Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 155

North Carolina’s Governor Says Offshore Drilling Should Be Closer To Beaches

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A couple sits on the beach in Nags Head, N.C., where there are currently no oil rigs.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Gerry Broome

A new federal proposal to allow offshore oil drilling from Virginia to Georgia is receiving some pushback from North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, who on Wednesday said drilling should be allowed even closer to his state’s renowned beaches and fishing grounds than is currently being considered.

Testifying before a House of Representatives panel on energy and mineral resources, McCrory first hailed the Obama administration’s offshore drilling plan for the Atlantic as an economic boon. But he then decried the proposal’s inclusion of a 50-mile “buffer zone” — an area where drilling is not allowed to occur — designed to reduce conflicts with other coastal industries like tourism and fishing, and mitigate impacts on coastal wildlife. The buffer zone would extend from Georgia’s southern border to Virginia’s northern limit.

In his testimony, McCrory criticized the buffer zone as putting too much of the offshore resources “under lock and key.” Similarly, in a recently publicized letter to Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, McCrory requested that the protective buffer be shrunk to just 30 miles, to allow drilling to occur 20 miles closer to North Carolina’s beaches than they would be under the Obama administration’s plan.

“North Carolina’s coastal and ocean activities would be undisturbed and the viewshed from any of our 320 miles of ocean beaches and shoreline would remain unobstructed with buffer reduction to 30 miles,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, the coastal communities that would be closest to offshore drilling activity in North Carolina are registering a different opinion. The governments of 16 of the state’s coastal cities and towns have passed resolutions opposing offshore oil exploration and development activities, as have the Outer Banks Chamber of Commerce and the Dare County, North Carolina, Tourism Board. In March, a federal hearing on Atlantic drilling in Kill Devil Hills drew what a Department of Interior spokeswoman called the largest crowd in the ocean energy agency’s history, the majority of whom opposed offshore oil development.

Emilie Swearingen, a town commissioner from Kure Beach, North Carolina that also testified at Wednesday’s congressional hearing, expressed strong opposition to offshore drilling, and voiced her town’s concerns that an oil spill off their shores would wreck the region’s fishing and tourism-driven economy.

“There is no place for this on the coast of North Carolina,” she said at the hearing.

Coastal tourism and recreation is a major contributor to North Carolina’s finances. According to statistics compiled from North Carolina’s Department of Commerce, nine of the state’s coastal counties generated more than $2.6 billion in tourism spending in 2013, supporting 29,740 jobs and $124.96 million in state tax receipts.

Due to past public opposition and various temporary moratoria imposed by both Congress and multiple presidential administrations, no drilling has occurred in U.S. Atlantic waters since 1984. But now, facing a resurgence in support for offshore oil development in the Atlantic from the governors of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, the Department of the Interior — which oversees all energy development in US federal waters – has taken preliminary steps to restart the program.

Wednesday’s hearing on the proposed offshore drilling program comes less than a week before the five year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, which occurred 50 miles off of Louisiana’s coast. That spill required clean-up activities on more than 410 miles of oil-marred Gulf coastline, and resulted in more than $40 billion in economic losses in the region.

Earlier this week, the Obama administration also announced new regulations aimed at improving the safety of offshore drilling. However, environmentalists have said those regulations are similar to the best practices already adopted by the oil and gas industry, and that new technologies cannot always account for the human error and lapses of judgment that have been the underlying causes of major spills like the Exxon Valdez in Alaska and the Deepwater Horizon.

Members of the oil industry have said they are still reviewing the rules.

Shiva Polefka is a Policy Analyst with the Ocean Policy program at the Center for American Progress.

The post North Carolina’s Governor Says Offshore Drilling Should Be Closer To Beaches appeared first on ThinkProgress.

100,000 People Are Without Water After Thieves Puncture Oil Pipeline In Mexico

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Workers clean up oil on the shores of a river in Mexico.

CREDIT: International Business Times/Screenshot

Thousands of people in southern Mexico have been left without water after a punctured pipeline spilled oil into local waterways.

Over the weekend in the Mexican state of Tabasco, thieves bored a hole in an oil pipeline operated by government-owned energy firm Pemex in an attempt to steal some of the oil. That puncture caused oil to spill into rivers, endangering drinking water. Originally, about 500,000 people were left without water after four water treatment facilities were closed so that officials could ensure the oil didn’t make its way into drinking water sources, but that number has dropped to about 100,000 people after two of the plants were re-opened.

The other treatment plants likely won’t open until Friday, to give official enough time to clean up oil near the plants. Until then, the state government is urging people to ration their water, and schools in the city of Villahermosa closed Wednesday to avoid endangering students. So far, it’s unclear how much oil spilled into the waterways, which included the Sierra River.

“The damage is terrible. Of course we want to avoid the contamination of drinking water processing plants, but the environmental damage is indisputably going to be very big regardless,” Humberto de los Santos, mayor of Centro, told International Business Times. According to IBT, cleanup could take up to 15 days.

Thieves targeting pipelines for their oil and gasoline have become a major problem in Mexico. In just eight months in 2014, according to McClatchy, 7.5 million barrels of oil and gas went missing in Mexico. The theft has climbed over the years: in 2000, Mexico had 155 cases of oil and gas theft from pipelines, while in 2013, thieves tapped pipelines 2,614 times. Pemex said in February that in 2014, the number of illegal taps totaled 3,674.

Pemex head Emilio Lozoya Austin called this theft from pipeline one of the worst kinds of crime in Mexico, because it prevents the revenue the energy brings from going to the government. But, he said, it’s a kind of theft that’s hard to control.

“If you catch a presumed criminal with tanks of gasoline or diesel, it’s not a trivial matter to prove that he stole it,” he said last year. “He can say he got it anywhere.”

In addition, due to the high number of pipelines in Mexico, it’s impossible to have enough guards watching over the oil and gas infrastructure.

