Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 147

Oil And Gas Wells Are Leaking Huge Amounts Of Methane, And It’s Costing Taxpayers Millions

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CREDIT: Shutterstock

In March, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell cited a methane gas plume the size of Delaware hovering over the Four Corners area in Northwest New Mexico as evidence that the Interior Department needs to cut “wasted gas that results from venting and flaring during oil and gas operations.”

This methane hot spot, which is located above an area that contains more than 40,000 wells, arises primarily from leaks in natural gas production and processing equipment spanning a large area of federal lands. While it may be the most visible instance of this issue, it is far from the only instance of methane — a powerful greenhouse gas that traps up to 34 times as much heat as carbon dioxide over the course of a century — being emitted into the atmosphere above public lands. A new report from the Government Accountability Office notes another unfortunate side effect of this inefficiency: the loss of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars each year.

The GAO has been urging the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), an Interior Department agency, to cut methane emissions via flared or vented gas since at least 2010, when the government office found that 40 percent of this methane could be economically captured and sold. According to the 2010 report, “such reductions could increase federal royalty payments by about $23 million annually and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an amount equivalent to about 16.5 million metric tons of CO2 — the annual emissions equivalent of 3.1 million cars.”

In the intervening half decade, the situation has only been exacerbated by the proliferation of new extraction techniques such as hydraulic fracturing. Last May, an Associated Press review of government records found that the BLM, which manages oil and gas development on federal and Native Americans lands, had been “overwhelmed” by the boom in fracking.

The new GAO report found that the Interior Department has made “considerable progress” since 2009 but has failed to implement a number of key recommendations included in the 2010 report. For instance, it found that in 2013 the BLM failed to complete production inspections on 19 percent of the wells it considered high risk.

According to the GAO report, oil and gas leased on federal lands and waters accounted for almost $48 billion in royalty revenues between 2009 and 2013.

Three Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Jewell this week in response to the new GAO report. In it, they express concern over the lack of regulation on federal oil and gas leases and encourage action to protect the environment and “ensure fair returns for taxpayers.” Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), and Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ) write in the letter that they went new regulations to “restrict the practice of venting and flaring” with Sen. Wyden saying that “venting and flaring natural gas from these wells hurts the environment and speeds up global warming, and it shortchanges the taxpayers.”

In a statement to the Associated Press, the Interior Department mostly agreed with the GAO’s recent findings and re-emphasized its responsibility to protect the environment and collect taxpayer revenue. As with many environmental oversight and regulatory issues, the agency feels funding to be insufficient, with David Haines, deputy assistant secretary for the Interior Department, saying that the money Obama requested in his budget for well inspections “would provide much needed resources to support BLM’s cradle to grave responsibilities for wells.”

Interior Department spokeswoman Jessica Kershaw said the agency is updating their “decades-old standards to encourage the kind of infrastructure and technology that many companies operating in the Bakken and Permian basins have demonstrated can reduce harmful emissions and capture the natural gas.”

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CREDIT: Center For American Progress

According to a 2014 report by the Center For American Progress, unconventional natural gas production and processing on federal lands and waters, including offshore drilling, may have generated as much as 3.7 million metric tons of methane in 2012. These fugitive methane emissions are notoriously hard to measure, and improving processes for data collection and synthesis are a primary aspect of the Interior Department’s responsibility on the matter.

The Interior Department manages coal, oil, and gas resources on more than 500 million acres of public land across the U.S. and more than 1.7 billion acres offshore. While Jewell has yet to implement new fracking and methane capture regulations, her rhetoric on climate change implies she means business, and in her March remarks she said that her department will propose standards to cut methane emissions from flared or vented gas in the coming months.

She also said one of the main reasons she “left the private sector for this job was not just to talk about climate change, but do something about it.”

While the U.S. is a leader in unconventional fossil fuel and natural gas extraction, Jewell noted that in recent years the agency has approved 52 commercial-scale solar projects on public lands in the West, which when built could produce enough electricity for over four million homes.

In January, the Obama Administration announced plans to cut methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by 40 to 45 percent from 2012 levels by 2025. In 2012, methane emissions accounted for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas pollution, and of this total nearly 30 percent came from the production, transmission, and distribution of oil and natural gas. Emissions from the oil and gas sector are projected to rise more than 25 percent by 2025 without substantial efforts to reduce them.

The new methane rules are part of the Obama Administration’s broader commitment to reduce overall U.S. emissions 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 and 26 to 28 percent by 2025. In lieu of congressional action, the administration has been pursuing executive avenues such as increased vehicle efficiency standards and the proposed Clean Power Plan to cut carbon emissions from existing power plants.

The post Oil And Gas Wells Are Leaking Huge Amounts Of Methane, And It’s Costing Taxpayers Millions appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Common Hormone Used To Fatten Up Cows Is Contaminating The Environment

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A synthetic growth hormone used in cattle production may persist longer in the environment than previously thought.

CREDIT: Shutterstock

Trenbolone acetate, or TBA, is a synthetic growth promoter used extensively in the cattle industry to help cows add muscle mass quickly. Implanted in the ears of over 20 million cows annually, cattle metabolize TBA to create 17-alpha-trenbolone, an endocrine disruptor that can end up in streams or rivers due to feedlot runoff or cattle manure applied to cropland.

For years, regulators weren’t concerned about the environmental risks associated with the compound because 17-alpha-trenbolone breaks down rapidly in sunlight. But a study published Friday in Nature Communications shows that TBA and its metabolite compounds persist in the environment in much higher concentrations — and for much longer — than previously thought, casting doubt on the current regulatory framework’s ability to properly manage risk associated with contaminants in the environment.

“TBA becomes a bit of a canary in a coal mine,” Adam Ward, assistant professor at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs and co-author of the study, told ThinkProgress. “It becomes a test case that demonstrates how a process that we didn’t recognize creates a risk we didn’t know existed.”

