Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 86

Nearly 90 Percent Of Americans Think Political Candidates Should Understand Science

When it comes to climate change, many politicians who reject mainstream climate science often claim, “I’m not a scientist.”

According to a new poll, the majority of Americans are responding to that by saying, “Well, maybe you should be.”

In a public opinion poll commissioned by Research!America and ScienceDebate.org and conducted by Zogby Analytics, 87 percent of Americans said that they think candidates running for Congress or president should have a basic understanding of the science that informs public policy decisions. That opinion holds true across the political spectrum, with 92 percent of Democrats, 90 percent of Republicans, and 79 percent of Independents saying that it’s important to them that candidates have a baseline understanding of science.

“Evidence from science is the great equalizer in a democracy,” Shawn Otto, chair of ScienceDebate.org, said in a press release. “We are living in a new age when science affects every aspect of public policy, and voters want candidates to give science issues like climate change, healthcare, GMO foods, and jobs in the new tech economy a higher priority.”

The findings come from a nationwide online survey of 1,002 adults. The organizations that commissioned the survey are nonprofits advocating a larger role for science in public policy — ScienceDebate.org, for instance, is campaigning for a “science-themed” debate to be held during the 2016 presidential election. According to the survey, voters support this idea, with 91 percent of Democrats, 88 percent of Republicans, and 78 percent of Independents wanting to see candidates discuss science-related issues during debates.

87 percent of Americans said that they think candidates running for Congress or President should have a basic understanding of the science that informs public policy decisions

Several current Republican presidential candidates have been known to trot out the “I’m not a scientist” trope to defend their contrarian views on climate change. Earlier this week, Ben Carson — a neurosurgeon with a clear background in science — compared understanding the complexities of climate science to understanding how the Earth rotates on its axis, or how gravity works.

“Gravity, where did it come from?” Carson asked a crowd during a town hall at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire. For what it’s worth, Carson also does not believe in evolution.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is now a full-fledged climate denier, but in 2009, when running for Senate, he told reporters, “I’m not a scientist. I’m not qualified to make that decision,” when asked whether humans contribute to climate change.

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum made waves earlier this summer during an interview with a Philadelphia radio station when he claimed that Pope Francis should back off talking about climate change, saying that the Catholic Church would be “better off leaving science to the scientists.” Later, in an interview with Fox News Sunday, the former Pennsylvania senator claimed that he was more qualified than the Pope to talk about climate change because “people in government have to make decision with regard to public policy that affect American workers.” Unlike the pope, who studied chemistry in school, Santorum has no background in science.

Unlike Santorum, Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) does have a background in science — he majored in biology in college. But he, too, pleads ignorance when it comes to climate science, telling a reporter in 2014 “I’d leave it to the scientists to decide how much [human activity contributes to climate change], what it means, and what the consequences are.”

Among scientists there is a 97 percent consensus that climate change is happening and is a result of human activity. In an effort to better communicate climate science with those in charge of public policy, several key climate assessments, including reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Climate Assessment, contain summaries or language targeted directly at policy makers.

Politicians weren’t always so far removed from science. Thomas Jefferson, in the Enlightenment tradition of his time, spoke five languages, had a keen interest in science, and was president of the American Philosophical Society. Abraham Lincoln, during his presidency, signed into law a bill that created the National Academy of Sciences. And Theodore Roosevelt, a noted outdoorsman and published ornithologist, oversaw the creation of the U.S. Forest Service.

Tags

Climate ChangePoliticsScience

The post Nearly 90 Percent Of Americans Think Political Candidates Should Understand Science appeared first on ThinkProgress.

The Future Of Our Food Depends On Honeybees, And The USDA Is Spending Millions To Save Them

In case you haven’t heard, honeybees aren’t doing so great. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture thinks it’s found a way to make life a little easier for these imperiled pollinators.

This week, the USDA announced that it would be setting aside $4 million for farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners who want to plant more pollinator-friendly flora — including wildflowers, native grasses, and cover crops like clover, sunflowers, mustard, and buckwheat — on their lands. The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) is working with farmers in six Midwestern states — Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin — to help make these bee-friendly changes.

“The future of our food supply depends on honeybees,” NRCS Chief Jason Weller said in a statement. “This effort partners with farmers, ranchers and forest landowners to ensure honeybees have safe and diverse food sources during a time when they need it most.”

The foraging opportunities for honeybees — and native pollinators like butterflies, bumblebees, and other wild bees — are greatly enhanced when they can access vast fields of wildflowers and other native plants. But these fields are being broken up by agriculture and covered up by development, so the USDA hopes that setting aside this money will help bring back foraging space for pollinators.

The USDA has been working on this initiative for the past two years, and the agency says that so far, it’s helped increase honeybee food on 35,000 acres. Last year, the agency invested $3 million into the program, which targets Midwestern states because most of the country’s beekeepers bring their bees there during the summer, turning the region into a “resting ground” for the bees, a place where they can gather pollen for the winter months. Investing in pollinator health results in other benefits for farmers, the agency says: cover crops can help improve soil quality and interrupt cycles of pests.

