Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 145

Summer Honeybee Losses Spiked Last Year, And Researchers Aren’t Sure Why

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CREDIT: Bee Informed Partnership/ARS/USDA

Honeybees are still dying and disappearing in huge numbers in the U.S., and summertime losses of bees have surged, according to a new survey.

The report, published Wednesday by the Bee Informed Partnership, Apiary Inspectors of America, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), surveyed more than 6,100 beekeepers across the country on their experiences with bee losses over the last year. The survey found that, in total, beekeepers lost 42.1 percent of their bees from April 2014 to April 2015, though some states saw higher losses — Wisconsin and Maine beekeepers, for instance, lost an average of about 60 percent of their bees over the last year.

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CREDIT: BEE INFORMED PARTNERSHIP/APIARY INSPECTORS OF AMERICA/USDA

The survey also had some other troubling findings: for the first time, bee colony losses in summer surpassed losses in winter. According to the survey, beekeepers reported summer losses of 27.4 percent — a surge compared to summer 2013’s losses of 19.8 percent. Winter losses for 2014-2015 were reported at 23.1 percent. According to the organizations involved in the research, losses of 18.7 percent are the maximum that beekeepers consider to be economically viable.

The spike in summer losses is “extremely troubling,” said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, co-author of the report and assistant professor of entomology at the University of Maryland.

“You expect colonies to die in the winter,” he told ThinkProgress, because cold temperatures and lack of flowers magnify bees’ stress. “You don’t expect them to die during the summer, which is paradise,” with its blooming flowers and abundance of pollen and nectar, he said.

VanEngelsdorp said he and his team aren’t sure yet what’s causing the high bee losses in the summer, but thinks poor nutrition might be contributing to it. When meadows — which can contain a vast array of flowers that bees can forage from — get plowed under and replaced by crops like soybeans and corn, it can affect the total nutrition the bees in the surrounding area get. This is a problem especially in the Midwest, vanEngelsdorp said.

Pesticides have also been pointed to as a potential cause of bee losses: neonicotinoids, a class of pesticides that are used widely in industrial agriculture, have been found in studies to damage bees’ brains and contribute to bee losses, though a recent USDA study concluded that neonics aren’t the main driver in colony losses. VanEngelsdorp said these two possible causes — pesticides and reduced nutrition — need to be studied further to determine whether or not they’re contributing to summer bee losses.

As for winter losses, vanEngelsdorp said he and his team think the varroa mite — tiny parasites that attach themselves to bees and suck out their circulatory fluid (the equivalent of blood) — are contributing. The mites can spread debilitating viruses to bees, including the deformed wing virus, which causes crumpled-up, useless wings in young bees.

The surge in summer losses will affect the way vanEngelsdorp and the rest of the researchers collect data on bee losses, he said. Typically, the team surveys beekeepers on how they managed their bees throughout the summer, and compare those responses to the beekeepers’ reported winter losses. Now, the team will need to look more closely at whether there are management practices that affect bee health in the summer.

Winter bee losses are slightly lower this year than they were in 2013, and, according to a press release about the survey, this is the second year in a row that winter losses have been “noticeably lower” than the nine-year average winter loss, which hovers at 28.7 percent.

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CREDIT: Bee Informed Partnership/Apiary Inspectors of America/USDA

Still, vanEngelsdorp said it’s too soon to call this decrease in winter losses a trend — typically there needs to be at least three years of data to make a trend, he said. And though this drop in winter losses is positive, vanEngelsdorp said bee losses remain a serious concern.

“We went from horrible to bad,” he said. “So instead of losing one in three, we’re losing one in five.”

One thing the researchers haven’t seen in the last few years is signs of Colony Collapse Disorder — a phenomenon in which an entire hive of bees simply disappears. Jeff Pettis, co-author of the report and senior entomologist at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service Bee Research Laboratory, said that this, compared with the lower winter losses, does paint a more hopeful picture for bees, even though the summer losses are “troubling.”

“If beekeepers are going to meet the growing demand for pollination services, researchers need to find better answers to the host of stresses that lead to both winter and summer colony losses,” he said in a statement.

There has been some progress in the quest to figure out what’s harming honeybees and what needs to be done to protect them. President Obama signed an executive order last year creating a “federal strategy” on the health of honeybees and other pollinators. The USDA has invested $3 million into an initiative to boost honeybee numbers, and the Environmental Protection Agency announced last month that it’s “unlikely” to approve new outdoor uses of neonics.

The post Summer Honeybee Losses Spiked Last Year, And Researchers Aren’t Sure Why appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Nuclear Power Will Play Only A Modest Role In Stopping Climate Change, Nuclear Agency Says

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A journalist checks radiation levels at stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. The 2011 disaster, which will cost Japan over $100 billion, set back the nuclear industry worldwide.

CREDIT: AP Photo

Nuclear power can play a modest, but important, role in avoiding catastrophic global warming — if it can solve its various problems including high construction cost without sacrificing safety.

That is the conclusion of a comprehensive 2015 “Technology Roadmap” from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA). It is also what I’ve been arguing on Climate Progress for a long, long time.

The IEA is the global body responsible for energy analysis, and one of the few independent agencies in the world with a sophisticated enough energy and economic model to credibly examine in detail the role of various low carbon technologies in a 2°C scenario (2DS) aimed at averting catastrophic global warming. The NEA was set up by the industrialized OECD countries “To assist its member countries in maintaining and further developing, through international co-operation, the scientific, technological and legal bases required for a safe, environmentally friendly and economical use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.”

Here is what the IEA and NEA project is a plausible though “challenging” pathway for the nuclear energy industry in a carbon constrained 2DS world — if it can get its act together:

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The IEA and NEA project nuclear could rise from its current 11% of world electricity capacity to 17% in 2050 in a carbon constrained world. (Click to enlarge.)

Because it is a low-carbon source of around-the-clock (baseload) power, a number of scientists and others have called for a reexamination of nuclear policy. The Chinese in particular have been building nuclear power plants at a steady pace. Yet very few new plants have been ordered and built in the past two decades in countries with market economies, such as the United States, which derives a fifth of its power from nuclear. That is primarily because new nuclear plants are so costly, but also because dealing with the radioactive nuclear waste remains problematic and the costs of an accident are so enormous.

In particular, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan slowed the rate of new plant construction starts. In 2014 there were only three new plants put under construction.

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At the same time, Fukushima caused a number of countries, including Japan and Germany, to reconsider their dependence on nuclear power. Germany is phasing out all its nuclear power plants on an accelerated schedule. In 2014, Japanese college professors calculated that the accident “will cost 11.08 trillion yen ($105 billion), twice as much as Japanese authorities predicted at the end of 2011.” That includes both radiation clean up and compensation paid to the victims.

