Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 135

China Can Stop Catastrophic Climate Change. But Will It?

A new study confirms what has been increasingly clear to outside observers: Whether or not the world will avert catastrophic climate change is now, to a large extent, in the hands of the Chinese.

The new London School of Economics (LSE) study, written by analyst Fergus Green and famed climate economist Nicholas Stern, matches what Climate Progress has been hearing and reporting for a while now: China’s coal use appears to have peaked. And that means China’s CO2 will likely peak by 2025 — five years earlier than the public commitment the country made to the world as part of the climate deal with the United States last year.

The world needs to slash greenhouse gas emissions roughly in half by 2050 and then drop to zero emissions or below by 2100 to have a reasonable chance of stabilizing below 2°C — the level that the world’s leading scientists and governments have determined is a threshold beyond which dangerous climate impacts accumulate and accelerate rapidly.

“Whether the world can get onto that [2°C] pathway in the decade or more after 2020 depends in significant part on China’s ability to reduce its emissions at a rapid rate, post-peak (as opposed to emissions plateauing for a long time), on the actions of other countries in the next two decades, and on global actions over the subsequent decades,” the LSE paper explains.

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China’s coal use (dark orange) has dropped sharply since 2013, according to government data analyzed by Energydesk China. A new London School of Economics study argues China has peaked in coal.

Speeding up climate action outside of China remains vital. All efforts must be taken to preserve, meet, and even beat the CO2 commitments that this country (and others) have made — and to mobilize for even deeper cuts in the future. But the stranglehold the anti-science and pro-pollution crowd have on Congress limits our near-term flexibility to act and lead. And the EU is already committed to cut total emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, and will no doubt make stronger commitments in the future.

But China has publicly committed only to peak CO2 emissions by 2030 or earlier, to peak coal use by 2020, and to double its share of carbon-free power by 2030. When the peaks occur and whether they look more like plateaus or actual peaks will determine whether we have a serious chance at avoiding climate catastrophe. That said, the Chinese agreed in the pledge “to make best efforts to peak early” — which strongly suggests they always anticipated peaking earlier.

According to the report’s authors, “to reduce its emissions at a rapid rate, post-peak, China will need to deepen its planned reforms in cities and in the energy system, supported by a concerted approach to clean innovation, green finance and fiscal reforms.” You can find the details in the full report China’s “new normal”: structural change, better growth, and peak emissions from LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and its Center for Climate Change Economics and Policy. I will explore these policies — and the prospects for China embracing them — in subsequent posts.

It bears repeating what China has already committed to is an astonishing reversal of its energy policy, which for two decades has centered around building one or two coal plants a week. Now China will be building the equivalent in carbon-free power every week for decades, while the construction rate of new coal plants decelerates like a crash-test dummy.

In the report, authors Stern and Green include a scenario whereby CO2 emissions from energy could peak as early as 2020. They argue that a China CO2 peak between 2020 and 2025 could allow the world to put global greenhouse gas emissions on the 2°C pathway.

Whether this will happen depends to a great extent on whether China (a very old civilization that often takes a long-term view) wants to be a superpower in a thriving world with a livable climate that it is perceived as helping to have preserved — or in a desperate world without one that it is perceived as having helped destroy. In theory, the United States has the exact same choice, of course, but it’s been a while since anyone claimed that our leaders take a long-term view of things.

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The U.S. Got More Rain This May Than Any Other Month On Record

This May was the United States’ wettest month in all 121 years of record-keeping, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

A total of 4.36 inches fell across the lower 48 states last month — 1.45 inches more than average, NOAA said Monday. Fifteen states saw precipitation that was “much above average” in May, and Oklahoma and Texas experienced their wettest month on record, with precipitation levels “more than twice the long-term average,” according to NOAA.

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CREDIT: NOAA

These records aren’t surprising for Oklahoma and Texas, which have been battling severe storms and major flooding over the last several weeks. These floods have swept away homes and have killed at least 28 people in the states. Scientists don’t yet know how much climate change played into these floods, but they noted to ThinkProgress last month that climate change is expected to make severe flooding like this more common.

“There are several factors that have created conditions that made it more likely to have this disastrous situation, and I would say the majority of them are natural factors,” Brenda Ekwurzel, a senior climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told ThinkProgress. “However, there’s a definite climate assist that creates the likelihoods of the odds of it being a more severe event.”

Along with this increased chance of heavy rainfall, scientists also say that some regions will see longer, more intense periods of drought — periods that then could be followed by heavy, intense rainfall. Warmer air can hold more moisture, which means that moisture can collect in the atmosphere for longer than usual and then fall all at once on a region. This “weather whiplash” exacerbates the risk of flooding, as the heavy rain can simply run off the surface of the dry, hard earth, rather than being absorbed by it.

