Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 133

Senator Introduces Plan To Cut Water Pollution From Fracking

A new bill would close loopholes that exempt oil and gas companies from certain clean water regulations, in the hopes of cutting down on water pollution from hydraulic fracturing operations.

The bill, introduced by Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), would get rid of two clean water exemptions for oil and gas companies — one enacted in 1987 and the other in 2005. The 2005 exemption, known as the Halliburton Loophole, came from a provision in that year’s Energy Policy Act and allows oil and gas companies to frack free from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. Cardin’s bill, dubbed the FRESHER Act, would do away with the Halliburton Loophole. It would also prompt the Department of the Interior to conduct a study on the impacts of oil and gas operations on stormwater runoff.

“With 15 million Americans living within one mile a mile of a well that has been drilled in the last 15 years, the loopholes oil and gas companies enjoy threaten our environment and public health,” Cardin said in a statement. “Oil and gas companies that already enjoy tax breaks should be required to follow the same laws to protect our water and public health as other industries.”

Fracking, the process of injecting high-pressure fluid into the ground to break up shale rocks and release natural gas, has been show to pose a risk to water sources. Just last week the Environmental Protection Agency released a long-awaited study on fracking, which concluded that fracking could end up endangering the health of drinking water in the U.S.

“From our assessment, we conclude there are above and below ground mechanisms by which hydraulic fracturing activities have the potential to impact drinking water resources,” the report’s executive summary reads. However, the EPA report also noted that it “did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.”

Still, there have been examples of fracking operations contaminating drinking water. A study last September linked well water contamination in Pennsylvania and Texas to faulty casing in oil and gas wells. Last August, Pennsylvania made public 243 cases of contamination of private drinking wells from oil and gas drilling operations in 22 counties across the state. And research from Stanford and Duke University in September found that wastewater from fracking — which can contain carcinogens and even radioactive material — poses a risk to drinking water.

Environmental groups praised Cardin’s bill, which has been introduced in Congress before but has never been signed into law.

“An industry that is causing harm to hundreds of thousands of people does not deserve to have special exemptions, especially when that very industry is actively blocking any attempts to be directly monitored for safety,” Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said in a statement. “We should take a precautionary approach to anything that has been shown to contaminate our precious water resources, and closing this loophole is a good start.”

Tags

FrackingPollution

The post Senator Introduces Plan To Cut Water Pollution From Fracking appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Court Throws Out Challenge To Shell’s Arctic Drilling Plans

One of many legal challenges to Royal Dutch Shell’s plans to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean this summer was thrown out by a federal appeals court on Thursday, after judges refused to accept arguments that the company was not prepared for a big oil spill in such a harsh, remote climate.

To environmental groups’ disappointment, a three judge panel for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) acted lawfully when it approved Shell’s oil spill response plans for its leases in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. Ten groups — which included the National Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace, and The Audubon Society — had argued in the lawsuit that BSEE’s approval of the response plans was “arbitrary” and “capricious,” because Shell would not realistically be able to clean up a large amount of oil if it spilled into the Arctic Ocean.

The panel majority did not, however, say Shell’s oil spill response plan was sound, nor did it say that Shell would be able to clean up a big spill. Instead, Circuit Judges Jacqueline Nguyen and Jerome Farris said BSEE just didn’t have the ability to reject Shell’s plans, because they were in line with the federal Oil Pollution Act. That act, the judges said, did not specifically require Shell to prove whether it could clean up the an entire oil spill to have its oil spill response plan approved.

The environmental groups also had two more arguments: that the oil spill response plan failed to consider endangered species, and that there was no environmental impact statement performed before BSEE approved the plan. Again, the two-judge majority rejected both of those arguments, saying BSEE was not required to prepare an environmental impact statement, nor was it required to consult with environmental agencies under the Endangered Species Act.

Senior Circuit Judge Dorothy Wright Nelson, however, disagreed. She argued that BSEE should have done both an Endangered Species Act consultation and an environmental impact statement before approving the plan, noting that the Oil Pollution Act specifically requires BSEE to consider environmental factors in its decision making process.

“The Oil Pollution Act and its implementing regulations grant the Bureau significant authority to regulate the activities of owners and operators of offshore facilities,” Nelson wrote. “The regulations demand that the plan include provisions for protecting wildlife and areas of special environmental importance.”

Environmentalists have long been worried about Shell’s ability to clean up an oil spill if one occurs in the Arctic Ocean, a sensitive ecological environment where weather is harsh and unpredictable. And they contend that a spill will happen, citing a Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) analysis that showed a 75 percent chance of a spill greater than 1,000 barrels should an oil company like Shell discover and fully produce oil in the Chukchi Sea leases.

Shell also already had an accident in the Arctic the first time it tried to drill there; in 2012, while the company was towing its Kulluk oil rig out into Dutch Harbor via ship, a harsh winter storm hit and the ship lost control of the rig. The rig, along with 150,000 gallons of fuel and drilling fluid, washed up on an island along one of Alaska’s pristine coastlines.

Now, the only way this lawsuit over Shell’s spill response plan can move forward is if it goes to the U.S. Supreme Court, and it’s unclear whether the environmental groups will try to appeal. However, environmental groups are trying to halt the company’s plans in other ways — a lawsuit filed earlier this month against BOEM accuses the agency of performing a “rush and cursory” review of Shell’s plans, and seeks to nullify it. Protestors have also delayed the company’s plans a number of ways, first boarding its rig and refusing to leave, then surrounding it in a barricade of kayaks.

