Climate Change, Pollution, Clean Energy, and the Environment

[LFC]

Here's an excellent recap (from Feb 2020) of the environmental sins of the Trump administration. Pure, Republican evil. This is right in their wheelhouse.

Donald Trump has been the worst president for environmental protection in American history.

Of course, with all that’s happening in this administration, it’s hard to keep track of everything, especially because, since the departure of the corrupt, headline-grabbing, and often outright ridiculous EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, most of the changes have happened away from the spotlight.

Pruitt’s successor, Andrew Wheeler (a former lobbyist for the fossil-fuel industry) is boring, careful, methodical, and extreme—the perfect man to roll back 20 or more years of environmental protection.

Here, then, is our take on the most significant anti-environmental moves this radically anti-environmental administration has made.

[LFC]

This is rather bizarre. The Nunakauyarmiut Tribe has had a long-standing tribal prophecy that the weather would warm, the ice would disappear, and the animals they depended upon would be replaced by others. It's happening.

“I used to hear it growing up,” he said “Over the generations, they used to predict this, and now it’s coming to pass.”

He is modern enough to have what he terms a Native American humor Facebook page with his wife called “Noah loves Kristy.” Yet as he spoke to The Daily Beast from a home that remained uncomfortably hot even with the doors and windows open, he seemed in genuine wonder of his forebears’ gift of prophecy.

“I don’t know how they knew,” he said. “But they knew.”

He was only partly jesting when he said, “Someday we might need air conditioners.”

He noted that air conditioning is not something you hear people talking about in Toksook Bay.

“I’m talking about it because it’s really hot,” he said.

He added, “At least we’re saving up on the stove oil.”

His two younger sons are aged 2 and 4, and he watches them starting life in a native land being transformed.

“You can see them sweating at night,” Lincoln said.

His family fishes and hunts to eat, and that is being affected by a corollary prediction the elders made. They used the expression “ungungsiit cimiingetciqluki” to describe a change in the sea and land creatures on which his tribe subsists.

“Animals we hunt to eat won’t come around anymore,” Lincoln said. “There’ll be different sorts of creatures we don’t eat. Animals not native to here, we’ll start seeing them around.”

The first creature to vanish was the Alaska state bird, the Willow Ptarmigan. It once flocked in abundance around Toksook Bay but has become increasingly rare in the past four or five years. It may prefer areas where it retains an advantage in its ability to molt into snow-white feathers and grow snowshoe-like extensions to its feet in winter.

“The Ptarmigan don’t come,” Lincoln reported.

The first non-native creature to appear was a blue shark.

“Like tropical,” Lincoln said. “Long fins.”

What might seem like one benefit from climate change is the increasing number of moose in the area.

“They were rare before,” Lincoln said.

He figures the moose are fleeing the clouds of mosquitoes generated by the increased warmth and perhaps seeking the same natural air conditioning he seeks when throwing open his windows.

“So they could have the Bering Sea breeze,” Lincoln said.

There are also muskox, but hunting them and even creatures as big as a moose is made extremely difficult by the fog that comes with the increased temperature.

“You can’t see,” Lincoln said. “Only a few lucky people get them.”

He noted in a nostalgic tone, “Usually when the weather is cold, blue skies.”

Hunting for muskox is further hampered because the permits run from February to April. The ice at that time is now too thin and the snow too scant for snow machines to be a safe and reliable means to go in search of them.

[LFC]

California is considering an interesting approach to real estate that clearly has a limited shelf life before being worthless due to climate change.

At a normal tide on a normal day on the Southern California coast, ankle-high waves glide over a narrow strip of gold sand. On one side sits the largest body of water in the world. On the other, a row of houses with a cumulative value in the hundreds of millions of dollars, propped on water-stained stilts.

Property value ebbs and flows, but when it comes to coastal real estate "the trend lines are pretty clear," says California state Sen. Ben Allen, squinting in the sun. "And they're not pretty."