The IEA and NEA note, “France, which today generates 75% of all its electricity from nuclear, still plans to reduce this share to 50% by 2025 while proposing to maintain nuclear capacity at its present level.”

The costs of new nuclear reactors have been rising for decades, and they are now extremely expensive, costing up to $10 billion dollars apiece. While solar power and wind power continue to march down the experience curve to ever lower costs — solar panels have seen a staggering 99 percent drop in cost since 1977 — nuclear power has been heading in the opposite direction.

Nuclear power appears to have a negative learning curve:

Average and min/max reactor construction costs per year of completion date for US and France versus cumulative capacity completed.

In the past several years, utilities have told state regulators that the cost of new nuclear plants is in the $5,500 to $8,100 per kilowatt range (see Nuclear power: The price is not right and Exclusive analysis: The staggering cost of new nuclear power).

A key reason new reactors are inherently so expensive is that they must be designed to survive almost any imaginable risk, including major disasters and human error. Even the most unlikely threats must be planned for and eliminated when the possible result of a disaster is the poisoning of thousands of people, the long-term contamination of large areas of land, and $100 billion in damages.

In 2014, just 5 gigawatts of capacity were added. In their “Nuclear Roadmap,” the IEA and NEA explain what level of capacity additions would be required in its 2 degrees Celsius scenario: “In order for nuclear to reach its deployment targets under the 2D scenario, annual connection rates should increase from 5 GW in 2014 to well over 20 GW during the coming decade.” That means returning to a nuclear build rate previously achieved for only one decade — 20 gigawatts per year during the 1980s. That target has many challenges in a post-Fukushima world.

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The IEA and NEA themselves note that “such rapid growth will only be possible” if several actions take place including: “vendors must demonstrate the ability to build on time and to budget, and to reduce the costs of new designs.” Also, both governments and the industry need to maintain and improve safety. If such advances do occur, then new nuclear plants could provide a moderate amount of the needed new carbon-free power for the 2°C scenario.

For the medium term, the Department of Energy and others have been working to develop small modular reactors that could start to ramp up production in 2030 and beyond. Constructed in factories, these reactors would cost $3-5 billion each. Ideally, they would be much safer than the large reactors. But because they are smaller and generate much less electricity, it’s not clear that their cost per kilowatt hour of delivering electricity would be much lower than current nuclear plants.

The final wild-card is the possibility of one or more major nuclear disasters in the coming years, which might once again impact existing and planned nuclear reactors. An April 2015 study “compiled the most comprehensive list of nuclear accidents ever created and used it to calculate the likelihood of other accidents in future.” Researchers concluded “In dollar losses we compute a 50% chance that (i) a Fukushima event (or larger) occurs in the next 50 years, (ii) a Chernobyl event (or larger) occurs in the next 27 years and (iii) a TMI event (or larger) occurs in the next 10 years.”

Bottom Line: If the world is able to put itself on the 2°C path in the coming years, and if the nuclear industry can resolve a variety of issues and avoid a major disaster, then nuclear power can make a modest but important contribution. At the same time, the IEA and many others have concluded that new renewable energy will play a far bigger role in the transition.

The post Nuclear Power Will Play Only A Modest Role In Stopping Climate Change, Nuclear Agency Says appeared first on ThinkProgress.

For The First Time, The Government Might Officially Link Diet To The Environment

This year, the federal government could advise Americans to consider the environment when deciding what they should make for dinner — a prospect that’s already drawn the ire of the meat industry.

We all remember the Food Pyramid. Well, now it’s officially been re-purposed into MyPlate, but the gist is still the same — to provide people guidelines for a healthy, balanced diet. In February, the advisory committee responsible for coming up with recommendations for the federal government’s dietary guidelines — a document that supplements MyPlate, providing more detail on healthy diets — included environmental sustainability in its report. That means that, for the first time, the federal government might include sustainability in its official dietary guidelines, which are set to be released this fall.

“A diet higher in plant-based foods, such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, and lower in calories and animal-based foods is more health promoting and is associated with less environmental impact than is the current U.S. diet,” the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) report states. It continues: “Current evidence shows that the average U.S. diet has a larger environmental impact in terms of increased greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, and energy use, compared to the above dietary patterns.”

This is a big deal for environmentalists and others concerned about climate change, because agriculture — especially meat production — is a major source of the carbon dioxide emissions that drive climate change. Since the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services, which are responsible for putting together the U.S. Dietary Guidelines every five years, use the DGAC’s report when determining what will go into the guidelines, sustainability might make it into the official guidelines. But the USDA and HHS aren’t explicitly required to include all the points from the report in their guidelines, and the meat industry has made no secret of its opposition to the proposed change. So now the question remains: will the government formally acknowledge environmental impact in its updated dietary guidelines, or will it leave the data out — a move the meat industry is pushing hard for?

A Common-Sense Move?

Even before the DGAC released its official report, the meat industry went on the defensive, responding to the committee’s discussion of sustainability during the meetings it held while crafting the report. During one of the DGAC’s meetings, the panel presented a slide that said that a diet “higher in plant-based foods…and lower in animal-based foods is more health-promoting and is associated with lesser environmental impact” than an average American’s diet.

The North American Meat Institute (NAMI) issued a statement lambasting the committee’s discussion. NAMI said that it “questions the scientific rigor of the DGAC decision” and that the recommendation ignored lean meat’s role in a healthy diet.

“Meat and poultry are an integral part of the American diet and the DGAC’s failure to recognize the role of lean meat as a component of a healthy eating pattern is concerning and ill considered,” NAMI stated. “It also reflects either an astonishing lack of awareness of the scientific evidence or a callous disregard of that evidence, again calling into question the entirety of the recommendations submitted by the DGAC to the agencies.”

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s president Philip Ellis issued a statement last week, saying that “the topic of sustainability is outside the scope of the Dietary Guidelines and we urge the Secretaries to reject any recommendations beyond health and nutrition.”

Still, as forceful as the meat industry’s response has been, environmental and health groups have also shown strong support for the inclusion of sustainability in the DGAC report. The committee notes that its findings on diet and sustainability do not mean that Americans need to cut out any one food group in order to lessen the environmental impact of their diets.

