Ten Years After

I'd love to change the world

But I don't know what to do

So I leave it up to you

   - Ten Years After

And I'm sorry when I say that

straight to this very day

It was the wrong way

     -Sublime

Good news

EU parliament declares climate emergency

Coal for electricity falls

Greetings

     Happy Black Friday!

    I just received the latest work from the Dark Mountain Project.  It's their 10th anniversary.   As you may recall 10 years ago, they famously put out a  manifesto, See also this  which suggested that the current approach to reversing the ecological damage reversing by humans was a losing battle, and the efforts to deal with climate change (new green deal) would probably do the ecosystem more harm than good.

Ten years later things haven't improved much. 

  Carbon emissions continue to increase

GREENHOUSE GAS CONCENTRATIONS AGAIN BREAK RECORDS

Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases once again reached new highs in 2018. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says the increase in CO2 was just above the average rise recorded over the last decade. Levels of other warming gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, have also surged by above-average continue to u t Since 1990 there’s been an increase of 43% in the warming effect on the climate of long-lived greenhouse gases.

And, “There is no sign of a slowdown, let alone a decline, in greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere despite all the commitments under the Paris agreement on climate change.”

  Recently we passed the 500 CO2 equivalence marker.  

Sea level keeps rising and recent studies show that by 2050, large cities in Asia will be flooded 

According to the new analysis, roughly three times as many people are at risk of being inundated by rising seas than previously reported — 150 million people are now living on land that will be below high tide by 2050. And this is a hopeful scenario, where warming is held to 2 degrees C and the ice sheets don’t collapse in the near future. In a more pessimistic scenario, the numbers double to 300 million people flooded out by 2050. That is roughly equivalent to the entire population of the United States going underwater in the next three decades.

Clean-energy investments in the developing world plummeted last year while coal use reached a record high.

Current carbon credit program may provide little or no environmental gain

“A 2016 study found that 73 percent of carbon credits provided little or no environmental gain, as they

provided little or no environmental gain, as they supported projects that would have happened anyway. That figure rose to 85 percent of projects under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism

Recently climate scientists have published a warning that the earth may be close, or have passed, to several climate tipping points .

Prof Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter, the lead author of the article, said: “We might already have crossed the threshold for a cascade of interrelated tipping points. The simple version is the schoolkids [striking for climate action] are right: we are seeing potentially irreversible changes in the climate system under way, or very close.”

“As a scientist, I just want to tell it how it is,” he said. “It is not trying to be alarmist, but trying to treat the whole climate change problem as a risk management problem. It is what I consider the common sense way.”

Phil Williamson at the University of East Anglia, who did not contribute to the article, said: “The prognosis by Tim Lenton and colleagues is, unfortunately, fully plausible: that we might have already lost control of the Earth’s climate.”

The new article comes as the UN warns action is very far from stopping global temperature rise, with the world currently on track for 3C-4C. The commentary lists nine tipping points that may have been activated.

But, it seems that politicians have decided that we can slowly add renewable resources, and continue to use fossil fuels as long as possible.

And if you think Obama might be embarrassed about that, you’d be wrong. As the former president told a cheering Texas audience last year, “You wouldn’t always know it ,but it [oil and gas production] went up every year I was president,” he said. “That whole, ‘suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas,’ that was me, people.”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explained the logic most succinctly a couple of years ago, speaking to another crowd in Texas. “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there,” he said, referring to the amount of recoverable crude in Alberta’s tar sands region. “The resource will be developed.”

.

           The main climate proposal is to electrify everything.  The fires in California demonstrate that if that means lots of power lines going through hit dry country, that could create it's own problems.

Of course, electricity is for stuff like electric vehicles which require lots of new lithium mines

Last week, Bloomberg published a report detailing how the boom in lithium mining is irreversibly destroying the local environment of northern Chile’s Atacama desert. Mining for lithium means removing large amounts of water, which means depleting the water supply for locals. According to the report, the Tilopozo meadow in Chile used to be a shelter for shepherds traveling at night, yet has become barren due to lack of grass or water. That puts a severe strain on local farmers.

