Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 82

These Bipartisan Security Experts Say Climate Change Is A National Security Threat

The impacts are real, and the costs of inaction are unacceptable."

The post These Bipartisan Security Experts Say Climate Change Is A National Security Threat appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Don’t Let Shell Fool You. Arctic Drilling Is Not A Thing Of The Past.

As it turns out, the United States is not the only country with interests in the Arctic.

The post Don’t Let Shell Fool You. Arctic Drilling Is Not A Thing Of The Past. appeared first on ThinkProgress.

The EPA Is Publishing Its Carbon Rule. Here Come The Lawsuits.

The EPA’s Clean Power Plan, which seeks to limit carbon emissions from the electricity sector, was finalized back in August, but it will be officially published in the Federal Register on Friday, setting in motion of flurry of court filings, lawsuits, and counter suits.

Fifteen states have said they will sue the EPA, revisiting arguments they used to try to stop the rule before it was even made. Fifteen other states, including Washington, D.C., will then intervene, arguing that the rules are not only legal, they are necessary.

“Significant reductions in these emissions must occur to prevent increases in the frequency, magnitude and scale of the adverse impacts of climate change,” wrote New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in a letter to the EPA in August. The attorney general named “heat-related deaths and illnesses; higher smog levels, increasing the rate of asthma, pneumonia and bronchitis; extreme weather, including storms, floods and droughts; threats to our food production, agriculture and forest productivity; and threats to our energy, transportation and water resource infrastructure” as concerns.

The 15 opposing states, led by West Virginia and mainly representing coal-heavy economies, are expected to argue that the EPA does not have the authority to regulate carbon emissions from power plants under this statute. The arguments will likely come down to debates over whether the EPA has overstepped its jurisdiction by allowing flexible state plans to include “outside the fence” measures such as efficiency and renewable energy, and whether another section of the Clean Air Act, which governs mercury emissions from power plants, renders the EPA unable to also regulate carbon.

Michael Myers, assistant attorney general of New York, disputed both those claims. The mercury or carbon argument “doesn’t make any sense,” Myers told ThinkProgress. “The contention that Congress intended the EPA to pick one of those, not both of them, is not an argument that is going to prevail in court.”

The opposing states may also argue that there was no opportunity to comment on parts of the final rule that were not in the preliminary rule. (The states previously argued that it was proper to strike down the rule during the preliminary stage, since the EPA wasn’t expected to make any changes.)

Environmental law experts, speaking on a call with reporters Thursday, said they were optimistic that the EPA rule would prevail.

“Its opponents are on the wrong side of the law and the wrong side of history,” said Howard Fox, an attorney with Earthjustice.

Earthjustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and the Environmental Defense Fund are planning to intervene in the case against the EPA within the next few days.

The anti-Clean Power Plan states will likely ask that the rule be postponed while the court hears the suit, but advocates say there is a high bar for courts granting a stay. Plaintiffs would have to show they are likely to win on the merits of the case, show that they will suffer “irreparable harm” during the time the court considers the case, demonstrate that their irreparable harm outweighs the harm of delaying the rule, and that a stay is in the public interest, said Joanne Spalding, chief climate counsel for the Sierra Club.

“We are confident that the Clean Power Plan is on legally sound footing,” Spalding told reporters.

Even former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman, who served under George W. Bush, thinks the plan is solid.

“EPA does have the authority,” Whitman said last year in Senate testimony. “The law says so and the Supreme Court has said so, twice. The matter, I believe, should be put to rest.”

The Clean Power Plan is a critical component to the Obama Administration’s carbon emissions reduction goals. In the lead up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, the plan is also considered an important signal to the international community that the United States is serious about meeting climate goals.

Tags

attorney generalCarbon RuleClean Power PlanEPAFederal RegisterLawsuitsNew York

The post The EPA Is Publishing Its Carbon Rule. Here Come The Lawsuits. appeared first on ThinkProgress.

How Offshore Wind Can Beat Natural Gas In The U.S.

New England is set to lose eight gigawatts of generating capacity from fossil fuels as aging power plants built in the 1950s and ‘60s retire and go offline. This will create a vacuum that could be filled by Canadian hydropower, natural gas, or offshore wind. Assuming that American utilities would rather build new sources of power in the United States than send their money to Canada, New Englanders will have two options. On the one hand, they could fill the energy gap with wind power, which has historically earned resistance from even climate-conscious NIMBYists. On the other hand, they could go with currently-cheap, cleaner-burning natural gas.