I think it’s quite important to recognize that our diets make a difference to the planet

The guidelines serve as general rules for a healthy diet and, to some extent, lifestyle, and are the basis for the federal government’s MyPlate, which replaced the Food Pyramid as a nutrition guide in 2011. But beyond being a blueprint for regular Americans, they also influence the food choices in federal prisons, hospitals, and schools. That’s much of the reason why proponents want to see sustainability in the guidelines: it could make a difference in emissions if all of these institutions invested in more plant-based food and a little less meat.

“I think it’s quite important to recognize that our diets make a difference to the planet, and make a difference to long term sustainability of our agricultural system, as well as to our health in the long run,” Doug Boucher, director of climate research and analysis at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told ThinkProgress. “I think it’s an important step forward.”

But a meat industry argument — that the committee is stepping out of the typical bounds of nutrition by including points on environmental sustainability in its recommendations — is one that some, including former Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, say could cause the USDA and HHS to refrain from including sustainability recommendations in its fall guidelines.

Glickman, who now serves as executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Congressional Program, told ThinkProgress that he was wary of the idea of including something like sustainability in the guidelines, even though he knows the importance of sustainable food.

“I think the dietary guidelines are largely health guidelines, and I think when we put too many things extraneous to health in those guidelines, it dilutes them, it diffuses them, it makes them less impactful, because the guidelines are really followed all over the country,” he told ThinkProgress.

USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack has hinted that he might feel similarly to Glickman about including sustainability in the guidelines. In February, Vilsack said that the DGAC scientists who created the report “have freedom. They are like my 3-year-old granddaughter. She does not have to color inside the lines.”

“I am going to color inside the lines,” Vilsack continued.

Vilsack expanded on his statement in a March interview with the Wall Street Journal.

“I read the actual law,” he said. “And what I read …was that our job ultimately is to formulate dietary and nutrition guidelines. And I emphasize dietary and nutrition because that’s what the law says. I think it’s my responsibility to follow the law.”

For Glickman, the concern goes beyond the question of whether or not environmental issues are outside the scope of the guidelines, however. If the USDA and HHS include sustainability in the dietary guidelines, they could end up taking attention away from other health-related issues, he said.

“I just think to the average consumer out there, the more information you give them in the guideline area, the less likely they’re willing to adopt specific practices of what they actually eat,” he said. “I view the guidelines as a basic health guide,” he continued, “rather than a more generic guide on how to live totally holistically.”

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MyPlate replaced the Food Pyramid as a guide for Americans’ meals in 2011.

CREDIT: USDA/choosemyplate.gov

The politicization of the sustainability issue — the attacks by the meat industry and Congress and the shows of support from environmental groups — have also made the sustainability section of the recommendations, which only totaled a few paragraphs out of a a report that was more than 500 pages, a part of the recommendations that overshadows other parts, Glickman said. In many ways, the sustainability section has become “the issue” in the discussion about the guidelines, he said, and that takes attention away from pressing health problems like obesity and diabetes.

But others don’t buy the argument that including the sustainability tenet would qualify as overreach, or would dilute the guidelines’ message. Parke Wilde, associate professor at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, said that including mentions of sustainability in the guidelines seemed like common sense to him.

“Environmental issues raise many of the same scientific questions that nutrition issues do, so it seems reasonably well-matched to have them in the same report,” he said. In other words, a diet higher in plants is good for the environment and for health, so it would make sense for the guidelines to let Americans know that. And, he said, other countries — such as Brazil — have already combined sustainability with and diet in their guidelines.

Wilde also said that he isn’t surprised about the response that the report’s treatment of sustainability is getting.

“I think if anything I’m surprised that the current Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee has been able to successfully steer so well clear of political pressure,” he said. “I think the report was surprisingly strong.”

A History Of Industry Pressure

But whether or not industry or political pressure will impact the federal agencies’ decision to include mentions of sustainability remains to be seen. The USDA has dealt with pressure from the meat industry before, and in some cases, has ended up making decisions that support the industry’s views. In 2012, the agency published an internal newsletter on its website that outlined what it was doing to become more environmentally-friendly, and included tips on how to lead a more sustainable lifestyle. One of those tips talked about the Meatless Monday campaign.

“One simple way to reduce your environmental impact while dining at our cafeterias is to participate in the ‘Meatless Monday’ initiative,” the newsletter read. “This international effort, as the name implies, encourages people not to eat meat on Mondays… How will going meatless one day of the week help the environment? The production of meat, especially beef (and dairy as well), has a large environmental impact.”

But, after outcry from the meat industry and a few members of Congress, the agency took down the memo, and clarified in a statement that it didn’t endorse Meatless Mondays.

“This was a chance for the U.S.D.A. to say, ‘We support meat production and the production and consumption of meals without meat; we support all forms of agriculture, and we actually believe that if Americans ate a bit less meat both they and American agriculture would be healthier,'” New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman wrote in 2012. “Not a chance.”

And according to Marion Nestle, New York University’s Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, the federal government’s recommendations on what and how much to eat have been influenced by the food industry before.

“More often than not, food industry pressures have succeeded in inducing government agencies to eliminate, weaken or thoroughly obfuscate recommendations to eat less of certain nutrients and their food sources,” Nestle wrote in 2008. Nestle uses the 2005 dietary guidelines as an example. In 2005, the guidelines included recommendations on Americans’ physical activity that were more in depth than they had been in 2000. They zeroed in on physical activity, a focus that industries like the American Beverage Association advocated, rather than diet.

“Physical activity is critical for maintaining a healthy body weight, but the emphasis on such recommendations distracts attention from ‘eat less’ messages,” Nestle wrote.

Still, Nestle told ThinkProgress in an email that the buildup around this year’s dietary guidelines is noticeable in its scope.

“This is the first time that I am aware of when the DGAC report was so controversial that everyone will be waiting to see what USDA and HHS do and do not do with it,” she said.

Nestle also said that she didn’t think anything major had been included in the DGAC’s report and not included in the actual guidelines — at least since 2005. That was the year that the DGAC report became a separate endeavor than the guidelines, something that was written by scientists to advise the USDA and HHS on what they should include in the guidelines. Before 2005, the DGAC wrote the guidelines.

The public comment period on the DGAC report ended May 8 — after being extended — so all stakeholders, not just the meat and dairy industry, had the chance to weigh in. Still, proponents of sustainability’s inclusion in the guidelines are concerned. Stephanie Feldstein, population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said she thinks the meat and livestock industry has “famously had an outsized influence” on the government and on all other entities affected by its lobbying.

“It’s one of the strongest lobbies in the country,” she told ThinkProgress.