As for Shell, a company representative told Reuters that it was happy to be done with at least the one lawsuit for now.

“We look forward to receiving the remaining permits necessary to commence exploration activities offshore Alaska in the weeks to come,” the representative said.

Tags

Arctic DrillingShell

The post Court Throws Out Challenge To Shell’s Arctic Drilling Plans appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Why Moby Wants You To Stop Showering

Skip Showers For Beef, a new grassroots project born of the California drought, acknowledges that giving up beef — a product that uses huge amounts of water — is hard. So the campaign’s creators have come up with a creative way for Californians to keep eating meat while reducing their water use: Just stop showering.

The project’s premise is a simple one — by the creators’ calculations, every four ounce hamburger requires roughly 450 gallons of water to produce. To offset those gallons, the average Californian would need to skip 26 showers.

“We’re not saying people should eat beef, we’re just saying people can eat beef, and here’s how,” Tom Bransford, co-founder of Skip Showers For Beef, told ThinkProgress. “If California as a state wants to keep producing beef, there’s a way they can do that — by everybody following a plan like this.”

The California cattle industry is the fifth largest in the state’s agricultural sector, bringing in $3.3 billion in revenue in 2012. In a country that consumed 24.1 billion pounds of beef in 2014, ranchers in California raised 177 million pounds of beef for commercial slaughter. According to a UC Davis study cited by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, it takes about 441 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef. In a slightly higher estimate, the Water Footprint Network puts the amount of water needed to produce a pound of beef to closer to 1,845 gallons. By the beef industry’s estimates, California uses more than 78 billion gallons of water to produce beef — by the Water Footprint Network’s, it uses over 326 billion gallons.

We’re not saying people should eat beef, we’re just saying people can eat beef, and here’s how…

California also grows a huge amount of alfalfa as food for cows — which, though highly nutritious, is also extremely water-hungry. As California’s highest acreage crop, alfalfa is also its thirstiest, using 240 billion gallons of water per year. Part of that alfalfa goes to California’s dairy industry, which is the largest in the country. But in some parts of California, as much as 50 percent of the alfalfa that is grown is shipped overseas to land-poor countries like China. Researchers have calculated that when all the water required to grow the exported alfalfa is taken into account, California ships one hundred billion gallons worth of water overseas.

As California struggles through the fourth year of a now-historic drought, the state has tried to reign in water use across a number of sectors, from requiring a 25 percent cutback in municipal water use to accepting voluntary restrictions from some of the state’s oldest water rights holders. But the state’s agricultural sector — which uses 80 percent of the state’s water not set aside for environmental purposes — has been a popular lightning rod for criticism of California’s water management practices. Within the sector, the beef industry’s outsized water footprint has been particularly subject to criticism.

Skip Showers for Beef’s Bransford comes from a cattle family that has been ranching in California for three generations, and he isn’t immune to the criticism the beef industry is facing during the drought. But he classifies statistics that draw attention to how much water the beef industry uses as “fear mongering.”

“These numbers are frightening people,” he said. “What we wanted to do was counter that sort of statistic and say, ‘You can say this about the hamburger, but we’re going to tell you something really out of the box here, which is there is an alternative.’ If you want to keep eating beef, there’s an alternative.”

Launched early this week, the campaign is a mix of social media outreach and physical, grassroots lobbying — the project literally deployed people dressed in cow costumes to hand out pamphlets on the streets of Los Angeles. The project’s website also features information about how many showers one needs to skip to equalize the water footprint of various beef-based foods (a beef taco only requires missing 10 showers, while a 16-ounce steak will set you back more than three months’ worth) and creative ways to manage bodily smells without water (like baby wipes or a dirt bath). There’s also a short little video from a Los Angeles couple who claims to be living the shower-free lifestyle and enjoying guilt-free beef.

The campaign might seem like pure satire, but Bransford claims that it’s meant to be taken in earnest — though the humor inherent in the idea of skipping a month’s worth of showers to eat a single hamburger isn’t lost on him.

“We hope people laugh, we hope people enjoy it, and if they think its satire that’s their business,” Bransford said. “But we definitely think all the tools at our disposal can be used to combat this drought, and if humor is a part of that, it’s a part of that.”

To lend an air of credibility to the project, Bransford reached out to celebrities to help get out his message — which led to an interesting partnership between Skip Showers For Beef and Grammy-winning artist and noted vegan Moby.

“This isn’t about vegans versus carnivores,” Moby said in an email to ThinkProgress. “This is about making your choice a responsible one. This drought in California has already exceeded historic proportions, but most Americans just aren’t paying attention. We need to create more attention-grabbing campaigns like this to wake people the f*** up and get them making responsible choices.”

Conservation efforts have largely been focused, Moby continued, on consumer efforts — restaurants not offering water or people not flushing their toilets. But those choices are dwarfed by what he refers to as “the elephant in the room — or, as the case may be, the cow.”

“As much I endorse the vegan lifestyle, I know I can’t force everyone to put down their burgers,” Moby said. “But maybe they could at least skip some showers here and there so that we all have enough water to survive. That seems reasonable.”

