Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 97

Renewable Energy Progress Eclipsing Capitol Hill

Washington, D.C. is bringing solar to low-income communities.

Two distinct groups share the sidewalks of our nation’s capital. The first group has been tasked with promoting the welfare of the American public. Its members earn upwards of $170,000 a year. The second group has an annual per capita income of $45,000 and faces some of the steepest barriers to economic advancement. The first group inhabits Washington — seat of the federal government. Think marble-columned buildings, lobbyists, interns, and partisan gridlock. The second group lives in the District, which is battling high unemployment and stubbornly persistent poverty rates. Can you guess which is doing more to fight climate change?

In Washington, lawmakers may have fallen short on global warming, but in the District, local leaders are tackling carbon pollution with stunning ambition. In 2013, the District of Columbia announced its aim of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2032. As part of this effort, city officials launched an initiative to install solar panels on the roofs of 130 low-income households by the end of this month. Aside from limiting carbon pollution, the plan delivers two huge benefits to District residents.

First, the program is giving a sizable boost to the city’s burgeoning solar industry. “We use solar installers that are local businesses that are based here in the District,” said Dr. Taresa Lawrence, Deputy Director of D.C.’s Department of Energy and Environment. The low-income solar initiative is spurring the growth of small businesses. Solar companies are hiring and training local workers, helping newly-employed installers learn the skills they need to build careers in the fast-growing field.

Solar installers, in turn, are giving working families a much-needed break on energy costs. Low- and middle-income households devote a larger portion of their paycheck to utility bills. Shrinking energy bills can significantly improve quality of life. “Our low-income families have to make tough choices,” said Lawrence. “They’re choosing between buying food, buying school supplies, buying medicine… Anything the District of Columbia can do to defray those costs — that’s a win for the District and that’s a win for the household.”

Historically, solar panels have been status symbols for an energy-conscious elite, a way for wealthy families to help power their homes or heat their pools in April. The high up-front cost of solar usually constrains access to households of considerable means. Thus, while solar panels can deliver enormous savings in the long-term, working-class families have often been largely unable to reap the benefits because they cannot mount the initial financial hurdle. According to George Washington University’s Solar Institute, “households earning less than $40,000 a year make up 40 percent of all U.S. homes, and yet they account for less than five percent of all solar installations.”

Earlier this summer, the White House announced a new plan to expand access to solar power to low- and middle-income families. The initiative relies in large part on partnerships with solar companies, NGOs, and local governments. In Washington, legislative paralysis has left the federal government with a limited number of tools for dealing with carbon pollution. Since entering office and directing billions to renewable energy in the successful Recovery Act, President Obama has largely addressed climate mitigation through existing authority granted to regulate greenhouse gases in the Clean Air Act — though this has been challenged, unsuccessfully, in Congress and the courts for years.

In the District, city leaders are taking bold steps to fight climate change with the tools they have. Last month, a small D.C. regulatory board halted a multi-state, $6.8 billion proposed merger between utility giants Exelon and Pepco because it could have interfered with the progress D.C. wanted to make with renewable energy generation.

This actually isn’t just a DC-based development. It’s actually indicative of a larger trend.

Increasingly, cities will become the focal point for climate action. Today, cities account for more than 70 percent of all energy-related carbon emissions, a number that is set to rise as people around the world migrate to urban centers. Local leaders have every incentive to tackle climate change. According to a new report from the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, embracing clean energy and energy efficiency “can generate stronger growth and job creation, alleviate poverty and reduce investment costs, as well as improve quality of life through lower air pollution and traffic congestion.”

The District is a testament to this fact. City leaders aren’t waiting for Washington to come around. As D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said in a recent address, “Now — more than ever — is a critical time for the District to show leadership in energy for our residents and businesses.”

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Why Is Politico Reporting On Climate Change Like There’s Still A Debate?

Will Politico ever inform their readers there’s a big difference between those leaders who say climate change is caused by humans and those who deny it? Memo to Politico: The latter group are as scientifically wrong as those who used to say cigarette smoking isn’t harmful.

The popular news outlet has perfected the “view from nowhere” style of political reporting where the only thing that matters is personalities and the horse race. A classic, if depressing, example is their piece, “The Pope vs. The Donald.”

Politico mentions “climate change” three times in the piece. First, they note that during his congressional address late this month, Pope Francis is expected “to call on Americans to set aside their political divisions and unite to tackle challenges such as climate change, economic inequality and immigration reform.”

But why exactly is climate change a challenge? Politico never explains. Quite the reverse, actually. Politico obfuscates. The second mention is a few paragraphs later:

Since being elected pope in 2013, Francis has jolted the world with his actions and statements…. he’s called for a greater emphasis on helping the poor and demanded more action to stop climate change, which he attributes to man-made causes.

