Guest post: A history of screw-ups – and its own plans – raise doubts about the ability of Shell to safely drill in the Arctic
Christine Ottery, Greenpeace Energy Desk
The US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has conditionally approved Shell’s Exploration Plan (EP), putting into motion the largest — and dirtiest — oil exploration campaign ever carried out in the US Arctic. The plan involves big increases in water discharges, air pollution, ship activity, and harassment of protected marine mammals.
And that’s if nothing goes wrong…
Bank Of America, Once The Largest Funder Of US Coal, To Cut Coal Funding Worldwide
Mike Gaworecki, DeSmogBlog
At its annual shareholder meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina last week, Bank of America announced that it was officially committed to slashing its financing of coal.
This is a major policy reversal for the bank. Just a few years ago, Bank of America, then the biggest bank in the US, was the largest underwriter of the US coal industry. From 2009 to 2010, for instance, the bank pumped some $4.3 billion into US coal companies, a fifth of all coal financing by the top 25 banks and financial institutions.
Those days are over for BofA, however. In announcing the new policy at the shareholder meeting, Andrew Plepler, head of corporate social responsibility for the bank, said, “Our new policy reflects our decision to continue to reduce our credit exposure over time to the coal mining sector globally.”…
NY Fracking Report Underscores Quake, Climate Risks
Bobby Magill, Climate Central
New York is 2,000 pages closer to becoming the first fossil fuels-rich state in the U.S. to ban fracking indefinitely because of the climate-changing methane it could emit and the earthquakes, air pollution and water contamination it could cause.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced in December that fracking, short for the natural gas extraction process called hydraulic fracturing, would be banned in New York, where the energy-rich Marcellus shale holds up to 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The state followed up this week with a 2,000-page final environmental report outlining why it would be better off without the environmental, climate and public health implications of the process…
Peak Russia + Peak USA means Peak World
Ron Patterson, Peak Oil Barrell
Since around 2005 many countries have increased their oil production but more have decreased. But the combined production of the United States and Russia have kept the world on a slight uptrend since that time.
World oil production jumped in 2011, hardly moved at all in 2013 but it was up by more than 1.5 million barrels per day in 2014. And after such a huge gain everyone and their brother were singing “peak oil is dead’. But if you scroll down through the 37 major world oil producers it becomes obvious that a majority of nations have peaked and most of them are in steep decline.
The above chart is EIA data however the next four charts below are JODI data with the last data point February 2015. The data on all charts is thousand barrels per day.
However in the last decade it has been two of the three world’s largest oil producers that have kept us from peak oil, the USA and Russia…
China’s path to power runs through Pakistan
Steven Zhou, AlJazeera
“This will be my first trip to Pakistan,” Chinese President Xi Jinping wrote in an op-ed for The Pakistani Daily Times, “but I feel as if I am going to visit the home of my own brother.” According to Xi, his fraternal affection is rooted in the stories he heard growing up about the friendship between the two countries, which new Chinese-sponsored billboards in Pakistan describe as “higher than the mountains, deeper than the oceans, sweeter than honey and stronger than steel.”
But Xi did not announce a new $46 billion investment — equivalent of one-fifth of Pakistan’s GDP — because he considers the country a long lost brother. Rather, China has decided that its road to becoming a great power runs directly through Pakistan…
Nuclear Power Seems Doomed to Dwindle in the U.S.
David Biello, Scientific American
After another transformer fire at the Indian Point nuclear facility on May 9, New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo would like to see the power plant shut down for good. The aging nuclear power plant is in the midst of its application to the federal government for a license renewal, which would allow the two reactors on site to continue to harness fission to boil water for electricity generation for another 20 years. But with local, well-connected opposition like the governor, Indian Point’s days as a nuclear facility may be numbered no matter what federal regulators decide.
