The Coal Industry Is Imploding. Why Is it Still So Powerful in Washington?
Zoë Carpenter, The Nation
As its battle against the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan intensifies, Big Coal is getting a lot of help from friends in high places.
Leading the rush to the industry’s defense is Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who has launched an underhanded campaign to undermine the Environmental Protection Agency’s new rules for greenhouse gases from power plants. In a March 3 op-ed, McConnell suggested that states should refuse to submit a state plan for lowering emissions. A few weeks later he sent a letter directly to every governor in the country, warning that developing such a plan would allow “the EPA to wrest control of a state’s energy policy.”…
Is Colorado Primed To Become The Silicon Valley Of Agriculture?
Luke Runyon, NPR
Colorado is famous for its beer and its beef. But what about its farm drones? In the last several years, Boulder and Denver have become hubs for tech startups, and companies in the state’s Front Range are on a tear, patenting new technologies in irrigation, food science and plant genetics. Public scientists are keeping pace, publishing research articles in agricultural science in record numbers…
"The urban core is in fact the heart of agricultural innovation in the state of Colorado," Graff said. New neighborhoods in Denver and other Northern Colorado cities are being structured around gardens, small farms and food hubs, taking the local food movement to a scale where it’s actually having a measurable effect on the city’s economy…
Horrific Conditions That Forced California Into Water Rationing
Tom Randall, Bloomberg
California’s governor has taken the unprecedented step of ordering mandatory water restrictions as the state’s epic drought enters a fourth year.
The restrictions are severe—a 25 percent reduction in water use and a ban on new homes unless they feature water-efficient irrigation, among others. However, they should come as little surprise to anyone who has watched this drought unfold. Here are four charts that offer a glimpse at California’s predicament, which by some measures has been the worst drought in at least 1200 years…
What Roads Have Wrought
Michelle Nijhuis, New Yorker
The first paved highway across the Brazilian Amazon began, in the nineteen-seventies, as a narrow, hard-won cut through dense rainforest. The road, which connects the northern port city of Belém with the country’s capital, Brasília, twelve hundred miles away, was hailed as a huge step in the region’s development, and so it was: it quickly spawned a network of smaller roads and new towns, drawing industry to the Brazilian interior. But the ecological price was high. Today, much of the Belém-Brasília highway is flanked by cattle pastures—a swath of deforestation some two hundred and fifty miles wide, stretching from horizon to horizon. Across the planet, road construction has similarly destroyed or splintered natural habitats. In equatorial Africa’s Congo Basin, logging roads have attracted a new wave of elephant poachers; in Siberia, road expansion has caused an outbreak of wildfires; in Suriname, roads invite illegal gold mining; and in Finland, so many reindeer are killed by cars that herders have considered marking the animals with reflective paint…
Open letter to Shell’s Ben van Beurden from John Ashton
John Ashton, The Guardian
The UK’s former top climate change diplomat urges the head of the oil company to become part of the solution to climate change.
…That is the story of your mask: a manifesto for the oil and gas status quo, justified by the unsupported claim that the economic and moral cost of departing from it would exceed the benefit in climate change avoided.
Beneath the mask is the face. Its story is encoded in language and tone, and it does not match the mask. You reject “stereotypes that fail to see the benefits our industry brings to the world”. But you resort freely to stereotypes yourself, to attack those who want more ambition.
You and those who agree with you have a monopoly on realism and practicality. You are “balanced” and “informed”. Your enemies are “naive” and “short sighted”.
And you accuse them of wanting “a sudden death of fossil fuels”. No phrase in your speech is more revealing. Nobody is asking for this and if they were they would be wasting their time. But the Freudian intensity of your complaint flashes from the text like a bolt of lightning.
Moreover, although you acknowledge doubts about the credibility of your industry, you don’t address them. You speak, as it were, peering down, with authority and detachment, at a world that should self-evidently look the same to others as it does to you. And from that height, you seem to be want us to believe that the issue is not how to deal with climate change but how to do so without touching your business model.
You are not detached, and in reality your authority is compromised by your obvious desire to cling to what you know, whatever the cost to society…
Report: Arctic oil drilling needed now to sustain U.S. energy security
Jennifer A. Dlouhy, Fuelfix
The analysis, conducted by the National Petroleum Council at the request of Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, makes the case for the United States to aggressively develop Arctic oil and gas resources that can help supply the country with energy long after some onshore fields’ production starts tailing off.
Oil majors over a barrel due to falling reserves
Christopher Adams, Financial Times
The world’s largest oil and gas groups shed more than a billion barrels of reserves in 2014, the sharpest decline in at least six years, according to figures that show their exploration record has worsened as big discoveries dwindle…
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Texas city opts for 100% renewable energy – to save cash, not the planet
Tom Dart, The Guardian
News that a Texas city is to be powered by 100% renewable energy sparked surprise in an oil-obsessed, Republican-dominated state where fossil fuels are king and climate change activists were described as “the equivalent of the flat-earthers” by US senator and GOP presidential hopeful Ted Cruz.