It’s absurd for Politico to toss in the phrase, “which he attributes to man-made causes.” The Pope is not the one doing the attribution. The world’s top scientists, and literally every major government in the world, are — most recently in the fifth assessment of the scientific literature of the IPCC.

Could you even imagine Politico writing, “the Pope demanded more action to stop the spread of cigarette use, which he says causes cancer and other health problems”? That would be absurd. But that is equivalent to what Politico did here.

The Encyclical explicitly makes clear the Pope is drawing on “a very solid scientific consensus” and “a number of scientific studies” and so on. As this New York Times headline put it in June when the Encyclical came out, “Pope Francis Aligns Himself With Mainstream Science on Climate.”

Heck, even the Politico reporter covering the launch broke character and snuck in this line in a June story, “The long-awaited encyclical put Pope Francis in line with the scientific consensus that climate change is an urgent threat that is largely human-caused, and he called out skeptics for delaying actions to solve it.”

Precisely. “Based on well-established evidence, about 97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening” — as the world’s largest general scientific society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, explained in its 2014 report, “What We Know.” The AAAS continued:

The science linking human activities to climate change is analogous to the science linking smoking to lung and cardiovascular diseases. Physicians, cardiovascular scientists, public health experts and others all agree smoking causes cancer. And this consensus among the health community has convinced most Americans that the health risks from smoking are real. A similar consensus now exists among climate scientists, a consensus that maintains climate change is happening, and human activity is the cause.

But as with the majority of Politico pieces on climate, readers learn nothing of this. The one final mention of climate change in the recent piece about the Pope’s coming visit is simply this: “Still, many of his declarations, especially on climate change and the dangers of ‘trickle-down economics,’ are at odds with positions held by Republicans, including nearly all of those running for president.”

Yes, the Pope’s “declarations” on climate change are “at odds with” the views of Donald Trump and virtually all other GOP presidential candidates. Shouldn’t readers get at least get one sentence saying who else Trump et al. are at odds with — like, say, every major scientific society along with the world’s leading governments and their national academies of science?

Even in articles entirely about climate change, like Monday’s “GOP to attack climate pact at home and abroad,” virtually the entire focus is the political drama. The one mention of science buried in that 1300-word piece is “In Paris, representatives of nearly 200 nations will try to hammer out an agreement for curbing the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for warming the planet and boosting sea levels.” Readers never learn who is doing the blaming or why we should listen to them and not, say, the GOP leaders who are the focus of the piece.

Most importantly, readers are never told of the likely civilization-destroying outcome if GOP leaders were actually successful at killing the global effort to preserve a livable climate.

Journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen has repeatedly criticized this “take-no-sides-at-all-cost” mentality — the “view from nowhere” as he calls it. “It’s an attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view,” explains Rosen. “American journalists have almost a lust for the View from Nowhere because they think it has more authority than any other possible stance.”

Obviously, overwhelming scientific evidence has more authority than the view from nowhere. Rosen notes that the latter view encourages journalists to think that “criticism from both sides is a sign that you’re doing something right, when you could be doing everything wrong.”

Tragically, Politico’s refusal to call out the anti-scientific views of GOP leaders doesn’t lead to “nowhere” — it leads to inaction, which itself leads to a ruined climate and chaos.

Politico is advancing a cynical view of politics wherein neither side can be “correct” and no outcome is better than another. It is reminiscent of the “chaos is a ladder” speech by the despicable Machiavellian and master cynic of Game of Thrones, Petyr ‘Littlefinger’ Baelish.

In Littlefinger’s worldview, “chaos” isn’t a bad outcome because all other things — including “love” — are “illusions”: “Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.” For Politico, the chaos of climate inaction isn’t a bad outcome because there apparently is no objective or scientific reality: “Only the horserace is real. Politics is all there is.”

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The Next Generation Of Solar Panels May Be Inspired By Ancient Japanese Papercraft

Solar designs have been inspired by leaves, windows, spray paint, and cloth. Now, a new innovation in solar technology means we can add one more inspiration to that list: the Japanese art of paper cutting, kirigami.

A study published Tuesday in Nature Communications outlines how thin, flexible solar cells shaped like cut paper would work — and how they could end up being more efficient and better at tracking the sun than conventional panels. Trackers that enable solar panels to tilt as the sun moves across the sky already exist, but according to the study, they’re often overlooked due to their heaviness and high cost — a cost that, the study notes, is actually increasing each year, even as overall solar costs continue to fall.

[image error]

CREDIT: Aaron Lamoureux – University of Michigan

“As a result, residential, pitched rooftop systems, which account for ~85% of installations, lack conventional tracking options entirely,” the study reads. “To further decrease installation costs and enable new applications, a novel approach to compact and lightweight solar tracking is required.”

That novel approach was thought up by a team of researchers at the University of Michigan. Aaron Lamoureux, a PhD student at the University of Michigan and lead author of the study, said that the group brainstormed and looked at several different patterns for solar cells before arriving at the one described in the paper.