Within the span of a 30-year mortgage, more than $100 billion worth of American homes is expected to be at risk of chronic flooding. As the climate warms and oceans rise, narrow strips of sand such as the one Allen is standing on, will be submerged, leaving coastal communities — affluent and not — with the torturous question of how to adjust. Build sea walls? Dump sand? For how long and at what cost?

"It's becoming a really serious resource question for a lot of local governments," says Allen, who represents coastal communities in the greater Los Angeles area that are spending millions to keep their beaches intact.

It's expensive to fight the sea. It's expensive not to do so. When property values plummet, so do property taxes. But right now property values here are still high, and Allen wants to put that value to use before it's gone.

That's why the 43-year-old Democrat has proposed legislation to create a revolving loan program, allowing California counties and communities to purchase vulnerable coastal properties. The goal would then be to rent those properties out, either to the original homeowner or someone else, and use that money to pay off the loan until the property is no longer safe to live in.

Think of it like a city-run Airbnb, where the profits go to making sure nobody is left picking up the full tab when the Pacific comes to collect.

It's a strategy that's never been tried at such a large scale, and its implementation would come with plenty of questions, policy experts say. But there's hope in various parts of the country that the legislation passes, putting to test a buy-to-rent strategy that could offer a more permanent solution to a growing problem.

I have to admit that I've got a knee jerk reaction of "F*** 'em!" Maybe it comes from being on the East Coast where I've seen a staggering number of homes built on barrier islands which are temporary and move all the time in nature. My view is that so many of these homes should never have been built and the idea of taxpayers potentially getting stuck with the bill gets to me. Admittedly if the program works out the taxpayers won't get stuck but then again much of this program could be performed on an individual level with people renting out their homes or "selling" them through reverse mortgages (if old enough).

[goldenvalley]

The Pacific coastline doesn't have glorified sand bars called barrier islands like the Atlantic and Gulf coasts have. Hurricanes don't hit the coast. That seems to happen more in Mexico. There is the possibility of tsunamis but none have hit or caused damage in that part of California in a long, long time. Still the coastline is eroding and in the cliffy parts of the coast sometimes crumbling into the sea. I am attracted to the state senator's idea because the value of the current houses is considerable and the counties might as well reap the property tax on them as long as possible. It's worth a try.

[LFC]

There is increasing lightning in the Arctic.

The Arctic isn't doing so hot. That’s because it is, in fact, too hot. It’s warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the planet, which is setting off vicious feedback loops that accelerate change. Ice, for instance, is more reflective than soil, so when it melts, the region absorbs more solar energy. More dark vegetation is growing in northern lands, absorbing still more of the sun’s heat. And when permafrost thaws, it releases gobs of greenhouse gases, which further warm the climate.

The Arctic has gone so bizarro that lightning—a warm-weather phenomenon most common in the tropics—is now striking near the North Pole. And according to new modeling, the electrical bombardment of the region will only get worse. By the end of the century, the number of lightning strikes across the Arctic could more than double, which may initiate a shocking cascade of knock-on effects—namely, more wildfires and more warming. “The Arctic is a rapidly changing place, and this is an aspect of the transformation that I'm not sure has gotten a whole lot of attention, but it's actually really consequential,” says UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, who wasn’t involved in the research.

To make thunderstorms you need a lot of heat. When the sun warms up the land, hot air and moisture rise in the atmosphere. Simultaneously, cold air in the system sinks. This creates a swirling mass known as a deep convective cloud, which in turn creates electrical charges that grow into lightning.

That’s normal in the tropics, where there’s plenty of heat to go around, but the Arctic should be cold enough to better resist this large-scale rising of hot air. No longer, apparently. “With surface warming, you will have more energy to push air into the high latitude,” says UC Irvine climate scientist Yang Chen, lead author on a new paper in Nature Climate Changedescribing the modeling. “And also because the atmosphere is warmer, it can hold more water vapor.”

