The EPA has identified 10,420 ”high risk” facilities, which store or use dangerous chemicals and, recent natural disasters have proved that natural catastrophes have the potential to cause fires, explosions, and the discharge of dangerous substances from installations. Managing hazardous chemicals and wastes, as well as combating climate change, are just a few of the numerous difficulties that policy and decision-makers must confront. There are a number of interconnections between climate change, hazardous chemicals, and wastes that have been identified, including that climate change can result in increased releases of hazardous chemicals into the environment and the waste sector is a potential source of both Greenhouse gasses (GHGs) and hazardous chemicals.

Understanding the risks associated with industrial facilities in the wake of climate change

Some of the effects of climate change are already being observed, such as increased temperatures, changes in precipitation, shifts in ocean currents, melting of ice, rising sea levels, increased severity and frequency of sea-level events, thawing permafrost, the retreat of glaciers and ice sheets, increased frequency, and intensity of extreme weather events, as well as increased frequency and intensity of wildfires. These climate change consequences are linked to an increase in primary releases of hazardous chemicals, which are those associated with the purposeful use of chemicals such as pesticides and chemicals in a wide range of industrial applications, such as manufacturing, agriculture, etc. In terms of pesticide use, it is noted that climate change is anticipated to impact pests, diseases, and vectors for both crop and livestock diseases, as well as the availability of pesticides. In terms of other chemical usage applications, one of the most important drivers of main releases is the fact that rising temperatures can cause chemicals to become more volatile, resulting in higher releases during usage and from stockpiles.

NBC Connecticut:”Climate Change Concerns at Polluted Sites”

Climate change has implications for long-range transport of hazardous chemicals, including changes in atmospheric circulation, ocean currents and circulation, precipitation, extreme weather events, and animal migration, in addition to increased primary and secondary releases of hazardous chemicals into soil, water, and the atmosphere. Climate change will also have an impact on the way chemicals affect different animal species and humans, as evidenced by the fact that evidence of this is already being detected.

It is well known that the chemicals industry is a large contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions and that it has strong ties to the fossil fuels industry and the release of hazardous chemicals during all phases of the chemical’s life cycle, including the creation of input materials, primary and secondary manufacturing processes, usage, and disposal. The application of pesticides, as well as the use of high-value chemicals in refrigeration and air-conditioning, fire suppression and explosion protection, foam blowing, and other applications, all have the potential to release hazardous chemicals and greenhouse gases during the use phase of the product. Lower primary releases of hazardous chemicals during the use phase can be achieved by researching, developing, and implementing alternatives to hazardous pesticides and other agricultural practices, such as implementing integrated pest management.

Natural disasters are already acknowledged as a significant contributor to occurrences at industrial sites, such as manufacturing plants and storage facilities, according to industry experts. It is possible that climate change will exacerbate the risks associated with natural hazards triggering technological risks, in which environmental disasters such as flooding or earthquakes cause major accidents at industrial sites or other technological facilities. Extreme weather events will become more frequent and intense as a result of climate change. These accidents create a great amount of strain on emergency response systems, governments, corporations, industry, and communities, both inside and across national borders, as well as on individuals and communities. Studies have found that natural disasters were the cause of up to 5 percent of industrial accidents that occurred at facilities that processed or stored hazardous materials. Several leaks and industrial spills arose as a result of Hurricane Harvey, which struck the United States coast near Houston, Texas, in August 2017. These polluted the surrounding ecosystem. Another study discovered 872 highly hazardous chemical facilities within 50 miles of the hurricane-prone United States Gulf Coast alone, with nearly 4,374,000 people, 1,717 schools, and 98 medical facilities all located within 1.5 miles of these sites. Increased public and environmental health concerns associated with disruptions to these facilities are becoming more prevalent as natural disasters become more severe and extreme weather occurrences become more common.

Historically, dumpsites were frequently built within flood plains and low-lying coastal locations where land was less expensive due to flood hazards, with one study estimating that there are many hundreds of thousands of such landfills in such areas around the world due to flood dangers. Flooding and eroding caused by rising sea levels have the ability to erode and physically damage both general and hazardous landfill sites, resulting in the discharge of wastes that were previously confined in these sites into the surrounding ecosystem. In addition to leaching, increased releases are caused by erosion, however, the latter has been argued to be a more substantial concern than the former in terms of environmental impact. Avoiding releases from historical landfills is made even more difficult by the fact that they are frequently poorly constructed, with inadequate or no linings and leachate management systems, and that there are few records of the types of wastes that were dumped in them during their operational life. Windstorms, floodwaters, droughts, and fires all have the potential to destroy waste management infrastructure and equipment other than landfills, as well as supporting infrastructure like the electrical grid that is needed to deliver electricity to the facility. Extreme weather events have the potential to disrupt daily waste collection and processing activities, as well as the management of hazardous waste during such events.

As previously mentioned, changes in temperature can have an impact on the partitioning of chemicals between phases in environmental compartments (air, water, soil, and vegetation), mostly through an increase in the vapor pressure of volatile compounds as the temperature rises. Hazardous chemicals are becoming more readily available for long-distance transport as a result of a trend toward higher gaseous fractions and larger concentrations in water.

A higher temperature of surface water may also result in a greater presence of particulate organic matter, which can form associations with hazardous chemicals, resulting in a reduction of freely dissolved water concentrations and an increase in transfers to sediments, both of which will have implications for long-range water transport.

Aside from all of this, it is becoming more recognized that Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment products contain lead, mercury, and other metals, as well as flame retardants and certain phthalates, which may be released during end-of-life management. Some of these chemicals have high global warming potential. A total of 53.6 million metric tons (or the equivalent of 7.3 kg per capita) of e-waste is predicted to have been generated yearly in 2019, representing an increase from 44.4 million metric tons in 2014, and this amount is expected to rise in the future. To prevent end-of-life products from entering the trash stream, it is also necessary to adequately manage hazardous compounds generated by renewable energy installations. Disruption of operations and the mobility of hazardous substances from waste and wastewater treatment facilities are both possible in the waste business. Mine sites, tailing dams, and other infrastructure can be disturbed, resulting in the release of potentially harmful substances.

Because of climate change, wind speeds are expected to increase, allowing chemicals to be transported more quickly and farther away from their existing primary and secondary sources of contamination. Environmental scientists believe that climate change will have significant implications on mercury cycling, which are linked to changes in ecosystem function, global atmospheric and ocean circulation, changes in vegetation cover and atmospheric oxidants, and increased air–seawater interaction. When rainfall and other precipitation are increased, it can result in the deposition of volatile compounds from the air to the surface, whereas low or no precipitation can promote airborne movement.

Potential health consequences arising from climate change and chemical exposure

Climate change has the potential to affect chemical exposure routes as well as the toxicological and ecotoxicological effects of chemicals on humans and wildlife. Higher temperatures can enhance the toxicity of air pollutants and pesticides, as well as the absorption of contaminants by animals and humans. Temperature-dependent increases in toxicity have been documented for a variety of poisons in a variety of species, including dieldrin in freshwater darters, atrazine in catfish, endosulfan in freshwater fish, and endosulfan in bollworms. In one study, which looked at PCB biotransformation in rainbow trout, it was found that the absorption pathway could change with time. According to the findings of this study, rainbow trout biotransformed a greater amount of ingested PCB into hydroxylated PCB metabolites when exposed to higher water temperatures, resulting in greater toxicity.