Tags

beefCaliforniaClimate ChangeDrought

The post Why Moby Wants You To Stop Showering appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Exploratory Drilling Approved For Louisiana Wetlands

The Army Corps of Engineers this week issued a permit for an oil and gas company to fill three acres of wetlands in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, where it will begin exploratory drilling — the first step towards hydraulic fracturing (fracking). The decision raised questions for local leaders and environmental advocates about how much control they have over their natural resources.

The wetlands, in the town of Abita Springs, are part of a pristine aquifer — home to Abita Brewing Company, Louisiana’s most famous beer, and the sole source of drinking water for miles around. Unsurprisingly in a town where the official seal shows a woman kneeling by the water, the proposal to start fracking has been met with community outrage. In fact, Abita Springs sued the Army Corps of Engineers over its failure to hold adequate public hearings on the issue. That suit, as well as one seeking to prevent the drilling under a land-use law, was dismissed.

Wetlands are natural buffers to the effects of climate change, including both flooding and drought. In addition, they are important to regional biodiversity and erosion control. Louisiana loses a football field’s worth of land every hour, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Part of the loss of land is due to oil and gas development.

Abita Springs Mayor Greg Lemons said he was “very disappointed” with the Army Corps’ decision to issue the permit.

“Louisiana has some of the best, sensitive, prettiest wetlands area in the world. Anything that can damage that or denude that is something we should really be thinking about not doing,” Lemons told ThinkProgress. “I’m of the understanding that the job of the Army Corps of Engineers is protecting wetlands.”

Stephanie Gray, a Louisiana State University professor who lives in the town of Covington in St. Tammany Parish, talked about her concerns about fracking to ThinkProgress in January.

“We’re concerned about damage to the natural environment,” she said. “We’re concerned about truck traffic, increases in accidents. And this particular drill site is about a mile away from a high school, so there aren’t only small towns being impacted, but a lot of subdivisions, businesses and kids, too.”

Ironically, the permit was issued less than two weeks after the Army Corps and the EPA released the new Waters of the United States rule, which offers protection to two million miles of streams and 20 million acres of wetlands that had not been clearly designated under the Clean Water Act. The rule clarifies what tributaries and wetlands are part of the overall water system and will decrease confusion and expense, the EPA and Army Corps said. The rule must be on the federal register for 60 days before it goes into effect.

A spokesman for the Army Corps’ Louisiana office said the new rule did not affect its evaluation of the permit, and that the agency was following the lead of the state agencies tasked with enforcing EPA standards.

“Some of the impacts to certain attributes of the environment — ground water, water quality — there are other agencies that have regulatory authority over those issues,” spokesperson Martin Mayer told ThinkProgress. The departments of Environmental Quality and of Natural Resources had already both issued permits for the exploratory drilling.

“We will not second guess them,” Mayer said. “We basically ensure that all the different aspects of the review have been satisfied.”

In a statement to NOLA.com, David Kerstein — president of Helis Oil and Gas Co., the company doing the exploratory drilling — said, “Helis is pleased with the corps’ decision after such thoughtful and meticulous review.”

In a section of the project’s website, the company says flatly that, “There is no risk of contamination to the aquifer.”

Lemons scoffed at Helis’ claim that pollution would never reach the area’s fresh water. “Let me tell you about the BP oil spill,” he said. “Let me tell you about a lot of other things that ‘can’t happen,’ that ‘won’t happen,’ that did happen.”

He also said the process has just made it clear that the state agencies should not be in charge of where fracking is allowed — especially state agencies that are funded by oil and gas permits. The town and parish will continue to seek legal action to stop the development of oil and gas drilling in the wetlands, he said.

A recent audit of the Department of Natural Resources showed the agency did a “horrific” job of regulating old wells, Lemons added. “They don’t fail at the beginning — it’s 20 to 30 years from now. God knows what’s down there,” Lemons said. “I’m not doing this for me… it’s protection of our kids and grandkids.”

Tags

AbitaArmy Corps of EngineersFrackingHelisLouisiana

The post Exploratory Drilling Approved For Louisiana Wetlands appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Scientists Say Tar Sands Development And Limiting Climate Change Are ‘Incompatible’

More than 100 scientists from the U.S. and Canada called for a moratorium on the development of tar sands Wednesday, saying the carbon-intensive form of energy was “incompatible” with limiting climate change.

The scientists published a consensus statement laying out 10 reasons why mining of tar sands — an energy source that’s found largely in Alberta, Canada’s Athabasca region and whose mining has led to significant deforestation and forest degradation in the province — needs to be halted. Those reasons — all of which were backed up by scientific research — included findings that the expansion of tar sands development would slow North America’s move to clean energy, that environmental protections on tar sands development were lacking, and that less than 0.2 percent of the region affected by tar sands mining had been reclaimed.

“If Canada wants to participate constructively in the global effort to stop climate change, we should first stop expanding the oil sands. More growth simply shows Canada has gone rogue,” Thomas Homer-Dixon, professor of governance innovation at Ontario’s University of Waterloo, said in a statement.

The scientists also singled out the impact tar sands development has on the local environment in their statement. “Independent studies have demonstrated that mining and processing Albertan oil sands releases carcinogenic and toxic pollutants (e.g., heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic compounds) to the atmosphere from smoke stacks and evaporation, and to groundwater from leaching of tailings ponds,” they wrote. “This pollution harms terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and the species within them.”