The decision is less obvious than one might think.

For as much as we hear about the untapped reserves of natural gas waiting to power our cities, it’s our abundant wind resources that should drive the conversation around clean energy. Winds along the coasts of the United States could provide four times the energy needed to power the whole country. And while wind still ranks among the costlier forms of power, in Europe — the world leader in offshore wind — prices have fallen markedly. Said Jeff Grybowski, CEO of Deepwater Wind, “In the New England region, New York and even into New Jersey, building a new gas plant… is just about the same price as building a new offshore wind farm in Europe today.”

In the long term, natural gas can’t compete with offshore wind. That’s because any new investment in natural gas has to be weighed against our climate goals. If we are to keep global warming to less than 2º C, we will have to abandon fossil fuels completely, and we will have to do so sooner rather than later. That means that new gas power plants, new pipelines, and new drilling operations will likely come with an expiration date. And when gas-fired power plants are closed down before they reach the end of their operating life, consumers will foot the bill. Moreover, investing in 20th century fuels like natural gas will only slow the transition to 21st century energy, as wind and solar operators work to reach the economies of scale needed to further drive down the price of electricity.

In the short-term, natural gas still offers a more attractive option to utilities, which is why offshore wind firms are clamoring for regular tax credits and streamlined regulations to help them compete with fossil fuels. The fledgling industry has the potential to generate thousands of new jobs, both for the engineers who design wind turbines and the men and women who build them. According to the Department of Energy, erecting 54 gigawatts of capacity from offshore wind would create 43,000 permanent jobs.

“This is an industry with enormous potential,” said Grybowski. “Right now, all the really high tech work in offshore wind is being done in Europe… but as we build projects in the U.S., more and more of the supply chain will come to the U.S.”

Some lawmakers are trying to clear the way for offshore wind. Senator Tom Carper (D-DE) and Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) have proposed an investment tax credit for offshore wind, which would give the industry the certainty it needs to plan ahead.

Constructing more offshore wind power will also help consumers to insulate themselves against fluctuations in the price of fossil fuels. “We know the price of oil and gas goes up and down. What goes down will eventually go up,” said Sen. Carper. “We need some other ways to generate electricity that are cost-effective and also do good things for the environment.”

Sen. Carper stands among the small number of Democrats who voted to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline. When asked about his support for the project, he said, “This has been an impediment to us getting other stuff done, including investment tax credits that would pave the way to offshore wind.”

If Senators Carper and Collins succeed in passing the investment tax credit, new wind projects would flourish in the Northeast. The region’s most populous cities lie along the sea, within arm’s reach of powerful ocean gales, and already, communities are preparing to meet the demand for wind energy. Workers are outfitting old fishing ports to service construction operations. Schools like the University of Massachusetts and the University of Maine are turning out dozens of PhDs in wind engineering. And four Northeastern states — New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Maine — are working with the Department of Energy to create a thriving market for offshore wind. The Atlantic coast is ripe for a clean energy explosion. It’s up to lawmakers to light the fuse.

Jeremy Deaton writes about the science, policy, and politics of climate and energy for Nexus Media. You can follow him at @deaton_jeremy.

Tags

Climate ChangeNatural GasOffshore Wind

The post How Offshore Wind Can Beat Natural Gas In The U.S. appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Florida Supreme Court Clears Hurdle Out Of The Way For Solar Power To Flourish

Solar power could soon be flourishing the Sunshine State. Thursday morning the Florida Supreme Court approved an initiative for the 2016 ballot that would allow Floridians to vote to reduce the state’s restrictions on rooftop solar power.

Although solar is growing exponentially nationwide, it has not thrived in Florida. Florida is one of a handful of states that prohibit residents from purchasing electricity from a source other than an electric utility. This has locked out third-party solar rooftop companies, such as SolarCity and SunRun, which install rooftop solar panels on a customer’s property at no cost and sell solar-generated power to that customer at a reduced electric rate.