“It looks extremely simple because it is extremely simple — it’s just linear cuts,” Lamoureux told ThinkProgress. “The other patterns we looked at were harder to make, and didn’t perform as well as far as tracking goes.”

The pattern uses super-thin crystalline gallium arsenide cells — which, historically, have struggled with high costs as a barrier to success — mounted on a plastic carrier that can be pulled and bent to capture optimal sun throughout the day. That ability to track the sun is what gives this design a leg-up over traditional rooftop solar panels.

“The amount of power you get out of a given solar cell is directly related to the area that the sun sees of that solar cell. The larger the affected area is, larger the amount of power you’re going to get,” Lamoreux said. If you look head-on at a piece of paper, then start to tilt it, it’ll appear — to your eyes — thinner and thinner until you’re just looking at the edge of the paper. “That’s what happens from the sun’s perspective,” Lamoureux said.

Existing solar tracking systems use motors to tilt the solar panels as the sun moves across the sky. Lamoureux said that, since this study represents only a proof of concept — that the idea exists and could work, but that there’s still more work to be done to develop it to operational scale — they’re still looking at different options for how the cells would be moved. If they were moved with a traditional motor, it would be smaller and more lightweight than the motors for larger solar panels. The group is also looking into the possibility of using different ways to manipulate the solar cells without traditional mechanical motors, such as impulses that would cause the cells to tilt.

[image error]

A quarter shows the scale of the flexible solar cells.

CREDIT: Aaron Lamoureux – University of Michigan

Lamoureux said there’s still a good deal of work to be done before the concept could be marketable. First, it would have to be scaled up — right now, the project is only about the size of a half-dollar. Researchers also need to determine how the cells fare from season to season — in high heat or extreme cold — and whether or not a different material would work better for the system. Lamoureux said the team has already started looking into some of these questions, and said that he doesn’t think any of them will prohibit the system from evolving and, potentially, making it to market.

“I definitely think that there are things that need to be addressed…but I don’t see any hard stops in that process, so I feel like all these roadblocks can be overcome with improvements in technology and a better understanding of how these things work,” he said.

He also said that, though he thinks traditional solar panels will always exist, researchers will continue to come up with innovations to make the existing technology more effective and efficient.

“Planar panels are nice because they’re easy to install on flat rooftops. The beauty of something that tracks the sun, though, is regardless of how efficient you get the [planar panels’] material, you still have these effective losses as sun moves,” he said. “As we try and further and further decrease the cost of solar electricity and increase amount of power we get, we will transition towards other types of geometries that have better performance and cost less.”

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California Is On The Verge Of Making Climate History

This week, California could make history in its efforts to combat climate change.

Members of the state Assembly will vote this week on California’s climate bill package, which breezed through the Senate and three separate Assembly meetings earlier this year. If the package of bills passes this next obstacle, it will be signed in to law by the governor.

This bill package, which has been called “historic,” outlines aggressive action to fight climate change. It is no surprise for California, though, since the state already has one of the highest renewable portfolio standards in the country, which requires 25 percent of electricity to come from renewables by 2016, and 33 percent by 2020. Governor Jerry Brown has made climate and environmental issues the focal point of his fourth term.

The climate package is composed of 12 bills which seek to address many environmental and health concerns, such as off-shore drilling, divestment, water quality, energy efficiency in disadvantaged communities, and increased public transportation. One of the bills, Senate Bill (SB) 32, has already failed in the Assembly — lawmakers voted Tuesday against the bill, which would have locked California in to reducing its emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. The bill could be brought up again for another vote later this week.

The package’s most far-reaching goal, however, is outlined in SB 350. The bill, authored by Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin de León and Senator Mark Leno, calls for a 50 percent reduction in petroleum use in cars and trucks, a 50 percent increase in energy efficiency in buildings, and for 50 percent of the state’s utility power derived from renewable energy, all by 2030. The bill’s goals are nearly identical to those called for by Gov. Jerry Brown in his inaugural address in January.

The bill has been receiving the largest amount of pushback, mostly from oil companies, agro-businesses and a handful of moderate Democrats. According to the Sacramento Bee, an estimated 20 Assembly Democrats met with Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins in late August to voice their concerns over the legislation, saying SB 350 doesn’t clearly state how it will affect motorists. Democrats control 65 percent of the California Assembly, but if these holdouts combine with Republicans to vote “no” on the legislation, it could mean the end for SB 350 in this legislative session.

“There’s absolutely no plan in front of us telling us how they’re going to reduce petroleum by 50 percent by 2030,” Assemblyman Henry Perea, one of the moderate Democrats, told the Sacramento Bee. The Western States Petroleum Association has also expressed concern over how the California Air Resources Board would implement the policies laid out in SB 350.