And, as this most recent spill illustrates, stealing oil from pipelines also threatens the safety of drinking water and the health of the environment. Last August, oil polluted a 14-mile stretch of the San Juan River — a major source of irrigation water for farmers in northern Mexico — after thieves tapped a pipeline that ran near the river. About 4,000 barrels of oil spilled into the river after the tap, and officials estimated at the time that the cleanup from the spill would take months.

Oil and gas theft can also have deadly consequences. In 2010, at least 27 people, including 12 children, were killed after an attempted theft caused an oil pipeline in Mexico’s Puebla state to explode. The explosion also injured 52 people and forced the evacuation of 5,000. In 2013, at least seven people were injured after an illegal tap led to the explosion of a Pemex pipeline near Mexico City.

Pemex is trying to find ways to stop this theft. Earlier this year, the energy firm announced that it would stop shipping usable gasoline through pipelines. Instead, the gas it sends through the pipelines will be left unrefined, a kind of fuel that wouldn’t be usable in cars or factories. Pemex hopes this move will decrease the market for stolen gasoline, as buyers discover that purchasing gas from thieves could damage their vehicles. But, as Pemex has admitted that some of its own employees are likely stealing gasoline, the measure probably won’t stop all thefts, since employees could theoretically steal the additives needed to refine the gasoline.

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In The Future, Yellowstone National Park Could Turn Incredibly Dry

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Pine forests and mountain streams are two Yellowstone features threatened by climate change.

CREDIT: Shutterstock

Twenty-three years ago, two scientists took a first look at what climate change might do to the ecology of Yellowstone National Park. The climate models they used were just beginning to take form, and their subsequent findings were mostly qualitative, with high levels of uncertainty.

In a recent paper published as part of a special park report on climate change, Yellowstone officials decided to ask those two scientists to revisit their research from over two decades ago — and what they found was a lot less uncertain. Climate change is set to have a potentially huge impact on Yellowstone’s ecology by the end of the century, increasing the potential for wildfires and decreasing the amount of snow the park receives. Combined with rising temperatures, these changes could alter Yellowstone’s landscape from a mostly forested mountain ecosystem to something more akin to the U.S. Southwest.

“The ecological effects of climate change will be more dramatic and far-reaching than we realized,” the report reads, noting that climate change is likely to create dry conditions in Yellowstone that haven’t been seen in the area in 10,000 years — a climatic and ecological condition the researchers describe as “uncharted territory.”

Fires like the 1988 wildfire that destroyed 36 percent of the park’s total acreage will become more common, and years without a single wildfire will become increasingly rare. This uptick in fire activity could potentially have far-reaching impacts on the area’s ecosystem, shaping the kind of vegetation that dominates Yellowstone’s landscapes.

“Fire has huge consequences for vegetation, because if things burn more frequently, it determines what kind of things can grow back in an area,” Ann Rodman, branch chief for physical science at Yellowstone Park told ThinkProgress.

As future fires become more frequent, dense stands of pine and spruce that now dominate Yellowstone’s landscape could become less common, replaced by young trees, grass, and shrubs. Without time to grow back between increasingly frequent fires, the park’s old mountain forests would, essentially, turn into open woodlands. More frequent fires could also push out native tree species like the whitebark pine, a keystone species that acts as an important source of food for grizzly bears and other wildlife in Yellowstone’s subalpine areas.

“Rather than driving through long, almost unbroken expanses of old lodgepole pine forests, as people did in the 20th century, people will drive through a landscape of younger forests interspersed with perhaps more frequent meadows and more frequent views of the surrounding mountains,” William Romme, a professor emeritus at Colorado State University and one of the report’s co-authors told E&E News.

Based on worst-case warming scenarios outlined by the IPCC, another report in the special issue projected that April 1 snowpack in Yellowstone could be reduced by up to 4.3 inches by 2100, with most of the park snow free on April 1 by 2075 — a decrease in precipitation that is already being seen throughout the West.

“We know, with certainty, trends that we’re already on a trajectory for: the snowpack is less, and that’s true all over the West and in Yellowstone as well,” Rodman said.

Less snow and an earlier melt will also impact the area’s mountain streams, which are kept cool throughout spring and summer due to snowmelt. As the climate changes, temperatures of Yellowstone’s streams are predicted to increase between 1.4 and 3.2 degrees Fahrenheit between 2050 and 2069, a change in temperature that could be good for non-native fish but bad for the native cutthroat trout, whose numbers could decline by 26 percent in response to warming streams.

Less snow could also spell trouble for native wildlife that depend on snow for habitat. “Snow-dependent species like lynx and wolverine probably are among the species that will be especially sensitive to climate change, and their populations and habitats should be monitored,” Romme said.

Yellowstone’s changing landscape might impact more than just the plants and animals that live there, however — it could also cut into the livelihood of small mountain communities that have come to depend on national parks for revenue.

“Like many treasured places around the West, Yellowstone will be experiencing devastating impacts related to climate change, from wildfire to reduced snowpack,” Diana Madson, executive director of the Mountain Pact, told ThinkProgress. “These ecosystem changes will not only hurt Yellowstone’s celebrated plant and animal species but the neighboring local economies that rely on tourism.” Climate adaptation is crucial, Madson notes, not only for the ecosystem of Yellowstone, but for small mountain communities that rely on tourism revenue.

But adaptation strategies can be difficult to implement in land management, because agencies with the same information are often under different constraints, making coordination difficult. The report, Rodman says, was intended to get people talking about the potential impacts of climate change on Yellowstone’s famous landscapes — something that park officials have already begun doing more.

“We’re talking about it a whole lot more, and that sounds like nothing but it is actually big,” Rodman said. “It’s a matter of having an awareness of where things are going, and incorporating that into decisions every day.”

The post In The Future, Yellowstone National Park Could Turn Incredibly Dry appeared first on ThinkProgress.

