A roundup of the news, views and ideas from the main stream press and the blogosphere. Click on the headline link to see the full article.
Natural gas: The fracking fallacy
Mason Inman, Nature Journal
Companies are betting big on forecasts of cheap, plentiful natural gas. Over the next 20 years, US industry and electricity producers are expected to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in new plants that rely on natural gas. And billions more dollars are pouring into the construction of export facilities that will enable the United States to ship liquefied natural gas to Europe, Asia and South America…
But a careful examination of the assumptions behind such bullish forecasts suggests that they may be overly optimistic, in part because the government’s predictions rely on coarse-grained studies of major shale formations, or plays. Now, researchers are analysing those formations in much greater detail and are issuing more-conservative forecasts. They calculate that such formations have relatively small ‘sweet spots’ where it will be profitable to extract gas…
See also Mason’s blog at Beacon Reader
Bank of England investigating risk of ‘carbon bubble’
Damiaa Carrington, PUB
The Bank of England is to conduct an enquiry into the risk of fossil fuel companies causing a major economic crash if future climate change rules render their coal, oil and gas assets worthless.
The concept of a “carbon bubble” has gained rapid recognition since 2013, and is being taken increasingly seriously by some major financial companies including Citi bank, HSBC and Moody’s, but the Bank’s enquiry is the most significant endorsement yet from a regulator…
Canada’s Green Energy Sector Now Employs More People Than Its Tar Sands
Jeff Spross, Climate Progress
Between 2009 and 2013, employment in Canada’s clean energy sector increased by 37 percent — meaning it now supplies more jobs than the country’s infamous tar sands, according to a new report.
Tracking the Energy Revolution — released Tuesday by Clean Energy Canada, a climate think tank — defined clean energy jobs as any work involved in the production of clean power; in the manufacture of the related equipment; in creating energy efficiency technology or services, like smart grids and building energy savings; in infrastructure for green transpiration; and in biofuels. All told, those sectors employed 23,700 people in Canada as of 2013, while the tar sands industry employed only 22,340…
A glut of oil?
James Hamilton, Econbrowser
he world is awash in oil, I’m hearing. The problem is, it’s fairly expensive oil.
Take for example Canada. The country has managed to increase its production of oil by a million barrels a day over the last decade. But almost all of that increase has come from oil sands. If you consider only conventional crude oil, Canadian production today would be a third of a million barrels a day lower than at its peak in 1973…
Wind and solar energy are ‘not ready for primetime,’ says Exxon analyst
AP, via The Guardian
North America, once a sponge that sucked in a significant portion of the world’s oil, will instead be supplying the world with oil and other liquid hydrocarbons by the end of this decade, according to ExxonMobil’s annual long-term energy forecast…
Abandoned U.S. oil wells still spewing methane, study finds
Richard Valdmans, Reuters
Some of the millions of abandoned oil and natural gas wells in the United States are still spewing methane, marking a potentially large source of unrecorded greenhouse gas emissions, according to a study released on Monday.
Researchers at Princeton University measured emissions from dozens of abandoned wells in Pennsylvania in 2013 and 2014 and found they were emitting an average of 0.27 kg (0.6 lbs) of methane per day, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…
Dissecting Germany’s new climate action plan
Mat Hope, Carbon Brief
Germany has implemented a series of ambitious polcies to decarbonise its economy. But despite significant investment in renewable energy, the country’s emissions have been rising for the last three years. Yesterday, the government announced new measures to get the country back on track.
We take a look at Germany’s new climate action plan, and what it means for the country’s long term decarbonisation prospects…
Is this the end of coal?
Geoff Lean, The Daily Telegraph
Maybe, just maybe, we will look back on the last weeks as one of those moments when history turned. For they have witnessed increasing signs that the world is beginning, unexpectedly, to reject its dirtiest fuel.
In an astonishing reversal – virtually unpublicised in Britain, and little noticed elsewhere – China, which burns more coal than the rest of the world put together, has announced it will cap its use within six years. Even more surprisingly there are signs that it is already declining, way ahead of schedule, as the country undergoes a largely unrecognised green revolution…
Keystone XL and Galilee basin threaten to bring down the global climate talks
Bill McKibben, The Guardian
The world’s nations are meeting in Lima, near the equator, to pledge and promise about global warming. But the actual worth of those promises can be more accurately gauged in the far north and the far south of the planet, where real decisions in the next months will show whether the climate concern is rhetorical or real.
By now most people know about the northern example: the tar sands of Alberta. Some time in the coming months the new Republican-controlled Congress will demand that Obama approve the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. If he vetoes that call and sticks to his principles, it will help keep expansion of the tar sands complex in check. That won’t make up for America’s vast expansion of oil and gas drilling in recent years, but it will send some kind of signal: there is a limit somewhere to how much fossil fuel we plan to extract.
