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May 17, 2013
(Guardian)
The Canadian government has nearly doubled its advertising spending to promote the Alberta tar sands in an aggressive new lobbying push ahead of Thursday's visit to New York by the prime minister, Stephen Harper.
The Harper government has increased its advertising spending on the Alberta tar sands to $16.5m from $9m a year ago.
The Canadian Press news agency, which first reported on the increase in advertising spending by the Department of Natural Resources, said the television advertising was just one part of a broad promotion for tar sands.
(Guardian)
Britain has given its clearest signal yet that it wants to allow European countries to import carbon-intensive tar sands oil from Canada.
Leaked papers seen by the Guardian show that in EU negotiations on laws intended to encourage the use of low-carbon transport fuels, the UK has rejected language that would class tar sands oil as more polluting than conventional crude or other fuels.
The European commission has proposed labelling the oil as "highly polluting" under its fuel quality directive, a move that would deter countries importing it. Studies suggest that oil from tar sands produces more than one-fifth more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional crude.
(New York Times)
WASHINGTON — A sharply divided Senate committee on Thursday approved the nomination of Gina McCarthy to serve as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
The Environment and Public Works Committee voted to clear Ms. McCarthy by 10-to-8 along strictly partisan lines, sending the nomination to the Senate floor where Republicans are threatening to filibuster unless the E.P.A. meets demands for additional information.
(Bloomberg)
Buried in the questions Senate Republicans want answered by the nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency is a stumper: data linking microscopic particles in the air to premature death.
The problem is the EPA doesn’t have the data, which was compiled by Harvard University researchers more than two decades ago, and confidentiality agreements with hundreds of thousands of participants prevent researchers from making it public. The nominee, Gina McCarthy, had nothing to do with the research.
Critics say the demand -- among 1,100 questions put to McCarthy -- exemplifies the way confirmation battles are now waged on Capitol Hill, with queries that appear to range beyond the nominee’s fitness for the post.
(The Hill)
The Senate on Thursday voted 97-0 to approve President Obama’s nominee to head the Department of Energy.
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and ranking member Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) hailed the fact that Ernest Moniz had broad bipartisan support.
“I think it is good when we are able to stand as the chairman and ranking member and really come to terms of agreement and support for an individual,” Murkowski said ahead of the confirmation vote.
Wyden said Moniz “is smart about energy policy” and “savvy” about how the Department of Energy operates.
(Midwest Energy News)
In January, northern Minnesota electric utility Minnesota Power announced a new direction forward for its generation portfolio.
The company’s “Energy Forward” plan calls for adding wind and hydropower, retiring one coal-burning unit, and converting two others to natural gas. Along with continued conservation efforts, the investments are projected to lower the utility’s carbon emissions 30 percent by 2015 compared to 2005 levels.
It’s the years beyond that, however, that worry climate activists.
(ClimateWire)
The Arctic Council added China and five other countries as official observers yesterday, expanding the focus of the organization and underscoring the complicated politics created by newly open waters in the north because of climate change.
The council -- which consists of eight Arctic countries -- granted observer status to India, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Singapore in addition to China.
The group deferred a final decision about an observer application from the European Union, although it welcomed the union's request "affirmatively." The E.U.'s bid faced a challenge from Canadian leaders in particular, who said the bloc's ban on seal products threatens the livelihoods of indigenous peoples.
(Climate Central)
As the planet warms under the influence of rising greenhouse gases, and melting ice drives sea level higher, scientists have focused mostly on changes in the vast ice sheets that cover Greenland and Antarctica. If either one melts substantially or slides into the ocean, the results would be catastrophic.