American Companies Are Shipping Millions Of Trees To Europe, And It’s A Renewable Energy Nightmare

In late March, a loosely affiliated coalition of southerners gathered outside of the British Consulate in Atlanta, Georgia with an unusual concern: wood pellets. The group, primarily made up of outdoors enthusiasts and conservationists, had traveled from multiple states to British Consul General Jeremy Pilmore-Bedford’s doorstep. Chief on their minds was the rapidly increasing use of the pellets, a form of woody biomass harvested from forests throughout the southeastern U.S. and burned for renewable electricity in Europe. According to the group, what started as a minor section of Europe’s renewable energy law has now burgeoned into a major climate and environmental headache.

“We were trying to elevate the profile of what exactly is going on on the ground here in the U.S.,” Shelby White, who helped organize the event, told ThinkProgress. “And also how it conflicts with the intentions of the policies that are driving the massive explosion of the industry.”

White said that the surge in demand fueled by Europe has caused “the clearcutting of wetlands and bottomlands on a massive scale,” and that Georgia now finds itself in the crosshairs of the industry.

I don’t think policymakers were able to see in advance that this would drive the entire destruction of Southeastern forests for wood pellets.

The expansive forests of the Carolinas, Georgia, and other nearby states have survived many human threats over the last few centuries, but the latest is one of the most unexpected. The rapid growth of Europe’s biomass industry, driven by the region’s renewable energy targets, is chipping away at southeastern forests. Enviva, the world’s largest supplier of these wood pellets, currently owns and operates six manufacturing facilities in the Southeast. In filing for a $100 million initial public offering (IPO) in October, the company states that demand for utility-grade wood pellets is expected to grow 21 percent annually from 2013 to 2020. The growth is being fueled by the conversion of coal-fired power plants to biomass-fired plants in Northern Europe and, increasingly, in South Korea and Japan, according to the company.

The next few years will go far in determining the future of the wood pellet industry. Europe will be revising its renewable energy standard for the post-2020 term and the U.S. will also make a determination on the merits of biomass — a decision that could come as early as this summer. Not only is there local and regional concern regarding the longevity of valuable forests, there is also evidence showing that woody biomass is actually an overall contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, at least when viewed on a 20 or 30 year timescale. According to many scientists, that is all the time we have to start dramatically reducing emissions in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

 

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U.S. wood pellet exports doubled in 2013 in response to growing European demand.

CREDIT: U.S. Energy Information Administration

 

Adam Macon, campaign director for Dogwood Alliance, a North Carolina forest preservation group, told ThinkProgress that “there was a general misunderstanding” when Europe included wood pellet biomass in their 2020 renewable energy target. The misunderstanding being that the industry would rely on scraps or waste left over from other manufacturing processes.

Macon said that what has happened instead is that “utilities really like burning stuff” and they are now burning whole trees and large, coarse woody residues, like tree tops. This is harming both local forests and setting back climate targets in the short term.

In order for wood pellets to burn “carbon free” the carbon emitted into the atmosphere must be recaptured by regenerated forests, which take several decades to grow. If these emissions aren’t offset, then burning wood pellets releases as much or more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than coal. A 2013 study published in Environmental Research Letters broke down the biomass lifecycle according to GHG emissions. It found that while the actual pellet production accounts for nearly half of the emissions, shipping the pellets across the Atlantic Ocean is a close second, making up around 31 percent of the total GHG footprint of the process. The actual burning of the pellets accounted for about 10 percent of the overall emissions.

Renewable forms of energy represent about a quarter of the E.U.’s total electricity generation, with biomass making up around three-fourths of that, according to the European Biomass Association. Between 2011 and 2013, the number of pellets being shipped from North America to Europe doubled to 4.7 million tons, with southern forests making up about two-thirds of the total volume. As the Audubon Society recently reported, a new Enviva Biomass pellet plant in North Carolina fills a truck with wood pellets bound for Europe about every half-hour.

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CREDIT: ThinkProgress

According to an analysis by the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), as of February, there were nearly two dozen proposed woody biomass facilities across the Southeast, including in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Currently there are seven in operation.

As part of a 2013 study, SELC found that over half of the sourcing area for Enviva’s Ahoskie, North Carolina plant — some 168,000 acres — falls within forested wetlands, and that this poses high risks to wildlife and biodiversity, especially birds. In Georgia alone, the study determined that around 100,000 acres of native forests could be at high risk of being converted into plantation pine for the pellet industry. Much of this at-risk area is currently covered in longleaf pine and other upland pine forest ecosystems and is home to skunks, weasels, frogs, snakes, birds and other animals that may not prove adaptable to the proposed changes.

“Despite claims to the contrary, Enviva is sourcing whole trees from forested wetlands to serve its Ahoskie, NC,” said David Carr, general counsel for SELC.

Wood is the oldest source of renewable fuel, used since humans started making fires some 800,000 years ago, and it is still widely in use — some one million American households currently use wood pellets for heating. The Southeast has one of the most developed forest industries in the world, and this infrastructure is a big part of what makes it so appealing as a biomass source. Another major appeal: private landowners control 86 percent of forests in the Southeast, compared to 56 percent of all U.S. forests, according to the U.S. Industrial Wood Pellet Association.

 

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A truck headed to Enviva’s flagship wood pellet production facility in Ahoskie, N.C., as photographed by the Dogwood Alliance in July 2014 during their investigation into the industry’s practices.

CREDIT: Dogwood Alliance

“This is the Wild West of logging,” said Macon. “There is an extreme lack of regulation on private land in the South so companies are not required to replant or to notify authorities of their plans. The forests in Europe are very protected.”

In February, several dozen scientists sent a letter to Gina McCarthy, head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), warning her that the use of woody biomass for energy doesn’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions; it actually increases them.