The decline in managed honeybees — both in the U.S. and abroad — has grabbed headlines over the last few years. That decline hasn’t slowed: a May report published by the Bee Informed Partnership, Apiary Inspectors of America, and the USDA found that U.S. beekeepers lost 42.1 percent of their bees from April 2014 to April 2015, with some states seeing losses as high as 60 percent. The survey also found that, for the first time, bee colony losses in summer surpassed losses in winter, with beekeepers losing 27.4 percent of their bees over the summer. According to the organizations involved in the research, bee losses of 18.7 percent are the maximum that beekeepers can endure and still be economically viable.

[image error]

Winter losses were slightly lower than the previous year, but experts warn that it’s too soon to consider that a trend.

“We went from horrible to bad,” Dennis vanEngelsdorp, co-author of the report and assistant professor of entomology at the University of Maryland, told ThinkProgress in May. “So instead of losing one in three, we’re losing one in five.”

The federal government has taken steps in recent years to combat this loss in honeybees, which the USDA notes pollinate $15 billion worth of crops every year. The White House announced a national strategy to combat pollinator losses in May, an effort that includes a goal of reducing winter honeybee losses to no more than 15 percent in the next 10 years. The strategy grew out of a pollinator task force created by executive order last year and includes increasing research and surveying efforts on honeybees. And, in line with the USDA’s efforts, the strategy includes a goal to “restore or enhance” seven million acres of pollinator-friendly habitat over the next five years.

The strategy also names pesticides as a possible factor in bee losses. One particularly publicized class of pesticides— neonicotinoids — have been found by researchers to cause bees to forget the smell of food, and many groups and businesses have called on the government to do more to protect bees from them.

“Mitigating the effects of pesticides on bees is a priority for the Federal government, as both bee pollination and insect control are essential to the success of agriculture,” the White House strategy reads. “Through actions outlined in this strategy, the federal government seeks to create physical and temporal space between the use of pesticides and those areas and times when pollinators are present.”

Other threats to bees include the varroa mite, which attach themselves to bees and suck out their circulatory fluid (the bees’ equivalent of blood). The mites can spread dangerous viruses to the bees including one that results in crumpled-up, useless wings in young bees. And poor nutrition — caused by lack of foraging ground — is also likely contributing to summer losses.

Tags

BeesHoney BeesUSDA

The post The Future Of Our Food Depends On Honeybees, And The USDA Is Spending Millions To Save Them appeared first on ThinkProgress.

The Fires In Indonesia Are A Health And Climate Nightmare

Indonesia is in the midst of the worst spate of forest fires in nearly two decades, sending choking smoke across Southeast Asia, releasing tons of carbon, and destroying thousands of acres of peat forest, one of the world’s most effective carbon sinks. The president of the island nation called for assistance this week from Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, and Russia to help fight the fires, which have been smoldering for months now.

“We have asked for help and we have received help from Singapore,” President Widodo said in a statement reported by Reuters. “We hope this will speed up the process because fires on peat land is different from regular forest fires.”

Indonesia had previously rejected an offer of help from neighboring Singapore, which has been suffering weeks of crippling pollution carried on trade winds. Malaysia, too, has been hit with the smoke from fires that were likely started by palm oil and wood pulp producers, who use slash and burn techniques to clear land on Sumatra and Borneo.

Singapore closed schools recently due to the smoke and has a standing alert on its environmental agency page. Exposure to smoke is associated with short- and long-term health impacts, including higher rates of asthma and asthma attacks and declines in cardiovascular health.

“Thousands of people in Sumatra and Kalimantan are sick. Little babies are dying because of the haze,” said Bustar Maitar, global head of Greenpeace’s Indonesia forests campaign.

[image error]

A heat map shows where fires are burning and the wind patterns carrying smoke up through Southeast Asia.

CREDIT: Global Forest Fires Watch/Dylan Petrohilos

Moreover, the fires burning in Indonesia are a climatologist’s nightmare — a perfect confluence of everything we should not be doing. Not only do forest fires release carbon and other greenhouse gases, they also reduce the amount of carbon absorbed by the environment. A recent study from the University of California, Berkeley found that carbon emissions from fires in that state had been drastically underestimated. Greenpeace estimates that the Indonesia fires will emit more carbon this year than the entire United Kingdom.

Land use, including peat and forest fires, accounts for 63 percent of Indonesia’s emissions. Indonesia is the sixth-largest emitter in the world, due almost entirely to land use. Indonesia has a moratorium in place on clearing “primary forests” (forests that have never been cleared or disrupted) and on converting peat bogs, an unusually effective type of carbon sink, which can release huge amounts of carbon when burned. Under its recently submitted emissions pledge to the United Nations, Indonesia said it will continue to reduce deforestation.

But that goal might be difficult to achieve. Indonesia has a long history of slash-and-burn agriculture. While technically illegal, the practice continues in the largely rural island nation, and experts have called for international intervention.

“You need to understand that the root cause of the fire is attributed largely on the social-economic issues,” Nirarta Samadhi, country director for the World Resources Institute, told Climate Home.

For a visual tour of the crisis, check out this drone footage from Greenpeace, showing tendrils of smoke rising ineluctably from acres upon acres of dense forest.

Tags

firesforest fireIndonesiaMalaysiaPeatSingapore

The post The Fires In Indonesia Are A Health And Climate Nightmare appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Study Links Fracking To Premature Births, High-Risk Pregnancies

A new study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has linked hydraulic fracturing — the process of pumping chemical-laced water into shale to extract the oil or gas embedded within — to premature births and high-risk pregnancies.

