepted than genetically modified products because gene editing is so similar to traditional breeding, just on a faster timeline. Gill also sees a market in places like Brazil or India, which haven’t been able to use productive breeds like Angus due to their lack of heat tolerance.


“We have hot climates already and billions of people in those hot climates that would like to have these quality animals,” Gill said. “Climate change may have spurred some of our thinking, but that probably is not as important as feeding the world.”



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AgricultureClimate AdaptationClimate ChangeLivestock


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Published on July 02, 2015 05:00

July 1, 2015

Rand Paul Wants To Sell Off America’s Public Lands

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.

At a campaign stop in Nevada on Monday, Kentucky Senator and Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul called for the federal government to sell off and privatize America’s national forests and other public lands.


As part of his “Stand With Rand” tour, Sen. Paul told an audience in the Nevada town of Mesquite that the federal government is a “bully” and that national public lands should be under state and private control, as reported by CNN.


“You run into problems now with the federal government being, you know, this bully — this big huge government bully,” Paul said. “You would have less of that if you had more local ownership of the land. State ownership would be better, but even better would be private ownership.”


A notable guest in the audience was outlaw Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who infamously refused to pay more than $1 million in grazing fees owed to taxpayers, resulting in a dangerous standoff in April 2014 with federal land management officials. Bundy is also widely known for his racist views, anti-government ideology and refusal to acknowledge the authority of the federal government, in particular over public lands.


Following his speech, Sen. Paul had a 45 private minute meeting with Cliven Bundy and his family focused primarily on public lands and states’ rights.


“In general, I think we’re in tune with each other,” Bundy told the Associated Press of Paul. “I don’t think we need to ask Washington, D.C. for this land. It’s our land.”


Since he gained national media attention for his standoff with federal officials and subsequent racist comments, Bundy has helped fuel the extremist movement to discard America’s public lands in Nevada. In April, Bundy and his supporters rallied around legislation known as the “Bundy Bill,” which would have authorized the state of Nevada to seize the public lands within its borders, prohibited any use without the state’s permission, and given county commissioners authority to sell off public lands.


Although legal experts agree that the “Bundy Bill” and similar legislative proposals are unconstitutional, efforts to seize and sell off America’s public lands have been introduced in ten other western states in addition to Nevada. With significant support from the oil and gas industry and Koch-backed organizations, other Republican members of Congress and 2016 contenders, including Ted Cruz, have also echoed Bundy’s rhetoric.


Monday’s speech is not the first time that Paul has been supportive of Bundy and called for state and private ownership of America’s public lands. Last year, Paul criticized the Department of the interior’s response to Bundy’s standoff, saying that he agreed that “the states and the individuals in the state should own these lands.”


Right-wing support of Bundy and his allies has continued to grow as well. Utah Governor Herbert recently contributed $10,000 of his own money to support the legal defense of a county commissioner, Phil Lyman, who knowingly broke federal laws by leading an illegal Bundy-endorsed ATV ride through archaeological sites and Native American burial grounds on U.S. public lands. While Bundy has yet to face legal action, Lyman was found guilty in May and owes more than $40,000 in legal expenses.


As Bundy continues to become an icon of the movement to sell off public lands, he still owes American taxpayers more than a million dollars in grazing fees and many are still calling for him and his armed militia to be brought to justice. Department of the Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said publicly last week that Bundy would be “held accountable.”


“The safety of our law enforcement officers and the safety of people that represent land managers at every level is of paramount importance to me,” Secretary Jewell told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “I am confident this issue is going to be appropriately resolved.”



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Cliven BundyPublic LandsRand Paul


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Published on July 01, 2015 13:46

Obama Administration Deals Blow To Shell’s Arctic Drilling Plans

In what’s been called a “major blow” to Shell’s Arctic drilling plans, the Obama administration released a new permitting decision Tuesday which found that, due to wildlife protections, the company can’t simultaneously bore two wells into the Chukchi Sea.


The oil company appears undeterred, saying it still intends to drill.


The Department of Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service sent what’s called a Letter of Authorization to Shell, saying the company’s two drilling rigs must maintain a buffer of at least 15 miles between them in order to minimize the number of Pacific walruses and polar bears that could be harmed by exploratory drilling activities. Right now, the rigs are proposed to operate simultaneously only nine miles apart.


The new requirement aligns with existing regulations under the Marine Mammal Protection Act to protect marine species from harassment and displacement by industrial noise, but poses a significant restriction to Shell because the well sites identified in the company’s drilling plan lie well within 15 miles of each other. As a result, Shell must reassess its plan for simultaneous operations of its two contracted drilling rigs, since only one of its wells can be drilled at a time.


