The past year was quite a whirlwind, especially on the policy front. Unlike many advocacy organizations, Fuel Freedom was well positioned to continue progress both philosophically and with the relationships we have built over the past few years. Read more →
Sen. Kevin de Leon, president pro tem of the California state Senate, is not only confident a climate-change bill will pass the Legislature and be signed into law. He fully expects the rest of the nation to follow California’s lead.
“Leadership does matter. That’s why we will not wait,” de Leon said last week during an energy discussion in Sacramento.
The lawmaker went on:
“We have never waited for Washington, D.C. To be honest with you, while Washington, D.C., dithers on this issue, between members who are negative, climate-change deniers altogether when the empirical data is there … We’re not waiting for that. We’re not gonna wait for Washington, D.C. We never have; we never will. We are the state of California, and we are the leaders nationally. And they’re gonna have to follow, and they will eventually follow what is done here.”
Senate Bill 350 passed the Senate on June 3 and now goes to the Assembly. If it’s approved there and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, the state will have achieved an ambitious plan that could have a huge impact on transportation and power generation in the state, and could affect the state’s economy long into the future.
The bill sets three goals to be achieved by 2030: cut petroleum use by 50 percent; increase the amount of renewables in electricity generation by 50 percent; and boost efficiency of buildings by 50 percent.
To discuss the measure, the group Diesel Technology Forum sponsored a gathering called “50/50/50 by 2030: Transportation and the California Energy Challenge. Carl Cannon, the Washington bureau chief of the website Real Clear Politics, moderated the event and interviewed de Leon.
De Leon said that if SB350 passes, it will save consumers money from “better fuel efficiencies” as well as reduce smog. “Air pollution knows no boundaries of political ideologies,” he said. The Democrat called the network of freeways in his Los Angeles district a “serpent that chokes the air out of a young child’s lungs.”
The bill was among several related to climate change passed by the Democrat-controlled Legislature. “These measures together represent the most far-reaching measures dealing with climate change, not in the history of California or the history of the country, but I would go a step further and say in the history but the world.”
De Leon said he’s looking forward to a “vigorous debate on the merits of the measure itself. … I think it’s going to be fun.” Democrats easily outnumber Republicans in both houses of the Legislature (26 out of 40 in the Senate; 52 out of 80 in the Assembly), but de Leon said that some Republicans had said to him privately that they “concurred that something must be done about this issue. Politically, that’s another issue altogether. But privately, I’ve heard on numerous occasions that ‘I agree with you, but it’s extremely difficult for us to do anything about this.’ ”
Watch the interview here:
And watch a panel discussion, with energy expert Amy Myers Jaffe and others:
There were pockets of pure hotness in the United States in 2014. California, for instance, endured an unprecedented drought, worsened by the warmest year in the state since 1934.
Although the United States, overall, had just its 34th-warmest year on record, the rest of the world suffered much more: As climate scientists had been predicting for much of the year, 2014 was the hottest year around the globe since records began being kept in 1880.
As USA Today reported:
The global temperature from 2014 broke the previous record warmest years of 2005 and 2010 …
Two separate data sets of global temperature — from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — confirmed the record. Another data set released last week by the Japan Meteorological Agency also found 2014 was the planet’s warmest.
The average temperature for 2014 was 58.24 degrees globally, 1.24 degrees above the 20th-century average, NOAA said.
(California’s average was 61.5 degrees. Alaska, Nevada and Arizona also had their warmest years on record. Earlier this month, it was announced that Anchorage had exactly zero days of below-zero weather in 2014.)
More USA Today:
“It just shows that human emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, are taking over the Earth’s climate system,” [University of Arizona atmospheric scientist Jonathan] Overpeck said. “The data are clear: The Earth is warming, and humans are causing the bulk of this warming.”
Nine of the 10 warmest years on Earth have now occurred in the 21st century, the data show.
The warming trend was driven by ocean temperatures moreso than land temperatures, which alarms scientists, since there wasn’t even a heat-producing El Nino event.
As The Washington Post reported:
Ocean temperatures were more than 1 F above average, NOAA said. They warmed to a new record even in the absence of an El Niño event, a naturally occurring cycle of ocean heating in the tropical Pacific.
“This is the first year since 1997 that the record warmest year was not an El Niño year at the beginning of the year, because the last three have been,” Gavin Schmidt, who directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told the Post’s Chris Mooney.
President Obama’s latest effort to mitigate the effects of climate change will be to crack down on methane leakage from oil and gas wells, The New York Times reported.
The EPA will announce new regulations this week aimed at reducing methane emissions by 45 percent by 2025, compared with 2012 levels. Final rules will be set by 2016, the newspaper reported, citing anonymous sources.
Obama, stymied by Republican opposition that stands to become more solidified now that the party controls the Senate as well as the House, has increasingly turned to executive action, skirting Congress, to deal with climate change. The administration says the Clean Air Act gives it the green light to issue such mandates.