This pollution also has a major impact on the native communities that live near tar sands development. The community of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, home to the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) and the Mikisew Cree First Nation, has been dealing with the tar sands contamination of the nearby wildlife for years. That contamination affects both tribes’ food source and traditional way of life, which is centered around hunting and fishing. Still, the Canadian government has long disputed that the contamination of the community comes from the tar sands.

“Every time we complain about pollution and sickness to the government, they always come back and says its natural,” ACFN member Jonathan Bruno told ThinkProgress last July. “But our elders and our land users — people who have lived off this land their whole life — they say it’s never been like this their whole lives. And we trust that.”

The native communities aren’t the only ones affected by this development. A 2013 study found that people living in the Fort Saskatchewan area, which is downwind of the oil and tar sands-rich “Industrial Heartland” of Alberta, were subject to levels of some dangerous volatile organic compounds that were 6,000 times higher than normal. Through examining 10 years of health records, the study also found incidence of leukemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in men was higher in the communities closest to the sources of pollution than in the surrounding counties — a finding that wasn’t a direct link between cancer and pollution, but which was still worrisome.

Tar sands development also emits a large amount of the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change. A Canadian government report released last April found that, because of tar sands development, oil and gas production makes up one quarter of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, allowing the energy sector to narrowly beat out transportation in terms of total emissions. The thick, sticky nature of the tar sands makes getting it out of the ground a more carbon-intensive process than extracting conventional crude oil.

The scientists’ statement ends with the fact that, increasingly, Americans and Canadians want to see action on climate change. Some of them are also strongly opposing tar sands and the proposed pipelines, such as Keystone XL, that would carry it. Earlier this month, beloved Canadian coffee and doughnuts chain Tim Horton’s agreed to remove advertisements for pipeline company Enbridge from stores around the country after the ads sparked major public outcry. And over the weekend, thousands marched in Minnesota in a protest against North America’s growing network of tar sands pipelines.

Tags

CanadaScientistsTar Sands

The post Scientists Say Tar Sands Development And Limiting Climate Change Are ‘Incompatible’ appeared first on ThinkProgress.

House Republicans Unveil Latest Attempt To Block Obama’s Climate And Clean Water Rules

Speaking generally, Congressional Republicans and conservative groups really don’t like the Obama administration’s attempts to limit carbon emissions and water pollution. They’ve tried to block new environmental rules in a number of ways, pushing federal and state legislation to block them, urging state governors to ignore them, and filing lawsuits to nullify them.

Now, House Republicans have unveiled yet another attempt to stop new regulations: The budget.

On Tuesday, the House Appropriations Committee introduced its budget bill for environment-related agencies in fiscal year 2016. That bill includes provisions to block what the committee calls “harmful, costly, and potentially job-killing regulations” from the Environmental Protection Agency, including the much-talked-about Clean Power Plan and the Waters of the United States rule.

To refresh, the Clean Power Plan refers to proposed rules that will require power plants to reduce their carbon emissions, for the primary purpose of fighting climate change. The Waters of the United States rule offers federal pollution protection to two million miles of streams and 20 million acres of wetlands.

Along with prohibiting the EPA from implementing those regulations, the bill would reduce the EPA’s funding by $718 million, a 9 percent reduction from fiscal year 2015 levels. According to the Hill, the EPA has already had its funding decreased by 20 percent since Republicans took the House in 2011. In addition, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would be cut by $8 million, and the Department of Interior would be forced to stop giving federal protection to endangered gray wolves in Midwestern states.

It was largely expected that House Republicans would attempt to block the Obama administration’s environmental regulations via the 2016 budget. Indeed, the House proposed similar cuts for the 2014 and 2015 budgets, but were less successful in part because of a Democrat-controlled Senate.

Now, however, Republicans have control of both the House and Senate, and there’s a lot of momentum in the Senate to try and delay or stop new EPA rules. Indeed, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has said he would “do everything I can to try to stop” the administration’s environmental agenda.

So far, Republicans have been unsuccessful in their attempts to stop EPA regulations via regular legislation, as they haven’t had enough votes to override a Presidential veto. However, they may have more luck attaching similar legislation to budgetary bill like they’ve done here, because if a compromise can’t be reached, the environmental agencies won’t be funded at all and will shut down.

Since it was introduced on Tuesday, the bill has already passed the appropriations subcommittee — but not without opposition from the committee’s Democrats. Ranking member Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) said the bill represented “going backwards” on environmental protections, while Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY) said the proposal “drastically shortchanges job-creating investments and vital environmental protections, while carrying a wish list of special interest giveaways that hurt hardworking American families’ health and safety.”

While most Republicans in opposition to the EPA’s Clean Power Plan rule have argued that the proposals will cost jobs in the coal sector, others have argued that job growth in renewable technologies combined with increases in energy efficiency will outweigh those losses. Researchers at private consulting firm Industrial Economics and the University of Maryland, for instance, recently predicted that the plan would add more than a quarter of a million jobs to the U.S. economy by 2040. This week, the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute said the Clean Power Plan would create nearly 100,000 more jobs than are lost.

Tags

Clean Power PlanClimate ChangeEPAHouseHouse RepublicansRepublicansWaters of the United States

The post House Republicans Unveil Latest Attempt To Block Obama’s Climate And Clean Water Rules appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Bloomberg Bombshell: ‘Climate Change Deniers Will Be Giant Money Losers’

A major new global financial report finds that investors who remain ignorant of or deny climate science will be big money losers compared to those who are climate-savvy.

