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On Fuel Economy Efforts, U.S. Faces an Elusive Target
On Fuel Economy Efforts, U.S. Faces an Elusive Target
One of President Obama’s signature achievements on climate has been strict new standards aimed at improving fuel efficiency to nearly 55 miles per gallon by 2025. But credits and loopholes, coupled with low gas prices, may mean the U.S. will fall well short of this ambitious goal.
Five years ago, flanked by auto industry executives at a Washington, D.C. auto show, President Obama announced a historic agreement to increase fuel economy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions for cars and light-duty trucks. “By 2025,” the President said, “the average fuel economy of their vehicles will nearly double to almost 55 miles per gallon.” The White House predicted the new rules would save car buyers about $1.7 trillion at the pump and eliminate about 6 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the life of the program. That’s more than a year’s worth of U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide.
If only it were so simple. But nothing is simple about the government’s sweeping attempt to curb climate emissions and oil imports by requiring auto companies to sell cars that are cleaner and more efficient.
Start with that frequently quoted 54.5 mile-per-gallon projection, which is not even close to the miles-per-gallon estimates pasted on the windows of new cars in dealer showrooms today, let alone the fuel economy that drivers would experience on the road in 2025. The government’s calculations take into account a dizzying array of adjustments and credits, for everything from electric cars, flex-fuel vehicles, energy-efficient air conditioning, and rooftop solar panels. Automakers also get credits for outperforming the standards in the years before they took effect in 2012.
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With New Tools, A Focus On Urban Methane Leaks
With New Tools, A Focus On Urban Methane Leaks
Until recently, little was known about the extent of methane leaking from urban gas distribution pipes and its impact on global warming. But recent advances in detecting this potent greenhouse gas are pushing U.S. states to begin addressing this long-neglected problem.
Battered by storms and weakened with age, the natural gas distribution pipes of urban New Jersey have long been in need of repair. And for a long time, the state’s largest utility, Public Service and Enterprise Group (PSE&G), has wanted to replace them. The problem is that pipelines cost upwards of $1.3 million per mile, and the utility owns 4,330 miles of it. Replacing it all would cost at least $6 billion, not to mention decades of work.
In December 2014, however, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) approached the utility with a solution. Using new technology that can trace methane emissions back to their sources with great precision,
researchers could home in on the highest-risk pipes, allowing the utility to prioritize repairs along the worst offending lines. EDF and its collaborators, from Colorado State University and Google Earth Outreach, then spent six months gathering data the utility could use.
The state’s Board of Public Utilities, which determines how much money PSE&G can raise from its customers and how it can spend it, had earlier rejected a request from the utility to raise $1.6 billion for 800 miles of new pipeline. But after the results of the monitoring effort were in, the utility narrowed its request to 510 miles of pipeline replacement, at a cost of $905 million over three years. Work on the project begins this month.
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Food Insecurity: Arctic Heat Is Threatening Indigenous Life
Food Insecurity: Arctic Heat Is Threatening Indigenous Life
Subsistence hunters in the Arctic have long taken to the sea ice to hunt seals, whales, and polar bears. But now, as the ice disappears and soaring temperatures alter the life cycles and abundance of their prey, a growing number of indigenous communities are facing food shortages.
The decades-long trend of extreme Arctic warming hit new heights this winter, as a mass of exceptionally warm air invaded the region, raising temperatures by almost 50 degrees Fahrenheit above average in some areas and driving temperatures above the freezing mark at the North Pole in late December. Arctic Ocean ice cover reached a new record winter low last month, putting even more stress on sea-ice-dependent seals and polar bears. Other wildlife populations, including caribou and some seabirds, are declining as species struggle to adapt to a swiftly changing polar ecosystem.
All these changes are also making it more difficult for Arctic people to put food on the table. The big Arctic melt is having a profoundly negative impact on many indigenous hunters, who for millennia have relied on the pursuit of whales, seals, fish, and land mammals such as caribou to feed their families. Even today, in an era of greater government support of far northern Native communities, indigenous people across the Arctic — from the Inuit of Canada and Greenland to the Yupik and Dene of Alaska — still depend heavily on subsistence hunting.
Now, as sea ice becomes an increasingly unreliable hunting platform and soaring temperatures alter the life cycles and abundance of prey species, some indigenous communities are facing worsening food shortages and a lack of proper nutrition. Last year, the U.S. government had to ship in frozen fish to Alaska communities whose walrus hunts had failed.