Methane, the primary component of natural gas, sometimes escapes from oil and gas wells, in addition to pipelines. Although the gas accounts for only 9 percent of overall greenhouse-gas emissions, it’s 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, another GHG that accounts for the majority of emissions.
The Natural Resources Defense Council applauded the proposed regulations, but the oil and gas industry said they’re unnecessary, since they’re already motivated to capture methane instead of allowing it to escape into the atmosphere. If it’s captured, it can be burned in power plants to generate electricity, making it a cleaner alternative to coal. Methane can also be used to fuel cars and trucks, as compressed (CNG) or liquefied (LNG) natural gas. It can also be converted into two types of inexpensive liquid alcohol fuels, ethanol or methanol.
Howard Feldman, director of regulatory affairs for the American Petroleum Institute, said:
“We don’t need regulation to capture it, because we are incentivized to do it. We want to bring it to market.”
That market would grow if the infrastructure for transportation fuels were expanded, creating more of an incentive to capture methane. The price of natural gas stood at $12.68 per million metric British Thermal Units (MmBTU) in June 2008, only to crash to $1.95 by April 2012. Last month the average was $3.43 at the Henry Hub terminal in Louisiana. Profit margins are still so low that oil drillers flare off much of it.
Ahead of the U.N. climate conference in Paris later this year, there will be a lot of talk about how nations should apportion the burden of reducing carbon emissions. The richer, more industrialized nations have a lot of ideas about what poorer, still-developing nations should do to grow their economies without polluting the atmosphere too much.
Invariably, we might hear the term “carbon diet” come up, with its emphasis on personal sacrifice and willpower.
It’s a counterproductive metaphor, writes Lisa Margonelli, author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank.
In a post for Slate, as part of its “Future Tense” initiative, Margonelli writes that the “dieting” analogy is unfair to those developing countries, particularly when the richer ones are dictating the terms:
Most of the world does not need a carbon diet. Three-quarters of the global population uses just 10 percent of the world’s energy, 1 billion people lack access to electricity, and 3 billion cook their food over dung, wood, and charcoal, leading to millions of early deaths. These people are energy starved—and they need a feast, not a diet. People in Angola, Bangladesh, and Cameroon, for example, use about 250 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, while people in the U.S. use 12,246.
She goes on to argue that people in developing countries deserve the chance at economic prosperity, so rich nations should promote innovations to serve the surging energy needs in a cleaner way.
For example:
Consider air conditioning. The world uses a trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity for AC right now, and with urbanization, greater wealth, and warming, it’s projected that amount will increase tenfold by 2050, far outpacing zero-carbon electricity generation. The issue is not whether people in developing countries “should” have air conditioning—what virtue is there in dying in your apartment during a heat wave? It’s how to get it to them. AC is a crucial part of building the knowledge economy employment that will eventually bring down carbon emissions because it increases the productivity of people and computers. Without AC there would be no grand economies in Hong Kong, Atlanta, or Bangalore.
The main reason the “diet” metaphor fails is that it suggests that the world’s problems can be solved by individual willpower.
The real issue with the carbon diet is that it suggests that we can deal with climate change as easily as we might switch to gluten-free pasta and beer, via willpower and careful substitution, when what we’ll really need is some kind of revolution in our thinking and technology.
On top of all that, most diets don’t work in the long term anyway. Which some people, sadly, are about to find out, a few weeks into their well-intentioned New Year’s resolutions.
(Photo: Yao ethnic minority women cook dinner on a smoke-spewing stove in Longji, China, in 2010. Credit: CHEN WS, for Shutterstock.com)
Climate experts are worried about a strange trend in the largest U.S. state: During all of 2014, the city of Anchorage, Alaska, did not see a day when the temperature fell below zero degrees Fahrenheit. That’s the first time in recorded history that’s happened.
As The Washington Post notes, the last time the mercury fell into negative digits was Dec. 26, 2013. Since then, the low has been above zero every day except one, Feb. 11, 2014, when it was exactly zero.
The Los Angeles Times says that in 2012, Anchorage had 32 days when the low temperature was below zero. In 2013 there were 14 such days.
Seven other cities in Alaska had record-warm years as well.
That doesn’t mean it was hot, per se. The average temperature in Anchorage during 2014 was 40.6 degrees, which to Southern Californians would feel like the next Ice Age. But that threshold was far above last year’s average temperature of 37 degrees.
The Times reported:
“These are definitely red flags that are very consistent with climate change,” said Chris Krenz, senior scientist at Oceana, an international conservation group. “These are anomalies … that show our climate system is off-kilter.”
Pope Francis will issue an encyclical, a message to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, urging them to take action on climate change, The Guardian reported.
The publication will follow the pontiff’s trip in March to the city of Tacloban, in the Philippines, which was devastated in 2012 by the super Typhoon Haiyan. Months later, the pope will address the UN General Assembly in New York.
The Guardian reports:
The reason for such frenetic activity, says Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, chancellor of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, is the pope’s wish to directly influence next year’s crucial UN climate meeting in Paris, when countries will try to conclude 20 years of fraught negotiations with a universal commitment to reduce emissions.