“We’re fooling ourselves if we call this sustainable and green mining,” Cristina Dorado, a Chilean biologist, told Bloomberg. “The lithium fever should slow down because it’s directly damaging salt flats, the ecosystem, and local communities.”

Cairn Energy Research Advisors estimates the lithium-ion industry is expected to grow from 100 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of annual production in 2017 to 800 GWh in 2027—not only as a result of electric cars but also because lithium is used in batteries to power various electrical and electronic goods, including mobile phones. Much of this will be mined from South America’s Lithium Triangle, which spans across Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, an area that is said to hold more than half the world’s supply of the metal beneath its salt flats. 

Also cobalt

Then there’s cobalt. In addition to the environmental concerns related to lithium production, cobalt mining is unequivocally destructive on multiple levels. Currently, half of the world’s cobalt is produced in the Republic of Congo. Concerning cobalt mining in the Congo region, journalists have revealed human and environmental abuses ranging from child and slave labor to toxic waste leakage and radioactivity in cobalt mines. “In 2014, according to UNICEF, about 40,000 children were working in mines across southern DRC, many of them extracting cobalt,” The Guardian reported.

             All of which could make a person discouraged.  In a recent article William Reese professor of ecology, and ecological economics says that we have placed ourselves in an untenable situation

"Reducing fossil fuel use on a vastly sped-up schedule, in the absence of adequate substitutes and a comprehensive wind-down plan, would soon produce some combination of inadequate energy supplies, broken supply lines, reduced production, declining incomes, rising inequality, widespread unemployment, food and other resource shortages, at least local famines, civil unrest, abandoned cities, mass migrations, collapsed economies and geopolitical chaos.

What politician is likely to let this scenario unfold? Would the public tolerate it?

As economists have long recognized, humans are spatial, temporal and social discounters — we naturally favour the here and now, and close relatives and friends, over distant places, merely possible futures and total strangers. Under what circumstances would hundreds of millions of people in scores of countries with disparate political philosophies and political ideologies — people who currently enjoy the “good life” — be induced simultaneously to risk wrecking their comfortable lives to stave off a climate or eco-crisis that many are not convinced is happening and, even if it is, it is perceived likely mainly to affect other people somewhere else?

And keep in mind, the world is committed to accommodating several additional billions who have yet to join the energy-addicted consumer party but are pounding on the door to be let in.

....

Perversely then, policy for climate disaster-avoidance seems designed to serve the capitalist growth economy and make the latter appear as the solution rather than cause of the problem. “Unfortunately,” as University of Vienna public policy professor Clive Spash points out, “many environmental non-governmental organisations have bought into this illogical reasoning.” (Note that many NGOs are dependent on the corporate sector for financial support.)

And this is why the international community — despite the Paris accord, Greta Thunberg, climate strikes and mass public protests — seems determined to stay its growth-driven fossil-fuelled course.

In these circumstances, the world can anticipate more and longer heat waves/droughts, desertification, tropical deforestation, melting permafrost, methane releases, regional water shortages, failing agriculture, regional famines, rising sea levels, the flooding (and eventual loss) of many coastal communities, abandonment of over-heated cities, civil unrest, mass migrations, collapsed economies and possible geopolitical chaos.

Perhaps the Dark Mountain Project was on track 10 years ago, as Paul Kingsnorth acknowledged in this interview

 CHARLOTTE DU CANN  Looking back at the decade, from the time of the manifesto to now, what strikes you as most significant in terms of the zeitgeist? 

PAUL KINGSNORTH  Perhaps the most significant fact about the last decade is how much was said in the manifesto that has become pretty much widely accepted. In terms of the culture, it was quite a wild thing to be saying: that it is not possible to stop the collapse and that we need to write about the situation for real. 