“This package of bills represents the most far-reaching effort to fight climate change in the history of our nation,” said De León on the Senate floor in June. De León also argued that his bill will stimulate employment and further invigorate California’s clean economy, which has already generated thousands of jobs. He said in late August that he’s working to draft amendments to SB 350 that would address some concerns about the California Air Resources Board’s oversight.

California’s climate bill package supporters include Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, the American Lung Association, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and many other clean energy businesses, contractors, and campaigns. Steven Cohen, Executive Director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, argued in a Huffington Post piece that the bill successfully sets goals, but allows for enough flexibility in how the state reaches those goals. He also points out that the state has a decade and a half to transition part of its motor vehicle fleet from the internal combustion engine, which could be feasible with tax incentives and other techniques.

Even with all of the environmental-related tensions stirring in the California Senate, the state has still managed to make strides in making the planet healthier. Just this past week, the California Assembly passed a bill that prompts public employee pension funds to divest from coal by July 2017. Los Angeles has also been moving forward to legalize urban beekeeping in local backyards. The California Environmental Protection Agency also recently announced its plan to label Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide as carcinogenic.

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The President’s Arctic Trip Showed Just How Crucial Climate Action Will Be For The Region

President Obama was in Alaska last week witnessing and warning of a warming world. After a powerful speech at an international Arctic conference hosted by Secretary of State John Kerry for foreign ministers, native leaders, and other dignitaries from 20 countries, President Obama toured the state to see staggering climate changes up close. The president’s Arctic sojourn, and his policies that affect the region, are destined to shape his climate change legacy in three important ways.

1. Driving a new global climate agreement and ambitious climate action

While in Alaska, the president hiked to Exit Glacier in the Kenai Fjords National Park near Seward to see first hand the rapid changes in a state that is warming twice as fast as the rest of the country. As temperatures spike, vast quantities of runoff from melting glaciers, ice caps, and ice sheets flow into the sea, which causes the global sea level to rise and puts nearly 3 billion people, or 40 percent of the world’s population, at risk of severe flooding and erosion.

While speaking to foreign ministers in Anchorage, the president repeatedly cautioned that world leaders are not moving fast enough to curb climate change. In recent months, 30 nations, including the United States and China — plus the 28 members of the European Union — have announced emissions reduction goals. In August, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled the final version of its Clean Power Plan, which calls for a 32 percent cut in carbon dioxide emissions from 2005 levels by 2030. The plan is part of President Obama’s larger strategy to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent compared with 2005 levels by 2025, and could be the linchpin of his climate legacy.

Many acknowledge that this year’s emissions reduction pledges by countries will not be strong enough to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit — the long-term goal of U.N. climate negotiations and the level scientists agree is the absolute limit for preventing unmanageable climate changes. In his Alaska travelogue, the president echoed a message that he delivered forcefully two days earlier to foreign ministers: “When it comes to climate change, I believe there’s such a thing as being too late. And that moment is almost here…it’s my hope that decades and decades from now, when this generation has long since left the planet, we will have acted decisively…We will have lived up to our own words  —  that our best days are still ahead.”

To turn this hope into reality, world leaders must usher a quick transition away from coal and other fossil fuels to clean energy sources like wind and solar. They must also secure in Paris this December a global climate pact that locks in a solid process for countries to regularly raise the ambition of their emissions reduction goals. The president’s urgent call to action from Alaska is likely to bolster his climate change legacy by jumpstarting the U.N. climate negotiations this fall and increasing the probability of success in Paris.

2. Helping imperiled communities avert climate catastrophe

After visiting Alaska’s vanishing glaciers, the president traveled to the small native fishing town of Dillingham and the tightly-knit native community of Kotzubue in the Arctic. In both communities, the president witnessed the determination of Alaska Natives to maintain their traditional hunting and fishing cultures and build sustainable economies. He also saw the real risks these communities confront daily, from thawing permafrost and shrinking sea-ice that once shielded many coastal towns from punishing storms, to threatened salmon, walrus, and seal populations and hunting seasons that underpin Alaska Native subsistence economies and way of life.

The president described flying over Kivalina, a small coastal community that is rapidly receding and at risk of being completely consumed by rising seas: “For many of those Alaskans, it’s no longer a question of if they’re going to relocate, but when.”

In 2003, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that flooding and erosion affected 184 out of 213 Alaska Native villages, or 86 percent. Alarmingly, what is happening in Alaska reflects a much wider trend in the United States and globally of a growing number of people displaced by more extreme weather and other climate change effects.

To help native villages in Alaska build resilience to climate change, the president announced a more than $35 million package of federal support for water infrastructure, resilience planning, and energy efficiency and renewable energy. The president also called on the Department of Housing and Urban Development to develop principles to ensure that support for communities opting to move away from high-risk areas is equitable for low-income families, people of color and others with high exposure to climate change risks. In addition, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will refine disaster assistance guidance for native communities in consultation with tribes to better acknowledge their ‘unique circumstances’ — in many cases, climate change does not just threaten homes but also their cultures and way of life. The new guidance should remove barriers that often prevent native communities in the midst of slow-onset climate disaster — such as Kivalina and Kotzebue — from receiving needed support.