The Impacts Of What We Eat

This is the first time sustainability has been included in the DGAC’s report. But it’s not the first time the committee has brought up the issue of sustainability, said Miriam Nelson, professor of nutrition at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts and chair of the DGAC subcommittee that addressed sustainability. Nelson told ThinkProgress she and other members of the committee suggested in 2010 that the committee look into including sustainability in its report. She said she and the other committee members thought it was important to include sustainability in their discussions because food security had been a part of the guidelines since their inception.

“Food security…has been a topic area of focus of the dietary guidelines since the very beginning,” she said. “A very important factor of food security is not just food security today but food security in the future.”

If food security — and insecurity — continues to be part of the report, then including information on sustainable diets isn’t outside the scope of the USDA and HHS, she said. Climate change is predicted to be a major factor in the world’s future food security — intensifying droughts and increasingly unpredictable weather will make growing crops difficult in some parts of the world, and higher temperatures could also cause livestock to suffer from more frequent heat stress.

Boucher also said the idea that plants should be the basis of meals isn’t new: the 2010 DGAC report also recommended that Americans “shift food intake patterns to a more plant-based diet that emphasizes vegetables, cooked dry beans and peas, fruits, whole grains, nuts, and seeds.”

Nelson said she had “no idea” whether the USDA and HHS will include the report’s section on sustainability in the guidelines, but said that because a healthy diet and a sustainable diet are “one in the same,” it would make sense if they did. And even if you take the sustainability aspect out of the report, the rest of the report still states that a diet high in plant-based foods is a healthy alternative to the average American’s diet.

An HHS spokesperson said in a statement to ThinkProgress that the agency and the USDA “are in the process of developing the eighth edition of the Dietary Guidelines,” but didn’t talk about the sustainability aspect specifically.

Letting Americans know that a diet high in meat is associated with more carbon emissions than a diet high in plant-based foods could make a difference in terms of emissions. Science has shown that meat is a significant contributor to climate change. In 2014, a study found that cutting back on meat consumption can lead to significantly lower carbon footprints. Specifically, the study found that meat-eaters contribute 50 to 54 percent more food-related greenhouse gases than vegetarians and 99 to 102 percent more than vegans.

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CREDIT: Copyright © Environmental Working Group, www.ewg.org. Reprinted with permission.

Those findings have been backed up by other studies and calculations. According to Vox, if the average person ate 152 calories of meat per day instead of 220 — which is the amount the IEA predicts the average person will be eating by mid-century — carbon emissions projections would fall significantly. And emissions-wise, agriculture is worse for the climate than deforestation, according to a recent study.

Even the beef industry has acknowledged that food sustainability is a challenge it must face. In a public comment on the DGAC’s report, Kim Stackhouse from the Cattlemen’s Beef Board and USDA’s Beef Checkoff Program detailed the beef industry’s efforts to reduce emissions and water use.

“Only by looking holistically at food production practices can our food systems meet demand and minimize unintended consequences,” Stackhouse writes. “The beef industry recognizes the important role it plays to produce food in a more sustainable manner and has committed to a journey toward more sustainable beef.”

Still, that doesn’t mean the industry supports the sustainability tenet of the DGAC report, as NAMI’s statement shows.

UCS’s Boucher said he hopes the USDA and HHS do include data on sustainability in the guidelines.

“I think if [the guidelines] would simply identify the foods that have highest carbon footprint or greenhouse gas footprint, that would be, I think, the really important contribution,” Boucher said. “And that would surprise people a whole lot, because they would see the impacts of what they choose to eat and serve.”

Kendra Klein, senior program associate for Physicians for Social Responsibility, said her group has been “excited and very hopeful” that the USDA start addressing diet’s influence on the environment — in terms of carbon emissions and in terms of pesticide and land use.

“I think it’s fundamental that we all begin talking about nutrition as something that is not only about the individual eater but is about food systems,” she said.”I think that’s a very important piece about redefining healthy food: people understanding themselves as part of a larger social and environmental system.”

Even if the USDA doesn’t factor sustainability into its dietary guidelines this year, however, Klein said that in the coming years it will be harder and harder for the agency to ignore food’s impact on the environment. As fisheries are depleted and droughts and flooding makes it harder for farmers to count on consistent crops, it will become clearer that food’s relationship with environmental health needs to be acknowledged, she said.

The post For The First Time, The Government Might Officially Link Diet To The Environment appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Port Of Seattle Votes To Delay Arrival Of Shell Oil Rigs, But The Fight’s Not Over Yet

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CREDIT: AP

In response to mounting pressure from protesters and public officials, the Port of Seattle voted Tuesday to ask for a delay in the arrival of Royal Dutch Shell’s Arctic drilling rigs.

The vote itself does not delay the arrival of the rigs, nor does it rescind the lease that the Port of Seattle signed earlier this year. Instead, the vote says that Shell’s use of the leased area — a 50-acre site near downtown Seattle — “should” be postponed “pending further legal review,” the New York Times reports. The vote also asks the local company that would host Shell, Foss Maritime, to delay harboring Shell’s equipment.

In early January, the Port of Seattle announced it had agreed to lease 50 acres of the 156-acre Terminal 5 to Foss, whose client is Shell. The agreement is worth $13.17 million over two years, according to the Seattle Times. Under the agreement, Shell would use the Seattle terminal as a home port for its Arctic drilling vessels — which include two Arctic drilling rigs and multiple tugboats, icebreakers, and environmental-response vessels — during late summer and winter. Following public announcement of the agreement, several environmental groups filed lawsuits with the Washington state court, alleging that the deal doesn’t comply with the terminal’s intended use as a container terminal, not a home port.

The vote to delay Shell’s arrival in Seattle comes just one day after the Obama administration granted Shell conditional approval for its plan to begin exploratory drilling in the Chukchi Sea this summer. Under Shell’s current plan, six exploratory wells would be drilled about 70 miles northwest of Wainwright, Alaska.

In allowing Shell to move forward with its plans, the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) cited newly-released safety regulations for drilling in the U.S. portion of the Arctic Ocean, which require companies to have plans in place should a spill or blowout occur. But environmental groups worry that the Arctic is too remote — and the weather there too unpredictable — to make drilling a safe bet. In the BOEM’s own analysis of the environmental impact of Shell’s plan, the agency acknowledged a 75 percent chance of a spill greater than 1,000 barrels. Residents of Wainwright, Alaska — a majority of whom are indigenous Inupiat whalers — say that a spill would devastate their way of life.

“The Arctic isn’t just a place of polar bears,” Wainwright Mayor John Hopson told the Port of Seattle Commission on Tuesday. “It’s a home, my home.”

