University of Adelaide researchers have constructed a marine food web to show how climate change could affect our future fish supplies and marine biodiversity.
Published today in Global Change Biology, the researchers found that high CO2 expected by the end of the century which causes ocean acidification will boost production at different levels of the food web, but ocean warming canceled this benefit by causing stress to marine animals, preventing them using the increased resources efficiently for their own growth and development. The result was a collapsing food web.
Read more at Ocean Warming to Cancel Increased Carbon Dioxide-Driven Productivity
A new analysis quantifies the 'Trump Effect' on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, finding emissions begin to flatten or increase by 2020 under his policy plans.
President Donald Trump's planned climate change policies could lead to an extra half a billion tons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 2025, according to a new analysis. That is equal to the annual electricity emissions of 60 percent of U.S. homes.
Climate Advisers, a Washington consultancy, predicts that U.S. carbon emissions, which have been falling, will begin to flatten or increase by 2020 if the Trump administration succeeds in repealing the Clean Power Plan and other Obama-era regulations.
In other words, decisions made today will have a delayed effect—but a prolonged one.
"We found that the 'Trump Effect' really begins to bite into the U.S. emissions trajectory in 2025—since many of the factors influencing today's emissions trajectory can't be reversed quickly," the report said.
The analysis assumes that some regulations are more vulnerable than others to rollbacks. The Clean Power Plan to curb carbon emissions from power plants, methane rules covering the oil and gas industry and a handful of efficiency regulations are "highly vulnerable" in the consulting firm's view, either because they're high profile or because they haven't been fully implemented. If these are the only rules the Trump administration is able to repeal, it would erase 332 million metric tons of carbon pollution cuts, Climate Advisers projected.
If, however, the Trump administration succeeds also in eliminating "moderately vulnerable" rules—those controlling landfill emissions, potent refrigeration gases such as HFCs and several energy efficiency standards—another 229 million tons of projected emissions cuts would not happen, the report finds.
Read more at Trump's Climate Cuts Could Result in Half-Billion Extra Tons of CO2 in the Air
Environmental and climate regulations that cut pollution from coal-fired power plants have played only a minor role in the decline of the coal industry, which has been hurt mainly by expanding use of natural gas and less demand for electricity, according to a Columbia University report published this week.
U.S. coal use fell by about 30 percent between 2011 and 2016. The paper attributes about half of that decline to low natural gas prices, 26 percent to falling demand for electricity and 18 percent to growth in renewable energy such as wind and solar. Only 3.5 percent of the coal industry’s decline is due to environmental and climate regulations that took effect prior to 2016.
The paper is among the first analyses to attribute specific factors in the decline of the coal industry in terms of percentages. Its conclusions contradict Trump administration claims that Obama-era climate and environmental regulations are the main reason the coal industry has declined in recent years.
Trump and other lawmakers have said President Obama’s efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions amount to a “war on coal” and have put coal miners out of work and prevented the country from being energy independent.
Yet, the U.S. is among the world’s largest producers of fossil fuel. It is the world’s largest producer of natural gas, second-largest producer of crude oil, and third-largest coal producer. The coal industry is also becoming increasingly automated, reducing the need for workers.
Read more at Environmental Rules Played Minor Role in Coal’s Decline
President Trump has directed the Interior Department to “review” all large national monuments created since 1996 to recommend ways for Congress to shrink or abolish them.
The directive came in the form of an executive order signed by the president Wednesday morning. It requires the department to make preliminary recommendations within 45 days and affects only those monuments that are larger than 100,000 acres.
Each of the monuments in the crosshairs was created using the Antiquities Act, a 1906 law that allows a president to unilaterally give national monument status to federal public land without congressional action. Historically, many monuments created using the act were later upgraded by Congress to become national parks.
“The Antiquities Act does not give the federal government unlimited power to lock up millions of acres of land and water, and it is time we ended this abusive practice,” Trump said before signing the order, singling out the new Bears Ears National Monument in Utah as an example. “I’m directing (Interior) Secretary (Ryan) Zinke to end these abuses and return control to the people — the people of Utah, the people of all the states, the people of the United States.”
In reality, the monuments are public land and most of them were public prior to being designated as national monuments. Federal law requires the government to include the public in many decisions about how the land is managed.
Zinke said Tuesday that the size of new monuments has been increasing in recent years, and the review is designed to investigate if they’ve been made too large without sufficient public input. He is expected to issue preliminary recommendations for Congressional actions to Trump within 45 days followed by a final report in four months.
National monuments play a role in America’s response and contribution to climate change because many of them harbor vast reserves of fossil fuel and timber, which are mostly made off limits to development when a monument is created. The monuments protect ecosystems vulnerable to climate change, store atmospheric carbon in dense forests and, in some cases, serve as sources of water for nearby communities.
Read more at How Trump’s Monuments Review Could Impact Climate
As President Trump prepares to mark 100 days in office, we spend the hour with the world-renowned linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky. Amy Goodman spoke to him on Monday night at the First Parish Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The conversation addressed climate change, nuclear weapons, North Korea, Iran, the war in Syria and the Trump administration’s threat to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Amy Goodman began by asking him about the Republican Party.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about this comment that you made that the Republican Party, you said, is the most dangerous organization in world history. Can you explain?