When 17-alpha-trenbolone and other TBA metabolites enter into the environment, they’re broken down rapidly by sunlight — but convert back to TBA metabolites in darkness. Ward and his colleagues discovered that this unique reactivity does have an impact on the environment, finding that concentrations of TBA metabolites like 17-alpha-trenbolon may exist in concentrations around 35 percent higher than previously thought. They also found that the TBA metabolites persisted longer in the environment, resulting in 50 percent more biological exposure.

The study also found that the areas with the highest concentration of TBA metabolites aren’t necessarily right next to the release point — sometimes, the worst exposure happens 20 to 25 miles from the site of pollution. “That really challenges how we think about pollution,” Ward said. “It may be that it takes a while for this combination of transport and reaction to produce the worst-case scenario.”

In runoff from feedlots, TBA metabolites have been measured in concentrations as high as 55 nanograms per liter, but even small amounts of endocrine disruptors like 17-alpha-trenbolon have been shown to adversely affect aquatic life. In concentrations as low as 10 nanograms per liter, studies have seen undesirable impacts on fish, including reduced rates of reproduction, skewed sex rations, and disruptions in hormones.

Though the study looked at TBA and its metabolite compounds specifically, Ward stresses that its real contribution is looking at how existing regulatory structure might be incomplete in its ability to deal with chemicals in the environment. The current regulatory system is largely focused on individual chemicals or compounds, forgoing a holistic approach to focus on individual constituents. To better manage the risks associated with chemicals in the environment, Ward says, regulatory bodies need to start thinking about how chemicals interact with the environment.

“The prevailing wisdom on how we manage risk is not complete,” Ward said. “We’ve been so focused on individual compounds that we’ve focused on the trees and not the forest.”

This isn’t the first time a study has discovered something unexpected about the way that TBA and its metabolites function in the environment. Ward has a background in hydrology and environmental transport, and has spent most of his career working on projects that look at how water carries compounds through the environment. In 2013, he met David Cwiertny, an associate professor at the University of Iowa who had just been involved in a study looking at how sunlight does — and does not — breakdown TBA metabolites in the environment.

“When TBA was approved for use, part of that approval was based on the idea that when you expose the compound to sunlight, it breaks down,” Ward said. In sunlight, TBA metabolites have half-lives of between 15 minutes and an hour.

The paper, published in Science in 2013, found that while 17-alpha-trenbolone does break down in sunlight, those compounds revert back to 17-alpha-trenbolone in the dark. The process of reverting back to 17-alpha-trenbolon happens much slower than the initial breakdown — around 100 times slower — but it does happen, meaning that instead of being permanently removed from the environment in the presence of sunlight, 17-alpha-trenbolone can persist in the environment much longer than anticipated.

Ward knew Cwiertny was excited about the study, but wondered whether its findings held true in nature. “I said, ‘You found it in the lab but is it meaningful in the environment? When we scale it up to a stream or a network of streams, do we actually care?”

Friday’s study makes the leap from lab to the environment. To do so, Ward and his co-researchers used mathematical modeling — a relatively new approach to studying emerging contaminants. “If this weren’t such a potent hormone, it would have been ideal to release some into a stream,” Ward said, “but that would be like poisoning the well to understand how the poison works.”

Ward stresses that the study’s findings don’t mean that operations that use TBA — or the companies that produce it — have been negligent. TBA and other growth enhancers help the cattle industry operate more efficiently, using less land and producing fewer greenhouse gases to create the same amount of beef.

“I don’t think the beef producers are doing anything wrong. I don’t think the chemical industry has been doing anything wrong,” Ward said. “No one is at fault, but now that we’ve seen a mistake or an omission or an oversight, it’s time for us to address it.”

The post Common Hormone Used To Fatten Up Cows Is Contaminating The Environment appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Environmental Groups Sue To Stop Oil Companies From Injecting Industrial Waste Into California’s Water Supply

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CREDIT: Courtesy Center for Biological Diversity

Against the backdrop of California’s historic drought, two environmental groups filed a lawsuit Thursday demanding that the state stop allowing oil industry wastewater to be injected into protected, clean aquifers.

In response to an investigation showing the California Department of Conservation has been allowing oil companies to inject waste into clean water sources for years, the department, named in the suit, only issued a “emergency rulemaking action” that allows the wastewater injections to continue until 2017.

The lawsuit by the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity asks that the action be invalidated and that the Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources be forced to immediately stop the continued wastewater injections.

“Everyone agrees they are illegally operating injection wells,” Center for Biological Diversity attorney Hollin Kretzmann told ThinkProgress. “The Safe Drinking Water Act is clear and prohibits this type of activity.”

Wastewater from oil and gas drilling can contain heavy metals, radioactive material, and chemicals like arsenic and benzene. Injection wells, where toxic substances are pumped deep underground, have been used for hazardous material disposal for decades, but an investigation by ProPublica in 2012 found that “structural failures inside injection wells are routine” and pose a tremendous health risk.

The state division responsible for regulating injection wells denies that the approximately 2,500 improperly-permitted wells pose a risk.

“As we’ve said before, the protection of California’s groundwater resources – as well as public health — is paramount, particularly in this time of extreme drought. The state and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are moving aggressively and quickly to test all wells that risk harming sources of water for drinking and agriculture,” California State Oil and Gas Supervisor Steven Bohlen, head of the Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources, told ThinkProgress in a statement.

“Thus far, testing of water supply wells by the State Water Resources Control Board has revealed no contamination of water used for drinking or agricultural purposes related to underground injection by the oil and gas industry. We intend to keep it that way,” he said.

He also noted that the department has shut down 23 wells but said it was done “out of an abundance of caution.”

California is under intense pressure from five years of drought. Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has passed historic water-conservation regulations, mostly targeting California residents and municipalities. Scientists estimate the state needs 11 trillion gallons of water to end the drought.

California produces about 17,000 barrels of oil a month. At a rate of roughly eight barrels of water per barrel of oil, that means California’s oil industry uses more than 51 billion gallons of water each year.