While the U.S. as a whole got more precipitation in May than it has in over a century, not all states saw wet weather. Nearly 70 percent of California is still in an extreme drought, and 99 percent is still abnormally dry. The drought, which scientists have said has “very likely” been exacerbated by climate change, has led to the state’s first-ever water rationing program and could end up costing the state’s economy $2.7 billion in agricultural losses.

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CREDIT: NOAA

However, in spite of California’s extreme drought, NOAA noted Monday that 24.6 percent of the contiguous U.S. is in drought as of the June 2 drought monitor — the smallest “drought footprint” in the country since February 2011.

“Drought conditions drastically improved across the Southern Plains. Drought improvement was also observed across the Central and Northern Plains, Upper Midwest, and the Central Rockies,” NOAA stated. However, it added, “drought conditions remained entrenched in the West” in May.

NOAA also noted another record in its report Monday: Alaska had the hottest May statewide average temperature last month in 91 years of record-keeping. The temperature — 44.9°F — was 7.1°F above average. “The warmth in Alaska was widespread with several cities were record warm, including Barrow and Juneau,” NOAA noted.

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G7 Leaders Agree On Action To Limit Global Warming To 2 Degrees

Group of Seven (G7) leaders agreed to limit global warming to 2°C at a meeting in Germany on Monday, a feat they hope to accomplish by reducing their carbon emissions, mobilizing $100 billion a year for climate change mitigation, and facilitating more investment in developing nations.

“Urgent and concrete action is needed to address climate change,” the declaration from the G7, a group of major world economies, said. “We remain committed to the elimination of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies,” it added.

Fossil fuels — primarily for the electricity and transportation sectors — are the leading contributor to human-caused climate change. Last month, the International Monetary Fund released a report stating that fossil fuel subsidies, including both direct financial assistance and related costs, were costing $5.3 trillion a year globally.

The G7, which includes Germany, France, Japan, Canada, the United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom, put out the agreement in advance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris later this year. While the agreement is non-binding, it still marks progress towards a final climate change agreement in December.

Environmental groups applauded the announcement, heralding it as a blow against the fossil fuel industry.

“The G7 is sending a signal that the world must move away from fossil fuels, and investors should take notice,” 350.org executive director May Boeve said in a statement. “If you’re still holding onto fossil fuel stocks, you’re betting on the past. As today’s announcement makes clear, the future belongs to renewables.”

Coming to an agreement at this G7 meeting was a key goal for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, according to Politico. She reportedly pushed G7 members to support a plan to “fully decarbonize” the world’s energy systems by 2100, with half to two-thirds of the reductions in emissions coming by 2050.

Still, the commitment of these seven industrialized nations isn’t the only thing that needs to happen in order to prevent a 2°C rise in temperature and the catastrophic effects of climate change that scientists say will come along with it. Combined, the United States, France, Canada, Germany, Japan, and Great Britain emit roughly the same amount of carbon per year as China does, according to data from the World Bank. That’s why, regardless of the G7’s commitment, efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in China and India — another major emitter — will be critical to combatting climate change.

And while Germany, France — which is hosting the UN summit later this year — and the United States are hardening their climate agendas, Japan and Canada were seen as potential holdouts leading up to the G7 agreement. Canada is heavily investing in developing its oil and gas exports, including through the development of tar sands, one of the world’s most carbon-intensive fossil fuels. Japan has increased its use of coal-fired power plants, particularly since the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and is in the process of exporting its coal plant technology into Asia’s developing nations.

In its agreement, the G7 countries pledged to facilitate climate change mitigation and preparedness in developing nations. Specifically, the group said it will increase access to renewable energy in Africa and other developing nations, “with a view to reducing energy poverty and mobilizing substantial financial resources.” It will also increase support for countries vulnerable to the effects of climate change through greater access to insurance coverage and early warning systems.

“Their commitment to increase renewable energy access in Africa and address climate risks from disasters will help build trust with developing countries ahead of the climate negotiations in Paris,” Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute said in a statement. “While more remains to be done — particularly around meeting the $100 billion goal — it is clear G7 leaders understand that delivering climate finance is a part of their role in the global community.”

The final agreement offered “support” for 40 to 70 percent reductions by 2050, compared to 2010 levels. The year 2010 might represent a kind of compromise in the group. The E.U. uses 1990 as its baseline year, but in previous goals announced by Japan, that country used 2013 as a baseline.

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The U.S.’s Biggest Coal Company Can’t Pay To Clean Up Its Own Mines

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. Nicole Gentile is the Director of Campaigns with the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress. You can follow her on Twitter at @nicolegentile.

A new investigation has found that the world’s largest private-sector coal company does not have adequate funds or insurance to clean up its own mining operations, increasing the risk that taxpayers will have to pay billions of dollars to clean up toxic coal mine sites across the country.

