Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 143

Craft Beer Company To Congress: We Need The EPA’s Clean Water Rule

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Several breweries have come out as strong supporters of the proposed Waters of the United States rule.

CREDIT: Shutterstock

Testifying before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Tuesday, Andrew Lemley, government affairs representative for New Belgium Brewing Company, voiced strong support for the EPA’s proposed Waters of the United States rule.

“Our brewery and our communities depend on clean water,” Lemley said. “Beer is, after all, over 90 percent water and if something happens to our source water the negative affect on our business is almost unthinkable.”

New Belgium Brewing Company — makers of Fat Tire beer — is based in Fort Collins, Colorado, with a second operation based in North Carolina. The company generated $249 million in revenue for Colorado last year, Lemley said, creating over 5,000 jobs — jobs which, according to Lemley, depend on clean water sources.

“We all rely on responsible regulations that limit pollution and protect water at its source,” Lemley said. “Over the past 23 years we’ve learned that when smart regulation and clean water exists for all, business thrives.”

The proposed EPA rule would clarify what streams, tributaries, and wetlands can be protected under the Clean Water Act. Supporters of the proposed regulation say that it would provide support for the third of Americans whose drinking water currently comes from upstream sources not protected under the Clean Water Act, while opponents say the regulations would be overreach on the part of the EPA.

A 2014 poll conducted by the American Sustainable Business Council found that 80 percent of small business owners support federal rules for protecting upstream headwaters as proposed by the EPA, with 71 percent saying that clean water is crucial to support economic growth.

Lemley mirrored that sentiment before the committee on Tuesday, calling access to clean water a “key to economic development” for the craft brewing industry.

This isn’t the first time that New Belgium Brewing Company has voiced support for the proposed rules. In June of 2014, Lemley testified before the House Subcommittee on Water, Power and Oceans in favor of the regulations, saying then that “making world class beer, being profitable and honoring the environment for [New Belgium] go hand in hand.”

New Belgium is just one of dozens of craft brewers that have rallied behind the EPA’s proposed regulations: Allagash Brewing Company, Brooklyn Brewery, Goose Island Beer Company, and Sierra Nevada are some of the 45 breweries that have joined the “Brewers For Clean Water Campaign“, led by Natural Resources Defense Council, in a show of support for clean water regulations.

“Beer is about 90 percent water, making local water supply quality and its characteristics, such as pH and mineral content, critical to brewing,” 32 breweries involved with the campaign wrote in a 2014 letter to the EPA. “Changes to our water supply — whether we draw directly from a water source or from a municipal supply — threaten our ability to consistently produce our great-tasting beer and thus, our bottom line.”

In March, U.S. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy spoke about the Clean Water Rule at the annual Craft Brewers Association Conference. “Clean water matters not just to better lives — but to better beer, and better business,” McCarthy said. “That’s why EPA matters. Our job is to protect water.”

The post Craft Beer Company To Congress: We Need The EPA’s Clean Water Rule appeared first on ThinkProgress.

New York Senators Call Out Their Colleagues For Denying Climate Change

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New York state Sen. Brad Hoylman, pictured here, held a town hall meeting on Tuesday to discuss the impacts of climate change on New Yorkers and call out some of his Republican colleagues for denying the science behind the problem.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Mike Groll

New York state senators who question the science of human-caused climate change got a public reprimanding from their colleagues during a town hall meeting on Tuesday to discuss how residents have been impacted by the phenomenon.

Sen. Brad Hoylman, a Manhattan Democrat who has been outspoken about the need to act on climate change, called out two powerful Senate Republicans who deny climate science. Both Syracuse-based Sen. John DeFrancisco and newly-elected Senate majority leader John Flanagan have cast doubt on the existence of global warming based on the fact that New York had a lot of snow in 2014.

Flanagan — who recently replaced former majority leader Dean Skelos after a corruption scandal — made his comments last week in a radio interview. “Based on the winter we just had, you say to yourself, are we really going through climate change?” He said.

Safe to say Hoylman was not impressed with that logic.

“My colleagues need to get their facts straight,” Hoylman said at the hearing, noting that weather in one small area of the world has nothing to do with the current global warming trend. “If we continue to stall — and that’s what we’re doing, we’re stalling — our inaction will doom us. The stakes are high, and that is not hyperbole.”

Hoylman was joined by three of his Democratic colleagues from New York City — Sens. Liz Krueger, Bill Perkins, and Daniel Squadron — who echoed his concern about climate science denial in the state Legislature. The senators said New Yorkers are already experiencing various plights via climate change’s impacts on public health and agricultural production, and that the policy conversation should focus on solutions to the problem rather than debate over its existence.

“Too many folks still say climate change is a question,” Squadron said. “There is a real question though, which is what are those efforts to fight climate change, and do we have sufficient efforts in place?”

Of the climate scientists who actively publish research, 97 percent agree that humans cause climate change. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which draws on the knowledge of almost 800 climate experts across the globe — says it is at least 95 percent likely that human activities are the main cause of atmospheric and ocean warming since the 1950s.

Right now, New York does have what’s known as a Climate Action Plan — a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent below the levels emitted in 1990 by the year 2050. It plans on doing this via investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy, and continued participation in a regional cap-and-trade system.

But Hoylman said the goals are not currently translating into policy. “We think [the Climate Action Plan] is just sitting on a shelf,” he said. “We need to set benchmarks; develop some transparency around these goals.”

Politically, the New York Legislature is split when it comes to climate. The leadership of the Republican-controlled Senate does not seem responsive to global warming concerns, while the Democrat-controlled House has been relatively active on exploring policy initiatives to combat the problem.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo is decidedly lukewarm on the subject. Though he’s pushed both adaptation and mitigation efforts in the state — including a $1 billion solar power investment — he’s historically refused to talk about the scientific link between extreme weather events and climate change, citing a desire to avoid contentious debate.