At least one company, Chevron, has been selling its wastewater to California’s drought-stricken farmers. The water has been treated, but independent testing has also found dangerous contaminants such as acetone and methylene chloride, as well as crude oil, in wastewater Chevron sold for irrigation purposes.

The other option is injection wells.

“In California, we don’t have the luxury of saying certain water is high priority and certain water is low priority,” Kretzmann said. “It’s all high priority right now.”

The post Environmental Groups Sue To Stop Oil Companies From Injecting Industrial Waste Into California’s Water Supply appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Judge Halts Work On Maryland Pipeline Due To Environmental Concerns

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CREDIT: shutterstock

Construction on a natural gas pipeline set to run through Maryland has been halted after a judge found that the state hadn’t done enough to protect the environment and hadn’t given residents enough of a chance to weigh in on the project.

Baltimore County Circuit Court Judge Judge Justin J. King ruled last week that the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) must go back and revise the permit it issued for the 21-mile pipeline, which is being constructed by Columbia Pipeline Group and is slated to run through Baltimore and Harford counties. According to the judge’s ruling, the permit’s water safety requirements were too general, “rendering it impossible for this court to determine whether the permit complies with state and federal water quality regulations.”

In addition, King wrote, the permit didn’t allow enough time for public input, and there wasn’t enough evidence that Maryland took a close enough look at how the project would affect historic sites. Construction on the pipeline, which is about halfway complete, has been temporarily halted. It will only resume after the state revisits the permit or, in the case of an appeal, if the ruling is overturned.

Environmentalists in Maryland, who have been warning of the danger the pipeline poses to the state’s waterways, applauded the judge’s move. The pipeline, as it’s permitted, would cross over 70 streams. Thirty-nine of those streams feed into the Loch Raven Reservoir, which provides water to most of Baltimore County, including the city of Baltimore.

Local environmental group Gunpowder Riverkeeper and three individuals filed for judicial review of the project, and these filings were consolidated into the case heard by Judge King.

King’s ruling “will eventually have MDE and Columbia go back through and make this permit more protective of the waterway resources we’re advocating for,” Theaux M. Le Gardeur, head of Gunpowder Riverkeeper, told the Baltimore Sun. “I can’t really tell folks where the pipeline should go, but if they do put it in, they should put it in in the right way.”

MDE is still reviewing the case and figuring out how it will proceed, a spokesman told the Baltimore Sun. The state agency could appeal the case if it doesn’t choose to revisit the pipeline’s permit.

In general, natural gas pipelines have fewer significant onshore accidents than pipelines carrying substances like crude oil and jet fuel, according to the Pipeline Safety Trust. However, that doesn’t mean they never leak: this week, a leak was reported at a TransCanada natural gas pipeline in Alberta, Canada.

And even if they don’t spill as frequently, natural gas pipelines are more likely to have serious incidents — ones resulting in death or hospitalization — than other pipelines. Many of these accidents come in the form of explosions: last February, a natural gas pipeline blast in Kentucky leveled homes and caused multiple fires, and last January, a TransCanada natural gas pipeline explosion shut off gas supplies for thousands of residents in Manitoba, Canada.

Still, there are multiple natural gas pipelines that have either been proposed or are already in the works around the country. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a natural gas line that would run through Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina, has drawn considerable opposition in the states it would impact — ten people were arrested in February protesting the pipeline. The Northeast Energy Direct pipeline, which would carry natural gas from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, has also garnered opposition.

The post Judge Halts Work On Maryland Pipeline Due To Environmental Concerns appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Hawaii Will Soon Get All Of Its Electricity From Renewable Sources

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Hawaii has the highest solar penetration in the nation, with one out of every eight homes having ‘gone solar.’

CREDIT: Courtesy Island Pacific Energy

Hawaii is on its way to having the greenest grid in the nation.

The state legislature sent a bill to the governor’s desk this week that moves the renewable portfolio standard (RPS) up to 100 percent by 2045 — which means that all electricity provided by the electric companies will have to come from renewable sources like solar and wind. Nationwide, electricity generation makes up about a third of all carbon emissions.

“We’ll now be the most populated set of islands in the world with an independent grid to establish a 100 percent renewable electricity goal,” State Senator Mike Gabbard (D) told ThinkProgress in an email. “Through this process of transformation we can be the model that other states and even nations follow. And we’ll achieve the biggest energy turnaround in the country, going from 90 percent dependence on fossil fuels to 100 percent clean energy.”

Gov. David Ige (D) has until May 15 to veto or sign the bill. If he fails to act by then, the bill will automatically become law. Hawaii would be the first state in the nation to have an RPS at 100 percent. Its previous RPS called for 40 percent renewables by the end of 2030.

Hawaii already has the greatest solar penetration in the nation. One out of every eight homes in Hawaii has solar, and roughly 10 percent of the state’s electricity comes from solar, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). Another quarter of Hawaii’s electricity comes from geothermal sources, according to the federal Energy Information Agency (The EIA does not track residential solar electricity generation).

Hawaii’s dramatic shift to renewable energy over the past few years has been largely driven by the island state’s high electricity prices. Hawaii gets most of its electricity from oil-fired power plants, and all the oil is imported. Electricity there can cost three times as much as the national average, Gabbard said.

But the transition to solar has not been without problems.

HECO, the Hawaiian Electric Companies, which comprises the state’s three major utilities, has come under fire for not integrating solar quickly enough. Some residents who have installed solar have had to wait as long as 18 months for the utility to interconnect their systems to the grid. In March, HECO sent some costumers a notice that interconnections would be indefinitely postponed, but the Public Service Committee immediately fired back, telling the utility it has an “affirmative duty” to interconnect customers.

Without storage, utilities are hard-pressed to balance all the energy widespread solar can generate.