As ThinkProgress previously reported, a coalition of solar advocates called Floridians for Solar Choice has been leading the effort to change this policy by pursuing a ballot initiative to permit third-party financing for rooftop solar by private companies. To get the initiative on the ballot, Florida required the coalition to first collect 68,314 voter signatures and then have the initiative language approved by the state Supreme Court.

On Thursday, the ballot initiative cleared this major hurdle when the Florida Supreme Court approved the “Solar Choice Amendment” for the November 2016 ballot. Advocates now have to collect the requisite 683,149 signatures to ensure the initiative goes on the ballot. It will then have to pass with 60 percent of the vote in 2016.

Florida’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, has been an active opponent of these efforts, arguing against it to the state Supreme Court. In a brief filed with the Supreme Court, Bondi called for the ballot initiative to be rejected due to misleading language. “Because local solar energy already exists in Florida, the summary misleads by suggesting the existence of ‘barriers’ and implying that the Amendment is necessary to allow local solar energy,” she stated. However, according to Floridians for Solar Choice’s website, current law “prohibits customer choice and blocks the growth of this abundant, clean homegrown energy source.” The measure is aimed at “expanding solar choice by allowing all customers the option to power their homes or businesses with solar.”

Over the past few months, Bondi has joined the state’s utility companies to push for a rival ballot initiative. Consumers for Smart Solar has focused on discrediting the Floridians for Solar Choice initiative, and says their goal is to “[establish] the right to solar in Florida’s constitution.” The group also claims that the Solar Choice initiative is “shady” and privileges solar companies. Fossil fuel funded organizations like the National Black Chamber of Commerce have “decried the Shady Solar Amendment as misleading.” Critics of the rival initiative have noted that Floridians already have the right to install solar panels, and that efforts to stall third party financing are intended to protect the utility companies’ interests.

Building the state’s renewable energy sector will be important to facilitate compliance with the Clean Power Plan, which requires Florida to reduce its emissions from fossil fuel power plants by 25% by 2030, compared with 2005 levels. According to analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Florida could meet its CPP 2030 goal by increasing renewable energy generation to 10 percent of the state’s electricity mix. The Solar Energy Industries Association ranks Florida as third in the nation for rooftop photovoltaic potential and the National Renewable Energy Lab estimated that the rooftop solar panels in the state could generate between 5 and 6 kWh per square meter installed per day.

Following the release of the Clean Power Plan, the Florida Public Service Commission — the state body responsible for regulating electricity — issued a news release listing the state’s carbon pollution reductions since 2008 and touting the 530 MW of renewable generation that has been added since 2008. This includes rooftop solar, utility-scale projects, and power-purchase agreements. But 530 MW of renewable generation pales in comparison to estimates of Florida’s potential if third party financing was available. In fact, back in 2008, the Florida PSC released a report saying that rooftop solar alone had the potential to generate nearly 100 times that amount.

Attorney General Bondi is also fighting the Clean Power Plan, joining 14 other attorneys general in filing with the DC Circuit for a stay of the rule’s compliance deadlines. Bondi joined them in arguing that EPA’s rule must be stopped because it would cause “irreparable harm” to the states. The Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity praised Bondi for her participation in the coalition, calling the Clean Power Plan requirements “egregious and unattainable.”

But state polling indicates that both the Solar Choice amendment and the Clean Power Plan are popular among Florida voters. According to a survey conducted by the Republican firm North Star Opinion Research, 74 percent of Florida voters say they support the Solar Choice ballot proposal. And recent polling by Public Policy Polling found that 63 percent of Florida voters say they support the Clean Power Plan.

As a result, Florida is in the midst of a paradoxical fight to limit its ability to increase renewable energy deployment and decrease carbon pollution in accordance with the Clean Power Plan. On the one hand, Bondi and the utility companies argue against renewable energy that cuts pollution and saves money on homeowners’ power bills. On the other hand, Bondi argues that cutting pollution could irreparably harm the state.

As of Thursday morning, Florida voters cleared a hurdle to be able to decide for themselves in 2016.

Erin Auel is a special assistant for the Energy Policy team at the Center for American Progress.

UPDATE

This post was updated to reflect the correct required number of signatures to advance the measure to the Supreme Court for review.

Share Update








Tags

FloridaSolar Power

The post Florida Supreme Court Clears Hurdle Out Of The Way For Solar Power To Flourish appeared first on ThinkProgress.