The consensus at Tuesday’s meeting, though, seemed to be that the contentious debate shouldn’t happen in the first place. Peter Iwanowicz, the executive director Environmental Advocates of New York, said the state needs to get to work on implementing solutions and taking a lead on adaptation.

“We’re debating whether climate change is happening rather getting to the task at hand,” he said.

The post New York Senators Call Out Their Colleagues For Denying Climate Change appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Texas Governor Signs Bill That Makes Local Fracking Bans Illegal

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CREDIT: LM Otero/Associated Press

Texas lawmakers have made it clear you don’t mess with Texas when it comes to extracting fossil fuels. Even if you’re a Texan.

On Monday, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed legislation that prohibits cities across Texas from banning hydraulic fracturing from their home turf. In what was a major agenda item for Texas lawmakers this session, towns like Denton, Texas — which passed the state’s first local fracking ban last November — will no longer be able to exercise local control over the oil and gas industry when it comes to nearby extraction.

The law will take effect immediately as it passed both chambers by more than a two-thirds margin. Communities will now only be able to impose ordinances that regulate aboveground activity related to oil and gas operations, such as things relating to traffic, noise, lights, or “reasonable setback requirements,” which dictate how far away drilling must be from buildings. The law is meant to ensure that these local surface regulations are commercially reasonable and do not “effectively” prohibit oil and gas operations.

In signing the bill, Gov. Abbott said it “does a profound job of helping to protect private property rights here in the State of Texas, ensuring those who own their own property will not have the heavy hand of local regulation deprive them of their rights.”

Many opposed to the bill found this type of rhetoric hypocritical, especially for a state with such a strong foundation in limited government oversight and local property rights.

“These bills absolutely conflict with longstanding conservative principles of local control and self-determination,” Luke Metzger, the founder and director of Environment Texas, told ThinkProgress in April. “Many of these legislators are speaking out of both sides of their mouths, decrying federal preemption of state sovereignty on the one hand, while pushing one-size fits all mandates from Austin overriding local ordinances.”

After Denton outlawed fracking in 2014, it was sued by the Texas General Land Office and Texas Oil and Gas Association. In another extreme reaction to the Denton fracking ban, lawmakers introduced a total of 11 bills this session to limit local oversight over fracking before settling on HB 40, which was signed into law on Monday.

“It’s a bad situation when city leaders’ hands are tied,” Denton Councilman Kevin Roden told the Wall Street Journal. “There seems to be an attitude that big state government knows better than the citizens of a city. I just think — conservative or liberal — that is something you don’t do in Texas.”

Texas is the country’s biggest oil and gas producer, and it rests on two massive shale gas deposits — the Barnett Shale in the north and the Eagle Ford Shale in the south. Other oil- and gas-rich states like New Mexico, Colorado, and Oklahoma are pursuing similar laws. In Oklahoma both chambers of the legislature have passed a bill limiting communities from imposing drilling ordinances.

Fracking is a process in which a mixture of pressurized water, sand and chemicals is sent underground to free up oil and natural gas reserves. Fracking operations are increasingly being tied to unusual earthquake swarms in states like Texas and Oklahoma. Local residents also worry about water and air pollution, as well as the heavy use of water in areas that are in short supply.

The post Texas Governor Signs Bill That Makes Local Fracking Bans Illegal appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Tiny Plastic Microbeads Are Being Banned In States Across The Country For ‘Causing Mega-Problems’

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CREDIT: shutterstock

A year after imposing a statewide ban on plastic bags, this week California could come significantly closer to passing the country’s strictest ban on another environmentally damaging plastic product: microbeads.

On Friday the state Assembly will vote on a bill that would outlaw these minuscule particles in products across the state. Last year a very similar bill came to the cusp of passing the legislature before falling one vote short in the Senate. While California may be pursuing the strictest ban in the nation, it is one of a number of states trying to move beyond microbeads.

Small, sand-like grains of plastic, microbeads have become very popular additives in many beauty and personal care products, primarily as exfoliates. They are used in place of natural alternatives including everything from salt and sugar to apricot shells, according to Sue Vang, with Californians Against Waste.

Once these coarse products perform their scrubbing duty they pass through water treatment plants, are discharged into water systems, and then gather in larger bodies of water. At this point they become part of the ever-growing mass of plastic flotsam — a “plastic soup” that is infiltrating water systems throughout the world and negatively impacting ecosystems, wildlife, and human health.

Vang told ThinkProgress that each year microbeads, which are typically smaller than one millimeter in size, contribute an estimated 38 tons of plastic pollution to California’s environment. They most commonly show up on labels as synthetic compounds like polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) and nylon. According to the 5 Gyres Institute, which advocates for a plastic-free ocean, a single container of facial cleanser can harbor more than 300,000 microbeads.

In 2014, New York attempted to implement a ban after a first-of-its-kind report from Attorney General Eric Schneiderman found that microbeads “are systematically passing through wastewater treatment plants across New York State and entering bodies of water,” and that roughly 19 tons of microbeads wash down the drain in New York every year. The bill failed to pass the Republican-controlled Senate, and Schneiderman is continuing to push for similar legislation this session.

Simply put, microbeads are causing mega-problems.

Illinois successfully passed the first statewide microbead ban last year, driven primarily by concern over the tiny particles presence in the neighboring Great Lakes. Legislation has also been proposed in nearby Michigan and Minnesota, as well as coastal Washington and Oregon. New Jersey, Colorado, Maine and Wisconsin have also recently passed or are in the process of passing compromise bans in which biodegradable microbeads are permitted. This admission has made the ban more palatable to the chemical and personal care industries, but has left many environmental groups unsatisfied.