Reuters reported last week that St. Louis-based Peabody Energy is “under scrutiny” from the federal government over concerns that the company is violating federal bonding regulations that are intended to guarantee that if a mining company goes bankrupt, it has sufficient insurance to pay to clean up its own mines. Instead of paying a third party for cleanup insurance, Peabody Energy has sought to comply with federal and state rules by promising regulators that it has sufficient financial resources on hand to pay for any cleanup costs — a practice known as self-bonding.

A review of securities filings by Reuters, however, found that at the end of 2014, Peabody’s assets were insufficient to meet federal and state self-bonding requirements. According to Reuters, “slumping coal prices and declining demand have put [coal] industry balance sheets under stress,” raising serious questions about whether Peabody and its competitors can continue to insure their own operations. In 2014, Peabody posted more than $700 million in losses.

“One of the key elements of (federal mining law) is to hold mine operators responsible and avoid taxpayers being saddled with the bill,” Greg Conrad, director of the Interstate Mining Compact Commission, an independent agency representing state coal programs, told Reuters in April.

Peabody, which operates the largest coal mine in the United States, is one of the five largest coal companies operating on the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana. The basin provides more than 40 percent of the country’s coal. Coal in this region is primarily mined in strip mines, a type of surface mining which leaves an open pit with coal exposed, requiring extensive cleanup by companies once mining is completed. Companies are required to replant vegetation, restore topsoil “to match the original topography,” and rebuild the original surface ecosystem.

With their own finances deteriorating, Peabody and other coal companies are now using subsidiary companies to supply the insurance needed to meet the bonding requirements, though it is not clear why the finances of the subsidiary companies are more stable than those of the parent companies. Regulators in Colorado, Illinois, Wyoming, Indiana, and New Mexico denied Reuters’ request to review the financial records of Peabody Investment Corporation, which is the subsidiary that Peabody is using in several states to meet its bonding requirements.

Although the use of subsidiaries to self-insure a company appears to be legal under current regulations, lawyers that Reuters consulted believe that the “language may have been meant to allow smaller coal companies to lean on the strength of their well-financed parent — but never the other way around.”

A Peabody spokesperson told Reuters that the company is following all regulations and its subsidiaries are in “full compliance with the various state and federal requirements.” However, if pushed to bankruptcy, Peabody would leave $1.38 billion in cleanup liabilities to the American taxpayer, according to the investigation.

The investigation also found that if the nation’s four largest coal companies — Peabody, Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal Inc and Cloud Peak Energy — were to file for bankruptcy, they would leave behind $2.7 billion in cleanup costs and no insurance to shield taxpayers from this liability.

The scrutiny of Peabody comes on the heels of Alpha Natural Resources losing the right to self-insure in Wyoming just last week because it no longer had enough cash on hand to cover cleanup costs. Reuters also found that in 2014 that Arch Coal failed to meet the financial requirements to be eligible to self-insure.

In addition to the serious concerns about avoiding insurance obligations and costs, recent investigations have shown that coal companies operating on public lands in Wyoming and Montana are using their subsidiary companies to intentionally dodge payments owed to taxpayers from mining publicly owned coal.

The Department of the Interior’s Office of Surface Mining and Reclamation and Enforcement is currently examining “all aspects” of the coal companies’ insurance practices.

According to the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement’s Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Program, “despite remarkable achievements, more than $4 billion worth of High Priority health and safety coal-related abandoned sites remain,” and “millions of Americans live less than a mile from abandoned coal mines.”

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Lindsey Graham Calls Out Fellow Republican Candidates Over Climate Change Views

In an interview Sunday with CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) continued to distance himself from the growing field of GOP presidential candidates when it comes to climate change and environmental policy.

“If I’m president of the United States, we’re going to address climate change, CO2 emissions in a business-friendly way,” Graham said during the interview, noting that he does “believe that climate change is real.”

The interview was taped Saturday in Boone, Iowa, where a number of GOP candidates gathered to attend a “Roast and Ride” event put on by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA). Declared GOP presidential candidates Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Carly Fiorina, and former Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX), as well as potential candidate Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), attended the event alongside Graham.

When it comes to the environment, however, Graham feels he has little in common with the other GOP nominees.

“Here’s a question you need to ask everybody running as a Republican: What is the environmental policy of the Republican party?” he asked. “When I ask that question, I get a blank stare.”

Though Graham’s own record in shepherding environmentally-friendly policies through Congress is somewhat mixed, he is currently one of only two Republican presidential candidates who accepts the science behind man-made climate change. Candidates like Rubio and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) have gone on record outwardly denying humanity’s contribution to the problem, and candidates like Fiorina and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) have questioned the basic science behind climate change. Besides Graham, in the Republican presidential field, only former New York governor George Pataki has shown that he accepts the science behind climate change and wants to address the issue.