The Port of Seattle’s vote follows a wave of public pressure from protesters and city officials, including Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, who announced last week that the port must obtain city permits before mooring of Shell’s vessels or rigs could begin. Last Thursday, around a dozen activists took to Elliot Bay in kayaks to protest the port’s agreement with Shell. Tuesday evening, another dozen protesters in kayaks paddled into the Puget Sound near Everett, a town some 30 miles north of Seattle, to meet the first of Shell’s oil rigs as it arrived. There is another protest planned for this Saturday, and organizers hope that more than 1,000 protesters in kayaks or small boats will participate.

“One thing is clear or has become clear to me, is that this lease has become an increasing distraction to the Port of Seattle,” John Creighton, a commissioner who supported asking to delay Shell’s mooring, said.

Representatives for both Foss Maritime and Shell told the New York Times that the commission’s decision would not stall their plans. In an email to the New York Times, Shell spokesman Curtis Smith said that the company would begin moving the rigs into the Puget Sound this week.

“If we decide to change our plans, we’ll make that call,” Smith said. “But for now, the plan is to move the rigs and begin loading them out in the days ahead.”

The post Port Of Seattle Votes To Delay Arrival Of Shell Oil Rigs, But The Fight’s Not Over Yet appeared first on ThinkProgress.

In Wyoming, Taking A Photo Of A Polluted Stream Could Land You In Jail

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If this guy is collecting data in Wyoming and wants to share it with the government, hopefully he obtained permission.

CREDIT: Shutterstock

To some, Wyoming’s Senate Bill 12 — otherwise known as the Data Trespass Bill — is merely a deepening of preexisting trespass laws — a way for private landowners to seek recourse from individuals trespassing on their property to collect data.

To others, the law is nothing short of an unconstitutional ban on citizen science throughout the state.

Passed by the Wyoming state government and signed into law by Gov. Matt Mead (R) in March, the law makes it illegal to “collect resource data” from any land outside of city boundaries, whether that land be private, public, or federal. Under to the law, “collect” means to “take a sample of material, acquire, gather, photograph or otherwise preserve information in any form from open land which is submitted or intended to be submitted to any agency of the state or federal government.”

Imagine, for a second, a hiker who is taking a walk through a national forest in Wyoming. During that hike, she notices a visibly polluted stream within the area. The next day, she returns with a camera to take a picture of the stream, with the intention of showing those photographs to the local authorities as proof of pollution. Under the Data Trespass Bill, unless the hiker obtained specific permission from the land’s owner or manager — in this case, the Forest Service — to collect that data, she would be subject to prosecution that could result in up to $5,000 in fines and a year in prison. And while the law probably won’t be used to slap fines on every Yellowstone tourist with a camera, it does have broad-reaching implications for environmental data collection in the state, according to Justin Pidot, an assistant professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, who wrote a piece on the law for Slate.

“People on the ground, who have been engaged in this kind of data collection in the past, now have to face the worry about being potentially prosecuted,” Pidot told ThinkProgress. “The chilling effect on citizen participation is huge.”

Environmental groups, like the Wyoming chapter of the Sierra Club, agree that the bill’s broad language will impede citizen science throughout the state.

“We are deeply concerned that this poorly written and overly vague bill will prevent concerned citizens and students from undertaking valuable research projects on public lands, out of fear of accidentally running afoul of the new law (the scope of which no one clearly understands) and being criminally and civilly prosecuted,” Connie Wilbert, organizing representative for the Sierra Club’s Wyoming chapter, told ThinkProgress. “There is no need for this new bill, and we can only conclude that it is an attempt by private landowners to scare people away from valid research efforts on public land.”

One of the most troubling components of the law, according to Pidot, is that it specifically targets data collected to be shared with the government, a focus he calls “anomalous, bizarre, and radical.” Under the statute, a citizen who uncovers an environmental disaster or public health threat — unless they’ve obtained specific permission from the landowner before collecting that data — would themselves be breaking the law by reporting it to the authorities.

The law, Pidot says, is less about trespassing and more about protecting powerful interests, like Wyoming ranchers who broadly supported the bill. For years, ranchers have been locked in a battle with a small group of citizen scientists, working for the Western Watersheds Project, over data they’ve collected — and how they’ve collected it.

Through a robust water sampling effort, the Western Watersheds Project has found high levels of E. coli bacteria in streams on land owned by the Bureau of Land Management — something the group says proves that ranchers are allowing their cattle to graze too close to streams. Those waterways, the Western Watershed Project argues, should be added to a list of impaired waters under the Clean Water Act — a move that could force tighter regulations on where ranchers allow their cattle to graze. In June of 2014, 14 ranchers filed a lawsuit against Jonathan Ratner, Western Watershed Project’s project director for Wyoming, alleging that the data collected by Ratner was obtained by crossing private property to reach the public lands — something that, under the new law, would be illegal without permission from the ranchers that own the land.

“There’s a real parallel between what this statute is doing and this effort on the part of the state and the ranchers to exclude this data that the Western Watersheds Project is collecting from inclusion on the impaired water list,” Pidot, who represents the Western Watersheds Project in a case not related to the statute, said. “The theory for most of the ranchers is, ‘You were near my land once, so you must have trespassed.'”

In some instances — where written permission is already required to access land — getting extra permission for collecting data might not be an insurmountable burden. But as Southern Fried Science’s Amy Freitag points out, there are some cases where trespassing might be the best way to obtain information about environmental problems. Cattle ranchers aren’t likely, she says, to allow someone onto their property to collect data they know might be used to restrict their grazing rights. If a scientist discovers illegal activity while trespassing, that means of discovery shouldn’t negate the fact that something illegal is going on.

“The offenses of the trespassing should certainly not negate the evidence of another crime,” Freitag writes. “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Wyoming’s bill, in Pidot’s mind, is another example of western states using legislation to conceal information about the environment and agriculture. He cites two different recently passed laws in Idaho and Utah that criminalize undercover investigations or whistle blowing in the agricultural industry.

“This is sort of a new tactic we’re seeing, where state governments are trying to build legal rules that prevent people from uncovering information about favored industrial groups,” Pidot said. “I think it’s very concerning as a phenomenon.”

Pidot believes the bill violates the Constitution in a number of ways, from infringing on First Amendment rights of free speech without special burden to undermining the ability to petition the government. It also interferes with the supremacy clause, Pidot says, because it uses state law to frustrate the purpose of federal law — in this case, enforcing the federal Clean Water Act by preventing citizen data from being considered by the government.

In the long run, Pidot hopes, part or all of the Data Trespass Bill will be found unconstitutional. Until then, he worries that other states will follow in Wyoming’s footsteps and enact similar legislation.