The Economic Cost Of Climate Change

The warmer it gets, the less productive a country’s economy will likely be — those are the results of a new economic and science study published yesterday in Nature.

The study, conducted by researchers at Stanford and UC Berkeley, examined fifty years of historical data to see if there was a relationship between temperature and economic performance. Looking at 166 countries — and taking out changes due to differences in countries (like geographic location or starting wealth) — the researchers analyzed whether a country’s economic performance increased or decreased as temperatures rose or fell.

They found that most countries have an economic sweet spot of 55°F — if a country tended to be cooler than 55°F, its economic performance tended to increase as it warmed towards 55°F. Once countries cross that threshold, however, their economic performance tended to decrease. The researchers found an especially strong negative correlation between a country’s economic performance and the temperature the warmer it gets — a country that begins with warmer temperatures, in other words, suffers a greater drop in economic performance per 1 degree of warming than a country that begins cooler.

“The data tell us that there are particular temperatures where we humans are really good at producing stuff,” Marshall Burke, professor of Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, said in a press release. “In countries that are normally quite cold — mostly wealthy northern countries — higher temperatures are associated with faster economic growth, but only to a point. After that point, growth declines rapidly.”

Perhaps more concerning, however, is what could happen in a world where climate change is allowed to continue unmitigated. Under that scenario, the researchers found, 77 percent of countries in the world would see a drop in per capita incomes relative to current levels, with global incomes falling 23 percent by 2100.

[image error]

Change in GDP per capita by 2100 compared to a world without climate change.

CREDIT: Burke, Hsiang, & Miguel (Nature, 2015)

And that decline in economic performance holds true for both rich and poor countries, something that runs counter to the idea that rich countries can simply pay for technology to adapt and avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

“The data definitely don’t provide strong evidence that rich countries are immune from the effects of hot temperatures,” Solomon Hsiang, the Chancellor’s Associate Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, said in a press release. “Many rich countries just happen to have cooler average temperatures to start with, meaning that future warming will overall be less harmful than in poorer, hotter countries.”

But, at least in the short term, global warming will likely exacerbate existing global inequalities, with the richest 20 percent experiencing slight gains as the world warms, according to the study. The poorest 40 percent of countries, meanwhile, will likely see a 75 percent reduction in average income in 2100.

As the researchers point out, correlation does not equal causation — Nigeria is poorer than Norway, they explain, but it would be flawed to say that Nigeria is poorer because it is warmer. But they argue that because temperature fluctuations from year to year are random, they can see how a particular country performs under cool and warm situations — effectively giving them a “control” with which to compare economic performance.

“If we see over and over that a country has lower economic production right when it also becomes hotter, then we can conclude that these environmental temperatures are likely causing these changes in economic performance,” the researchers wrote in a supplemental explanation.

Wesleyan University environmental economist Gary Yohe told the Associated Press that the study as significant and thorough, adding that it used “the most modern socio-economic scenarios.”

The study looks at a future where nothing is done to mitigate climate change, however, which is an increasingly unrealistic outcome as nations prepare to negotiate an international climate deal during the upcoming U.N. climate talks. In advance of the Paris conference, Burke hopes that delegates will enter the talks with a realistic idea of what’s at stake if the world adopts a business-as-usual approach to carbon emissions.

“Our research is important for COP21 because it suggests that these economic damages could be much larger than current estimates indicate,” Burke said in a press release. “The benefits of action on mitigation are much greater than we thought, because the costs of inaction are much greater than we thought.”

Tags

Climate ChangeClimate Economics

The post The Economic Cost Of Climate Change appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Could Beer Save The Honeybees?

The fight to save honeybees has gotten boosts recently from the USDA, the White House, and researchers who are still working to determine why managed honeybees continue to die off. Now, bees have one more thing on their side: beer.

Or, at least, one of the main ingredients of beer. This week, the EPA approved the use of potassium salts of hops beta acids (HBAs) — a biochemical (or naturally-occurring) pesticide that’s derived from hops, the flowers of the plant Humulus lupulus — around honeycombs. Research has shown that HBAs have potential for repelling varroa mites, a dangerous mite that attaches itself to honeybees and sucks out their circulatory fluid. Varroa mites weaken bees and spread debilitating diseases, including deformed wing virus, which causes crumpled up, useless wings in young bees.