Now the kind of things we were publishing in the first books you can find in the New York Times and the Guardian; in the fact that Extinction Rebellion are called Extinction Rebellion. Most people are saying: we are in the catastrophe now, ecologically speaking. Which is a shame because it would have been nice if we had been entirely wrong.  

Some wise person said "Rowing harder doesn't help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction"

Which suggests we should change direction.   Here are William Reese's suggestions

"So, where might we go from here? A rational world with a good grasp of reality would have begun articulating a long-term wind-down strategy 20 or 30 years ago. The needed global emergency plan would certainly haveincluded most of the 11 realistic responses to the climate crisis listed below — which, even if implemented today would at least slow the coming unravelling. And no, the currently proposed Green New Deal won’t do it.

Here, then, is what an effective “Green New Deal” might look like:

1. Formal recognition of the end of material growth and the need to reducethe human ecological footprint;

2. Acknowledgement that, as long as we remain in overshoot — exploiting essential ecosystems faster than they can regenerate — sustainable production/consumption means less production/consumption;

3. Recognition of the theoretical and practical difficulties/impossibility of an all-green quantitatively equivalent energy transition;

4. Assistance to communities, families and individuals to facilitate the adoption of sustainable lifestyles (even North Americans lived happily on half the energy per capita in the 1960s that we use today);

5. Identification and implementation of strategies (e.g., taxes, fines) to encourage/force individuals and corporations to eliminate unnecessary fossil fuel use and reduce energy waste (half or more of energy “consumed” is wasted through inefficiencies and carelessness);

6. Programs to retrain the workforce for constructive employment in the new survival economy;

7. Policies to restructure the global and national economies to remain within the remaining “allowable” carbon budget while developing/improving sustainable energy alternatives;

8. Processes to allocate the remaining carbon budget (through rationing, quotas, etc.) fairly to essential uses only, such as food production, space/water heating, inter-urban transportation;

9. Plans to reduce the need for interregional transportation and increase regional resilience by re-localizing essential economic activity (de-globalization);

10. Recognition that equitable sustainability requires fiscal mechanisms for income/wealth redistribution;

11. A global population strategy to enable a smooth descent to the two to three billion that could live comfortably indefinitely within the biophysical means of nature.

Feeling lucky?

Baby, even the losers

get lucky sometimes

   -Tom Petty

Greetings

     It seems that China and Obama have agreed on terms for a Climate Change treaty.   Ignoring for a moment whether Obama a can deliver, one might ask, whether it makes any difference.

      We are all used to the notion of compromise, and a " first step"  or a "step in the right direction".   And using that sort of measuring stick, you could argue that any US and China commitment to reduce emissions is a good thing. 

     Some folks are calling it  a landmark  agreement.   Grist calls it a "game changer"

    It's a little short on details, so it's hard to evaluate.    But let's assume the best.   According to this analysis, China' s 2030 peak is pretty much a given.   The US  reductions are a little more iffy.   So, that's 45% of the emissions . If the rest of the world made  similar commitments, ( also iffy) we might have a 50 - 50 chance of staying under 2 degrees.  

Are you feeling lucky?

      Other analyses may differ. Here's a recent piece from Scientific American where,  Dr Michael Mann shows argues (using an ECS of 3), in order to stay under 2 degrees, "  fossil-fuel burning would essentially have to cease immediately" , and that we will probably hit 2 degrees by 2036 (ECS of 3) or 2046 (ECS of 2.5).  

        Below, Kevin Anderson discusses the underlying question " Is some deal better than no deal"    ?      As you might guess,  he' s not too enamored  with a weak deal, because we'd just end up with " a slightly modified business as usual future heading for temperature rises of 4C or more."

"If we can’t get anywhere, then let’s have the international community be honest about this and admit they have failed to deliver and that the world must prepare for very high levels of climate change. We mustn’t continue to hide our abject failure behind some long, eloquent document absent of substance."