Through changes in metabolism and excretion processes, increased temperatures have an impact on the ability of animals and people to cope with toxins. In the short term, temperature increases may promote toxin clearance and excretion; but, prolonged temperature increases have been shown to cause metabolic stress, which results in increased toxin buildup. These effects have been shown in fish, such as Arctic char, where temperature-related metabolic stress results in increased mercury bioaccumulation, according to research.

Climate change has an impact on overall growth rates and nutrient requirements, which in turn has an impact on toxin bioaccumulation in the environment. For example, lake trout grow less efficiently in warmer temperatures, which is likely to result in more bioaccumulation throughout the course of a trout’s lifetime. Chemically weakened bodies with suppressed immune systems are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, such as dramatic temperature fluctuations and hurricane-force winds, dirty water supplies, and food shortages, along with other stresses and diseases.

Immunosuppression can be produced by a variety of dangerous compounds in a wide variety of animal and plant species. PCB and mercury exposure, for example, has been associated to decreased immunological responses in humans, polar bears, beluga whales, seals, and sled dogs, among other animals. POPs and mercury have also been found to have a suppressive effect on fish immune systems.

Conclusions

It is a high priority to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thereby future global climate change. This is important for a variety of reasons, including decreasing the negative impacts of climate change on the globe and avoiding the increased mobility and impacts of hazardous chemicals. It is also necessary to design waste and wastewater management infrastructure and operations, mine waste sites, and industrial facilities so that they are resilient to future climatic changes in order to prevent the release of dangerous chemicals. Historical sites must be analyzed in order to identify whether rehabilitation or retrofitting of infrastructure is required in order to make them more robust to climate change. Efforts should be made to reduce waste whenever possible, with garbage disposal being the final and least preferable choice.

Planning for hazardous chemical management must take into consideration the existing and future implications of climate change in order to reduce the potential dangers that may arise.

Best Available Techniques (BAT) and Best Environmental Practice (BEP) should be used in primary chemicals production as well as downstream businesses in order to reduce energy inputs, limit unintended releases of dangerous chemicals and greenhouse gas emissions, and minimize waste formation. Process and product adjustments that can be done to reduce production-related releases should be implemented whenever possible. Renewable energy and fuel switching can provide additional benefits in the mining and minerals processing industries, just as they do in other industries.

Companies argue that they flare and vent for safety and maintenance and because selling or reusing the gas is not financially feasible. The industry and its regulators even refer to this gas as “waste.” But experts say a valuable resource is being squandered because of weak regulations, ineffective tracking of flaring and venting, and a lack of economic incentives to capture and sell the gas.

“The atmosphere is a free dumping place,” said Robert L. Kleinberg, senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “It’s like throwing garbage out the window back in the Middle Ages.”

A satellite data analysis by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism found that oil and gas companies in the 13 top-flaring states designated by the Department of Energy flared more than 3.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas between 2012 and 2020. That’s equal to more than $10.6 billion in revenue based on the market value of natural gas in each of those years.

The American Petroleum Institute, the nation’s main oil and gas trade association, would not answer questions from the Howard Center. Instead, it noted previous statements in which the group has said flaring is necessitated by “a lack of gas gathering lines or processing capacity” and for safety reasons. Nonetheless, the group has acknowledged that flaring must be reduced.

Colin Leyden, the Texas political director for nonprofit advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund, says that the oil and gas industry’s routine flaring is driven by “purely the economic interests of the company.”

“In other words, we’re here for the oil,” he said of the industry’s thinking. “We’d like to make money on the gas, but if we don’t, we’ve got the oil to make our profit. That’s what our economics are built around.”

Regulatory exemptions

Flaring occurs mostly at oil wells, but even companies that primarily produce and sell natural gas also burn off some of it.

At best, a flare breaks down methane-rich natural gas so that only a small amount of the pollutant escapes into the air. At worst, a flare is defective, spewing methane into the atmosphere.

Some flaring is unavoidable, the oil and gas industry says. Between 15% and 25% of natural gas produced in the United States is estimated to be “sour,” or contaminated with hydrogen sulfide, the nonprofit Earthworks reports. This gas must go through a purification process to become marketable. Not all operators find this process economical, so they flare the sour gas instead.

Operators also flare when drilling or plugging a well to control emissions. Instead of allowing greenhouse gases to escape from the well unadulterated, companies choose to flare them.

Some state regulatory agencies allow companies to burn natural gas that they can’t get to market. These companies may not have the technology to convert gas to liquid for transport, or some of their wells may not be connected to high-capacity pipelines.

A flare burns associated natural gas on an oil pad on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation on Oct. 27, 2021. More than 199 billion cubic feet of natural gas has been burned on the reservation from 2012 to 2020, according to a Howard Center Investigation. (Isaac Stone Simonelli / Howard Center for Investigative Journalism)

For example, when producers in North Dakota’s Bakken Shale began placing multiple wells on a single well pad, gas production exceeded pipeline capacity, forcing operators to dispose of excess gas, according to Lynn Helms, the director of North Dakota’s Department of Mineral Resources. But a Howard Center analysis of North Dakota Pipeline Authority reports shows that flaring still occurs more often at wells connected to pipelines compared to those that are not.

State agencies also make exceptions for companies that claim connecting to a pipeline is too costly.

In Oklahoma, regulators may allow flaring if it is not “economically feasible to market the gas.” Louisiana has a similar “economic hardship” clause for venting gas directly into the atmosphere. State statutes don’t always clearly define these terms, and the regulatory agencies simply require companies to demonstrate that getting the gas to market is economically impractical.

Eliminating routine flaring, however, is technically and politically feasible, experts say.

“No one has any reason to put methane into the air for beneficial purpose,” said Kleinberg, the energy policy scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

Some companies are already working on slashing routine flaring. Apache Corporation, a subsidiary of publicly traded oil company APA Corporation, which operates in Texas, said in October 2021 that it reached its goal to end routine flaring after investing in pipeline infrastructure. Several other public companies have endorsed plans to eliminate routine flaring by 2030, according to the Environmental Defense Fund.

That nonprofit environmental advocacy group says that policies requiring gas capture — the process of trapping natural gas to prevent its release into the atmosphere — are effective and inexpensive ways to end flaring.

Methods for using the extracted natural gas on-site exist, and engineers such as West Virginia University’s John Hu are hard at work developing portable units that capture and convert natural gas into environmentally safer, marketable materials like hydrogen and solid carbon. Hu and his research partner Xingbo Liu won one of 14 Department of Energy grants in 2020 to build technology that mitigates flaring and venting.

Hu said companies will be more inclined to buy into technology like his if and when the government puts more pressure on companies that flare.

“Sooner or later, they’ll be in trouble,” Hu said of companies that flare. “It depends [on] how much of the regulatory pressure.”

Poor data, no incentives

The problem of excessive flaring and venting begins with “how little we know about the actual amounts” of methane being released, said Barry Rabe, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

“Reporting on methane is done on the honor system,” he said.