“Burning biomass instead of fossil fuels does not reduce the carbon emitted by power plants. In fact, as EPA itself acknowledges, burning biomass degrades facility efficiency and increases day-to-day emissions over emissions when fossil fuels are burned alone,” the letter stated.

The scientists said that treating all woody or agricultural feedstocks as “carbon-free” as long as they are derived “from sustainable forest or agricultural practices” could have major negative implications. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, treating woody biomass as carbon-free with modest carbon restrictions would require an increase of wood equivalent to 70 percent of the U.S. timber harvest by 2035, an amount that would account for about four percent of U.S. electricity. The International Energy Agency estimates that treating bioenergy as carbon-free globally, combined with strong carbon policies, would lead to a reliance on woody biomass for six percent of global electricity by 2035 — requiring a more than doubling of the global commercial timber harvest.

Timothy D. Searchinger, a researcher at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University who signed onto the letter to the EPA letter, told ThinkProgress that the whole industry is being driven by bad government policy that all started with a mistake.

“I have actually talked to people in the E.U. community and they admit it was a mistake,” said Searchinger, who has researched biofuel policy for years.

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Stacks of trees at Enviva’s Ahoskie facility as photographed by the Dogwood Alliance in September 2013 during their investigation into the industry’s practices.

CREDIT: Dogwood Alliance

“The industry is saying they don’t use whole trees, just residues,” said Searchinger. “So we say, ‘fine, why are we having this debate then?’ The answer is they’re not using residues — you can see pictures of them using huge logs.” Searchinger said now that the wheels are in motion, the combination of European renewable policies relying on the biomass contributions and growing vested interests in the U.S. make it very hard to stop the expansion of the industry.

“If we don’t fix it now it will never get fixed,” he said. “People are still only making modest amounts of money. If the U.S. gets the rule wrong, we’ll open it up for every country in the world to go cut down trees and say it’s better for the climate.”

Instead of being a forward-looking practice, Searchinger sees the wood pellet industry as a call back to long-abandoned industries.

“What brought back the forests of Europe was coal,” said Searchinger. “England was basically deforested by 1850; they got into coal because they didn’t have any trees left. The idea that we can go back to trees, that’s not knowing history and therefore repeating it.”

Today England is absorbing far more trees than it can naturally accommodate: In 2013 the U.K. imported more wood pellets from the U.S. than the rest of the European Union combined, 1.5 million metric tons. This amount could easily double or triple in the near future if utilities like Drax continue converting coal-fired power plants to biomass facilities, a process they much prefer to shuttering the plants entirely.

Instead of emulating the many European countries rapidly pursuing solar or wind power, the U.K. is relying significantly on burning wood to meet the E.U.-mandated goal of getting 20 percent of energy production from renewables by 2020.

Tim Portz, executive editor of North Dakota-based Biomass Magazine, a monthly trade publication, said that in the U.K. “it’s all about” Drax’s conversion of coal-fired power plants to wood pellet facilities. Portz, who has been covering the wood pellet industry for about five years, said Drax plans to convert approximately half of its 3,900 megawatt fleet to wood pellet inputs, which would require around seven million metric tons of pellets per year.

“What does that look like? Seven million metric tons would take all of the pellets from 14 half-million ton-per-year facilities, and that’s a very large pellet plant,” Portz said. He added that no one even considered making plants that big before pellets started being used for power production.

“If I invested in wood pellets 10 years ago, I’d be thinking about pellets for stoves, which sell in 40 pound bags at Home Depot or Lowes,” he said. Plants for this type of production are about 10 times smaller than those being built for utility-scale electricity generation.

Portz said the narrative that this industry is going to cause mass deforestation just isn’t true because pellets aren’t worth that much. According to him, lands managed to be forest products are designed to get the highest value wood fiber possible — tall, straight trees that are a couple feet in diameter at chest height and can be converted to lumber, i.e. 2x4s. Portz said that the whole trees used in biomass pellet processing likely come from the thinning of these loblolly pine plantations, on which they can fit 600 trees on a single acre, in order to get rid of imperfect trees.

Portz hasn’t seen any kind of an appetite for a U.S. policy that would emulate Europe’s in using wood pellets to replace coal and meet climate goals. He said the biomass industry is seen as a sort of “red-headed stepchild” in the energy world: climate change deniers don’t see the point of subsidizing the fuel and environmentalists are concerned for forest health and longevity.

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A Drax biomass storage dome as part of a coal-fired power plant conversion to wood pellet fuel in the U.K.

CREDIT: flickr/Department of Energy and Climate Change

“Environmentalists think you are wrong to cut down all the trees and the other side thinks you’re crazy — they don’t see the problem with coal power in the first place,” said Portz. Regardless, industry insiders project that demand could rise to as much as 50 million metric tons a year as Canada, South America, Southeast Asia and even Russia, with some of the largest forests assets in the world, consider woody biomass as a fuel option.

The early stages of the industry’s expansion are on display in Canada, where a pellet production plant meant to export nearly one million tons of product to South Korea is under development in British Columbia. According to a recent report from Global Forest Watch, Canada and Russia have become leaders in deforestation, overtaking more tropical countries like Brazil. The study found that Russia and Canada combined to make up about one-third of global tree cover loss between 2011 and 2013, averaging a combined 26,000 square miles each year. These Boreal forests act as major carbon sinks, keeping vast carbon reserves out of the atmosphere, and this loss, primarily attributable to forest fires, is a disconcerting trend for GHG emissions.

With climate change already contributing to the frequency and intensity of forest fires and associated loss of forest, the addition of a profitable, extensive, and poorly overseen biomass industry could push the forests further into disrepair. Both Portz and Jessica Brooks, deputy director of the U.S. Industrial Pellet Association (USIPA), a group promoting the use of woody biomass, emphasized the importance of uniform market regulations and strong sustainability criteria in the future success of the industry.