SolarCity co-founder Lydon Rive said his company plans to offer solar plus storage in Hawaii next year, allowing homeowners to go completely off the grid, as E&E News reported this week. The new Tesla battery can serve as a “hedge against bad policy outcomes,” Rive said.

A driving factor in the proliferation of low-cost solar has been a policy known as net metering, in which customers are credited for the electricity they put back on the grid, through, for instance, rooftop solar. But the practice has been heavily targeted by utilities in some states, such as Arizona, that claim solar allows customers to avoid paying their fair share of grid costs. High interconnection fees and monthly surcharges are just two other ways utilities can discourage residential solar investment — “bad policy outcomes” from a solar perspective.

Even before Hawaii’s legislature passed the RPS bill, its electricity sector was already in flux.

In December, NextEra Energy, a Florida-based utility company, agreed to buy all three of HECO’s electric utilities, for about $6 billion. NextEra is expected to invest heavily in transmission and distribution infrastructure, including a $600 million undersea cable connecting the Oahu and Maui power grids, as ThinkProgress reported.

The new RPS will mean NextEra inherits a system that is expected to be a testing ground for new technologies and methods of transmission in the coming decades.

“NextEra has much more technical expertise and resources than HECO, so in the grid modernization area, NextEra brings a lot more to the table than our existing utility,” Gabbard said. “Ultimately, it’s about what’s in the best interest of the people of Hawai`i. It’s very important for NextEra to be clear that they support continuing customer choice as it applies to PV.”

The post Hawaii Will Soon Get All Of Its Electricity From Renewable Sources appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Is Corn Ethanol Breaking The Law?

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CREDIT: Shutterstock

Corn ethanol may be breaking the law, according to a study from last month, “Cropland Expansion Outpaces Agricultural and Biofuel Policies in the United States.”

It appears that corn was caught yellow-handed by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers in a plot with other crops like soy to replace “millions of acres of grasslands.” But scientists named corn the ring-leader: “Corn was the most common crop planted directly on new land.”

I know you’re wondering, “since when is it illegal to replace carbon-storing grassland with the Walter White of Biofuels?” Answer: Since the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), “which requires blending of gasoline with biofuels that are supposed to be grown only on pre-existing cropland, in order to minimize land-use change and its associated greenhouse gas emissions,” as the UWM news release explains.

Now if only anybody were actually enforcing the law, the anti-hero of biofuels would be perp-walked to prison for destroying the very environment it was supposed to help protect.

We last saw the evil genius called corn ethanol in a 2013 piece headlined, “Biofuels Policy Helping Destroy U.S. Grasslands At Fastest Rate Since 1930s, Boosting Threat of Dust-Bowlification.”

This new UMW study is the “first comprehensive analysis of land-use change across the U.S. between 2008 and 2012.” University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers “tracked crop-specific expansion pathways across the conterminous US and identified the types, amount, and locations of all land converted to and from cropland” during that time.

Scientists learned that crops “expanded onto 7 million acres of new land,” during those four years and replaced “millions of acres of grasslands.” Half of that was new soy and corn, which was increasingly used to make biofuels between 2008 and 2012 to meet U.S. government mandates, which included a minimum target of over 12 billion gallons of biofuels for in 2010.

What was the climate impact of this expansion? The University of Wisconsin-Madison concluded:

“The conversion to corn and soy alone, the researchers say, could have emitted as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as 34 coal-fired power plants operating for one year — the equivalent of 28 million more cars on the road.”

Corn ethanol should get its own show on HBO or AMC.

The Renewable Fuels Association, which is the “the authoritative voice of the U.S. ethanol industry,” has responded to this peer-reviewed study with a blog post by their Senior Vice President, Geoff Cooper. Cooper points out this is a very difficult calculation to do and that the dataset the authors use for this purpose has been called into question. Ideally, the RFS will put their critique through the peer-review process to publish it in a journal.

UPDATE: The study’s lead author sent me a reply to the RFA blog critique: “Most of their points seem to stem from a misunderstanding of our study and comparable data. We stand confidently by our results and conclusions.”

It seems not a month goes by that a study doesn’t come out condemning the fuel that now comprises some 10 percent of U.S. gasoline. “New airborne measurements downwind from an ethanol fuel refinery in Decatur, Illinois, show that ethanol emissions are 30 times higher than government estimates,” we learned just this Tuesday, for instance, when NOAA published a study on “ozone-forming compounds” generated by a corn ethanol refinery. “The measurements also show emissions of all volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which include ethanol, were five times higher than government numbers, which estimate emissions based on manufacturing information.”

What will we learn in June, that corn ethanol is “behind uptick in abandoned kittens“? Okay, maybe not that, but still.

In 2011 I wrote a post titled, “The Corn Ultimatum: How long can Americans keep burning one sixth the world’s corn supply in our cars?” If we don’t voluntarily abandon corn ethanol, it seems inevitable that human-caused climate change and Dust-Bowlification will ultimately arrest its development:

If we stay on business-as-usual CO2 emissions, we will turn the normal climate of our breadbasket into “severe drought.” Growing enough food for Americans, let alone the countries we currently help feed, won’t leave much land available for crop-based biofuels (Via NASA).

The post Is Corn Ethanol Breaking The Law? appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Weather Forecasters Used To Be Among The Country’s Staunchest Climate Deniers. Why That’s Changing Fast.

Keah Schuenemann, a meteorology professor at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, has never met an atmospheric or climate scientist who doesn’t agree that most of the planet’s warming over the last century is a result of human activity. Weather forecasters though, whom she deals with regularly, are a different story. Schuenemann, who has a PhD in atmospheric and oceanic science from the University of Colorado, Boulder, said she’s been exposed to a “whole slew of forecasters who don’t understand climate science.”

This experience has even influenced her approach to teaching.

“My students can vouch for the fact that I boycott some meteorology software created by some very vocal weather folks who use their weather platform as a means of influencing people with no climate background into thinking the ‘cool kids’ don’t accept the IPCC conclusions,” she told ThinkProgress.