Put those together and you’ve got big, flashy storms that are now moving within 100 miles of the North Pole. (Scientists can pinpoint the strikes in the remote region with a global network of radio detectors: When a bolt hits the ground, it actually turns into a kind of radio tower, blasting out a signal.) And where you’ve got lightning, you’ve got the potential for fire, especially as the Arctic warms and dries. “The 2020 heat wave in the Russian Arctic shows how—even at high latitudes—really warm weather conditions can develop that can lead to fires that burn intensely and can grow to be very large,” says Isla Myers-Smith, an ecologist at the University of Edinburgh who studies the region but wasn’t involved in this new work. “A lot of area burned during the 2020 fire season in the Russian Arctic.”

[LFC]

The discussions about seeding the atmosphere to reflect sunlight scares the shit out of me. It's ironic that some of the denial community, which spent decades telling us we can't know as much as we know about global climate, has given a thumbs-up to completely monkeying with the climate we can't really understand. W...T...F?

This piece advocates more data, which is fine. I look at the uncertainty factor we still have in climate change science (we know which way it's going but have only so much power for very specific predictions) and think that even with more data we're layering an new uncertainty on top of existing uncertainty. Getting the localized effects right is going to take a LOT more investment in research than we've been willing to put into climate change study thus far.

Without condoning or condemning the poorly understood tactic, recent reports suggest we should try to understand one proposed strategy to cool the planet: altering the atmosphere to reflect sunlight. Called solar radiation modification (SRM), this strategy is a type of geoengineering that involves scattering particles into the sky to reflect sunlight back out into space so it can't warm the Earth's atmosphere.

In theory, SRM could cool off the planet and help limit global warming to 1.5ºC compared to preindustrial levels. But it's viewed as something of a last-resort tool to tackle climate change. Two new analyses explore what deploying this tactic could mean for the environment and the flora, fauna, and people living in it. In all, the authors of both reports suggest that more work needs to be done to understand SRM.

The idea has gained some traction. Bill Gates, for example, advocated for it in 2019. The Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP) has released more than 100 studies related to SRM in the decade since the group was formed. But recently, in response to public outcry, the Swedish Space Corporation canceled a test flight that would help study SRM.

But studies may be what we need most. According to one of the papers published this week, a great many unknowns within SRM still need to be addressed.

The document is the outcome of a large group of geoengineering modelers, climate scientists, and ecologists who met digitally over the past two years. Called the Climate Intervention Biology Working Group, the team was concerned that efforts, like GeoMIP, to understand or model SRM outcomes didn't account for ecology and biodiversity. The paper doesn't come out for or against SRM but rather suggests that these knowledge gaps need filling before the world decides to use the strategy.

This research focused on one particular SRM approach, called stratospheric aerosol injection, which involves releasing reflective particles into the stratosphere.

The paper lays out an agenda for us to understand what these impacts might be. According to Peter Groffman—professor at the Advanced Science Research Center at City University of New York and one of the paper's authors—it advocates for increased teamwork between climate scientists, geoengineering modelers, and ecologists. In the past, this teamwork was uncommon, he said. "We went in with the idea that we really needed to bring these groups together to talk about this complex problem," he told Ars.

Alan Robock is one of the founders of GeoMIP and a co-author on the paper. GeoMIP asks climate scientists around the world to perform standardized tests on how climate would change in certain situations: a continued release of carbon, a reduction of carbon emissions, and under a hypothetical deployment of SRM.

[andydp]

They were proposing a similar "altering" tactic during Vietnam.  They wanted to position huge mirrors in orbit to reflect sunlight and focus it on Vietnam where it would deprive the Viet Cong use of the night.  It was thrown out when they realized it wouild affect migratory patterns of birds and animals.  