Portz pointed to the Netherlands as a model of sustainable forestry, saying that the U.S. doesn’t come close to having the same requirements. Those in the biomass industry, including the USIPA, argue that the Netherlands’ strong sustainability criteria are hampering the potential of the industry to provide pellets to the country.

Brooks, who told ThinkProgress that “sustainability is the backbone of the industrial wood pellet industry in the U.S.” said wood pellets are important for another reason: they are the only renewable energy source to supply baseload fuel. Unlike solar and wind power, biomass isn’t intermittent and doesn’t rely on advances in energy storage in order to provide a reliably dispatchable generation source at any time of day.

She also reiterated Portz’s argument that wood pellets are very “low on the value chain” and that the industry does not drive new harvest but “makes an efficient use of low-grade fiber.” She also emphasized that the industry is providing jobs and economic development for rural regions that have seen a recent decline in forest products due to the weakening of the pulp and paper industry and the overall recession.

 

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Enviva’s Ahoskie facility as photographed by the Dogwood Alliance in December 2014 during their investigation into the industry’s practices.

CREDIT: Dogwood Alliance

Not all locals are convinced of the benefits of the industry’s growth, however. Residents living near the Port of Wilmington in North Carolina are worried that the construction of two 150-foot-tall domes to store pellets before they are shipped overseas will usher in a number of problems.

“According to Google Maps, I’m 2,932 feet from the base of these domes,” J.T. Cobelt, who has lived in the area for 23 years, told a local news outlet in March. “There would be the safety issue, traffic issue, potential for noise. They’ll be hundreds of feet of conveyor running these pellets. Conveyors are particularly noisy.”

In December, Dogwood Alliance, the Natural Resource Defense Council, BirdLife Europe and a handful of other groups sent a petition signed by some 50,000 Americans to European leaders urging them to stop subsidizing biomass and focus on other renewables like wind and solar. They call the initiative Save our Southern forests, or SOS.

Both White and Macon have recently traveled to Europe to try to convey the local and regional challenges being felt back home by the rise of the industry. Macon said that he came away from his meeting with the British Consul in Atlanta in March feeling that Pilmore-Bedford had been unaware of the severity of the situation.

“He was genuinely surprised to hear that this devastation was being caused,” he said. “I don’t think policymakers were able to see in advance that this would drive the entire destruction of Southeastern forests for wood pellets.”

This genuine surprise seems to apply to everyone now grappling with the expansion of an industry with no precedent at this scale.

The post American Companies Are Shipping Millions Of Trees To Europe, And It’s A Renewable Energy Nightmare appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Vatican Announces Major Summit On Climate Change

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CREDIT: AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino

Catholic officials announced on Tuesday plans for a landmark climate change-themed conference to be hosted at Vatican later this month, the latest in Pope Francis’ faith-rooted campaign to raise awareness about global warming.

The summit, which is scheduled for April 28 and entitled “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity. The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development,” will draw together a combination of scientists, global faith leaders, and influential conservation advocates such as Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is slotted to offer the opening address, and organizers say the goal of the conference is to “build a consensus that the values of sustainable development cohere with values of the leading religious traditions, with a special focus on the most vulnerable.”

“[The conference hopes to] help build a global movement across all religions for sustainable development and climate change throughout 2015 and beyond,” read a statement posted on several Vatican-run websites.

According to a preliminary schedule of events for the convening, attendees hope to offer a joint statement highlighting the “intrinsic connection” between caring for the earth and caring for fellow human beings, “especially the poor, the excluded, victims of human trafficking and modern slavery, children, and future generations.”

The gathering will undoubtedly build momentum for the pope’s forthcoming encyclical on the environment, an influential papal document expected to be released in June or July. The Catholic Church has a long history of championing conservation and green initiatives, but Francis has made the climate change a fixture of his papacy: he directly addressed the issue during his inaugural mass in 2013, and told a crowd in Rome last May that mistreating the environment is a sin, insisting that believers “safeguard Creation … Because if we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us! Never forget this!” The Vatican also held a five-day summit on sustainability in 2014, calling together microbiologists, economists, legal scholars, and other experts to discuss ways to address climate change.

The upcoming conference and the release of the encyclical could also have political implications here in the United States. The pope is scheduled to stop by Washington, D.C. during his trip to America in September, where he plans to address a joint session of Congress. Some conservatives have been critical or dismissive of the pontiff’s support for green policies, but if Francis, who is wildly popular among both Catholic and non-Catholic Americans, brings up climate change during his remarks, it could be an uncomfortable moment for many lawmakers: The Center for American Progress Action Fund estimates that 169 members of the 114th Congress (or 56 percent) have expressed doubts about the science behind climate change, 35 of whom identify as Catholic.

The post Vatican Announces Major Summit On Climate Change appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Lawmakers Threaten To Throw Out Everything That Has Made Texas A Wind Power Leader

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Texas was responsible for more than a third of the wind capacity added in 2014, according to a new report from AWEA.

CREDIT: AP Photo/LM Otero

Texas leads the nation for installed wind capacity, according to a new report, but local and national policies are threatening its place at the top.

Since 2011, 40 percent of all new energy generating capacity installed in Texas has come from wind, and the state installed more than a third of the nation’s new wind capacity last year, according to a report released Wednesday by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). Texas also leads the nation with 17,000 wind industry jobs, the U.S. Wind Industry Annual Market Report found.

This growth is largely due to local and national policies encouraging wind development, which have paid off by making wind is cost-competitive with other energy sources in Texas.

For example, when Georgetown, Texas, went shopping for a new electricity agreement, it was a financial decision to select a wind developer, said Chris Foster, the city’s manager of resource planning and integration. “They won straight up on price,” he said Wednesday at a press conference.

For the past few years, the wind industry in Texas has benefited from supportive local policies and a national production tax credit (PTC). ERCOT — the local electricity authority in Texas — allows providers to source their electricity from anywhere in the region at the same transmission rate, which means wind turbines can be placed in the best possible locations for energy generation. The state also started a program to build out additional transmission lines and instituted an RPS.