“What do we, as a society, believe is the role of citizens in ensuring that truthful information about wrongful conduct is made available, to both the public and the government?” Pidot asks. “In the absence of that information, the government has the luxury of pretending there aren’t any problems.”

The post In Wyoming, Taking A Photo Of A Polluted Stream Could Land You In Jail appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Carbon Pollution’s Harm To Sea Life Coming Faster Than Expected

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Pacific oysters are being harvested in this AP file photo. Experts warn rising CO2 levels in the ocean pose a major danger to shellfish and other sea life.

CREDIT: AP/Ted S. Warren

The oceans are now acidifying faster than they have been over the last 300 million years, a time period in which there were four major extinctions driven by natural bursts of carbon. In fact, humans are acidifying the oceans 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.

Recent research finds that the threat to marine life posed by human-caused carbon pollution is coming faster than expected. And that’s a problem because as 70 Academies of Science warned in a 2009 joint statement on acidification: “Marine food supplies are likely to be reduced with significant implications for food production and security in regions dependent on fish protein, and human health and wellbeing.”

Why does carbon pollution threaten marine life? Significantly, as carbon dioxide is absorbed in water it causes chemical reactions that reduce “saturation states of biologically important calcium carbonate [CaCO3] minerals,” which “are the building blocks for the skeletons and shells of many marine organisms,” as NOAA explains. In the parts of the ocean teeming with life, the seawater has an overabundance (supersaturation) of these calcium carbonate minerals used by so-called “calcifying organisms,” which include corals and algae and mollusks and some plankton.

As the ocean absorbs more carbon dioxide, more and more places are becoming undersaturated with these minerals, thereby threatening calcifying organisms. Besides a decline in calcification, the World Meteorological Organization explained in 2014, “Other impacts of acidification on marine biota include reduced survival, development and growth rates, as well as changes in physiological functions and reduced biodiversity.”

A 2015 study in Science concluded that the Permo-Triassic extinction 252 million years ago — considered the “the greatest extinction of all time” — happened during the time when massive amounts carbon dioxide were injected into the atmosphere, first slowly and then quickly (driven by volcanic eruptions). The researchers found “During the second extinction pulse, however, a rapid and large injection of carbon caused an abrupt acidification event that drove the preferential loss of heavily calcified marine biota.” How bad was this extinction? Besides killing over 90 percent of marine life, it wiped out some 70 percent of land-based animal and plant life.

Today, coral reefs alone are estimated to support a quarter of all marine life. NOAA explains that “The fish that grow and live on coral reefs are a significant food source for half a billion people worldwide.” The combination of warming waters and acidification have already caused serious harm to major coral reef around the world, and many appear unlikely to survive the century. Oceanographer and coral expert J.E.N. Veron, former chief scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, has written, “The science is clear: Unless we change the way we live, the Earth’s coral reefs will be utterly destroyed within our children’s lifetimes.”

Ocean acidification and carbon pollution have already proven to be major threats to the U.S. oyster industry, as was clear from the “The Great Oyster Crash” of 2007 in coastal Oregon and Washington. There were “near total failures of developing oysters in both aquaculture facilities and natural ecosystems on the West Coast,” as NOAA put it, with oyster larvae dying by the millions. Why? Originally it was thought that rapidly acidifying coastal waters made it difficult for larvae to build the shells needed for survival.

But a December 2014 study of Pacific oyster and Mediterranean mussel larvae in Nature Climate Change determined that “the earliest larval stages are directly sensitive to saturation state, not carbon dioxide (CO2) or pH” (acidity). So what matters most is how much calcium carbonate is in the ocean water relative to the total amount it could hold.

This finding has dramatic consequences for the speed at which rising carbon dioxide levels will harm ocean life. Lead author George Waldbusser, an Oregon State University marine ecologist and biogeochemist explains why:

Larval oysters and mussels are so sensitive to the saturation state (which is lowered by increasing CO2) that the threshold for danger will be crossed “decades to centuries” ahead of when CO2 increases (and pH decreases) alone would pose a threat to these bivalve larvae. “At the current rate of change, there is not much more room for the waters off the Oregon coast to absorb more CO2 without crossing the threshold we have identified with respect to saturation state,” he said.

That means some of the worst impacts of rising carbon dioxide levels in the ocean may come sooner than expected.

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Brazilian Ranchers Aren’t Cutting Down As Much Forest Anymore. Here’s Why.

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Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has slowed in the past decade.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Andre Penner

Pressure from environmental groups and federal prosecutors is helping break the link between cattle ranching and deforestation in the Amazon, according to a new study.

Agreements with Brazil’s largest slaughterhouses have “dramatically” reduced deforestation by ranchers, research published Tuesday in Conservation Letters found.

Supply chain solutions — such as the market-driven agreements Brazilian beef companies entered into with Greenpeace and the Brazilian government in 2009 — are remarkably effective and have rapidly changed deforestation behavior for beef suppliers, said Holly Gibbs, a professor at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an author of the study. Both 2009 agreements committed companies to only sourcing beef from ranchers who were not engaging in deforestation.

The agreements have been “exceptionally influential,” Gibbs told ThinkProgress.

When JBS, one of Brazil’s biggest beef producers, signed the agreements, only 2 percent of its suppliers were registered as zero-deforestation. By 2013, nearly all were, the researchers found.

The reasoning is simple: “If you don’t comply with the agreement, you won’t have access to the market,” Gibbs said. “It starts to change the tone of agriculture in Brazil.”

Agriculture and deforestation have long been coupled in the Amazon Basin. Stretching across 1.4 billion acres — and making up half of the world’s remaining tropical rainforest — the region is one of the biggest carbon sinks in the world, making it a critical component of addressing climate change.

Unlike most countries, where carbon emissions are counted in things like coal factories and cement production, Brazil’s carbon footprint it counted in the number of trees it loses each year. Soy and beef production have caused 70 percent of Brazil’s deforestation in recent years, Gibbs said. More than two-thirds of deforested land in the Brazilian Amazon is used for cattle ranching.

“To delink this agricultural production from deforestation would have huge impacts on climate change,” Gibbs said.

According to state data, Brazil’s carbon footprint due to deforestation has been decreasing since 2004. Which is not to say deforestation has stopped — it’s just slowing.

Deforestation, forest degradation, and clearing peat account for an estimated 4.3 billion to 5.5 billion tons of emissions globally per year, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

In addition, deforestation can be devastating to the animal and human life that depends on forests for food and survival. Some 1.6 billion people depend on forests for “food, fresh water, clothing, traditional medicine and shelter,” the World Wildlife Federation estimates.