These initiatives build on the community resilience pillar of the president’s Climate Action Plan and other recent resilience announcements by the White House to help reduce climate risks in low-income communities. While these resilience actions are not enough to eliminate climate change threats in Alaska and around the country, they are steps toward helping climate-imperiled communities that are likely to enhance the president’s climate change legacy.

3. Allowing risky offshore oil and gas development in the Arctic Ocean

At striking odds with the above strides to reduce climate change risks is the Department of Interior’s (DOI’s) decision to let Royal Dutch Shell move ahead with exploratory oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea. Shell’s 2012 Arctic drilling attempt ended with a rig running aground on an island in the Gulf of Alaska.

The president has rightly set aside Bristol Bay from offshore oil and gas leasing — a move that will safeguard waters that help provide 40 percent of America’s wild-caught seafood. The president also designated 9.8 million acres in the ecologically-rich waters of the Beaufort and Chukchi Sea as off limits to offshore development. In addition, he asked Congress to designate as wilderness the Coastal Plain and other core areas of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — home to caribou, polar bears, gray wolves, and other wildlife.

DOI officials insist that offshore oil and gas activities are held to the highest safety and environmental standards. Even so, DOI estimates that future oil and gas development in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s northwest coast “brings with it a 75-percent chance of one or more spills of more than 1,000 barrels of oil.” In a recent Newsweek op-ed, former EPA Administrator Carol Browner and CAP Ocean Policy Director Michael Conathan describe the dangers of offshore development in the Arctic Ocean, including “regular hurricane-force winds, errant icebergs and 30 foot swells” that make the area “unsafe for exploration.” Absent from Alaska’s North Slope is the infrastructure needed to respond to an oil spill — including adequate roads, a large airport, deep water ports and shipyards. Even if Congress funds the president’s proposal to accelerate by two years the acquisition of a new icebreaker — by 2020 instead of 2022 — and to plan the construction of additional ones, it would only narrow, not close, the U.S. emergency response capacity gap in this remote and harsh region.

Experts estimate that if the oil and gas that is believed to be recoverable in Alaska’s Arctic is extracted and burned it would emit nearly 16 billion metric tons of CO2 — more than double total U.S. CO2 emissions in 2013. For this reason, scientists say that all of the Arctic’s oil and gas resources — and globally, a third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves, and over 80 percent of coal reserves — must be kept in the ground or under the sea to avoid unmanageable climate changes.

Allowing offshore oil and gas development and their associated emissions in a region where drilling risks run unacceptably high is out of step with the president’s larger strategy to tackle climate change. Like oil-coated waves crashing into a pristine Arctic coastline, Shell moving forward with oil and gas production in the Arctic could irreparably sully the president’s otherwise strong environmental legacy.

Cathleen Kelly is a Senior Fellow at American Progress specializing in international and U.S. climate mitigation and resilience.

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Worried About Refugees? Just Wait Until We Dust-Bowlify Mexico And Central America

“The Syria conflict has triggered the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II,” explains the European Commission. As Climate Progress has been reporting for years, and as a major 2015 study confirmed, “human-caused climate change was a major trigger of Syria’s brutal civil war.”

But the unprecedented multi-year drought that preceded the Syrian civil war is mild compared to the multi-decade megadroughts that unrestricted carbon pollution will make commonplace in the U.S. Southwest, Mexico, and Central America, according to many recent studies.

Given the current political debate over immigration policy, it’s worth asking two questions. First: if the United States, through our role as the greatest cumulative carbon polluter in history, plays a central role in rendering large parts of Mexico and Central America virtually uninhabitable, where will the refugees go? And second: will we have some moral obligation to change our immigration policy?

If we don’t take far stronger action on climate change, then here is what a 2015 NASA study projected the normal climate of North America will look like. The darkest areas have soil moisture comparable to that seen during the 1930s Dust Bowl.

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Just the last 12 months have seen headlines like these: “Worst drought in 40 years puts more than 2 million people in Central America at risk” and “Drought Reduces Mexico’s Agricultural Production by 40%.” Of course you probably haven’t seen those stories, since most major U.S. media outlets have been too busy covering brutal droughts right here at home.

For a similar reason, there had been little reporting at the time on what one expert called perhaps “the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent,” from 2006 to 2010. The 2015 study, “Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought,” found that global warming made that Syrian drought two to three times more likely. “While we’re not saying the drought caused the war,” lead author Dr. Colin Kelley explained. “We are saying that it certainly contributed to other factors — agricultural collapse and mass migration among them — that caused the uprising.”

The study identifies “a pretty convincing climate fingerprint” for the Syrian drought, retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley told Slate. Titley, also a meteorologist, said, “you can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.”