“I was called an Al Gore clone, a tree-hugger,” says Jim Briggs, interim city manager of Georgetown, a community of about 50,000 people some 25 miles north of Austin…
Carbon Capture: Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?
Jonathan Franzen, The New Yorker
Last September, as someone who cares more about birds than the next man, I was following the story of the new stadium that the Twin Cities are building for their football Vikings. The stadium’s glass walls were expected to kill thousands of birds every year, and local bird-lovers had asked its sponsors to use a specially patterned glass to reduce collisions; the glass would have raised the stadium’s cost by one tenth of one per cent, and the sponsors had balked. Around the same time, the National Audubon Society issued a press release declaring climate change “the greatest threat” to American birds and warning that “nearly half ” of North America’s bird species were at risk of losing their habitats by 2080. Audubon’s announcement was credulously retransmitted by national and local media, including the Minneapolis Star Tribune, whose blogger on bird-related subjects, Jim Williams, drew the inevitable inference: Why argue about stadium glass when the real threat to birds was climate change? In comparison, Williams said, a few thousand bird deaths would be “nothing.”…
This 26-year-old grad student didn’t really debunk Piketty, but what he did do is just as important
Matthew Yglesias, Vox
Here’s the quick version of what you need to know:
- Piketty’s empirical finding that wealth inequality has risen drastically is untouched.
- Piketty’s empirical finding that the capital share of national income has risen (and the share going to workers has fallen) is also untouched.
- Rognlie finds that when you account for depreciation properly, the capital share’s increase has been less dramatic than Piketty says.
- Rognlie finds that when you account for depreciation properly, the capital share’s increase has been entirely about housing.
- Many economists are much less persuaded by Piketty’s r > g model and predictions of the future than they are by his backward-looking empirical work.
- Whether you endorse Piketty’s policy prescriptions continues to hinge overwhelmingly on issues that are outside the scope of either his or Rognlie’s work…
Paris 2015: Tracking country climate pledges
Staff, Carbon Brief
31 March marked the loose deadline for countries to submit their pledges to the UN on how far they intend to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
These promises, known as "intended nationally determined contributions", or INDCs, will determine the success of the deal that the UN hopes to sign off in Paris in December this year.
While only five countries plus the EU made the deadline, more than a hundred others are expected to filter in throughout the coming eight months.
Carbon Brief is tracking the pledges made by each country. We’ll update this post as each INDC comes in…
10 Powerful Images Explain Why We Should Be Worried About TTIP/CETA
Stop TTIP, Films for Action
The EU is negotiating two far-reaching trade agreements: one with the USA (TTIP = Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) and one with Canada (CETA = Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement). The official line is that this will create jobs and increase economic growth. However, the beneficiaries of these agreements are not in fact citizens, but big corporations.
Here are 10 reasons we should all be worried about TTIP/CETA.
Germany sets very high bar for fracking
Caroline Copley, Reuters
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet signed off on a draft law on Wednesday that imposes an effective ban on the controversial technique of fracking for shale gas.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, involves blasting chemicals and water into rock formations to release trapped gas. Opposition is strong in densely populated Germany due to concerns about the risk of contaminating drinking water.
Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks said the new law would set Germany’s strictest conditions for fracking…
No more big power plants? Civic energy could provide half our electricity by 2050
Editor, Energy Transition DE
In Germany, energy democracy has been a central pillar of the Energiewende. Now, a British research team has proven that in 2050 half of the UK’s electricity could come from small-scale civic projects if the energy sector is reorganized accordingly. Stephen Hall summarizes the findings…
14 Great Environmental Comics
Matt White, Publishers Weekly
With comics becoming more topical in recent years, many creators are tackling environmental causes in their work. While the titles below vary in genre and style, their message–that nature is formidable yet also fragile–remains constant. So with Earth Day coming up on April 22, here are 14 comics that cover topics from climate change to pollution, deforestation, endangered species, and more…
Oceans in Crisis: One Woman Will Cross the Pacific to Raise Awareness
Dahr Jamail, Truthout
Sonya Baumstein has rowed across the Atlantic Ocean, kayaked from Seattle to Juneau, and paddled across the Bering Strait.
But now she is in final preparations to become, at 29 years old, the first woman to row across the Pacific Ocean. From Choshi, Japan, to San Francisco, her route will carry her over 5,700 nautical miles of what is arguably the most challenging open ocean crossing in the world, one that will include winds in excess of 50 knots, over 40-foot-high seas, and the threat of freighters and other large vessels…
Truthout caught up with Baumstein in Port Townsend, Washington, where she was finishing construction on her boat and making final arrangements. In April, she will fly to Japan to begin her trans-Pacific row…