The problem of excessive flaring and venting begins with “how little we know about the actual amounts” of methane being released, said Barry Rabe, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and professor of environmental policy at the University of Michigan. (Source: Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan)

While most of the federally designated top-flaring states require oil and gas companies to report the volume of gas they combust, state officials have little sense of those reports’ accuracy, and none use satellite data to confirm company-reported flaring totals, the Howard Center found. Additionally, satellite data picks up only the heat signatures from flaring and cannot detect how much natural gas is being vented. Specialized infrared imaging technology is able to measure the invisible emissions that come from venting, though it’s not yet widely deployed.

Patrick Courreges, the communications director for the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, said his agency must take company reports at face value.

“When it comes to auditing vent and flare, we don’t do it,” Courreges said. “The system we have in place is not a good tool for actually determining how much methane is going out.”

Of the states the Howard Center analyzed, four maintain little or no information on flaring and venting volumes. Officials in states like West Virginia and Kansas have argued that flaring is not commonplace, but satellite data reveals that operators in those two states burned a combined total of 16 billion cubic feet of natural gas between 2012 and 2020. That’s equal to carbon dioxide emissions from energy use in over 100,000 homes in one year, according to an Environmental Protection Agency calculator.

In Oklahoma, the nation’s fourth-largest gas producer in 2020, regulators also don’t know exactly how much companies are flaring and venting. Operators may release up to 50,000 cubic feet of gas a day without permission from the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the state’s regulatory agency. The Howard Center built a database to track those extra flaring and venting requests and found that the total was dwarfed by the 32 billion cubic feet of flared gas alone that satellites captured between 2012 and 2020.

Poor or nonexistent data collection is compounded by a lack of statewide economic incentives to capture the gas. Rabe, who also teaches environmental policy at the University of Michigan, argues that severance taxes on natural resources would pressure oil and gas companies to use or sell natural gas instead of releasing it into the atmosphere.

“Unless there’s pressure politically, regulatory standpoint or taxes, you’re not going to invest in the equipment, the metrics, to catch all the gas,” Rabe said.

Taxing flared gas would also bolster state revenues. Louisiana estimated that it would have received $801,000 in severance taxes in fiscal year 2021 if it had taxed flared gas, according to the state’s revenue department.

“From an economist’s perspective, if you can measure it, it would make sense to tax it,” said Janie Chermak, chair of the University of New Mexico’s economics department.

Of the top-flaring states, only North Dakota and Alaska tax methane emissions, Rabe said, and most efforts to impose such taxes fail.

Texas Rep. Vikki Goodwin proposed unsuccessful legislation in 2021 that would have imposed a 25% tax on the marketable value of natural gas from flaring. “If we were to tax it when they release it, then it might give them the incentive to go ahead and set up the infrastructure they need to sell it,” the Democratic lawmaker from Austin told the Howard Center.

Goodwin represents the top oil and gas-producing state, which has consistently flared the largest volumes of gas across the United States since 2013, according to satellite data. In fact, Texas has flared more than the next top state, North Dakota, by margins that range from roughly 30 billion cubic feet to 93 billion cubic feet between 2013 and 2020.

But oil and gas companies are resistant to these taxes and some industry groups have even threatened that their companies would relocate to different states if such taxes were enacted.

Natural gas is burned off in a flare stack in McMullen County, Texas, on Oct. 25, 2021. Between 2012 and 2020, oil and gas operators in Texas and a dozen other U.S. states collectively flared at least 3.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, according to a Howard Center analysis of satellite data. (Aydali Campa / Howard Center for Investigative Journalism)

Challenges to a centralized policy

A week after his inauguration, President Joe Biden signed an executive order identifying climate change as a key domestic and foreign policy issue. The order included directives for federal agencies to reduce overall methane emissions from the oil and gas industry “as quickly as possible.”

The administration’s subsequent $1 trillion infrastructure bill, which passed Congress in November 2021, initially contained ambitious climate change policies, including a federally mandated fee on methane emissions from the oil and gas industry. But opposition from coal-rich West Virginia’s Sen. Joe Manchin quashed that effort.

The fee, which would attach a pre-calculated cost to methane emissions from each producing basin for each calendar year, was resurrected in the Build Back Better Framework, touted as “the largest effort to combat climate change in American history.” That too hit a Manchin roadblock, but negotiations continued into 2022.

“They’re more worried about the fact that in the legislation, not just an executive agency but in legislation, you would have to design a measurement and disclosure system that would have to be made more accurate to make that tax accurate,” he said.

Industry groups also argued that the fee would disproportionately impact even operators with low emissions. But Rabe said that companies should not be absolved of the responsibility to implement environmentally conscious practices.

“Even at levels of small production, there should be ways, in my view, to follow best practices on monitoring, leak detection, state-of-the-art equipment,” he said.

Leyden of the Environmental Defense Fund concurred. Even low-producing oil wells, taken as a whole, emit large volumes of methane into the atmosphere, and many of them are owned by big companies with “the resources to address the issue,” he said.

Multi-well oil pads burn natural gas in McKenzie County at sunset on Oct. 29, 2021. The advent of horizontal drilling in North Dakota allowed for multi-well oil pad operations that overwhelmed natural gas pipelines. (Isaac Stone Simonelli / Howard Center for Investigative Journalism)

In addition to the methane fee, the EPA, under Biden’s January executive order, proposed new regulations that would require a reduction in flaring emissions from the oil and gas industry.

These rules, set to be finalized in 2022, aim to eliminate venting and include a nationwide standard to limit natural gas flaring. Operators would be required to use the gas on the well site or transport it for sale. If neither option is available, operators would be allowed to flare the gas only under the EPA’s 95% flaring efficiency standard. The EPA is taking steps to put record-keeping measures in place to ensure flares would function properly.

The Bureau of Land Management, the agency responsible for regulating oil and gas activity on federal and tribal land, is also moving to reduce methane emissions from the industry. In November 2021, the White House announced that the agency planned to regulate “excessive venting or flaring” by requiring operators to pay a royalty fee on gas flared or vented on federal and tribal land.

It’s unclear whether these federal efforts will be more successful than previous attempts to regulate the oil and gas industry. Over the last decade, that sector has donated more than $20 million to Democratic and more than $100 million to Republican federal candidates and officeholders, according to Howard Center calculations of campaign finance data from the watchdog group OpenSecrets.

In 2016, the BLM attempted to limit flaring and venting, but states and fossil fuel companies killed those efforts through litigation.

Policy experts worry the same could happen again.

The U.S. Supreme Court has said it will review the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants in a case brought by West Virginia, North Dakota and various coal companies.

Rabe predicts a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs could have “huge impacts” on the EPA’s authority to broadly regulate methane emissions.

Reporters Aydali Campa, Jimmy Cloutier, Mollie Jamison, Isabel Koyama, Laura Kraegel, Maya Leachman, Michael McDaniel, Andrew Onodera, Kenneth Quayle, Isaac Stone Simonelli, Rachel Stapholz, Sarah Suwalsky, Zachary Van Arsdale and Alexis Young contributed to this story.

