Resilience Roundup – Feb 27

February 27, 2015

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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.


China Cut Its Coal Use 2.9 Percent Last Year, Will They Peak Even Before 2020?

Joe Romm, Climate Progress
China cut its coal consumption 2.9 percent in 2014, the first drop this century. Domestic coal production fell 2.5 percent.

As we reported last year, the Chinese government announced in November it would cap coal use by 2020. The new data raise the possibility the peak in coal consumption will come even sooner.

This reversal on coal utterly refutes the GOP claim that China’s recent climate pledge with the United States “requires the Chinese to do nothing at all for 16 years.”…

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U.S. Tells Canada Its Climate Goal May Affect Keystone Decision

Jim Snyder, Jonathan Allen, Bloomberg
U.S. climate negotiators have told their Canadian counterparts that Canada’s plan to cut carbon emissions could be one of the factors that President Barack Obama weighs as he considers whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, a U.S.

official said. The U.S. hasn’t suggested it might approve the $8 billion proposed project in exchange for climate commitments, the official said. Canada is developing a proposal as part of United Nations-sponsored talks aimed at cutting carbon emissions that governments were encouraged to submit by next month.

The notion that there’s any linkage between Canada’s UN goals and the president’s decision on the pipeline is patently false, said another U.S official familiar with the issue. There is a longstanding process for determining these projects, and the State Department is currently conducting that review, the official added. ..


Judge Declines Final Rule in Harvard Divestment Suit

Jan Lee, Triple Pundit
Last Friday Harvard University’s legal team was in court to address what seems to have become iconic debate of our times: the financial support of the fossil fuel industry. Harvard Corporation, which oversees the university’s investment portfolio, was sued last year by seven students who maintain that Harvard “has a legal obligation — and, more importantly, a moral duty —to stop profiting from human suffering and environmental destruction.” The group, which is representing itself, is succinct in its goal: “Our lawsuit simply asks Harvard to live up to its centuries-old promise to promote “the advancement of youth.”

The issue of contention is Harvard’s continued financial gain from investments in the fossil fuel industry, which the university defends as contributing to the endowments that further its scholastic efforts. Last year Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust dismissed student requests for divestment, stating that the university needed to be“clear-sighted about the risks that divestment could pose to the endowment’s capacity to propel our important research and teaching mission.”…


Peak fossil fuel won’t stop climate change – but it could help

Gary Ellem, The Conversation (Australia)
Fossil fuels are ultimately a finite resource – the definition of non-renewable energy. Burning of these fuels – coal, oil and gas – is the main driver of climate change. So could the peak of fossil fuels help mitigate warming?

The short answer is maybe … but perhaps not how you might think.

In a paper published this month in the journal Fuel, my colleagues and I suggest that limits to fossil fuel availability might take climate Armageddon off the table, although we will still need to keep some fossil fuels in the ground for the best chance of keeping warming below 2C…


To stop Big Oil, environmentalists need labor unions

Rebecca Burns, AlJazeera
In their push to halt construction of the Keystone XL and other pipelines in recent years, environmentalists have often put a familiar question to labor: Which side are you on? More often than not, unions have ended up on the other side of the line in the tar sand, backing the oil and gas industry in its efforts to expand the pipeline and drilling projects that are poised to push us past the point of carbon no return.

With hard-hit construction and trade workers swayed easily by industry’s promise of jobs, no matter how short term, the prospects for recruiting labor in the fight against climate change often look grim. But given that the workers who drill, mine and frack the earth — often at enormous risk to their health and safety — are specially poised to shut down these operations, the environmental movement can’t afford to give up on the idea of a robust blue-green alliance. In order to bring about such an alliance, however, the movement must offer workers something more than the distant promise of green jobs…


Lester Brown: ‘Vast dust bowls threaten tens of millions with hunger’

Suzanne Goldberg, The Guardian
Vast tracts of Africa and of China are turning into dust bowls on a scale that dwarfs the one that devastated the US in the 1930s, one of the world’s pre-eminent environmental thinkers has warned.

Over 50 years, the writer Lester Brown has gained a reputation for anticipating global trends. Now as Brown, 80, enters retirement, he fears the world may be on the verge of a greater hunger than he has ever seen in his professional lifetime.

For the first time, he said tens of millions of poor people in countries like Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Peru could afford to eat only five days a week. Most of the world was exhausting its ground water because of overpumping. Yields were flatlining in Japan. And in northern and western China, and the Sahel region of Africa – an area already wracked by insurgency and conflict – people were running out of land to grow food. Millions of acres of were turning into wasteland because of over-farming and over-grazing…


If We Dust-Bowlify Mexico And Central America, Immigration Policy Will Have To Change

Joe Romm, Climate Progress
Immigration policy and the funding of the Homeland Security Department are front page news. But here is a rarely-asked question raised by a new NASA study that builds on considerable recent recent drought research.