But there’s another ice reserve to worry about: the many thousands of smaller glaciers unconnected to continental-scale ice sheets. They’re melting, too, and a new report in Science shows that between 2003 and 2009, they dumped about 260 billion tons of meltwater into the ocean annually, contributing about 7 millimeters per year to sea level rise, just as much as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
May 16, 2013
(Guardian)
One afternoon in the waning days of winter, the most powerful man in Newtok, Alaska, hopped on a plane and flew 1,000 miles to plead for the survival of his village. Stanley Tom, Newtok's administrator, had a clear purpose for his trip: find the money to move the village on the shores of the Bering Sea out of the way of an approaching disaster caused by climate change.
Newtok was rapidly losing ground to erosion. The land beneath the village was falling into the river. Tom needed money for bulldozers to begin preparing a new site for the village on higher ground. He needed funds for an airstrip, He came back from his meetings in Juneau, the Alaskan state capital, with expressions of sympathy – but nothing in the way of the cash he desperately needed. "It's really complicated," he said. "There are a lot of obstacles."
(Guardian)
A survey of thousands of peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals has found 97.1% agreed that climate change is caused by human activity.
Authors of the survey, published on Thursday in the journal Environmental Research Letters, said the finding of near unanimity provided a powerful rebuttal to climate contrarians who insist the science of climate change remains unsettled.
The survey considered the work of some 29,000 scientists published in 11,994 academic papers. Of the 4,000-plus papers that took a position on the causes of climate change only 0.7% or 83 of those thousands of academic articles, disputed the scientific consensus that climate change is the result of human activity, with the view of the remaining 2.2% unclear.
(Bloomberg)
Prime Minister Stephen Harper is seeking to counter opposition to TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s Keystone XL pipeline, a project crucial for boosting Canada’s economy and Harper’s plans to make the country an energy superpower to rival Saudi Arabia.
Harper will discuss the pipeline at an event today moderated by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin for the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and meet separately with business executives to support Keystone. Harper follows Canadian cabinet ministers and provincial premiers to the U.S. to lobby for the $5.3 billion project.
(ClimateWire)
Cleveland’s chamber of commerce is ready to launch an unusual program to help businesses get loans for energy efficiency retrofits. In Salt Lake City, the local chamber is promoting “clean air” to reduce gasoline use.
These out-of-the-ordinary pursuits by local business associations are increasingly being used in regions where the politics of climate change might not fly, but profits from clean energy do.
Local chambers are devising ways to reduce the travel time of big trucks, swap gas guzzlers for natural gas haulers and erect wind turbines in conservative states.
(Bloomberg)
Quebec Environment Minister Yves- Francois Blanchet introduced legislation that would ban hydraulic fracturing, drilling and testing for natural gas in the St. Lawrence River valley for as long as five years.
The moratorium will be in place until a new law governing the exploration and production of hydrocarbons takes effect, or for a maximum of five years, according to a copy of the bill posted today on the government’s website. The bill would suspend all existing licenses to drill for shale gas without compensation, according to the document.
(Reuters)
Experts judged on Wednesday that a reactor on Japan's west coast is located on ground at high risk of an earthquake, setting in motion a process that will likely lead to the first permanent shutdown of a nuclear plant since the 2011 Fukushima crisis.
Mothballing the reactor at Japan's oldest nuclear station would be the most stringent measure adopted in Japan since the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear station north of Tokyo exposed failings in nuclear oversight. The experts' finding is likely to send shockwaves through an industry that has long been used to a light touch from regulators.
(Circle of Blue)
Groundwater is often compared to a bank account. By this analogy, the United States is making significantly more withdrawals than deposits, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s first national assessment of groundwater depletion.
Between 1900 and 2008, the country’s groundwater reserves dropped by nearly 1,000 cubic kilometers (264 trillion gallons) – enough water to fill Lake Erie twice.
And the problem is getting worse. The rate of depletion from 2000 to 2008 was nearly three times greater than the average rate of depletion for the entire study period.
(AP)
Federal weather forecasts for Superstorm Sandy were exceptionally accurate last fall, but the warnings themselves were confusing, an internal review found.