  --------

https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/7473-The-world-is-heading-towards-a-weak-and-irrelevant-deal-on-climate-change

former director of the Tyndall Centre, the UK's leading academic climate change research organisation, talks to chinadialogue's Tom Levitt about climate politics and his hopes for a global deal on reducing emissions by the end of 2015.

Tom Levitt (TL): Is any deal better than no deal at the UN climate summit in Paris next year?

Kevin Anderson (KA): No, I don’t think it is. If no worthwhile deal appears to be forthcoming from Paris then first we have to be open and honest about that, and put in an emergency timetable to bring leaders together again to hammer out a deal. What will happen with a weak deal is targets or frameworks far removed from those necessary to meet the 2C commitments - first agreed by leaders at the Copenhagen Summit in 2009 - will be used to inform the basis of national policies. In practice we’d then likely only achieve a proportion of those and thereby lock in a slightly modified business as usual future heading for temperature rises of 4C or more.

Rather than having a weak and irrelevant deal that would stop the process of significant mitigation for another four or five years, we have to drive a process to bring our leaders back to negotiations. If we can’t get anywhere, then let’s have the international community be honest about this and admit they have failed to deliver and that the world must prepare for very high levels of climate change. We mustn’t continue to hide our abject failure behind some long, eloquent document absent of substance.

TL: How do you see the European Union’s leadership role on climate change?

KA: The EU has not developed internal policies that are in any way consistent with its repeated and expressed goals of avoiding the 2C characterisation of dangerous climate change. The EU is now aiming for what it says is an ambitious target of a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030. That’s far too weak. We need to achieve more than double that for the EU to be making its reasonably fair contribution to a 2C future as outlined by the IPCC. The science and the numbers that come out of the IPCC report in terms of the carbon budget – taking into account a reasonable element of equity - would mean nations and regions like the US, EU and Australia would need to reduce their emissions at a much faster rate than even the EU is considering.

TL: The UK has been seen as a leader on climate change since the passing of the Climate Change Act in 2008. But is it now in danger of ditching or failing to meet its commitments?

KA: To its credit the UK does have carbon budgets, but, unlike the 80% target for 2050 outlined in the Climate Change Act, they are not enshrined in law. The long-term, 2050 targets are irrelevant and worse still misleading in relation to climate change. The only thing that matters is the build-up of greenhouse gases, particularly CO2, in the atmosphere, in other words carbon budgets. The problem with the UK’s 2050 80% target is that it allows us to think that we can do things tomorrow that we failed to do today. If no agreement is reached in Paris next year, there may be increasing pressure on the government to repeal the Act itself. And even if the Act remains, I think the influence of the Committee on Climate Change may be reduced, and there is a risk that it could be abolished.

TL: If we were to have a realistic chance of meeting the 2C target, what expectation would that put on China?

KA: If we look at the IPCC's carbon budgets for a reasonable chance of staying within a 2C framing of climate change, then the message is fairly stark for Annex 1 countries, i.e. the US, Europe, etc. They have to eliminate fossil fuel use from their energy system early in the 2030s. For non-Annex 1 countries, including and dominated by China, they would need to eliminate all fossil fuels from their energy system by 2050, but also they need to peak their emissions by the mid 2020s and, by 2030, be delivering decarbonisation rates of at least 10% reductions year on year. Together these give a good chance of staying below a 2C rise in temperature.

A big point for China is the issue of infrastructure development. When China constructs airports, ports, roads or buildings it is currently locking in very high energy-use and hence carbon futures, as even China will not be able to transition to low-carbon energy sources at sufficient rate. The other issue is trying to overcome the way the West frames success and progress. China has a very different philosophical and cultural background to that of the West so has real scope to think differently about what it means to be successful. The model we’ve developed in the West is dominated by consumption – that’s how we repeatedly measure success – let us hope China can propose alternatives.

TL: How far can the policies promoted by The New Climate Economy report and others like them take us in reducing GHG emissions and tackling climate change?