Shell had planned for simultaneous well drilling this summer because such operations can only proceed before sea ice begins to form during the Arctic autumn. Tuesday’s action by FWS halves the rate at which Shell will be allowed to drill its exploratory wells this summer, should it secure its remaining outstanding federal permit for drilling operations from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.


The decision from FWS comes shortly after lawyers with the public interest organization Earthjustice last week uncovered the regulatory discrepancy in Shell’s proposed exploration plan. In a letter delivered to the White House Tuesday morning that highlighted the finding, five Democratic Senators said Shell’s Arctic drilling proposal represented a “clear violation” of wildlife protection rules, one that “will negatively impact the resting, feeding, and breeding grounds of walruses.”


Walrus, a species already affected by the impacts of climate change in the Arctic, are an important subsistence resource for Alaska Native coastal communities.


In their letter, the Senators urged President Obama to “follow [his] own agencies’ guidelines to protect wildlife, indigenous peoples, and limit greenhouse gas emissions” and “to rescind Shell’s conditional Exploration Permit in the Chukchi Sea.”


Drilling for oil in the Arctic is strongly opposed by environmentalists and some Alaska Native tribal groups who maintain that there is no proven safe method of drilling in the Arctic’s harsh climate, or of cleaning up an oil spill in an area with little to no infrastructure to support spill response. Asked during a twitter chat why his Administration is allowing Arctic drilling while trying to combat climate change, President Obama said the administration “can’t prevent oil exploration completely” in the Arctic, and is “setting the highest possible standards” for safety.


The legal oversight highlighted in the Senators’ letter is the latest in a string of mistakes by Shell in its pursuit of Arctic oil. The company’s last attempt at exploratory drilling in the Arctic in 2012 included failures of key oil spill response equipment during testing and numerous felony safety and environmental law violations by a subcontractor resulting in more than $12 million in fines. Finally, when Shell sought to haul its massive Kulluk drilling vessel out of Alaskan waters in December that year to avoid state tax liability, the rig ran aground after severe weather caused it to snap its tow line. U.S. Coast Guard aviators evacuated Shell’s crew from the rig before it washed up on an uninhabited island.


As of last weekend, Shell had already begun positioning its drilling vessels in Alaskan harbors in expectation of receiving its remaining federal permits.


Elise Shulman is a communications associate for the Oceans Program at the Center for American Progress. Shiva Polefka, also of the Center, is a Policy Analyst for the Oceans Program.



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Published on July 01, 2015 12:24

Western Europe Shatters Temperature Records During Multi-Day Heat Wave

Temperatures sailed across Western Europe Wednesday, as Britain recorded its hottest July day ever — 98.1 degrees Fahrenheit at Heathrow Airport. Across the English Channel, Paris saw its second-hottest day on record, with a high of 103.4 degrees Fahrenheit.


The high temperatures are part of a multi-day heat wave that broke records across Spain earlier this week, with Madrid setting a new June record high Monday with a temperature of 103.5 degrees Fahrenheit.


Thousands lost power in western France Tuesday, as high temperatures caused power equipment to malfunction in Brittany and the Pays de la Loire. According to the Guardian, state authorities called the situation “exceptional,” noting that its unique for high temperatures to have such an impact on power equipment. Early Wednesday morning, high temperatures caused another power cut in western France that left 120,000 homes in the town of Vannes without electricity.


Governments across the continent urged residents to take precautions, warning that the heat could pose serious health risks to young children, the elderly, and those with preexisting health conditions. In August of 2003, a heat wave killed more than 71,000 across Europe, according to statistics from the International Disaster Database, making it the deadliest heat wave in history. France alone saw more than 14,000 fatalities, mostly isolated elderly. The country has since implemented emergency heat wave measures, including registries for isolated, “at-risk” individuals, and air-conditioned spaces open to the public. Because of emergency measures like these, officials don’t expect this heat wave to be as deadly as the one in 2003.


Europe isn’t the only continent to see record high temperatures in recent weeks. Last month, a heat wave in India led to more than 2,300 deaths, making it the fifth deadliest in world history. Last week, a heat wave in Pakistan killed more than 1,200, with temperatures reaching 113 degrees Fahrenheit. Morgues in the country literally overflowed as officials struggled to deal with the crisis, which was the eighth deadliest heat wave ever recorded.


