[TheClimate.Vote] January 8, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/January 8, 2019/
*
*[moving forward]
*Supreme Court Refuses Exxon Appeal, Allows Mass. Climate Probe to Proceed*
By Karen Savage
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for the Massachusetts' 
attorney general to continue her investigation into possible climate 
change-related deception by Exxon, declining to hear the company's 
appeal of a ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

The oil giant has been fighting Massachusetts Attorney General Maura 
Healey's probe since she launched it in March 2016, issuing Exxon a 
subpoena-like request for documents that could help her determine 
whether the company violated state consumer protection laws by 
misleading consumers on the impacts of its products on climate change. 
She is also investigating whether the corporation deceived Massachusetts 
shareholders by failing to divulge potential climate change-related 
risks to their investments.

Exxon responded by suing Healey in Massachusetts, claiming she lacked 
jurisdiction and alleging that her investigation was politically 
motivated. The suit was dismissed in January 2017 by Massachusetts 
Superior Court Judge Heidi E. Brieger, who ruled that "zealously" 
pursuing defendants does not make Healey's actions improper and ordered 
Exxon to turn over the requested documents.

Brieger's decision was upheld by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial 
Court in April 2018 and last October, Exxon asked the U.S. Supreme Court 
to review the ruling.

"Today's #SCOTUS victory clears the way for our office to investigate 
Exxon's conduct toward consumers and investors," Healey wrote on Twitter.

"The public deserves answers from this company about what it knew about 
the impacts of burning fossil fuels, and when."

The high court's decision not to consider Exxon's appeal is the 
company's latest legal setback, which faces not only the continuing 
investigation in Massachusetts but also a lawsuit filed in October by 
then-New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood. Letitia James, who was 
sworn in as the state's new AG on January 1, has vowed to continue the 
New York suit, alleging that the company has deceived investors for 
years by deliberately downplaying the climate risks to its business and 
long-term financial health.

Exxon is also defending itself against a series of climate 
change-related lawsuits around the country filed by communities seeking 
to hold various fossil fuel companies accountable for the costs of 
climate damages.
As part of Healey's investigation, she has requested transcripts of 
investor calls, evidence of internal discussions regarding the filing of 
Securities and Exchange Commission reports, documentation and research 
to back up public statements by former Exxon chief executive and 
now-former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. She has also sought 
evidence to substantiate or refute statements made in several Exxon 
reports--including the 2014 Managing the Risks Report. In it,  Exxon 
told shareholders it was "confident that none of our hydrocarbon 
reserves are now or will become stranded" due to climate change, a claim 
some experts have called deceptive.
Healey is asking Exxon to turn over internal scientific research, 
information related to public relations and media communication plans, 
as well as copies of communication with organizations supportive of or 
backed by the oil industry such as ALEC, the American Petroleum 
Institute, the Heartland Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute, 
the Heritage Foundation and others.
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/01/07/supreme-court-exxon-climate-massachusetts-healey/


[Outdated in 2009 too]
*Pelosi Says House to Revisit Climate Plan Based on 2009 Bill*
The U.S. House will take up climate legislation, including a measure 
based on a bill the body approved last time Democrats were in the 
majority, said Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
"We couldn't pass in the Senate our climate bill, and we'll be returning 
to that," Pelosi said on Friday at a Trinity Washington University event 
for MSNBC's "The Speaker" town hall broadcast.
While Pelosi didn't elaborate, the measure that fits this description is 
the 2009 cap-and-trade legislation that narrowly passed by the House but 
died in the Senate, and would have imposed the nation's first limits on 
greenhouse-gas emissions linked to global warming.
It also would have created a market for trading pollution permits to 
curb emissions, with the goal of reducing global warming greenhouse-gas 
emissions 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. It was panned at the time 
by business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as an unrealistic 
approach that would harm the economy and kill jobs...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-04/pelosi-says-house-to-revisit-climate-plan-based-on-2009-bill-jqiapimq


[Climate Journalism funding]
*Hollywood Foreign Press Association Awards $1 Million Grant to 
InsideClimate News*
The grant provides ICN critical support for its investigative 
journalism, national reporting network and student journalism program.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06012019/golden-globe-awards-hollywood-foreign-press-association-insideclimate-news-million-grant-climate-change


[Or maybe nationalize the oil industries]
*"Innovation": the latest GOP smokescreen on climate change policy*
It does not mean what they think it means.
By David Roberts at drvoxdavid@vox.com Jan 4, 2019
The politics of climate change are shifting against the GOP. New polling 
shows that majorities of Republicans accept that climate change is a 
problem and support steps to address it. It is mainly the stubborn core 
of far-right conservatives, mostly older white men, that still rejects 
reality altogether.