The Mercer Research report, “Investing in a Time of Climate Change,” details the prospects — and the pitfalls — of various climate scenarios. For the report, “Mercer collaborated with 16 investment partners, collectively responsible for more than US$1.5 trillion, to produce the report,” including Germany’s Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and “the private sector arm of the World Bank Group.”

A Bloomberg column by investment guru Barry Ritholtz summed up the report: “In the real world, climate-change deniers are and will be giant money losers.”

The report has several key findings. Clearly, “climate change will give rise to investment winners and losers.” Some industries, like coal, will likely see average annual returns over the next decade “eroding between 26% and 138%,” depending on how aggressively the world attempts to fight climate change. Other industries, like renewables, could see average annual returns increase by up to 97 percent over the 10-year period — if the world does seriously move toward a 2°C pathway coming out of the Paris climate talks this December.

The report identifies three phases investors may go through — “Climate-Unaware Future Takers,” “Climate-Aware Future Takers,” and finally “Climate-Aware Future Makers”:

[image error]

CREDIT: Mercer

A key goal of the report is to get investors to “progress along these phases to the extent they can.” Significantly, if investors make it to the final phase — the “future makers” — they “feel compelled by the magnitude of the longer-term risk of climate change to seek to influence which scenario comes to pass.”

Some investors might become “future makers” because they feel compelled as human beings to try to minimize the potential harm to billions of other people. But the study makes clear you don’t have to be altruistic to desire a 2°C future. Strictly from an investment perspective, the sustainable path is much better than the catastrophic one:

“A 2°C scenario does not have negative return implications for long-term diversified investors at a total portfolio level over the period modelled (to 2050), and is expected to better protect long-term returns beyond this timeframe,” the report states.

Mercer finds that “A 2°C scenario could see return benefits for emerging market equities, infrastructure, real estate, timber and agriculture” whereas “4°C scenario could negatively impact emerging market equities, real estate, timber and agriculture.” In other words, Dust-Bowlification is bad for business.

For those out there who think that somehow the market has already priced-in climate risk, Helga Birgden, Mercer’s Global Responsible Investment Business Leader, explains: “We recognize that markets do not always price in change; they are notoriously poor at anticipating incremental structural change and long-term downside risk until it is upon us.”

Or you can just look at the rapidly rising prices for coastal property in Miami, especially luxury condos, to see that markets seem far more predisposed towards bubbles than towards climate reality. And who will be the biggest losers? As John Van Leer, a University of Miami oceanographer, explained in 2013, it is going to get harder and harder to insure and sell coastal homes.

“If buyers can’t insure it, they can’t get a mortgage on it,” he told National Geographic. “And if they can’t get a mortgage, you can only sell to cash buyers. What I’m looking for is a climate-change denier with a lot of money.”

And that was precisely the point investment guru Barry Ritholtz made in his Bloomberg column about the Mercer report.

“I expect those who suffer from cognitive dissonance over whether global warming is real will soon be greeted by a brutal Darwinian result in the markets,” he writes.”I don’t make many forecasts but here is one: It is only a matter of time before the deniers exist only in think tanks funded by the fossil energy industry and oddball conspiracy groups.”

Let’s hope that is sooner rather than later, for all our sakes.

Tags

climateInvestmentStock MarketWorld Bank

The post Bloomberg Bombshell: ‘Climate Change Deniers Will Be Giant Money Losers’ appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Paul Ryan’s New Amendment Would Make The Obama Trade Deal Even Worse For The Climate

A massive trade agreement between the United States and several Asian nations has been held up while President Obama waits for Congress to start the approval process. But in a bid to get more Republican support, Congress could throw away a U.S. tool for addressing international climate change goals.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) introduced an amendment to a customs bill this week that would “ensure that trade agreements do not require changes to U.S. law or obligate the United States with respect to global warming or climate change.” The customs bill would be part of a package that would make approving the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP) a straight up-and-down vote in Congress, the so-called “fast-track” option.

Environmental groups have already taken a strong stand against the TPP. Under the proposed agreement, corporations will likely be able to sue governments that interfere with their business — even if the interference comes from enforcement of carbon reduction goals and passing environmental legislation.

The most recent move from Rep. Ryan is largely symbolic, according to economists familiar with the deal. There is nothing in the TPP that addresses climate change regulations, so there is nothing this language would affect. But Karthik Ganapathy, a spokesman for the environmental organization 350.org, disagrees with this assessment.

“We’re worried that this language will effectively tie the hands of the U.S. Trade [Representative],” he told ThinkProgress. “We’re really nervous about a provision that binds the hands of negotiators and prevents them from doing anything on climate change.” He also pointed out that including climate change language in a bid to secure the votes needed to pass the fast-track might backfire, alienating Democrats.

“The strategy from the GOP leadership seems designed to win over votes on the far right, bit I think it will lose far more votes from the left and the center who care about climate change,” Ganapathy said.

The TPP has been a political morass for Obama, who views the deal as part of his presidential legacy. He is pushing for the bill to fast-track the deal — which would allow it to go to Congress as a straight up-and-down vote — but he has been broadly criticized for the deal’s lack of transparency. Specific details of the TPP remain largely unknown and unpublished, although WikiLeaks has posted some chapters, including one dealing with environmental regulations.