Apr 13, 2021 19:16:19 GMT LFC said:

The discussions about seeding the atmosphere to reflect sunlight scares the shit out of me. It's ironic that some of the denial community, which spent decades telling us we can't know as much as we know about global climate, has given a thumbs-up to completely monkeying with the climate we can't really understand. W...T...F?

This piece advocates more data, which is fine. I look at the uncertainty factor we still have in climate change science (we know which way it's going but have only so much power for very specific predictions) and think that even with more data we're layering an new uncertainty on top of existing uncertainty. Getting the localized effects right is going to take a LOT more investment in research than we've been willing to put into climate change study thus far.

[goldenvalley]

Apr 13, 2021 19:42:11 GMT andydp said:

They were proposing a similar "altering" tactic during Vietnam.  They wanted to position huge mirrors in orbit to reflect sunlight and focus it on Vietnam where it would deprive the Viet Cong use of the night.  It was thrown out when they realized it wouild affect migratory patterns of birds and animals.  

Apr 13, 2021 19:16:19 GMT LFC said:

Seriously someone actually proposed that? It's astounding.  

[andydp]

Apr 13, 2021 23:39:47 GMT goldenvalley said:

Apr 13, 2021 19:42:11 GMT andydp said:

They were proposing a similar "altering" tactic during Vietnam.  They wanted to position huge mirrors in orbit to reflect sunlight and focus it on Vietnam where it would deprive the Viet Cong use of the night.  It was thrown out when they realized it wouild affect migratory patterns of birds and animals.  

Seriously someone actually proposed that? It's astounding. 

Remember, this was the time before we had night vision goggles (NVG). The early ones, called "Starlight Scopes" were the size of a 600mm telephoto lens.  The new ones are worn like a set of ski goggles and are fantastic.  If you look at some soldier's helmets, you'll see a bracket.  That holds the NVG for the soldier.  The best thing about them, they are a "passive" system.  They do not emit "signals" (like infra red energy) that could be detected by the enemy. 

The systems used in tanks are different and actually use the heat signature from whatever you're looking at. They use a super cooled heat detector.  I've seen it work in 90 degree days in Alabama.

[LFC]

The whitest paint in the world could help cool buildings.

The paint revealed in October was based on calcium carbonate (CaCO3), the mineral that makes chalk. It had a reflectance of about 95.5 percent, meaning that less than 5 percent of sunlight hitting it would be absorbed as heat.

The new one, detailed in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, uses barium sulfate instead, something that is already employed commercially in paper and cosmetics. The team estimates that 98.1 percent of sunlight is reflected back by the new paint, meaning only 1.9 percent of heat is absorbed.

“In our experiment, the new paint doubles the cooling power of the previous one,” senior author Professor Xiulin Ruan from Purdue University told IFLScience.

Tests have shown that during strong sunlight noon hours material covered in the new paint was 4.4°C (8°F) cooler than ambient temperature. At night, the material kept a temperature of 10.5°C (19°F) below the surrounding areas.

This extraordinary ability to cool could be a game-changer in the fight against global warming. This paint could be used to cool buildings instead of air conditioners.

[LFC]

Here's an unexpected but welcome group showing a real interest in green energy. Sounds like reality is being faced rather than scratching, clawing, and then dying anyway. I say good for them and let's see what can be done.

What if the British crown had offered the Luddites a retraining program and the promise of good-paying factory jobs? Perhaps they would have accepted the textile transition?

That’s essentially what the nation’s largest coal miner union is suggesting. In exchange for job retraining, wage replacement, and preferential hiring for out-of-work coal miners, the United Mine Workers of America would support the transition away from carbon-polluting fossil fuels. It’s also calling for tax incentives to build portions of the renewable energy supply chain in coal country.

“We’ll take good paying jobs any way we can get them,” said Cecil Roberts, the president of the UMWA, in a talk hosted by the National Press Club. “The government has not done a good job, if at all, managing what’s going on in the coal fields,” he said, citing rounds of layoffs and mine closures.

