[TheClimate.Vote] March 21, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Thu Mar 21 09:25:15 EDT 2019
/March 21, 2019/
[Fracking hits legal barrier]
*Landmark climate victory: Federal court rejects sale of public lands
for fracking*
Mar 20, 2019 - News Release
In a landmark victory for climate, health, and public lands, a federal
judge late yesterday rejected the sale of public lands for fracking and
ordered a halt to drilling on more than 300,000 acres in Wyoming.
"This ruling is a triumph for our climate," said Jeremy Nichols,
WildEarth Guardians' Climate and Energy Program director. "To limit
greenhouse gas emissions, we have to start keeping our fossil fuels in
the ground and putting an end to selling public lands for fracking. This
decision is a critical step toward making that happen."
"Fracked gas is dangerous for people and terrible for the climate," said
Barbara Gottlieb, Environment and Health Program director for Physicians
for Social Responsibility. "This latest court win is not only a victory
for our health and future, but it reinforces that the oil and gas
industry doesn't get a free pass to pollute."
While the ruling applies to Wyoming, it has implications for public
lands across the American West and is a major rebuke to the Trump
administration's anti-environment, anti-climate agenda.
In 2016, WildEarth Guardians, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and
the Western Environmental Law Center sued the U.S. Department of the
Interior and the Department's Bureau of Land Management for failing to
account for the climate consequences of selling public lands for
fracking in the American West.
The suit targeted more than 460,000 acres of public lands in Colorado,
Utah, and Wyoming that were leased to the oil and gas industry in 2015
and 2016. An interactive map of these lands is available here >>
When leasing, the Bureau of Land Management refused to calculate and
limit the greenhouse gas emissions from future oil and gas development.
During the case, the judge decided to address 303,000 acres of leases in
Wyoming first. In his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph
Contreras held the Bureau "did not adequately quantify the climate
change impacts of oil and gas leasing," violating federal environmental
laws.
- -
*Judge Blocks Wyoming Fossil Fuel Leases, Says Government Must Consider
Climate Impacts*
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/03/20/federal-fossil-fuel-leases-climate-change-nepa/
- - -
"It's high time the federal government was held accountable for the
costs of sacrificing our public lands for dirty oil and gas," said
Samantha Ruscavage-Barz, managing attorney for WildEarth Guardians.
"This win demonstrates the Trump administration can't legally turn its
back on climate change."
Last fall, scientists with the Department of the Interior released an
assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from the production and
consumption of fossil fuels from public lands. The report found these
emissions, which come from federal coal, as well as offshore and onshore
oil and gas, accounted for 25 percent of all U.S. climate pollution.
At the same time, federal climate scientists released Volume II of the
Fourth National Climate Assessment, which sounded new alarms over the
costs of climate change to the U.S. The report called for "immediate and
substantial global greenhouse gas emissions reductions" to prevent the
most catastrophic impacts of climate change.
"With the science mounting that we need to aggressively rein in
greenhouse gases, this ruling is monumental," said Kyle Tisdel, attorney
and Energy and Communities Program director for the Western
Environmental Law Center. "Every acre of our public land sold to the oil
and gas industry is another blow to the climate, making this ruling a
powerful reality check on the Trump administration and a potent tool for
reining in climate pollution."
More than 25 million acres of public lands in the U.S. have been leased
to the oil and gas industry for development. More than 20 million of
these acres are located in the western states of Colorado, Montana, New
Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming.
Under Trump, the pace of leasing public lands for oil and gas
development has surged. In 2018, nearly 4 million acres were put up for
sale to the oil and gas industry. So far in 2019, the administration
auctioned off or proposed leasing more than 2.1 million acres.
Judge Contreras' ruling today signals that unless the Department of the
Interior and Bureau of Land Management begin fully accounting for the
climate costs of all oil and gas leasing in the U.S., the agencies will
be running afoul of federal law.