Within the scientific community, there is a 97 percent consensus that the climate is changing, and that human activity is the cause — scientists are about as sure man-man activity is creating climate change as they are that smoking cigarettes leads to lung cancer.

“When 90 percent of the doctors tell you you’ve got a problem, do you listen to the one?” Graham asked.

In a different interview on Sunday, GOP candidate and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum highlighted the scientific consensus around climate change as evidence against its existence.

“All of this certainty, which is what bothers me about the debate, the idea that science is settled,” Santorum told Fox News Sunday. “Any time you hear a scientist say science is settled, that’s political science, not real science.”

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Opponents Of Obama’s Carbon Pollution Rule Are Trying Nearly Everything To Take It Down

When the Obama administration unveiled its plan to make the most significant move ever to tackle the carbon pollution that causes climate change, it expected opponents to throw everything they had, even the kitchen sink, against it.

So it can be hard to keep track of all the tactics that critics in Congress, the states, and industry have been using to keep the administration from regulating carbon dioxide from power plants. Some are redundant, some are doomed to fail, and some have a chance of stopping or fatally delaying the rule.

But first, it’s important to keep in mind what the carbon rule actually is.

The proposed rule, part of the Clean Power Plan, provides states with the flexibility to craft their own plans to reduce carbon emissions from the electric power sector. Those plans altogether would have to meet the national goal of a 30 percent drop in carbon emissions from existing power plants by 2030 from 2005 levels. It’s the result of a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that greenhouse gases should be regulated under the Clean Air Act if they endanger public health — which it did.

Each state would have a broad menu of carbon-cutting options, including energy efficiency improvements, adding clean energy, implementing a carbon tax, joining a cap-and-trade system, or instituting their own. For the most part, states will look to transition from the worst heavy-pollution coal-fired power plants to cleaner-burning natural gas and renewables. Even more importantly, the rule is a major part of America’s international commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent below their 2005 levels by 2020 — which has already encouraged other countries to make commitments of their own.

The fight to solve the climate crisis is itself a race against time, and the Clean Power Plan (CPP) is no less than that same race distilled down into an American political fight. Opponents have taken this to heart, and have made delaying implementation of the rule one of their main goals, utilizing many different tactics to gum up the works long enough with the hope that a Republican president would stop things entirely in 2017. The Democratic field, from Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders to Martin O’Malley to Lincoln Chafee, are each supporters of serious climate action, while it’s difficult to find a Republican that takes the issue seriously.

Here is how opponents will try to stop or slow the rule before 2017.

To the courts

The most direct and immediate method that opponents of the Clean Power Plan have used thus far has been to make the case that the rule is illegal. Though cases thus far have found little traction because the proposed rule is not yet final, it will become final later this summer. Then judges will be asked to wrestle with myriad questions brought by state and industry plaintiffs, and it is hard to imagine this not going to the Supreme Court.

Fifteen governors of coal-dependent states told President Obama in a letter that they believed the CPP is illegal. The state lawsuits claim that the proposed regulations “impose impermissible double regulation” because the EPA already regulates general air pollution from power plants.

However the idea to use the Clean Air Act to cut carbon pollution has passed legal scrutiny before — the EPA is required to regulate CO2 if it finds that it endangers public health, which it has. Last year, a 7-2 majority ruled in a separate case that EPA had the authority to regulate greenhouse gases from stationary sources already subject to the Clean Air Act’s permitting requirements.

This will not stop a blizzard of lawsuits from descending upon the courts once the final rule is released in the summer. These will be tied to subjects as varied as the intricacies of the passage of the Clean Air Act, whether states can incorporate emissions reductions “beyond the fenceline” of power plants, the likely impact on the coal industry, and the Tailoring Rule, which allowed the EPA to target only the largest emissions sources. The administration will no doubt vigorously defend the rule from all of these cases over the next year and a half. Many of the following tactics, however, depend on these cases dragging on or gaining enough of a victory to upend the final rule, causing the EPA to have to go back to the drawing board.

Congressional legislation

If the courts don’t slow down the carbon rule, opponents have no shortage of representation trying to halt, gut, or delay things in Congress. Electric utilities, coal operators, and the oil and gas sector, upped their donations to Republicans last election and it paid off. As displayed in hearings hostile to the carbon rule, Congress is even more energized to attack the EPA through hearings, rhetoric, and legislation than normal.

Sen. Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV) introduced legislation last month that would scuttle the carbon rule and tie EPA’s hands if it attempted to get the process moving again. The Affordable Reliable Energy Now Act has one Democratic cosponsor, fellow West Virginian Joe Manchin. The bill’s sponsors said they see that bill as a starting point, with potential to change it to attract more cosponsors.