“Ensuring our coal miners aren’t left behind as America transitions to a cleaner energy future is one of my top priorities,” said Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) at the event. “While the industry has been in a steady downturn in job opportunities, maintaining those good-paying jobs as we reduce emissions is both possible and it’s our responsibility.”

They're also still clawing to increase the use of coal but that's no shock. This is a multi-prong attack on the problem of lost jobs, not a complete capitulation.

To claw back some of that share, the UMWA plan prioritizes carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), calling for a utility-scale coal plant with CCS to be operational by 2030. The Biden administration's infrastructure plan supports CCS, but even with that, the UMWA's timeline might be ambitious, since companies have abandoned two US commercial CCS plants that burned coal. And given coal’s precipitous decline over the last decade, 2030 may not be soon enough to have a significant impact on mine employment. The union seems to acknowledge that, with its plan also calling for more US production of steel, which uses high-quality coal, and creating additional markets for “alternative products from coal.”

But even if coal production were to stabilize, it wouldn’t be enough to rehire the tens of thousands of miners that have been laid off. To that end, the union’s plan calls for job retraining programs and the “build-out of renewable supply-chain manufacturing in coalfield areas” and to “provide hiring preference for dislocated miners and families.” The UMWA also suggests that out-of-work miners could process coal waste to extract critical minerals, and Roberts said that he’s hopeful that coal country will become a significant manufacturing hub.

[LFC]

Biden is pushing to do something.

President Joe Biden cast the fight to constrain climate change as both a moral and financial imperative on Thursday as he kicked off a two-day virtual summit with world leaders to address its dire consequences and attempt to reclaim the U.S.’s mantle of leadership on the global response.

“This is a moral imperative, an economic imperative. A moment of peril but also a moment of extraordinary possibilities,” Biden said as the virtual summit convened on Thursday morning. “Time is short but I believe we can do this and I believe that we will do this.”

Participants in the summit include Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, among many others.

“No nation can solve this crisis on our own,” Biden said. “All of us, particularly those of us who represent the world’s largest economies, we have to step up.”

Leading up to the event, the Biden administration had announced a pledge to cut emissions by 50 to 52 percent by the end of the decade when compared to 2005 levels.

Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry wrote on Twitter Thursday that the U.S.’s new nationally-determined contribution under the Paris Agreement, combined with efforts to slash carbon emissions by Japan, Canada, the EU and UK, would put those economies on track to limit the planet’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Left unmentioned in his statement were major developing economies, including China — which, under Xi, has sent mixed messages on climate — and India. The latest round of emission-slashing targets came on the heels of a new pledge of cooperation between the U.S. and China.

The new target represents a sharp turn away from efforts by Biden’s predecessor, former President Donald Trump to deny the threats posed by climate change. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement; Biden promptly rejoined.

[goldenvalley]

Here's a look at the NOAA release on normal climate in the US.  

[LFC]

China is not just the biggest carbon producer, it's now a bigger emitter than all of the advanced economies put together.

Carbon pollution from China's bustling, coal-intensive economy last year outstripped the carbon pollution of the US, the EU, and other developed nations combined, making up a whopping 27 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

As China’s economy has grown in the last 30 years, so too have its emissions. While pollution from developed countries has largely been flat since 1990, it has more than tripled in China. The country’s soaring emissions and stable population mean that its per capita emissions have grown quickly, too. At 10.1 tons per person, emissions are just below the 10.5 ton average of the 37-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD.

The US still leads the world in per capita emissions, at 17.6 tons per person, according to Rhodium Group's numbers, though President Joe Biden has pledged that the US will halve emissions by 2030. The other developed countries in the report include all 27 current EU member states: the UK, Australia, Canada, Chile, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, and Turkey.

China’s draconian lockdowns early in the COVID-19 pandemic allowed the country's economy to bounce back relatively quickly, and as a result, Rhodium expects that China's emissions per capita in 2020 will surpass the average of the OECD nations.