The Judge stated, "[The] agency must consider the cumulative impact of
GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions generated by past, present, or reasonably
foreseeable BLM lease sales in the region and nation."
https://westernlaw.org/landmark-climate-victory-federal-court-rejects-sale-public-lands-fracking/
- -
[Here is the ruling]
*GRANTING IN PART PLAINTIFFS' MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT;*
***DENYING DEFENDANTS' CROSS-MOTIONS FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT;*
***DENYING MOTION FOR LEAVE TO FILE AMICUS BRIEF*
https://pdf.wildearthguardians.org/support_docs/Opinion_Westwide_3-19-2019.pdf
[Seen from above]
*Dramatic Satellite Photos Show Historic Flooding Across Central U.S. in
Wake of Bomb Cyclone*
https://earther.gizmodo.com/dramatic-satellite-photos-show-historic-flooding-across-1833380530
[after the storm, suffering persists]
*Cyclone Idai could be the Southern Hemisphere's deadliest storm - 2.6
million people in need of immediate aid, more than 1,000 feared dead -
"Everything is destroyed, everything"*
By Ishaan Tharoor - 20 March 2019
(The Washington Post) - We don't know how many people have died since
Cyclone Idai made landfall last Thursday on the coast of Mozambique
before barreling west into Zimbabwe and Malawi.
Aerial photography and drone footage have shown the apocalyptic scenes
left in the cyclone's wake: Fields of crops were ruined, rising
floodwaters tore bridges off their moorings, mudslides smashed roads and
whole villages were swept away. Survivors found themselves trapped on
new "islands," surrounded by the brackish waters that obliterated their
homes.
The United Nations estimated that more than 2.6 million people are in
need of immediate assistance. Aid officials believe the tropical storm
damaged or destroyed some 90 percent of the Indian Ocean port of Beira,
Mozambique's fourth-largest city. Though the country's authorities
placed the official death toll at under 100 so far, President Filipe
Nyusi spoke to local media after flying over affected areas in a
helicopter and said that "everything indicates that we can have a record
of more than 1,000 dead." In Zimbabwe, the official death toll stood at
98; in Malawi, it's at 56 -- but the actual figures may take months to
determine.
"The region affected by Idai is one of the poorest in the world," wrote
my colleague Max Bearak, who was en route to the ravaged city on
Wednesday. "Infrastructure was already lacking, and the storm has
destroyed key public institutions like hospitals and water sources."
Beira is a major entry point for food and gas inland; its paralysis
raised fears of possible shortages across the region at a time when
resources are already deeply strained.
Rescue efforts were hampered by collapsing infrastructure, poor
telecommunications and heavy rains that continued through Tuesday. A
giant storm surge, reported to be above 19 feet in some areas,
transformed Beira -- a city of half a million people -- into a woeful
waterworld, largely cut off from the rest of the country. According to
the New York Times, the main highway into the city is impassable, while
debris and toppled trees clog up other secondary roads.
"Everything is destroyed, everything," said Deborah Nguyen, a World Food
Program official, to The Post. "When I got here on Sunday, you could see
the tops of palm trees in rural areas. Now it is just an inland ocean.
The rain isn't stopping anytime soon." Her organization is nevertheless
still attempting to airdrop food to stranded communities.
If the death tolls rise to the levels suggested by Nyusi and others,
then Idai may prove an epochal event. "If these reports, these fears,
are realized, then we can say that this is one of the worst
weather-related disasters -- tropical cyclone-related disasters -- in
the Southern Hemisphere," Clare Nullis, a spokeswoman for the World
Meteorological Organization, told reporters. [more at
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/03/20/cyclone-idai-could-be-southern-hemispheres-deadliest-storm/?utm_term=.cdc5cd985e83]
https://desdemonadespair.net/2019/03/cyclone-idai-could-be-the-southern-hemispheres-deadliest-storm-2-6-million-people-in-need-of-immediate-aid-more-than-1000-feared-dead-everything-is-destroyed.html
[classic, excellent video, medical journal explains global warming]
*Watch: Climate change: It's the mother of all human health issues*
By JEFFERY DELVISCIO and DOMINIC SMITH - APRIL 24, 2017
[watch the video at
https://www.statnews.com/2017/04/24/climate-change-human-civilization/]
You might think of it -- it being human civilization as we know it today
-- as the product of a lucky greenhouse.
These days we talk about climate change mostly in terms of a threat. It
represents a set of new risks to our health, our infrastructure, our
relatively stable existence. But ages before humans began to adding to
that change, the climate system created the perfect conditions for human
existence during a period called the Holocene.
"It's no coincidence that during that stable period of climate that
we've had the development of human civilization as we know it," said
Jeffrey Shaman, director of the climate and health program and an
associate professor at Columbia University.
"Agriculture started, human urbanization started -- all this benefited
because we actually had a very remarkably long period of time, 10,000 to
12,000 years of the Holocene, in which temperatures didn't really move
that much globally."