While this type of anti-science affront really bothers Schuenemann, overall she believes meteorology academic programs “are slowly integrating more climate literacy in their curricula.”

But that’s come “about ten years too late in my opinion,” she added.

Training to be a weather forecaster is completely different than studying to be a climate scientist. For years this divergence in knowledge has left weathercasters with a bad rap when it comes to incorporating climate change into their coverage. While fault for this has been placed on political and religious ideologies as well as audience interests, a prevailing element has been a lack of adequate climate knowledge.

However with more forecasters taking an interest in educational materials like the National Climate Assessment and enrolling in programs like Climate Matters, a Climate Central program affiliated with NASA and NOAA that helps forecasters perform local climate analyses, there is a sea change underway in how weather forecasters report the climate.

For most of us, there’s weather and there’s climate. The weather is something we check multiple times a day through a variety of means: TV, phone, computer, walking outside. It dictates our immediate plans and holds sway over our mood. We praise the forecasters when they bring us news of blue skies and warm temperatures, and curse them when they are wrong.

Then there’s climate: it’s changing but we don’t think about it every day. Maybe we drive less or stop eating meat to do our part in slowing greenhouse gas emissions. Maybe in the dog days of summer we lament the way humanity is destroying the earth, or how capitalism has led us awry. Maybe we invest in solar panels, both for environmental and economic reasons.

My job is to give you accurate science. I never get into the political side.

While climate change is filtering its way into discussions across many industries — economics, insurance, energy, textiles, public relations — rarely is its impact as inherent, and unavoidable, as in the business of forecasting the weather. Meteorologists are not climate scientists, but they are the de facto group charged with imbuing the general public with a sense of the differences between weather and climate, and how the high-in-the-sky notion of climate change plays into our daily obsession with the weather.

For better or worse, forecasters are the vanguard of educating the masses on this issue — and an educated public could go a long way in redirecting the domestic debate and galvanizing action to actually address climate change. Until now they’ve shirked this role. Either out of indecision, external pressures, or a lack of interest, weather forecasters — the public-facing figures who hold their audience’s trust as well as their attention — are yet to take the lead in forecasting climate change.

A recent survey added to the anecdotal evidence that this shift is underway by finding that more than 9 in 10 TV weathercasters have concluded that climate change is happening. Of these, nearly 9 in 10 think human activity is at least partly responsible over the past 50 years. The survey, conducted by the George Mason University (GMU) Center for Climate Change Communication on 464 broadcast meteorologists, represented a significant increase from a similar 2010 survey, when 54 percent of weathercasters nationwide were convinced that the climate was changing, 25 percent were unconvinced, and 20 percent were undecided — and, of those, only about 65 percent felt human activity was at least half to blame.

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CREDIT: George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication

In the 2010 survey, the authors wrote that “it is now clear that most weathercasters significantly underestimate the degree of consensus about anthropogenic climate change among climate scientists.”

Edward Maibach, director of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, told ThinkProgress that the important thing about the new data is that it “makes clear that most TV weathercasters understand that climate change is altering the weather and other important things in their community, like water supplies and food crops.“

Maibach, who was lead author of the report, declined to comment directly on how much beliefs about climate change in the weathercaster community have changed recently as “all of the surveys have asked slightly different questions.” However, based on conversations he had, Maibach said his impression is that “more weathercasters are now more conversant with the facts than in the past.”

“Warning people about slow onset threats like climate change is obviously very different than warning people about rapid onset threats like tornadoes or other extreme weather events,” he said. “Lots of weathercasters understand that this is a new skill they will have to master, and many are already diving in and getting quite good at it.”

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CREDIT: George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication

Dan Satterfield, chief meteorologist at WBOC in Maryland, told ThinkProgress that he was shocked more by the amount of climate skepticism in the 2010 survey than by the rapid fall of skepticism displayed in the recent analysis.

“It’s been the talk of the last two or three weather conferences,” he said. “How and when to bring up climate change.” Satterfield said he realized that a lot of forecasters just hadn’t put in the time to learn about the climate science, but “that’s all gone now.”

Satterfield, who has worked as a meteorologist for several decades in various regions of the U.S. including Oklahoma and Florida, said that this shift has a lot to do with educating TV broadcasters — many of whom don’t have much of a hard science background — on the science of climate change. Not only does this help dispel the climate denial “myths” around the science, but it helps the broadcasters better incorporate the new information into their coverage. Satterfield said that while he imagines there are still forecasters in the Deep South and Midwest that are hesitant to air segments dealing with climate change, “they shouldn’t be.”

“I found I get lots of respect from the audience if I say I don’t care about politics,” said Satterfield. “My job is to give you accurate science. I never get into the political side.”

We’re getting buried by a landslide of research all on one side.

In a blog post about the new survey, Satterfield details some of the “ridiculous pronouncements about climate change” from TV weathercasters that he’s heard over the years, including “statements blaming the sun, volcanoes, or even claiming that CO2 was good for you.” These assertions “looked to be taken directly from right-wing talk radio,” he wrote.

Satterfield said that the weathercasters who made these outlandish statements “never took the time to search out what the real science showed” and that many of the remaining deniers are simply those who are yet to be adequately educated on the subject.

One recent extreme example of this lack of education — or lack of will to become educated — on the issue of climate change comes from the co-founder of the Weather Channel, John Coleman. In October 2014, Coleman, who does not hold a meteorology or climate science degree, told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly that climate change is based on “bad science” and does not exist. Coleman, who claims to have studied the topic for years, said “the science is not valid” and “there has been no warming for 18 years.”

In response to Coleman’s remarks, the Weather Channel issued a statement saying that the planet is “indeed warming,” with temperatures increasing 1 to 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 100 years. The Weather Channel’s statement says that the “extent the current warming is due to human activity is complicated” but that “impacts can already be seen” including “shorter-term phenomena such as heat waves and precipitation extremes.”