The Center for Climate and Security has been writing on the Syria-climate connection for over three years. Co-founder & Director Francesco Femia explained recently:

That drought, in addition to its mismanagement by the Assad regime, contributed to the displacement of two million in Syria. That internal displacement may have contributed to the social unrest that precipitated the civil war. Which generated the refugee flows into Europe.

And no, he’s not saying climate change “caused” the refugee crisis, nor am I. Major refugee crises are generally driven by multiple contributing factors. In this case, one of the factors appears to be climate change. In the coming years and decades, climate change will become a bigger and bigger factor.

During the U.S. Dust-Bowl era, some 3.5 million people fled the region. As I noted in “The Next Dust Bowl,” a 2011 Nature article reviewing the literature, “Human adaptation to prolonged, extreme drought is difficult or impossible. Historically, the primary adaptation to dust-bowlification has been abandonment; the very word ‘desert’ comes from the Latin desertum for ‘an abandoned place’.”

But what scientists tell us we are doing to our climate will be much worse than the Dust Bowl of the 1930 — worse even than medieval U.S. droughts. Indeed, Lisa Graumlich, Dean of the University of Washington’s College of the Environment, notes that the Southwest drought from 1100-1300, “makes the Dust Bowl look like a picnic.”

Remember, the Dust Bowl itself was mostly contained to the 1930s, whereas multiple studies project that future Dust Bowls will be so-called “mega-droughts” that last for many decades — “at least 30 to 35 years,” according to NASA. Further, the 1930s Dust Bowl was regionally localized. As the NASA map above makes clear, we are on track to Dust-Bowlify much of the U.S. breadbasket and Southwest, and virtually all of Mexico and Central America.

Other recent research makes clear we would also turn large parts of the Amazon, Europe, and Africa into near-permanent dustbowls. And this would be “irreversible” on a timescale of centuries.

How bad were the medieval droughts? “Highly evolved societies collapsed and descended into warfare.” These are civilization-destroying, monster droughts. As the news release notes, one of those droughts “has been tied by some researchers to the decline of the Anasazi or Ancient Pueblo Peoples in the Colorado Plateau in the late 13th century.”

And the post-2050 droughts we are foisting on future generations will be much worse — considerably drier and hotter. The dark brown area in the top chart corresponds roughly to the normal climate becoming “severe drought,” which of course means a great many years will be much drier. And the normal temperature will be some 9°F warmer.

Certainly, no country with rational leaders would risk self-destruction like this. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how even a very wealthy country like America could “adapt” to such permanent Dust Bowls over vast areas of its most inhabited and arable land, at least the way most people think about adaptation today.

It seems likely most would adopt the traditional means humans have used to “adapt” when facing a brutal and very long-term drought — abandonment. Of course, we are a large country and we could in theory spend vast sums relocating our population. Also, we are the breadbasket for the world, which is to say we generate a lot of surplus food today — not to mention the 40 percent or so of food we waste. So we could probably avoid mass starvation in this country post-2050 with stringent enough measures.

But what of our poorer neighbors to the south? They will engulfed by near-permanent Dust Bowl or severe drought. And of course their coastal areas (and ours) will be trying to “adapt” to sea level rise of perhaps several feet by 2100. Again for all but the wealthiest coastal areas, the primary adaptation strategy will probably be abandonment.

Much of the population of Mexico and Central America — likely over 100 million people (Mexico alone is projected to have a population of 150 million in 2050!) — will be trying to find a place to live that isn’t anywhere near as hot and dry, that has enough fresh water and food to go around. They aren’t going to be looking south.

Now, from a purely moral perspective, if you burn down your neighbor’s house and farm, most people would say you have some obligation to house and feed them. So what should happen if one exceedingly wealthy country is the primary contributor to destroying the entire climate of another (relatively poor) country, which itself contributed only a tiny bit to that climate change? The answer seems straightforward — we do everything possible to help them.

But what will happen in the real world where this process occurs gradually over the coming decades for Mexico and Central America — at the same time United States is dealing with the self-inflicted destruction of its own livable climate?

The situation will be a humanitarian and security disaster of almost unimaginable dimensions compared to the current refugee crisis. As Femia and colleague Caitlin Werrell told Climate Progress, “If we worry about the security implications of refugee and migration flows in the future, we need to think about the problem in terms of prevention. Preventive security.”

It’s time to listen to the world’s top scientists and move quickly toward the supercheap path of avoiding climate catastrophe in the first place.

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India’s Unconventional Plan To Increase Solar Power

How could the world’s third-largest coal consumer use coal to get more solar power?

India’s government is ordering its state-owned utility, NTPC, to sell electricity from solar power along with electricity from coal-fired power in order to boost solar’s position in the country. The decision, dating back to the middle of July but first reported by Bloomberg, mandates that the utility sell currently-cheaper coal power bundled into one unit with solar power, which is currently more expensive.

