Renewable Revolution

by Jethro Mullen   @CNNMoney

April 12, 2018: 7:14 AM ET   

SNIPPET:

New Zealand has stunned the energy industry by slapping a new cap on drilling for oil and gas in its waters as part of efforts to combat climate change.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced Thursday that the government will "no longer be granting any new offshore oil and gas exploration permits."

"This is another step on our transition away from fossil fuels and towards a carbon neutral economy," Ardern said in a speech.

The country's oil industry 🐉🦕🦖 quickly voiced its anger over the move.

Full article (with the expected whining and veiled threats from the fossil fuelers  ):

http://money.cnn.com/2018/04/12/news/companies/new-zealand-oil-gas-exploration/index.html

Agelbert NOTE: If you didn't notice how CNN cleverly excluded Renewable energy from the "energy industry", you weren't paying attention. Also, every single time some government does something that is OBVIOUSLY required to mitigate Catastrophic Climate Change, some "journalist" uses words like "stunning", "surprise", "unexpected", etc. ad nauseum, as if the unsustainable polluting status quo is somehow "rational" and ending polluting practices isn't.

The truth twisting, fossil fuel worshipping media 😈 is definitely into Orwellian discourse.  🤬

Here's just ONE graphic from the non-polluting segment of the ENERGY INDUSTRY that clearly explains why New Zealand is doing the correct economic AND biosphere math.   

Agelbert NOTE: The destruction of the arctic biome continues. The article describes the melting of the ice as an "opportunity for the shipping industry to expand", as if there isn't a brutal extinction cost 🚩 thousands of species will be forced to pay because of this profit over planet expansion. The effect of increased shipping in the arctic will be 💣 the accelerated degradation of the global biosphere. 😨🔫 So it goes.





April 12, 2018 by gCaptain


The Arctic’s declining sea ice has meant more opportunities for the shipping industry to expand its use of the region that in decades past was unnavigable for the vast majority of the year.

The Northwest Passage through Canada and the Northern Sea Route, or Northeast Passage, north of Russia and Siberia, are both valued because they could significantly shorten ship transit times between Asia, Europe, and North America.

In August 2017, a newly designed LNG carrier with an ice-hardened hull became the first merchant ship to sail across the Arctic Ocean without the aid of an icebreaker. The vessel, the Christophe de Margerie, made the voyage in just 19 days, nearly a week faster than the traditional route through the Suez Canal.

In February, a similar tanker, the Eduard Atoll, completed its own unescorted trip through the region in the dead of winter, marking another historic first. During that voyage, the vessel sailed South Korea to Sabetta terminal in northern Russia, where it loaded LNG produced at a new $27 billion plant and transported it to France.

To illustrate this increase in ship activity in the Arctic, a team of scientists has banded together to analyze and map more than 120 million data points in order to track where ships are most using the region.

To make the map, the team, led by Paul Arthur Berkman, director of the science diplomacy center at Tufts University, and Greg Fiske, a geospatial analyst at the Woods Hole Research Center, used data compiled by SpaceQuest, a company designs microsatellites that can monitor the track Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals from ships.

Once the data was plotted, there were some interesting observations to be made.


Looking at the data, Berkman, Fiske, and their colleagues found that the mean center of shipping activity moved 300 kilometers north and east—closer to the North Pole—over the 7-year span.

Notably, they were particularly surprised to find more small ships, such as fishing boats, wading farther into Arctic waters. The team also plotted the AIS ship tracks against sea ice data from NSIDC and found that ships are encountering ice more often and doing so farther north each year.

Despite the seemingly growing opportunities for shipping, the increasing number of ships in the region has given rise to serious concerns about pollution, oil spills, and disturbances to marine life, among other possible impacts.

Berkman is the coordinator and lead investigator of Pan-Arctic Options, which provides objective information that can guide the placement of infrastructure and the management of activities such as search and rescue and pollution response.

Now whether or not open Arctic waters will be long-term boon for shipping remains to be seen, but scientists agree that the melting trend does not bode well for the Arctic environment as we have known it.

“Arctic sea ice cover continues to be in a decreasing trend, and this is connected to the ongoing warming of the Arctic,” said Claire Parkinson, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “It’s a two-way street: the warming means less ice is going to form, and more ice is going to melt. But also, because there is less ice, less of the Sun’s radiation is reflected off of Earth, and this contributes to the warming.”

http://gcaptain.com/researchers-map-seven-years-of-arctic-shipping/

Global Citizen News Digest


April 13, 2018

SNIPPET:

The country still gets 10% of its power from coal.

Finland is known for having the world’s best education system. It’s also been called the “happiest country in the world” and the best country to be a mother.

Now, it wants to become one of the first countries in the world to completely phase out coal.

The Scandinavian powerhouse aims to completely eliminate coal dependency by 2029, one year ahead of its previous goal of 2030, environment minister Kimmo Tiilikainen said Tuesday. 

“Greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced much sooner than initially planned to mitigate climate change,” Tiilikainen said in a statement.

Furthermore, energy companies that eliminate coal use by 2025 will be eligible for government subsidies, he added.

full article with graphics:

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/finland-plans-to-ban-coal-2029/

Agelbert NOTE: This article, over a year old now, has valuable information about what will happen, IN OUR TIME, when, not if, the AMOC shuts down. The  East Coast of the USA would almost immediately experience a sea level rise of at least 80 centimeters (i.e. 2 feet and 7.5 inches) . 🌊 Besides all the catastrophic flooding, it would cost billions of dollars just to raise the level of the port facilities alone.

Topographic map of the Nordic Seas and subpolar basins with schematic circulation of surface currents (solid curves) and deep currents (dashed curves) that form a portion of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). Colors of curves indicate approximate temperatures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturning_circulation


Scientists have recently begun to re-examine a scary question: Will a crucial ocean current shut down?

ROBINSON MEYER  JAN 7, 2017

SNIPPET:

But then she went on. From what we know right now, the possibility that AMOC will shut down remains a “potential impact of climate change with significant consequences.”

“Yet other impacts are much more certain” to result from climate change, she said, listing “increased surface temperatures, sea level rise, and ice melt.” While some harms, like those of a collapsing AMOC, are still up for debate, it is almost completely certain that climate change will bring serious consequences for us in our time. Rampant drought, drier rivers, and vanished 🌊 coasts are all ours to inherit.

Full article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/what-a-real-debate-looks-like-in-climate-science/512444/

Agelbert NOTE: This video continues from the Paul Beckwith video in the previous post on this topic board. 



Paul Beckwith

Published on Apr 17, 2018

What happens if the Atlantic Meridional Overturning (AMOC) slows down, or even stops? The former has happened, and if the latter occurs there will be global chaos. How close are we to reaching the threshold for a “rewriting” of global ocean circulation? If it occurs, will it be permanent, for at least hundreds of years? How much will already extreme weather change, and how much will global food supply be impacted?

Always more questions than answers. Please support my ongoing efforts to analyze our global climate system in videos with a donation at my website http://paulbeckwith.net

The Intercept



By Kate Aronoff

April 17 2018, 7:00 a.m.

SNIPPET 1:

Müller, at least, is honest about this denialism — even if he prefers the term “skeptic.”

Müller’s own scientific rationale may make no sense, but his conclusion is easy on the conscience: Relax, everything will be OK. Another version of that message is being marketed across COP23. As climate scientists call for a dramatic transformation of the world’s economy, a different set of deniers is starting to coalesce around something easier — plans to seemingly tackle climate change that may well still portend planetary catastrophe, even according to conservative climate projections. Unlike Müller, they’re at the center of the climate policymaking debate in Bonn. Like its predecessor events, exhibition halls at COP23 were dotted with stalls sponsored by fossil fuel companies proselytizing carbon capture and storage technology; international investment banks eager to discuss the central role of private finance in driving the new green revolution; industry-backed think tanks exploring the necessity of spraying particulates into the air to block out the sun. The solutions coming out of high-level talks don’t inspire much more confidence.

They peddle in a set of easy fixes: a market signal here, an industrial-grade aerosol there, and the crisis will be an artifact of history, with corporate shareholders better off for it.

If you believe that, then I have a clean coal plant to sell you.

SNIPPET 2:

The relevant question isn’t whether the Earth is heating up, but what we intend to do about it. That’s a radically different conversation about climate change than the one that’s been had in America to this point. Here, decades of propaganda from the fossil fuel industry and the denialist think tanks they support have forced the debate to orbit around whether there’s a problem at all, prying open the Overton window to accommodate conspiracy theorists and Nobel Prize winners alike. That the two co-habitated for years on the same cable news panels put the climate debate on deniers’ terms, taking any discussion of reasonable, large-scale solutions — stringent regulation, massive public investment, an economy planned around reducing emissions — virtually off the table. In its place has come a parade of utopian techno-fixes and market-based solutions, dreamed up by the likes of Milton Friedman and now embraced by left and right alike. The same disinformation campaigners that created a debate over the reality of climate change have hedged their bets and staked a claim to solving a problem that they had tried to convince the world didn’t exist.

In late March, Royal Dutch Shell — Europe’s biggest oil company — released a pathway to meeting the low-bar commitment laid out in the Paris Agreement to cap warming at 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels; the actual text calls to cap it at “well below” 2 degrees Celsius. Still, the company’s decarbonization plan — to reach net-zero emissions by 2070 — is hugely ambitious. As Vox’s David Roberts notes, it’s also premised on two big fantasies: that fossil fuel production and consumption can continue at roughly similar levels for the next several decades, and that at some point between now and then we’ll figure out how to suck massive amount of carbon out from the atmosphere with so-called negative emissions technologies, which remain unproven at scale.