It's a crucial juncture for the party. There are two ways it could go.

The first is a good-faith search for conservative-friendly climate 
solutions. A handful of Republicans are taking this route, supporting a 
bill called the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, introduced in 
the House in November and (in a slightly different form) the Senate 
earlier this month. It would implement a $15 carbon tax, rising at $10 a 
year, with all the revenue returned as per-capita dividends, aiming to 
reduce US carbon emissions 40 percent within 10 years and 90 percent by 
2050. It's a credible, ambitious climate effort. It's got two Republican 
co-sponsors in the House and one in the Senate.

(It is distinct from the similar though somewhat less ambitious proposal 
from the Climate Leadership Council, which is backed by several retired 
Republicans and the Americans for Carbon Dividends PAC.)

The problem is that most GOP funders and elected officials remain 
devoted to the cause of protecting fossil fuels, and protecting fossil 
fuels is, by definition, incommensurate with serious action on climate 
change.

So most of the party's prominent figures have opted for the second 
route: bullshitting.

In some cases, it's just an incoherent pastiche. For a particularly 
pungent example, check out this op-ed from Holman Jenkins Jr., the 
longtime Wall Street Journal editorialist. Jenkins is to climate change 
what the WSJ's Stephen Moore is to economics: loudly, pugnaciously, and 
consistently wrong...
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/1/4/18166400/republicans-climate-change-innovation-policy


[serious warning - a manifesto]
*Potential irreversible Planet thresholds for a disastrous Future*
Climate State - Published on Jan 7, 2019
Johan Rockström (Stockholm Resilience Centre),  talks about planetary 
boundaries and tipping points, "Living in the Anthropocene", at the Club 
of Rome 50th Anniversary Meeting in Rome, October 2018. 
https://www.pik-potsdam.de/news/in-sh... And briefly outlines the 
report, "Transformation is feasible – How to achieve the Sustainable 
Development Goals within Planetary Boundaries" 
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/r...
Source https://www.facebook.com/clubofrome/v... and 
https://50thclubofrome.com
Johan Rockström https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Rockstr%C3%B6m
http://twi2050.org
https://youtu.be/yDny9BIE0zU
- - - -
[the Institute for Applied Systems Analysis]
The World in 2050
TWI2050 was launched by the International Institute for Applied Systems 
Analysis (IIASA), the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), 
and the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC).
  The World in 2050 (TWI2050) is a global research initiative in support 
of a successful implementation of the United Nations' 2030 Agenda. The 
goal of TWI2050 is to provide the fact-based knowledge to support the 
policy process and implementation of the SDGs.
- - -
The urgent question now is how to act on this aspirational agenda and to 
have a clear understanding of the full consequences and cost of inaction 
and the benefits of achieving SDGs in every major region of the world.
http://www.iiasa.ac.at/web/home/research/twi/TWI2050.html


[BBC checks pain down under]
*Bluebottle: Thousands of Queensland beachgoers stung*
Vast numbers of bluebottle sea creatures have been pushed ashore in 
Queensland, Australia, stinging thousands of people and forcing the 
closure of swim spots.
Surf Life Saving Queensland said over 2,600 people received treatment at 
the weekend. Bluebottle stings are painful but typically not 
life-threatening.
Unusually strong winds pushed colonies of the creatures towards beaches.
About 13,000 stings were recorded in the past week.
That's three times more than in the corresponding period last year.
Most incidents took place in Queensland's heavily populated Gold Coast 
and Sunshine Coast regions.
Dr Lisa-Ann Gershwin, an expert from Australian Marine Stinger Advisory 
Services, agreed it was unusual to see gatherings in such numbers.
She said "a really weird run" of strong winds and heat spells had 
brought bluebottles and other species closer to shore.
But she added that given those unusual weather conditions, the number of 
bluebottles should be considered "not abnormal".
The species is most commonly found in deeper seas, but can be moved 
easily because it has a "sail" crest on its back.
"A bluebottle has that sail that sticks up - so the wind grabs the sail 
and drives them ashore," Dr Gershwin told the BBC.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-46777854


[uplifting]
*News Feature: The solar cell of the future*
Stephen Battersby
PNAS January 2, 2019 116 (1) 7-10; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1820406116
If the latest photovoltaic technologies can team up, they promise to 
capture the sun's energy far more effectively than ever before.