Preterm births were 40 percent higher among women who lived in areas of intense drilling and fracking operations, and these women’s pregnancies were 30 percent more likely to be considered “high-risk,” the authors found.

Preterm birth — when a baby is born earlier than the 37th week of pregnancy — is associated with a range of medical problems, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Being born premature is linked to breathing problems, cerebral palsy, and hearing and vision impairments. In addition, preterm-related causes of death are the single leading cause of infant deaths, the CDC reports, accounting for 35 percent of infant deaths in 2010. Preterm birth can cause long-term neurological disabilities.

“The growth in the fracking industry has gotten way out ahead of our ability to assess what the environmental and, just as importantly, public health impacts are,” study leader Brian S. Schwartz, MD, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Bloomberg School, said in a statement.

In the past decade, fracking has experienced a boom across the United States, from Pennsylvania, where this study took place, to North Dakota, Texas, and California.

[image error]

Production of natural gas from shale grew nearly seven-fold in the United States from 2007 to 2014.

“More than 8,000 unconventional gas wells have been drilled in Pennsylvania alone,” Schwartz said. “We’re allowing this while knowing almost nothing about what it can do to health. Our research adds evidence to the very few studies that have been done in showing adverse health outcomes associated with the fracking industry.”

Indeed, studies on fracking have linked the process to a number of concerns. Preliminary research from Colorado and Pennsylvania had already pointed to low birth weights. More generally, a Yale study found that people who live near natural gas wells are more than twice as likely to report respiratory and skin conditions.

Researchers in Texas found higher levels of cancer-causing chemicals in the drinking water near fracking sites. Researchers at Duke found that wastewater, produced by both conventional and unconventional oil drilling, has high volumes of elements that basically turn into chemical cleaning agents when mixed with other pollutants.

The most comprehensive water contamination study is likely an EPA report, which concluded earlier this year that fracking has not led to “widespread, systemic” water contamination. However, the agency did find several specific instances of contamination from fracking and concluded that fracking creates several key vulnerabilities that could potentially undermine the health of drinking water in the United States.

“Fracking is a public health disaster unfolding before our very eyes,” Dr. Gina Angiola, a board member of Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility, said in a statement. “A premature birth can lead to a lifetime of health problems and expenses. Families suffer, while industry profits. Unacceptable.”

Tags

Frackingpreterm birth

The post Study Links Fracking To Premature Births, High-Risk Pregnancies appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Massive Coral Bleaching Event Is Sweeping Across The World’s Oceans

For the third time in recorded history, a massive coral bleaching event is unfolding throughout the world’s oceans, stretching from Hawaii to the Indian Ocean.

A group of ocean scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), XL Catlin Seaview Survey, the University of Queensland, and Reef Check, confirmed this bleaching event is being brought on by a combination of a strong El Niño pattern, a warm water mass in the Pacific called “the Blob,” and increasingly warming ocean temperatures brought on by climate change. This potentially lethal mixture of elements is expected to impact about 38 percent of the world’s coral reefs by the end of this year and kill over 4,633 square miles (12,000 square kilometers) of reefs. NOAA predicts that by the end of 2015, almost 95 percent of U.S. coral reefs will have been exposed to ocean conditions that can cause corals to bleach.

“This is already an unusually long time” for a coral bleaching event to be going on, said Mark Eakin, NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch coordinator. “And El Niño is expected to continue well in to next year, so it is expected to that this will start all over again in 2016 and may get worse.”

[image error]

Alice Lawrence, a marine biologist, assesses the bleaching at Airport Reef in American Samoa.

CREDIT: XL Catlin Seaview Survey

This bleaching event is of particularly high concern to ocean experts because of its duration and intensified causes. Eakin explained to ThinkProgress that this bleaching event began in June 2014, and has been continuously spreading across the Pacific Ocean. By 2015, coral bleaching was occurring in the south Pacific Ocean, in areas such as the American Samoa Islands and the Solomon Islands. It has now spread further in to the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, and coral bleaching has been reported in Florida, Cuba, Bahamas, Haiti, Puerto Rico and other coastal countries. Coral in Hawaii, specifically, is in the worst condition scientists have ever seen. This is only the second bleaching occurrence in the Hawaii region’s history.

“People are very dependent on coral reefs around the world. Half a billion people rely on coral reefs and fisheries to survive,” Eakin said. The organizations also indicated that over $30 billion in income is at stake because of this event.

According to the XL Catlin Seaview Survey, 93 percent of the heat that’s been generated by climate change has been absorbed by the ocean. So, coral bleaching acts as a visual indicator of ocean warming. When corals are stressed by temperature changes, as well as changes in amount of light or nutrients, they expel the symbiotic algae that live in their tissues, which causes them to turn completely white or pale. Without the algae in their tissues, coral loses its major source of food and is more susceptible to disease. Coral can bounce back from small amounts of bleaching, but long-term bleaching is often deadly.

[image error]

NOAA’s standard 4-month bleaching outlook shows a threat of bleaching continuing in the Caribbean, Hawaii and Kiribati, and potentially expanding into the Republic of the Marshall Islands.

CREDIT: NOAA

A World Wild Life study released last month predicted losing all coral reefs by 2050 due to warming oceans and ocean acidification. Coral reef ecosystems make up only 0.1 percent of ocean area, but nearly a quarter of all marine species depend on them to survive and rely on their habitat.