Stiv Wilson, campaign director for the Story of Stuff Project, told ThinkProgress that the bills excluding biodegradable plastics were written by the industry and passed with “sneaky” language that in some ways “duped” legislators and stakeholders.

Wilson said the loophole in the legislation doesn’t qualify how long the biodegradable plastic would last in the environment, and that a full environmental assessment is yet to be done.

“Our mantra is guilty until proven innocent,” said Wilson. “Until we can demonstrate from a third party that these are safe in the environment, we will not allow them.”

The Story of Stuff Project is pushing for the California ban, which does not include the loophole, as are a number of other environmental groups, including Clean Water Action, Californians Against Waste, and the 5 Gyres Institute. Wilson said that “a lot of the crappy stuff” that the Story of Stuff Project campaigns against “ends up being made out of plastic.”

“There is a better path towards happiness than buying a bunch of crappy stuff,” said Wilson. The Story of Stuff Project recently released a short video explainer on the issue called “Let’s Ban the Bead!”

Wilson said he is also working towards microbead policy at the federal level, and is currently engaging legislators like Fred Upton, (D-MI), in crafting legislation. On May 1, Upton and other members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Health held the first legislative hearing on the Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015.

“Simply put, microbeads are causing mega-problems,” said Upton, who chairs the committee.

U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, (D-NY), who has shown support for the New York ban, is also pushing for a federal ban.

In response to a report that found thousands of plastic particles per square kilometer in Lake Erie and up to 1.1 million particles per square kilometer in Lake Ontario, Gillibrand has asked the EPA to add microbeads — tiny plastic particles that didn’t necessarily start out as microbeads in products but became worn down over time — and microplastics to the list of Great Lakes contaminants.

They attract toxins that harm fish and birds and get passed on to humans.

“When plastic microbeads leach into our water, they attract toxins that harm fish and birds and get passed on to humans,” Gillibrand said earlier this year. “We need to protect New Yorkers, our water, and our wildlife from dangerous pollutants and damage caused by microbeads.”

After waging a tough campaign against a microbead ban in California last year, the industry has remained on the sidelines for the most part this time around. Last year the Personal Care Products Council released a statement saying they use plastic microbeads in their products because of their “safe and effective exfoliating properties” and that they take “concerns regarding the presence of plastic microbeads in the environment very seriously.”

California’s microbead bill has been championed by Democratic Assemblyman Richard Bloom.

“This is not a problem without a solution,” Bloom said in a late April about the legislation he authored. “Safe and natural alternatives are available such as walnut husks, pecan shells, apricot shells, and cocoa beans. Some brands already use environmentally safe alternatives. However, there are still a number of companies who are holding out.”

Microbeads only amount to a small part of the overall plastic pollution problem plaguing the planet. Large masses of plastic have gathered in different ocean gyres around the world, including one off of the west coast known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. About 80 percent of the debris in this patch comes from land-based activities in North America and Asia, where humans dispose vast amounts of plastic that can take hundreds of years to completely break down. As sea levels rise due to climate change, the amount of plastic being flushed into the ocean could rise dramatically, especially in low-lying countries like Bangladesh.

The Plastics Industry Trade Association states that the plastics industry is the third largest manufacturing industry in the country with more than 16,200 facilities and 885,000 employees. This leaves groups like Vang’s Californians Against Waste with a lot of work ahead of them.

“We hope to next address single-use takeout food packaging, which has similar issues when littered in the environment, and which also has some readily available alternatives,” said Vang.

The post Tiny Plastic Microbeads Are Being Banned In States Across The Country For ‘Causing Mega-Problems’ appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s Best Climate Change Burns

[image error]For climate activists — or really anyone who thinks climate change is a problem — there’s a lot to love about Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. The two-term Democratic Senator from Rhode Island is a climate change champion in Congress, introducing legislation aimed at slowing the planet’s warming, calling out colleagues who deny the problem exists, and, for nearly the past three years, giving weekly, impassioned speeches on the Senate floor on the need to act on climate change.

On Monday, Whitehouse will give his 100th floor speech on climate change. As Agence France-Presse reports, Whitehouse usually gives these speeches to an empty or near-empty room, accompanied by a green sign warning his colleagues that it’s “Time To Wake Up.”

Few of Whitehouse’s colleagues have taken his pleas for action to heart. More than 56 percent of Republicans in the 114th Congress deny or question that climate change exists and is caused by humans, and some members of Congress, such as Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), openly mock the idea that climate change is posing a problem.

So far, this hasn’t deterred Whitehouse, however.

“If I look back 20 years from now and I can’t say I did everything possible, I’ll never be able to live with myself,” he told Morning Consult about his weekly speeches.

Whitehouse said he had something specific planned for his 100th speech, which he’s set to give around 6:15 p.m. Monday, but said he was “not going to ruin the surprise.” Until then, here are six of the greatest moments from Whitehouse’s past floor speeches on climate change:

‘They’re Not Gynecologists, Either’

In early 2014, a pattern emerged among some politicians who were asked whether or not they accepted that climate change was happening: instead of answering definitively one way or another, they skirted the question, saying simply “I’m not a scientist.”

Whitehouse lambasted this response in November, noting that the lawmakers who have used the excuse — including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), House speaker John Boehner (R-OH), and Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) — were “not gynecologists, either, but many have no hesitation about trying to regulate that area.”

“Say you’re not a scientist. Isn’t the responsible thing to sound out scientific opinion?” Whitehouse asked on the Senate floor. “Scientific opinion about climate change is now firmly settled. Climate change is caused by the massive carbon pollution we have unleashed.”