In principle, the deluge of energy pouring down on us from the sun could 
meet the world's power needs many times over. Already, in the United 
States, the total power capacity of installed solar photovoltaic (PV) 
panels is around 60 gigawatts, an amount expected to double in the next 
5 years, and China increased its PV capacity by nearly 60 gigawatts in 
2017 alone. Meanwhile, improvements in PV panel technology have driven 
down the price of solar electricity, making it cost competitive with 
other power sources in many parts of the world.

That's not a bad start. But to take full advantage of that energy deluge 
and make a real impact on global carbon emissions, solar PV needs to 
move into terawatt territory--and conventional panels might struggle to 
get us there. Most PV panels rely on cells made from semiconducting 
silicon crystals, which typically convert about 15 to 19% of the energy 
in sunlight into electricity. That efficiency is the result of decades 
of research and development. Further improvements are increasingly hard 
to come by.

Material shortages, as well as the size and speed of the requisite 
investment, could also stymie efforts to scale up production of existing 
technologies. "If we are serious about the Paris climate agreement, and 
we want to have 30% [of the world's electricity supplied by] solar PV in 
20 years, then we would need to grow the capacity of silicon 
manufacturing by a factor of 50 to build all those panels," says Albert 
Polman, leader of the photonic materials group at the AMOLF research 
institute in Amsterdam. "It may happen, but in parallel we should think 
about ways to make solar cells that take less capital."

A slew of new technologies is aiming to tackle the terawatt challenge. 
Some could be cheaply mass produced, perhaps printed, or even painted 
onto surfaces. Others might be virtually invisible, integrated neatly 
into walls or windows. And a combination of new materials and optical 
wizardry could give us remarkably efficient sun-traps. In different 
ways, all of these technologies promise to harvest much more solar 
energy, giving us a better chance of transforming the world's energy 
supply in the next 2 decades.
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/1/7


[no fees or favors received for posting this ]
*Think Resilience Guided Course *
We live in a time of tremendous political, environmental, and economic 
upheaval. What should we do? Think Resilience is an online course to 
help you get started on doing something. It features 22 video 
lectures--about four hours total--by Richard Heinberg, one of the 
world's foremost experts on the urgency and challenges of transitioning 
society away from fossil fuels.

Think Resilience is offered by Post Carbon Institute and based on our 
years of work in energy literacy and community resilience. We've packed 
a lot of information into four hours, and by the end of the course 
you'll have good start on two important skills:

How to make sense of the complex challenges society now faces. What are 
the underlying, systemic forces at play? What brought us to this place? 
Acting without this understanding is like putting a band-aid on a 
life-threatening injury.
How to build community resilience. While we must also act in our 
individual lives and as national and global citizens, building the 
resilience of our communities is an essential response to the 21st 
century's multiple sustainability crises.
You can take Think Resilience at your own pace in the Self-Directed 
Course. Or, you can participate in a six-week Guided Course hosted by 
Richard Heinberg in live webinar sessions.
https://education.resilience.org/course-options/


[listening to the sound of health - text and audio]
*How Do You Measure The Amount Of Carbon In A Tree?*
By PATRICK SKAHILL - DEC 11, 2018
The latest national climate assessment says forests play a key role in 
keeping our air clean.

According to the report, America's forests stored the equivalent of 11 
percent of the country's carbon dioxide emissions over a 25 year period.

That's because when trees breathe they suck up carbon dioxide, release 
oxygen, and store that leftover carbon in their trunks.

But how scientists determine the amount of carbon stored in a tree is a 
question open for debate.

When Bob Marra goes into the woods, he takes a tool with him. It's a 
hammer -- his magic sonic hammer.

"It's called a sonic hammer. But I call it the 'magic' sonic hammer, 
just because it looks kind of cool," Marra said.

Marra is a biologist with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment 
Station. While the hammer isn't magical, it did do something pretty 
cool: help us look inside a tree.

To do that, Marra hammered nails into the trunk of a sugar maple in 
northwest Connecticut, girdling the tree with sensors. Then, he circled 
and tapped on each nail. Each tap was recorded by a computer.

Marra's recording sound waves. Measuring how fast sound travels from the 
nail he hits, to all the other nails around the tree.

It's called "sonic tomography." Think of it like a CAT scan for trees. A 
way to peer inside a trunk without drilling to see if a tree is rotting 
-- or solid wood.

"The denser the wood, the faster the sound waves," Marra said.

Dense wood is really good at storing carbon. But if a tree is less dense 
inside, that could indicate decay. And also, that the tree might not be 
as good at storing carbon as we think.