“A lot of the world’s marine protected areas (MPAs) are focused on coral reefs and they are a very important way to protect coral reefs,” Eakin said. “But, at a time like this, even they are not enough.”

The world has already lost 27 percent of its coral reefs and it is estimated that 58 percent are threatened by human activity. Only 3 to 4 percent of the worlds ocean’s are protected, and 27 percent of the world’s coral reefs are protected by MPA’s.

The only real way to stop this is to stop climate change

Jennifer Koss, NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program acting program manager, said in a statement that experts need to “think globally and act locally” to start fixing or slowing this problem. “To solve the long-term, global problem, however, we need to better understand how to reduce the unnatural carbon dioxide levels that are the major driver of the warming,” she said.

The effects of coral bleaching can be minimized by ensuring that local policies — like over-fishing and pollution regulations — are enforced. Shiva Polefka, ocean policy analyst at Center for American Progress, told ThinkProgress that although Marine Protected Areas can be a tool for regulation, more needs to be done to ensure coral’s survival.

“As scary as global warming and bleaching events are, corals face an array of human pressures, and if we can manage those better, lessen them, then coral reefs have a fighting chance to survive the warming that is already locked in and underway,” he said via email.

[image error]

A long-nose file fish struggling to find coral polyps to eat. File fish are iconic reef fish that are totally reliant on healthy corals for food.

CREDIT: XL Catlin Seaview Survey

A recent discovery around Heron Island, located off the coast of Queensland, Australia, found that the yellow finger corals have built up a resiliency to ocean acidification. This is most likely a response to fluctuations in temperature and pH, Mongabay reported.

Unlike years past, recent technological advancements have allowed scientists at NOAA to monitor coral in near-real-time, closely assess reef heath, and deploy rapid response teams from the XL Catlin Seaview Survey and its University of Queensland partners to capture images of coral bleaching as it happens. Reef Check also deploys volunteer citizen scientists worldwide. The data collected helps scientific research teams advance their understanding of coral recovery and support future restoration efforts.

“The only real way to stop this is to stop climate change,” said Mark Eakin. “The only way to stop this at a large scale is to take actions on a worldwide, long term scale.”

Tags

Climate ChangeCoral BleachingCoralsReefs

The post Massive Coral Bleaching Event Is Sweeping Across The World’s Oceans appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Now Is The Time For A Carbon Tax, IMF Chief Says

Have we reached a tipping point towards putting a price on carbon?

The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) called for a carbon tax late Wednesday at the IMF/World Bank annual meeting in Lima, Peru. Meanwhile, reports show that more and more places are adopting carbon taxes, in largely successful efforts to use market forces to increase clean energy development.

Climate change is now a “macro-critical” issue, IMF managing director Christine Lagarde said. The wording there is important, because the IMF defines macro-critical issues as “either critical to the achievement of macroeconomic program goals or necessary for the implementation of specific provisions under the IMF’s Articles of Agreement,” the Sierra Club noted Thursday.

“The IMF has correctly recognized, after taking a sober look at major threats to the long term stability of all countries, that a changing climate poses threats to the stability and vitality of the world’s economies,” Steve Herz, a senior attorney with Sierra Club’s International Climate Program, said in a statement emailed to ThinkProgress.

This is just the latest in the IMF’s commentary on the economic damage caused by systems that support fossil fuels. The IMF — whose “primary purpose is to ensure the stability of the international monetary system” — made headlines earlier this year when it reported that governments spend $5.3 trillion in fossil fuel subsidies annually.

“Lagarde’s comprehensive climate change agenda for the IMF is historic both for its content, and for its timing ahead of international climate negotiations this summer in Paris,” Herz said.

Lagarde referred to the problem of energy subsidies again Wednesday during the organization’s Conversation on Climate Change. “Now is the time to phase out energy subsidies,” she said.

Lagarde: if we chicken out of climate change we will all turn to chicken: we will be fried, grilled and roasted. #Voices4Climate

— IMF (@IMFNews) October 7, 2015

The IMF, which carries out its mission through monitoring, lending, and technical assistance, cannot invest directly. “What we can do is certainly provide strong advocacy for things such as removing subsidies that actually go to the wrong pockets. What we can do is provide tools for countries to actually set the right prices, including externalities,” Lagarde said.

Phasing out energy subsidies, such as the United States’ tax incentives on oil and gas exploration, might prove harder than adding a carbon tax — a program that has already proven successful across a wide swath of economies.

There are 40 countries and more than 20 cities, states and regions, that already have or have planned carbon prices, covering about 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report released Thursday by the New Climate Economy.

[image error]

According to that report, carbon pricing works, and it would work even better if governments raised the cost to polluters.

There are myriad examples of carbon tax programs that have worked. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, for instance, which includes nine northeastern states, is credited with adding $1.3 billion to the economy there, while saving consumers $460 million in energy costs.

There are a number of ways to structure carbon pricing. Revenue from RGGI, for instance, goes back into state funds that support investment in efficiency and clean energy programs. That is essentially the structure Lagarde supported, with revenues going internationally to support renewable energy in developing nations, which have been promised $100 billion to help reach emissions reduction targets.

But for years economists in the United States have called for a revenue neutral carbon tax. Under this type of program, carbon emitters would be taxed, but the money would not go into government coffers. Instead, the revenue would be returned to consumers, most likely as a tax rebate.