The gigantic October storm lost tropical characteristics hours before landfall in New Jersey, so the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stopped calling it a hurricane. Instead it shifted focus to flooding and high wind warnings and moved responsibility from the National Hurricane Center in Miami to local weather offices.
NOAA's self-assessment said that led to confusion by the public and the media, a complaint made by independent meteorologists.
The 66-page report uses the word "confusion" 88 times.
(The Hill)
The nonprofit group created out of President Obama's reelection campaign is targeting Senate Republicans over their opposition to his nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Organizing for Action (OFA) on Wednesday pressed supporters to call out Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee a day ahead of the panel's second attempt to confirm Gina McCarthy, Obama's nominee to be EPA administrator.
"These climate deniers in the Senate are trying to block a bipartisan nominee for EPA administration," the group said in a graphic posted to Twitter.
"For these deniers, is simply voting on an EPA administrator too hot to handle?"
May 15, 2013
(The Hill)
Western Canada’s landlocked oil and gas producers have kept a wary eye on a British Columbia election campaign rife with debate about pipelines and fracking. And while many will prefer the surprising Liberal victory Tuesday night than an NDP government, the election result still leaves a number of unanswered questions about the relationship between the province and the industry.
Christy Clark took the campaign stance that her incumbent Liberal party was a shrewd steward of the economy while NDP policies would “kill” the natural-gas sector vital to the production of liquefied natural gas. “I say yes to growing our economy. Adrian Dix says no,” was Ms. Clark’s refrain regarding the NDP leader.
But the Liberal win is still a relative wildcard for the energy industry.
(Bloomberg)
Canada is "very close" to an agreement with industry on new rules to lower greenhouse-gas emissions from the oil and natural gas industry, Environment Minister Peter Kent said.
“We’re very close to bringing in regulations,” Kent said today in an interview in Paris. The rules could be announced in the “coming months,” he said, without providing details.
Canada’s greenhouse-gas output has risen from 1990 levels mainly because of surging bitumen production from Alberta oil sands. Producers are under pressure to reduce the environmental footprint in the face of a European Commission plan to penalize crude derived from bitumen as part of a proposed fuel-quality directive.
(Guardian)
When the history of humanity's struggle to combat climate change is written, few characters will play as prominent a role as Charles David Keeling. A geochemist, Keeling developed an accurate method of measuring CO2 in the atmosphere, and in 1958 began recording background levels of the gas at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.
That was the start of the famous Keeling Curve, which has tracked the steady rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Those levels have soared from 315 parts per million when Keeling began, to a grim milestone reached last week, as atmospheric concentrations exceeded 400 parts per million.
(The New York Times)
If there were one American industry that would be particularly worried about climate change it would have to be insurance, right?
From Hurricane Sandy’s devastating blow to the Northeast to the protracted drought that hit the Midwest Corn Belt, natural catastrophes across the United States pounded insurers last year, generating $35 billion in privately insured property losses, $11 billion more than the average over the last decade.
And the industry expects the situation will get worse. "Numerous studies assume a rise in summer drought periods in North America in the future and an increasing probability of severe cyclones relatively far north along the U.S. East Coast in the long term," said Peter Höppe, who heads Geo Risks Research at the reinsurance giant Munich Re.
(The Daily Climate)
Around 20 percent of the snow cover in North America's greatest mountain range has been lost because of warmer springs in the last three decades.
Scientists from the American Geophysical Union and the U.S. Geological Survey report that they had established a pattern of snowfall in the northern and southern Rockies: when the snowpack was large in the northern Rockies, it might be correspondingly meager in the southern mountains and vice versa.
But since the 1980s, snowpack declines have occurred simultaneously along the entire length of the Rocky Mountains, with unusually severe declines in the north.
(StateImpact Pennsylvania)
A new poll out Tuesday shows strong support for a moratorium on natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania, despite showing general support for gas extraction.
The Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy at the University of Michigan, in conjunction with the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, surveyed both Pennsylvania and Michigan residents on fracking. The survey shows general support for gas extraction in Pennsylvania. Forty-nine percent of respondents approve, and 40 percent oppose.
But almost two-thirds support a drilling moratorium in order to study the risks. Pollster and University of Michigan professor Barry Rabe says that’s not such a contradiction.
(16 WNEP)
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection is testing air quality this week in Susquehanna County in the area with the most natural gas activity.
DEP says with so much drilling and fracking and so many compressor stations being built to help transport the gas, some have questioned if the air is being polluted.
Hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” is the process of using liquid to break up underground shale to extract natural gas.
It’s hard to miss all the natural gas activity in the Elk Lake area of Susquehanna County but some people wonder what you can’t see here, what’s happening to the air. So the state brought an air testing unit to spend the week in the area, trying to figure out if all the gas activity is causing any air quality concerns.
(Chicago Tribune)
Chicago Tribune business reporter, Julie Wernau finds southern Illinois landowners on both sides of the fence when it comes to the soon to be installed fracking well.
A bill to regulate horizontal hydraulic fracturing in Illinois is ready to move forward, according sources in Springfield who have been negotiating the bill behind closed doors.
Following months of negotiations, the legislation stalled in March after a last-minute amendment was added to require unionized well contractors at each well site until drillers themselves were licensed.
The move caused a coalition of business, labor, construction, transportation and agricultural organizations to pull their support for the bill.
(E&E Daily, sub req'd)
Federal judges grappled today with how to resolve a conflict between the Clean Air Act and the Natural Gas Act that is stalling the construction of a new natural gas compressor in Maryland.
Dominion Transmission Inc. wants to build the Allegheny Storage Project in Myersville in Frederick County. The town doesn't want the facility and is using Maryland's Clean Air Act implementation plan to effectively deny the company the necessary permits by claiming the proposed site isn't zoned for such a facility.
But the utility has the approval of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and contends that the federal Natural Gas Act overrides Maryland's pollution statute.
(Bloomberg)
Chancellor Angela Merkel must ditch coal in favor of cleaner gas power plants to protect the climate, said the co-leader of Germany’s Greens party, urging a redoubling of efforts to raise carbon prices in the world’s biggest cap-and-trade program.
The Greens will push for more ambitious European Union climate targets for 2020 to help raise CO2 prices, said Juergen Trittin, outlining his party’s strategy for federal elections in little more than four months. A higher price for carbon permits would make burning coal more expensive and so less attractive, which the Greens would complement by setting strict efficiency standards for new fossil plants, he said.
(The Globe and Mail)
Failure to build needed oil sands pipelines – particularly Keystone XL – could result in persistent price discounts and slow expansion of the sector, even as North American production booms, the International Energy Agency warned Tuesday.
In a forecast that portends downward price pressure in the coming years, the international agency said supply growth – fuelled largely by North America – will outstrip the increase in demand over the next five years, resulting in a buildup of global spare capacity that is typically associated with weak crude prices.
May 14, 2013
(Wall Street Journal)
North American oil production will dominate world-wide supply growth over the next five years, the International Energy Agency predicted Tuesday, the result of growing production from "fracking" and other technologies that access once-inaccessible reserves.
It is a shift that few predicted five years ago, and will come at the expense of producers like members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries that for years have dominated the industry.
In its most recent analysis, which takes a five-year view of the oil market, the IEA said U.S. production is rising much faster than previously forecast as a result of sustained high prices and more-efficient operations.
(Los Angeles Times)
Carbon dioxide measurements in the Earth's atmosphere did not break the symbolic milestone of 400 parts per million at a Hawaiian observatory last week, according to a revised reading from the nation's climate observers.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revised its May 9 reading at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, saying it remained fractions of a point below the level of 400 ppm, at 399.89.
Individual readings at any of NOAA's observation stations are subject to revision on a regular basis. Sometimes a data point is moved to another set when the sets are adjusted for the international date line.
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