But Shaman said our climate tampering could introduce some nasty
disruptions to the climate coddling we've taken for granted until this
point in our history. Swings in temperatures, changing weather patterns,
and sea level rise could all have serious effects on human health writ
large, he said. "It's going to be more difficult to feed ourselves,
there will be more heat-related morbidity and mortality."
In the video above, Shaman helps us visualize why we should love what
climate change has done for all of us -- and what to do now that the
climate system has our attention.
https://www.statnews.com/2017/04/24/climate-change-human-civilization/
[What did we know so long ago?]
*U.S. Government Knew Climate Risks in 1970s, Energy Advisory Group
Documents Show*
By Kaitlin Sullivan
A series of newly discovered documents clarify the extent to which the
U.S. government, its advisory committees and the fossil fuel industry
have understood for decades the impact carbon dioxide emissions would
have on the planet.
The documents obtained by Climate Liability News show how much the
National Petroleum Council (NPC), an oil and natural gas advisory
committee to the Secretary of Energy, knew about climate change as far
back as the 1970s. A series of reports illuminate the findings of
government-contracted research that outlined the dangers associated with
increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
They also shed light on how this advisory group to the federal
government understood the fossil fuel industry's contributions to
climate change, and unveil the strategies it used to downplay the
industry's role.
"These documents reaffirm that, to one extent or another, the fossil
fuel industry as a whole has known for decades about the basics of
climate change and its implications. But rather than warning the public
and taking action, many of them turned around and orchestrated
anti-science, anti-policy denial campaigns dwarfing even those of Big
Tobacco," said Geoffrey Supran, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard who has
extensively studied those denial campaigns.
Many of the documents were compiled by Hugh MacMillan, then a senior
researcher on water, energy and climate issues for Food & Water Watch,
an environmental nonprofit. He was preparing to file a public comment to
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in response to the Trump
Administration's plan to replace the Clean Power Plan. MacMillan
compiled archived NPC reports published on the organization's website,
copies of federal laboratory findings on climate change, which were
published in scientific journals, and a book that documented the
history of the NPC. MacMillan shared those documents with CLN.
"I wanted to educate myself on the evolution of rhetoric on climate
change within the federal energy policy making apparatus. The archived
NPC reports chronicle that evolution--from early acknowledgment of the
potential for an ecological crisis, to acceptance of the notion of
carbon budgets, to deploying de-regulation in the decades since," said
MacMillan, who no longer works for Food & Water Watch.
According to Supran and other experts, the documents are an important
step in explaining what fossil fuel companies knew and how long ago they
knew it, a critical element in any attempt to hold oil companies
accountable in climate liability lawsuits.
"This illustrates that the National Petroleum Council's failure to
advocate for bold government action to avoid the worst effects of
climate change and to facilitate a transition to a low-carbon economy
hasn't been based on ignorance of the problem," said Kathy Mulvey,
accountability campaign director of the Union of Concerned Scientists'
climate & energy program.
The documents also include more recent evidence that despite having
understood the climate ramifications of fossil fuel burning for many
years, the companies still have plans to expand oil production in the
U.S. In a presentation at the 2018 U.S. Energy Information
Administration Conference, Plains All American Pipeline, a company that
recently joined forces with ExxonMobil, outlined the ways in which the
U.S. oil industry is thriving. The presentation states that continental
U.S. oil production peaked in 1970 but is, "likely to equal or exceed
initial peak in 2020."
*Exposing Industry-Wide Knowledge, Potential Liability*
The National Petroleum Council (NPC) membership lists include now-former
chairmen, presidents and chief executives of at least eight oil
companies including Texaco, Marathon Oil, Conoco and Phillips, which
have since merged, and Occidental Petroleum Corporation. The documents
show that the knowledge was widespread in the industry, and not just
limited to individual companies like ExxonMobil and Shell, whose
internal files have been uncovered in a series of journalistic
investigations that show their longtime understanding of the risks of
climate change. That the knowledge was widespread could affect the
dozens of climate liability suits that have been filed against the
industry by various communities around the country.
Proof that organizations like NPC knew that fossil fuels largely caused
climate change could be enough to hold individual oil companies liable
in court, said Benjamin Franta, a postdoctoral candidate at Stanford
University whose research focuses on the history of the fossil fuel
industry.
"Industries are held to the expert in the field so they can be liable
for things even if they don't know about it," Franta said. "Anything
climate scientists were saying in the field, that's the expert knowledge
that fossil fuel companies had a duty to know about it."