‘You Can Believe NASA….Or You Can Believe The Senator With The Snowball’

In Feburary, Sen. Whitehouse hit back against Sen. Inhofe’s speech in which the Republican senator brought a snowball to Senate floor in an attempt to show that, despite NASA and NOAA finding that 2014 was the warmest year on record, it was “unseasonably cold” in D.C.

In his brief speech — which wasn’t technically part of his 99 “It’s Time To Wake Up” speeches on climate but which still addressed climate change — Whitehouse referenced the multitude of groups that acknowledge climate change, including an corporate interests, “every major American scientific society,” the U.S. Navy, and Pope Francis.

He also explained that the polar vortex was responsible for bringing cold air down to D.C. that week — an event that doesn’t disprove the earth’s greater warming trend that is “beyond legitimate dispute” among scientists.

‘That’s Not Really The American Way’

Whitehouse refuted a Senate colleague’s statement in 2013 that “God won’t allow us to ruin our planet.” Rather than a religious statement, Whitehouse said this was “magical thinking,” and quoted scripture to back up his argument.

“If God is not a God of consequences, why does Luke 6:38 tell us, ‘For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you,’ and Proverbs 22:8 tell us, ‘Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity?'”

Why, Whitehouse asked, would God allow so much suffering in the world — disease, disasters, pain — but shelter us from the consequences of destroying our planet?

“Instead of correcting our own behavior, we’re going to bet on a miracle? That’s the plan? Excuse me, but that’s not really the American way,” he said.

‘The Oceans Are Warning Us And We Still Do Not Listen’

Whitehouse doesn’t just focus on political fights in his speeches, however. As a Senator from Rhode Island, Whitehouse has been particularly keen on spreading the word about climate change and ocean acidification’s impact on the world’s oceans. In one of his latest speeches on ocean acidification and warming, Whitehouse spoke of the oceans’ mass absorption of carbon dioxide and the impact that has on marine life, and on the fishermen that depend on it.

“I’ve had fishermen back home tell me they’re catching fish their fathers and grandfathers never saw come up in their nets,” Whitehouse said.

Warmer temperatures “make oxygen less soluble in water,” Whitehouse said. “Do we tell the fish to hold their breath while we wait to wake up?”

“From coast to coast, and pole to pole, the oceans are warning us, and we still do not listen,” he continued.

‘[Mitch McConnell’s] Own State Recognizes Climate Change As A Problem’

In March, Senate Majority Leader McConnell issued a statement warning other states not to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rule on carbon pollution from power plants.

But Whitehouse, in an April speech, singled out McConnell’s state of Kentucky for its statements on climate change. Whitehouse said that the state of Kentucky — along with several cities, Kentucky-based scientists, and Kentucky publications — have warned about the impacts climate change will likely have on the state, including increased migration from coastal states.

“Before our distinguished majority leader, the senior senator from Kentucky, asks all other states to throw in the towel on conforming to the U.S. government’s plan for dealing with carbon pollution, I would ask that he acknowledge that his own state recognizes climate change as a problem,” he said.

‘The Clearer The Science Becomes, The Harder The Polluters Fight’

In his 98th “Time To Wake Up” speech on climate chage, Whitehouse compared the tactics of the oil industry in sowing doubt on climate change to those of the tobacco industry, which in the 1950s and 1960s sought to spread doubt that smoking caused cancer. Action on climate change is a “business risk” for the fossil fuel industry, and that risk is similar to the risk felt by the tobacco industry if the public believed cigarettes caused cancer, Whitehouse said.

“The fossil fuel industry is engaged in a massive effort to deny climate science and deceive the American public,” he said. “They’ve been at it for years, and the clearer the science becomes, the harder the polluters fight.”

The post Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s Best Climate Change Burns appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Nevada Solar Power Users Could Face New Fees This Summer

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Hundreds of activists gathered outside NV Energy headquarters in Las Vegas to protest a state cap affecting rooftop solar installations and urge the Legislature to lift it.

CREDIT: AP Photo/John Locher

In a 21-0 vote, Nevada’s state senators agreed Sunday to let the public utilities commission create a new electricity rate for people who have installed their own solar panels.

Under current law, these solar customers can effectively zero-out their electricity bills by selling any excess energy their panels produce back to the utility company. But this incentive, called net metering, is “capped” — only the first 3 percent of customers are eligible for the program. The bill would ostensibly serve to lift the state’s net metering cap, but all new solar customers would be subject to a fee.

The Nevada PUC has until July 31 to determine what new solar customers will have to pay.

Rooftop solar has been a high-profile issue in Nevada in recent months, as the industry nears the 3 percent cap. Last month, hundreds of people turned out for a rally to support increasing the cap. Net metering is considered a key driver in the residential solar industry’s boom.

In the past year, Nevada saw the fastest solar job growth in the nation, said The Solar Foundation, a non-profit industry group. With nearly 6,000 solar employees, the state also has the highest per capita solar employment. While Nevada has several utility-scale solar projects, residential solar has also been been an important part of the industry. In 2014, nearly twice as many residential solar systems were installed over the year before — and nearly 2,000 Nevadans now have their own solar power, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

SB 374 was the second-most heaviest lobbied bill of the session, State Sen. Kelvin Atkinson (D) told the Las Vegas Review Journal on Sunday. As enacted, the bill transfers the decision on how to address the net metering cap to the public utility commission.

“Everybody won’t be happy,” Atkinson said. “Everybody won’t be thrilled, but it’s the right thing to do.”