Revenue neutral carbon taxes appeal to free-market conservatives because they do not increase the size of government, as well as climate change activists, who see them as an effective deterrent to continued investment in carbon-intensive energy sources.

However the plan is structured, advocates of carbon pricing want to strike while the iron is hot — and prices are low.

“Conditions are now particularly favorable for both carbon pricing and fossil fuel consumption subsidy reform due to the fall in global oil prices over the last year, combined with lower gas and coal prices,” the report says.

“The time is right to introduce carbon prices around the world, as well as to pursue complementary measures like reform for fossil fuel subsidies, which act like negative carbon prices,” Lord Nicholas Stern, co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, the parent organization of the New Climate Economy, said in a statement. “The world economy is undergoing a remarkable period of transition, and we need to act now to avoid locking ourselves into unsustainable development patterns.”

Tags

carboncarbon pricingChristine LagardeemissionsIMF

The post Now Is The Time For A Carbon Tax, IMF Chief Says appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Major Pumpkin Supplier Is Anticipating Yields Cut In Half

The potential consequences of climate change are pretty well known: rising sea levels, global food insecurity, more frequent and extreme wildfires, stronger storms.

But what you might not know is that climate change could also threaten your holiday slice of pumpkin pie.

This year, Libby’s Pumpkin — which supplies more than 85 percent of the world’s canned pumpkin — is anticipating that their annual pumpkin yields will be reduced by half due to an unusually rainy late spring and early summer. The company, which is owned by Nestle, is headquartered in Morton, Illinois — the self-proclaimed pumpkin capital of the world. Ninety percent of the United States’ pumpkins are grown within a 90-mile radius of Peoria, Illinois, which is just 10 miles from Morton.

When we ship the last of the 2015 crop — in early November — we will be left with no reserves

Illinois experienced record-setting precipitation in June, with more than nine inches falling over most of the state throughout the month — 5.33 inches above average. From May through July, prime growing months for the kinds of processing pumpkins found throughout Illinois, the state received almost two feet of rain — 10.4 inches above average, according to Jim Angel, Illinois’ state climatologist.

“This year’s harvest was reduced because rains came early in the season during a critical growth period,” Roz O’Hearn, corporate and brand affairs director for Nestle USA, told ThinkProgress. “The result: not as many pumpkins formed from the flowers.”

Normally, Libby’s harvests pumpkins from late August through the end of October or early November, but this year, the harvest ended on October 5, almost a month early, due to poor yields.

“We originally reported our yield could be off by as much as a third, but updated crop reports indicate yields will be reduced by half this year,” O’Hearn said.

O’Hearn told ThinkProgress that Libby’s anticipates having enough product to get customers through the Thanksgiving holiday, but expects that holiday demand will completely deplete their stock, leaving nothing in reserve. That means that once Libby’s makes its final shipment of canned pumpkin — probably around the beginning of November — there will be no extra canned pumpkin to stock shelves.

“We plant several thousand acres with Libby’s select seed. Generally, the yields meet the current year’s needs and provides enough reserve to carry us through the start of the New Year,” O’Hearn said. “Unfortunately, when we ship the last of the 2015 crop — in early November — we will be left with no reserves. That means we will have no pumpkin to ship until the next harvest, which will begin in August 2016.”

At a Senate roundtable last week on climate change and food production, Nestle’s president of corporate affairs Paul Bakus spoke of declines in Libby’s pumpkin harvests. The last time Libby’s was hit with a shortage of similar magnitude was 2009, when two times the normal amount of precipitation fell during the harvest, causing tractors to become trapped in the mud and unable to reach the pumpkins before their quality degraded beyond Libby’s standards for harvest. When pumpkins sit on saturated soil for too long, O’Hearn explained, it negatively affects their quality, creating an environment conducive to blight and mildew. During the 2009 shortage, supply was already down from a poor harvest in 2008, and pumpkin stocks were depleted into 2010.

In central Illinois … May through June precipitation has increased by an average of two inches

Heavy spring rains are consistent with the kind of weather Illinois can expect to see in the future due to climate change, according to the National Climate Assessment, an increase in both average precipitation and heavy precipitation is projected for Illinois by the middle of the current century. Over the past century, Angel points out on his blog that Illinois’ average precipitation has increased by between 10 and 15 inches, depending on location. In central Illinois, where Libby’s pumpkin growing operation is located, May through June precipitation has increased by an average of two inches (though Angel points out notable exceptions, like drought years in 1988, 2005, and 2012). For the entire state of Illinois, four of the 10 rainiest Junes on record have occurred since 2010.

O’Hearn did not say whether Libby’s has begun planning for a future where frequent late spring rains are more common, though Bakus made clear during the Senate roundtable that Nestle as a corporation is attune to the potential impacts on their business due to climate change.

“When we feel the impact of climate change, we feel it globally,” he said.

And when it comes to messing with beloved pumpkin products, climate change doesn’t seem content to stop with pie — as the Atlantic noted last month, unseasonably warm summer temperatures in Oregon forced Rogue Brewery to release its seasonal pumpkin beer five weeks earlier than usual this year.

Starbucks, which announced this year that it would begin including pumpkin puree into its pumpkin spice latte, did not respond to ThinkProgress’ request for information about how the impending pumpkin shortage might impact the beloved/hated seasonal beverage. But even if there’s enough pumpkin to go around, the PSL might not be long for the world: recent studies show that climate change is already taking its toll on the global supply of Arabica coffee.