The kinds of wishful thinking baked into Shell’s decarbonization plan, though, are also the ones plaguing the research compiled by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, a clearinghouse for climate science from around the world where the “least-cost” pathways to decarbonization are also those anointed to keep warming below catastrophic levels. As climate modeler Glen Peters points out, the oil giant’s projections for fossil fuel consumption and negative emissions don’t differ wildly from those laid out in the IPCC’s model collection. Fittingly, then, the official account for UNFCCC tweeted a glowing review of the study.  😇 🤬

With multinationals like Shell prepared to play hardball, the debate over what to do about climate change is much harder to win than the one over whether it’s happening. Major polluters are prepared to do just that and are already coming to the table at international climate talks with ready-made plans. 😈 👹 💵 🎩 🍌 🏴‍☠️

Full article:

https://theintercept.com/2018/04/17/climate-change-denial-trump-germany/



Inside Climate News


Some of the biggest oil and gas companies are embroiled in legal disputes with cities, states and children over the industry's role in global warming.

Aprill 11, 1018

BY DAVID HASEMYER

SNIPPET:

The storm of litigation could have a broad impact if it succeeds in holding fossil fuel companies accountable for the kinds of damages they foresaw decades ago, said Harold Koh, a professor of international law at Yale Law School who served as senior legal adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

"The industry has profited from the manufacture of fossil fuels but has not had to absorb the economic costs of the consequences," Koh said. "The industry had the science 30 years ago and knew what was going to happen but made no warning so that preemptive steps could have beentaken." 

"The taxpayers have been bearing the cost for what they should have been warned of 30 years ago," Koh added. "The companies are now being called to account for their conduct and the damages from that conduct."

Full article:


https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04042018/climate-change-fossil-fuel-company-lawsuits-timeline-exxon-children-california-cities-attorney-general

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April 19, 2018




The power outage in Puerto Rico is on track to become the second largest blackout in world history, surpassed only by the outage from Hurricane Haiyan. As climate change worsens and sea levels rise, we can expect more damage from hurricanes, as higher storm surge reaches much further inland. And climate change is already contributing to increased hurricane activity in the North Atlantic since the 1970s, according to the US National Climate Assessment.


The Puerto Rico blackout is also a prime example of how, despite deniers’ fears of the cost to combat climate change, inaction is far more expensive than addressing it. The price tag to rebuild the PR grid is bigger than the alternative plan to include renewable energy, storage, and microgrids for resilience.
 
It’s also yet another example of environmental injustice. Because as Politico’s David Viknik exposed last month, the Trump administration’s response to Harvey in Texas and Irma in Florida was  much quicker and more robust than Maria in Puerto Rico. Among plenty of other concerning figures, just nine days after Harvey, FEMA had paid out over $140 million to Texans, whereas nine days after Maria they had distributed a paltry $6 million.
 
That report from not-even-a-month-ago isn’t even the latest example of how communities of color are treated vastly different than wealthy white communities. On Tuesday, Megan Jula of MotherJones reported that after an affluent white community resisted a fracking site near their school, the company decided to move its drill site. Its internal analysis, according to Jula, was that the proximity to the school meant the site was “not preferable.” 


So it selected a new site, one that was actually closer to a school. But this school is in a Hispanic community, so instead of drilling near a site that’s 77% white kids, they’ll be risking the health and well-being of a school that’s 82% hispanic.      


The location is technically legal- fracking operations are required to be 500 feet from homes, and 1,000 feet from schools. This site is 509 feet from a home and 1,360 feet from the school. Which is totally reasonable and not at all something that families should complain about. 😈

Fortunately the Sierra Club, NAACP and other environmental groups care more about these kids than the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) who approved the fracking application. They’ve filed a lawsuit, arguing that COGCC failed to address public concerns and that because the school’s playground and fields are within 1,000 feet of the fracking rig, it’s illegal.

These examples show how wrong deniers are when they claim hurricanes and climate change are no big deal and shouldn’t be talked about, or that fossil fuels are good for us and should be welcomed into our lives with open arms.


But because these risks are felt more deeply by communities of color than the old affluent white demographic of denial, odds are slim they’ll care.'

4,559 views


Paul Beckwith

Published on Apr 19, 2018

Like jet streams in the atmosphere, ocean currents like the Gulf Stream are vital for moving heat from the warm equator to the cold poles. As Arctic temperature abruptly increases, our delicate planetary heat balance is ripped apart, causing extreme weather and extreme ocean events.

The hot, slowing Gulf Stream water piles up on the US East coast causing rapid sea level rise, amplifying hurricanes, filling storms with water to dump as rain or snow on coastal cities, and increasing wave heights that batter and reconfigure coastlines. Weather Wilding and Whiplashing.

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