Advanced Search
November 24, 2014
This is an image of new video released November 17 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) showing how carbon dioxide (CO2) moves through the atmosphere. Image courtesy of NASA. Click here to watch the video.
On November 17, the White House convened a meeting of the State, Local and Tribal Leaders Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience, attended by members of the Task Force from across the country, White House staff and Vice President Joe Biden. The Task Force presented 35 recommendations on how the Federal government can support communities preparing for climate change impacts. The report recommendations are organized in seven themes: resilient communities; improving infrastructure resilience; natural resource resilience; human health and population resilience; hazard mitigation, disaster preparedness and recovery; the economics of resilience; and capacity building. Overall, they guide the Federal government to modernize programs, incorporate climate change into planning, and remove barriers to community action on climate change.
In related news on the same day, the Obama Administration took advantage of the occasion to announce new initiatives, online toolkits and executive actions on climate change. The Climate Resilience Toolkit is a part of the Climate Action Plan, and aims to assist local officials in understanding “the topics of coastal flood risk and food resilience. . . [and it will soon] address additional areas such as water, ecosystems, transportation, and health,” according to the White House. The Administration will also hold online and in-person climate resilience training for local officials, and is launching a Climate Education and Literacy Initiative to convene thought leaders in climate science and education at the White House to discuss how to enable the next generation of leaders to be climate smart. These new measures are expected to ‘reorient’ existing funds before the induction of the new Republican Congress next year, when obtaining future funding could be ‘problematic,’ according to Reuters reporting. However, in the words of Mayor James Brainard (R-Carmel, Indiana), a member of the task force, “Neither party should want to be the party for dirty water or dirty air.”
For more information see:
Toolkit, Reuters, Whitehouse.gov, PR Newswire
On November 17, the White House issued a statement opposing new legislation pushed by House Republicans. The President is threatening to veto bills H.R. 4795, 1422, and 4012, all involving the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). H.R. 1422 would allow an increased number of scientists associated with industry to join the independent Science Advisory Board of the EPA. H.R. 4012 would require the EPA to make public all technical and scientific material before moving forward with any regulations. H.R. 4795 would cause any EPA air quality standard revisions to require updated regulations. According to the White House, “the measures could delay or prevent environmental decisions.” The administration claims these bills would infringe on the privacy of test subjects and businesses, prevent states from providing input on regulations, and would negatively impact the Science Advisory Board. The Statements of Administration Policy for all three bills share the same conclusion; if the President were given the bills, “his senior advisors would recommend that he veto.”
Huffington Post, Politico
On November 18, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Brian Schatz (D-HI) proposed the American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act, which would require large emitters of greenhouse gases, including but not exclusively carbon dioxide, to pay a fine of $42 per ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent they emit. The fee will be assessed on oil, gas and coal produced or imported to the United States, as well as non-fossil fuel sources that emit large amounts of greenhouse gases. The proposed Act would not go into effect until 2015, after which time the rate would increase by 2 percent every year to follow inflation, overall raising about $2 trillion dollars over a 10 year period. The $2 trillion would all be returned to U.S. taxpayers, although it could also be used to help benefit the country in other ways, such as reducing the national debt or supporting clean energy projects. While the bill has garnered support from other Democrats, commentators, economists, policymakers and interest groups alike, Schatz said the Republican party was not quite there yet, but would be. He commented, “Republicans in the Congress are going to take some time to warm up to this proposal, but I am confident that they will listen to their consciences and their constituents, and join us on the right side of history.” Whitehouse added, “We are subsidizing big polluters to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars annually by allowing them to pollute for free. We all pay the costs of this subsidy through higher health costs, property damage from rising seas, warming waters that affect our fishing industry, and more.”
Civil Beat, The Hill, Whitehouse.gov
On November 14, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a proposed Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rule, and signed a final Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rule, which both aim to strengthen the oil and gas industry’s measuring and reporting of methane emissions. Revisions to the final Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rule include, “changes to certain calculation methods, amendments to certain monitoring and data reporting requirements, clarifications of certain terms and definitions, and corrections to certain technical and editorial errors that have been identified during the course of implementation.” The final rule is set to go into effect on January 1, 2015. The proposed rule focuses on acquiring new data from onshore natural gas and petroleum operations, including natural gas pipelines and hydraulic fracturing wells. The proposed rule will have a 60 day comment period before its final version is issued, and is expected to come into effect in 2016. Recently, four Democrats in the House of Representatives pushed the Bureau of Land Management to propose strong rules targeted at methane emissions throughout the oil and gas industry.