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How Forest Loss Is Leading To a Rise in Human Disease
How Forest Loss Is Leading To a Rise in Human Disease
A growing body of scientific evidence shows that the felling of tropical forests creates optimal conditions for the spread of mosquito-borne scourges, including malaria and dengue. Primates and other animals are also spreading disease from cleared forests to people.
In Borneo, an island shared by Indonesia and Malaysia, some of the world’s oldest tropical forests are being cut down and replaced with oil palm plantations at a breakneck pace. Wiping forests high in biodiversity off the land for monoculture plantations causes numerous environmental problems, from the destruction of wildlife habitat to the rapid release of stored carbon, which contributes to global warming.
But deforestation is having another worrisome effect: an increase in the spread of life-threatening diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. For a host of ecological reasons, the loss of forest can act as an incubator for insect-borne and other infectious diseases that afflict humans. The most recent example came to light this month in the Journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases, with researchers documenting a steep rise in human malaria cases in a region of Malaysian Borneo undergoing rapid deforestation.
This form of the disease was once found mainly in primates called macaques, and scientists from the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene wondered why there was a sudden spike in human cases. Studying satellite maps of where forest was being cut down and where it was left standing, the researchers compared the patchwork to the locations of recent malaria outbreaks. They realized the primates were concentrating in the remaining fragments of forest habitat, possibly increasing disease transmission among their own populations.
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El Niño and Climate Change: Wild Weather May Get Wilder
El Niño and Climate Change: Wild Weather May Get Wilder
This year’s El Niño phenomenon is spawning extreme weather around the planet. Now scientists are working to understand if global warming will lead to more powerful El Niños that will make droughts, floods, snowstorms, and hurricanes more intense.
Wild weather is gripping the planet. An El Niño has been wreaking havoc around the world, causing major flooding in South America, droughts in Indonesia and southern Africa, an unprecedented hurricane season in the North Pacific last fall, and much more.
Climatologists are still calculating whether this is the biggest El Niño on record. What they do agree on is that there have now been three “super-El Niños” in the space of just over three decades — in 1982-83, 1997-98, and now 2015-16. This unusual recurrence gives weight to a forecast made by Wenju Cai of Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, two years ago that headline-grabbing “super El Niños” were in the process of upgrading from once every 20 years to once every ten years.
So what is going on? Is global warming beginning to cause more frequent and intense El Niños? And what effect might more powerful El Niño cycles have on the planet’s steadily warming climate?
El Niños are short-term aberrations of ocean currents and weather systems that start in the waters of the tropical Pacific and send shock waves around the world. They usually occur after several years of calm conditions during which prevailing tropical winds blowing across the world’s largest ocean pile warm water up in the west of the Pacific, around Indonesia.
This cannot continue indefinitely. Eventually, there is a breakout. The warm waters turn and wash back east toward the Americas.
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Energy Landscapes: An Aerial View Of Europe’s Carbon Footprint
Energy Landscapes: An Aerial View Of Europe’s Carbon Footprint
PHOTOS BY ALEX MACLEAN
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Over a series of months, MacLean documented historical design advantages that many European nations have inherited and now knowingly reinforce in their physical landscapes: dense urban centers with an emphasis on pedestrian and bike accessibility; compact rural and suburban communities with sharp growth boundaries; connectivity between public transport and human-powered transportation; the integration of commercial and retail space into the fabric of residential areas; and a dearth of sprawl. “How we organize ourselves on the ground is the key factor determining how much fossil fuel we burn,” MacLean says.
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Once Unstoppable, Tar Sands Now Battered from All Sides
Once Unstoppable, Tar Sands Now Battered from All Sides
Canada’s tar sands industry is in crisis as oil prices plummet, pipeline projects are killed, and new governments in Alberta and Ottawa vow less reliance on this highly polluting energy source. Is this the beginning of the end for the tar sands juggernaut?
In the summer of 2014, when oil was selling for $114 per barrel, Alberta’s tar sands industry was still confidently standing by earlier predictions that it would nearly triple production by 2035. Companies such as Suncor, Statoil, Syncrude, Royal Dutch Shell, and Imperial Oil Ltd. were investing hundreds of billions of dollars in new projects to mine the thick, highly polluting bitumen.