In North America, the Pacific Northwest — typically temperate, even in the summer — saw record-breaking heat last week, with temperatures soaring above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some areas. Walla Walla, in Eastern Washington, hit 113 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday, breaking a June record and tying the third hottest day ever recorded for the city. The heat is expected to stick around the Northwest and northern Rockies into next week, with highs in the 90s and low 100s expected in areas west of the Continental Divide.


South America also saw record-breaking temperatures last month, with the Colombian city of Urumitia setting a national June record with a high of 107.6 degrees Fahrenheit on June 27.


While it’s still too soon to connect any of the recent heat waves to climate change, scientists agree that global warming and deadly heat events are likely linked.


“Attribution of events to climate change is still emerging as a science, but recent and numerous studies continue to speak to heat waves having strong links to warming climate,” Marshall Shepherd, University of Georgia atmospheric sciences program director, told ThinkProgress during India’s deadly heat wave.


A recent study published in Nature Climate Change found that 75 percent of the world’s extremely hot days can be attributed to climate change.



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Climate ChangeEuropeHeat Waves


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Published on July 01, 2015 12:02

In Oklahoma, Fracking Companies Can Now Be Sued Over Earthquakes

If you live in Oklahoma, and you’ve been injured by an earthquake that was possibly triggered by oil and gas operations, you can now sue the oil company for damages.


That’s the effect of a ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Court, which on Tuesday rejected efforts by the oil industry to prevent earthquake injury lawsuits from being heard in court. Instead of being decided by juries and judges, the industry was arguing that cases should be resolved by the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, a state regulatory agency.


The state’s high court rejected that argument.


“The Commission, although possessing many of the powers of a court of record, is without the authority to entertain a suit for damages,” the opinion reads. “Private tort actions, therefore, are exclusively within the jurisdiction of district courts.”


The ruling is a win for Sandra Ladra, the woman at the center of the lawsuit. Ladra claims that on Nov. 5, 2011, she was watching television with her family when a 5.6 magnitude intraplate earthquake struck, causing huge chunks of rock to fall from her fireplace and chimney. Some of the rocks fell onto Ladra’s legs and into her lap, causing what the lawsuit describes as “significant injury.”


Ladra claimed $75,000 in damages against Tulsa-based oil and gas company New Dominion LLC, and Cleveland, Oklahoma-based Spess Oil Co. for allegedly causing the earthquake. According to the lawsuit, the companies directly caused the earthquake through wastewater injection, a common process in which oil companies take the leftover water used to drill wells and inject it deep into the ground.


There is some science to back up Ladra’s claim. A joint study by the University of Oklahoma, Columbia University, and the U.S. Geological Survey linked the 2011 earthquake to a wastewater injection. However, the Oklahoma Geological Survey has disputed that study, asserting that the earthquake was more likely the result of natural causes.


Tuesday’s ruling by the state Supreme Court does not say whether the oil companies are in fact responsible for the earthquake, much less the injuries Ladra sustained. It does, however, give Ladra the opportunity to make her case before a judge and a jury, instead of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which is run by three elected Republican commissioners.


“It’s a significant development,” Poe Leggette, a partner at the law firm BakerHostetler, told the Wall Street Journal. “Any time you have an issue like this that is going to become subject to a potential jury trial, it clearly increases risk to the companies.”


The issue of whether oil companies could be held responsible for earthquakes has been closely watched in Oklahoma, where seismic activity has been steadily on the rise since the start of the fracking boom there in 2009. Right now, the state averages about 10 small earthquakes per day — on June 26, there were 25 quakes. The Oklahoma Geological Survey recognizes this is unprecedented, saying “[n]o documented cases of induced seismicity have ever come close to the current earthquake rates or the area over which the earthquakes are occurring.”


Though the link between earthquakes and wastewater injection keeps getting stronger and stronger, it’s not yet definitive. Thus far, the research has lacked data on sub-surface pressure, which is rarely accessible. However, if available, that data could take the science further than merely noting correlations between when earthquakes happen, when wastewater injection happens, and where faults are located.


Most scientists do increasingly believe that the wastewater injection process is causing the increase in quakes. According to the research so far, the large amount of water that is injected into the ground after a well is fracked can change the state of stress on existing fault lines to the point of failure, causing earthquakes. Wastewater injection is used in both conventional drilling and fracking, but happens much more during fracking because of the large amounts of water fracking requires.