In the House, Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY) introduced legislation that did not go quite as far, but like the Senate bill allowed governors to opt their states out of the regs, and delayed compliance until all litigation finished. This would essentially kill the plan — and the House bill is more moderate. Capito’s bill would require EPA to produce 50 different plans targeted at each state (instead of allowing each state to come up with their own, alongside a model), as well as detailed climate modeling and global emissions reporting. The House is likely to pass their version and it is an open question as to whether Capito’s bill, or some version of it, would pass the Senate. It is less likely that such legislation would survive a veto.

However, a bill focusing mainly on delay, positioned as a moderate compromise, could get enough votes from moderate Democrats from coal states to get close to overriding a veto. Earlier this year a nonbinding McConnell amendment that would prevent EPA from withholding highway funds from states that failed to submit an implementation plan received 57 votes, including Sens. Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), and Joe Donnelly (D-IN).

The Congressional Review Act (CRA) allows Congress to repeal a final rule issued by the Executive Branch within 60 legislative days of being published in the Federal Register. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has promised to push a CRA vote on the final carbon rule. McConnell did his best to begin the CRA process early, well before the proposed rule was final, and he failed. This time, he will likely succeed in getting it through Congress, though the President will assuredly veto, and it is unlikely McConnell has the votes to override.

Budget

Republican leaders in Congress know very well that overriding a veto is beyond their reach for most legislation. One tactic to get around that would be to attach a bill as a rider to a must-pass piece of appropriations. The government needs a budget to function, and as the world has learned over the last few years, it will shut down if Congress and the President cannot come to a compromise agreement.

There will no doubt be pressure to attach a bill gutting the Clean Air Act or delaying the Clean Power Plan to budgetary legislation. The question is whether House and Senate leadership want to have that fight with the President over this. Environmental groups are confident the president will not blink, but if conservatives decide they can gain more by having that fight, they could decide to pull the trigger.

State legislative action

A number of state legislatures have been busy, as dozens of bills tie the hands of the states to make it difficult for governors to comply with the CPP. Arizona, Nebraska, and South Dakota legislators want their environmental agencies to submit reports of how the plans would impact the economy before submitting it. Minnesota, Montana, and West Virginia legislators introduced bills that make the executive branch submit plans to the legislature for approval before going to the EPA.

Kentucky passed a law that prevents any plan it implements from increasing energy efficiency, renewable energy, or gas-fired power plants at the expense of coal ones. It passed both houses unanimously and was signed by Democratic Governor Steve Beshear last year. However, as coal plants retire on their own due to external market forces, Kentucky could get close to complying despite trying not to.

The Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) has been able to place op-eds in at least 16 local newspapers, telling state legislatures to fight the EPA’s proposed carbon rule. The authors are identified only as state officials for AFP, with no information about oil industry ties or backing from the Koch brothers.

These legislative approaches are popular with the conservative bill mill ALEC, yet on the whole they have been met with limited success so far. Moreover, electric utilities oppose this kind of meddling on the part of the legislature. They want the governor of the state to have the ability to make the state plan with them, and don’t want their hands tied at the state level.

If watering down, delaying, or interfering is not enough, there’s always fossil disobedience.

Out-and-out refusal

Last year, coal industry lawyers published a paper arguing that states did not have much to lose by not filing a State Implementation Plan. The idea took off, with new Sen. McConnell writing an op-ed in March telling states to “think twice about submitting a state plan.”

Still, to even the most recalcitrant states, not having a Plan B is worse than the thought of beginning to comply. The environmental agencies of nearly every state are looking into plans that could meet the emissions reduction rule. The Clean Air Act is federal law, and it will be difficult for states to trump it no matter the opposition.

Governor John Hickenlooper (D-CO), often a skeptic of EPA actions he believes interfere too much with Colorado, responded to McConnell’s letter with one of his own, stating that his state would be complying with the CPP.

Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin issued an executive order preventing agencies from working to comply with the proposed rule, although it could be argued that she did that to preserve gubernatorial power as the legislature attempts to take it away during the plan-drafting process.

* * *

The Clean Power Plan is in a race against time. The timing of each proposed and final rule was spaced out in order to get everything in place by the end of President Obama’s second term, cementing it in place as best as a new regulation can be. The proposed rule for new power plants came out in 2013, with the final rule released a year later, giving it two years to sink in. The proposed rule for existing sources got released that year and soon it will become final, giving states a year and a half to submit their compliance plans. Any significant delay could allow the next president and Congress to walk back, destroy, further delay, or otherwise complicate the regulations.

Opponents’ arguments about electric bills, jobs, and reliability are compelling to some. However, a large majority of American voters — including 63 percent of Republicans — support federal efforts to regulate greenhouse gases from existing power plants.

Some environmental groups are optimistic that the CPP can beat the lawsuits, legislation, state action, state inaction, and budgetary showdowns — and begin helping states cut their carbon pollution.