Eyeing this oil boom, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he was certain that the Keystone XL pipeline — “a no-brainer” in his words — would be built, with or without President Barack Obama’s approval. Keystone, which would carry tar sands crude from Alberta to refineries along the Gulf of Mexico, was critical if bitumen from new tar sands projects was going to find a way to market.
What a difference 18 months makes. The price of oil today has plummeted to around $30 a barrel, well below the break-even point for tar sands producers, and the value of the Canadian dollar has fallen sharply. President Obama killed the Keystone XL project in November, and staunch
The industry is suddenly weathering a perfect storm that analysts say has significantly altered its prospects.
opposition has so far halted efforts to build pipelines that would carry tar sands crude to Canada’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts.
Equally as ominous for the tar sands industry are political developments in Alberta and Canada. In May, Alberta voters ousted the conservative premier and elected a left-of-center government. The new premier, Rachel Notley, is committed to doing something meaningful about climate change and reviewing oil and gas royalty payments to the province, which are among the lowest in the world.
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How ‘Natural Geoengineering’ Can Help Slow Global Warming
How ‘Natural Geoengineering’ Can Help Slow Global Warming
An overlooked tool in fighting climate change is enhancing biodiversity to maximize the ability of ecosystems to store carbon. Key to that strategy is preserving top predators to control populations of herbivores, whose grazing reduces the amount of CO2 that ecosystems absorb.
As natural wonders go, perhaps the most awe-inspiring is the annual migration of 1.2 million wildebeest flowing across East Africa’s vast Serengeti grassland. It would be a tragedy to lose these animals. But we almost did in the mid-20th century when, decimated by disease and poaching, their numbers crashed to 300,000.
The consequences of that collapse were profound. Much of the Serengeti ecosystem remained ungrazed. The accumulating dead and dried grass in turn became fuel for massive wildfires, which annually burned up to 80 percent of the area, making the Serengeti an important regional source of carbon dioxide emissions.
Then, conservation programs to eradicate disease and crack down on poaching led to the recovery of the wildebeest, restoring the grazing system and reversing the extent of the large-scale wildfires. Grazing now causes much of the carbon in grass to be released as animal dung, which is in turn incorporated by insects into soil reservoirs that are not prone to burning. The Serengeti ecosystem has now reverted to a carbon dioxide sink so large that it is estimated to offset all of East Africa’s current annual fossil fuel carbon emissions.
The wildebeest decline and recovery taught a valuable lesson, not only in how easy it is to loose an iconic animal species, but, more importantly, how the loss of a single species can have far-reaching ramifications for ecosystems — and the climate.
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Unnatural Balance: How Food Waste Impacts World’s Wildlife
Unnatural Balance: How Food Waste Impacts World’s Wildlife
New research indicates that the food discarded in landfills and at sea is having a profound effect on wildlife populations and fisheries. But removing that food waste creates its own ecological challenges.
The world wastes more than $750 billion worth of food every year — 1.6 billion tons of food left in farm fields, sent to landfills, or otherwise scattered across the countryside, plus another seven million tons of fishery discards at sea. That waste has gotten a lot of attention lately, mostly in terms of human hunger.
Hardly anyone talks about what all that food waste is doing to wildlife. But a growing body of evidence suggests that our casual attitude about waste may be reshaping the way the natural world functions across much of the planet, inadvertently subsidizing some opportunistic predators and thus contributing to the decline of other species, including some that are threatened or endangered.
A new study in the journal Biological Conservation looks, for instance, at California’s Monterey Bay, where the threatened steelhead trout population has declined by 80 to 90 percent over the past century. Efforts to restore the species along the Pacific Coast have focused on major initiatives like the recent demolition of a dam that had blocked access to critical steelhead breeding grounds on the Carmel River, which empties into Monterey Bay.
But a team of co-authors led by Ann-Marie Osterback, a marine ecologist at the University of California-Santa Cruz, suspects that garbage and fishery discards might also play an underrated part in the problem. The hypothesis is that local food wastes inadvertently subsidize Western gulls in the Monterrey Bay area, and these gulls in turn prey on the juvenile steelhead trout.
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Indonesian Coal Mining Boom Is Leaving Trail of Destruction
Indonesian Coal Mining Boom Is Leaving Trail of Destruction
Since 2000, Indonesian coal production has increased five-fold to meet growing domestic demand for electricity and feed export markets in Asia. The intensive mining is leading to the clearing of rainforest and the pollution of rivers and rice paddies.
