A global oil glut has tanked prices and cut profits—so why won’t Shell give up on the north?
Paul Barrett Benjamin Elgin, Bloomberg
In a windowless conference room in Anchorage, a dozen Royal Dutch Shell employees report on the highest-profile oil project in the multinational’s vast global portfolio. Warmed by mid-July temperatures, Arctic ice in the Chukchi Sea, northwest of the Alaskan mainland, is receding. Storms are easing; helicopter flights will soon resume. Underwater volcanoes—yes, volcanoes—are dormant. “That’s good news for us,” Ann Pickard, Shell’s top executive for the Arctic, whispers to a visitor…
In 2007, LeVine and other lawyers representing nongovernmental organizations and native Alaskan groups went to court to stop Shell. They argued that regulators didn’t know enough about the effects of drilling in the Arctic, that the company lacked adequate spill response plans, and that Eskimo tribal representatives hadn’t been adequately consulted. Years of Whac-a-Mole litigation unfolded in federal courts in Alaska, San Francisco, and Washington: Environmentalists identified planning flaws, judges halted drilling preparation, the government and Shell proposed fixes, drilling prep resumed, and the lawyers went back to court. The six-month post-BP-spill moratorium came and went in 2010. Shell’s cutting-edge three- and four-dimensional seismic technology, not available in the 1980s and 1990s, bolstered the company’s confidence. In the summer of 2012, with the courts and regulatory agencies temporarily in favorable alignment, Shell returned to the Arctic. “It’s just too big a prize,” Pickard says. “We can’t afford to leave it all there.”…
E.P.A. Announces New Rules to Cut Methane Emissions
Gardiner Harris and Coral Davenport, New York Times
The Obama administration on Tuesday proposed the first federal regulations requiring the nation’s oil and gas industry to cut emissions of methane as part of an expanding and increasingly aggressive effort to combat climate change.
In a conference call with reporters, Janet McCabe, the Environmental Protection Agency’s acting assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation, said the rules were designed to ensure that oil and gas companies reduced waste and sold more gas that would otherwise be lost, while protecting the climate and the health of the public…
The Thin Green Line Is Stopping Coal and Oil in Their Tracks
Eric de Place, Sightline
“Everybody outside the Northwest thinks that’s where energy projects go to die.” That’s the reputation our region has earned as an increasing number of proposed coal and oil export projects have encountered ferocious opposition. It’s what the backer of a proposed oil refinery in Longview, Washington, told reporters earlier this year after his company’s stealth proposal was outed by environmental groups…
But in big ways and small—from Coos Bay, Oregon, to Prince Rupert, British Columbia—the Thin Green Line has held fast. Big energy projects have faced delays, uncertainty, mounting costs…and then failure. A review of these projects makes clear just how successful the region has been in denying permission to dirty energy companies as it stays true to its heritage as a center of clean energy, sustainability, and forward thinking…
Study: China May Have Overestimated Carbon Emissions
Bobby Magill, Climate Central
Carbon dioxide emissions in China may have been overestimated since 2000 because of conflicting estimates of the greenhouse gas emissions it produces and the carbon content of the coal it burns, a Harvard-led study published Wednesday shows.
Overestimated emissions may be critical for China ahead of the upcoming Paris climate negotiations in December. China struck a pact with the United States in 2014, pledging to peak its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and increase its use of clean energy to around 20 percent of its total energy production by 2030…
But the Harvard study, published in the journal Nature, says the amount of carbon dioxide produced from burning fossil fuels in China and producing cement there may have been 14 percent lower than official 2013 estimates included in the Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research — The European Union’s database of global greenhouse gas emissions…
However, Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, called the study “unsatisfactory.”
Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have continued rising globally, and the study doesn’t address how its results square with those increasing carbon emissions, Trenberth said…
Global stocks in ‘panic mode’ as Chinese factory slump drags on markets
Shane Hickey and Martin Farrer, The Guardian
The FTSE 100 has hit its lowest level this year after further signs of a weakening Chinese economy spooked investors.
Britain’s leading share index fell to 6,286 points on Friday morning immediately after opening, a decline of 1.26%.
The drop mirrored stock markets across Asia-Pacific after they went into “panic mode” when further signs of a weakening Chinese economy compounded overnight losses on Wall Street and European bourses.
China’s factory sector shrank at its fastest pace in more than six years in August as domestic and export demand dwindled, a private survey showed, adding to worries that the world’s second-largest economy may be slowing sharply and sending financial markets into a tailspin….
Your Meat-Eating Habit Is Killing More Than Just Cows
Gabrielle Canon, Mother Jones
The earth is in the middle of its sixth mass extinction, and die-offs are happening more quickly than ever before. In a little over a century, the world has said goodbye to more than 400 species—and many biologists believe this is just the beginning. Scientists predict that in the next 35 years, as many as 37 percent of the world’s species could go extinct, if current trends continue.
While we know that climate change is a major culprit in the loss of biodiversity, some researchers now believe burgers might also be to blame. In a new report, a team from Florida International University cited the land degradation, pollution, and deforestation caused by rising global demand for meat as "likely the leading cause of modern species extinctions," and the problem is only expected to get worse.