“The administration is working this very hard,” said David Doniger, director of the Climate and Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “All the elements are there to complete the CPP on time, to prevail against legislative challenges and lawsuits‎, and to work with stakeholders for timely, smart, and cost-effective state plans.”

Eyes around the world are watching the plan’s progress, as the world prepares to negotiate a serious climate agreement in Paris at the end of this year.

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Santorum: I’m More Qualified Than Pope Francis To Talk About Climate Change Because I’m A Politician

In an interview with Fox News Sunday, former Pennsylvania senator and current GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum tried to explain why he is more qualified than the Pope to discuss climate change. Santorum caused a stir earlier this week when he told a Philadelphia radio station that Pope Francis should “leave science to the scientists” and focus on things like “theology and morality” instead of climate change.

“If he’s not a scientist — and in fact, he does have a degree in chemistry — neither are you?” host Chris Wallace asked Santorum Sunday. “So, I guess the question would be, if he shouldn’t talk about it, should you?”

Santorum defended his discussions about climate change by distinguishing politicians from church leaders. “Politicians, whether we like it or not, people in government have to make decision with regard to public policy that affect American workers,” Santorum said, adding that while “the pope can talk about whatever he wants to talk about,” he questions the Pope’s use of his moral authority to combat the issue of climate change.

“I’m saying, what should the pope use his moral authority for?” Santorum asked. “I think there are more pressing problems confronting the earth than climate change.”

The Catholic Church has long framed climate change as a moral issue, noting that its potential impacts — rising sea level, more frequent extreme weather events, and natural resource scarcity — disproportionately impact poor and developing nations. The Pope is expected to release an encyclical letter on the environment June 18, which will be the Church’s strongest move to date on addressing the issue of climate change.

Santorum — a devout Catholic — disagrees with the Pope’s stance that climate change is a man-made. He has often called climate science “political science,” and argued on Sunday that a scientific consensus on climate change underscores this point.

“All of this certainty, which is what bothers me about the debate, the idea that science is settled,” Santorum said. “Any time you hear a scientist say science is settled, that’s political science, not real science.”

97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists agree that the climate-warming seen over the past century is a result of human activity. The scientific consensus that global-warming is man made is about the same as the consensus within the scientific community that smoking leads to lung cancer.

On Sunday, Santorum also called climate science “speculative science, which has proven over time not to have checked out,” claiming that climate predictions over the past 15 years have proven untrue. One common climate denial argument rests on a so-called “pause” in global warming over the past 15 years, when temperatures were not appearing to rise at the rate predicted by climate models. Early this week, however, NOAA released a new study reassessing temperature data over the past century taking into account new methods for measuring global surface temperature. The study found that there has been no slowdown in global temperature increase over the past 15 years — instead, the rate of temperature increase has been accelerating slightly.

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The Unintended Consequences Of North Carolina’s ‘Ag-Gag’ Law

On Wednesday, both the North Carolina House and Senate voted to override Gov. Pat McCroy’s veto of House Bill 405 — referred to by opponents as North Carolina’s “ag-gag” law. The bill is set to become law January 1, and environmentalists are worried that its impacts won’t be limited to animal rights and potential whistle-blowers.

“It would have an environmental effect,” Gray Jernigan, staff attorney and communications coordinator with Waterkeeper Alliance told ThinkProgress. “If there was a spill of swine waste due to a lagoon failure, or an equipment malfunction on a hog facility, this would really make an employee second-guess whether they call environment or public health officials to come respond to the problem.”

The bill gives businesses in North Carolina the right to sue someone for gaining access to a nonpublic area in order to obtain workplace secrets or take photographs or video of workplace violations. The bill’s supporters say that it helps protect businesses from bad actors and strengthens private property rights, but opponents of the bill worry that its broad language might deter whistle-blowers and private citizens alike from reporting workplace violations — especially within the state’s large agricultural sector.

North Carolina is one of the country’s leading producers of hogs and pigs — the two top counties in the country in terms of hog and pig sales are Duplin and Sampson, both located along North Carolina’s eastern coast. Most of those pigs are raised in factory farms, with an average of 4,300 hogs per farm in the state.

The hog industry is big business, with sales totaling $2.9 billion in 2012, but it also leaves North Carolina with a big problem: how to dispose of the millions of tons of waste created by the hogs each year.

To combat the waste problem, hog farmers have adopted the lagoon and sprayfield system, using open-air pits called lagoons to store the manure before it is applied to nearby fields. But, as Jernigan points out, lagoons are often unlined or leaking, threatening contamination of ground and surface water around the farm.

“I think the lagoon and sprayfield system of waste disposal, at hog facilities in particular, is really just a broken system,” Jernigan said. “It leads to pollution of the air, through emissions of gases and odors from the exposed waste sitting out in the open air, it leads to groundwater contamination from unlined or poorly-lined lagoons, and it results in surface water and further groundwater pollution from spraying on a ditch or open field that is sitting in an area of exposed groundwater.”