Politico, EPA Final Rule, EPA Proposed Rule
On November 17, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released a new map visualization, generated using high resolution computer models, showing how carbon dioxide (CO2) moves through the atmosphere. The simulation, known as “Nature Run,” uses data on CO2 to model its movements as the gas is affected by both human and natural interactions, from the time period of May 2005 to June 2007. The model visually displays how the Northern Hemisphere releases most CO2 emissions, as well as the seasonal absorption of large amounts of CO2 by plant-life. “We hope the comprehensiveness of this product and its groundbreaking resolution will provide a platform for research and discovery throughout the Earth science community,” said Bill Putman, the project’s lead scientist. The visualization was made by a model called GEOS-5, created over 75 days on a supercomputer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. This July, NASA launched a new satellite, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite, in order to better track global carbon emissions. According to the NASA press release, “this kind of high-resolution simulation will help scientists better project future climate.”
National Geographic, Science World Report, NASA
On November 19, the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) released a report warning that current national pledges to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) by 2020 will not be enough to prevent global temperatures from rising above 2 degrees C, the internationally agreed upon target to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. The 2014 Emissions Gap Report factored the amount of greenhouse gas that could feasibly be emitted up to 2030 without surpassing the 2 degrees C guardrail, and found that even if the world meets all existing mitigation pledges, an additional 14 to 17 billion tons of greenhouse gases (GHG) will need to be cut. According to UNEP, “based on additional assumptions about non-carbon dioxide emissions, it has been estimated that global total greenhouse gas emissions will need to reach net zero sometime between 2080 and 2100.” The report warns that the cost of postponing inaction until 2020 will result in greater long-term costs and higher risks to the population. It also highlights workable reduction strategies across different sectors, including action on short-lived climate pollutants (SCLPs), such as black carbon and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which could provide economic benefit while also reducing emissions.
2014 Emissions Gap Report Executive Summary, 2014 Emissions Gap Report, The Associated Press
On November 20, during a meeting of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development in Berlin, 21 countries confirmed pledges for a combined $9.3 billion to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) to help developing countries curb greenhouse gas emissions, just a little less than the Fund’s $10 billion target for this year and far short of the annual $100 billion the Fund hopes to receive. The Canadian government announced a $265 million contribution to the fund. Britain gave a new pledge of up to $1.13 billion from an existing UK climate aid fund available for spending from 2011-2016. In the time leading up to the Berlin meeting, Japan pledged $1.3 billion, and the United States pledged $3 billion at the G-20 event in Australia. There remain some large developed countries, including Russia and Australia, which have yet to pledge a donation. United Nations Forum Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Christina Figueres commented, “The Green Climate Fund is the epicenter that determines the direction of both public and private investment over the next decades.”
The Guardian, Reuters, The Guardian, International Business Times, The Globe and Mail
On November 17, a report was released stating that Japan’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the 2013 fiscal year were the highest on record for the country -- 1.224 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2013, an increase of 1.4 percent from the previous year and an increase of 16 percent from 1990. In 2010, Japan devised a plan to cut CO2 emissions by heavily investing in nuclear power, boosting nuclear energy’s electrical output from 30 percent to 50 percent of the country’s total energy generation. In March 2011, when the Fukushima nuclear disaster occurred, Japan shut down all 48 of its active nuclear reactors and began importing coal and natural gas. Tomomichi Akuta, an analyst at Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ Research and Consulting, said, “Unless a number of [nuclear] reactors come back online soon, the trend of high emissions is unlikely to change much.” Nobuo Tanaka, a public policy professor at Tokyo University and former executive director of the International Energy Agency, commented, “It wouldn’t be easy for Japan to avoid being held accountable for its growing carbon footprint given that the United States and China are trying to take serious steps in tackling global warming.”