Some utility companies argue that net metering means solar customers aren’t paying their fair share for the grid, because they can theoretically zero out their bill by selling power back to it. But solar advocates say that fees stymy the burgeoning industry and don’t count the benefits — such as transmission and generation savings — that rooftop solar offers everyone. Advocates also contend that using clean, renewable solar energy benefits everyone by reducing carbon emissions.

After the vote, solar advocates called foul on the Senate’s passing of the amended bill.

“The Nevada Coalition to Protect Ratepayers and the thousands of solar employees we represent have anticipated a public hearing concerning the future of rooftop solar. To this date we have not received one,” Bryan Miller, co-chairman of an industry group, The Alliance for Solar Choice, said in a statement.

A similar fee imposed in Arizona in 2013 had a significant cooling effect on the growth of rooftop solar in that state.

This year, residential installation company SolarCity moved 85 jobs out of Arizona, citing a slowdown caused by the fee.

The post Nevada Solar Power Users Could Face New Fees This Summer appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Washington State Is In A Drought ‘Unlike Any We’ve Ever Experienced’

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Washington Gov. Jay Inslee talks to the media about his statewide drought emergency as state ecology director Maia Bellon looks on, Friday, May 15, 2015, in Olympia, Wash.

CREDIT: AP

Citing historically low snowpack, falling river levels, and rising temperatures, Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA) declared a statewide drought emergency for Washington on Friday.

“We’re really starting to feel the pain from this snowpack drought. Impacts are already severe in several areas of the state,” Inslee said. “Difficult decisions are being made about what crops get priority water and how best to save fish.”

Sectors that rely heavily on melting snowpack, like agriculture and wildlife, are expected to be hit hardest by the drought, with the Washington Department of Agriculture anticipating $1.2 billion in crop losses this year.

Statewide, snowpack levels are currently 16 percent of normal, ten percent lower than the last time a statewide drought emergency was declared in 2005. Of 98 snow sites measured at the beginning of the month by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), 66 were snow free — 11 of them for the first time in history. Along with record low snowpack, the NRCS found that 17 of 34 long-term measuring sites recorded their earliest peak on record, occurring on average 48 days earlier than normal.

“This drought is unlike any we’ve ever experienced,” Maia Bellon, director of the Washington Department of Ecology, said. “Rain amounts have been normal but snow has been scarce. And we’re watching what little snow we have quickly disappear.”

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A map showing drought conditions in Washington state as of May 12, 2015.

CREDIT: National Drought Mitigation Center

Bellon’s department has called for $9.5 million in funding for drought relief, to be split between things like agricultural irrigation projects, municipal emergency funding, salmon and trout protection, and conservation education. To preserve remaining water resources, some irrigation districts in the Yakima Basin — the state’s most productive agricultural region — are shutting off water deliveries to farmers for weeks at a time. State officials are hoping to minimize agricultural losses with a kind of triage, according to the New York Times, diverting water to high-value crops like cherries or wine-grapes while allowing certain seasonal crops to go fallow.

For the state’s salmon and trout populations, dwindling snowpack and low stream flows hinder their migration to spawning grounds. In April, the U.S. Geological Survey reported that 78 percent of the state’s streams were running below normal, with some reaching historic lows. Some wildlife managers are planning on creating temporary channels to help the fish navigate low waters, but others might have no choice but to trap the salmon and trout and move them to cooler spawning grounds upstream.

“We’re working hard to help farmers, communities and fish survive this drought,” Bellon said.

The drought is also expected to contribute to a particularly volatile wildfire season, as wildfire managers expect the season to begin earlier and at higher elevations than normal. Last year, Washington experienced the largest wildfire in the state’s history, which burned an area 4.5 times the size of Seattle. Even before the drought emergency was declared, forecasters predicted that below-average precipitation might translate into an especially difficult wildfire season throughout much of the Northwest.

Areas like the Olympic Mountains and the Cascades, which are usually some of the wettest areas of the state, are especially dry this year, providing wildfires with fuel necessary to turn a routine burn into a blaze.

“There’s a lot of heavy fuel out [on the Olympic Peninsula],” Peter Goldmark, Washington’s commissioner of public lands, told the Seattle Times. “The stream flows are going to be low, and barring a miracle, that landscape’s going to be bone dry.”

Cities like Seattle or Tacoma, which rely largely on rain-based reservoirs, aren’t expected to bear the brunt of the drought. In addition to being lucky with rainwater, Inslee said, urban water systems have been investing in water storage and collection, which help urban areas weather periods of low snowpack.

Washington isn’t the only Northwest state dealing with drought despite normal rainfall amounts. Seven counties in Oregon are already under a governor-declared drought emergency, with eight more already submitted to Gov. Kate Brown (D-OR) for consideration. Unlike California’s current drought — brought on by a combination of heat and lack of precipitation — both Washington and Oregon’s droughts have been called “wet droughts,” characterized by normal precipitation but above-average temperatures that cause winter snow to fall as rain instead.

With the Pacific Northwest expected to warm between three and ten degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, this year’s record-breaking winter — the warmest on record for Washington and the second-warmest for Oregon — could become the region’s new normal.

The post Washington State Is In A Drought ‘Unlike Any We’ve Ever Experienced’ appeared first on ThinkProgress.

The Really Awful Truth About Climate Change

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Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in a scene from the movie “The Awful Truth.” (AP Photo)

So Vox ran a story Friday, “The awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit” by former Grist columnist Dave Roberts. While I’m a longtime fan of Roberts, the piece is filled with inaccurate and misleading statements, historical revisionism, and a fatally flawed premise.

The premise comes from an equally flawed commentary in Nature, “Policy: Climate advisers must maintain integrity” in which German analyst Oliver Geden argues that climate scientists (and others) have been “spreading false optimism,” about our chances of stabilizing below 2°C total global warming. Geden’s piece has drawn significant criticism from scientists on BuzzFeed, ClimateWire, and here, as Roberts notes.