KA: The first thing to bear in mind is that these reports are primarily about greening growth. They are not about climate stabilisation. That’s an important distinction. They are genuinely interested in how we can green the process of economic development, but they are not thinking about what the science says about carbon budgets and keeping to the 2C target. That’s a real danger because there is an assumption that if we green growth that’s adequate. But if the temperature keeps rising then the implications of a rapidly changed climate will, overall, play out negatively in terms of economic development.

These reports are authored by well meaning people trying to figure out how far you can push the current socio-economic and political systems to address climate change. The fact is that the speed and depth of mitigation now required for 2C begs fundamental questions of the current systems. Perhaps these systems could have addressed climate change if they’d responded appropriately at the time of the first IPCC report almost a quarter of a century ago. But in 2014 our emissions are 60-65% higher than they were in 1990 and are showing no signs of coming down in the next few years.

TL: Do you still have faith in the UN process or is it time to pursue alternatives like bilateral deals?

KA: I am all for continuing with the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and related processes, I think we need to be pushing them as hard as we can. But there are other things we should do alongside them. The UK’s Climate Change Act was a separate process, outside of the UNFCCC, as were the EU negotiations. We already have a mix of approaches. It’s a mistake to think that these can’t be designed to complement the UN negotiations. Ultimately however, if you are serious about climate change as a global problem then a global framework is necessary to understand the collective implications of everyone’s efforts. It is foolish and naïve to decry the UN process assuming you could substitute it for smaller, bilateral or other negotiations – these are necessary, but only as a complement to the UN process.

TL: Why do you think that message about 2C isn’t getting through to policymakers?

KA: Those of us in the scientific community who have been developing emissions scenarios and pathways have not served the policy-makers or civil society well. We have collectively adopted the approach of the New Climate Economy authors in trying to second-guess how hard we can push the political and economic system. It is our job as academics to stand outside of such constraints and say if the international community wants to meet it targets of 2C then these are the necessary carbon budgets and these are the range of accompanying emissions pathways. We should stand our ground as independent, objective analysts, much more than we have.

By trying to serve the political system in a way that is well meaning, we have ultimately undermined a robust understanding of the severity of the situation we have got ourselves into. It’s led us to the point today where we have squandered any reasonable opportunity of an evolutionary transition to 2°C, and now face revolutionary changes to our energy systems. The scale and timeframe of such systemic re-writing of energy supply, demand and distribution inevitably raises fundamental questions about the structure of contemporary society. 

We have squandered any reasonable chance of keeping within 2C of climate change unless we take draconian action, says climate scientist Kevin Anderson

The former director of the Tyndall Centre, the UK’s leading academic climate change research organisation, talks to chinadialogue’s Tom Levitt about climate politics and his hopes for a global deal on reducing emissions by the end of 2015.

…
KA: The EU has not developed internal policies that are in any way consistent with its repeated and expressed goals of avoiding the 2C characterisation of dangerous climate change. The EU is now aiming for what it says is an ambitious target of a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030. That’s far too weak. We need to achieve more than double that for the EU to be making its reasonably fair contribution to a 2C future as outlined by the IPCC. The science and the numbers that come out of the IPCC report in terms of the carbon budget – taking into account a reasonable element of equity – would mean nations and regions like the US, EU and Australia would need to reduce their emissions at a much faster rate than even the EU is considering.

TL: The UK has been seen as a leader on climate change since the passing of the Climate Change Act in 2008. But is it now in danger of ditching or failing to meet its commitments?

KA: To its credit the UK does have carbon budgets, but, unlike the 80% target for 2050 outlined in the Climate Change Act, they are not enshrined in law. The long-term, 2050 targets are irrelevant and worse still misleading in relation to climate change. The only thing that matters is the build-up of greenhouse gases, particularly CO2, in the atmosphere, in other words carbon budgets. The problem with the UK’s 2050 80% target is that it allows us to think that we can do things tomorrow that we failed to do today. If no agreement is reached in Paris next year, there may be increasing pressure on the government to repeal the Act itself. And even if the Act remains, I think the influence of the Committee on Climate Change may be reduced, and there is a risk that it could be abolished.