Millions of species live in the Amazon Basin, including sloths, poison dart frogs, pygmy marmosets, and black spider monkeys — all threatened by human encroachment as well as climate change. Worldwide, there is still the equivalent of 35 football fields of forest being cut down each minute, the World Wildlife Foundation says.

But some would say at least the tide has turned on the acceptability of farming on deforested land.

Even McDonald’s Corp, which was targeted for sourcing beef from deforested areas as far back as the 1980s, has joined in. Last month, the company announced plans to achieve zero forestation throughout its supply chain by 2030.

“As we see all these big multi-national companies step forward… we need to start understanding what that means on the ground,” Gibbs said. “Are we going to see changes, or are we going to see greenwashing?”

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Iowa Scientists To Presidential Candidates: Climate Change ‘Is Not An Issue That Can Be Ignored’

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CREDIT: YouTube/screenshot

On Monday, 188 researchers and scientists from across Iowa posed a pointed question to potential presidential candidates: what will you do about climate change?

In the fifth annual Iowa Climate Statement, the diverse group of scientists from 39 colleges and universities across the state focus on getting politicians to weigh in on what they plan to do about the problem. The lead authors of the statement feel that climate change has been ignored by presidential candidates from both parties in previous elections, and they want presidential hopefuls to address climate change while campaigning this time around.

Iowa is the first state to hold its primary caucus, and for this reason it possesses an outsized influence on the presidential race. The authors feel that this attention can be used to their advantage in an effort to highlight the issues surrounding climate change.

Chris Anderson, assistant director of Iowa State University’s Climate Science Program, told ThinkProgress that the debate over climate change in the 2016 presidential election will differ from previous elections in that there will be more existing and proposed policies that candidates can comment on. These include the proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulations on carbon emissions from power plants, the international agreements coming out of the Paris climate talks in December, and the Production Tax Credit (PTC) for renewable energy such as wind and solar power, to name a few.

Many of these policies would affect Iowa directly. For example, eliminating the PTC, as some lawmakers want to do, “would undermine the economic staples Iowa has built and prevent continued growth of it,” Anderson said. “Would candidates oppose this legislation if it passed through Congress?

During the announcement of the Climate Statement Monday, David Courard‐Hauri, an associate professor who directs the Environmental Science and Policy Program at Drake University, said “climate change is affecting Iowans and will continue to affect us in increasingly significant ways” and that “it is not an issue that can be ignored.”

Courard‐Hauri said it’s clear that “how to address climate change is one of the most important choices that a president will make.”

“Whether he or she wants to reduce carbon emissions, come up with a plan to cope with expected damages, or ignore the issue and leave the costs to our children, we want to make sure anyone who wants to be president can say specifically how they will deal with climate change,” he said.

Each year the Iowa Climate Statement has focused on different aspects of climate change. In 2014 the scientists highlighted public health threats like increased cardiovascular and respiratory health problems and more exposure to allergens.

The 2014 statement also brought attention to water quality issues, especially critical in a state so reliant on an agricultural economy. It stated that “excessive heavy rains” have increased exposure to toxic chemicals and sewage spread by floods as well as led to “soil runoff in agricultural areas which then pollutes waterways with nitrates and phosphorus.”

Anderson said that climate change is increasing the frequency of excessively wet springs in Iowa as well as the number of excessively wet days.

“The U. S. is a global leader in agricultural production and this provides our government with trade leverage,” Anderson said. “Excessive rainfall from climate change is eroding our soils, which undermines our agricultural productivity.”

Anderson also said that the longer the U.S. waits to adapt to climate change, the more expensive this adjustment will become and the more Americans will “expose ourselves to weather hazards that could have been avoided.”

The Iowa Climate Statement has been growing in scope every year. In 2011, it got a modest 33 signatures. By 2014 it had 180, and this year’s statement has 188 signatories.

“The great majority of people teaching science and policy classes in the state of Iowa at the secondary education level believe that climate change is very important and that it’s caused by humans, and they’re willing to sign a statement to that effect,” Jerry Schnoor, the co-director of the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research at the University of Iowa, told ThinkProgress in 2014.

As a conservative state with a lot of renewable energy, Iowa also finds itself in the crosshairs of another similarly divisive debate: the future of energy generation. In 2014, Iowa led the country in ethanol production and got 27 percent of its total electricity generation from wind power — second only to coal, which has dropped significantly in the last decade as a source of power in the state. In the last decade, about $10 billion has been invested in Iowa’s wind energy industry, which now supports some 6,000 jobs.

The debate around ethanol production is especially heated this election cycle, as biofuel subsidies, long supported by Republicans campaigning in the state, may fall out of favor with some candidates who lament any type of federal involvement. At the Iowa Ag Summit in March, both Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry — both of whom are Republicans — chose not to endorse the Renewable Fuel Standard, which sets a minimum percentage of biofuel that must be blended into gasoline supply.

This diehard conservative approach does not sit well with Anderson.

“Iowa is conservative where it makes sense to be conservative and progressive where it makes sense to be progressive,” said Anderson. “We can show the economic value of investing in renewable energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Iowa shows that addressing climate change does not have to be an economic drag.”

The post Iowa Scientists To Presidential Candidates: Climate Change ‘Is Not An Issue That Can Be Ignored’ appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Sea Level Rise Is Happening Faster Than Anyone Thought

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Sea level rise is happening faster than previously thought, according to a new study.

CREDIT: Shutterstock

Global sea level rise isn’t just happening — it’s happening much faster than previously thought, according to new research from climate scientists at the University of Tasmania, in Australia.

The study, published Monday in Nature Climate Change, found that sea level rise has been speeding up over the past two decades compared to the rest of the 20th century. This contradicts previous satellite data dating back to 1993, which appeared to show sea level rise accelerating in the 1990s, but slowing slightly over the past decade.

“That slowing has puzzled scientists because it coincides with an increase in water entering our oceans from Greenland and West Antarctica,” Christopher Watson, the study’s lead author, said in a press statement.

To understand the apparent slowdown in sea level rise, researchers at the University of Tasmania looked at other factors that might impact sea level measurement, such as changes in the height of the Earth’s land surface. First, Watson and his colleagues compared data from tide gauges — which measure sea level height relative to a specific set of coordinates — to satellite data, which measures the height of the sea surface using radar.