Tags

Climate ChangeFood

The post Major Pumpkin Supplier Is Anticipating Yields Cut In Half appeared first on ThinkProgress.

New USDA Guidelines Leave Out Sustainability

When the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services release their updated dietary guidelines this year, one highly-publicized section will be missing.

The dietary guidelines, a government document that provides details on what makes up a healthy diet and lifestyle, won’t include discussions of how sustainability relates to diet. In a blog post Tuesday, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell outlined their decision not to include the topic of the environment — something many in the environmental and public health communities have pushed for over the last year — in the guidelines, which are updated every five years and whose latest version is due out this fall.

We do not believe that the 2015 DGAs are the appropriate vehicle for this important policy conversation about sustainability

“Issues of the environment and sustainability are critically important and they are addressed in a number of initiatives within the Administration,” the two secretaries write. “In terms of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs), we will remain within the scope of our mandate in the 1990 National Nutrition Monitoring and Related Research Act (NNMRRA), which is to provide ‘nutritional and dietary information and guidelines’… ‘based on the preponderance of the scientific and medical knowledge.’ The final 2015 Guidelines are still being drafted, but because this is a matter of scope, we do not believe that the 2015 DGAs are the appropriate vehicle for this important policy conversation about sustainability.”

Sustainability first emerged as a potential topic of inclusion for the dietary guidelines last year, during a meeting of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, a group of scientists responsible for coming up with recommendations for the guidelines. Then, the committee included sections on sustainability in its advisory report.

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

The committee’s reference to the climate and environmental impacts of a person’s diet excited environmentalists, who saw it as a way for the federal government to educate the American public about food’s — and specifically meat’s — link to climate change. Studies have found that meat-eaters contribute 50 to 54 percent more food-related greenhouse gases than vegetarians do, and that, in terms of emissions, agriculture is worse for the climate than deforestation.

So it was no surprise that environmentalists were disappointed by USDA and HHS’ decision Tuesday. Not just because the federal government missed an opportunity to link food choices with environmental issues, but because there appeared to be significant support for the inclusion of sustainability in the guidelines: one analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity looked at the 29,000 public comments on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s report, and found “overwhelming support” for including sustainability. And six health and food experts wrote a letter in Science last week saying that “the issue of scope is not the overarching concern, but a political maneuver to excise sustainability from dietary discussions.”

“It’s frustrating to see the Obama administration again allow politics to trump science,” Stephanie Feldstein, population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “The decision to treat sustainability and dietary health as separate issues only benefits industry profits while putting our health, our environment and the future of our food system at risk.”

The politics Feldstein is referencing include major pushback from the meat industry, which pounced on the issue as soon as news of the advisory committee’s discussions of sustainability got out last year. The North American Meat Institute (NAMI) issued a statement in December 2014 that blasted the committee for addressing sustainability, saying that the committee’s “focus on sustainability is objectionable because it is not within the committee’s expertise” — a claim of sustainability being beyond the scope of the dietary guidelines that Vilsack and Burwell ended up agreeing with.

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

“The way that this has played out shows that there are clear politics behind it

Ricardo Salvador, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Food and Environment Program, told ThinkProgress that he doesn’t think there’s much doubt that this pressure from the food industry played into HHS and USDA’s decision. Industry pressure clearly influenced Congress, which last year tacked on a list of directives to a spending bill that included “concern” that the scientific committee “is showing an interest in incorporating agriculture production practices and environmental factors” into their recommendations.” The document “direct[ed] the Obama administration to ignore such factors in the next revision of the guidelines.”

“The way that this has played out shows that there are clear politics behind it,” Salvador said. The food industry, he said, was worried that if the guidelines tied environmental health to food production, profits would be affected. “Everybody who has been following this process and knows who’s speaking with whom knows food industry executives have been in the office and pressuring the secretary on this issue.”

Salvador, along with noted food experts Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, and Olivier De Schutter, published a piece in Medium this week that calls for the creation of the country’s first National Food Policy, a plan that would incorporate issues surrounding hunger, climate change, environmental degradation, health, and inequality — topics that are usually tackled through “piecemeal and often contradictory approaches,” even though they’re “interlocking problems that can best be addressed through a unified and coordinated policy focused on their common denominator: the food system.”

One of the main arguments of the piece, Salvador said, is that a lot of the dysfunction present in the food and agricultural system arises because the country doesn’t recognize the connections within the food system. Wage inequality is connected to the exploitation of labor for food production he said, just as climate change is related to producing and shipping food — and as climate change impacts the production of food.

“This is an instance where we would all really benefit from making those connections,” he said.

The connections won’t be made this year, at least not in the dietary guidelines. But some agree that it’s only a matter of time before the country realizes that the heavy rains and droughts that decimate crops and the overfishing that’s depleting the oceans mean that diet is inexorably tied to sustainability. The public needs to realize that first, Salvador said, before the government can be swayed.

“What policymakers are able to do…is not really ultimately decided by the backroom politics. It’s really decided by culture of the nation,” he said. “We will decide — as with civil rights movement and the marriage equality movement — that as a culture, we’re not going to put up with a food system that exploits nature and people. When that happens, politicians wont have a choice.”

Tags

Department of Health and Human ServicesSustainabilityUSDA

The post New USDA Guidelines Leave Out Sustainability appeared first on ThinkProgress.