If the TPP goes to an up-and-down vote, it is expected to pass, but Obama has had trouble corralling the votes. After the Senate voted against fast-track in May, the president called Democratic leadership to the White House.

“Members in attendance reiterated their support for TPA legislation that will pave the way for high-standard trade agreements that support good American jobs, protect our workers and environment, and ensure that the United States, and not countries like China, write the rules for the global economy,” the White House reported.

It’s unclear, though, whether that support could withstand an assault on U.S. tools to address climate change, and support from Democrats will be needed to pass the fast-track bill.

“We have the votes that we hope to have. We are where we want to be… but some Democrats are going to have to support this to get this over the finish line,” Ryan told Fox News on Thursday.

Other environmental groups responded by saying that even as a symbolic gesture to garner Republican support, the language sends the wrong message at a time when addressing climate change is more critical than ever.

“Our organizations have already expressed our strong opposition to fast track because of its implications for our global climate,” The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council wrote in a letter to legislators. “Twenty-first century trade agreements must ensure that climate policies not be undermined by trade rules and must address trade-related climate issues like fossil fuel subsidy elimination. These bills take us in the exact wrong direction.”

But Obama has said the TPP will help advance climate change goals. He told NPR’s Marketplace in June that the deal will allow the United States to put pressure on burgeoning economies that are engaging in risky climate activity, such as clear-cutting and coal-fired power.

Still, many see the TPP as a direct challenge to Obama’s environmental legacy.

“[The TPP] just contradicts the president’s climate policy,” Bill Waren, a trade analyst with Friends of the Earth, told ThinkProgress in May. “One hand takes away from the other.”

Tags

350.orgClimate ChangeCongressfast-trackObamaPaul RyanSierra ClubTPPTrans-Pacific Partnership

The post Paul Ryan’s New Amendment Would Make The Obama Trade Deal Even Worse For The Climate appeared first on ThinkProgress.

This Big Texas City Will Soon Be Powered Entirely By Wind And Sun

GEORGETOWN, TEXAS – There’s a fast-growing city in Texas that also has one of the most progressive energy programs in the country — and it’s not Austin.

Located about 30 miles north of the Texas capital in a deeply conservative county, the city of Georgetown will be powered 100 percent by renewable energy within the next couple years. Georgetown’s residents and elected officials made the decision to invest in two large renewable energy projects, one solar and one wind, not because they reduced greenhouse gas emissions or sent a message about the viability of renewable energy — but because it just made sense, according to Mayor Dale Ross.

This was a business decision and it was a no-brainer.

“This was a business decision and it was a no-brainer,” Ross told ThinkProgress from his office along one of the city’s main thoroughfares. “This is a long-term source of power that creates cost certainty, brings economic development, uses less water, and helps the environment.”

In a state better known for what it prospects for underground, Texas has one of the best aboveground renewable energy profiles in the country — especially west Texas, where the wind blows hard and consistently and the sun shines unabatedly. Texas also has its own electricity grid, which allowed state lawmakers to build the thing often lacking in the development of major renewable energy projects: transmission lines. As part of the state’s Competitive Renewable Energy Zone program, or CREZ, Texas has spent around $7 billion building transmission lines to make far-removed wind and solar projects accessible to population centers in the central and eastern parts of the state.

By bringing nearly 150 megawatts of wind energy from north Texas and another 150 megawatts of solar from far west Texas, Georgetown is taking full advantage of what the Lone Star State has to offer. And in doing so, it is getting some of the cheapest, most reliable, and most sustainable energy in the country.

“Here in the great state of Texas — better known for oil derricks — here’s this rather smallish city going and doing this,” said Ross. “Burlington, Vermont was one of the first cities to go renewable, that didn’t surprise many people.”

Late last year, Burlington, which is about one-third smaller than Georgetown, announced it had enough renewable energy to run the city — however the energy mix is quite different. The city will be relying about equally on biomass, hydropower, and wind and using little, if any, solar. Vermont also has a statewide goal of getting 90 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2050. In Texas, there is no equivalent climate change-driven policy pressure to go renewable.

[image error]

CREDIT: ThinkProgress/Patrick Smith

While Georgetown may be small, it is growing in influence. Located at the perimeter of the Austin metropolitan area, according to the latest U.S. Census from this May it is the second-fastest-growing city in the country. After a year of 7.6 percent growth, it now has a population of around 60,000.

Ross said that a lot of “folks don’t really care what kind of electrons are flowing down the transmission lines,” they just don’t want to pay more for power. Once he explains the new setup to residents, even the most skeptical and politically conservative, they tend to come around.

“The main criticism I’ve heard about green energy is the worry that the tax credits might go away,” said Ross. “Well that doesn’t impact us because they are contractually obligated to deliver energy at that price for 25 years.”

Ross, who is a Certified Public Accountant by trade, took this idea one step further.

“And if you are really looking into that — in the tax code which industry gets the most deductions and credits of any industry out there? That would be fossil fuels. Renewable energy credits are minuscule compared to fossil fuels,” said Ross, who was elected as a Republican mayor earlier this year.

