Germany fired back at Rick Perry’s criticism of Europe for not living up to its vow to fight climate change, saying the U.S. energy secretary’s suggestion to renegotiate the landmark Paris accord is “absurd.”
The 2015 global agreement to limit global warming-causing gases already lets nations adjust their own emissions targets, making it pointless for the U.S. to reopen talks in hopes of winning more favorable terms, said German environment ministry spokesman Michael Schroeren.
“That is, in the first place absurd, and secondly from the U.S. point of view completely unnecessary,” Schroeren said in a statement to Bloomberg. “The Paris accord is a dynamic accord. It allows signatory states much flexibility.”
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Regarding Paris
Schroeren welcomed Perry’s call for the U.S. to remain party to the Paris accord, brokered in 2015 in the French capital by more than 190 nations.
The U.S. energy secretary’s statements Tuesday marked one of the first times a member of Trump’s cabinet has made a direct public call for remaining part of the agreement. The president, who vowed to “cancel” the agreement during the campaign, is expected to announce his decision next month, when world leaders gather for the Group of Seven summit in Italy.
Trump may deny the Paris accord’s underlying premise. But it’s unclear what, if anything, the president wants to renegotiate about the deal itself, said Alden Meyer, who has followed climate talks for two decades as director of policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Flexible Mechanisms
“What is it that he doesn’t like about the agreement? The fact that it lets each country set its own goals? The fact that it requires India and China to come up to our level of reporting and transparency? The fact that it allows flexible market mechanisms?” Meyer said. “This really is a made-in-America agreement.”
Read more at Germany Calls Rick Perry’s Push to Rework Paris Climate Agreement ‘Absurd’
Calculating the costs of natural disasters is a valuable way for governments to recognize and limit the potential for damage, especially as extreme weather linked to climate change occurs more often, the United Nations' disaster prevention chief says.
Recent deadly landslides caused by floods in Peru and Colombia show the urgent need for governments to prepare better and invest more, said Robert Glasser, head of the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR).
"It's important to quantify the costs. As long as the costs of these disasters are invisible, it is very easy to ignore them, and it's very hard to make the case to spend money on prevention," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview this week.
"It's about tying climate risk together with disaster risk more broadly and quantifying the costs historically and projecting future costs," he said.
The heavy human toll and economic damage of flooding were laid bare in Colombia this month when two landslides killed more than 330 people and left thousands of others homeless.
Flooding in Peru last month killed more than 100 people, while Hurricane Matthew in Haiti last year caused more than 600 deaths and $2.7 billion in economic losses.
"With climate change, we are seeing a marked increase in extreme weather," Glasser said.
Global economic losses from disasters have reached an average of $250 billion to $300 billion annually, according to a 2015 report by UNISDR.
A yearly global investment of $6 billion would pay off in benefits of $360 billion in less damage and fewer economic losses in 15 years, the report said.
Yet spending on preparedness and resilience remains low. The U.N. has called on governments to spend at least 1 percent of development aid by 2020 on disaster preparation, but they currently spend just half that amount.
Read more at U.N. Risk Chief: Put a Price on Disasters
Rechargeable zinc-based batteries could not only store as much energy as lithium-ion batteries but also be safer, cheaper, smaller and lighter, new research finds. The results suggest zinc batteries could find use in mild hybrids (microhybrids), electric vehicles, electric bicycles, and eventually perhaps smartphones and power grid storage.
The researchers are now aggressively testing these batteries and exploring scaling up this technology. “We feel we can have a battery ready for the market by the end of 2019,” says Michael Burz, CEO of energy technology firm EnZinc in San Anselmo, Calif., which helped engineer the new batteries.
When it comes to electric vehicles, the new batteries will “be 30 to 50 percent cheaper than comparable lithium-ion systems,” Burz says.
Lithium-ion batteries have become notorious for safety incidents resulting from overheating, at times bursting into flames and even exploding. The U.S. Navy was researching alternative technologies because “there's a Navy and a broader military concern with the safety of lithium-ion batteries—on soldiers, on sailors, on platforms,” says Debra Rolison, head of the advanced electrochemical materials section at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and one of the researchers involved in the zinc breakthrough.
Zinc-based batteries do not pose the same fire risk linked with lithium-ion batteries, and can in principle match or surpass them in terms of specific energy (energy per unit mass), as well as energy density (energy per unit volume). Moreover, zinc is cheap and widely available. All these features help explain why zinc-based batteries “are the go-to global battery for single-use applications,” Rolison says.
Read more at Zinc Battery Breakthrough Could Mean Safer, Lighter Cars and Smartphones
There is no legal precedent for Trump to undo Obama's order of permanent protection from drilling, and action by Congress would take years.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Friday aimed at resurrecting offshore drilling in the Arctic—an area that Barack Obama had protected in one of his final moves as president.
It comes during a flurry of executive orders issued this week as Trump nears his 100th day in office, and is among several administration actions designed to unleash unfettered fossil fuel production on public lands and waterways. But when it comes to drilling in the Arctic, it's not clear just how much Trump can legally accomplish, and any attempt to overturn existing protections will likely face a protracted legal battle from environmental advocates.
When Obama ordered the permanent protection of nearly 120 million acres of Arctic and Atlantic waters from drilling just a month before he left office, many wondered just how "permanent" that would be.