California Governor Signs Ambitious Renewable Energy Bill Into Law

While a whole bunch of states are suing the EPA for regulating carbon spewing from the electricity sector, other states, such as California, are moving full-steam ahead towards renewables and carbon-cutting.

Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill into law Wednesday that requires state-regulated utilities to get a whopping 50 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, and hydro, by 2030. The law also requires a 50 percent increase in energy efficiency in buildings by that year. The goals were previously laid out during Brown’s inaugural address.

“This is really a very significant occasion,” Brown said at the signing event Wednesday in Los Angeles. “California is taking the lead, there is no question about it.”

The state had previously set a mandate of procuring 33 percent renewable energy by 2020. The original bill, introduced by Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, is part of a larger suite of climate-related legislation introduced this year.

“California is laying the groundwork for a healthier and sustainable future for all of our families,” de León said in an emailed statement to ThinkProgress. “We are showing the world through innovation how we can transition and increase access to renewable energy while cleaning up the air we breathe, especially in our most polluted communities.”

It remains to be seen exactly how California’s utilities will achieve this new goal. A report from Energy+Environment Economics earlier this year found that “significant renewable integration challenges are likely to emerge… above 33 percent.” However, benchmarks for renewable energy are constantly increasing, while smart grids and storage help even out demand and make managing transmission easier.

California already gets more electricity from solar than any other state in the country, with enough solar capacity installed in the state to power nearly 3 million homes — and that investment has paid off. Nearly 55,000 Californians work in the solar industry.

The goals in developing renewable energy and protecting California’s natural resources don’t need to conflict

But not all news out of the clean energy industry is good. Some projects have been criticized for their outsized impact on natural resources — i.e. plant and animal habitats. A new report from the Nature Conservancy, though, suggests that California can reach its 50 percent goals without adversely impacting, well, nature, and without increasing costs.

“The goals in developing renewable energy and protecting California’s natural resources don’t need to conflict,” Erica Brand, energy program director at the Nature Conservancy, told ThinkProgress. But land use is also an important component of nature — and of climate change mitigation.

Of course, climate change itself has adverse effects on wildlife. “Moving California to a clean energy future…is incredibly exciting and possible,” Brand said. “It’s important for our community, our economy, and the environment.”

California has the third-lowest emissions per capita (after Washington, D.C. and New York), but as the most populous state, it is still the second-largest emitter in the country. Meanwhile, the state has been hit hard by a drought that has been tied to climate change.

Wednesday’s new law is unlikely to be the last thing California says about climate change mitigation. A part of the original bill that also called for 50 percent reductions in petroleum use in California’s cars and trucks was jettisoned last month, under pressure from the oil industry, supporters said.

Nationwide, transportation accounts for about 30 percent of carbon emissions, but California, with its so-called car culture, is even higher. According to state data, 38 percent the state’s greenhouse gas emissions came from transportation in 2009.

But even without the oil limits, California is one of the country’s most aggressive states on climate change action. Hawaii, which recently set a goal of reaching 100 percent renewable energy by 2050, is the only state that has been more ambitious in its energy planning. California is the only state to have an energy storage mandate.

The governor, for his part, is leading the charge against anyone who denies the science of climate change.

“Climate skeptics don’t quite get it,” Brown said Wednesday. “They are in political Pluto, and we have to bring them back to Earth, where the rest of us live.”

Tags

CaliforniaRenewable EnergySB 350Utilities

The post California Governor Signs Ambitious Renewable Energy Bill Into Law appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Yes, The Pope Supports A Carbon Price. Economists Just ‘Misinterpreted The Encyclical.’

The pope’s climate encyclical does not oppose carbon pricing. Quite the reverse, as we will see.

Leading climate economists who support putting a price on carbon, including William Nordhaus and Robert Stavins, have criticized the pope for supposedly opposing or ignoring carbon taxes and/or carbon pricing.

I have long thought that some people were misreading and overemphasizing one paragraph in the encyclical at the expense of others that are clearly supportive of carbon pricing. This week I was able to get some insight from economist and longtime Vatican observer, Anthony Annett, a 15-year veteran of the International Monetary Fund who is a climate change and sustainable development advisor at Columbia’s Earth Institute and Religions for Peace.

“My view is that Nordhaus misinterpreted the encyclical…”

Annett worked with the Vatican in the run-up to the encyclical. In April, he helped organize a Vatican event on climate change co-sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. And he co-authored detailed remarks on business and market insights and implications of the Encyclical delivered at the Vatican press conference for the encyclical, named Laudato Si’.

“My view is that Nordhaus misinterpreted the encyclical,” Annett told me. “First, the pope is criticizing the potential abuse of carbon credits, not ruling them out completely. Second, the pope says nothing explicitly about carbon taxes. And later on he says that business must bear the full social cost of its activity — which really implies putting a price on carbon.”

Before focusing on the source of the misinterpretation, let me first underscore the central point that Pope Francis implicitly — indeed, it’s almost explicit — calls for pricing carbon. Paragraph 167 of the encyclical explains that the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio echoes the 1972 Stockholm Declaration and “enshrined international cooperation to care for the ecosystem of the entire earth, the obligation of those who cause pollution to assume its costs, and the duty to assess the environmental impact of given projects and works.”

Polluters pay. They are obligated to assume the costs of polluting. To ensure there is no ambiguity about what he is saying, the pope repeats and expands the message a little later.