Many of North Carolina’s concentrated hog farming operations are located along the state’s Eastern shore, in an area that was historically swamp and wetland — these are areas that tend to be more prone to flooding, heightening the risk that waste from hog farms could enter North Carolina’s drinking water, Jernigan said.

In January, researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the University of North Carolina published a study looking at bacterial contamination in rivers directly next to North Carolina’s pig farms. For a year, they tested waters both up and downstream from factory pig farms, and found that both samples contained high amounts of fecal matter — some in excess of state and federal recreational water quality guidelines for fecal coliforms, E. coli, and Enterococcus.

According to a report in Environmental Health News, the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources treats large pig farming operations as “non-discharge facilities,” meaning that the farms aren’t subject to state rules about how to monitor and dispose of their waste. Under state regulations, pig farms are subject to inspections twice a year.

To Bob Martin, program director of the Food System Policy Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, existing regulatory framework doesn’t go far enough to ensure that North Carolina’s hog farms aren’t polluting neighboring water and air. Martin, who looked at factory farming intensively for three years as part of a joint JHSPH-Pew Charitable Trusts Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, told ThinkProgress that during its three-year look at factory farming in America, the commission found that almost all states are woefully underfunded when it comes to inspecting factory farms.

“There aren’t enough resources allocated by state governments and state legislatures to adequately enforce the law,” Martin said, noting that it can be especially difficult to catch a farm breaking environmental regulations if you’re only looking twice a year.

Jernigan shares Martin’s concern, and worries that the newly passed law will make it more difficult for citizen or employees to report environmental violations as they occur.

“Here in North Carolina, the regulations and the inspections and enforcement regime is totally inadequate,” he said. “It’s essentially a self-reporting and complaint-based system right now, and this bill would effectively discourage self-reporting. This would silence citizen complaints and it would also silence self-reporting.”

In February, the EPA announced it would launch an investigation into North Carolina’s hog farm regulations — environmental and civil rights groups have long claimed that the state is lax about regulating the factory farms because they tend to be located next to poor communities of color. To Martin, House Bill 405 would become another way for the state to silence these already disenfranchised communities.

“They are oftentimes people with the least power in society, and this last avenue of showing what is happening in their lives would be maybe illegal,” he said. “It’s really outrageous.”

Tags

AgricultureEnvironmentNorth Carolina

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Thousands March In The Midwest’s Largest-Ever Anti-Tar Sands Rally

[image error]

Protesters march against tar sands oil in St. Paul, MN on Saturday, June 6, 2015.

CREDIT: courtesy of the Sierra Club

Thousands gathered in St. Paul, Minnesota Saturday afternoon to march in protest of the growing network of tar sands pipelines in America, singling out one pipeline — the Alberta Clipper — in particular.

Activists from across the Midwest were joined by environmental leaders such as 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, Sierra Club President Aaron Mair, and Indigenous Environmental Network Director Tom Goldtooth in protesting tar sands, an unconventional and carbon-intensive fuel that’s found largely in the Athabasca region of Alberta, Canada. About 5,000 people attended the march, according to the Sierra Club’s Mark Westlund — making it the largest anti-tar sands march the Midwest has ever seen.

The main goal of the protest was to emphasize that the conversation about tar sands and fossil fuels was about more than just the Keystone XL pipeline, McKibben said on a press call in the leadup to the march.

“It’s gone way way way beyond Keystone,” he said. “That one got the attention…but the beautiful result has been the ‘Keystonization’ of pretty much every pipeline company across the country.”

Over 5k people here for the Tar Sands Resistance!! #stoptarsands #powershift pic.twitter.com/zlihM2hDNJ

— Energy Action (@energyaction) June 6, 2015

5,000 pipeline fighters standing up for a just future free of fossil fuels! Beautiful! #StopTarSands pic.twitter.com/8T3PBJjpX1

— Rob Friedman (@BobbyHertz) June 6, 2015

Tar sands fighters fill the streets of St. Paul as far as the eye can see! #StopTarSands pic.twitter.com/z7qnQuhRs8

— Sierra Club (@sierraclub) June 6, 2015

Indigenous women and youth lead thousands of #StopTarSands marchers in St. Paul, MN on Saturday pic.twitter.com/A3ghHGax82

— David Goodner (@davidgoodner) June 6, 2015

That “Keystonization” means that Americans have started to protest multiple pipeline construction and expansion projects, including Alberta Clipper. Pipeline company Enbridge is in the process of increasing capacity of Alberta Clipper, which carries tar sands from Hardisty, Alberta to Superior, Wisconsin, from 450,000 to 570,000 barrels per day, with the ultimate goal of increase the pipeline’s capacity to 880,000 bpd — more than the capacity of Keystone XL.