But Roberts asserts, “the heated reactions elicited by Geden’s piece do show that he’s on to something.” Dave, Dave, Dave, if heated reactions proved someone is “on to something,” then I guess Fox News is fair and balanced after all….

So what is “The awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit”? Roberts asserts that no one wants to admit “The obvious truth about global warming is this: barring miracles, humanity is in for some awful shit.”

No. And by “no” I mean that, setting aside the vagueness of the word “miracles,” lots of people have been saying in recent years that humanity faces some awful shit if we don’t don’t adopt super-aggressive action ASAP. But they have not been saying it’s scientifically hopeless or requires religious miracles — since that isn’t true, though it seems to be what Geden and Roberts want them to be saying.

No, the really awful truth about climate change is that while climate scientists, the International Energy Agency, and many others have been increasingly blunt about how dire our situation is — and what needs to be done ASAP to avoid catastrophe — much of the so-called intelligentsia keep ignoring them.

The most recent example comes in a report out earlier this month from 70 leading climate experts (click here). The parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (aka the world’s leading nations) set up a “structured expert dialogue” from 2013 to 2015 to review the adequacy of the 2°C target. Early this month, the experts reported back. Thoughtfully, they simplified their key conclusions into 10 core messages. Among them:

Message 1: “Parties to the Convention agreed on an upper limit for global warming of 2°C, and science has provided a wealth of information to support the use of that goal.” Incorporating concerns about ocean acidification and sea level rise, “only reinforces the basic finding emerging from the analysis of the temperature limit, namely that we need to take urgent and strong action to reduce GHG emissions” (emphasis in original).
Message 2 (again, original emphasis): “Limiting global warming to below 2°C necessitates a radical transition (deep decarbonization now and going forward), not merely a fine tuning of current trends.”

Yeah, scientists just love to spread false optimism.

Message 4: “Significant climate impacts are already occurring at the current level of global warming” (which is about 0.85°C) and so additional “warming will only increase the risk of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts. Therefore, the ‘guardrail’ concept, which implies a warming limit that guarantees full protection from dangerous anthropogenic interference, no longer works.“
Message 5: “The 2°C limit should be seen as a defence line … that needs to be stringently defended, while less warming would be preferable.”
Message 6 (from the 2014 IPCC mitigation report): “Limiting global warming to below 2 °C is still feasible and will bring about many co-benefits, but poses substantial technological, economic and institutional challenges.”

I reviewed all the mitigation literature in my January post, “It’s Not Too Late To Stop Climate Change, And It’ll Be Super-Cheap.”

Again, no one is saying it would be easy, but it is straightforward, and the literature couldn’t be clearer on how low-cost it is. Geden asserts, “The climate policy mantra — that time is running out for 2 °C but we can still make it if we act now — is a scientific nonsense.” Even Roberts points out, “No. It may be a nonsense, but it’s not a scientific nonsense. No branch of science, certainly not climatology, can tell us what the humans of 2050 are capable of.”

Almost. Thank goodness these pundits weren’t around when we had to do something really difficult, like suffer millions of casualties and remake our entire economy almost overnight to win World War II.

It may well be true that policymakers are unlikely to do what is scientifically, technologically, and economically possible (and morally necessary). But what precisely would Geden have climate scientists tell policymakers — “You folks can’t stop unimaginable catastrophe because you’re simply too greedy and myopic so we’re not even going to tell you how you could do it?” In fact, Geden never tells us what he thinks the advice should be nor what target he would recommend to policymakers (which makes his piece mostly a time-waster).

Note: Geden conflates climate scientists with climate advisers, so he can make it sound like climate scientists are overly optimistic about our ability to hit the 2C target. Even today, most climate scientists didn’t consider themselves experts on energy technology or economic analysis or policy — their job in the IPCC was to tell policymakers what the science says will happen if we act and if we don’t. The job of economists, energy experts, and their ilk has been to tell policymakers what different scenarios entail and how much they would cost, which turns out to be virtually nothing in the 2C case.

Again, that doesn’t mean 2C is easy to do or that we will do it — just that if we ever got off of our asses the way the Greatest Generation did, it would require us to invest only a smidgen of our wealth to make the transition, and we’d be paid back again and again in productivity gains and health gains and energy security gains. And of course there’s that whole not destroying a livable climate thing.

The reality of the transition is no longer theoretical. Last fall, China pledged to “increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 20% by 2030.” That “will require China to deploy an additional 800-1,000 gigawatts of nuclear, wind, solar, and other zero emission generation capacity by 2030 — more than all the coal-fired power plants that exist in China today and close to total current electricity generation capacity in the United States.”

Over the next 15 years, the Chinese will build enough clean electricity to power America. So how exactly is it “nonsense” to think the U.S., EU, or even India could not do the same over, say, twice as much time? Answer: It isn’t.

Here’s Message 8 from the world’s leading climate experts: “The world is not on track to achieve the long-term global goal, but successful mitigation policies are known and must be scaled up urgently.”

Such Polyannas, these climate experts.

Roberts writes of Geden’s piece, “Politicians, he says, want good news. They want to hear that it is still possible to limit temperature to 2°C. Even more, they want to hear that they can do so while avoiding aggressive emission cuts in the near-term — say, until they’re out of office.”

This is no doubt true of many politicians, yet last year the entire EU pledged to cut total emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, which is pretty aggressive. And last month, Governor Jerry Brown (D-CA) issued an executive order setting the same goal for California.

