Earth is on brink of a sixth mass extinction, scientists say, and it’s humans’ fault
Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post
Five times in the past, the Earth has been struck by these kinds of cataclysmic events, ones so severe and swift (in geological terms) they obliterated most kinds of living things before they ever had a chance to adapt.
Now, scientists say, the Earth is on the brink of a sixth such “mass extinction event.” Only this time, the culprit isn’t a massive asteroid impact or volcanic explosions or the inexorable drifting of continents. It’s us.
In a study published Friday in the journal Science Advances, biologists found that the Earth is losing mammal species 20 to 100 times the rate of the past. Extinctions are happening so fast, they could rival the event that killed the dinosaurs in as little as 250 years. Given the timing, the unprecedented speed of the losses and decades of research on the effects of pollution, hunting and habitat loss, they assert that human activity is responsible.
“The smoking gun in these extinctions is very obvious, and it’s in our hands,” co-author Todd Palmer, a biologist at the University of Florida, wrote in an e-mail to The Washington Post…
Dutch government ordered to cut carbon emissions in landmark ruling
Arthur Neslen, The Guardian
A court in the Hague has ordered the Dutch government to cut its emissions by at least 25% within five years, in a landmark ruling expected to cause ripples around the world.
To cheers and hoots from climate campaigners in court, three judges ruled that government plans to cut emissions by just 14-17% compared to 1990 levels by 2020 were unlawful, given the scale of the threat posed by climate change.
Jubilant campaigners said that governments preparing for the Paris climate summit later this year would now need to look over their shoulders for civil rights era-style legal challenges where emissions-cutting pledges are inadequate…
Europe’s energy revolution marches on: one-third of power supply now renewable
Karel Beckman, Energy Post
Fully one-third of electricity produced in Europe last year came from renewable energy, reports ENTSO-E (the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity). Four years ago this was just 24%. The increased share of renewables has come at the expense of fossil fuels. “There is a revolution taking place”, says Susanne Nies, Corporate Affairs Manager at ENTSO-E.
ENTSO-E’s annual overview of the European electricity market, Electricity in Europe 2014, which has recently been released, testifies to the steady expansion of renewables generation taking place in the EU electricity sector:
Evolution of ENTSO-E net generation, (Source: ENTSO-E)…
The Men Who’re Stealing The Sun
Don Quijones, Wolf Street
If there’s one thing we should have learnt from this extended period of post-crisis drudgery, it is that there is no limit to how far our elected governments will go to protect the interests and privileges of oligarchs and oligopolies. In Spain, the government will even steal the sun’s rays to protect the country’s energy plutocracy.
Now the Spanish government is planning to tax homes that produce their own energy through solar power and store some of it using batteries. El País reports:
A draft decree prepared by the Industry, Energy and Tourism Ministry establishes a new fee to discourage the use of batteries or other storage systems by people who produce electricity, with solar or photovoltaic panels for instance, and who are connected to the national power grid…
All of this is necessary, claims the government, in order to plug a €26 billion accumulated tariff deficit – the gap between energy production costs and what end consumers pay for power…
Why wind and solar power are such a challenge for energy grids
David Roberts, Vox
Last week, I described a modeling study showing that it is possible to run the entire US economy on renewable energy: wind, water, and solar power. Technologically, the tools are available. Economically, the total system costs would be lower than a business-as-usual scenario. But politically, the plan is wildly ambitious, to the point of fantasy.
Among other things, it would require that policy and investment decisions be approached holistically, coordinated across multiple sectors, and made on the basis of multidecadal cost-benefit horizons, with enormous upfront investments paying off in health and climate benefits that unfold over decades…
So here’s our question: given current energy infrastructure and institutions, how much variable renewable energy (VRE) — wind and solar — can we integrate into the energy system?
This is a complex and contentious topic, in part because energy systems, and our understanding of them, are rapidly evolving. This post will offer a broad overview the kinds of challenges wind and solar pose to grids, and the kinds of solutions grid managers use to address those challenges. In my next post, we’ll look more closely at how far those solutions can get us…
North Dakota’s oil production has peaked: Kemp
John Kemp, Reuters
North Dakota’s crude oil output has peaked, according to the latest production data published by the state government, as the slump in prices takes its toll.