[goldenvalley]

NYT has some cool graphics to show "normal" temps and rainfall changing over the years.  Take a look. Note: the graphic is animated and I can't seem to pull it off the NYT website to show it here.

[LFC]

Things are never simple when it comes to mucking around with our atmosphere and climate.

The thickness of the stratosphere has decreased by around 400 meters (1,312 feet) since 1980, and scientists fear that this contraction could reach 1.3 kilometers (0.8 miles) by 2080. Writing in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the authors of a new study confirm for the first time that the stratosphere has been thinning on a global scale, and that greenhouse gas emissions are primarily responsible for this.

The stratosphere is a vital component of the atmosphere that extends from roughly 20 to 60 kilometers (12.4 to 37.3 miles) above the Earth’s surface, and contains the ozone layer. As such, it plays an important role in absorbing the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays – yet previous measurements have hinted at the fact that this crucial atmospheric layer may be thinning in places.

Until now, this loss of stratospheric thickness had largely been attributed to the depletion of the ozone layer as a result of the widespread use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) over numerous decades. Fortunately, though, the phasing out of CFCs has allowed the ozone layer to largely recover over the past 20 years or so, alleviating fears around lasting damage to the stratosphere.

However, this new study reveals that the stratosphere has continued to contract even as CFC use has dropped and the ozone layer has rebounded, indicating that another factor must be driving this alarming trend.

Personally I think the people who flippantly talk about climate engineering to offset the impacts of greenhouse gases are insane. After 50 years of intense study we're still trying to figure out all the cascading impacts of man-made global warming but we'll spin up a program in a decade or so to change it back in a predictable fashion? F*** YOU!

[LFC]

Gawd we suck as a nation. No wonder Ayn Rand lived here. It fit her greed and selfishness like a glove.

As President Joe Biden moves quickly to reinstate the full slate of environmental policies weakened by former President Donald Trump, including the landmark Migratory Bird Treaty Act, he’s signaling that climate change and biodiversity loss are now major priorities for the US.

Earlier this month, the Interior Department also launched a campaign to conserve 30 percent of US land and water by 2030, joining more than 50 other countries that have committed to that goal. Biden is pursuing the target, known as 30 by 30, alongside a new and more ambitious commitment to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Yet there’s one big problem with this post-Trump environmental renaissance: The US still hasn’t joined the most important international agreement to conserve biodiversity, known as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). And it isn’t just a small, inconsequential treaty. Designed to protect species, ecosystems, and genetic diversity, the treaty has been ratified by every other country or territory aside from the Holy See. Among other achievements, CBD has pushed countries to create national biodiversity strategies and to expand their networks of protected areas.

Since the early 1990s — when CBD was drafted, with input from the US — Republican lawmakers have blocked ratification, which requires a two-thirds Senate majority. They’ve argued that CBD would infringe on American sovereignty, put commercial interests at risk, and impose a financial burden, claims that environmental experts say have no support.

With Biden now in office, some experts see a pathway to ratification — certainly, environmental groups are calling for it — while others say there’s no chance of wooing enough Republicans. But they all agree on one thing: The US’s absence from the agreement harms biodiversity conservation at a time when such efforts are desperately needed.

[LFC]

WTF, Joe? And not even an explanation?

As president, Joe Biden has talked a lot about moving the United States away from fossil fuels to help meet his target to slash the nation’s planet-heating emissions in half by 2030. But it’s far from clear how this squares with that plan. According to The New York Times, the Biden administration has decided to back an enormous Trump-era oil and gas project drilling project in the North Slope of Alaska. The plan, approved by the Trump administration in October, was blocked in court in February when environmental groups sued the federal government, arguing it had overlooked the consequences for local wildlife and the global climate crisis. On Wednesday, the Biden administration filed new papers in U.S. District Court for Alaska defending the Trump-era project. The Interior Department refused a Times request to explain how its backing for the mass drilling project project fits with its climate pledges.