The area in question includes the entirety of the Chukchi Sea and most of the Beaufort Sea off Alaska, as well as a stretch of the Atlantic Ocean from Massachusetts to Virginia. Obama's executive order relied on his powers under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953 (OCSLA), which allows a president to withdraw certain areas from drilling.
Trump's order, called the America-First Offshore Energy Strategy, directs Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to lift the ban in some of the areas Obama had sought to protect. It also directs Zinke to review the current five-year plan, which dictates which federal waters can be leased and does not include the banned areas.
The executive order also instructs regulators to reexamine their policy on seismic testing in areas where it is currently not allowed, and it instructs Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to review marine monuments and sanctuaries created or expanded in the past 10 years, while refraining from designating any news ones.
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Legally, Trump may be on shaky ground when it comes to overturning Obama's withdrawal, though. The legal underpinning of Obama's move—OCSLA—states that "The President of the United States may, from time to time, withdraw from disposition any of the unleased lands of the outer Continental Shelf."
So Obama clearly had the authority to issue the ban, said David Uhlmann, the director of the Environmental Law and Policy Program at the University of Michigan Law School. "The more difficult question is whether a subsequent president can alter that withdrawal, or whether it is truly permanent," he said.
Those defending the ban will likely argue that because the act does not explicitly say that subsequent presidents can undo a withdrawal, it should stand.
"No prior presidents have ever purported to undo a permanent withdrawal once it's been put in place," said Erik Grafe, an attorney with Earthjustice. "It'd be an unprecedented action and, we think, unlawful."
Read more at Trump Moves to Lift Arctic Offshore Drilling Ban, but It Might Not Be So Easy
An appeals court agreed to delay ruling on the Obama plan to rein in global warming emissions.
A federal appeals court on Friday temporarily granted the Trump administration's request to defer ruling on the validity of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, and said it would next consider handing the far-reaching climate rules back to the Environmental Protection Agency to be overhauled or even dismantled.
It was a significant tactical advance for EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who on President Donald Trump's orders is working to undo the CPP, which would regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and is critical to meeting U.S. pledges under the Paris climate agreement.
But the court did not give Pruitt all he wanted. He had sought an indefinite hiatus—or "abeyance," in legal jargon—for as long as it took for him to decide what to do about controlling carbon dioxide emissions, which the Supreme Court has repeatedly found to be EPA's mandate under the Clean Air Act.
Instead, the appeals court granted an abeyance for just 60 days. It asked the adversaries who have been fighting in court ever since the rules were proposed to submit briefs in just over two weeks on whether the painstakingly devised regulations should be "remanded"—basically sent back to EPA's drawing board.
If that happens, electric power plants, especially those burning coal, which have long produced a major proportion of U.S. greenhouse gases, would be allowed indefinitely to continue doing so largely unfettered by federal constraints. They would be mitigated only by market forces, state and local laws, and rules governing other pollutions.
David Doniger, a lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the ruling disappointing, but not devastating. He noted that if the rule is remanded to Trump's EPA, the Supreme Court stay could be lifted and the Obama version could remain in force, pending its reconsideration.
Even if the appeals court ultimately decides not to cede the field entirely to the Trump-Pruitt EPA, it's hard to see at this point how anything but delay and uncertainty lies ahead for the next few years.
Read more at Trump's EPA Wins Advantage in Campaign to Dismantle Clean Power Plan
President Trump on Friday called for the review of a five-year plan for offshore oil and gas leasing that the Obama administration put in place to keep large swaths of the Atlantic and Arctic off-limits to fossil fuel development.
Trump signed an executive order calling for the review during a ceremony at the White House. It comes just before the symbolic 100-day mark of his administration and instructs the Commerce Department to also review all marine sanctuaries created or expanded in the past 10 years. The order echoes another signed earlier this week for a review of all large national monuments established since 1996 and recommending ways for Congress to shrink or abolish them.
The latest order is part of a concerted effort to roll back Obama-era environmental regulations — such as the Clean Power Plan and a moratorium on federal coal leasing — put in place in part to curb the greenhouse gases emitted by the burning of fossil fuels. Those emissions are raising global temperatures and sea levels, as well as impacting weather patterns and the health of ecosystems.
Trump and officials in his administration, many of whom have connections to the oil and gas industry, have decried those regulations as “job killing” and preventing economic growth. They have also cited them as a threat to national security. Trump promised during his campaign to roll them back and bolster America’s declining coal industry as well as fully exploit the country’s fossil fuel reserves.
“This executive order starts the process of opening offshore areas to job-creating, energy exploration,” Trump said in remarks before the signing. “It reverses the previous administration’s Arctic leasing ban and directs Secretary Zinke to allow responsible development of offshore areas that will bring revenue to our treasury and jobs to our workers.”
The new order “puts us on track for American energy independence,” Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told reporters Thursday evening.
Zinke is charged with carrying out the review of the current five-year offshore leasing plan over the next couple of years. In the meantime, that plan “remains in existence; there is no immediate change,” Zinke said.
Under the current leasing plan, 3.8 million acres of the Atlantic and 115 million acres of the Arctic under U.S. jurisdiction are placed off-limits for leasing. Offshore leasing accounts for about 16 percent of U.S. oil production and 5 percent of natural gas production, with about 97 percent of that activity occurring in the western Gulf of Mexico. The plan did allow for leasing in 2.8 million acres of the Beaufort Sea off of Alaska.
Read more at Trump Orders Review of Obama Offshore Drilling Plan