The world’s most biodiverse areas are also the places where meat production is most likely to increase in the coming years. "It’s a colossally important paper," Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, New York, who studies how human diets affect the environment, told Science Magazine…
Islamic leaders issue bold call for rapid phase out of fossil fuels
Arthur Neslen, The Guardian
Islamic leaders have issued a clarion call to 1.6bn Muslims around the world to work towards phasing out greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and a 100% renewable energy strategy.
The grand mufti’s of Lebanon and Uganda endorsed the Islamic declaration on climate change, along with prominent Islamic scholars and teachers from 20 countries, at a symposium in Istanbul.
Their collective statement makes several detailed political demands likely to increase pressure on Gulf states ahead of the Paris climate summit in December…
New Monsanto Spray Kills Bugs by Messing With Their Genes
Tom Philpott, Mother Jones
In a fascinating long piece in MIT Technology Review, Antonio Regalado examines the genetically modified seed industry’s latest blockbuster app in development—one that has nothing to do with seeds. Instead, it involves the industry’s other bread-and-butter product: pesticide sprays. But we’re not talking about the poisonous chemicals you convinced your dad to stop dousing the lawn with. The novel sprays in question are powered by a genetic technology called RNA interference, which promises to kill specific insects and weeds by silencing genes crucial to their survival, while leaving nontarget species unscathed…
How Much Of California’s Drought Was Caused By Climate Change? Scientists Now Have The Answer.
Kate Valentine, Think Progress
Over the last few years, as California’s historic, four-year drought has intensified, scientists have found clues linking the extreme weather event to human-caused climate change. Now, a new study is the first to estimate just how much climate change contributed to the drought.
The study, published Thursday in Geophysical Research Letters, found that climate change can be blamed for between 8 to 27 percent of the drought conditions between 2012 and 2014 and between 5 to 18 percent in 2014. Though these relative contributions of climate change differ between the two periods of time, due to differences in severity of the drought from year to year, the study said climate change’s absolute contribution was “virtually identical” between the two periods — meaning climate change has contributed a fairly steady amount to California’s drought over the last three years…
A State of Thirst
Katharine Jose, Planetizen
In the middle of a population boom, Texas is looking across state lines for more water. The U.S. Supreme Court said no the first time; does that mean it will say no again?…
Scientists warn of unprecedented damage to forests across the world
Robert McSweeney, Carbon Brief
Forests around the world are being affected by humans – both directly by deforestation and indirectly by climate change, say experts in a special issue of the journal Science. In a series of reviews of the latest research into the health of the world’s forests, scientists find they are far from being in the best shape for coping with climate change over this century. And this could affect how well trees absorb and store carbon in the future, they say…
The exploitation of migrants has become our way of life
Felicity Lawrence, The Guardian
The British right pretends to be tough on immigration but promotes a business model that depends on it
When the foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, talked of the threat to the UK from “marauding migrants” at Calais last week, I decided to review the stories of the hundreds of foreign-born workers I have met in more than a decade of writing about their lives in the UK: those working for the mainstream economy, albeit hidden in the shadows of its long subcontracted supply chains, whether in food production, construction, care work, cleaning or catering.
What becomes immediately clear is the deep dishonesty at the heart of much of the rhetoric on this issue. The right claims to be tough on immigration, but it is the opposite of tough on the causes of immigration. It promotes a business model that depends on a constant churn of workers to carry out jobs that are underpaid and insecure at best, and all too often dirty, dangerous, and degrading. It requires not just immigration, but immigration without end, since only the newly arrived, the desperate and the vulnerable will tolerate the conditions that have been created, as the roll call of migrant workers I have met, with its constantly changing nationalities, shows…
The Dutch ‘Basic Income’ Experiment Is Expanding
Maria Sanchez Diez, City Lab
Free cash is in the works for a growing number of Dutch urbanites. After the city of Utrecht announced that it would give no-strings-attached money to some of its residents, other Dutch cities are getting on board for social experiments with “basic income,” a regular and unconditional stipend to cover living costs.
Tilburg, a city of 200,000 habitants close to the border with Belgium, will follow Utrecht’s initiative, and the cities of Groningen, Maastricht, Gouda, Enschede, Nijmegen, and Wageningen are also considering it…
Far left splits from Tsipras as Greece heads to elections
George Georgiopoulos and Renee Maltezou, Reuters
Rebels opposed to Greece’s international bailout walked out of the leftist Syriza party on Friday, formalising a split after its leader Alexis Tsipras resigned as prime minister and paved the way for early elections.
Greece’s president gave the conservative opposition a chance to form a new government following Tsipras’s resignation on Thursday, but the country appears almost certain to be heading for its third election in as many years next month…
Greece Is For Sale – And Everything Must Go
Nick Dearden, Information Clearing House
"Global Justice" – I’ve just had sight of the latest privatisation plan for Greece. It’s been issued by something called the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund – the vehicle supervised by the European institutions, which has been tasked with selling off an eye-watering €50 billion of Greece’s ‘valuable assets’.
The fund was a real sticking point because the European institutions wanted to move it to Luxembourg, where they could keep a better eye on it. Anyhow, it’s still in Athens, and this document, dated 30 July, details the goodies on sale to international investors who fancy buying up some of the country.
We’ve attached it to this blog to give a flavour of what’s up for grabs at the moment. Fourteen regional airports, flying into top tourist hubs, have already gone to a German company, but don’t panic because stock in Athens airport is still on the table, as well as Athens’ old airport which is up for a 99 year lease for redevelopment as a tourism and business centre…