Indian Point is not unique in heading toward shutdown, although the circumstances of each reactor’s closing are as unique as the reactors themselves. In the past few years five nuclear reactors from Florida to California have shut down permanently—despite license renewals. The reactors at San Onofre in California and Crystal River in Florida ceased operations over botched repairs that caused safety concerns. The Kewaunee reactor in Wisconsin closed early because its ability to make money by selling electricity was undercut by cheap natural gas and renewables like wind power and similar economic woes shuttered Vermont Yankee. Several currently operating reactors face the same challenges: Without financial support from Illinois’s government, the slew of reactors in that state may shut down, too. And unlike Indian Point, which makes money selling electricity to power-hungry New York City, nuclear reactors in other parts of the state face economic challenges…
Aerotropolis alert! Airport mega-projects driving environmental destruction worldwide
Rose Bridger, The Ecologist
Governments and corporations are driving a global wave of ecologically disastrous airport-centered mega-projects each destroying as much of 100 sq.km of farmland and forests – sucking water, resources and economic activity from surrounding areas, excluding host communities and locking in high-carbon infrastructure for decades to come.
The aerotropolis is a disastrous model of development. Those working for social, economic and environmental justice must unite in opposing the fast-tracked planning and construction that is taking place around the world. All over the world, major developments called an ‘aerotropolis’, or airport city, are being constructed, planned and announced.
An aerotropolis is an airport-centric development. Inverting the traditional model of airport development, the airport is not built to serve a city. A city is built around an airport…
How the Texas of Canada swung to the left
Audrea Lim, AlJazeera
On Tuesday the people of Alberta voted in a provincial election that usually ends up being utterly uneventful. But just an hour after polls closed, it had become clear that the social-democratic New Democratic Party (NDP), would be forming a majority government.
Across Canada, media outlets began to declare a miracle on the prairies, an Orange Spring and an Orange crush. Comments in my Facebook feed compared the event to Elizabeth Warren, Ralph Nader or Bernie Sanders being elected by a landslide in Texas. Energy stocks began to fall, and an energy fund manager called the victory “completely devastating.” Meanwhile, Twitter users celebrated, expressed disbelief, declared the coming of the apocalypse and threatened to leave Alberta for Saskatchewan…
Resilience is The New Black
Nelson Lebo III, The Automatic Earth
Sustainability is so 2007. Those were the heady days before the Global Financial Crisis, before $2-plus/litre petrol here in New Zealand, before the failed Copenhagen Climate Summit, before the Christchurch earthquakes, before the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP)…the list continues.
Since 2008, informed conversations on the economy, the environment, and energy have shifted from ‘sustainability’ to ‘resilience’. There are undoubtedly many reasons for this shift, but I’ll focus on just two: undeniable trends and a loss of faith. Let me explain…
Resilience reader Paul Heft points to a repost of this article with an intro by Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism here.
Yves here. One does not have to look hard to discern the troubling message of this post: that people are no longer motivated by appeals to broader, more abstract values, that what motivates them are more narrow, survival-oriented approaches.
While it’s always a bit dangerous to challenge someone on what he considers to be his his home turf, I wonder whether Dr. Nelson Lebo III’s abandonment of the notion of sustainability has less to do with that idea not being as motivating as he had hoped, versus the march from triumph to triumph of disposable products and planned obsolescence. It’s far more work than it used to be to buck that trend…
An anthology of poetry on climate change
Carol Ann Duffy, The Guardian
If information was all we needed, we’d have solved climate change by now. The scientific position has been clear for decades. Researchers have been waving a big red flag that has been impossible for our politicians to miss. Even Margaret Thatcher was giving speeches about global warming in 1988. So why have we made so little progress? Why do carbon emissions continue to rise seemingly inexorably?
Information, it seems, is not enough. Journalists have transmitted the warnings of scientists, but they have sometime focussed too much on the mini-controversies and the unimportant disagreements and not enough on the big picture. That has often left readers confused.
