Humans Cross Another Danger Line for the Planet
Mark Fischetti, Scientific American
Five years go an impressive, international group of scientists unveiled nine biological and environmental “boundaries” that humankind should not cross in order to keep the earth a livable place. To its peril, the world had already crossed three of those safe limits: too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, too rapid a rate of species loss and too much pouring of nitrogen into rivers and oceans—primarily in the form of fertilizer runoff.
Now we have succeeded in transgressing a fourth limit: the amount of forestland being bulldozed or burned out of existence (see map below). Less and less forest reduces the planet’s ability to absorb some of that carbon dioxide and to produce water vapor, crucial to plant life. And the ongoing loss alters how much of the sun’s energy is absorbed or reflected across wide regions, which itself can modify climate…
Food diversity under siege from global warming, U.N. says
Chris Arsenault, Reuters
Climate change threatens the genetic diversity of the world’s food supply, and saving crops and animals at risk will be crucial for preserving yields and adapting to wild weather patterns, a U.N. policy paper said on Monday.
Certain wild crops – varieties not often cultivated by today’s farmers – could prove more resilient to a warming planet than some popular crop breeds, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said.
But these wild strains are among those most threatened by climate change…
Moving Stories report: The voices of people who move in the context of environmental change
UK Climate Change and Migration Coalition
Moving Stories highlights these powerful, inspiring and often traumatic stories. We compiled Testimonies from ten regions across the world. These came from local news reports, academic journals and interviews recorded by NGOs. The stories highlight different kinds of movement affected by slow– and rapid–onset disasters. The stories show us that movement linked to environmental change is different across the world. The stories also reveal that individual decisions to move or stay vary in even response to the same disaster.
The End of the Partisan Divide Over Climate Change
Tom Zeller Jr., Forbes
The revelation late last week that global average temperatures set a new record in 2014 seemed to underscore a political and cultural shift on climate change that, by many accounts, was already well underway. From the stock markets and Wall Street to the boardrooms of Big Oil — and even the living rooms of Republican voters — the era of reflexive skepticism and denial of basic climate science appears to be coming to a close.
That won’t likely mean an end to partisan bickering, of course. But as the adage goes, the first step to solving a problem is admitting that you have one…
Davos oil barons eye $150 crude as investment slump incubates future crunch
Ambrose Evans Pritchard, The Daily Telegraph
Rampant speculation by hedge funds and a rare confluence of short-term shocks have driven the price of oil far below its natural clearing level, coiling the springs for a fresh spike this year that may catch markets badly off-guard once again.
"The price will rebound and we will go back to normal very soon," said Abdullah Al-Badri, Opec’s veteran secretary-general. "Yes, there is an over-supply, but fundamentals don’t justify this 50pc fall in price."
Experts from across the world – from both the West and the petro-powers – said the slump in fresh investment in 2015 is setting the stage for a much tighter balance of supply and demand, and possibly a fresh oil crunch…
Poland’s shale gas revolution evaporates in face of environmental protests
Arthur Nelson, The Guardian
“Whenever Chevron organised anything, we demonstrated,” said Barbara Siegienczuk, 54, one of the leaders of the local anti-shale gas protest group Green Zurawlow in south-eastern Poland. “We made banners and placards and put posters up around the village. Only 96 people live in Zurawlow – children and old people included – but we stopped Chevron!”…
“After years of dependence on our large neighbour (Russia), today we can say that my generation will see the day when we will be independent in the area of natural gas and we will be setting terms,” he said, adding that well conducted exploration, “would not pose a danger to the environment.”
But things haven’t turned out that way. Plans for a shale gas-fuelled economic revival appear to be evaporating as test wells have not performed as expected or have suffered regulatory delays. Foreign investors have pulled out and sustained environmental protests like that in Zurawlow have hampered drilling plans.