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A December 2014 rainstorm brings much needed relief to drought-stricken California. Climate models show the current lack of precipitation in the state to be part of an expected hotter and drier climate driven by human-caused global warming.

CREDIT: flickr

In an effort to clarify their positions in support of the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is causing climate change, businesses and organizations like the Weather Channel and the American Meteorological Society (AMS) have published statements laying out their views.

Dr. Keith Seitter, executive director of the AMS, agrees with Satterfield that weathercasters are learning more about climate change and that they are becoming more likely to include “aspects of the changing climate when reporting on local weather events.”

“With climate change in the news regularly, television weathercasters are being called on to address the issue, if not on-air, then in speaking engagements or on social media,” Seitter told ThinkProgress.

Seitter said that while extreme weather events such as flooding or drought are one of the most salient ways climate change issues can “help further inform” a weathercast, there are a number of other tangible examples. These include reporting on things like earlier springtime blossoms, especially those that impact allergies, as well as putting heat records in context, such as how climate change is causing more days to spike to temperatures above 90 or 100 degrees.

“This is all useful information that helps the public understand what to expect and how that might be different than what some of them grew up expecting,” said Seitter.

According to the AMS, there are a number of other ways that climate change impacts weather forecasting. These include rain occurring more frequently instead of snow in mountainous areas; spring snowpacks decreasing and snowmelt occurring earlier, causing streams to shift; growing seasons becoming longer; and record high temperatures being much more frequent than record lows.

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Data from the U.S. Drought Monitor in California showing most of the state to be in exceptional drought as of late April, 2015.

CREDIT: U.S. Drought Monitor California

Jim Gandy, chief meteorologist for WLTX in Columbia, South Carolina, has been somewhat of a trailblazer in incorporating climate impacts into his broadcasting career, which has spanned some three decades in the state. Gandy told ThinkProgress that he started covering “climate matters” around five years ago for a project that was a partnership with GMU’s Center for Climate Change Communication. As part of a year-long study that started in 2010, Gandy did a number of segments incorporating climate change into his coverage. The university then undertook pre- and post-study surveys to gauge the audience’s reaction to the stories.

Gandy said that while he initially got some pushback, he never received many complaints from viewers.

“We got more complaints about what the anchors were wearing according to the news editor,” he said. These days, Gandy said they typically do a story factoring in climate change every three weeks or so, although they are sometimes just featured online. He said the segments that seem to resonate the most with viewers are the ones about how climate change relates to ecology.

“We think we are the pollen capital of the world,” said Gandy. “And we’re seeing longer and more intense pollen seasons. The feedback I’m getting from people is they are recognizing this in their personal lives.”

Another climate change story that viewers found especially engaging focused on poison ivy. Gandy said he won an award for the coverage, which took advantage of some research from Duke University showing that a rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is affecting the growth of poison ivy. He said after doing the story he was even contacted by people at nearby national parks who were familiar with the issue.

“In this area poison ivy is a big deal,” he said. “When we went on the air for the first time with that, it surprised a lot of people.”

The feedback I’m getting from people is they are recognizing this in their personal lives.

More intense, heavier rainfall is another climate impact that Gandy has highlighted. While average rainfall is decreasing in the state, incidents of extreme rainfall are increasing. Gandy says that “when it comes down to it” he is not trying to take a viewpoint, but simply explaining the “overwhelming” science.

“We’re getting buried by a landslide of research all on one side,” said Gandy, who originally studied meteorology back in the 1970s. “The research shows beyond a reasonable doubt that the climate is changing and fossil fuels are largely responsible.”

When Gandy first studied meteorology the field ignored certain elements of atmospheric science that took longer than five days to develop, as the daily forecast didn’t extend beyond that timeframe. Over the ensuing decades the forecast has extended up to two weeks, and the influence of human-caused climate change is now bringing even more science, technology, and data into weather broadcasters’ portfolios.

Schuenemann, who teaches meteorology to the next generation of weather forecasters, said that she teaches a class that combines “all the really hard topics,” including climate change, in an effort to make sure the students understand “how changes are happening to large-scale weather patterns.”

She also has the students undertake projects based on the potential impacts of climate change on past events like Hurricane Sandy.

“I think it gives them a chance to at least be exposed to the idea,” she said. “And about how they might be able to talk about these things in the future.”

The post Weather Forecasters Used To Be Among The Country’s Staunchest Climate Deniers. Why That’s Changing Fast. appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Scientists Discover Fracking Chemicals In Pennsylvania Drinking Water

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Fracking opponents protest before the Tom Corbett inauguration to become the 46th governor of Pennsylvania at the state capitol in Harrisburg, Pa., Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2011.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Matt Rourke

The “foaming” drinking water wells of a few rural Pennsylvania homes have been infiltrated by chemicals commonly used in fracking operations, according to new peer-reviewed research.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, the research showed three homes in Bradford County with water wells containing multiple compounds similar to the mix used by drilling companies. The amount of those compounds were small, however, and did not pose a health risk, the authors said.

Still, the scientists say their findings pose a direct refutation to industry claims that fracking poses no risk to drinking water systems.

“This is the first documented and published demonstration of toxic compounds escaping from uncased boreholes in shale gas wells and moving long distances [into drinking water]” Susan Brantley, one of the study’s authors, said in comments to the Associated Press.

One of the households’ water supply contained 2-Butoxyethanol (2BE), a commonly used drilling chemical that is known to cause adrenal tumors in animals (it’s unknown if it causes cancer in humans). In that case, the water well was “foaming,” the study says.

How did this happen? According to the study, it was likely the result of poor practices when constructing nearby gas wells for fracking. Constructed in 2009, those gas wells lacked protective casing of steel and cement when they were drilled below approximately 1,000 feet, the study said.

The alleged result was that “natural gas and other contaminants migrated laterally through kilometers of rock at shallow to intermediate depths, impacting an aquifer used as a potable water source.” During the process of fracking, companies drill a well underground, then blast a high-pressure mix of water, sand, and chemicals into it to crack underground shale rock.