While the cost of both wind and solar power are trending downwards quickly, Georgetown was able to get such a good deal in part due to timing. According to Chris Foster, Georgetown’s Resource Planning & Integration manager and the one responsible for working through all the logistics of the city’s energy needs, wind prices were particularly low at the time the city locked in the 144-megawatt, 20-year deal with EDF Renewables in early 2014. Foster said that in late 2013 wind energy bidders were worried that tax breaks wouldn’t be renewed, and because of this they offered extremely cheap rates in exchange for a long-term contract. Foster was not allowed to disclose the exact rate.

The wind power Georgetown is getting from EDF’s farm is just a small push in the much larger rush of wind power taking place across Texas. Around 2,200 megawatts, enough to bring power to some 400,000 homes, are expected to come online in the state before 2017. According to the American Wind Energy Association, Texas leads the country in both under-construction wind capacity and installed wind capacity, of which it has over 14,000 megawatts.

[image error]

Chris Foster, Georgetown’s Resource Planning & Integration manager, and Dale Ross, mayor of Georgetown, outside of the Ross’s office in early June, 2015.

CREDIT: ThinkProgress/Ari Phillips

Even though wind power has brought some 17,000 jobs and $26 billion in capital investment to the state, lawmakers came remarkably close to repealing key renewable energy policies in this year’s legislative session, which ended in early June. The Senate passed legislation that would have done away with the state’s renewable portfolio standard, which has already been surpassed anyways, and — more harmfully — frozen the CREZ program that is responsible for the bulk of the new transmission lines. The bill never made it out of the House. Advocates of both programs argue that they have worked, and Georgetown appears to be the model example.

“We asked everybody in the state to show us the cheapest power at the longest terms,” Foster told ThinkProgress. “We looked at nuclear, coal, gas, some solar, and wind — and wind was by far and away the cheapest form of power.”

Foster, who came to Ross’s office for the interview, said that natural gas prices were competitive but that the providers were only willing to offer five- or six-year contracts.

A year or so after signing the wind contract Georgetown went looking for additional long-term power. During this time Foster realized that solar would nicely complement the profile of wind energy, which blows most overnight. While solar power is less developed in Texas, as costs drop the potential is sky high. Texas is ranked first in solar energy potential according to the State Energy Conversation Office but only tenth in installed solar capacity. In 2014, Texas installed 129 megawatts of solar, ranking it 8th for the year nationally.

“Between 2012 and 2014 the solar market came down almost 80 percent in cost,” said Foster. “So once again we had great timing, as the solar providers wanted long-term contracts in order to help break into the Texas market.”

In February, Georgetown’s City Council approved the final agreement with California-based SunEdison to provide up to 150 megawatts of solar power to the city between 2017 and 2041. It is the largest SunEdison solar agreement in Texas to date. While Texan leaders such as former-governor Rick Perry have made California out to be an entrepreneurial desert, where it’s “next to impossible” to build a business, the California solar industry is far outpacing Texas in solar development. In 2014, California led the country in solar installations adding 4,316 megawatts of solar electric capacity to the grid.

For the most part, Texas lawmakers seem more focused on banning local fracking bans rather than incentivizing solar power when it comes to creating a business-friendly energy environment.

Part of what really shocks most people is that we did this in the middle of a shale gas boom.

Georgetown was able to eschew any industry pressure in making its energy decisions, which Foster said were “easy” once it was determined that they met three main criteria: they were the lowest-cost source of power, they eliminated the risk of long-term price fluctuation, and they helped the city increase its renewable energy portfolio. Originally Georgetown had a target of getting 30 percent of its power from renewables by 2030.

According to Ross, making decisions based on these factors helps the city plan for a prosperous future, in which it can both continue growing rapidly and maintain its small town values.

“A lot of times these discussions are framed around either choice A or choice B,” said Ross. “But I’m always looking for choice C where you have the best of both possible worlds and I think that’s what we’ve done with green energy.”

Ross hopes the renewable energy will help attract large companies, especially in the tech industry, that have established renewable energy policies. He said the city has received “many phone calls” from high-tech companies since announcing the solar farm in March. The cheap and reliable prices also appeal to companies that want to avoid any price volatility associated with the international fossil fuel market or potential greenhouse gas regulations such as the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which aims to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

Nearby Austin is a well-established tech hub. Dell started there, and Facebook and Apple both have operations in the area. While Austin Energy has been at the forefront of renewable energy generation, the utility is unable to go 100 percent renewable due to their prior investments in fossil fuels, according to Foster.

“They own coal and gas generation that’s been steel in the ground for years and a lot of it is paid off,” said Foster. “So they are in a conundrum where if they really want to go renewable they will have to scale back on their cheapest assets that they already own, thus increasing their prices.”

Alternatively, after ending an energy contract with the Lower Colorado River Authority in 2012, Georgetown didn’t own any generation, allowing the utility to build its energy portfolio from scratch.

“Part of what really shocks most people is that we did this in the middle of a shale gas boom, with energy coming from gas plants being really cheap,” said Foster. “But none of the suppliers at that price were willing to do long-term contracts — they don’t believe it will stay cheap for so long.”

While it is impossible to really know which electrons come from where along the transmission lines crisscrossing the state, Foster said it’s important to note that not only is Georgetown contracting the energy, but also the rights to transmit the energy physically along the transmission lines.

“If we didn’t do that we would be selling the energy into the western grid and buying someone else’s energy in the southern grid,” he said. “We wanted the 100 percent green moniker to be more than a paper deal though, so we’re renting the capacity of the transmission lines we need to move it here from the western part of the state.”