Standing on a hilltop in Kerta Buena, an Indonesian village on the island of Borneo, local farmers look out over a blackened moonscape. In the 1980s the land was forested, but now it is pockmarked with craters where miners have clawed coal from the earth. On a recent November afternoon, trucks crisscrossed the site on their way to and from riverside coal barges in the nearby provincial capital of Samarinda. The sound of their engines reverberated across the barren landscape.
Kerta Buena lies in northeastern Borneo, an island larger than France that is primarily split between Indonesia and Malaysia. ITM, the Indonesian company that owns the mine, says it produces 29 million tons of coal per year on sites across Indonesian Borneo that cover nearly 200,000 acres — half of them on land the government designates as “production” forest. Although an ITM spokesman said the company’s mining sites have five-year reclamation plans in accordance with Indonesian law, some Kerta Buena farmers complain that wastewater from coal mining activities is leaking into rice paddies and damaging their harvests. Acid mine drainage across Borneo has killed fish in aquaculture operations, and farming communities — often located next to coal mines — must contend with coal dust that routinely coats crops and seeps into their homes.
“I don’t have a voice to express my concerns,” said one farmer, Made Sari. The reduced harvest costs her hundreds of dollars per year, she said, and pollution from coal mining may force her to return to her ancestral village in the Indonesian island of Bali.
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Canada’s Indigenous Bands Rise Up Against a Tar Sands Pipeline
Canada’s Indigenous Bands Rise Up Against a Tar Sands Pipeline
TransCanada, the company behind the now-defunct Keystone XL, is proposing another pipeline that would ship Alberta tar sands oil to Canada’s Atlantic coast. But fierce opposition from First Nation communities could derail this controversial project.
Sitting in his office on the outskirts of Montreal, Serge Otis Simon, council chief of the Kanastake — a band of Mohawks — is clear about what might happen if the proposed Energy East Pipeline is routed through the band’s land, in spite of their opposition. “The Warrior Society are men whose duty is given by creation to protect the land, people, and community,” he told me, describing a group of Mohawks who go by that name. “I can’t think of a more honorable way to be killed than standing in the way of that pipeline.”
The rhetoric may be extreme, but it reflects the passions surrounding the debate over oil and gas pipelines in Canada. And it may well not be hyperbole. The Kanastake, after all, are the First Nations band that rose in armed revolt against Quebec and the federal government in 1980 over a developer’s efforts to build a golf course and condominium complex on a burial site in a sacred pine grove next to their reserve. The two-and-a-half month standoff ended when the Kanastake surrendered to police.
Now that President Obama has shot down the contentious Keystone XL Pipeline — which would have transported oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast — the spotlight is turning to Energy East. Proposed by TransCanada, the same company behind Keystone XL, the Energy East Pipeline is the next most likely conduit for what is known as unconventional crude. It would run from Alberta nearly 3,000 miles east to ports in Atlantic Canada, snaking across territory claimed by some 150 First Nations groups.
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Will Paris Conference Finally Achieve Real Action on Climate?
Will Paris Conference Finally Achieve Real Action on Climate?
The emission pledges from the world’s nations still fall short of the goal for limiting global warming. But as negotiators convene in Paris this week, there is cautious optimism that a significant international agreement on climate can be reached.
Six years after the last negotiations crashed so spectacularly in Copenhagen, climate delegates assemble in Paris this week to fix the world’s atmosphere. This time, despite the high security following the recent terrorist attacks in the French capital, they will meet in a better mood.
That’s because, in the preceding months, more than 150 nations have put pledges for future emissions on the table for the decade between 2020 and
2030. And the world’s biggest two emitters of heat-trapping greenhouse gases — the U.S. and China — are in harmony after a bilateral agreement in Washington last year.
But if the diplomats enter the home stretch more optimistic than in Copenhagen, climate analysts warn that the national “contributions” on offer still don’t meet the negotiators’ self-declared task of capping global warming at two degrees Celsius. About 2.7 degrees is the most optimistic guess of the long-term outcome of the pledges. A victory for diplomacy should not be confused with a victory for the climate.
So, is the glass half full or half empty?
On the downside, time is running out to halt the continuing accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This year, the world is a record one degree warmer than pre-industrial levels — exactly halfway to the two-degree ceiling. The much discussed warming hiatus of the past decade is over.