Mulvey said the fear of being held liable for the cost of climate change
impacts could also cause a domino effect. More insider information may
become public, which is what happened when whistleblowers came forward
during lawsuits against tobacco companies in the 1980s.
"As more and more companies are directly tied to the concept of
deception, some of them may see fit to differentiate themselves from
their competitors, which might include being more transparent or
offering up information about what was really going on inside the
industry," Mulvey said.
*The Department of Energy Was Warned*
One of the newly uncovered documents obtained by Climate Liability News
was prepared by the energy division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and
presented in 1982. The lab is funded by and has contracts with the
Department of Energy, meaning the federal government was aware of the
research results.
The document, titled "Energy supply and demand implications of CO2,"
clearly outlines the conclusion by researchers that action must be taken
to reduce fossil fuel use in order to curb CO2 emissions: "Use of fossil
fuels should peak and start to decline within the next several decades,
possibly as early as 2010. Explicit actions to retard fossil-fuel use
would need to become effective in the next 10-20 yr." A more concise
statement opens the report: "Intensive development of non-fossil energy
sources appears warranted."
The report also advises against attempting to extract as much oil, gas
and coal as possible.
"The world's remaining recoverable resources of oil, gas, and coal are
estimated to contain nearly 4,000 billion metric tons of carbon," the
report said. "This is enough, if burned and if half of the emitted
carbon dioxide remains airborne, to increase the concentration of CO2 in
the earth's atmosphere by nearly a factor of four. That is almost
certainly too much. 'Acceptable' levels of CO2 may be no more than 1.5
to 2.5 times the present concentration. Thus, the world's cumulative use
of fossil fuels, at least during the next two centuries, may need to be
restricted to levels far below the estimated recoverable resources."
Earth's temperature has already risen by one degree Celsius and
scientists have recently reduced their estimate--from two degrees to 1.5
degrees Celsius--for the maximum amount the planet can warm by the end
of this century if we are to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
Although the Oak Ridge National Laboratory report illustrates the U.S.
federal government was made aware of this in 1982, the nation has opted
out of the Paris Agreement which outlines a coordinated global effort to
reduce greenhouse-gas-emissions mitigation.
Another report, also from 1982, which was prepared by the NPC, worked to
downplay scientists' knowledge of how carbon dioxide drives climate
change: "Some long-term possible problems, such as the CO2 'greenhouse'
effect, are not yet understood well enough to determine impacts or to
establish final control strategies."
Playing naive to the fossil fuel industry's contributions to climate
change is not the only tactic the new documents help clarify. Some
reports, such as a 1981 report titled The Oil and Gas Industries: An
Overview , claimed fossil fuel pollution had been mitigated: "The
petroleum industry has made substantial progress in environmental
conservation in the past decade, and the major environmental concerns
perceived in the 1970's as arising from the industry are now vastly
diminished because pollution sources are under effective control."
According to Mulvey, statements like this illustrate a decades-long
coordinated effort by the fossil fuel industry to simultaneously invest
further in oil and stave off public knowledge of the danger surrounding
an increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. The difference is that this time,
advisors to the federal government were involved.
"While there's liability associated with selling a product you know to
have harmful side effects and lying about it, there's also potential
liability with giving the government information that you know to be
false. That could constitute fraud," Franta said.
One 1983 document underscores how the NPC recognized the importance of
controlling what information reached lawmakers. "While the CO2 issue
remains--appropriately so, in our view--largely in the research
communality, it is important to consider the possibility that the issue
may become prominent in political arenas," the report said. "It is
important that we fashion perspectives and programs that can be
sustained through periods of excessive attention or inattention to the
issue."
For this reason, Mulvey said some information related to fossil fuels
and climate change may have been kept private within the NPC.
"The NPC is an industry dominated group that many have felt it wasn't in
the industry's best interest to make the government aware of this,"
Mulvey said. "Or it could be that it was conveyed to the government but
the industry was simultaneously using its political influence to thwart
action."
*A Record of What They Knew*
These documents show not only how widespread the knowledge of climate
impacts was decades ago, but also how deeply the subject was studied.
The research delved into the overall impact of climate change on the
planet, but also also sought to understand which places would be hit the
hardest.
A 1983 document recognizes that the effects of climate change will be
exacerbated in some regions. "The foreseeable consequences of climate
change are no cause for alarm on a global scale but could prove to be
exceedingly bad news for particular parts of the world," the report
said, going on to specifically name Bangladesh, where, "coastal flooding
is already serious."