Officials privately talk of the shale experiment as a ‘disaster’…
Ban fracking, says former Tory environment secretary Caroline Spelman
Damian Carrington, The Guardian
…Spelman’s demand for a halt to fracking was made in an amendment to a controversial government bill on which MPs will vote on Monday.
The amendment, which has the backing of half the MPs on the EAC, calls for a “moratorium on the hydraulic fracturing of shale gas deposits in order to reduce the risk of carbon budgets being breached.” This “reflects the conclusions” of an EAC inquiry which will be published on Monday and is expected to conclude that the push for fracking could derail efforts to tackle global warming…
Renewables dominate German energy mix
Euractiv
2014 was a successful year for Germany’s Energiewende green energy project, with a study stating that for the first time, renewables led power production in Germany. EurActiv Germany reports.
Germany’s green energy transition project, Energiewende, is boasting significant progress compared to one year ago. For the first time, 2014 renewable energy sources were the most important source in the country’s power mix…
Many renewable sources ‘now cheaper than fossil’
Ecobusiness
The cost of generating power from renewable energy sources has reached parity or dropped below the cost of fossil fuels for many technologies, the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) has revealed.
Irena’s “Renewable Power Generation Costs in 2014” report concludes that biomass, hydropower, geothermal and onshore wind are all competitive with or cheaper than coal, oil and gas-fired power stations, even without financial support and despite falling oil prices, a Wam report said.
Solar photovoltaic (PV) is leading the cost decline, with solar PV module costs falling 75 per cent since the end of 2009 and the cost of electricity from utility-scale solar PV falling 50 per cent since 2010, it said. Report link
Africa’s oil shock
Zainab Usman, Aljazeera
The plummeting of global crude prices is generating ripple effects worldwide. While oil exporters are reeling from plunging revenues, oil importers are bracing for cheaper oil, and the potential economic stimulus. Global economic relations may also witness profound shifts as the United States overtakes Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer.
Given the concentration of oil and other natural resources in Africa, it is worth examining how falling oil prices will affect the continent’s economic transformation aspirations…
A Caribbean Island Says Goodbye Diesel and Hello 100 Percent Renewable Electricity
Kaitlyn Bunker, RMI via Renewable Energy World
Bonaire (pop. 14,500), a small island off the coast of Venezuela, is famous for its beautiful marine reefs, which are visited by 70,000 tourists every year. What many of the tourists don’t realize is that the majority of the electricity powering their needs comes from renewable energy. Yet for the residents of Bonaire, the switch from fossil-fueled to renewable energy systems has made a world of difference.
Like many Caribbean islands, Bonaire originally relied on diesel fuel to generate electricity for residents, with a peak demand of 11 MW. This fuel had to be shipped in from other nations, resulting in high electricity prices for Bonaire residents, along with uncertainty about when and how much prices might increase with changing fuel costs.
In 2004, everything changed when a fire destroyed the existing diesel power plant. Although tragic, the situation provided an opportunity for Bonaire to consider what kind of new electricity system to build. Temporary diesel generators were rented to provide power for the short term. Meanwhile, the government and local utility began working together to create a plan that would allow Bonaire to reach a goal of generating 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources…
China cuts energy intensity by 4.8 pct in 2014
Stian Reklev and Kathy Chen, Reuters
China beat a key energy efficiency target in 2014, cutting its energy intensity by 4.8 percent from a year earlier, the State Council said on Tuesday, as it tries to reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
The government had aimed for a 3.9 percent cut in energy intensity after a 3.7 percent drop in 2013 in order to meet its target of cutting energy intensity to 16 percent below 2010 levels by 2015.
Energy intensity is a measure of the amount of energy needed to increase GDP, and high levels of energy intensity indicate a high cost of converting energy into GDP…
Fossil fuel firms accused of renewable lobby takeover to push gas
Arthur Neslen, The Guardian
Major fossil fuel companies and energy utilities have used their financial power to take control of key renewable energy lobby groups in Europe in an effort to slow the continent’s transition to clean energy, according to industry insiders.