But AWEA’s report comes just a day after the Texas state Senate passed a bill that will remove the state’s renewable energy standard (RPS) and reduce investment in transmission lines. And the national Production Tax Credit (PTC) was left to expire at the end of last year.

This could be a double-punch to local wind developers.

Under the RPS, utilities have the option to buy renewable energy credits (RECs), if they do not produce enough energy from renewable sources. This system has driven the development of a $40-million market for RECs in Texas, which would disappear if the state bill SB931 becomes law. The bill would not only repeal the RPS, it would also halt investment in high-voltage transmission lines.

Jeff Clark, executive director of the Wind Coalition, a Texas-based trade organization, said wind energy has been developed in good faith, with the expectation that the transmission line will be built and the REC market will continue.

“That is typically not how Texas treats businesses, changing the rules in the middle of the game,” he said during the press conference Wednesday.

Policy uncertainty can wreak havoc on cost-competitiveness — and jobs — in a nascent industry (and wind is still nascent — nationally, wind accounted for 4.4 percent of electricity production in 2014, according to AWEA).

And the federal PTC might be even more uncertain than local policies. Under the congressional budget process, the PTC has expired and been renewed four times since 1998, leading to steep declines in installations — and industry employment — each time.

In 2012, failure to extend the PTC in a timely fashion cost the industry 30,000 jobs, more than a third of the then-total. The current version of the PTC expired Dec. 31, 2014, but industry representatives have expressed hope that it will be included in current tax packages under consideration by Congress.

The PTC “shouldn’t have to go off a cliff,” said AWEA spokesman Rob Gramlich. He urged Congress to pass a multi-year extension. “We don’t necessarily need the PTC forever,” he said.

Congress is notoriously gridlocked on tax issues, but the wind industry is a rare across-the-aisle issue, creating a domestic energy source while satisfying calls for clean, renewable energy.

“It was the intent of Congress to create an alternative production source of American electricity,” Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said in a statement. Citing the dramatic cost declines, he said, “The wind industry has done what Congress asked them to do. Congress needs to hold up their part of the bargain.”

The post Lawmakers Threaten To Throw Out Everything That Has Made Texas A Wind Power Leader appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Congress Has Made Undermining Energy And Environmental Laws The Focus Of Its First 100 Days

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CREDIT: AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File

In its first 100 days, the 114th Congress has cast more roll call votes on energy and environmental issues than on any other issue, according to a new report. Many of these votes sought to undermine environmental protections or fast track projects like the Keystone XL pipeline, but none of them have become law.

The report, published Wednesday by the Center for American Progress (CAP), cataloged the votes Congress has cast in the first 100 days of 2015, and found that 59 of the Senate’s 135 roll call votes — or 44 percent — were cast on energy or environment-related legislation or amendments, while 25 of the House’s 144 votes were cast on environmental and energy issues.

The report states that, despite these votes, “the energy and anti-environmental agenda of the 114th Congress has come off the rails before leaving the station,” noting that debates at the beginning of the year over bills that sought to approve the Keystone XL pipeline took weeks of lawmakers’ time. Legislation to approve the pipeline, rather than wait for the State Department to issue its final national interest report on the project, was passed by Congress in February but ultimately vetoed by the president.

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CREDIT: Center for American Progress

Matt Lee-Ashley, director of public lands at CAP and co-author of the report, told ThinkProgress that though it’s usual for party leadership to focus in on one or two issues when they take control of Congress, it’s not usual for the focus to fair as poorly as the Republican-controlled Congress’ “fossil fuel-focused agenda.”

“The energy and environmental votes thus far have been on overwhelmingly divisive questions like whether to lift protections on wilderness lands and to deny that human activity is contributing to climate change,” he said in an email. “The highest priorities of oil and gas companies, like facilitating the export of U.S. energy supplies, haven’t fared well so far on the floor of the Senate, and congressional leaders seem to have gotten sidetracked by ideological anti-environment proposals.”

The CAP report focused particularly on the Senate, whose new majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) made Keystone XL his first order of business in the new year and pledged in late 2014 that he would do everything he could to stop the Obama administration’s proposed rule on power plant emissions.

The Senate seemed poised this year to tackle “a wishlist of fossil-fuel industry priorities:” in 2013 and 2014, according to a 2014 CAP report, oil, gas, and coal companies spent more than $720 million to help elect members of congress that were friendly to its agenda. But as Lee-Ashley noted, that agenda, which includes priorities like speeding up approval for oil and gas exports and opening up new regions for offshore drilling, hasn’t yet gotten off the ground, mostly because Senate leaders like Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) have gotten sidetracked by other environmental issues, including President Obama’s proposal to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and attempts to make it easier to sell off America’s public lands for oil and gas development. The Senate also voted in January to approve a measure introduced by Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) that said that climate change is real, but then, a few minutes later, rejected a measure stating that it is caused by humans.

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CREDIT: Center for American Progress

Lee-Ashley said this failure of Congress to enact its environmental goals in its first 100 days will have implications for the upcoming presidential election, and for the rest of the 114th Congress’ tenure.

“I think leaders in the new Congress and presidential hopefuls are going to have to look at the strategy the new Congress has pursued and ask: what went wrong?” he said. “There is plenty of room for thoughtful energy policy and bipartisanship on land conservation, but trying to sell national forests and weakening protections for clean air and clean water are nonstarters with most Americans.”

CAP isn’t the only group to criticize Congress’ focus on anti-environmental efforts in its first 100 days — environmental groups, too, have called out Senate Republicans in particular for driving the agenda.

“This Congress is rewarding big oil, coal, gas, with votes, amendments, bills that attempt to undermine the fundamental bedrock laws that the environmental community has been fighting for the last 45 years,” Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, said.