Though the chemicals discovered are commonly used in fracking, it is unclear whether those specific chemicals are actually used at the drilling sites near the three homes. That’s because the drilling companies would not provide scientists with access to their specific fracking chemicals. Still, the researchers said, shale activity is “the most probable source.”

The oil and gas industry is pushing back against the study. In a response written this week by Katie Brown of the industry group Energy in Depth, she said the study had “major research gaps,” particularly with its discovery of 2BE. That chemical is found in many other products, she said, “including things as common as Windex and cosmetic products.”

“2-BE can be an indicator of a lot of things, actually,” Brown writes. “At no point do the researchers consider that the ‘very low concentrations of 2-BE’ could be from any one of these multiple, common and commercial sources.”

She also notes that the researchers themselves admitted they could not say with 100 percent confidence that fracking itself caused the chemicals’ presence — just that it was the “most probable” cause.

“It is not possible to prove unambiguously that the [chemicals] were derived from shale gas-related activities,” the study reads.

This isn’t the first time, however, that Butler County residents have had concerns about nearby drilling and their drinking water. As noted by the New York Times, three Butler County homeowners sued drilling company Chesapeake Energy Corporation in 2011 over reportedly contaminated drinking well water.

It’s also not the first time research has been published linking well water contamination to oil and gas operations — specifically, to a poorly-constructed well. Last year, another Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study showed that faulty casing and cementing in gas wells had contaminated drinking water in Texas and Pennsylvania.

The post Scientists Discover Fracking Chemicals In Pennsylvania Drinking Water appeared first on ThinkProgress.

11 Western Towns Say Coal Companies Are Cheating Taxpayers Out Of Billions

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The old mining town of Telluride, Colo., is pictured nestled in a valley from the top of Mount St. Sophia, in this July 17, 2001, file photo.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Ed Andrieski

For Western mountain towns, where climate change has shortened the ski season, diminished the snowpack, and increased fire risks, the fair value of coal is a serious question.

Coal, when burned, is a major carbon emitter, and is increasingly being mined out of publicly-owned lands in the Rockies. But a group of 11 ski towns is now fighting back against cheap Western coal, the cost of which they say is being kept low due to a federal loophole.

Organized under the Mountain Pact, the group of towns, which includes Park City, Utah and Telluride and Aspen, Colorado, sent a letter Tuesday to Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, urging her to close the loophole, which they say costs taxpayers a billion dollars every year in lost revenue.

“Whether money ends up coming to us is not our concern,” Telluride Mayor Stu Fraser told ThinkProgress. “We have to try to make sure that we are doing the right thing for the environment.”

The letter’s signatories come from towns uniquely positioned in the fight against climate change. Western states are some of the biggest coal producers in the United States, but these communities are also some of the most affected by climate change.

Fraser said Telluride is experiencing more and more “erratic” weather patterns. He also said the snowpack in the surrounding mountains is melting faster than usual due to dust storms kicked up in dry areas from as far away as Mongolia. Telluride’s lakes are also worryingly low, he said.

The effects of climate change are myriad in the mountains. Hot, dry summers can lead to devastating wildfires. Low snowpack can threaten water supply. And, of course, these climate impacts can cause winter resort towns’ revenues to take a hit. A study by Mountain Pact found that by 2030 the decrease in snowpack is estimated to result in $120 million lost annually in just one Utah county.

“We’ve got climate change… and coal is definitely part of it,” Fraser said. Not only will correctly valuing coal increase taxpayer revenue — some of which can be used to for climate change mitigation — but it also is important for making the price fairer, he said.

Coal producers “are getting this lower-priced product that is being used substantially more than it should be,” Fraser said.

In fact, coal mined on public lands in the west is significantly cheaper than it is in other areas. Last summer, a report from the Center for American Progress found the spot price for coal in the Powder River Basin was less than 20 percent of the price for Northern Appalachian coal. According to recent estimates, 40 percent of coal sold in Wyoming is sold to subsidiary companies at below-market rates, which are used to calculate taxpayer royalties.

“We should be collecting fair returns on taxpayer-owned land,” Mountain Pact founder Diana Madson told ThinkProgress.

According to her group’s letter, this undervaluation of coal “may have cost taxpayers upward of $30 billion in lost revenue” over the last 30 years.

“The costs of adapting to a changing climate are rising, but at the same time coal companies are taking advantage of gaping loopholes that allow them to pay less, thus depriving many western states (and taxpayers across the country) their fair share of the revenues from coal leased on federal land,” the letter reads.

The issue appears to be widespread in the west. According to the Center for American Progress, in 2012, 42 percent of coal produced in Wyoming was sold to a subsidiary. The Department of Interior independently found that the undervaluation of coal is costing at least taxpayers $80 million per year.

The government also subsidizes coal production on federal land, including for transportation and — ironically — royalty relief.

In January, the Dept. of Interior proposed a new method of valuing coal, which would not accept the price set during transactions with subsidiaries. The public comment period ends on Friday.

The post 11 Western Towns Say Coal Companies Are Cheating Taxpayers Out Of Billions appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Climate Deniers Insert Themselves Into Boston University’s Divestment Debate

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CREDIT: Andrew Breiner/Shutterstock/Boston University

Probably the last thing you’d expect to find when browsing the website of Boston University’s Trustees is a comment section where top university scientists debate right-wing policy advocates about the reality of human-caused climate change.

But if you look hard enough, that’s exactly what you’ll get.

At a bottom of a recently-released document discussing fossil fuel divestment at BU, at least four men affiliated with the conservative Heartland Institute are arguing about climate change with three professors — evolutionary ecologist Les Kaufman, molecular biologist Edward Loechler, and Department of Earth & Environment associate professor Ian Sue Wing.

We didn’t expect the reality of climate change to be an issue in the university.