TL: If we were to have a realistic chance of meeting the 2C target, what expectation would that put on China?

KA: If we look at the IPCC’s carbon budgets for a reasonable chance of staying within a 2C framing of climate change, then the message is fairly stark for Annex 1 countries, i.e. the US, Europe, etc. They have to eliminate fossil fuel use from their energy system early in the 2030s. For non-Annex 1 countries, including and dominated by China, they would need to eliminate all fossil fuels from their energy system by 2050, but also they need to peak their emissions by the mid 2020s and, by 2030, be delivering decarbonisation rates of at least 10% reductions year on year. Together these give a good chance of staying below a 2C rise in temperature.

A big point for China is the issue of infrastructure development. When China constructs airports, ports, roads or buildings it is currently locking in very high energy-use and hence carbon futures, as even China will not be able to transition to low-carbon energy sources at sufficient rate. The other issue is trying to overcome the way the West frames success and progress. China has a very different philosophical and cultural background to that of the West so has real scope to think differently about what it means to be successful. The model we’ve developed in the West is dominated by consumption – that’s how we repeatedly measure success – let us hope China can propose alternatives.

TL: How far can the policies promoted by The New Climate Economy report and others like them take us in reducing GHG emissions and tackling climate change?

KA: The first thing to bear in mind is that these reports are primarily about greening growth. They are not about climate stabilisation. That’s an important distinction. They are genuinely interested in how we can green the process of economic development, but they are not thinking about what the science says about carbon budgets and keeping to the 2C target. That’s a real danger because there is an assumption that if we green growth that’s adequate. But if the temperature keeps rising then the implications of a rapidly changed climate will, overall, play out negatively in terms of economic development.

These reports are authored by well meaning people trying to figure out how far you can push the current socio-economic and political systems to address climate change. The fact is that the speed and depth of mitigation now required for 2C begs fundamental questions of the current systems. Perhaps these systems could have addressed climate change if they’d responded appropriately at the time of the first IPCC report almost a quarter of a century ago. But in 2014 our emissions are 60-65% higher than they were in 1990 and are showing no signs of coming down in the next few years.

TL: Do you still have faith in the UN process or is it time to pursue alternatives like bilateral deals?

KA: I am all for continuing with the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and related processes, I think we need to be pushing them as hard as we can. But there are other things we should do alongside them. The UK’s Climate Change Act was a separate process, outside of the UNFCCC, as were the EU negotiations. We already have a mix of approaches. It’s a mistake to think that these can’t be designed to complement the UN negotiations. Ultimately however, if you are serious about climate change as a global problem then a global framework is necessary to understand the collective implications of everyone’s efforts. It is foolish and naïve to decry the UN process assuming you could substitute it for smaller, bilateral or other negotiations – these are necessary, but only as a complement to the UN process.

TL: Why do you think that message about 2C isn’t getting through to policymakers?

KA: Those of us in the scientific community who have been developing emissions scenarios and pathways have not served the policy-makers or civil society well. We have collectively adopted the approach of the New Climate Economy authors in trying to second-guess how hard we can push the political and economic system. It is our job as academics to stand outside of such constraints and say if the international community wants to meet it targets of 2C then these are the necessary carbon budgets and these are the range of accompanying emissions pathways. We should stand our ground as independent, objective analysts, much more than we have.

By trying to serve the political system in a way that is well meaning, we have ultimately undermined a robust understanding of the severity of the situation we have got ourselves into. It’s led us to the point today where we have squandered any reasonable opportunity of an evolutionary transition to 2°C, and now face revolutionary changes to our energy systems. The scale and timeframe of such systemic re-writing of energy supply, demand and distribution inevitably raises fundamental questions about the structure of contemporary society.