“As long as production is increased, little concern is given to whether it is at the cost of future resources or the health of the environment,” explains the pope in paragraph 195. He is explicitly critiquing the way businesses are driven to pursue “maximization of profits, frequently isolated from other considerations.” The pope immediately continues, “as long as the clearing of a forest increases production, no one calculates the losses entailed in the desertification of the land, the harm done to biodiversity or the increased pollution.”

The pope then directly spells out a fairly explicit call for putting a price on carbon equal to its “social costs”:

In a word, businesses profit by calculating and paying only a fraction of the costs involved. Yet only when “the economic and social costs of using up shared environmental resources are recognized with transparency and fully borne by those who incur them, not by other peoples or future generations,” can those actions be considered ethical.

In short, ethics requires the full social costs of actions that destroy a livable climate must be made clear to all and “fully borne by those who incur them.” Again, that seems like a fairly unambiguous endorsement for carbon pricing and for establishing a social cost of carbon. The pope is quoting his predecessor, Benedict, from a 2009 Encyclical Letter, which underscores the fact that this is not a new (or controversial) position from the Vatican.

[image error]

A man looks at a copy of Pope Francis’ encyclical on sale at the Vatican bookshop, in Rome, Thursday, June 18, 2015.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Andrew Medichini

Despite the pope’s straightforward statements in support of carbon pricing, Yale climate economist William Nordhaus just wrote an entire essay called “The Pope & the Market” in the October 8 issue of The New York Review of Books. He focused on this theme: “My major point is that the encyclical overlooks the central part that markets, particularly market-based environmental policies such as carbon pricing, must play if countries are to make substantial progress in slowing global warming.”

Similarly Robert Stavins, Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, told the New York Times in June, “I respect what the pope says about the need for action, but this is out of step with the thinking and the work of informed policy analysts around the world, who recognize that we can do more, faster, and better with the use of market-based policy instruments — carbon taxes and/or cap-and-trade systems.” On Monday, Stavins offered a lengthy defense of his position on his blog.

So what is the source of this confusion?

It is almost entirely due to paragraph 171 — set between the two endorsements of carbon pricing cited above. It states in full:

The strategy of buying and selling “carbon credits” can lead to a new form of speculation which would not help reduce the emission of polluting gases worldwide. This system seems to provide a quick and easy solution under the guise of a certain commitment to the environment, but in no way does it allow for the radical change which present circumstances require. Rather, it may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.

Stavins writes, “In surprisingly specific and unambiguous language, the encyclical rejects outright ‘carbon credits’ as part of a solution to the problem.” Stavins is correct that the encyclical is specific. But the term “carbon credits” — “crediti di emissione” in the Italian version — is actually quite ambiguous.

When I read it, I thought it was quite unclear exactly what the encyclical was attacking, which is why I have been trying to get some clarification.

Indeed, Stavins himself notes in his next paragraph:

If the references to “carbon credits” were intended to refer only to offset systems (such as the Clean Development Mechanism [CDM]) and not to cap-and-trade systems, then I would be much less concerned about the Pope’s complaints. However, the encyclical does not make the distinction. Indeed, I doubt that the authors of the encyclical recognize the difference, and unfortunately, readers of the encyclical will likewise lump together all carbon markets, which is what some policy makers also do, unfortunately.

Carbon credits often refer to offsets in both English and Italian. Offsets are quite problematic, since they involve letting people sell credits for emission reduction projects that might have occurred anyway. That’s why I have written so many posts critical of domestic and international offsets (especially CDM) often using the term “rip-offsets. Even in 2015, we still see headlines exposing the abuse of CDM credits, such as “Russian industry paid to increase emissions under UN carbon credits scheme.”

Given how sophisticated and detailed the analysis is in the encyclical — and given the repeated embrace of the underlying principles of carbon pricing — I thought the authors probably meant to criticize offsets and dubious CDM projects. But the ambiguity of the “carbon credits” paragraph lent itself to misinterpretation. Without further clarification from the Vatican itself, I can understand why people took that paragraph as critical of carbon trading — although I still don’t understand how one can read the encyclical and think the pope opposes carbon pricing. I’d urge the Vatican to issue a formal statement clarifying the matter as we head toward Paris, where a great many countries will be advocating carbon trading.

As for the encyclical’s broader critique of capitalism as it is currently practiced, it seems pretty clear that we have turned the global economy into a giant Ponzi scheme that betrays our children and is doomed to collapse. And that’s without even considering issues of income inequality.

Finally, we just learned that the new Chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the former Vice Chair, Korean economist Hoesung Lee. Lee explains in this video that if he had to choose the single most important policy for addressing climate change, it would be putting a price on carbon. A few have dissed him for such a view, but the fact is that we have ignored the call to action by the IPCC and others for so long, we’ve really limited the strategies available to us.

By any reasonable analysis, a serious and rising carbon price is the sine qua non for keeping total global warming below 2°C and averting catastrophic climate change. The plausible alternatives are far less market-friendly strategies. That’s a key reason why so many countries and governments — from the EU to China to California — embrace carbon pricing. With the support of the pope and other key international leaders, it seems likely this crucial policy will become even more widely used in the years ahead.

Tags

Carbon PriceClimate ChangePope Francis

The post Yes, The Pope Supports A Carbon Price. Economists Just ‘Misinterpreted The Encyclical.’ appeared first on ThinkProgress.