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EarthquakesFrackingOklahoma


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Published on July 01, 2015 07:33

The West Is Literally On Fire, And The Impacts Could Be Widespread

As expected, the 2015 wildfire season has meant more bad news for drought-stricken Western states. As of June 30, 45 wildfires large active wildfires burned from Alaska down to Arizona and as far west as Colorado. Wildfires in Southern California had driven thousands from their homes, while fires in Alaska have burned more than one million acres this year.


Separate from human interference, wildfires are a completely natural occurrence that help a forest ecosystem with regeneration and growth. But decades of fire suppression tactics combined with climate change have provided wildfires with an abundance of dry, dead fuel, leading to more fires and a longer fire season. Fighting wildfires also comes with a large price tag, with an average of $1.13 billion spent on wildfire suppression each year. With climate change, that price could increase to $62.5 billion annually by 2050.


But wildfires impact more than just forests and the economy — they can have far-reaching impacts on public health, water quality, and climate change.


“These cascading impacts are the things that keep me up at night,” Jason Funk, a senior climate scientist for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told ThinkProgress. “We haven’t been looking at them so much.”


Fires Can Cause Choking Pollution That Rivals Beijing

Wildfires come with smoke — and as residential developments continue to blur the boundaries between forest and urban, communities are increasingly facing health risks associated with smoke pollution.


“In the West, we have a lot of development and people living in the wildland-urban interface, and they’re in a position to be exposed to smoke and wildfire risk when it happens,” Funk said. “It’s rather difficult to predict where these smoke plumes are going to end up.”


These cascading impacts are the things that keep me up at night

In 2013, Climate Central looked at air pollution related to 11 of the largest Western fires from the past 12 years, and found that in nine cases, the worst air pollution day of the year in a nearby urban area was caused by a wildfire. Fires that burned within 50 to 100 miles of a city often resulted in air quality five to 15 times worse than normal. And, on at least two different occasions, wildfires burning in Southern California caused air quality in cities like Los Angeles and San Diego to resemble that of Beijing.


The biggest threat from wildfire smoke comes from the fine particles present in the smoke, which can enter into the lungs through the eyes, mouth, and nose, or aggravate preexisting health conditions like lung or heart disease. In 2007, during a period of sustained wildfires near San Diego, six area hospitals saw a 25 percent increase in respiratory syndrome diagnosis, and a 50 percent increase in asthma diagnoses.


As climate change accelerates snowpack loss across the West and drives up temperatures, wildfire seasons are expected to increase in length, with wildfires becoming more numerous and potentially more intense. That means more days of the year where communities could be exposed to lowered air quality due to wildfire smoke.


Eroding Soil Can Pollute Already Depleted Water Sources

As fires burn through forests, surface vegetation — trees, bushes, even leaf coverings — also burn, exposing soil to erosion. Soil erosion makes it easier for sediment and pollutants to make their way into water sources, diminishing water quality for fish and humans alike.


“It’s easier for water to runoff of a burned area than a forest area, because forests act as sponges,” Sheila Murphy, a research hydrologist with the National Research Program at the U.S. Geological Survey, told ThinkProgress. “Immediately after a fire, there’s an impermeable layer [of soil], and there’s no vegetation or trees to slow [runoff] down.”


According to the University of Wyoming, the annual volume of runoff in the year after a fire can be as much as 30 percent more than the year before, and impacts of soil erosion from wildfires can be seen as far as 100 miles from the actual site of the burn. High-intensity fires tend to impact soil erosion more than low-intensity fires, because they destroy greater amounts of surface cover.


Probably all through the Pacific Northwest we’re going to see an impact on fisheries

Streams or watersheds that are located within the area of a burn can experience higher levels of sediment runoff after a wildfire, especially when the fire is followed by a major precipitation event — even if that storm comes months after the fire has finished burning. As soil runoff increases in streams and watersheds, fish are often the first to be negatively impacted — ash from the fire, for instance, can cause a stream’s pH levels to increase, or clog a fish’s gills. According to the USGS, many native fish species have evolved within a particular fire regime, and are capable of surviving natural wildfire cycles. But with wildfires becoming more common — and with the season stretching on longer — species could have a difficult time adapting, something that Funk says could spell trouble for both fish and fisheries.


“Probably all through the Pacific Northwest we’re going to see an impact on fisheries,” he said.