[LFC]

Real movement? I'm sure long-term investors want the big oil companies to remain highly profitable and that means planning for the greater use of renewables.

Yesterday was a bad day to be an oil company.

First, a court in the Netherlands ruled that Royal Dutch Shell needs to slash its emissions more than it had planned in order to meet Paris Agreement targets. The court ordered the oil supermajor to cut carbon pollution by 45 percent by the end of the decade.

Next, shareholders of ExxonMobil elected at least two board candidates—and possibly a third—put forth by activist investors who want the company to rein in its sprawling oil and gas operations and invest more in clean energy.

And lastly, Chevron’s shareholders rebuffed the company’s board to approve a proposal to reduce emissions produced by the use of its products, like the burning of gasoline.

Together, the legal ruling and shareholder votes appear to represent a dramatic shift in the way courts and shareholders plan to hold oil companies accountable in the face of a changing climate.

Here are the details of the Exxon vote.

The Exxon board vote sounded a similar warning. Hedge fund Engine No. 1, which Bloomberg reports as having no history of activism in oil and gas, put forward a slate of four candidates for the board. Their goal is to push the descendent of Standard Oil toward more investments in clean energy and to force the company to pare back new capital expenditures on oil and gas projects. Exxon spent $35 million to defeat the candidates and beat back the proposals.

Engine No. 1 was partly victorious thanks to votes from BlackRock, Exxon’s second-largest shareholder and the world’s largest investment manager, with more than $8.6 trillion under management. The firm has taken an increasingly aggressive stance on how companies it invests in should approach climate-related risks.

Two of Engine No. 1’s candidates won their elections outright, and the tally for a third was too close to announce. The new board members are Kaisa Hietala, former renewable products VP at Neste, a Finnish oil refiner, and Geoffrey Goff, former CEO of Andeavor, another oil refiner. The third candidate who may yet win is Alexander Karsner, a senior strategist at X, the Alphabet division.

In addition, Exxon shareholders approved two proposals aimed at increasing the transparency of the company’s lobbying efforts. One requires all lobbying expenses to be reported, and another requires the board to report on whether the company’s lobbying of lawmakers lines up with the Paris Agreement.

[AnBr]

www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/exxon-shell-and-chevron-suffer-major-setbacks-as-climate-concerns-cause-power-shift-113420869883

[LFC]

The Keystone XL pipeline dies a well deserved death.

Construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline was officially terminated on Wednesday, handing a big victory to environmentalists who fought the project for more than a decade as they intensified their battles against other fossil fuel development.

The decision by TC Energy and the government of Alberta to pull the plug on the $8 billion pipeline had been widely expected after Joe Biden scrapped the permit to build its US leg in one of his first acts as president.

“We remain disappointed and frustrated with the circumstances surrounding the Keystone XL project, including the cancellation of the presidential permit for the pipeline’s border crossing,” said Jason Kenney, Alberta premier.

The project, which would have carried bitumen from the oil sands of northern Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries, had faced opposition from the outset and became symbolic of the political stand-off over the future of fossil fuels in the US.

It was blocked in 2015 by then-president Barack Obama, who said it would undermine US attempts to address climate change. But Donald Trump signed an order to push it forward during his first week in office. Biden’s decision to revoke the permit fulfilled a pledge made on the campaign trail.

In Canada, where politicians had lobbied to keep the project alive, Biden’s decision was greeted with dismay. This was especially true in Alberta, where the province had taken a $1.1 billion stake in the project and lent TC Energy another $4.7 billion for construction. Some 150 km of the pipeline had already been installed in the Canadian province.

This project was busting with alarm bells and never should have been approved at any level. The taking of Native American land, the crossing of a large, critical aquifer, the caustic nature of this particular form of oil, coupled with the poor track record of the company pushing it should have caused their application to be DOA.

