Global Coal Boom Ends As China — And World — Wakes Up To Reality Of Carbon Pollution
Joe Romm, Climate Progress
“Global coal demand is slowing fast,” is the headline in a June Business Insider Australia story. “The global coal renaissance is the most important climate story today,” is the headline in a July Vox story.
Which is correct? Mostly the first one. There was a true global coal renaissance starting around the year 2000, a resurgence due primarily to China. But it is now stalling.
China was responsible for some 80 percent of the growth in global demand since 2000. You can see that in this June 15 chart from BP’s Group Chief Economist based on their newly-released “Statistical Review of World Energy 2015.”…
It’s not Climate Change – It’s Everything Change
Margaret Atwood, Medium
Margaret Atwood reflects on three pictures of a future without oil which she penned in 2009.
It’s interesting to look back on what I wrote about oil in 2009, and to reflect on how the conversation has changed in a mere six years. Much of what most people took for granted back then is no longer universally accepted, including the idea that we could just go on and on the way we were living then, with no consequences. There was already some alarm back then, but those voicing it were seen as extreme. Now their concerns have moved to the center of the conversation. Here are some of the main worries.
Planet Earth?—?the Goldilocks planet we’ve taken for granted, neither too hot or too cold, neither too wet or too dry, with fertile soils that accumulated for millennia before we started to farm them –- that planet is altering. The shift towards the warmer end of the thermometer that was once predicted to happen much later, when the generations now alive had had lots of fun and made lots of money and gobbled up lots of resources and burned lots of fossil fuels and then died, are happening much sooner than anticipated back then. In fact, they’re happening now…
Hillary Clinton has a renewable energy plan, but she still needs one for fossil fuels
Ben Adler, Grist
Hillary Clinton’s new renewable energy agenda has impressed climate hawks with its ambition. But some activists worry that Clinton still isn’t standing up to fossil fuels. And if she doesn’t, she won’t have crucial bargaining chips that might help get her renewables agenda through a Congress controlled at least partially by Republicans.
Clinton started fleshing out her climate and energy policies with a video posted on Sunday and a speech Monday in Iowa. She laid out the first two planks of what her campaign promises will be a multi-pronged platform for tackling climate change. According to her campaign, as president, Clinton would ensure that “the United States will have more than half a billion solar panels installed across the country by the end of her first term, and that by 2027, the United States will generate enough clean renewable energy to power every home in America.”…
Study: We’ve wiped out half the world’s wildlife since 1970
Brad Plumer, Vox
In early July, a dentist from Minnesota named Walter James Palmer traveled to Zimbabwe, lured a male lion out of Hwange National Park, and shot him to death. The twist? This was no ordinary lion. No, Cecil the lion was a popular tourist attraction, and so now half the internet has erupted in outrage over his death.
It’s a grisly tale. But it’s also not an isolated case. Not even close. Over the past four decades, humans have managed to kill off a staggering number of wild animals worldwide — from charismatic lions and rhinos right down to lowly frogs. Most of these deaths don’t spark anywhere near the furor that Cecil’s did. But they certainly add up.
A major recent survey by the World Wildlife Fund estimated that the number of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish worldwide has declined a whopping 52 percent between 1970 and 2010. The main culprits? Humans. Mainly through hunting, fishing, deforestation, pollution, and other forms of habitat destruction. Statistically speaking, Cecil’s death at the hands of a person was more likely than not…
Against Forgetting
Derrick Jensen, Slate
Where have all the animals gone? It’s hard to fight for what you don’t know you’ve lost.
Last night a host of nonhuman neighbors paid me a visit. First, two gray foxes sauntered up, including an older female who lost her tail to a leghold trap six or seven years ago. They trotted back into a thicker part of the forest, and a few minutes later a raccoon ambled forward. After he left I saw the two foxes again. Later, they went around the right side of a redwood tree as a black bear approached around the left. He sat on the porch for a while, and then walked off into the night. Then the foxes returned, hung out, and, when I looked away for a moment then looked back, they were gone. It wasn’t too long before the bear returned to lie on the porch. After a brief nap, he went away. The raccoon came back and brought two friends. When they left the foxes returned, and after the foxes came the bear. The evening was like a French farce: As one character exited stage left, another entered stage right.
How to think about Islamic State
Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian
Islamic State is often called ‘medieval’ but is in fact very modern – a horrific expression of a widespread frustration with a globalised western model that promises freedom and prosperity to all, but fails to deliver
The Greek Warrior
Ian Parker, The New Yorker
How a radical finance minister took on Europe—and failed.