This could have the effect of expanding the production and usage of solar power, making it less expensive for distribution companies to bring it to customers. India’s power distribution companies are also run by the government, and had been losing money when buying more expensive electricity and selling it at a lower price.

The other effect, of course, will be the continued use of quarter-century-old coal plants that will get their power output bundled with newer solar plants coming online. This helps guarantee the coal plants’ operation, as well as their carbon emissions.

“These plants are already 25 years old,” Rupesh Agarwal, a partner at BDO India LLP, told Bloomberg. “Will they function for that many more years? Do we need to extend the lives of these plants to bundle with solar energy when solar on a stand-alone basis is becoming competitive?”

NTPC will construct 15 gigawatts of solar over the next four years as a part of this deal.

Coal India, the largest coal company in the world, has seen the value of solar for years — the company has installed solar panels at mine installations across the country.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi committed to 100 gigawatts of solar capacity in the next seven years, which will be a large increase from the current 4.5 gigawatts. This capacity will be an almost even split between distributed rooftop installations (about 40 gigawatts) and larger grid-connected solar farms.

Boosting solar capacity to 100 gigawatts would be hard, as the Indian consulting firm Bridge to India recently estimated the country was on track to install 31 gigawatts over the next four years.

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CREDIT: Courtesy of Bridge To India

Should they achieve it, this will help achieve the other major energy goal put forth by the government: bringing electricity to the 400 million households that currently do not have it. This means more power, from everywhere. Renewable prices — especially solar — are dropping, which helps those trying to limit the growth of India’s carbon emissions. At the same time, India has become more and more dependent upon imported fossil fuels — including coal despite significant domestic reserves. Recent reports have predicted that India will outpace China in coal imports in the near future.

“Despite its significant coal reserves, India has experienced increasing supply shortages as a result of a lack of competition among producers, insufficient investment, and systemic problems with its mining industry,” according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. “Although production has increased by about 4% per year since 2007, producers have failed to reach the government’s production targets.”

China has committed to slowing and reversing its coal usage due to climate and air quality concerns. A recent study found that over 17 percent of all deaths in China are related to high pollution levels. Yet Indian cities have to struggle with some of the worst air pollution in the world.

It’s not just solar that has a lot of potential in India. A study released last week found that India’s wind energy capacity is much higher than originally anticipated — 302 gigawatts for turbines with hubs reaching 100 meters, compared with the 100 gigawatts previously thought.

The government is also trying to keep energy demand low — last month, Energy Minister Piyush Goyal committed India to replace all conventional streetlights with LEDs within two years. This will cut demand almost to almost a third of current levels — 3,400 megawatts to 1,400 megawatts. Fortunately for them, LED streetlight prices have dropped almost by half in the last year.

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Cities Could Save $17 Trillion Just By Reducing Their Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Making cities greener could save a lot of, well, green, according to a new report.

The report, published Tuesday by the New Climate Economy, found that if cities around the world implemented certain carbon-reducing strategies — including making buildings more efficient and investing in public transportation — they could save a combined total of $17 trillion by 2050.

The report looked at actions such as “aggressively” deploying high-efficiency lighting, “ambitiously” installing solar on buildings, increasing the fraction of methane captured from landfills, and expanding public transit. It found that, if all of the measures were implemented, cities would reduce their combined greenhouse gas emissions by 3.7 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030. That’s more, the report notes, than the annual emissions of India.

Nick Godfrey, head of policy and urban development at the New Climate Economy, said in a statement that the amount of money saved by cities could be even higher.

“US$17 trillion in savings is actually a very conservative estimate, because it only looks at direct energy savings generated from investment, which are a small proportion of the wider social, economic, and environmental benefits of these investments,” he said.

The report recommends that cities make commitments to undertake these carbon-saving initiatives by 2020. On the national level, countries should implement support structures that incentivize city-wide efforts to reduce emissions. And on the international level, at least $500 million should be made available for cities to expand existing efforts to tackle climate change. The international community will be key in helping cities in developing nations find the capital they need to make these changes –investing in improving the creditworthiness of these countries, for instance, can help them raise needed funds. That tactic has worked with cities in Uganda and Peru, the report points out.

“There is now increasing evidence that emissions can decrease while economies continue to grow,” Seth Schultz, a researcher for the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, a group of major cities committed to fighting climate change, told the Guardian. “Becoming more sustainable and putting the world — specifically cities — on a low carbon trajectory is actually feasible and good economics.”

Cities’ roles in fighting climate change have been showcased in recent years. In July, mayors from around the world met at the Vatican to discuss climate change. Last year, a report from the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group found that, on their own, cities had the potential to cut 8 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. In August, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wrote in Foreign Policy that cities are “key” to fighting climate change.

“Many of the most important new initiatives of this century — from the smoking ban adopted in New York City to the bus rapid transit system pioneered in Bogotá — have emerged from cities,” Bloomberg wrote. “Mayors are turning their city halls into policy labs, conducting experiments on a grand scale and implementing large-scale ideas to address problems, such as climate change, that often divide and paralyze national governments.”