[image error]

Humulus lupulus, whose flowers could help protect bees against varroa mites.

CREDIT: wikimedia commons

One 2012 study found that, when bees were wiped with solutions of 1 percent HBA, 100 percent of mites placed on them died, while the bees’ mortality was unaffected. It also found that, when cardboard strips dipped in HBA were placed in bee colonies, it caused more mites to fall off the bees than in colonies without HBA cardboard.

HBAs have long been used in beer brewing and as a preservative for meat, and because of this “long history of exposure,” they’re generally thought to be safe, according to the EPA. Beekeepers have been known to use other natural ways to try to get varroa mites off their bees: brushing bees with powdered sugar, for instance, increases their grooming activity, which dislodges the mites. Beekeepers can also use fumigants to try to rid the hive of mites, but that method can also result in bee deaths, making it a less-than-ideal solution.

Managed honeybees are still struggling in the United States, both from varroa mites and from other factors that scientists are still working to understand. A May survey found that U.S. beekeepers lost an average of 42.1 percent of their hives from April 2014 to April 2015, with beekeepers in some states seeing losses as high as 62 percent. These losses are bad news for beekeepers, who generally view losses of around 18.7 percent to be the maximum they can sustain and still be economically viable. In addition, this year, summer losses in bees were higher than winter losses for the first time — a finding that’s troubling to bee experts, who say bees are typically healthier in the summer, when flowers are blooming.

Varroa mites are likely contributing to winter losses, and poor nutrition — from bees getting all their food from crops instead of from meadows with a wide array of flowers — could be contributing to summer losses. Pesticides — especially one particular class, neonicotinoids — have also been pointed to as a potential cause of bee losses: neonicotinoids are used widely in agriculture and have been found to damage bees’ brains.

Tags

Honey Bees

The post Could Beer Save The Honeybees? appeared first on ThinkProgress.

A Utah Power Plant’s Scheme To Circumvent The Clean Water Act

Near the Huntington Power Plant, about 110 miles south east of Salt Lake City, Utah, there is a farm. It’s a peculiar farm, according to Richard Webster, a senior attorney with the nonprofit law firm Public Justice, because it contains no crops, no animals, and no harvesting machinery. Save for a few patches of grass and some irrigation equipment, there’s little to distinguish the parcel of land as a farm at all.

That’s because, according to a Notice of Intent to Sue issued last week by HEAL Utah and the Sierra Club, the farm isn’t used as a working farm. It’s a fake farm, irrigated with wastewater from coal ash landfills, meant to help the Huntington plant, owned by PacifiCorp, avoid treating its polluted water. In circumventing those regulations, Webster and other environmental groups claim, the Huntington plant has been contaminating nearby water sources with millions of tons of coal ash for years.

“This whole thing is designed as an elaborate scheme to circumvent the Clean Water Act,” Webster told ThinkProgress. “What they’re essentially doing is taking water that is highly toxic to plants and using it for irrigation.”

According to Lindsay Beebe, a local organizer with the Sierra Club, the investigation into the Huntington plant’s contamination began when the power plant withdrew a wastewater permit that they had previously been using, which had allowed the plant to discharge its waste into the Huntington Creek, which runs adjacent to the power plant.

“That was a red flag,” Beebe told ThinkProgress, “because they had a permit to have runoff from their plant site run into Huntington [Creek], and it indicated they were no longer doing that anymore.”

What they’re essentially doing is taking water that is highly toxic to plants and using it for irrigation

After looking into the site’s records and visiting the plant, it became clear to the environmental groups investigating the plant that PacifiCorp was merely shifting its contaminated waste to different places around the site — not dealing with the contaminated water in a manner in keeping with Clean Water Act regulations. Beginning around 2007, according to Webster, the Huntington plant began intercepting the flow from two streams that drain the site’s landfills, which include waste from the plant like coal ash, a toxic byproduct created when coal is burned for power. The plant then diverted those polluted streams into a holding pond, from which irrigation water for the plant’s farm is drawn.

Essentially, Webster said, by diverting the polluted streams to a holding pond and spraying that water over a farm, the plant avoids the permits — and expensive pollution treatment — that would be required under the Clean Water Act, since Huntington Creek is listed as an impaired waterway.