Foster said that in the first five years of the contracts there is less than a two percent chance the that city will need to use generation other than the two big renewable farms — at anytime, including cloudy days and quiet nights.

[image error]

An EDF wind farm like the one that will be powering Georgetown.

CREDIT: Courtesy of City of Georgetown

While most of Texas’ current solar power is located in the sun-drenched west, the rest of the state also catches pretty good rays. Austin gets around 300 sunny days a year. If small and residential solar really booms in the area, it could be real game-changer.

In Georgetown for instance, if residents want to install rooftop solar the city utility will fully net meter the energy, allowing solar producers to get paid for the excess energy they put back into the grid. With many utilities running scared from the impact of cheap and distributed renewable energy on their business model, Georgetown’s net metering policy is far more progressive than the industry standard.

Foster said more rooftop solar in Georgetown will actually help the current utility-scale wind and solar farms function more efficiently and last longer.

“If residential homes can integrate solar panels and have some sort of storage technology to levelize the load they can bring down electricity costs for everyone,” he said.

Home solar installations produce the most power during the afternoon and evening. With more of this energy coming from residential installations, the power from the utility-scale wind and solar farms can be used for other purposes, making the locked-in cheap rates go even further.

To keep fully powered, right now Georgetown requires around half of the 300 megawatts of renewable energy in its long-term contracts. Foster said this adheres to the typical utility planning process in which you “build twice what you need and grow into it.” He said the two power plants will equal load demand in about 10 or 15 years. For now the company is selling off excess energy to places like nearby Round Rock.

After listing all the benefits of the clean energy for Georgetown, Ross said he was preparing to meet with a group of politically conservative constituents in the near future. He said on these occasions he encounters a lot of “non-factual” criticism about the energy deals, but that once he explains the process the reaction is commonly ‘oh I get it now, that makes sense.’

He said he sometimes asks the skeptics if they think wind and solar are going to stop producing energy before fossil fuels.

“Fossil fuels are a finite resource right?” he said. “Seems to me that the wind and sun will be out in Texas for many, many years. I don’t have a degree in environmental science or anything, but if I had a choice and the costs were the same I would want something without stuff coming out of a smokestack.”

Tags

AustinFossil FuelsGeorgetownRenewable EnergySolar PowerTexasTransmissionWind Energy

The post This Big Texas City Will Soon Be Powered Entirely By Wind And Sun appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Senators Vote To Repeal Clean Water Rule That Protects Millions Of Miles Of Streams

Congressional Republicans are one step closer to blocking the Obama administration’s attempt to clarify the EPA’s regulatory powers under the Clean Water Act.

On Wednesday, the Senate Environment and Public Works committee voted 11-9 to pass a bill that would effectively repeal the administration’s recently announced regulations for water pollution. The vote was split cleanly among party lines, with only Republicans supporting it.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), would nullify the Waters of the United States Rule, released in late May, and set specific guidelines that the EPA must follow in re-writing the rule.

As it stands, the rule seeks to clarify the bodies of water that can be regulated under the Clean Water Act. In its current form, the Waters of the United States Rule, also known as the Clean Water Rule, restores protections for navigable waterways and their tributaries, and protects bodies of water that are located next to rivers and lakes.

The EPA argues that the Clean Water Rule only protects waters that have historically been protected under the Clean Water Act, and does not require a new permitting process for agriculture.

“It does not regulate most ditches and does not regulate groundwater, shallow subsurface flows, or tile drains. It does not make changes to current policies on irrigation or water transfers or apply to erosion in a field,” the EPA said in the press statement after the final rule was released. “The Clean Water Rule addresses the pollution and destruction of waterways – not land use or private property rights.”

Opponents of the rule, however, claim that it extends far beyond the EPA’s historic jurisdiction and into controlling state or privately-owned waters. They also say it could adversely impact farmers and industry. According to the Hill, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), chairman of the committee, said that farmers in Oklahoma are more concerned about the Clean Water Rule than any other federal policy.

Barrasso’s bill is co-sponsored by a handful of Senate Democrats, including Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), Joe Donnelly (D-IN) and Joe Manchin (D-WV). The bill sets guidelines for specific bodies of water that cannot be regulated — like isolated ponds — and requires that the EPA consult with state and local governments as well as private companies before rewriting the rule, according to the Hill.

Not a single Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted for the bill. Instead, the committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) called the bill a “back-door repeal of the Clean Water Act” that would remove protection for a significant portion of the country’s waters.

Boxer and five other Democrats on the committee offered amendments to the bill, which they hoped would help preserve parts of the rule’s protections. Those amendments were voted down along party lines.

Barrasso’s bill now heads to the Senate floor, where it needs 60 votes to pass.

This isn’t the first time members of Congress have voted for a bill aimed at blocking the Clean Water Rule. In May, the House passed a bill sponsored by Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA), which sought to block the EPA’s proposed rule and force the creation of a new one.

Environmental groups argue that attempts by Congress to block the Clean Water Rule run counter to what the public wants.

“The senators who voted against clean water today weren’t listening to the majority of Americans who want to see their rivers, streams, and livelihoods protected from pollution,” Ally Fields, federal clean water advocate with Environment America, said in a press statement emailed to ThinkProgress.

Tags

EPASenateWater

The post Senators Vote To Repeal Clean Water Rule That Protects Millions Of Miles Of Streams appeared first on ThinkProgress.