Via Cronkite News

Leading an alliance of more than 100 countries, US President Joe Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have launched the Global Methane Pledge – an agreement to cut methane emissions by 30% between 2020 and 2030.

Methane is a greenhouse gas which has caused about 0.5°C of global warming, according to the latest assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Each molecule added to the atmosphere is about 26 times more potent at warming than a CO₂ molecule, but only remains in the atmosphere for about a decade. Methane leaks from oil and gas wells, landfills and is belched out by livestock. Countries signed up to the agreement encompass two-thirds of the global economy and half of the top 30 methane emitters, including Brazil. China, India and Russia however have not signed at the time of writing.

I have been working on and talking publicly about methane emissions and their effect on the climate for about a decade. During that time, the levels of methane in the atmosphere have gone rapidly upwards, causing more global warming. So while I think it would be great to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030, what is that niggling at the back of my mind?

It’s the suspicion that so much noise about methane cuts will (deliberately or not) be a good news story that obscures slow progress on CO₂ emissions. You might ask: is this such a problem? Isn’t any action to be applauded? Yes, and no. Yes, because any reduction is greenhouse gas emissions is progress towards the Paris Agreement temperature goals. That is undeniable. No, if it displaces effort away from the main driver of global warming – fossil CO₂ emissions.

We may not know how much displacement is happening, but we do know that for the past 30 years, since the Rio Earth Summit, the world has failed to reduce CO₂ emissions. And so, because we have effectively left it too late to have a smooth reduction in CO₂ emissions down to zero while limiting warming to well below 2°C, we hope that perhaps methane is going to save our bacon.

How can methane reductions be so much more effective than CO₂ reductions, when methane contributes less to global warming than CO₂? It’s because methane is much shorter-lived in the atmosphere than CO₂, and therefore reducing emissions of methane actually reduces the amount of methane in the atmosphere within decades. Methane has a half-life of around a decade, so roughly speaking, if you emit 10 tonnes of methane today, 5 tonnes remain in the atmosphere after a decade. If we completely stopped emitting methane today, the methane-caused global warming would halve in about 20 years. This is in stark contrast to CO₂, which lives for so long in the climate system that even with no emissions at all, the CO₂-caused global warming will remain the same for centuries.

So this makes it quite clear that all the way along on the pathway to net-zero CO₂ emissions, our ever-diminishing annual CO₂ emissions are causing additional warming, which will remain for hundreds of years. This is why slow progress on CO₂ is so damaging. Every tonne of CO₂ we emit will stay in the climate system, warming the planet, for hundreds, potentially even thousands, of years.

Short-term wins or long-term success?

Reductions in methane emissions do provide a quick win in terms of shaving off up to a few tenths of a degree of global warming. The 30% cut would reduce the global average temperature by about 0.1°C by 2050, which is the same amount as the warming as we have had since COP21 in Paris in 2015.

This decrease in temperature is proportional to the rate of methane emissions reductions though. Once the reductions stop (e.g. we stabilise global methane emissions at 30% below 2020 levels) then methane-caused warming will stabilise, and then start to slowly rise again. This is because while the atmosphere responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels relatively fast (a few years), the deep ocean responds much more slowly. The whole climate system would take hundreds of years to equilibrate to changes, and so if we “froze” the atmospheric composition, temperature would slowly rise over centuries. If we were able to decrease methane emissions after 2030, at a rate of about 3-5% per decade, this would counter the slow equilibration, and give a stable level of methane-caused global warming.

The fact that methane emissions cuts bring down temperature on a near-term basis only has led to two distinct conclusions being drawn from the same fundamental science.

Position one is that cutting methane emissions produces results faster than cutting CO₂ emissions, and therefore we should do this to put the handbrake on global warming. This argument places a priority on limiting global warming in the short term. However, if limited funds are spent on methane cuts instead of CO₂ cuts (such as by a company with a set budget for emission reduction projects) then temperatures will be lower in the short term but higher in the long term.

Position two is therefore that we should prioritise CO₂ cuts over methane cuts. The cumulative nature of CO₂ means that if we reach net zero in 2050 with rapid action starting from 2025, we will have lower sum-total CO₂ emissions and therefore lower temperatures than if we delay even longer and only start reducing emissions in 2035. All efforts should go towards CO₂ reductions, and until we are confident we are on track with CO₂, there is no time to waste on methane.

These two conclusions arise from the same science. It is the surrounding assumptions – whether we can act on two fronts at once, or if action on methane inevitably detracts from actions on CO₂, whether we should prioritise near-term warming so society can adapt to a slightly more gradual change in climate, whether by 2100 we will have cracked carbon removal and storage so we can remove all the CO₂ later?

These are discussions that go way beyond the climate science, which is why it is great that methane is having its day at COP26 – so long as the political discussions are based on a solid foundation of the science, so that the consequences of any decisions are understood.

While these contrasting viewpoints may seem confusing, there is one simple fact that nobody can disagree with. Fossil fuels are the cause of about a third of all anthropogenic methane emissions. Therefore, if we stopped fossil extraction and use by 2030, the Global Methane Pledge would be achieved at the same time as eliminating most anthropogenic CO2 emissions. It’s that simple.

Michelle Cain, Lecturer in Environmental Data Analytics, Cranfield University and Visiting Researcher in Atmospheric Science, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

US and China announce joint efforts to cut carbon emissions | DW News

The atmosphere of the planet Venus is mostly carbon dioxide, which has made it a torrid hell, with streams of molten lead.

And, as Adam Vaughan observes in New Scientist, concentrations of it in the atmosphere have been increasing since 2000. Given how potent it is, that is a real concern. It is also a mystery.

Methane is 80 times more powerful as a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over 20 years. Since 1750 when humanity began this vast and dangerous experiment on our only home, of burning massive amounts of coal and other hydrocarbons, methane has contributed to 16% of the global heating we have produced.

The only upside is that methane does not stay in the atmosphere the way CO2 does. Stop making it, and it goes away after a decade or so. So, for God’s sake, let’s stop making it.

In 2020, Vaughan says, researchers were alarmed to find the biggest jump in atmospheric methane since records began being kept in 1983.

Some of the increased methane is from drilling carelessly for natural gas, as Russia does (Qatar is far more scrupulous and its gas fields are not significant sources of methane emissions). North American hydraulic fracturing and older oil rigs also produce methane. Over-all, about half of methane emissions come from the fossil fuel industry.

Vaughan, however, interviews scientists who are convinced that the big increase in methane emissions in the past twenty years is being produced by over-active microbes in tropical wetlands, which are becoming hotter and wetter with the climate emergency. They even worry that there may be a feedback loop, such that a hotter earth produces more microbes making more methane that in turn heats up parts of the earth and makes them wetter, producing more methane-creating microbes, and so on and so forth.

Biological sources of methane are not new. The expansion of rice cultivation in East Asia in the 19th century is thought by climate historians to have led to a big increase in methane production by microbes in the paddies, contributing to global heating.

As for the 50% of methane emissions that come from oil and gas and fracking fields, there is no excuse for that. They can be capped. They must be capped.