On July 4th, the night before a referendum asked the Greek people to decide how far their debt-ridden government should accommodate the demands of its main creditors—the “troika” of the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—Yanis Varoufakis, the country’s minister of finance, sat outdoors at an Athens restaurant, wearing a T-shirt with an outline of Texas on the front. In January, Varoufakis, an economist who had been teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, abruptly entered Greek politics, becoming the public face of the country’s defiant negotiations with European leaders. After months of fatigue, he had slept for much of the day, and he was in a good mood. Varoufakis, who is fifty-four, had the peace of mind of someone who was certain of an election result and already savoring the satisfactions to follow. His government, the left-wing Syriza party, would lose. The people would vote “yes”—that is, in favor of making more concessions than Varoufakis and Alexis Tsipras, the country’s forty-year-old Prime Minister and the leader of Syriza, had said that they could stomach. Varoufakis would resign as a minister, and would never again have to endure all-day meetings in Brussels and Luxembourg, listening to other European finance ministers scold Greece for its disobedience. And he would no longer need to marshal scant supplies of discretion to disguise the fact that he and Tsipras had, in recent weeks, lost significant faith in each other. Varoufakis had not given up his hostility toward the troika, or the economic arguments underpinning that hostility, but he spoke as if Syriza’s weeklong campaign of slogans and street protests in support of ohi—“no”—were already archived in Greece’s long history of resistance to external aggressors. A “yes” vote, Varoufakis declared, was “inevitable.”…
Why writing stories about climate change isn’t fantasy or sci-fi
Piers Torday, The Guardian
Piers Torday loved reading end of the world books when he was growing up, and his Last Wild books have been dubbed “cli-fi” but if you think stories showing the effects of climate change are futuristic fantasies, think again…
Although I see some of these nonhuman neighbors daily, I was entranced and delighted to see so many of them over the span of just one evening. I remained delighted until sometime the next day, when I remembered reading that, prior to conquest by the Europeans, people in this region could expect to see a grizzly bear every 15 minutes…
Humans accidentally created hidden carbon sink in the desert
New Scientist
Since the dawn of farming, humans have been accidentally creating a huge carbon sink that by now may store more carbon than all of the world’s living plants.
But this sink is in the last place that you’d expect to find huge amounts of carbon – under the desert.
That is the surprising conclusion of work done in one desert in China. If the findings are confirmed in other deserts around the world, it could present a way of taking carbon out of the atmosphere. But it also means we need to be careful not to disturb the huge carbon sinks stored under desert sands…
Amazon rainforest was home to millions of people before European arrival, says study
Ian Johnstone, The Independent
Far from a pristine forest stretching for mile upon mile, the Amazon was once home to millions of people who domesticated huge swathes of land before the arrival of Europeans caused their societies to collapse, according to a new study.
An international team of researchers concluded that the minimum population in 1492 would have been about eight million, with an “unlikely” upper figure of 50 million. Their findings suggest the forest returned to wilderness after the civilisations were wiped out by disease and conquest brought by the Europeans.
The researcher’s conclusions are partly based on one of the few remaining signs of the civilisations – the dark, fertile soil produced by farming techniques and waste. Some of theses sites are only accessible because of deforestation…
Just how big can bug-ranching grow?
Heather Smith, Grist
In 2013, the FAO released another report called “Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security,” which provided a broad survey of insect harvesting and farming practices around the world. At 200 pages, it was kind of like the Whole Earth Catalog for insect-eating enthusiasts:…
The FAO had only recently begun to think about insect farming in a serious way. It wasn’t even clear what category it would fall under (after much deliberation, it decided to classify insects as “non-wood forestry products.”) But this kind of insect-eating boosterism wasn’t without precedent in the western world. In 1885, a man named Vincent J. Holt published a pamphlet with the refreshingly direct title of Why Not Eat Insects?
The insect-boosters of today have — with their fancy dinners and their protein bars — positioned insects in western culture as a foodstuff for the well-educated and well-to-do. Part of the reason for this, I am sure, is that insects are expensive: Without the automation or economies of scale that could make raising them more efficient, they are pretty freaking expensive to grow.
Holt, on the other hand, is writing from an era before factory farming and cheap meat. Like many social reformers of the day, he is preoccupied with poor people — and nakedly obsessed with the idea of feeding insects to them:…
Want more wind and solar? We’ll need to get rid of outdated grid rules.
David Roberts, Vox
As I noted in two previous posts, wind and solar power pose unique challenges to electricity grids, and those challenges put economic constraints on the growth of renewables.
For the most part, wind and solar — also known as variable renewable energy (VRE) — haven’t run into those constraints yet, because their penetration remains relatively low. In 2014, wind generated just 4 percent of US electricity; solar produced less than 1 percent. But if wind and solar ever hope to supply 30 percent, 50 percent, or even 100 percent of electricity, they’ll have to address the obstacles posed by current grids.
Those obstacles are varied — technologies, policies, and markets — but the cheapest, most ready-to-hand solutions are found in the rules that govern current grids, the operations, regulations, and markets that determine what resources are currently deployed to meet electricity demand, and when…
It started with a futon in a dumpster. Now it’s a student org that’s changing the way we see waste.
Megan Kelley, Upworthy
It started with a futon in a dumpster. Now it’s a a nationwide resource that’s changing the way students think about campus waste. Heck yes.
Every year, millions of college students in the U.S. pack up and head off campus, leaving tons (literally) of stuff behind. And only a small fraction of it really belongs in a dumpster.
So Alex and a group of his friends at the University of New Hampshire started a campus organization called Trash2Treasure..