“Because the creek is impaired, they would have to treat the wastewater to quite a high standard,” Webster said. But spraying the polluted water on a farm doesn’t make the pollution go away, Webster added.

“They just keep shifting it around the place, but in the end the pollution is getting into the stream by hook or by crook,” he said.

According to the notice, a 2003 report prepared by PacifiCorp noted that groundwater flows from the area beneath the farm to Huntington Creek, raising concern that contamination on the farm could eventually end up in the creek. The company’s own testing also shows elevated levels of contaminants like boron and mercury in the ground water near the on-site landfills, which are unlined, as well as adjacent to the plant’s farm. According to the notice, levels of contamination have increased steadily between 2003 and 2014.

“What we know, from the company’s own testing of test wells, is that high levels of contamination indicators, like boron and mercury, are all present at really elevated levels on-site,” Beebe said. “We’re hoping the state will undertake an investigation into the impact of the contamination that is well known on the surrounding ecosystem and waterways.”

The pollution is not going away. They just keep shifting it around the place

Spraying waste products onto a farm, in order to disperse them, is not unheard of. Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) often use this technique to help dispose of the animal waste created on the farms, leading to some concern about groundwater contamination when animal waste is applied in excess. According to Webster, this is the first time he has seen this technique used at a power plant.

“Companies try everything they can to escape the Clean Water Act, and that seems pretty apparent here,” Jack Tuholske, a practicing environmental attorney not involved with the case and current director of the Water Justice Program at the Vermont Law School, told ThinkProgress. “They’re trying to create a loophole to irrigate, and it poses some serious issues of a company trying to avoid its responsibility to protect waters from pollution.”

PacifiCorp denies the allegations, claiming that the notice’s conclusions were based on false information.

“Concerns raised in the letter are issues that are available in the public records, and were reported by PacifiCorp to the Utah Department of Environmental Quality,” the company said in a prepared statement emailed to ThinkProgress. “These issues have been addressed or are currently being addressed with the oversight of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality. PacifiCorp continues to ensure that Huntington plant remains in compliance with the recently finalized coal combustion residual rules and all requirements of the Clean Water Act.”

The notice also highlights other issues with the plant, including unpermitted discharge directly into Huntington Creek, as well as a poorly-managed coal storage pile that has been discharging pollutants into the creek. PacifiCorp has 60 days to respond to the notice; if they fail to respond, Webster said, the groups will file a lawsuit in federal court.

“Instead of moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic, it’s time to start doing something real,” Webster said. “The question is not if they have to clean it up, it’s when. They really may as well bite the bullet and clean it up now, as opposed to continuing to make the problem worse and building up more liability for their shareholders.”

Tags

Clean Water ActCoal Ash

The post A Utah Power Plant’s Scheme To Circumvent The Clean Water Act appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Almost Every Chemical-Based Sunscreen In The U.S. Linked To Coral Destruction

Coral reefs cannot seem to catch a break this year. Between a particularly strong El Niño, ocean acidification and increasing ocean temperatures, links between overfishing and reef collapses, and the declaration of a massive coral bleaching event expected to affect 95 percent of U.S. coral reefs by the end of the year, the current state of the global environment has been particularly detrimental to coral reefs.

And now, research has shown that a chemical found in almost every chemical-based sunscreen used in the United States is linked to coral destruction.

The study, published Tuesday in the Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, was led by Craig Downs from the Haereticus Environmental Laboratory in Virginia. He told Reuters that the research was conducted in order to help explain why baby corals have not been developing in many established reefs.

Between 6,000 and 14,000 tons of sunscreen lotion make their way into coral reef areas each year

Researchers conducted the study in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Hawaii — areas that attract large amounts of tourists each year to swim in reef areas. They found that the chemical oxybenzone affects coral in three different ways: it alters its DNA, makes coral susceptible to potentially fatal bleaching, and acts as an endocrine disruptor, which causes baby coral to encase itself in its own skeleton and leads to its death.

To make things worse, it does not take a large amount of this chemical to upset coral. According to the research, concentrations of oxybenzone as low as 62 parts per trillion — equivalent to a drop of water in six and a half Olympic-sized swimming pools — are deemed harmful.