As sediment from increased runoff moves farther downstream, it can eventually end up in reservoirs, forcing municipalities to spend more on water treatment in order to remove sediment and pollutants before the water can be used as drinking water. Sediment from fires often contains high levels of pollutants — like nitrates leeched from burned plant tissues — which in high concentrations can be harmful to human health. Following the 2010 Fourmile Canyon Fire in Colorado, high-intensity precipitation events that happened as much as 10 months after the wildfire caused significant changes in water quality that, according to the USGS, had “the potential to profoundly influence downstream water treatment processes, water-supply reservoirs, and aquatic ecosystems.”


“In the western U.S., part of the problem is we have limited water resources and we use up a lot of our water already, so there’s already stress on the water,” Murphy said. “Wildfire is an added stressor, in a way.”


Alaskan Fires Are Especially Bad News For Climate Change

In 2009, a multi-author study published in Science found that forest fires have a “substantial positive feedback on the climate system” — that the burning of forests releases carbon into the atmosphere, hastening climate change, which in turn impacts wildfire season.


But if longer, more numerous wildfires in the lower 48 are bad, scientists worry that an increase in Alaskan wildfires could be even worse. That’s because Alaska is home to vast tracts of permafrost — soil, rocks, and dead organic material that remain frozen all year. Permafrost stores a lot of carbon (some 1,400 gigatons, more than is currently in the Earth’s atmosphere), and a lot of Alaska sits on top of permafrost — about 85 percent of the state sits on top of some permafrost.


Here's an #AlaskaDivisionofForestry map of the 319 active fires burning in Alaska as of Sunday morning. pic.twitter.com/zaTodSFEaI


— AK Forestry (@AK_Forestry) June 29, 2015



As of Sunday, more than 300 wildfires were actively burning in Alaska — a fast start to the wildfire season that could foreshadow a larger trend. According to a new report by Climate Central, the number of wildfires in Alaska has increased dramatically over the past decade.


“This is an area that has not seen regular fire for a very long time, maybe 5000 or more years according to some studies,” Todd Sanford, a climate scientist at Climate Central, told ThinkProgress in an email. “Scientists, in particular, are keeping an eye on the vast stores of carbon in these areas and how wildfire and warming in the region may put these at risk of being emitted and contributing to further warming.”


This is a risk that won’t be going away anytime soon

A lot of that carbon is stored in permafrost — and Sanford worries that increased wildfire activity could accelerate its melting.


“Wildfires can burn off the top vegetation layer that provides insulation for the colder layers of the permafrost. Also, wildfires can char and blacken the surface,” Sanford said. “These darker surfaces absorb more sunlight leading to increased surface warming, which can further accelerate thawing.”


As global warming continues to alter the Arctic climate — which has been warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, on average — wildfires in Alaska could become the new normal, a change that could have global ramifications.


“The risk of wildfires appears to be on the rise and future projections have a great deal more warming in store for Alaska in the coming decades meaning this is a risk that won’t be going away anytime soon,” Sanford said. “Fires in Alaska also have the potential to impact areas well beyond Alaska through degraded air quality and carbon emissions.”



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June 30, 2015

Bill Gates Plans To Invest $2 Billion In New Renewable Technology. That’s Not A Great Idea.

Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and the richest man in the world, plans to double his billion-dollar investments in green technology in an effort to stave off catastrophic climate change, he told The Financial Times.


“Climate change is a big problem, but it’s one that if you do the right types of [research and development] you can actually avoid the ill effects,” Gates said.


Gates wants to expand his investment in alternatives to fossil fuels — and he wants alternatives even to our current renewable options. He said he thinks new technology is the only way to get truly low-cost clean energy, FT reported.


It’s true, renewable energy is often criticized for being too expensive (even though in many places, solar and wind are cost-competitive with traditional fossil fuel sources). But experts on solar — the fastest growing source of renewable energy — say what pushes costs down is not a “breakthrough” technology. It might not sound exciting, but it’s changes in policy and financial innovations that spur industry growth and could be the difference between transforming the energy grid soon, or too late.


Luckily, we already have scalable, workable technology for renewable energy. Expanding and improving those will get us further, faster than the “miracle” Gates called for.


The Future Is Now, Not Later


Most scientists agree that if we do not curb carbon emissions dramatically, there will be irreversible, catastrophic climate change by 2036. But it takes about 30 years for a new technology to enter the energy space, solar expert Jigar Shah told ThinkProgress.


That’s because unlike consumer technology, such as a phone or personal computer, electricity is a giant system. Shah likens adding new electricity sources to rolling out a new kind of asphalt that would make roads last three times as long. The product is undoubtedly better, but how long would it take for all governments and companies around the world to switch over? Furthermore, electricity — more so than asphalt — needs to be reliable, so it has a high barrier to the market.