A strong agreement on climate in Paris would drive change forward.
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For Storing Electricity, Utilities Are Turning to Pumped Hydro
For Storing Electricity, Utilities Are Turning to Pumped Hydro
High-tech batteries may be garnering the headlines. But utilities from Spain to China are increasingly relying on pumped storage hydroelectricity – first used in the 1890s – to overcome the intermittent nature of wind and solar power.
In the past decade, wind energy production has soared in Spain, rising from 6 percent of the country’s electricity generation in 2004 to about 20 percent today. While that is certainly good news for boosters of clean energy, the surge in renewables has come with the challenge of ensuring that electric power is available when customers want it, not just when the wind blows.
To help accommodate the increased supply of wind, Spain’s utilities have turned not to high-tech, 21st-century batteries, but rather to a time-tested 19th-century technology — pumped storage hydroelectricity. Pumped storage facilities are typically equipped with pumps and generators that move water between upper and lower reservoirs. A basic setup uses excess electricity — generated, say, from wind turbines during a blustery night — to pump water from a lower reservoir, such as behind a dam, to a reservoir at a higher elevation. Then, when the wind ceases to blow or electricity demand spikes, the water from on high is released to spin hydroelectric turbines.
That’s precisely what the giant Spanish utility Iberdrola has done with the expansion to its $1.3 billion Cortes-La Muela hydroelectric scheme, completed in 2013. The company uses surplus electricity to pump water from the Júcar River to a large reservoir on a bluff 1,700 feet above the river. When demand rises, the water is released to generate electricity. The 1,762-megawatt pumped storage generating capacity is Europe’s largest and is part of a hydroelectric complex capable of powering about 500,000 homes a year.
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On Thin Ice: Big Northern Lakes Are Being Rapidly Transformed
On Thin Ice: Big Northern Lakes Are Being Rapidly Transformed
As temperatures rise, the world’s iconic northern lakes are undergoing major changes that include swiftly warming waters, diminished ice cover, and outbreaks of harmful algae. Now, a global consortium of scientists is trying to assess the toll.
For more than 25 million years, Lake Baikal has cut an immense arc from southern Siberia to the Mongolian border. The length of Florida and nearly the depth of the Grand Canyon, Baikal is the deepest, largest in volume, and most ancient freshwater lake in the world, holding one-fifth of the planet’s above-ground drinking supply. It’s a Noah’s Ark of biodiversity, home to myriad species found nowhere else on earth. It’s also changing fast, due to heat-trapping greenhouse gases that are increasingly disrupting the climate.
Baikal’s surface waters are warming at an accelerating pace, rising at least 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) over the past quarter century — twice as fast as global air temperatures, new research shows. The ice season, which typically covered the lake from January through May, has been shortened by nearly three weeks since the mid-1800s, and the ice has thinned nearly 5 inches since 1949. By the end of the century, scientists say that Baikal could be ice-free a month or more longer than today.
This rapidly changing climate threatens the lake’s unique, cold-adapted creatures, including the iconic nerpa — the world’s only true freshwater seal — whose fertility drops in warmer winters. Fishermen complain that the omul — a once-bountiful species of whitefish — has already grown scarce. Rising temperatures may also factor into some mysterious new problems plaguing the lake in the past few years. The brilliant green underwater forests of endemic Baikal sponges are dying, victims of an unknown pathogen. And dense algal mats choke wide swaths of bottom near shore.
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Not on This Land: A Western Tribe Takes a Stand and Says No to Big Coal
Not on This Land: A Western Tribe Takes a Stand and Says No to Big Coal
The Northern Cheyenne are opposing a proposed railroad that would cut through their ancestral lands to haul Montana coal to the Pacific coast for export. An e360 video reports on the Cheyenne’s fight against the railroad and the extraordinary coalition of tribal people and ranchers who have joined together to stop the project.
Tongue River Railroad, which would run alongside the reservation and carry coal from the planned Otter Creek mine to rail lines that connect to Pacific ports. The tribe’s long fight against the railroad is coming to a head, with a decision by the federal Surface Transportation Board expected in the spring.
“This is our homeland,” tribal councilman Conrad Fisher tells the filmmakers. “It’s the cultural landscape, it’s the social landscape, it’s the spiritual landscape. Essentially, it’s the fabric of who we are as Cheyenne people.”