If the United States, through our role as the greatest cumulative carbon polluter in history, plays a central role in rendering large parts of Mexico and Central America virtually uninhabitable, what will that mean for Homeland Security? And will we have some moral obligation to change our immigration policy?

People often associate environmental refugees primarily with sea level rise, and that is likely to be the case in places like Bangladesh and the South Pacific. But for North America, the primary cause will be the near-permanent Dust Bowls we are creating…


Spiralling Cost of Nuclear Power Station

Prof Peter Saunders, Institute of Science in Society
When the UK government announced in a 2008 White Paper that it was planning a new fleet of nuclear reactors, it proclaimed that nuclear was “one of the cheapest low-carbon electricity generation technologies.” It would be a very good deal for the consumer because the price would be low; and a very good deal for the taxpayer because it would not need a subsidy [1].

Now we are told that the new Hinkley Point C plant will cost more than four times the figure in the White Paper. There will most certainly be a subsidy, possibly as much as £16 bn. The government has also agreed to buy the electricity produced at Hinkley Point at a price that will be adjusted to keep up with inflation but starts at £92.50/MWh, which is about twice both the current wholesale price of electricity and the estimate given in 2008 [2].

How could the cost have risen so much in so short a time, and even before construction starts? On the new figures, and with the costs of renewables falling year by year – now equal or below the cost of fossil fuels in many parts of the world [3] – is nuclear a cheap low-carbon energy source even if we think that it really was in the first place? And in the face of this, why is the government so determined to push ahead with the project?…


Robert Reich: America is headed full speed back to the 19th century

Robert Reich, Salon
Former labor secretary Robert Reich on the dangers of on-demand jobs and our growing intolerance for labor unions…


What’s Your Climate Change Elevator Pitch?

Anna Fahey, Sightlone Daily
The clever folks over at Climate Denial Crock of the Week (that’s Peter Sinclair) and Skeptical Science (John Cook) were in San Fran back in December, interviewing scientists, when they had the brilliant idea to ask each one to give their best climate change “elevator pitch.”

The set-up is simple: You’re on an elevator. Somebody says, “Oh, hi, you’re a climate scientist? What’s the big deal about climate change anyway?” What do you say in two minutes or less? And the resulting series of short videos is proving to be inspiring and instructive…


Dietary Panel: Eating Less Meat is Better for the Environment

Clare Foran, National Journal
If you want to help save the planet, eat less meat. That’s the conclusion of freshly-minted federal recommendations that could radically alter the way Americans eat.

"A diet higher in plant-based foods, such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, and lower in calories and animal-based foods is more health promoting and is associated with less environmental impact than is the current U.S. diet," states the report from the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee…


Amsterdam Has Officially Run Out of Spaces to Park Its Bicycles

Feargus O’Sullivan, Citylab
Amsterdam is currently tackling a problem most cities can only dream of having: It has way too many bikes.

So massively popular is cycling in the Netherlands’ largest city that the city center has run out of places to put them all. Amsterdam’s daily two-wheeled commuter flood fills downtown with more bikes than it has space to park, forcing the city come up with a drastic, visionary solution. It’s going to park those bikes underwater. Oh, and on water, too…


Kenyan teenager converts his school’s poop into safe, clean energy

Charley Cameron, Inhabitat

In early January 2013, Kenya’s oldest English-language school, the Maseno School, opened new dormitories for 720 students, and it had a couple of problems. Pit latrines and a faulty sewage system inevitably left foul odors and polluted local freshwater sources, while the kitchen used firewood for cooking fuel—unhealthy for cooks and the environment alike. High school senior, Leroy Mwasaru, now 17, and four of his friends had an idea: to harvest poop and other waste and turn it into a safe, clean and eco-friendly source of cooking fuel…


New study directly measures greenhouse effect at Earth’s surface

Robert McSweeney, Carbon Brief
Scientists know that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere cause the Earth to warm. But measuring exactly how much heat they trap is harder than you might think.

Previous studies using satellites have established that more heat is entering the atmosphere than leaving it. But a new study goes a step further and directly measures the amount of warming greenhouse gases are producing at Earth’s surface.

The paper provides the critical link between rising carbon dioxide concentrations and the extra energy trapped in the climate system, the researchers say…

News clippings image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission.

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