Between 6,000 and 14,000 tons of sunscreen lotion make their way into coral reef areas each year, and much of that sunscreen contains oxybenzone. The Huffington Post reported that the chemical is used in more than 3,500 sunscreens worldwide. However, harmful chemicals can also find their way into oceans through sewer systems and sewer overflows. The Washington Post reported that cities including Ocean City, Maryland, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, have built sewer outfalls that send waste water away from public beaches and deep into the ocean with an assortment of toxic chemicals from personal care products like sunscreen.

This study is the latest to examine sunscreen’s impact on corals, but previous research has also found that sunscreen is a danger to corals. Conservation and environmental protection organizations have advised people to be mindful of the personal care products they use, especially while swimming in oceans. The National Park Service reported that 90 percent of snorkeling and diving occurs on only 10 percent of the world’s reefs, making the most “popular reefs” the most susceptible to harmful chemicals from sunscreens. Though no sunscreen has been named completely “reef friendly,” mineral and children’s sunscreens are found to be less harmful for reefs.

The human health effects of oxybenzone, along with other chemicals found in the vast majority of sunscreens, have been called into question by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) in previous years. The group has found that oxybenzone penetrates the skin, gets into the bloodstream, and acts as an endocrine disruptor, much like it has been found to do in coral reefs. EWG states that concentrations of oxybenzone are linked to disorders such as endometriosis in older women and lower birth weights in newborn girls — but the group notes that the studies showing this link aren’t conclusive.

Some dermatologists at organizations such as the Skin Cancer Foundation have been critical of EWG’s findings. Some have said the group’s work “lacks scientific rigor,” and that the sunscreen rating system is “arbitrary and without basis in any accepted scientific standard.” According to Reuters, the American Academy of Dermatology says there is no data showing oxybenzone as a health hazard. EWG has noted that more research must be done in order to gain a better understanding of the chemical.

There is no debate, however, that the ocean’s coral reefs are under significant amounts of stress from multiple factors. Though coral reef ecosystems make up just 0.1 percent of ocean area, nearly a quarter of all marine species depend on them to survive and rely on their habitat. Mark Eakin, NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch coordinator, recently told ThinkProgress about the potential detrimental global effects of a mass coral bleaching event, indicating that nearly half a billion people around the world rely on coral reefs and fisheries to survive and over $30 billion in income is at stake.

Tags

Corals

The post Almost Every Chemical-Based Sunscreen In The U.S. Linked To Coral Destruction appeared first on ThinkProgress.

3 Myths About The Paris Climate Agreement, Refuted

On Tuesday afternoon, a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee questioned Todd Stern, U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change, in a hearing on the forthcoming Paris climate agreement.

Senator Barrasso (R-WY) used the opportunity to make a number of familiar objections to the agreement. He claimed, for example, that the agreement “won’t achieve the environmental gains that have been promised.” He further claimed that the United States is reducing greenhouse gas emissions while fast-developing economies such as China “are getting a pass on having to take any shared economic pain.” He also claimed that the administration is acting to circumvent Congress and that the agreement must be submitted to the Senate for formal consent.

Stern refuted each of these objections. The reality, he explained, is that the agreement has the potential to be successful in addressing carbon pollution. It also will elicit serious climate action from all countries, including fast-developing economies, and will not penalize the U.S. economy. Further, it is not the case that the administration is seeking to illicitly bypass Congress.

Here are the three myths about the Paris climate agreement, refuted:

‘Paris is bound to fail’

One takeaway from the hearing was that it is a mistake to claim that the Paris agreement is bound to fail. The agreement can actually prove successful in limiting carbon pollution.

A key aspect of the Paris outcome will be a set of nationally determined pledges from all parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, to limit carbon pollution. Approximately 150 countries have already submitted pledges to the UNFCCC with target dates of 2025 or 2030.

Pledges submitted to date now cover approximately 90 percent of world emissions and have lowered projected warming to 2.7 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100, according to an analysis from Climate Action Tracker cited by Stern. By contrast, currently implemented policies result in projected warming of 3.6 degrees C.

This decrease in projected warming is both remarkable and insufficient. The internationally recognized threshold for avoiding the most dangerous effects of climate change is an increase of 2 degrees C.