Many fewer people have heard of Australia’s Galilee basin, but that’s about to change. Work is scheduled to start in January on turning this remote basin into the world’s biggest coal mine — a colliery so vast that this single mine, in a nation with 0.3% of the world’s population, would produce 6% of the carbon necessary to take the planet past a 2C temperature rise, the red line set by the world’s governments…
Coal giant exploits the global poor to save its own hide
Dave Roberts, Grist
The outlook for coal — especially thermal coal, the kind used to make electricity — is increasingly grim. Developed countries are seeing flat demand and rapid shifts to natural gas and renewables. Several western investment banks are shifting their funding to renewables. Developing-world demand is still on the rise, but China, which has single-handedly supported coal export markets for over a decade, is planning to cap its use of coal and vastly increase its use of renewable energy by 2020. Banking giant Goldman-Sachs has warned of a rapidly closing window for profitable thermal coal projects; “most thermal coal growth projects will struggle to earn a positive return for their owners,” it says. Naturally, Big Coal is desperate to halt its decline. And as the largest privately owned coal company in the world, one of the few big energy players devoted solely to coal, Peabody Energy is the most desperate of all.
Link to Carbon Tracker Energy Access report
There’s a global warming generation gap in the GOP, like on the issue of gay marriage
Chris Mooney, Scott Clement and Steven Mufson, Wonkblog, Washington Post
Congressional Republicans want to make fighting the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate regulations and President Obama’s greenhouse gas reduction targets a centerpiece of their agenda over next two years — now that they have wrested control of the Senate as well as House.
But how will the politics of that look 10 years from now?
Several commentators have suggested that climate change could become the gay marriage issue of the future for the GOP. In other words, demographic changes within the Republican Party itself and in society in general could leave GOP leaders looking badly out of step with their own constituency and scrambling to switch sides…
Report Downplays Role of Global Warming in California Drought
Brian Clark Howard, National Geographic
California’s ongoing drought is due primarily to natural variability in the Pacific Ocean, not human-induced global warming, a government report released Monday argues.
But whether that variation in ocean conditions is truly "natural" or is driven by a changing climate remains a major matter of debate among scientists…
The Men Who Planted Trees
Anna Badkehn, Nautilus
…“The trees that kept mud from sliding into the river are gone,” Kayantau explained. “Now when it rains, mud slides into the river. The mud adds up, and one year, one day, there will be no river. But we are fishermen. This river is our life. It’s what we will leave our sons and grandsons. If the river is gone, how will they live? We had to do something.”
So one morning last summer, Kayantau asked the hard, sunjerked men of Sindaga to leave their pirogues moored and stay ashore. He gathered the children and womenfolk. For five days, armed with hoes, sandaled, their soiled boubous flapping like giant wings in the thirsty wind, the 4,800 villagers—any man, woman, and child strong enough to work in the humid summer sun— bedded out 13,560 slim, two- foot-tall saplings of Acacia nilotica along the east bank of the Bani, downstream from the village. The idea, Kayantau told them, was simple: As the saplings grew into twisted, fissured trunks under dense thorny crowns, their roots would cinch the abrading topsoil of the desiccated seasonal swamplands and keep alluvial cut- banks from slumping into the river, preserving the watercourse for their descendants.
The villagers worked for free. They became volunteer conservationists, planting back the bush…
The Guerilla Gardener
Joe Piasecki, Argonaut News
Seeds of a movement are growing in a fenced-off empty lot on the unflashy south end of Abbot Kinney Boulevard.
Natalie Flores, 27, passed by the space a few doors down from Washington Boulevard — then a trash-strewn mess of dry grass and a handful of dying trees — during a meditative barefoot morning walk in February.
“I’m looking at all these empty plots, passing them one by one. Eventually I started exploring and noticed the fence in back of this one was open. I just started pulling weeds, thinking ‘here goes my insecurity, here goes my doubt,’” recalls Flores, who was working at Groundwork Coffee Co. on Rose Avenue at the time. “A neighbor came by and asked if I was building a garden. I said ‘sure’ and he brought me some tools.”
Flores and friend Sarah Klein, 35, began to enlist the help of others through a series of weekend gardening parties that, over the past 10 months, have given rise to vegetable plots, avocado and banana trees, a patch of succulents and an herb garden of basil, oregano, rosemary, sage and thyme. The wooden skeletons of two abandoned couches have been repurposed as planters for an upcoming crop of “couch” potatoes.
The gardeners don’t have permission to be there. They didn’t ask.
“The space was open and we just kind of took it over,” says Flores…