The state produced 1.17 million barrels per day (bpd) in April, down from a peak of 1.23 million in December, the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) reported on Friday.
The former rapid growth in production has stalled and current output is no higher than it was in September 2014…
Judge blocks onset of new fracking rules on federal public land
Bruce Finley, Denver Post
A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked the Bureau of Land Management from putting into effect the government’s new rules for fracking on federal public land.
U.S. District Judge Scott W. Skavdahl of Wyoming granted a request by oil-producing states Colorado, North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming to temporarily delay the rules until the court has a chance to review whether they are legal.
The BLM rules issued March 20 — after years of work — require oil and gas companies to reveal the chemicals they inject, to meet construction standards when drilling wells and to dispose of contaminated water safely.
Colorado and the other states contend the federal BLM cannot impose regulations on hydraulic fracturing, arguing that federal law lets states regulate oil and gas operations…
A big new study looks at federal energy-efficiency efforts — and the results are grim
Brad Plumer, Vox
In climate-policy circles, energy efficiency has long been considered the ultimate free lunch. There are, in theory, lots of opportunities to upgrade our insulation, our furnaces, our appliances so that we’re squandering less energy. Not only would boosting efficiency cut down on pollution, but we’d actually save money over time. Everyone wins.
Except … what if energy-efficiency policies aren’t always as cost-effective as everyone assumes?
Chris Nelder tweeted comments on the study here.
100% renewable energy – Embracing the “exponential growth of solutions”
Energy Transition DE
While we keep burning harmful fossil fuels on an unimaginable scale, there’s also a number of good news: A growing number of communities around the world set themselves a goal of 100% renewables. What we need most are thus visionaries and political will, argues Stefan Schurig…
Ready for some good news? Well, keep reading. I will get to it in a minute, but first, I must say that it is just not easy to be positive these days. We continue burning highly valuable resources such as oil and gas on an unimaginable scale. We keep heating up the planet despite the obvious devastating impacts of climate change. Many countries and regions are suffering from worsening pollution and most of the countries depending on oil and coal imports have no idea how to emancipate themselves from this resource dependency. We are degrading our natural environments at an unprecedented pace and neither our national politicians nor the United Nations seem capable of stopping it. So where is the good news?…
New report estimates enough natural gas is leaking to negate climate benefits
Peter Moskowitz, The Guardian
Natural gas has been touted as an environmentally friendly substitute to coal and oil production, but a new report estimates enough gas is leaking to negate most of the climate benefits of process. The report, commissioned by the Environmental Defense Fund and carried out by environmental consulting group ICF International, estimated the amount of leaks from natural gas and oil production on federal and tribal land in the US. It also looked at venting and flaring, processes in which drilling sites purposefully let gas go into the atmosphere for a variety of reasons – usually for safety.
Climate Catastrophe Predicted by U.S. as Obama Urges UN Action
Mark Drajem, Bloomberg
Labor productivity would dwindle as workers wilt in the heat. Summers in Illinois would feel like a Louisiana swamp. Epic downpours and surging seas of the future would leave $5 trillion in losses. And worsening air quality would result in 57,000 premature deaths in 2100. As President Barack Obama tries to unite the nation behind his efforts to combat climate change, the White House on Monday released a detailed projection for a dystopian future if greenhouse-gas emissions remain unchecked. The most catastrophic impact, the administration argued, can be avoided if leaders mandate the carbon cuts necessary to keep global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit).
Global Warming Is Now a "Medical Emergency" That Could Wipe Out 50 Years of Global Health Gains
Bryan Schatz, Mother Jones
Climate change, if left unchecked, threatens to undermine the last half century of gains in global health. That’s the conclusion of a study released Monday by an international commission convened by the Lancet, a prestigious medical journal based in the UK. Declaring it a "medical emergency," the authors argued that the potential impacts of global warming—such as floods, drought, heat stress, catastrophic storms, the spread of disease, and increased food insecurity—pose a "potentially catastrophic risk" to human health.
The report notes that deaths from air pollution and heat waves have been on the rise. In 2010, for example, wildfires in Russia burned 2.7 million acres, doubling the amount of particulate matter in the Moscow region. The pollution, combined with a severe heat wave, contributed to an increase of 11,000 deaths in just one month. (Or consider a more recent example, when nearly 700 people died over three days during a blistering June heat wave in Pakistan.) In some areas, dengue fever and malaria may rise, the study says. Cholera outbreaks can occur during extreme weather, and clean water can become harder to get. The report discusses scenarios in which higher temperatures can lead to food shortages, migration, and even conflict…
Infographic: What Do Your Country’s Emissions Look Like?