People like Gates “are so used to consumer tech that they don’t understand how infrastructure works,” Shah said.


“The only way to solve climate change is a trillion dollars at a time,” Shah said, referencing the huge costs of transitioning to clean energy. “And if you’re going to bring a trillion dollars of capital [into a technology], think about how much testing you demand.”


Meanwhile, Gates has invested in nuclear recycling and solar chemical power — technologies that are just now being developed.


Solar photovoltaic technology has been around for about four decades, and wind power has been in use for more than a century, so maybe it’s not surprising that in the first three months of this year, solar and wind accounted for 70 percent of the United States’ new energy generating capacity. Maybe it’s surprising that it took this long.


How Renewable Energy Gets Big

No matter how effective a technology is, it will only take off under certain conditions. Policy and financing might not sound sexy, but they work — they are what’s needed for renewable energy to proliferate worldwide.


For instance, a 2004 policy in Germany is widely credited with lowering solar panel prices worldwide. The feed-in tariff — under which renewable energy producers are compensated for the electricity they put on the grid, cost-adjusted by how expensive the source is. It was a national policy, and industry could depend on it. These types of pro-renewable, dependable policies can really make things happen.


“The national feed-in tariff in Germany was really the tipping point that allowed the solar industry globally to drive costs down,” the Department of Energy’s Minh Li told ThinkProgress.


This graph shows the growth in solar panel production worldwide.


[image error]


It’s also worth noting that fossil fuel industries enjoy a literal wealth of subsidies. The IMF calculated the public cost of fossil fuels at $5.3 trillion, when health and environmental impacts are considered.


Gates is pushing for technological investments, not policy ones, and he thinks the government should be focusing on the same thing. “Government [research and development] budgets should be increased in order to accelerate innovation,” he said in the interview last week.


In fact, the current administration is doing quite a bit to foster innovation — both technical as well as financial. The Department of Energy’s SunShot incubator program, for instance, has provided $120 million to 120 small businesses since 2007. Those businesses have turned around and leveraged their successes for another $2 billion in private sector investments, according to Minh. “It’s a great example of the government making a little investment and private sector taking it on,” he said.


But look at what happened when the United States implemented a tax credit on solar investments in 2006.


[image error]

CREDIT: Courtesy SEIA



Installations went way up, and costs came way down. In fact, the average cost of solar has fallen by 73 percent since the tax credit was enacted.


A similar thing happened with the wind industry, when a tax credit was introduced for that technology. (When the credit expired, the wind industry laid off an estimated 30,00 people layoffs. Policy certainty matters.)


The Silver Lining

That’s not to say there is nothing good in Gates’ comments. Gates is an outstanding philanthropist. He is worth about $80 billion, personally, and co-chairs the $42.9-billion Gates Foundation with his wife, Melinda. The foundation has done an extraordinary amount of good around the world, particularly in developing nations.


But for years, climate activists have been urging Gates to do more on climate mitigation. British newspaper The Guardian launched a campaign in March urging Gates to divest from coal and fossil fuels.


According to a recent study, 92 percent of U.S. coal, most of Canada’s tar sands, and all of the Arctic’s oil and gas will have to stay in the ground in order to limit the increase in worldwide temperatures to 2°C. The University College London researchers found that “a third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves, and over 80 percent of current coal reserves should remain unused from 2010 to 2050.”


In order to achieve that goal — and ultimately avoid the catastrophic effects associated with a 2°C warming — we need to seriously curb the use of fossil fuels.


But even though Gates hasn’t done that, it’s still meaningful that the world’s richest man is talking about the need to address climate change.


“I would not say that Bill Gates is off mark,” DoE’s Li said. “I would say that he’s focusing his dollars on an important part of the solution space.”



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Bill GatesclimateClimate ChangeDepartment of EnergyJigar ShahRenewable EnergySolarSunShotWind


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Published on June 30, 2015 13:43

Two Of The World’s Largest Countries Are Joining Forces To Fight Climate Change

On Tuesday, Brazil and the United States announced a joint effort to address climate change and boost renewable energy during a visit by Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to the White House.


Specifically, both countries pledged to increase renewable energy targets to 20 percent by 2030. The target excludes hydropower, an especially contentious power source in Brazil, where large and valuable ecosystems can be flooded out to make way for reservoirs.