Joe Biden needs Pennsylvania to remain president in 2024, and so won’t come out against fracking, which is a big industry in the state to which a lot of its blue collar workers are committed. That is Biden’s base. But this fracking business has to stop. And it certainly can’t be allowed to put out methane.

Vaughan quotes experts as saying that just one percent of oil, gas and fracking installations put out 30 percent of the hydrocarbon industry’s methane, so you could zero in on the worst offenders.

Both the European Union and the Biden administration are planning regulation of methane emissions, so that the worst-polluting companies will be in trouble if they don’t change their ways.

Ordinarily much of the heat reaching the earth from the sun strikes the surface and then radiates back out into space through our atmosphere, which is 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, 0.9 percent argon, and 0.1 percent other gases. Those former gases do not interfere much with the heat radiating back away. But in the 0.1 percent of the atmosphere that isn’t oxygen, nitrogen or argon, there are some trace amounts of the powerful heat-trapping gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane. The more of the latter you put up there, the greater the barrier is to heat escaping. It is like being on vacation in the Bahamas and going around wearing a winter coat; and then putting on a second and third winter coat.

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Bonus Video:

Thomas Reuters: “Why cutting methane emissions is key to fighting climate change”

( The Conversation) – Back in 2019, more than 11,000 scientists declared a global climate emergency. They established a comprehensive set of vital signs that impact or reflect the planet’s health, such as forest loss, fossil fuel subsidies, glacier thickness, ocean acidity and surface temperature.

In a new paper published today, we show how these vital signs have changed since the original publication, including through the COVID-19 pandemic. In general, while we’ve seen lots of positive talk and commitments from some governments, our vital signs are mostly not trending in the right direction.

So, let’s look at how things have progressed since 2019, from the growing number of livestock to the meagre influence of the pandemic.

Is it all bad news?

No, thankfully. Fossil fuel divestment and fossil fuel subsidies have improved in record-setting ways, potentially signalling an economic shift to a renewable energy future.

However, most of the other vital signs reflect the consequences of the so far unrelenting “business as usual” approach to climate change policy worldwide.

Especially troubling is the unprecedented surge in climate-related disasters since 2019. This includes devastating flash floods in the South Kalimantan province of Indonesia, record heatwaves in the southwestern United States, extraordinary storms in India and, of course, the 2019-2020 megafires in Australia.

In addition, three main greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — set records for atmospheric concentrations in 2020 and again in 2021. In April this year, carbon dioxide concentration reached 416 parts per million, the highest monthly global average concentration ever recorded.

Last year was also the second hottest year in recorded history, with the five hottest years on record all occurring since 2015.

Ruminant livestock — cattle, buffalo, sheep, and goats — now number more than 4 billion, and their total mass is more than that of all humans and wild mammals combined. This is a problem because these animals are responsible for impacting biodiversity, releasing huge amounts of methane emissions, and land continues to be cleared to make room for them.

In better news, recent per capita meat production declined by about 5.7% (2.9 kilograms per person) between 2018 and 2020. But this is likely because of an outbreak of African swine fever in China that reduced the pork supply, and possibly also as one of the impacts of the pandemic.

Tragically, Brazilian Amazon annual forest loss rates increased in both 2019 and 2020. It reached a 12-year high of 1.11 million hectares deforested in 2020.

Ocean acidification is also near an all-time record. Together with heat stress from warming waters, acidification threatens the coral reefs that more than half a billion people depend on for food, tourism dollars and storm surge protection.

What about the pandemic?

With its myriad economic interruptions, the COVID-19 pandemic had the side effect of providing some climate relief, but only of the ephemeral variety.

For example, fossil-fuel consumption has gone down since 2019 as did airline travel levels.

But all of these are expected to significantly rise as the economy reopens. While global gross domestic product dropped by 3.6% in 2020, it is projected to rebound to an all-time high.

So, a major lesson of the pandemic is that even when fossil-fuel consumption and transportation sharply decrease, it’s still insufficient to tackle climate change.

There is growing evidence we’re getting close to or have already gone beyond tipping points associated with important parts of the Earth system, including warm-water coral reefs, the Amazon rainforest and the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.

OK, so what do we do about it?

In our 2019 paper, we urged six critical and interrelated steps governments — and the rest of humanity — can take to lessen the worst effects of climate change:

1. prioritise energy efficiency, and replace fossil fuels with low-carbon renewable energy

2. reduce emissions of short-lived pollutants such as methane and soot

3. curb land clearing to protect and restore the Earth’s ecosystems

4. reduce our meat consumption

5. move away from unsustainable ideas of ever-increasing economic and resource consumption

6. stabilise and, ideally, gradually reduce human populations while improving human well-being especially by educating girls and women globally.

The University of Sydney: “World scientists declare climate emergency”

These solutions still apply. But in our updated 2021 paper, we go further, highlighting the potential for a three-pronged approach for near-term policy:

1. a globally implemented carbon price

2. a phase-out and eventual ban of fossil fuels

3. strategic environmental reserves to safeguard and restore natural carbon sinks and biodiversity.

A global price for carbon needs to be high enough to induce decarbonisation across industry.

And our suggestion to create strategic environmental reserves, such as forests and wetlands, reflects the need to stop treating the climate emergency as a stand-alone issue.

By stopping the unsustainable exploitation of natural habitats through, for example, creeping urbanisation, and land degradation for mining, agriculture and forestry, we can reduce animal-borne disease risks, protect carbon stocks and conserve biodiversity — all at the same time.

Is this actually possible?

Yes, and many opportunities still exist to shift pandemic-related financial support measures into climate friendly activities. Currently, only 17% of such funds had been allocated that way worldwide, as of early March 2021. This percentage could be lifted with serious coordinated, global commitment.

Greening the economy could also address the longer term need for major transformative change to reduce emissions and, more broadly, the over-exploitation of the planet.

Our planetary vital signs make it clear we need urgent action to address climate change. With new commitments getting made by governments all over the world, we hope to see the curves in our graphs changing in the right directions soon.

Thomas Newsome, Academic Fellow, University of Sydney; Christopher Wolf, Postdoctoral Scholar, Oregon State University, and William Ripple, Distinguished Professor and Director, Trophic Cascades Program, Oregon State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, is a larger climate problem than the world anticipates, and cutting its emissions will be crucial to slow global warming, a new United Nations report warns. The greenhouse gas is many times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the planet, and its concentration in the atmosphere is increasing faster than at any time since record keeping began in the 1980s.

Methane is much more than a climate problem, though, and this is where the report gets interesting. As methane emissions are reduced, the world reaps several benefits quickly, for health as well as the climate. In most cases, the benefits of taking action far outweigh the cost – in fact many of them make money.

The report’s lead author Drew Shindell, a climate scientist and physicist, explained the findings and the urgency.

What are the most important lessons from the methane report?

The top takeaway is that methane is going up very quickly, and it needs to drop by nearly half by 2030 to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F) if we hope to stay on the lowest-cost path. That means we have a rapid U-turn to make.

The good news is that we have a lot to gain by cutting these emissions.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, but it’s also a precursor of surface ozone, which is a toxic air pollutant. So, reducing methane improves the quality of the air we breathe at the same time that it reduces climate change, and the results are almost immediate.