The Paris agreement, however, can nevertheless prove effective in protecting current and future generations. This is because the agreement will produce a lasting framework, in which the parties improve their pledges over cycles and review progress. “We need successive periods to ratchet up ambition,” Stern said. “We would like to see these every five years.”

‘The United States should not act because the rest of the world will not act’

Another takeaway from the hearing was that it is a fallacy to maintain that the United States should not transition to a clean energy economy because the rest of the world will not act.

In the run-up to Paris, many developing countries are making serious commitments to limit carbon pollution. Approximately two-thirds of the post-2020 climate goals submitted to the UNFCCC to date have been from developing countries. Brazil, for example, pledged to reduce emissions 37 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. South Africa pledged to peak emissions by 2025. Mexico pledged to peak emissions by 2026. China pledged to peak emissions around 2030. India pledged to increase non-fossil energy to account for 40 percent of electric power capacity by 2030.

These are not hollow pledges. As Stern indicated in the hearing, China’s pledge to increase renewable energy to account for 20 percent of energy consumption by 2030 will necessitate a deployment of clean energy electricity capacity that rivals the total electricity capacity of the United States.

In another notable shift, developing countries are increasingly contributing to international climate finance. In September, China announced that it would channel more than $3 billion in climate finance through the China South-South Cooperation Fund on Climate Change. In addition, countries such as Mexico, Peru, and Colombia have joined traditional donors such as the United States, European Union, and Japan in support of the Green Climate Fund.

The Paris agreement will cement a new geopolitics of climate action. It will expect all parties to the UNFCCC to submit emissions reduction pledges, make them more ambitious over time, and report on progress. The Paris agreement therefore stands in marked contrast to the Kyoto Protocol — in which the United States did not participate — which sought emissions reductions only from developed countries. “This is a completely different ball game,” said Stern, calling the Paris agreement “the not-Kyoto.”

Further, it is not the case that the U.S. or any parties to the UNFCCC are trading economic prosperity for emissions reductions. There has been a recent wave of business support for a strong multilateral agreement, through developments such as the October 16 declaration of oil and gas CEOs and the October 18 pledge of 81 large U.S. companies. “Business leaders live in a fact-based world,” Stern said. He noted that support for climate action is not only on the right side of history but also on “the right side of the balance sheet.”

‘The Senate has to approve any agreement that comes out of Paris’

In the hearing, Barrasso claimed that the agreement must be sent to the Senate for formal consent. He further charged that “whatever deal is reached in backrooms of the Paris climate change conference, it has been telegraphed by this Administration that the deal will be a calculated end-run around Congress.”

This narrative is misguided; there is no effort to pursue U.S. participation in the agreement illicitly. Whether the Paris climate agreement will qualify as an executive agreement or a treaty will depend on its content, which is still under negotiation. Elements that would suggest the need for formal congressional consent include legally binding national emissions reduction goals or legally binding national finance commitments.

It is possible, however, that the Paris agreement will lack these elements and will qualify as an executive agreement rather than a treaty. Although the core Paris agreement will be legally binding, the associated national goals are expected to be non-binding political commitments.

As Senator Markey noted in the hearing, the Paris agreement is being negotiated under the parent treaty of the UNFCCC. In 1992, the George H.W. Bush Administration submitted the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to the Senate, which gave its unanimous consent to U.S. ratification. The UNFCCC included the primary goal of reducing global carbon pollution to avoid dangerous climate change. As a party to the treaty, the U.S. is already committed to seek emissions reductions and report on progress.

If the content of the final agreement qualifies as an executive agreement — which is looking increasingly likely as the Paris meeting approaches — the Senate’s consent to the UNFCCC, as a parent treaty, would provide authorization for U.S. participation. The president’s foreign affairs power would provide authorization as well, as would the fact that the agreement would require no new legislation to be given domestic effect.

* * *

Stern made clear in the hearing that opposition to the agreement is economic and diplomatic folly. It is also at odds with the welfare and security of the United States. The agreement should therefore inspire broad bipartisan support.

Gwynne Taraska is a Senior Policy Advisor at the Center for American Progress, where she works on international climate policy. She is in Bonn, Germany, this week for the Paris track negotiating session.

Tags

Climate ChangeParis 2015SenateTodd Stern

The post 3 Myths About The Paris Climate Agreement, Refuted appeared first on ThinkProgress.