McKibben said he hopes the protest in St. Paul will bring more attention to these other pipeline projects, which are being proposed all over the country.

“This fight expanded beyond Keystone almost immediately. People have been fighting other pipelines with great power,” he said. “The press hasn’t payed as much attention because it hasn’t involved presidential politics in the same way as Keystone has…We hope this rally will help bring things front and center.”

Aaron Mair, president of the Sierra Club, said that the march will help drive home to President Obama just how much opposition there is to tar sands in the U.S.

“Today’s march and rally are sending a clear message to the president and his administration: this nation doesn’t want or need dirty fuels from Canada’s tar sands,” he said in a statement. “If we’re going to keep our air and water clean, cut climate pollution, and protect Tribal and farming communities here and in Canada, we must ultimately keep tar sands oil in the ground. The president cannot ignore us because the movement demanding clean energy solutions to the climate crisis is growing stronger and more diverse.”

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A Televised Presidential Debate, About Science?

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Republican presidential candidates from left, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., prepare for a Republican presidential debate in Sioux City, Iowa, Thursday, Dec. 15, 2011.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Eric Gay

Science issues aren’t usually hot topics for presidential candidates, whose rhetoric tends to revolve more around jobs and the economy than space exploration and funding for energy research. But one organization wants to change that, and is pushing for 2016 presidential candidates to agree to a full debate on science issues, including climate change.

ScienceDebate, a group that started during the 2008 election, is working with campaigns and media outlets to try to convince them to air a general election debate on science issues. Sheril Kirshenbaum, executive director of the group, told ThinkProgress that she helped start the group in 2008 because she and her fellow co-founders weren’t hearing enough talk about science issues — including energy, climate change, health, and space exploration — between Barack Obama and John McCain.

The group didn’t succeed in getting a debate over science issues on TV — Kirshenbaum said both candidates originally agreed to the debate but then backed out — but it did get Obama and McCain to provide written responses on 14 science-related questions.The 2012 campaign was similar — candidates didn’t engage in a televised science debate, but they did answer questions about science that ScienceDebate sent them. In both cases, the questions were selected after whittling down thousands of submissions from the public.

People talk about these issues as if they’re just science issues and they’re really just human challenges

Kirshenbaum is hopeful that this election, there will be a televised debate. She said the organization has gotten an earlier start this year than in previous elections, and has been talking with media outlets and campaigns to gauge interest. Her team is trying to get the word out to the public that the group exists, in order to garner support from people who are interested in seeing more science in political campaigns. They’re also soliciting question suggestions for a debate from the public and gathering signatures for a petition calling for a science debate.

Already, the fact that multiple candidates have made statements on one particular science issue — climate change — is good news, she said, regardless if the statements have been supportive of the science or dismissive of it. Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, and Rick Santorum have all made comments about climate change in recent months, though they haven’t been supportive of action on the issue.

Kirshenbaum said that ScienceDebate doesn’t take sides on candidates’ views on climate change and other issues. Regardless of what they say about science, she said, “we just feel like their policies and views need to be out for all of us to decide on.”

“Our role from the beginning…is not to rank them or rate them but simply provide a means for voters to know what policies would look like,” she said. “It’s not about quizzing them; it’s about finding out what their science policy would be.”

Kirshenbaum did single out democratic candidate Hillary Clinton — whose campaign director John Podesta* tweeted in April that addressing climate change would be at the top of Clinton’s agenda — as someone who could influence the campaign’s treatment of climate change.

“The fact that she’s making this such a big issue means that no matter what happens next, every candidate will have to talk about it,” Kirshenbaum said. She also said that she thinks there’s been a cultural shift in how the public views science in recent years, with shows like Cosmos and Breaking Bad bringing science to a general audience.

“It might not always be the most accurate portrayal, but I think there’s more recognition that this stuff is pretty important,” she said.

Debates over science have also played out heavily in Congress over the last few years. Earlier this year, Ted Cruz (R-TX) said he thought NASA should spend less time studying planet earth and more time finding ways to go out into space. And a bill introduced this year sought to cut federal research in geoscience and social science.

Too often, these sorts of fights are treated as special interests, Kirshenbaum said. Her group is trying to get candidates — and the media — to realize that the public does want to hear about what candidates think about scientific issues. In polling commissioned by ScienceDebate in 2012, more than half of Americans agreed that public policy should be based on the “best available science” instead of on personal opinions, and according to a 2008 poll, 85 percent want to see a debate on science.

Things like clean water, energy, healthy food, and other science-related issues are all things that affect everyone, Kirshenbaum said.

“People talk about these issues as if they’re just science issues and they’re really just human challenges,” she said, “No matter if you’re a Republican or a Democrat, they’re going to affect you and your family.”

*Disclosure: John Podesta founded the Center For American Progress Action Fund, which is the parent organization of ThinkProgress.

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