That is where this comes in. Alan Rusbridger asked me to curate a series of 20 poems that respond to the topic of climate change. The brief was to reach parts of the Guardian readers’ hearts and minds that the reporting, investigations, videos, podcasts and the rest had failed to reach…
The arguments that convinced a libertarian to support aggressive action on climate
David Roberts, Grist
To the casual observer, the American right can appear an undifferentiated wall of denial and obstructionism on climate change, but behind the scenes there are signs of movement. A growing number of conservative leaders and intellectuals have come to terms with climate science and begun casting about for solutions. Led mainly by libertarians and libertarian-leaning economists, they’ve begun to coalesce behind a carbon tax, which they consider the most market-friendly of the available alternatives.
Jerry Taylor, a longtime veteran of the libertarian think tank Cato Institute who recently founded his own libertarian organization, the Niskanen Center, is a vocal proponent of this perspective. About five or six years ago, he says, he was convinced by a series of discussions, mainly with other right-leaning thinkers, that he was wrong on climate policy. His position "fundamentally switched."
In March, he released a new policy brief, "The Conservative Case for a Carbon Tax," which argues for a steadily rising "revenue-neutral" fee on fossil fuel producers. Aside from a small portion set aside to cushion low-income households, all the revenue would be devoted to reducing other taxes…
Brazil plans to ‘nationalise’ rainforest in pioneering plan to protect Amazon
Donna Bowater, The Independent
The Brazilian rainforest could be effectively nationalised under a draft bill being considered by the country’s MPs.
The proposed legislation would recognise the sovereignty of Brazil over the Amazon’s natural resources and set up a national Amazonian policy council with the aim of enshrining environmental protection and regulating economic activities in the rainforest…
Christian Parenti on Climate Change, Militarism, Neoliberalism and the State
Vincent Emanuele, Truthout
On April 19, 2014, I sat down with author, journalist and professor Christian Parenti in Chicago. His work, which is wide-ranging and essential, explores some of the most powerful and brutal forces in our society: war, capitalism, prisons, policing and climate change. In this interview, we discussed ideology, climate change, Marxism, activism, the state, militarism, violence and the future. This is the first of a two-part interview… Vincent Emanuele for Truthout: I’d like to begin by revisiting your 2011 book, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. Right around the time Tropic of Chaos was published, Syria was experiencing record drought and massive livestock and crop losses. The connections between neoliberalism, climate change and Cold War-era militarism, for you, were on full display. However, you’re clear in noting that climate change exacerbates pre-existing crises. In other words, climate change is not necessarily the driver of crises in Syria, or Afghanistan, for example. You call this process the "catastrophic convergence." Can you talk about these various themes in the context of the last four years since Tropic of Chaos was published?
Christian Parenti: Syria is a prime example. There has been a terrible drought there, which coincided with austerity measures imposed by the Assad government cutting aid to Sunni farmers. Many of them were forced to leave the land, partly due to drought, partly due to the lack of support to properly deal with the drought. Then, they arrive in cities, and there’s more austerity taking place. This is experienced as oppression by the Alawite elite against an increasingly impoverished Sunni proletariat who’ve been thrown off their land.
Cycling vs. Car Transportation
Editor, Environmental News Network
What’s more expensive? Owning a car or a bicycle? Answer seems obvious doesn’t it? But how much more expensive are cars compared to bicycles?
First, we need to consider not only the actual cost of the vehicle, but the hidden cots which can be related to air pollution, climate change, travel routes, noise, road wear, health, congestion, and time.
Lucky for us, researchers have compared the costs and according to a Lund University study, traveling by car is six times more expensive for society and individuals.
Lund University press release and video.
How Amsterdam became the bicycle capital of the world
Renate van der Zee, The Guardian
In the 1960s, Dutch cities were increasingly in thrall to motorists, with the car seen as the transport of the future. It took the intolerable toll of child traffic deaths – and fierce activism – to turn Amsterdam into the cycling nirvana of today…
Dutch solar road makes enough energy to power household
Tarek Bazley, AlJazeera
Engineers in the Netherlands say a novel solar road surface that generates electricity and can be driven over has proved more successful than expected.
Last year they built a 70-metre test track along a bike path near the Dutch town of Krommenie on the outskirts of Amsterdam…