NASA: “Sources of Methane”

A lot of steps to reduce methane also save money, because methane is intrinsically valuable. If you capture methane from a landfill, you have a source of income right there. Capture it from leaking pipelines, and it pays for itself, because that’s the whole point of these pipelines – they transport methane as natural gas.

With the technology already available today, the world could cut methane emissions from fossil fuels, agriculture and rotting waste by 45% within a decade. That would avoid 0.3 degrees Celsius (0.5 F) of warming, which might not sound like much, but it’s one-fifth of the Paris climate agreement budget of 1.5 C.

So, you get climate benefits, you get public health benefits and it’s also a financial win for the companies capturing the methane.

It’s not like this is rocket science. A large part of the methane being released is from natural gas pipelines and storage, oil and gas pumping and landfills – and those are all problems we know how to fix.

How does cutting methane improve health?

Methane causes ground-level ozone, which contributes to a lot of respiratory problems, including asthma in children, respiratory infections or chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. There’s pretty robust evidence that it can also exacerbate cardiovascular disease.

Both methane and ozone are also greenhouse gases that cause warming, which creates more health risks, particularly through heat exposure.

We looked at medical research and modeling, and used that to figure out what’s at stake. We found that for every million tons of methane emitted, about 1,430 people die prematurely, there are about 4,000 asthma-related emergencies and 300 million work hours are lost to the health effects. To put that into context, around 370 million tons of methane are released annually due to human activities.

If you reduce methane emissions in 2022, you’ll see the ozone response in 2022, whereas you have to wait to see the climate effects until the climate system adjusts over at least a decade.

What’s causing methane emissions to rise so quickly?

We know global emissions are going up. That’s easy to measure by chemical sampling of the air, and satellites can monitor large methane sources. But which sources are most responsible is a tougher question.

Global methane emissions were fairly level about 15 to 20 years ago, and then they started creeping up. Now, especially over the past five years or so, they’ve been rising at a fast rate.

Some studies point to the rise of hydraulic fracturing, which quickly expanded gas production and roughly parallels the recent methane increase. Others say livestock and the increasing global demand for meat played a big role. Some point to natural sources – particularly wetlands in the tropics responding to climate change.

The most likely scenario is that it’s a combination of all three.

The bottom line is that the overall methane emissions have to be lowered to slow climate change. If the increase is coming from fossil fuel or waste or livestock, then we need to go after the human sources. If it’s coming from natural systems that are responding to climate change, we still have to go after those human sources of methane. Cutting methane emissions is the strongest leverage we have to slow those feedbacks down.

If cutting methane pays for itself, and the technology exists, why isn’t more being done?

The oil and gas industry itself is divided on methane. Many of the big companies supported the U.S. methane emissions rules that were set by the Obama administration – and later rolled back by the Trump administration – because they know capturing methane pays for itself. It’s not an onerous economic burden on them, and supporting it can improve the image of the industry.

For small operators, however, the upfront costs of equipment and the need to hire labor to inspect the pipelines may be harder.

For example, if a company is going to repair a pipeline, it can close off a section, bring in a compressor, and pump all of the excess gas farther down the line before starting to work on it. Doing that requires getting a compressor and having the trucks to move it and the staff to maintain it. A lot of studies have found that these investments pay for themselves in a few years because of the value of the methane saved. But many small operators find it simpler and less costly for themselves to just vent the gas into the atmosphere when they want to work on the pipe.

There’s a similar problem with landfills and waste. As organic matter like food waste decomposes, it releases methane. Many landfills in developed countries already capture some of that methane gas. But many developing countries don’t have managed landfills or even trash pickup, making it impossible to capture the biogas.

The report lists a few recommendations, in addition to technical solutions, that can be used for landfills everywhere, including better waste sorting so organic material is kept out of landfills and used for compost instead, and reducing food waste overall.

Agriculture also has some straightforward solutions. Eating a healthy diet that, for many people, means cutting out excess red meat would go a long way in reducing the amount of livestock being produced for slaughter. Encouraging changes in food consumption can be politically dicey, but this is a huge emissions source. We’re not going to keep warming under 1.5 C without dealing with it.

What does this mean for natural gas as an energy source?

The report shows why adding more natural gas is incompatible with keeping warming to less than 1.5 C.

The only way to keep using natural gas far into the future is to pull carbon out of the air. That’s a huge risk, because it assumes we’ll make up for today’s harms later. If that technology turns out to be too expensive or not socially acceptable, or it simply doesn’t work the way we think it will, we can’t go back in time and fix the mess.

As the report explains, the world will have to stop building more fossil fuel infrastructure. The better route is to be responsible now and take care of the climate rather than counting on cleaning up the mess later.

[Explore the intersection of faith, politics, arts and culture. Sign up for This Week in Religion.]

Drew Shindell, Professor of Climate Sciences, Duke University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Clean Energy Wire) – Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court has ruled that the government has to have a more detailled plan how to reduce emissions as of 2030 to not put the largest burden on today’s young people. Photo: FfF.

In an unexpected decision widely hailed as historic, Germany’s highest court has ruled that the government’s climate legislation is insufficient, lacking detail on emission reduction targets beyond 2030. The decision “significantly strengthens” climate action by ruling that if the government fails to protect the climate, it could violate citizens’ fundamental rights, legal experts said. Youth activists, who had lodged the complaint to force the government to do more to mitigate climate change, said the ruling was a timely decision ahead of Germany’s federal election this year. Conservative and Social Democratic ministers from the ruling grand coalition government blamed each other for the lack of post-2030 clarity and promised they would present reform proposals. However, it is likely the task of finding a solution will be up to the next government after the September general election, which could catapult the Green Party to power. [Update adds background, additional reactions]

Germany’s Constitutional Court has found in a landmark ruling that key parts of the country’s climate legislation are insufficient. The court said Germany’s Climate Action Law is partly unconstitutional and obliged the government to introduce details on greenhouse gas reduction targets for the period after 2030 by the end of next year.

“The challenged provisions do violate the freedoms of the complainants, some of whom are still very young,” the court said in a statement with reference to climate activists who had filed the complaint with support from several environmental NGOs. “The provisions irreversibly offload major emission reduction burdens onto periods after 2030.”

Legal experts said the decision is unexpected and unprecedented in Germany and will have far-reaching effects. “Climate action has been significantly strengthened by the Federal Constitutional Court today,” Thorsten Müller, head of Stiftung Umweltenergierecht (foundation for research on energy and environment law), told Clean Energy Wire. “So far, we have not had any successful lawsuits for more climate action in German jurisdiction.”

He called the decision “historic,” as for the first time the court made very clear that a violation of the state’s obligation to protect the “natural foundations of life,” which it said includes climate protection, could constitute a violation of the fundamental rights of citizens. Citizens now have a process to sue, but lawsuits for more climate action “are unlikely to succeed in most cases, unless we are in the situation where the state violates its objective duty to protect,” he explained. Concrete climate policy would still be decided in the political process.