Some Democrats in Congress are pushing back against Republicans’ energy and environmental agenda: Democratic lawmakers from New England and the West sent a letter to governors across the U.S. this week asking them not to heed Sen. McConnell’s call to opt out of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed climate rule.

And environmental groups are hoping to get ahead of the issue in the upcoming presidential election: a coalition of groups is expected to announce this weekend an initiative to register 1 million climate voters by Election Day.

The post Congress Has Made Undermining Energy And Environmental Laws The Focus Of Its First 100 Days appeared first on ThinkProgress.

This Was The Hottest 3-Month Start Of Any Year On Record

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NASA reported Tuesday that this was the hottest three-month start (January to March) of any year on record. This was the third warmest March on record in NASA’s dataset (and the first warmest in the dataset of the Japan Meteorological Agency).

The odds are increasing that this will be the hottest year on record. Last week NOAA predicted a 60 percent chance that the El Niño it declared in March will continue all year. El Niños generally lead to global temperature records, as the short-term El Niño warming adds to the underlying long-term global warming trend.

And in fact, with March, we have broken the record again for the hottest 12 months on record: April 2014 – March 2015. The previous record was March 2014 – February 2015 set the previous month. And the equally short-lived record before that was February 2014 – January 2015.

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This is using a 12-month moving average, so we can “see the march of temperature change over time,” rather than just once every calendar year, as science writer Dr. Greg Laden puts it.

The global warming trend that made 2014 the hottest calendar year on record is continuing. Some climate scientists have said it’s likely we’re witnessing the start of the long-awaited jump in global temperatures — a jump that could be as much as as 0.5°F.

While March was slightly on the cool side for those living in northeastern U.S., the rest of the country and the globe is quite warm, with large parts of the West and Russia experiencing astonishing warmth. That’s clear in the NASA global map below for March temperatures, whose upper range extends to 7.5°C (13.5°F) above the 1951-1980 average!

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Global temperatures in March vs. 1951-1980 average. Via NASA.

March continued the record-smashing hot start to the year in drought-stricken California. And that means the earliest the drought is likely to ease is late fall or early winter — and that assumes a full-blown El Niño develops in the coming months.

It was also quite warm last month in Siberia, where the permafrost is fast becoming the perma-melt. The permafrost contains twice as much carbon as is currently in the entire atmosphere. The faster it turns into a significant source of carbon dioxide and methane emissions, the more humanity will be penalized for delaying climate action. The defrosting may add as much as 1.5°F to total global warming by 2100 — something that is not factored into any current climate models.

h/t Greg Laden

The post This Was The Hottest 3-Month Start Of Any Year On Record appeared first on ThinkProgress.

This Federal Report Underestimates Renewables Every Year, And Energy Experts Have Had Enough

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The federal Energy Information Administration expects utility-scale solar to drop off after 2016.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan

Every year, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) releases a report on the future of energy in America. And every year, renewable energy advocates say the report is a bust.

The Annual Energy Outlook routinely overestimates the cost of wind and solar energy and underestimates the future price of fossil fuel costs, experts say, which can lead to less renewable energy development — which means greater focus on developing conventional energy sources, such as natural gas.

In the 2015 report, released Tuesday, the EIA predicted that the United States would only increase its use of renewable energy consumption from 8 percent to 10 percent by 2040. Coal will continue to account for 18-19 percent of U.S. energy consumption over the next 25 years, while natural gas’s slice of the pie will grow 2 percent, the group predicted. Other analysts, including Bloomberg New Energy Finance, expect the U.S. coal fleet to continue to diminish.

But lowballing renewables can have major impacts on our energy future, some experts say.

“Real policies are being designed around these assumptions,” Jeff Deyette, an analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told ThinkProgress. For example, predictions that natural gas prices will be low can skew power plant developers away from choosing renewable resources.

Deyette blamed the low renewable projections on inertia at the government agency. Costs for solar, wind, and other renewables have dropped significantly over the past few years, and the rate of installation has greatly increased. These rapid changes can be hard to include in modeling that includes years of data, but in any case, there is a pattern in the EIA’s estimates. The EIA itself has reported that it was overly optimistic on natural gas prices for the past several years.

Meanwhile, estimates for wind capital costs have been high, said Michael Goggin, an analyst at the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). Capital costs used for this year’s report have not been released, he said, but the pattern of underestimating fuel costs is a problem.

“It’s not just that they are wrong — any projection is going to be wrong — it’s that there is consistent bias” in the case of natural gas, Goggin said.

The discrepancies in predictions can be striking. The report this year predicts that by 2040, the U. S. will have added only 48 gigawatts of solar generating capacity. The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) expects that the industry will add half of that by the end of 2016.

This difference is partly because the agency predicts that when the solar investment tax credit (ITC) expires in 2016, the utility sector of the industry will plummet.

“It’s going to be very hard for these plants to be competitive in a post-ITC world,” Gwen Bredehoeft, an EIA analyst, told ThinkProgress.

But Ken Johnson, a spokesman for the SEIA, said that the report is “based on some flawed assumptions.” In an email to ThinkProgress, Johnson acknowledged the failure to extend the ITC would be a huge economic blow for the industry, costing tens of thousands of jobs, but said SEIA was optimistic that the tax credit could be extended.

“Even if the ITC is not extended, the solar industry isn’t going to whither on the vine, as this report seems to indicate,” he wrote. “Advancements in technology, lower prices, consumer demand and climate change will help our industry to eventually bounce back and resume its growth.”

The Union of Concerned Scientist’s Deyette agreed that EIA’s projections were overly pessimistic for solar. “I think it’s really underestimating the growth potential and cost decline potential beyond [the expiration of the ITC],” he said.

According to data from the industry group, utility-scale prices have dropped 62 percent since 2010 — four years after the ITC went into effect. That price drop indicates that the scaling up of the industry the ITC was meant to foster has been responsible for more cost reduction that the 30 percent tax credit itself.