Such documentation could be legally valuable if certain countries or
regions file lawsuits against oil companies for climate damages. The
Pacific island nation of Vanuatu recently announced it is considering
such a suit, and is recruiting other vulnerable nations to join it.
Another document acknowledged that climate change had long been the
focus of discussions among oil industry representatives, and that
burning fossil fuels would likely contribute to "catastrophic climate
changes" that could be mitigated by tighter regulation: "The reason that
the subject continues to cause debate and to stimulate research is that
it is so very closely tied to the world energy problem. If fossil fuel
combustion is the major cause of increasing atmospheric CO2, if the
increasing CO2 content will result in large or possibly catastrophic
climate changes, and if natural constraints are either inadequate or too
slow to keep the situation stable, then action must be initiated fairly
soon to reduce the discharge of CO2 into the atmosphere."
Documents like these paint a broader picture of the extent to which the
fossil fuel industry as a whole was aware that its product would cause
catastrophic environmental damage. Being able to illustrate what
organizations such as the NPC, and even the federal government, knew
expands the field of parties that could be held liable.
"It's not just Exxon. This is industry-wide knowledge of the fact that
the fossil fuel industry's products were going to cause climate change,
and that was going to have damaging side effects for the world," Franta
said.
https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/03/18/national-petroleum-council-climate-change/
[Dramatic opening]
*Climate Crisis : New 2019 UK Report*
Just Have a Think
Published on Mar 3, 2019
Climate and Environmental Crisis. That's the message of a new report
published this week by the Institute of Public Policy Research in the
UK. The report doesn't pull many punches in its description of our
environmental predicament. This week we take a look at the detail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJGnYAjU8OY
- - -
[IPPR]
*Prosperity and justice: A plan for the new economy - The final report
of the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice*
https://www.ippr.org/about
- -
[Oxfam]
*Last year, the world's billionaires saw their wealth go up $2.5 billion
each day.*
https://actions.oxfam.org/international/fight-inequality-2019/petition/
- - -
[Nature Sustainability]
*A good life for all within planetary boundaries*
Article - Published: 05 February 2018
Abstract
Humanity faces the challenge of how to achieve a high quality of
life for over 7 billion people without destabilizing critical
planetary processes. Using indicators designed to measure a 'safe
and just' development space, we quantify the resource use associated
with meeting basic human needs, and compare this to downscaled
planetary boundaries for over 150 nations. We find that no country
meets basic needs for its citizens at a globally sustainable level
of resource use. Physical needs such as nutrition, sanitation,
access to electricity and the elimination of extreme poverty could
likely be met for all people without transgressing planetary
boundaries. However, the universal achievement of more qualitative
goals (for example, high life satisfaction) would require a level of
resource use that is 2-6 times the sustainable level, based on
current relationships. Strategies to improve physical and social
provisioning systems, with a focus on sufficiency and equity, have
the potential to move nations towards sustainability, but the
challenge remains substantial.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0021-4#Tab2
*This Day in Climate History - March 21, 2007 - from D.R. Tucker*
March 21, 2007 - In her CBSNews.com "Notebook" segment, Katie Couric
observes:
"The last time Al Gore came to Capitol Hill--six years ago--he was
there to certify the electoral college results that made George Bush
president.
"But today it was a triumphant return, this time as a private
citizen, to declare that the world faces a 'planetary emergency'
over climate change. And now, a lot of his skeptics agree that Gore
makes a powerful point.
"The scientific consensus is clear, and Gore urged Congress to
listen to scientists, not special interests. He pushed for an
immediate freeze on greenhouse gases, as well as cleaner power
plants, more efficient cars, and stronger conservation efforts.
"Gore said 'a few years from now...the kinds of proposals we're
talking about today are going to seem so small compared to the scale
of the challenge.'
"Here's hoping Congress puts partisanship aside, and comes together
to act boldly on global warming."
http://youtu.be/sYpj2ZYfS3M
- -
(In his remarks to Congress, Gore famously states: "The planet has a
fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor
says you need to intervene here, you don't say, 'Well, I read a science
fiction novel that told me it's not a problem.' If the crib's on fire,
you don't speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action."
Also, at this hearing, former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, a
Republican, states, "I believe the debate over global warming is
over"--an idea that would be considered heresy throughout the entire GOP
just two years later.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/21/AR2007032100945.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11437-al-gore-rallies-us-congress-over-climate.html#.UvtuMKa9LCQ
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