Johannes Friedrich, Mengpin Ge and Thomas Damassa, World Resources Institute
Leveraging data from WRI’s CAIT Climate Data Explorer, the dynamic graph below allows you to explore just-released CAIT emissions data for 2012 by country and economic sector, and share this information on social media.
This picture of global emissions tells a number of stories…
Why are bees hurting? A lineup of suspects
Nathanael Johnson, Grist
In my last piece I made the case that the rumors of honeybee extinction have been greatly exaggerated, but honeybees are still suffering larger than usual losses, and some wild bees are probably going extinct.
So what is it that’s hurting bees? And what are our options for helping them?…
Oslo creates world’s first ‘highway’ to protect endangered bees
AFP, The Guardian
From flower-emblazoned cemeteries to rooftop gardens and balconies, Norway’s capital Oslo is creating a “bee highway” to protect endangered pollinators essential to food production.
“We are constantly reshaping our environment to meet our needs, forgetting that other species also live in it,” Agnes Lyche Melvaer, head of the Bybi, an environmental group supporting urban bees, which is leading the project.
“To correct that we need to return places to them to live and feed,” she explained, sitting on a bench in a lush city centre square bursting with early Nordic summer growth…
A fairer way to fly
Stephen Devlin, nef
We all know that flying is bad for the environment and a major driver of climate change. What’s more, demand for flights is expected to more than double over the next few decades, making the problem even worse.
But what most of us don’t know is that the majority of flights are taken by a very small and very rich segment of the population. It’s estimated that 70% of the total number of flights are taken by only 15% of the population, while 57% of the population took no flights abroad whatsoever in 2013. Those who do fly are significantly wealthier – for example, the average income for leisure passengers at Edinburgh Airport in 2013 was more than twice the average Scottish income…
The majority shouldn’t have to subsidise the air miles lifestyle of the elite. That’s why we’re joining forces with the Fellow Travellers campaign in proposing that the current system of Air Passenger Duty, which levies the same small charge regardless of how frequently we fly, should be replaced with a Frequent Flyer Levy. A move to this system would see nothing charged on the first return flight that an individual takes each year, but would see it increase progressively the more flights the individual takes…
Does Cleveland Know the Secret to Building Wealth Without Gentrification?
n +1, Gar Alperowitz, Next City
The following is an excerpt from City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis, a collection of essays on American cities, written by the people who live in them. City by City is edited by Keith Gessen and Stephen Squibb, and published by n +1.
Gar Alperovitz is a historian, political economist, activist, and writer. He has written many books, including The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, and, more recently, What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution. He grew up in Racine, Wisconsin, and has contributed to numerous efforts at economic reconstruction, including in Youngstown and Cleveland, Ohio. All of which he discussed with n+1…
Local Food and the CASTE Paradigm
Anita Dancs and Helen Scharber, Triple Crisis
Food produced on small farms close to where it is consumed—or “local food” for short—accounts for only about 2% of all the food produced in the United States today, but demand for it is growing rapidly. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, sales of food going directly from farmers’ fields to consumer’s kitchens have more than tripled in the past twenty years. During the same period, the number of farmers’ markets in the United States has quintupled, and it’s increasingly easy to talk about “CSAs”—community-supported agriculture operations where consumers pay up front for a share in the season’s output—without explaining the acronym.
But as local food has grown, so have the number of critics who claim that locavores have a dilemma. The dilemma, prominently argued by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu in their 2012 book The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet, is that local food conflicts with the goal of feeding more people better food in an ecologically sustainable way. In other words, well-meaning locavores are inadvertently promoting a future characterized by less food security and greater environmental destruction. The critics are typically academics, and while not all of them are economists, they rely on economic arguments to support their claims that the globalized food chain has improved our lives.
Why are critics pessimistic about the trend toward local food? Their arguments hinge on what we call the CASTE paradigm—the idea that Comparative Advantage and economies of Scale justify global Trade and lead to greater Efficiency…