Greetings

Here's a doozy.     

 Looking forward to Obama's big thing on Climate Change.  

EPA regulations would be part of Obama's climate plan.

"Going forward, obviously the EPA is going to be working very hard on rules that focus specifically on greenhouse gas emissions from the coal sector," she said. "They're doing a lot of important work on that space."

( NB  They've been working "very hard" on them since 2007 when the Supreme Court determined they were required to address carbon under the clean air act.)

snark snark

http://grist.org/news/epa-abandons-investigation-into-fracking-pollution/

EPA abandons investigation into fracking pollution

By John Upton

ShutterstockWant to know what’s in that water? Don’t ask the EPA.

The EPA is dropping its only investigation that has found evidence of water contamination from fracking.

Following a three-year study of groundwater pollution around Pavilion, Wyo., the EPA concluded in a draft report in 2011 that fracking chemicals were a likely cause. The finding was obviously controversial — frackers would like us to believe that injecting poisonous chemicals into the ground couldn’t possibly poison water. Critics of the research found fault with the EPA’s methodology and said contamination could have predated fracking.

In the face of these controversies, the agency backed down Thursday, announcing that it was halting the research and abandoning its own draft findings. From The Hill:

The EPA said it will not complete or seek peer review of a 2011 draft study, which found that groundwater pollution in the Pavillion, Wyo., area was consistent with chemicals used in gas production.

The EPA said … it would now support further study led by the state of Wyoming.

“While EPA stands behind its work and data, the agency recognizes the State of Wyoming’s commitment for further investigation and efforts to provide clean water and does not plan to finalize or seek peer review of its draft Pavillion groundwater report released in December, 2011,” the EPA said as part of a joint release with the state of Wyoming.

“Nor does the agency plan to rely upon the conclusions in the draft report,” the EPA said.

Though the announcement was welcomed by industry, the frackers still weren’t satisfied. “EPA should not only drop the Pavillion work from consideration, it should fully retract it,” American Petroleum Institute official Erik Milito said in a statement. “Our environmental performance is strong. It is a shame this reality is sometimes overshadowed by misinformation generated by faulty procedures and analysis from a federal agency.”

So the investigation will now be handed off to the state of Wyoming, whose officials were critical of the EPA’s draft finding. And the research will be funded by the very company that did the alleged polluting. From the AP:

The new research led by Wyoming officials would be funded at least in part by a $1.5 million grant from Encana Corp.’s U.S. oil and gas subsidiary, which owns the Pavillion gas field. The state will issue a final report in late 2014, Gov. Matt Mead’s office said in a news release.

We’ll give the last word to Josh Fox, director of Gasland, the Emmy Award-winning documentary about fracking: “I’m dumbfounded,” he said. “Wyoming was openly hostile to this investigation from the get go. And to have Encana pay for it? That’s insane.”

Obama's other hand

Greetings 

     On the one hand, Obama made a nice speech about climate change the other day.   Lots of nice sounding proposals.   But, all the benefits from the  EV's the eventual EPA rules, and the solar panels, = all will be wasted as long as he continues to encourage the export of coal to China.    No net benefit.

    And the Obama administration has decided that there is no need to consider the climate change impacts as part of the decision making process on the coal terminals, for this proposed export.

   What's wrong with this picture?

---

See here

The Army Corps of Engineers today said it would not conduct an areawide or cumulative review of various coal export terminal proposals in Oregon and Washington state.

In a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Energy and Power Subcommittee, corps acting regulatory chief Jennifer Moyer also said her agency would not weigh the climate change impacts of burning more American coal overseas.   

----

The biggest oversight in Obama’s climate plan is a doozy

By David Roberts

Coal should stay in the ground.