But it’s where Roberts (and Geden) leap next that bears scrutiny:

Climate scientists, Geden says, feel pressure to provide the good news. They’re worried that if they don’t, if they come off as “alarmist” or hectoring, they will simply be ignored, boxed out of the debate. And so they construct models showing that it is possible to hit the 2°C target. The message is always, “We’re running out of time; we’ve only got five or 10 years to turn things around, but we can do it if we put our minds to it.”

That was the message in 1990, in 2000, in 2010. How can we still have five or 10 years left? The answer, Geden says, is that scientists are baking increasingly unrealistic assumptions into their models.

No, no, and not quite. This is a complete revision of history.

Climate scientists were not saying in 1990, “we’ve only got five or 10 years to turn things around.” Read the IPCC’s Overview of its 1990 First Assessment Report here. Warning: It’s a yawner.

But that’s no surprise since the UNFCCC wasn’t even negotiated and ratified until 1992. That treaty’s goal was to set up an international process to “stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [human-caused] interference with the climate system.” The UNFCCC did not define what that level was at the time. It wouldn’t officially pick 2°C for almost two decades!

And so climate scientists were not saying in 2000, “we’ve only got five or 10 years to turn things around.” Read the IPCC’s entire 2001 Third Assessment Report here. Another yawner.

There are, however, two specific and synergistic reasons why scientists became increasingly concerned during the 2000s.

First, in that decade, Chinese emissions soared, taking us off of more moderate pathways that scientists had been anticipating. You can see that in a chart Roberts posts.

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Historical emissions have of late been tracking RCP8.5, catastrophic 4°C warming. But until 2000, emissions were tracking scenarios of much less warming

CREDIT: Global Carbon Project

Second, at the very end of the 2000s, the world community finally settled on 2°C as the threshold for dangerous warming, which meant CO2 levels in the air needed to be stabilized below 450 parts per million. That consensus, as many people have explained, solidified with the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report.

That’s why, for instance, in 2004, when Princeton Professors published a landmark paper in Science, “Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies,” they wrote: “Proposals to limit atmospheric CO2 to a concentration that would prevent most damaging climate change have focused on a goal of 500 +/- 50 parts per million (ppm).”

So it was only around late 2007 that people paying very close attention, like climate scientists, could see that 1) emissions were veering onto a worse case scenario track 2) just as a scientific and political consensus was forming around the need to set the bar at 2°C, which was now starting to look like a best-case scenario.

That’s why in 2010, a previously reticent Lonnie Thompson explained why previously reticent climatologists had begun speaking out: “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.” It’s why, when I launched Climate Progress nine years ago, I created a category called “uncharacteristically blunt scientists.”

But again, it wasn’t actually until December 2010 that the parties to the UNFCCC officially adopted 2°C as the upper limit.

Besides climate scientists, many other climate advisers were becoming increasingly blunt, such as the International Energy Agency, which warned in 2009 “The world will have to spend an extra $500 billion to cut carbon emissions for each year it delays implementing a major assault on global warming.”

Their 2011 World Energy Outlook [WEO] release should have ended once and for all the notion that climate advisors were pulling their punches. The U.K. Guardian’s (misleading) headline captured the urgency: “World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns … If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change.”

Half right. Yes, rapid change is needed. But the IEA did not say the climate change would be irreversible in five years. They wrote:

If internationally co-ordinated action is not taken by 2017, we project that all permissible emissions in the 450 Scenario would come from the infrastructure then existing, so that all new infrastructure from then until 2035 would need to be zero-carbon, unless emitting infrastructure is retired before the end of its economic lifetime to make headroom for new investment. This would theoretically be possible at very high cost, but is probably not practicable politically.

Yes, shutting down existing fossil fuel infrastructure is much more costly than not building it in the first place. It is politically difficult (see U.S. coal plants), but it also happens all the time (see U.S. and China coal plants).

Everything about the 450 (or lower) scenario is politically difficult as I (and many others) have been saying for years. In one 2008 post, “Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 1,” I answered the headline question, “Not today — not even close.”

People can use the political difficulty of averting catastrophe as a reason to express hopelessness if they think that is productive, but don’t try to pin this on climate scientists or climate advisors.

There’s an old saying “it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness” that is based on a Chinese proverb, “Don’t curse the darkness – light a candle.”

But it turns out there is a third option. You can curse the candle lighters, maybe because you have your eyes closed. And that’s the really awful truth.

The post The Really Awful Truth About Climate Change appeared first on ThinkProgress.

This Billionaire Tried To Get University Scientists Fired For Doing Their Job

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Continental Resources CEO Harold Hamm.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Kevin Cederstrom

Despite a growing body of scientific research connecting oil and gas activity to a dramatic spike in earthquakes across several U.S. states, some industry leaders are fighting this characterization. Harold Hamm, billionaire CEO of Oklahoma City-based Continental Resources, told a dean at the University of Oklahoma last year that he was so displeased by the university’s research on the topic that he wanted certain scientists dismissed, Bloomberg News reported.

In an email to colleagues dated July 16, 2014 and obtained by Bloomberg, Larry Grillot, the dean of the university’s Mewbourne College of Earth and Energy, said that he had met with Hamm, a major donor to the university, to discuss his concerns about earthquake reporting by the Oklahoma Geological Survey (OGS), which is housed in the university. “Mr. Hamm is very upset at some of the earthquake reporting to the point that he would like to see select OGS staff dismissed,” Grillot wrote, adding that Hamm indicated he would be meeting with Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R) to discuss moving the OGS out of the university.

OGS seismologist Austin Holland was summoned to meet with Hamm and university president David Boren in late 2013 to discuss some of his findings linking fracking activity to earthquakes. In an interview with EnergyWire published earlier this week, Hamm denied any attempt to bully the scientist: “We care about the industry,” he said. “When people disparage parts of it, I want to know why. I want to know what basis they have for doing that.”