Brazil also committed to restore and reforest 12 million hectares — an area roughly the size of Pennsylvania — and to eliminate illegal deforestation.


“The environmental agenda is absolutely key and essential for our two countries,” Rousseff said during a press conference Tuesday afternoon. She also vowed to fight for an “ambitious” climate agreement when international leaders and negotiators gather in Paris for a climate summit at the end of the year.


The joint pledge came within hours of China’s official submission of its climate targets to the United Nations in preparation for the Paris climate summit, making Tuesday a significant milestone in global efforts to build momentum for a global treaty to fight climate change. That treaty is set to be agreed upon at the end of 2015, and should go into effect after 2020.


“In these last five months before the climate negotiations in Paris, this is a chance for Obama and Rousseff to demonstrate leadership and come out in front with strong commitments,” Amanda Maxwell, Latin American project director with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told ThinkProgress. “This focus on renewables is especially important as emissions from Brazil’s energy sector have been rising due to increased use of fossil fuels, and the planned large hydropower projects have been so controversial.”


The Belo Monte dam, currently under construction, will flood 1,500 square kilometers of rainforest — an area larger than New York City — and displace 40,000 indigenous people. Federal prosecutors recently determined the those constructing the dam, which would be the world’s third-largest hydroelectric energy producer, had violated agreed-to terms regarding the relocation of locals.


Maxwell also said a poll “found that 95 percent of Brazilians feel climate change is impacting their lives yet 85 percent also feel the government is not doing enough to address it.”


Rousseff said she “very much welcomes” the decision to pursue a joint renewable energy goal and that it will “prove extremely important in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” She also said it “speaks to our clear-cut commitment to making sure global temperatures will not rise above two degree Celsius.”


Brian Deese, Obama’s top adviser for energy, told reporters on Tuesday that “this is a big deal” and that, while the target is ambitious “it’s one that’s actually achievable in a way that will actually create new, low-cost opportunities for the American economy.”


Clean energy currently represents about seven percent of the United States’ power sector, excluding hydropower, so meeting the target will involve tripling renewable energy capacity in the next 15 years. The EIA expects nonhydropower renewable power generation to increase 6.9 percent in 2015. While solar power production will grow rapidly, energy from wind, biomass, and biofuel will make up the largest percentages.


Rousseff has been suffering through a political firestorm in Brazil of late, after a scandal surrounding state-controlled oil giant Petrobras, slow economic growth, and a crippling drought around São Paulo have engaged much of the country in a heated conversation. The presence of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics have made the issues more prominent on a global scale. Two years ago Rousseff canceled a state visit to the United States after the Snowden documents revealed the U.S. government had spied on her communications.


In March, João Augusto de Castro Neves wrote in the World Politics Review that the drought could force “the government to enact measures to curb power and water use in the coming months,” and that the low reservoir levels are “the result not only of historically little rainfall, but also of federal and state governments’ refusal to impose any restrictions on consumption and use during an election year.”


Rouseff narrowly won re-election in October 2014.


With both leaders now looking forward after tough reelection campaigns in the last several years, climate change has risen to the top tier of their international agendas — and there is a lot of potential for progress and collaboration. The country — home to the vast Amazon rainforest — cut its greenhouse gas emissions 41 percent between 2005 and 2012, primarily by slowing deforestation. A recent study found that Brazil has kept 3.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere since 2004 — more than any other country.


However, deforestation is still occurring. According to the the World Wildlife Fund, Brazil lost 4,571 square kilometers of rainforest in 2012, and 5,891 in 2013.


The twin goals of ending deforestation and ramping up renewables give Brazil a lot to work towards.


Jeremy Martin, director of the energy program at Institute of the Americas told ThinkProgress that while “Brazil has made great progress on incorporating renewables,” the country “has always been a hydro country.”


“Dealing with this will continue, particularly as the drought forces the issue, but it will not get resolved quickly or easily,” he said.



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Published on June 30, 2015 11:43

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Message To People Who Think Pope Francis Shouldn’t Talk About Climate Change

When Pope Francis released his encyclical on the environment earlier this month, he faced some criticism from people who said religious leaders do not have the correct expertise to speak authoritatively about climate change.


Acclaimed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is not one of those people.


On Tuesday, the author and host of the late-night talk show StarTalk tweeted that despite being a religious figure, Pope Francis is more than qualified to talk about scientific issues. In a series of tweets, Tyson noted that the Vatican Observatory employs dozens of scientists who inform the pope on issues like climate change.