Data collected from tide gauges can be skewed by things like earthquakes or sediment settling, which can change where the tide gauge is located relative to the coordinate points it’s measuring. That change in location can affect the gauge’s measurement of sea level. To account for these issues, Watson and his colleagues used GPS stations to understand how tide gauges have risen or fallen — where no GPS stations existed, they used computer modeling to estimate how the tide gauges might have changed position.

Using the newly recalibrated data, the researchers found that sea level rise between 1993 and 1999 — the earliest segment of satellite data — was overstated. According to satellite data, over that six-year period, global sea level rose 3.2 milimeters (about .12 inches) per year; using Watson’s recalibrated data, sea levels probably rose closer to between 2.6 to 2.9 mm (about .1 to .11 inches) per year. This over-estimation of sea level rise gave the appearance of sea level rise slowing in the previous decade, when it was actually accelerating at a rate of between 0.041 and 0.058 mm (.001 to .002 inches) per year.

“We see acceleration, and what I find striking about that is the fact that it’s consistent with the projections of sea level rise published by the IPCC,” Watson told the Guardian. “Sea level rise is getting faster. We know it’s been getting faster over the last two decades than its been over the 20th century and its getting faster again.”

Because sea levels can naturally fluctuate as water is exchanged between land and sea, Watson notes that the rate of increase is too small to be statistically significant — though he told the Washington Post that it’s clear that sea levels are now rising at roughly double the rate observed in the 20th century, something that will have potentially huge ramifications for coastal areas across the world.

“Accelerating sea level is a massive issue for the coastal zone — the once-in-a-lifetime inundation events will become far more frequent, and adaptation will need to occur,” Watson told the Post. “Agencies need to fully consider the impact of accelerating sea level and plan accordingly.”

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Jeb Bush Signals His Faith Informs His Positions On Climate Change

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CREDIT: AP

Former Florida governor and presumptive Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush voiced a faith-based form of environmentalism over the weekend, potentially breaking ranks with many of his GOP colleagues on climate issues. But if he really wants to take religion seriously during his likely run for the White House, he’ll have to come to terms with his pope’s increasingly progressive stance on climate change.

While delivering the commencement address at Liberty University, Bush, a lifelong Christian who converted to Catholicism in 1995, lauded the role of faith in American history. He championed the positive influence of religious leaders such as Pope Francis, and insisted that it is impossible for elected officials to completely divorce their faith from their politics.

“The endpoint is a certain kind of politician we’ve all heard before — the guy whose moral convictions are so private, so deeply personal, that he even refuses to impose them on himself,” Bush quipped, sparking peals of laughter from the thousands of graduates in attendance.

Bush’s appeal to religion is standard fare for potential GOP presidential candidates, especially when speaking before Liberty University, an evangelical Christian school that has produced many of the Religious Right’s most influential leaders. What was less expected — and potentially groundbreaking — was how he described one of the key components of his faith: concern for the environment.

“America’s environmental debates, likewise, can be too coldly economical, too sterile of life,” Bush said. “Christians see in nature and all God’s creatures designs grander than any of man’s own devising, the endless glorious work of the Lord of Life. Men and women of your generation are striving to be protectors of Creation, instead of just users. Good shepherds, instead of just hirelings. And that moral vision can make all the difference.”

This combination of faith and environmentalism, although common in some progressive circles, is highly unusual for a major GOP candidate, and ultimately begs the question: will Bush follow the lead of the Catholic hierarchy and become one of the first prominent Republicans to make the spiritual case for legislation to combat climate change, or is his speech just another case of religious doublespeak?

It bears mentioning that the former governor’s remarks were vague, in part because Bush has undergone something of an evolution — or, perhaps, a spiritual journey — on the issue of climate change over the years. In 2011, he hesitantly acknowledged that global warming “may be real,” but said he was unsure whether it was “disproportionately man-made” and argued skeptics have “every right” to contend that “it’s not a certainty.” And while recent weeks have seen him more willing to recognize our changing climate — he described it in April as an issue he is “concerned about” and encouraged cooperation with other countries to “negotiate a way to reduce carbon emissions” — his actual policy agenda is incomplete at best. Speaking to a group in New Hampshire last month, Bush explained his only solution to climate change was to “take advantage of the abundance of natural gas,” a position that mirrors proposals from some Democrats but still carries its own environmental risks.

If Bush’s take on the environment feels murky, his pope’s position is crystal clear.

But if Bush’s take on the environment feels murky, his pope’s position is crystal clear. Pope Francis has made headlines for his progressive take on green issues, a pro-environment legacy he inherited from his predecessors but has nonetheless made a central component of his own papacy. Since mentioning the need to care for God’s creation during his first mass as the pontiff, Francis has labeled the mistreatment of the earth a “sin,” convened two summits at the Vatican on sustainability, and is scheduled to publish a formal papal encyclical next month that is expected to instruct the world’s billion-plus Catholics to act on climate change. The pope’s zeal is backed by a growing faith-based coalition to protect the planet, with Catholics, interfaith organizations, and even evangelicals regularly pushing lawmakers to pass legislation that preserves our natural resources.

Of course, Francis’ staunch support for the earth has frustrated many within his own church, including Catholic members of the GOP, which is notoriously skittish on the issue of climate change. But a Bush candidacy that embraced progressive energy policies could still pay dividends politically: a 2014 survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute found that solid majorities of Americans support stricter limits on vehicle and CO2 emissions, and a full 73 percent of Hispanic Catholics are very or somewhat concerned with climate change overall — a key demographic that largely supported Jeb’s brother, George W., but has since abandoned the Republican party. A slate of green policy proposals could also chip away at longstanding progressive gains with young adults, 68 percent of whom believe America should address climate change as soon as possible.

A Bush candidacy that embraced progressive energy policies could pay dividends politically.

Yet this rapidly expanding faith-and-climate-conscious electorate has yet to flex its political muscle in conservative circles, and the pope’s call for a more earth-minded faith has not been enough to change the hearts (or policies) of so many American politicians. Marco Rubio, who is also Catholic and a possible presidential hopeful, openly denied any human influence on global warming, and of the 169 members of the 114th Congress who have expressed doubts about the science behind climate change, 35 identify as Catholic.

If Bush does enter the presidential race, he could very well take this same route and walk back his climate comments to win conservative votes, as the Republican primary is historically where many moderate ideas go to die. But Bush’s take on climate change — however uneven — is already lightyears away from most Republicans, and he has rooted his support for green policies in something bigger than polls or denials of science; he rooted it in his devotion to the divine. If he backtracks on that, voters won’t just worry about his electability, they’ll likely worry whether he has become the exact kind of politician he mocked: one who plays politics with his faith.

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