The arguments all surround a document called a “Fossil Fuel Issue Analysis” — an overview of the debate surrounding fossil fuels and climate change, conducted by the university’s Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing (ACSRI). The ACSRI is currently considering a request to purge all fossil fuel investments from the university’s $1.6 billion endowment, thereby taking a symbolic stance against the primary cause of global warming.

For Kaufman, a professor who advocates for fossil fuel divestment at the university, the document’s release was long overdue.

“We were excited when they put it right up there on the website and agreed to address the issue,” he told ThinkProgress. “But we were appalled by the first posting.”

Kaufman called the document “shocking.” In it, the viewpoints of scientific organizations like the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Research Council of the National Academies are juxtaposed with those of the right-wing think tank The Heartland Institute, and the blog of former weatherman John Coleman. While the document acknowledges that “a majority of scientists argue that human activity plays a significant role in climate change,” it also cites Heartland’s Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, which argues that climate models are based on “gross and imperfect measurements” and that global warming won’t be bad for humankind.

For Kaufman, this was despicable. “We had hoped to have an open discussion [of divestment] that was based solely on hard data and how the data are interpreted,” Kaufman said. “We didn’t expect the reality of climate change to be an issue in the university.”

So, he took to the comment section to voice his outrage. His colleagues did as well.

Two weeks later, Kaufman got a response from Russell Cook, a blogger who says he receives “strings-free grants” from Heartland. Cook’s also the editor of the Gelbspan Files, a site dedicated to proving that climate denying scientists are not corrupted by the fossil fuel industry. Cook confirmed to ThinkProgress that he wrote the comments, which disparage Kaufman for engaging in “anti-science efforts to push out one entire side of the issue for consideration.”

[T]here is little if any evidence CO2 is the primary cause of global warming.

Shortly after that, others affiliated with Heartland piled on. James H. Rust, a Heartland policy adviser, commented that global warming is a “fraud … [a] scare [that] has been kept alive by false predictions of catastrophic events for more than 20 years.” Donn Dears, an energy expert for Heartland, wrote that “there is little if any evidence CO2 is the primary cause of global warming.”

Neither Rust nor Dears returned ThinkProgress’ request for confirmation that they wrote the comments, though well-known climate denier Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley — a one-time adviser to former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and current policy adviser at Heartland — confirmed his own participation in the debate. Monckton’s remarks toed the line that global warming would not be severe or dangerous.

It’s clear why Kaufman and his colleagues were engaged with the Fossil Fuel Issue Analysis at Boston University, as both are involved in the university’s divestment movement. But it’s unclear how Heartland got involved. To get to the document itself, you have to go through five separate links. The document’s release was not advertised anywhere on the website. There have been no press releases or news articles discussing the document.

Of the four men affiliated with Heartland, Monckton and Cook responded to ThinkProgress’ inquiry on how they were alerted to the document. Via email, Monckton said he could not remember. Cook said he was directed there by Heartland.

Among some at the university, the think tank’s participation has brought a suspicion that political interests are making their way into BU’s decision on whether or not to divest. One professor, who asked not to be identified, voiced concern about a recent $50 million gift to the university from former J.C. Penney CEO Allen Questrom, who regularly donates thousands of dollars to Republican politicians.

This committee has to do this. It’s proper. It’s logical.

Not everyone at BU thinks that way, though. Biology professor Edward Loechler — who is the faculty representative for Divest BU — says he doesn’t think politics are perverting the divestment discussion. In fact, he said he welcomes the inclusion of the climate denier’s perspective in the Fossil Fuel Issue Analysis.

“This committee has to do this. It’s proper. It’s logical,” he said. “We live in an academic committee. As long as they adjudicate in the end, and say look, we look at both sides and we looked at the arguments from the deniers — as long as they do that, I think this is fine.”

Loechler noted that the ultimate decision on whether to divest will be made by the Boston University Trustees, a committee made up of CEOs, attorneys, religious leaders — people who might not necessarily be well-versed in the issue of climate science. If the ACSRI came to the committee without proving that it considered climate deniers, it may look biased — even though, in the scientific world, it isn’t.

“[The Trustees] want to know that this isn’t a whitewash,” Loechler said. “They want to know that the people who walked into this room to give them the best explanation of what’s going on here really grappled with this and really did their homework.”

Still, Loechler said the fact that the ACSRI did include climate denial in their assessment of fossil fuels is proof of the success of that movement relative to their credibility in the scientific world. In terms of the scientific reality, 97 percent of scientists actively publishing climate research conclude that humans cause global warming. It’s the relative success of groups like Heartland that demand the other 3 percent’s inclusion in documents like this one.

“People at the Heartland Institute are trolling the internet, looking for places to put this garbage up,” he said, “to muddle things.”

People at the Heartland Institute are trolling the internet, looking for places to put this garbage up.

So, despite the inclusion of climate denial in BU’s Fossil Fuel Investment Analysis, Kaufman is optimistic about the ultimate outcome — that eventually, the Boston University Trustees will decide to divest from fossil fuels, based on the weight on the scientific evidence. “It’s my impression, and I believe it’s very likely, that eventually this will be adjudicated,” he said.

Claire Richer, who leads BU’s student divestment movement and is one of three student representatives of ACSRI, agreed. She noted that BU Student Government recently passed a referendum showing that 75 percent of students who voted believe the university should divest from fossil fuels. Richer said the next step is to hold forums on divestment in the fall semester to engage the community on the issue. A decision, she said, could possibly be made next year.

Richer said there may even be some changes made to the Fossil Fuel Investment Analysis document, just to clarify its intent. Indeed, she said the intent of the document was not to represent the be-all and end-all position of the university, but to “stimulate discussion … and make sure people are talking about [divestment].”

If the comment section is any indication, it’s certainly working out as planned.

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This post has been updated to clarify the description of Russell Cook’s blog. It now says “corrupted,” not “funded.”

The post Climate Deniers Insert Themselves Into Boston University’s Divestment Debate appeared first on ThinkProgress.