[Deleted]

I couldn't agree more, LFC - speaking as a Canadian, the only way this damned thing was going to die a death was for your country to deny the permits 'cos sure as eggs is eggs it's the only way Alberta will ever get it through their thick heads that the future of their province can no longer be tied to oil. If they'd put half as much thought and $$$ into green energy as they have into tar they might not be in the sad and sorry state they're in now. My only fear is that if there's a Conservative or Republican government in the future (and there will be, dammitalltohellandback) that pipeline will probably be resurrected, approved and built before anybody can say 'hang on a bit'!! I'm afraid I have a very bleak view of the future of this planet

[LFC]

The Clean Air Act has been wildly successful in terms of ROI, both in lives and dollars. (Bold is there's.) Of course that money doesn't directly and predictably funnel into the "right" pockets so it must be attacked rather than putting the needs of the nation first. Thanks for your "patriotism" Republicans.

In March 2011, EPA issued the Second Prospective Report which looked at the results of the Clean Air Act from 1990 to 2020. According to this study, the central benefits estimate exceeds costs by a factor of more than 30 to one. The report was updated in April 2011.

Emissions control programs that reduce air pollution from smokestacks and tailpipes provide enormous air quality and health benefits today, and the benefits will grow over time as programs take their full effect.

In 2020, the Clean Air Act Amendments will prevent over 230,000 early deaths. Most of the economic benefits (about 85 percent) are attributable to reductions in premature mortality associated with reductions in ambient particulate matter.

The 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments programs are projected to result in a net improvement in U.S. economic growth and the economic welfare of American households.

Our central benefits estimate exceeds costs by a factor of more than 30 to one, and the high benefits estimate exceeds costs by 90 times. Even the low benefits estimate exceeds costs by about three to one.

Image showing net improvement in economic welfareThis net improvement in economic welfare is projected to occur because cleaner air leads to better health and productivity for American workers as well as savings on medical expenses for air pollution-related health problems. The beneficial economic effects of these two improvements alone are projected to more than offset the expenditures for pollution control.

[LFC]

Welcome to the new reality in the American West.

Drought is here to stay in the Western U.S. How will states adapt?
Drought "is not a temporary condition we can expect to go away, but rather something we have to deal with," one expert said.

Trees are dying. Riverbeds are empty. Lake Mead's water level dropped to its lowest point in history, and Utah's governor asked residents to pray for rain.

Water is increasingly scarce in the Western U.S. — where 72 percent of the region is in "severe" drought, 26 percent is in exceptional drought, and populations are booming.

Insufficient monsoon rains last summer and low snowpacks over the winter left states like Arizona, Utah and Nevada without the typical amount of water they need, and forecasts for the rainy summer season don't show promise.

This year's aridity is happening against the backdrop of a 20-year-long drought. The past two decades have been the driest or the second driest in the last 1,200 years in the West, posing existential questions about how to secure a livable future in the region.

It's time to ask, "Is this a drought, or is it just the way the hydrology of the Colorado River is going to be?" said John Entsminger, the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.

And this is both insane and unsustainable.

A report this spring from Arizona State University's Kyl Center for Water Policy argues that "the perception that Arizona is worst off among the western states is wrong."

Irrigated agriculture consumes 74 percent of the state's water supply. But as populations boom, more farmland is becoming neighborhoods, driving down water use.

"Farming in the Sun Corridor faces a genuine crisis, but that does not necessarily translate into urban shortages," the report said. "Of course, the fact that the Sun Corridor's dominant city is named after a bird that periodically immolates itself clearly invites scrutiny."

It's not that Phoenix won't have water in 20 years, but rather that to ensure that it does, industry might need to rethink why Arizona, which is mostly desert, is one of the top three market-vegetable-producing states.

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How will the States adapt? Easy. Reversing migration. Back to the Great Lakes region. From Scottsdale, AZ to Scotts, MI.