The German court’s decision follows a rising number of similar cases across the world. In the first decision of its kind, the Netherland’s Supreme Court in 2019 upheld a ruling by a lower court forcing the government to meet emission reduction targets. The case not only inspired German activists, but also similar climate justice lawsuits in many other countries, including Belgium, France, Ireland, New Zealand, Britain, Switzerland and Norway.
Climate action is not ‘nice-to-have’ – activist

Müller said he was greatly surprised by the ruling. “If you had asked me before, I would have said that this lawsuit has no chance of success.”

Germany’s current governing coalition of chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) introduced the country’s first major climate law with binding emissions reduction targets for the 2020s as part of a comprehensive package of measures in 2019. The package was meant to ensure that Germany reaches its 2030 targets, but the climate action law also included a line on “pursuing” the long-term target of greenhouse gas neutrality by 2050. However, it postponed the decision for emissions reduction targets post-2030 to a later date.

Climate activists welcomed the ruling. “Climate action is not ‘nice-to-have’, it’s our fundamental right and from today we know that officially,” said Lisa Neubauer, one of the leading figures of Germany’s Fridays for Future protest movement, at a press conference after publication of the ruling. “It gives us everything we need for this year, for this federal election campaign, and for our future work as a movement.”

Neubauer and several other activists, supported by NGOs Germanwatch and Greenpeace, had sued the German government in early 2020 over what they said was its insufficient action to tackle climate change. It was one of several lawsuits filed then, which CDU lawmaker Jan-Marco Luczack had dismissed as a good “PR gag.” A first similar lawsuit against the federal government was filed by three farming families with the help of Greenpeace in October 2018. The Berlin Administrative Court dismissed that suit.

The immediate consequence of the ruling is that the German legislator must regulate the continuation of the reduction targets for the post-2031 period by 31 December 2022 at the latest. This does not mean annual sector reduction targets until 2050, when climate neutrality is to be reached, cautioned Müller. However, “there must be points of reference, that is the core message of this ruling, in order to be able to precisely assess how we get from today to the goal of climate neutrality.” The court also did not rule that the targets until 2030 have to be adapted.
Future obligations to reduce emissions violate plaintiffs’ rights to freedom

The court said Germany’s Basic Law – the country’s constitution – obliges the state to protect the climate, which includes reaching the target of climate neutrality. The court did not prescribe when or how this goal should be reached, but said the German government had already decided to try to limit global temperature rise to well below 2°C and preferably to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, as prescribed by the Paris Climate Agreement. The court argued that the emissions reduction provisions in the climate law violate the complainants’ freedoms guaranteed by Basic Law.

To reach the Paris targets, the post-2030 goals would have to be achieved faster and more urgently, it said. “These future obligations to reduce emissions have an impact on practically every type of freedom because virtually all aspects of human life still involve the emission of greenhouse gases and are thus potentially threatened by drastic restrictions after 2030,” said the court, adding that the legislator should have taken precautionary steps to mitigate these major burdens in order to safeguard the freedom guaranteed by fundamental rights.
“Generational climate action budget” for Germany

This is the second aspect that makes the decision historic, said legal expert Müller. “We are always talking about budget approaches in the area of climate action,” he said. Now the Federal Constitutional Court added a new dimension to this by not only saying there is a global emissions budget that must be divided up among states. “No, there is also a generational climate action budget within the countries.”

Lawyer Hermann Ott from environmental organisaton ClientEarth also saw this as a key part of the ruling. “For the first time, a German court has accepted that we have a limited climate budget left and that the constitutional duty to protect future generations is engaged.” If the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions is not fairly distributed over the next 30 years until 2050, “there may be disproportionate impacts on the fundamental rights of future generations,” Ott said. “The court has now recognised this and made it clear to the government that climate debts cannot be postponed.”
Ruling parties enter blame game, promise reform

Government representatives from conservatives and Social Democrats entered a sort of blame game after the publication of the ruling. Environment minister Svenja Schulze (SPD) said she would have liked to include another interim target for the 2030s, “but there was no majority for this” in the negotiations in 2019. Her Social Democrat colleague and chancellor candidate Olaf Scholz publicly criticised CDU economy minister Peter Altmaier: “To the best of my recollection, you and the CDU/CSU have prevented exactly what has now been called for by the Federal Constitutional Court. But we can quickly correct that. Are you with us?” Schulze said she would present key points for a reform of the climate law in summer.

Altmaier did not talk about the 2019 negotiations, but replied that he already proposed post-2030 interim targets in his call for a “historic consensus” on climate among all German parties in September 2020, which in turn was not answered by the SPD.

At a press conference, Altmaier said that the ruling was of “extraordinary importance” for climate protection, the rights of young people and for the planning security of German businesses. “We have set into motion many things in the past years. Some of them came late, maybe too late,” Altmaier said. He added that the ruling must be respected and implemented. “I see this ruling as a gift, because it means that climate action is put back on the agenda before the general election.” He said he would present his fellow ministers with suggestions in the coming weeks on how the government could ensure that climate policy making wasn’t delayed by the elections and the ensuing creation of a new government.

German parties have swung into full campaign mode for the national election in September, after both the Conservatives and the Green Party presented their chancellor candidates last week. This also means that a decision on the reform of the climate law will be up to the next government, in which the Greens could play an important role, maybe even providing the chancellor.

The party’s candidate, Annalena Baerbock, welcomed the ruling. Calling it a “historic decision” on twitter, she wrote that it gave a concrete mandate to revise the climate action law now. “Climate action protects our freedom and the freedom of our children and grandchildren […] The next few years are crucial for consistent action,” she said.

“Meanwhile, the Greens’ chancellor candidate floats serenely above it all, hailing the ‘historic decision’,” commented journalist Tom Nuttall on Twitter.
Ruling strengthens planning security for German companies

German stakeholders largely welcomed the ruling as a push for more clarity and ambitious climate action. German industry federation BDI highlighted the need for planning security for companies it represents. “In a transparent way, policymakers must outline viable climate paths up to 2050 in order to specify CO2 reductions. This creates clarity and planning security for companies to develop new technologies and invest massively, and is in the interest of industry,” said BDI in a statement.

Ingbert Liebing, head of the German association of local utilities (VKU), also welcomed the decision. “The ruling increases the pressure to create clear and more reliable framework conditions for climate protection in the long term,” Liebing said. “Municipal enterprises are already making a variety of contributions to climate protection today, but for this they need reliable framework conditions from politicians – as the judges in Karlsruhe have clearly demanded today.”

Via Clean Energy Wire

—–

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Deutschland.de: “Floating wind turbine to be tested in Baltic Sea”

The significant increase in CO2 comes as a surprise, since emissions fell 7% last year because of the covid-19 economic slowdown. But it turns out that all the virus did was to slow things down a little, not stop emissions in their tracks. In fact, if it had not been for the pandemic, last year would have see the biggest increase in carbon dioxide ever recorded in a single year!

Methane, which is an even more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, also jumped up. It doesn’t stay nearly as long in the atmosphere as CO2, but it heats it up a lot while it is around. Rapidly increasing methane is very bad news, 28 times worse than increasing CO2, at least in the short run. Hydraulic fracturing for natural gas production appears to be a major source of methane.

President Biden has suggested capping these wells to stop the leaks.

NOAA points out that we haven’t seen 412 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the mid-Pliocene era, starting 3.6 million years ago.