I’ve mostly been offeringmodest praise for Obama’s climate plan, but there are some notable oversights. While it addresses U.S. coal-fired plants through EPA regulations, it neglects another, equally large aspect of the coal problem. Specifically, I’m talking about coal mining, leasing, transport, and export in the U.S. Northwest. There’s a bad situation there and it’s getting worse.

The Powder River Basin stretches across southeast Montana and northeast Wyoming. It is rich with low-grade (dirty) coal. Most of that coal is on public land, owned by you and me. What you and I are doing at the moment, via the Bureau of Land Management in the Department of the Interior, is leasing the mineral rights on those public lands to coal companies for pennies on the dollar.

Domestic demand for coal is declining (and will decline further once EPA regulations are in place), so what these coal companies want to do is start shipping the coal by rail to the West Coast and from there exporting it to China and other coal-hungry developing countries, where it sells for prices up to seven times higher than in the U.S.

It’s a sweet deal for the coal companies: buy low, sell high. But it’s a raw deal for everyone else and a disaster for the climate.

Joe Smyth has a great post about the rotten coal-leasing programhere, and I wrote about the push for coal-export terminals here. There’s lots of background in those posts if you want it. In this post, I’ll mostly focus on the topic at hand, which is what Obama can and should do about it.

First, the coal-leasing program. A recent report from the Inspector General at Interior revealed that the program is (or rather, remains, after decades of corruption [PDF]) terribly run, with spotty enforcement, very little competitive bidding, disregard of rising exports, and prices that fall well below going market rates. Overall, writes The New York Times, the program’s failures “deprived taxpayers of almost $30 billion over the previous 30 years.”

The BLM says it has a “task force” looking into it, for whatever that’s worth. Obama should make it a priority to finally clean up that cesspool.

But he should go farther than that. The problem is not just that the public is leasing coal at below-market rates, it’s that market rates are too low. Coal markets do not currently internalize the costs imposed by carbon pollution (the “social cost of carbon”). Obama should insist that the social cost of carbon be integrated into the leasing program. That would more fairly balance the public’s interest in revenue from leases with its interest in a livable climate. Such a move would substantially reduce the the amount of coal leased on public land — as it should.

Second, coal exports. “Turning Cascadia into a conveyor belt for coal,” as KC Golden puts it, flies in the face of the region’s character as a nature-rich tourist destination and as a high-skill, high-tech hub. Dozens of new coal trains a day would thunder through the region’s small towns (and my beloved Seattle as well), making noise, clogging traffic, and spewing toxic dust. The coal would then be loaded on to giant, polluting ships in giant, polluting ports, turning the bucolic coastal towns where they are located into loud, dirty industrial hubs. All to ship coal the American public got scammed out of to China, where it will be burned and accelerate climate change.

It’s insane. And it’s running into resistance that may prove fatal. Three of the six proposed coal export terminals have been scrapped and the others face serious problems. Delay alone could kill the remaining ports, as there are signs that China’s demand for coal mayfall short of expectations. News of slowing Chinese growth is part of what sent coal stocks tumbling the other day.

What’s needed is a comprehensive environmental assessment of the whole network of coal leases, trains, and ports, an assessment thatincludes the effects on carbon emissions. (Preliminary analysis shows that — shocker — exporting the coal would raise carbon emissions[PDF].) Only the feds can do that kind of analysis. The governors of both Washington and Oregon have asked the feds for one, as have mayors, members of Congress, and activists. But just the other day, the Army Corps of Engineers refused (again). That’s Obama’s corps. He should kick their asses into gear and get a comprehensive assessment underway.

Remember what Obama said about Keystone: “Our national interest will be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.” How does turning over one of the world’s biggest dirty coal fields to private companies for cheap notexacerbate the problem of carbon pollution?

Of course it does. Digging up and burning that Powder River Basin coal will put enough carbon in the atmosphere to undo all of Obama’s other climate work.

If Obama really believes, as he proclaimed on Tuesday, that increasing climate pollution is not in the nation’s interests, then he needs to get serious about stopping coal leasing and coal exports in the Northwest.