Cities around the world have suffered severely from climate change and pollution, so it makes sense that some of them are starting to find new ways to tackle climate change. Dry weather and major air pollution has made Santiago, Chile home to some of the worst air in the world. Beijing, China also regularly suffers from dangerous air pollution. Superstorm Sandy hit New York City hard, but the city has implemented a plan to prepare itself for future storms.

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Want To Save Coral Reefs? First, Save The Fish

When deciding how to conserve coral reefs, the mass of fish in an area should take priority over geographic location, a new study has found.

Though past research has linked healthy coral reefs to healthy fish populations, this study, published in the Journal of Biogeography by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), is conflicting with common conservation and management practices.

Study author Tim McClanahan of WCS looked at 266 sites in seven countries in the southwest Indian Ocean. During the 12 years he conducted research, he looked at numbers of fish species, coral abundance, algae, depth, geographic location, and types of fishery management. This allowed him to compare the significance of each factor and discover the best practices to conserve endangered reefs.

“The trick is find the order of their influence from most to least influence,” McClanahan explained in an email. To do that, he used a statistical method called a “step-wise forward regression analysis,” which involves “finding the strongest influences, removing that influence on the full data set, taking the remaining variance and then look at the next factor in line, until all variance in all the factors you measured are accounted for.”

Strong correlations were found between the total mass of all fish in an area — or fish biomass — and fishing restrictions in the area. In other words, the latitude and longitude were found to contribute the least to the variation of species, and to overall coral health.

It is largely agreed upon in the scientific community that fishing is a primary cause in the devastation of coral reefs. Often called the “rainforests” of the ocean, just 10 areas of coral reef hotspots host as much as two-thirds of the world’s marine species. These 10 spots cover less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s oceans. According to a 2002 New Scientist article, destructive fishing methods have devastated many near-shore reefs off the coast of the Philippines, an area that’s home to some of the most threatened reefs in the world.

Thanks to over-fishing, along with pollution and climate change, the world has already lost 27 percent of its coral reefs — and 58 percent are threatened by human activity. According to the World Wildlife Fund, 80 percent of the world’s shallow reefs are severely over-fished. About 27 percent of the world’s coral reefs are protected by Marine Protected Areas, but because these areas operate under different regulations from region to region, many aren’t effective at keeping coral reefs safe.

So how can governments effectively protect coral reefs?

According to McClanahan’s findings, the highest conservation priorities in a region should be reef systems where fish biomass exceeds 600 kilograms (1,322 pounds) per hectare (2.47 acres). However, “many reefs are below this recommended level. This is leading to losses in diversity of species,” McClanahan said. According to a study published in Nature earlier this year, most of the world’s coral reefs aren’t succeeding at maintaining an optimal biomass level.

Restricted fishing areas where only lines and traps were used had biomass values that were often near or above the 600 km/ha threshold.

“So, we think restricting gear can result in the desired diversity,” McClanahan explained. “There is high variation, but strict gear management is doing pretty well compared to poorly managed closures.”

With more conservation policies and restrictions set in areas with high levels of biodiversity, coral reefs have a much greater chance of sustaining life in our world’s rapidly changing oceans.

Jess Colarossi is an intern with ThinkProgress. She is currently working on her B.A. in Journalism and minoring in Environmental Studies and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston, M.A.

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Sarah Palin Says She Wants To Be Donald Trump’s Energy Secretary

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin says that if Donald Trump becomes president of the United States, she wants to be his Secretary of Energy.

As Palin was speaking with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday, the conversation shifted to a discussion of businessman and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who recently said that he would “love” to have her in his cabinet if he won the White House. When asked which position she would want in a hypothetical Trump administration, Palin was quick to answer: Energy Secretary.

“I think a lot about the Department of Energy, because energy is my baby: oil and gas and minerals, those things that God has dumped on this part of the Earth for mankind’s use instead of us relying on unfriendly foreign nations,” she said, using a conservative theological argument to justify wanton use of fossil fuels — an argument that has been debunked by none other than Pope Francis.

Palin went on to explain that her theoretical tenure as Energy Secretary would be short, primarily because she would immediately disband the entire department.

“If I were head of [the Department of Energy], I’d get rid of it,” she said. “And I’d let the states start having more control over the lands that are within their boundaries and the people who are affected by the developments within their states. If I were in charge of that, it would be a short-term job, but it would be really great to have someone who knows energy and is pro-responsible development to be in charge.”

Palin isn’t alone in her desire to disband the Department of Energy, a crucial component of the federal government established by President Jimmy Carter that oversees, among other things, the safety and security of America’s nuclear weapons. Several Republicans have called for its abolishment in the past, and current Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry has previously stated that he wants to close it down, although he famously forgot the name of it during a debate in 2012.

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