The NOAA observations are disheartening because we have a relatively short time window, maybe 30 years, to get down to net carbon zero if we are going to avoid squandering our oceanic carbon budget.

See, the oceans absorb carbon dioxide, and if we stop putting it up in the atmosphere, they will take in everything we’ve produced since 1750. It will take them a while, and it will make them acidic, killing off maybe half of marine life. But gradually the parts per million of CO2 will come back down.

The catch is that the oceans only have so much absorptive capacity. If we exceed it, any further carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere will stay there for a very long time, and will wreck the earth’s climate for a very long time.

So we want to see the PPM of carbon dioxide level off, not jump up.

I’ll revise what wrote earlier:

From about 10,000 years ago after the last ice age, there were typically between 260 and 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This era is known as the Holocene. Then from about 1750, humankind starting turning the turbines of steam engines by burning, first wood, but then coal, in very large amounts. Then in the late 19th century the internal combustion engine was invented, which used petroleum to spark small explosions that drove pistons. By 1960 there were about 300 parts per million of CO2 up there. We had entered the Anthropocene, in which human beings are driving the climate. And driving it fast and furious.

Now it is 412.5 ppm. Never before in the whole history of planet earth has so much CO2 been put into the atmosphere so quickly. CO2 did increase from time to time in the past, but over millions of years and because of volcanoes.

And here is the bad news. The last time it was 412 ppm was the middle Pliocene warm period, stretching from 3.6 and 2.85 million years ago.

Temperatures in the middle Pliocene were on average as much as 5-7 degrees F. higher than today. The Arctic was 10 degrees C. hotter than today’s and it was covered in forests, not tundra. Seas were roughly 75- 90 feet higher. Some places now wet were desert-like. Here is what would happen to five cities under this scenario.

This 90 feet sea level rise is therefore almost certainly baked in and will occur, over the next few hundred years (oceans are huge and cold and take time to warm up). I wouldn’t buy real estate in Miami or lower Manhattan with an idea of passing it on to your grandchildren. Any beachfront property is ephemeral.

Folks, we are going in the wrong direction.

——

Bonus Video:

Grantham Imperial: “The Pliocene: The Last Time Earth had over 400 ppm of Atmospheric CO2”

Trump said, according to Kevin Liptak at CNN,

“The Paris accord was not designed to save the environment, it was designed to kill the American economy. I refuse to surrender millions of American jobs and send trillions of American dollars to the world’s worst polluters and environmental offenders, and that’s what would have happened.”

The Paris Accord allowed countries to set their own goals for reduction of carbon dioxide and methane emissions, so it could hardly have been weaponized against the US economy.

Coal, gas and petroleum produce heat-trapping and very dangerous carbon dioxide when they are burned, which is wrecking the planet with global heating, sea level rise, extreme weather, more intensive hurricanes, drought, and wildfires, among other undesirable and even apocalyptic threats.

A Trump-style anything-goes inaction on the climate emergency could cost the US $5.2 trillion by 2050, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute. Trump either is too stupid to understand the dangers here or is just greedy and holds a lot of stock in fossil fuel corporations. I suspect it is a combination of the two. That he says brain dead things like that wind turbines cause cancer or that the climate crisis is a Chinese hoax suggests that he isn’t very bright, or that he think the public isn’t and he is trying to make money off dirty energy.

The industries Trump wants to save, like coal and petroleum, are doomed by market forces and anyway don’t employ all that many people. Solar and wind now employ many times more people than coal.

Despite all Trump’s efforts to prop up the coal industry, it lost 24% of its jobs under this president.

Making electricity from coal is typically estimated to cost 5 cents a kilowatt hour. New wind installations in the US are averaging 2 cents a kilowatt hour. So let’s say your monthly electricity bill is $200 a month in the summer on coal. If your local utility put in a wind farm instead, in much of the country, it would be $80. Are you really going to spend an extra $120 a month for the next decade just because you like Donald Trump? If so, you are alone.

Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:

Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)

As Business Insider points out, Moody’s ranked Trump’s economic plans against those of Joe Biden and concluded that Biden will create 7 million more jobs than Trump would have, and Biden would give a $4,800 raise to the average American household.

Biden plans to create ten million green energy jobs.

Trump, addressing an audience of smart, powerful people, added:

“The United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world. Every day we are proving we can protect our workers, create new jobs and safeguard the environment without imposing crippling mandates and one-sided international agreements on our citizens.”

You cannot safeguard the environment if you are putting over 5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually. Trump boasts that the amount of carbon the US emits has declined slightly. That is mainly because we are now getting 20% of our electricity from renewables and because natural gas plants have replaced a lot of coal plants, with gas being cheaper and about half as carbon intensive. In other words, the slight decline in CO2 emissions has occurred despite Trump’s policies. But the larger issue is that the CO2 stays up there once it is put into the atmosphere. It is cumulative. After the oceans exhaust their ability to absorb it, which will happen soon, some of the CO2 could stay up there for 100,000 years. So think of it like this. You weigh 240 pounds and you want to lose weight. You were putting on 10 pounds a year lately. So this year you only put on 9 pounds, and went to 249. You wanted to lose weight. Reducing the amount of extra weight you put on isn’t reducing weight. You’re getting fatter, just at a slower rate. So the US put out 5.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2018 and 5.1 in 2019. That’s what trump is boasting about? That in two years we put out over 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide? It is a very powerful heat trapping gas, which acts as though you were setting off atom bombs in the atmosphere.

Trump tried to appeal to the “old environmentalism,” claiming to have devoted efforts for clean water, and to have championed national parks (which he actually leased to polluters and oil drillers).

The US does not, as Trump keeps lying, have the cleanest air in the world. US air is quite dirty, and Trump made it substantially dirtier, as Hilary Brueck pointed out at Business Insider. The air pollution is mainly caused by precisely those fossil fuels that Trump has championed, especially coal, but also gasoline and diesel. For Trump to push coal and then tout clean air is like a toddler pooping his pants and then boasting of how good he smells.

The US ranks 7 to 10th on important indices of air quality, and we finish off 80,000 to 150,000 people a year with our bad air. 111 million Americans live in locales with more air pollution that our 2017 standards allow. Air quality can be measured in several ways, by how much PM 2.5 particulate matter is in the air, but also by the ozone levels. The US fares all right (but below 6-9 other countries) on PM 2.5, but it is very bad on ozone. The EPA explains, “Breathing ozone can trigger a variety of health problems including chest pain, coughing, throat irritation, and airway inflammation. It also can reduce lung function and harm lung tissue. Ozone can worsen bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma, leading to increased medical care.”

Everything Trump says about the environment and about fossil fuels, carbon dioxide and the climate threat is not just false but absurd. Why exactly he spouts this world-destroying nonsense will be up to future psychiatrists to tell us. Maybe they can pickle his brain and study its abnormalities once he shuffles off this mortal coil.

The good news is that I won’t have to write this column refuting his enormities for much longer. Adults are about to take over climate policy, and while they won’t be in as much of a hurry or stricken by as much alarm as I am, there is a prospect of substantial change. Just a modicum of government help for renewables could well create a technological disruption and suddenly we’d have electric cars and solar farms on the scale we have smartphones.