Using a grant from the National Science Foundation, Marra tested his 
tomography idea --- scanning around 70 trees in northwest Connecticut.

He found dozens were rotting inside, even ones that on the outside, 
looked good.

"What's going on inside of these trees, is kind of hidden to us, for the 
most part," Marra said. "Trees that, otherwise, look to be perfectly 
fine and you would have no reason to think otherwise, can have internal 
decay taking place."

Marra said that's an important consideration -- especially when it comes 
to carbon storage or "sequestration."

"If we're going to look to forests as a way to sequester carbon, we 
should develop much more accurate estimates of how much carbon is 
actually sequestered."

In addition to sonic tomographs, Marra also did electrical resistance 
tomography, measuring how well electricity moves through the tree. 
Electricity moves well through moisture, indicating possible internal decay.

That's because there are whole markets based on this.

Take, for example, California. Its aggressive pollution regulations have 
fostered an expansive cap-and-trade program. California polluters can 
offset emissions by buying up carbon credits. And landowners across 
America can profit by "proving" their forest is really good at storing 
atmospheric carbon.

Rajinder Sahota is with the California Air Resources Board, which 
oversees the program. She explained the process.

"What you do, is you have a measurement at the beginning of that time 
period that says, 'here's how much is in my forest,'" Sahota said.

Then, through audits, landowners prove their land, over time, can store 
carbon in a way that's better than business as usual.

"Here's how my forest looks relative to what is the common amount of 
stored carbon," Sahota said. "And here's how much, if I undertake some 
activities, I can increase that carbon storage in my forest."

But measuring all that? Well, here's where it gets tricky.

   "What's going on inside of these trees is, kind of, hidden to us for 
the most part," Marra said. His team performed tomographs on trees in 
northwest Connecticut.
"You look at any tree. Especially a hardwood tree. You look at its 
shape. That's really complex," said Christopher Woodall, a researcher 
with the U.S Forest Service.

Woodall's equations are used by California to calculate stored carbon.

"You estimate the volume. And then you got to figure out the biomass 
within that volume," Woodall said. "And then, turn that into an estimate 
of carbon."

To do that, foresters don't go out and look at every tree. Instead, they 
sample. Measuring a variety of trees and plugging those numbers into a 
complex model.

But forestry science is evolving. Woodall has since published work 
saying the equations need to be improved. In part, because new 
technologies are making biomass estimates more efficient and precise.

"I think we're not too far away from not necessarily sampling trees in 
the U.S., but actually having a true census. Eventually, with a 
combination of satellites … and with drones and laser scanning, we're 
headed to the point where we might be able to know something about every 
tree in the U.S.," Woodall said.

He said that could happen soon or in 50 years. But for now, scientists 
are taking baby steps, trying to assess the role of forests in climate 
change. Because, as Woodall said, it's too important to ignore.
http://www.wnpr.org/post/how-do-you-measure-amount-carbon-tree
- -
[academic paper]
*Estimating carbon loss due to internal decay in living trees using 
tomography: implications for forest carbon budgets*
Abstract
The world's forests sequester and store vast amounts of atmospheric 
carbon, playing a crucial role in climate change mitigation. Internal 
stem decay in living trees results in the release of stored carbon back 
into the atmosphere, constituting an important, but poorly understood, 
countervailing force to carbon sequestration. The contribution of 
internal decay to estimates of forest carbon stocks, though likely 
significant, has yet to be quantified, given that an accurate method for 
the non-destructive quantification of internal decay has been lacking. 
To that end, we present here a novel and potentially transformative 
methodology, using sonic and electrical resistance tomography, for 
non-destructively quantifying the mass of stored carbon lost to internal 
decay in the boles of living trees. The methodology was developed using 
72 northern hardwood trees (Fagus grandifolia, Acer saccharum and Betula 
alleghaniensis) from a late-successional forest in northwestern 
Connecticut, USA. Using 105 stem disks corresponding to tomographic 
scans and excised from 39 of the study's trees, we demonstrate the 
accuracy with which tomography predicts the incidence and severity of 
internal decay and distinguishes active decay from cavities...
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aae2bf


*This Day in Climate History - January 8, 2013- from D.R. Tucker*
January 8, 2013: Media Matters releases an analysis showing that 
"...news coverage of climate change on ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX remained 
low in 2012 despite record temperatures and a series of extreme weather 
events in the U.S. When the Sunday shows did discuss climate change, 
scientists were shut out of the debate while Republican politicians were 
given a platform to question the science."
http://mediamatters.org/research/2013/01/08/study-warmest-year-on-record-received-cool-clim/192079 


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