The Wall Street Journal Japan, Report
On November 19, China’s cabinet, the State Council, released an energy development plan to cap coal consumption at 4.2 billion tons per year by 2020, and to increase the share of non-fossil fuels in the total energy mix to 15 percent by 2020. China’s current coal consumption is approximately the same as the rest of the world combined, with coal meeting about 65 percent of China's total energy needs. Some researchers have said economic trends indicate a slowing growth rate in coal use, with a peak around 2020. The plan’s release comes a week after an announcement that China would reach an emissions peak around 2030, and increase its share of non-fossil fuels in the energy mix to 20 percent in the same time period. Alvin Lin, the China climate and energy policy director in the Beijing office of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said, “We think it’s definitely a positive sign, in line with what they've said they're going to do, [but] we’d like to see it a bit lower than that.” In September 2013, public outcry over the high levels of smog in Chinese cities prompted the need for officials to take action. Alex Wang, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) who studies Chinese environmental policy and regulations, said, “Opponents of climate change regulation in the U.S. have long used China’s emissions as an excuse for inaction on the U.S. side. Last week's joint announcement is the beginning of the end for this line of argument.”
For more information, see:
The New York Times, Shanghai Daily, Associated Press
On November 18, Yale’s Climate Change Communication project and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication released their Climate Change in the American Mind report. The study revealed that 67 percent of Americans support limits on carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants in order to combat climate change and reduce negative health effects, even if this increased electricity bills. According to the project, prices may increase because “power plants would have to reduce their emissions and/or invest in renewable energy and energy efficiency.” The study also found that two-thirds of Americans think global warming is occurring, while 16 percent do not think it is happening. The report conducted interviews in late October, taking responses from 1,275 adults nationwide. Also among the key findings was a revelation that “Americans think both the private and public sectors should be doing more to address global warming.”
Yale, Report
On November 17, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) released a report analyzing the impacts of the proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Clean Power Plan on grid reliability. According to the report, “the proposed CO2 emissions limitations will result in the retirement of between 3,300 MW and 8,700 MW of coal generation capacity [and] could result in transmission reliability issues due to the loss of generation resources in and around major urban centers.” In particular, the report says that ERCOT is concerned with the timing and scale of the changes needed to meet emissions goals, and that the resource mix changes would result in significant costs not considered in EPA’s Regulatory Impact Analysis due to needed improvements to the transmission system. The authors indicate that the short time period for retirement of capacity could increase the risk of “rotating outages” in order to balance supply with demand. A full report of the environmental regulatory impact study is scheduled to be released in mid-December, including impacts to ERCOT of other proposed or recently finalized environmental regulations.
Report
On November 19, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released a report finding that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) draft regulation on carbon emissions from power plants overestimates the electricity industry’s cost of compliance by $9 billion. Instead, the NRDC analysis indicates the draft regulation, called the Clean Power Plan, would save the industry and its customers close to $2 billion by 2020, and $6.4 billion by 2030. NRDC says the EPA used outdated pricing of energy efficiency and renewable energy when it did its estimates, leading to an overestimation of the costs of compliance. NRDC re-evaluated the savings by inputting current prices for renewable energy and energy efficiency into the same ICF International model the EPA used to create its price estimates. “It’s clear that EPA has ample room to significantly strengthen the Clean Power Plan,” commented Starla Yeh, a policy analyst at NRDC and co-author of the report.
NRDC, Click Green
=====================
1. Washington Post Editorial on Republican Congress and Climate Change
2. New York State Governor Declares State of Emergency as Snow Covers the State
3. Tom Steyer Says Climate Change Is a Local Voter Issue
4. Obama Making Last Two Years of Presidency about Climate Change
5. Polar Bear Population Falls 40 Percent
6. Indian Think-Tank Unimpressed with US-China Climate Deal
7. Poll Shows Americans View Climate Change as Problem for Poorer Nations
Authors: Emily Jackson, Angelo Bardales, Carlos Villacis and Brendan Ingargiola
Editor: Laura Small
Advancing science-based climate solutions
Top-Rated Climate Nonprofit – 4-Star Charity