Indeed, one of the biggest problems with drawing conclusions from the EIA projections is that the agency does not factor in policy changes. If the ITC is extended, solar’s forecast could dramatically change. If more states and cities enact fracking bans, the outlook for natural gas could change.

Even the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Clean Power Plan, a rule that will limit the carbon emissions from power plants and is expected to dramatically reduce U.S. dependence on high-emission coal generation, is not accounted for in the EIA report — because the rule hasn’t been finalized yet.

Deyette said failure to accurately capture pricing data and more general changes in the direction of energy production makes the EIA’s report out of touch.

“It just doesn’t really pass the test of sensibilities in terms of where we’re going,” he said.

The post This Federal Report Underestimates Renewables Every Year, And Energy Experts Have Had Enough appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Will Harvard Divest From Fossil Fuels? Students And Alumni Demand Answers In Week Of Action

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Harvard students sit in for fossil fuel divestment in February, 2015.

CREDIT: 350.org

Environmental activists at Harvard are hoping to flip the equation on global warming this week: instead of climate change bringing rising temperatures, they hope adding heat to the discussion will change the climate of the University’s approach to the issue.

Last week was the first annual Climate Week at Harvard, a university-sanctioned slate of events meant to elevate the discussion around climate change. This week, Heat Week is offering a much fiercer palette: a mobilization and sit-in by students, alumni, and other activists meant to spur the University into divesting from fossil fuels. Participants are engaging in nonviolent, civil disobedience by blockading Massachusetts Hall, which houses the office of President Faust, as well as University Hall, the other administrative building in Harvard Yard.

“We’re asking Harvard: Whose side are you on? What side of history are you going to be on?” Annie Schugart, media co-coordinator of Divest Harvard and a Harvard student, told ThinkProgress in an email.

This is a debate that has been simmering on campus for several years. In 2012, Harvard became the first school in the country to pass a student fossil fuel divestment referendum. In that vote, 72 percent of the study body weighed in favor of the University divesting its fossil fuel funds. Throughout this growing momentum, university leaders have held the line that fossil fuel divestment is neither warranted nor wise.

Schugart said she didn’t really hear much about Climate Week, and while conversation around the issue is welcome, “divesting from fossil fuels is something that needs to be done immediately.”

“Harvard invests so much in our futures, but its decision to invest in fossil fuel companies acts in direct opposition to this investment,” she said. After years of discussion with little progress, Shugart said its “time to step up the heat and show Harvard we aren’t stopping until Harvard divests.”

The fossil fuel divestment movement has targeted universities and their holdings of oil, gas, and coal stocks. Harvard, as is often the case, would be the holy grail. It is also the alma mater of climate activist and author Bill McKibben, who along with eight other alumni spent Monday night in the Alumni Association.

In a letter addressed to Philip W. Lovejoy, executive director of the Alumni Association, the former students say Harvard has “rebuffed” the requests of current students for a public discussion about divestment, and the alumni association has also refused to engage.

“[If] it’s wrong to wreck the planet then it’s wrong for Harvard to profit from that wreckage,” states the letter. “And that the Harvard students who have been the brave leaders in the divestment fight so far deserve the support of us Harvard graduates.”

At $36.4 billion, Harvard holds the largest endowment of any college in the world. To date, Harvard President Drew G. Faust has said the school does not plan to divest, but would rather engage with companies and corporations to improve their environmental behavior and greenhouse gas profiles. In January, it came to light that the university had actually increased its stake in publicly traded fossil fuel companies by sevenfold in the third quarter of 2014 to a total of $79.5 million. This number only includes SEC filings, and most of Harvard’s endowment is not held in direct investments, meaning fossil fuel investments could amount to far more. According to Jamie Henn, co-founder and communications director for 350.org, “there is little doubt that [Harvard] holds hundreds of millions of dollars in fossil fuel companies.”

At a panel discussion on Monday billed as part of Climate Week, Faust called the challenge of climate change “profound” and said confronting the dangers it poses “is among the paramount tasks of our time.”

“Universities have a crucial role to play: We act through our research, our educational programs, our embrace of sustainability on our campus, our engagement with the wider world,” she said.

While the panel steered clear of divestment for the most part, Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard professor and co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” infused it into the debate after nearly 40 minutes.

“I think we’re at a point where we need disruptive politics,” Oreskes said. “I don’t see how we can have this conversation we’re having here and still be continuing to invest in companies that are building more fossil fuel infrastructure … that is locking us into the very grave problem [of climate change] that we claim to be very very worried about.”

Joseph Hamilton, a Harvard Law student with Harvard Climate Justice Coalition, told ThinkProgress that while it’s great to have as much discussion about climate change as we can, Climate Week was “definitely a deflection.” He said it had a marked absence of voices from the social movement or from the student body.

“It’s no coincidence that they announced Climate Week after we announced Heat Week,” he said. “It’s no coincidence that there’s no serious engagement with the divestment issue.”

Hamilton, who is participating in the sit-in this week, is part of a group of seven student plaintiffs that have filed a lawsuit seeking to compel the University to divest its fossil fuel holdings. In March, a Massachusetts trial court sided with Harvard Corporation and dismissed the lawsuit. The plaintiffs are preparing to file an appeal.

Hamilton said the concerns of those participating in Heat Week and those filing the lawsuit are the same.

“We are both trying to hold Harvard accountable for failing to live up to its mission,” he said. “The lawsuit is an attempt to have judicial and legal intervention and Heat Week is more about moral standing.”

Hamilton commended other schools, like nearby MIT, for having open debates about divestment, but said just talking about the problem isn’t enough. As Bloomberg notes, while the divestment movement is gaining steam, it is still far from widely accepted. While Syracuse recently said it would no longer invest in fossil fuel companies and Stanford is no longer buying coal stocks, fewer than 30 universities worldwide have formally endorsed the campaign.

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