Big energy firms such as Total, Iberdrola, E.On and Enel have together adopted a dominant position in trade bodies such as the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) and European Photovoltaic Industry Association (EPIA). Their representatives now constitute a majority on both group’s boards.
Officials in the two groups have variously been told to argue for a renewable-gas alliance as the answer to Europe’s energy security concerns, and lowered their 2030 clean energy ambitions by a third, according to ex-staffers, renewables experts and policy insiders. They argue that the more pro-gas stance influenced the 2030 climate targets adopted by EU governments last year.
“One of the advantages the fossils still have over renewables is capital and that is why they say that the perfect match is between renewables and gas,” the Green MEP Bas Eickhout told the Guardian. “The strategy is familiar. It ends with a fossil fuel takeover.”…
Lucid begins producing electricity inside city water pipes
Steve Law, Portland Tribune
Portland-based Lucid Energy, which designed and built the gravity-based renewable energy system, announced it has started producing energy for its first local installation, at pipes under the roadway at Southeast 147th Avenue and Powell Boulevard in East Portland.
City water flows downhill through four 42-inch turbines inside water pipes, generating electricity sold by Portland General Electric…
In Your Wildest Schemes
The Nib, Medium
The free market won’t stop climate change, but its failure is inspiring the people who will
Towards a Green Economy: Green Growth or No Growth? – Robert Pollin
Paul Jay, Real News
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. This is Reality Asserts Itself. I’m Paul Jay in Baltimore. In this Reality Asserts Itself, we’re going to explore, over around ten segments, what a new green economy might look like and how we might get there. When President Obama ran in 2007, he talked a lot about a green economy as being a solution to the economic crisis, and many people have talked about it. But we haven’t seen many concrete plans, certainly from those who are governing, to get there. So, in the beginning of this series with Robert Pollin, who’s done some work–Bob Pollin from the PERI institute–he’s tried to model what a green economy might actually look like (he’s tried to actually crunch the numbers) and talk a little bit about how you get from A to B. So, without further ado, joining us in the studio is Bob Pollin. Thanks for joining us…
Available as video, audio and trascript. According to the script Bob Pollin should be debating Tim Jackson author of ‘Prosperity without Growth’ in the near future.
Can Boomers Make Cohousing Mainstream?
Chris Bentley, Citylab
Cohousing refers to a kind of shared housing in between that single-family world and the hippie communes (or hipster co-ops) it’s often confused with. Danish architect Jan Gudmand-Høyer pioneered the model in the late ’60s and early ’70s, bringing together friends and like-minded utopians to co-design and develop multi-unit homes that would foster a sense of community among their residents. He talked about reintroducing "play" into daily life or, as he put it, "moving from Homo productivo to Homo ludens"—from worker drones to more joyful beings. The idea has caught on in Europe, where somewhere between 1 and 8 percent of Danes live in a form of cohousing. (In the U.S., that figure is less than one hundreth of one percent of total housing units.) Gudmand-Høyer’s Skråplanet and Trudeslund communities still thrive. But in the U.S. it has been a slow climb…
A Counterculture Spirit Flourishes, Preserved Under Fiberglass Domes
Patricia Leigh Brown, New York Times
The trill of panpipes from a yurt wafted across the mulch hillocks of the Domes, a 1970s experiment in communal housing in which students live in igloolike fiberglass domes and snuggle up in snow-white interiors of plastic foam.
Although plenty of campuses offer specialized housing — often reserved for vegans, teetotalers, athletes and other like-minded souls — it is probably safe to say that there is no place quite like the Domes, an early venture into sustainable living at the University of California, Davis. The complex of 14 tiny domes (elevation: 52 feet, population: 28-plus) is officially named Baggins End, after the Tolkien characters…
The university, founded as an agricultural extension of the University of California, Berkeley, has long been recognized for innovation — in breeding tomatoes, for example, and other crops. Davis itself has been an early adopter of passive solar heating, ecologically planned communities, city bike trails and other progressive environmental amenities…