According to state officials, the average rate of earthquakes in Oklahoma is now 600 times higher than historical averages. An unprecedented 20 small quakes were recorded in one day alone last year. Multiple scientific studies have pointed to a specific aspect of oil and gas extraction as the likely cause for the uptick in seismic activity: wastewater extraction. As ThinkProgress’ Emily Atkin explained, “scientists increasingly believe that the large amount of water that is injected into the ground after a well is fracked can change the state of stress on existing fault lines to the point of failure, causing earthquakes.”

While Oklahoma officials had been reluctant to acknowledge the growing body of research connecting oil and gas activity with fracking, the state changed course in April, launching a website detailing what state officials know about the rise in earthquakes and what measures are being taken to address it. “We know that the recent rise in earthquakes cannot be entirely attributed to natural causes,” the site states. “The Oklahoma Geological Survey has determined that the majority of recent earthquakes in central and north-central Oklahoma are very likely triggered by the injection of produced water in disposal wells.”

Immediately after the site was launched, however, the state legislature passed two bills that would preemptively prohibit cities and counties from banning oil and gas extraction.

Regardless of Hamm’s intent, university officials told Bloomberg that his pressure had no impact on the research being done by the OGS. “I didn’t want it to impact their day-to-day work,” Grillot said of the OGS staff. “Foremost for us is academic freedom.”

Hamm has frequently dismissed the risks associated with the industry that has made him billions of dollars. Continental ships 90 percent of its oil by railroad, a method Hamm referred to as an “effective” and flexible means of transport, ignoring the rise in damaging and deadly oil by rail accidents. He has defended continued government subsidies for the oil and gas industry while denouncing those for renewable energy sources, saying of wind turbines, “once they’re there, they haunt you.”

When asked about the threat of climate change, the damaging impacts of which are accelerated by the burning of fossil fuels, Hamm, a top energy adviser to 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, has frequently pointed to global population trends rather than the role of the oil and gas industry. “Overpopulation — that probably hurts the environment more than anything,” he said in a 2013 interview with National Journal.

The post This Billionaire Tried To Get University Scientists Fired For Doing Their Job appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Canada Announces Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reductions Target Of 30 Percent By 2030

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CREDIT: shutterstock

Canada announced Friday that it was committing to a goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent compared to 2005 levels by 2030, an announcement that comes in the lead-up to the United Nations’ international climate talks at the end of this year.

Under the new commitment, Canada will cut its emissions down to 515 metric megatons by 2030, Bloomberg reports. In 2013, the country’s emissions totaled 726 metric megatons, and in 2005 — the baseline year Canada uses in its new commitment — its emissions totaled 731 metric megatons.

In addition, Canada announced Friday its “intention to develop new regulatory measures” for the oil, gas, and chemical industries. Though the country didn’t make any firm commitments in its oil and gas sector, it said it intended to develop regulations “aligned with recently proposed actions in the United States to reduce the potent GHG methane from the oil-and-gas sector,” along with regulations for natural gas-fired electricity.

Canada’s Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq called the commitment “fair and ambitious,” and said that it and the intended regulations “underscore our continued commitment to cut emissions at home and work with our international partners to establish an international agreement in Paris that includes meaningful and transparent commitments from all major emitters.”

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CREDIT: government of Canada

Some environmental groups, however, weren’t so happy about the announcement. Though Canada’s pledge included plans to start implementing new regulations on its oil and gas industry, groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council said they wished the country had made a more concrete commitment to addressing emissions from the tar sands — the fastest-growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada, according to the Pembina Institute.

“Canada’s climate target is less-than-meets-the-eye and another disappointing sign of its reluctance to fight climate change,” Danielle Droitsch, Canada project director at the NRDC, said in a statement. “Yet again, Canada blithely ignores addressing its largest source of climate pollution—its tar sands oil development.”

The NRDC also called Canada’s commitment “significantly weaker” than that of the United States. The U.S. made a commitment earlier this year to reduce its emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. Historically, Canada’s pledges have lined up with the United States’, but Prime Minister Stephen Harper said earlier this year that it was “unlikely” that Canada’s targets would be the same as the United States’.

The NRDC noted that Canada’s pledges were also concerning because, as of now, the country isn’t on track to meet its 2020 emissions reductions targets. Last year, a report found that without significant new policies, Canada wouldn’t meet its Copenhagen Accord target to reduce its emissions 17 percent by 2020, compared to 2005 levels.

Climate activist group 350.org told RTCC that, if Canada’s government doesn’t scale back on its tar sands development immediately, it wouldn’t be able to meet its new emissions reductions goals.

“These targets are a nice gesture, but for now that’s all they are, because the numbers here simply don’t add up,” Canadian spokesman for 350.org Cameron Fenton said. “Scientists have told us over and over that averting climate disaster means leaving virtually all tar sands in the ground; and until our government starts taking real steps to achieve that, these announcements are little more than pie-in-the-sky.”

Prime Minister Harper has come under fire during his eight years in office for his pro-tar sands and anti-environmental policies. According to a report from earlier this year, Canada could get 100 percent of its electricity from low-carbon sources like wind, solar, and hydropower by 2035 and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050. But that’s only if the federal government takes strong action on climate change, and if Harper’s past policies are a guide, that isn’t likely in the near future.

Canada does have a federal election coming up in October, however, so the prospect of federal action on climate change could soon change. And the recent election of a left-wing government in Alberta could mean more regulations on the tar sands industry in the province.

The post Canada Announces Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reductions Target Of 30 Percent By 2030 appeared first on ThinkProgress.