“Yes, it’s possible to be a supreme holy figure yet still know what you are talking about regarding the Climate,” he tweeted.





The Pope employs a dozen full time astrophysicists as part of the four-century old Vatican Observatory http://t.co/nIWzPHooDu


— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) June 30, 2015






Yes, it’s possible to be a supreme holy figure yet still know what you are talking about regarding the Climate.


— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) June 30, 2015



This isn’t the first time a scientist has spoken in defense of the pope. Independent climate scientists who reviewed the encyclical following its publication found little to argue with in terms of its scientific language.


During that review, Rutgers University professor of environmental sciences Anthony Broccoli said the Pope’s status as a religious leader had nothing to do with whether he could get the science correct.


“Pope Francis doesn’t have to be a scientist to arrive at these conclusions,” he told ThinkProgress at the time. “All he would have to do is consult the extensive reports on climate change that have been written by the world’s climate scientists in a process organized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These reports have been written to inform policymakers and stakeholders about the state of the science and they are a reliable source of information.”


Aside from having a cadre of scientists by his side, Pope Francis has his own science background, achieving a technician’s degree in chemistry before becoming a priest. Indeed, in his latest encyclical, Francis stressed that religion and science can enter into an “intense and productive dialogue with each other.”


Tyson seems to agree with that idea, too. Last year, while hosting the show Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, Tyson drew attention for his implications that faith can help science blossom by producing “fantastic, world-changing ideas.



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Published on June 30, 2015 10:45

China Just Made Its Plans To Fight Climate Change Official

On Tuesday, China released long-awaited final greenhouse gas targets as part of its submission to the United Nations climate talks in Paris later this year.


Li Keqiang, China’s prime minister, said in a statement the country “will work hard” to peak its CO2 emissions before 2030, which was its previous commitment as part of the United States-China joint pledge from November 2014, the first time China had agreed to mitigate emissions.


The statement also said that China will cut its carbon intensity, or greenhouse gas emissions per unit of GDP, by 60-65 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, a large increase from its 40-45 percent goal for 2020.


Stian Reklev at Carbon Pulse writes that this commitment is on the “lower end of expectations, as China is estimated to be on track to overachieve its current target of reducing its carbon intensity.”


“China has already achieved a 33 percent reduction in the carbon intensity of its booming economy since 2005, and last month the government ordered its manufacturers to cut current levels by a further 40 percent by 2025,” writes Reklev.


The statement also reaffirms China’s goal of increasing non-fossil fuel sources of energy consumption to about 20 percent by 2030.


“China’s climate action plan reaffirms its commitment to pursue a lower-carbon development pathway driven by domestic interests,” Nick Mabey, CEO and Founding Director of E3G, a sustainable development non-profit, said in a statement. “But it can do more. It must now integrate climate change actions into its ambitious development and economic reforms.”


While these are not bold new targets, they are of critical importance to the international negotiations surrounding the climate talks at the end of the year in which leaders hope to establish a post-2020 agreement that applies to all nations. China is the world’s second largest economy and biggest greenhouse gas emitter, and no deal would be achievable without their cooperation.


With China officially submitting its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) to the UNFCCC, the world’s three largest carbon polluters, including the United States and the European Union, have all made commitments ahead of the Paris Summit. The United States plans to to reduce emissions by 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, and to make its best efforts to reduce by them by 28 percent. EU leaders have agreed to a 2030 greenhouse gas reduction target of at least 40 percent compared to 1990.


Even small decreases in China’s emissions seem like monumental feats when compared to other countries. According to a recent analysis, in the first four months of 2015, China’s coal use fell almost 8 percent compared to the same period last year — a reduction in emissions that’s approximately equal to the total carbon dioxide emissions of the U.K. over the same period.


Late last year the government announced it plans to cap coal use by 2020, a necessary target to meet its global pledge of peaking greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Reducing its use of coal, which still generates three-fourths of China’s electricity, is also a key element of China’s renewable energy target of 20 percent non-fossil fuels in “primary energy consumption by 2030.”


China is also the leading renewable energy investor, spending some $89.5 billion last year on clean energy, almost a third of the global total.


“China’s climate targets signal its commitment to deepening the energy efficiency and clean energy efforts it began a decade ago, which have resulted in China becoming the largest wind power country in the world and being on track to pass Germany this year as the largest solar PV country in the world,” said Fuqiang Yang, Energy, Environment and Climate Change senior adviser for the Natural Resources Defense Council in a statement.



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Published on June 30, 2015 06:58

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