Francis has addressed global inequality and environmental depredation in recent months, arguing that economies needn’t harm the ecosystem to provide opportunity for citizens. In October, he spoke at the World Meeting of Popular Movements in Rome:
“An economic system centered on the god of money needs to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it. … The monopolizing of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness.”
Slate.com science writer Phil Plait said it’s “wise” for the pope to issue his statement on climate change after visiting Tacloban:
… people there are still recovering from the incredible power of super Typhoon Haiyan … and it’s known that cyclones like that one are becoming more powerful due to global warming. It will present a strong and clear message of the urgency of this issue.
I have no doubt that the deniers in Congress (and in the usual venues) will bloviate, creating sound and fury over this. But what they are doing is flailing, trying to delay the inevitable.
Negotiators at the U.N. climate conference in Lima, Peru, emerged after 36 straight hours of talks with a deal that has received mixed reviews.
On its face, the Lima Accord is a breakthrough: For the first time, the world’s nations, rich and poor, have signed on to an agreement requiring everyone to cut their own greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet some critics say the deal is so diluted that there are few penalties, beyond international scorn, for nations failing to come up with a plan.
According to The New York Times‘ Coral Davenport:
The strength of the accord — the fact that it includes pledges by every country to put forward a plan to reduce emissions at home — is also its greatest weakness. In order to get every country to agree to the deal, including the United States, the world’s largest historic carbon polluter, the Lima Accord does not include legally binding requirements that countries cut their emissions by any particular amount.
“If a country doesn’t submit a plan, there will be no punishment, no fine, no black U.N. helicopters showing up,” said Jennifer Morgan, an expert on climate negotiations with the World Resources Institute, a research organization.
Under the draft of the final agreement, each of the 190 nations has until March 31 to enact its own domestic plan to reduce carbon emissions. Countries that miss the deadline will have until June. Collectively, the plans, known as the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, will be the foundation for an agreement to be signed at a Paris U.N. conference next year.
Many questions about the deal persist: Megan Rowling of Reuters has a story about how rich countries will help poorer ones deal with the cost of reducing emissions without stunting their own economies.
And The Guardian notes that language in the deal mentioning specific targets was amended:
… there will be few obligations to provide details and no review to compare each nation’s pledges – as had been demanded by the European Union – after China and other emerging nations refused. The text says INDCs “may include” details such as base years and yearly targets, far weaker than a former draft that said nations “shall provide” such details.
But as AP’s Karl Ritter reported, many were still hopeful and optimistic about what had been accomplished:
“As a text it’s not perfect, but it includes the positions of the parties,” said Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who was the conference chairman and had spent most of the day meeting separately with delegations.
An idea is gathering momentum among several governments: Reducing global greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.
As AP reports from the United Nations climate talks going on in Lima, Peru, this week:
… in a historic first, dozens of governments now embrace her prescription. The global climate pact set for adoption in Paris next year should phase out greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, says the London-based environmental lawyer.
“In your lifetime, emissions have to go to zero. That’s a message people understand,” said the Pakistani-born [Farhana] Yamin, who has been instrumental in getting that ambitious, some say crucial, goal into drafts being discussed at U.N. talks in Lima this week.
As The Guardian notes, the ambitious goal is spelled out in a policy document titled “ADP 2-7 agenda item 3 Elements for a draft negotiating text.”
The guidelines being hashed out in Lima could make their way onto the agenda for the next big U.N. climate conference, in Paris next year. The Guardian writes:
While a year seems like a long time, it’s not in the world of UN climate talks.
As one Australian observer pointed out, there are only six weeks of negotiating time on the UN’s schedule between now and Paris.
But if language such as “full decarbonization by 2050” were to become a reality, it basically defines an end point for the fossil fuel energy industry as we know it.
The reaction to President Obama’s climate-change deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping, among congressional Republicans, was swift and negative. The prevailing sentiment is that China didn’t give up as much in the bargain as the U.S., and that China isn’t likely to live up to its end of the agreement anyway.
But Mother Jones magazine quotes some experts on U.S.-China relations, and they say China is indeed serious about cutting greenhouse-gas emissions.
MJ’s James West writes:
So I asked experts on US-China relations to explain why this deal was so attractive to the leaders of two countries that have historically locked horns over everything from human rights to lingerie imports. Here’s their explanation of why China really does want to want to act on climate change, and why the bargain makes sense for President Barack Obama, as well:
China has to act on air pollution. If it doesn’t, the country risks political instability. Top Republicans have slammed the US-China deal as ineffective and one-sided. “China won’t have to reduce anything,” complained Sen. Jim Inhofe (Okla.) in a statement, adding that China’s promises were “hollow and not believable.”
But the assumption that China won’t try to live up to its end of the bargain misses the powerful domestic and global incentives for China to take action. The first, and most pressing, is visible in China’s appalling air quality. President Xi Jinping needs to act now, says Jerome A. Cohen, a leading Chinese law expert at New York University. Why? Because “the environment—not only the climate—is the most serious domestic challenge he confronts.”