NOAM CHOMSKY: I also said that it’s an extremely outrageous statement. But the question is whether it’s true. I mean, has there ever been an organization in human history that is dedicated, with such commitment, to the destruction of organized human life on Earth? Not that I’m aware of. Is the Republican organization—I hesitate to call it a party—committed to that? Overwhelmingly. There isn’t even any question about it.
Take a look at the last primary campaign—plenty of publicity, very little comment on the most significant fact. Every single candidate either denied that what is happening is happening—namely, serious move towards environmental catastrophe—or there were a couple of moderates, so-called—Jeb Bush, who said, "Maybe it’s happening. We really don’t know. But it doesn’t matter, because fracking is working fine, so we can get more fossil fuels." Then there was the guy who was called the adult in the room, John Kasich, the one person who said, "Yes, it’s true. Global warming’s going on. But it doesn’t matter." He’s the governor of Ohio. "In Ohio, we’re going to go on using coal for energy, and we’re not going to apologize for it." So that’s 100 percent commitment to racing towards disaster.
Then take a look at what’s happened since. The—November 8th was the election. There was, as most of you know, I’m sure, a very important conference underway in Morocco, Marrakesh, Morocco. Almost roughly 200 countries at the United Nations-sponsored conference, which was—the goal of which was to put some specific commitments into the verbal agreements that were reached at Paris in December 2015, the preceding international conference on global warming. The Paris conference did intend to reach a verifiable treaty, but they couldn’t, because of the most dangerous organization in human history. The Republican Congress would not accept any commitments, so therefore the world was left with verbal promises, but no commitments. Well, last November 8th, they were going to try to carry that forward. On November 8th, in fact, there was a report by the World Meteorological Organization, a very dire analysis of the state of the environment and the likely prospects, also pointed out that we’re coming perilously close to the tipping point, where—which was the goal of the—the goal of the Paris negotiations was to keep things below that—coming very close to it, and other ominous predictions. At that point, the conference pretty much stopped, because the news came in about the election.
And it turns out that the most powerful country in human history, the richest, most powerful, most influential, the leader of the free world, has just decided not only not to support the efforts, but actively to undermine them. So there’s the whole world on one side, literally, at least trying to do something or other, not enough maybe, although some places are going pretty far, like Denmark, couple of others; and on the other side, in splendid isolation, is the country led by the most dangerous organization in human history, which is saying, "We’re not part of this. In fact, we’re going to try to undermine it." We’re going to maximize the use of fossil fuels—could carry us past the tipping point. We’re not going to provide funding for—as committed in Paris, to developing countries that are trying to do something about the climate problems. We’re going to dismantle regulations that retard the impact, the devastating impact, of production of carbon dioxide and, in fact, other dangerous gases—methane, others.
OK. So the conference kind of pretty much came to a halt. The question—it continued, but the question was: Can we salvage something from this wreckage? And pretty amazingly, the countries of the world were looking for salvation to a different country: China. Here we have a world looking for salvation to China, of all places, when the United States is the wrecking machine that’s threatening destruction, in—with all three branches of government in the hands of the most dangerous organization in human history.
And I don’t have to go through what’s happened since, but the—in general, the Cabinet appointments are designed to—assigned to people whose commitment and beliefs are that it’s necessary to destroy everything in their department that could be of any use to human beings and wouldn’t just increase profits and power. And they’re doing it very systematically, one after another. EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, has been very sharply cut. Actually, the main department that’s concerned with environmental issues is the Department of Energy, which also had very sharp cuts, particularly in the environment-related programs. In fact, there’s even a ban on posting and publishing information and material about this.
Read more at Chomsky on the GOP: Has Any Organization Ever Been So Committed to Destruction of Life on Earth?
Energy Secretary Rick Perry supports remaining in the Paris climate agreement, but wants the United States to renegotiate its terms, he said Tuesday.
That puts him on one side of a schism forming within President Donald Trump’s White House over how to handle the historic 195-country deal to slash emissions of greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, first daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, senior adviser Jared Kushner, support remaining in the agreement; chief strategist Steve Bannon and Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt ― two of the more radical, far-right voices in the White House ― want Trump to fulfill his campaign promise to exit the agreement.
Perry, in a Tuesday morning speech at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance conference, tempered his view. He touted decreasing emissions last year in the U.S. and China ― the world’s top polluters ― and criticized European countries, such as Germany, for not doing enough to shrink their own carbon footprint.
“There’s a lot of cheerleading the Paris accord and keeping the United States involved in that,” Perry said. “But the two countries that are making the real impact on emissions are the U.S. and China. So, I’m looking over at my friends in Germany and France going, ‘What are you all doing?’”
It’s true that German emissions rose by 0.7 percent last year, driven largely by an increase in vehicles on the road and the continued use of coal to generate about 40 percent of the country’s electricity. The numbers stand in stark contrast to Germany’s hard-line policy supporting renewable energy, which now produces 30 percent of its electricity. The country plans to shutter all its nuclear power plants by 2022 as part of its energiewende, or energy transition, policy.
“You have Germany, for instance, who has made the decision to go away from coal, to get out of the nuclear business, to double down, to hear them tell it, on renewables,” Perry said. “But the fact is their emissions have gone up because they’re using more coal, and they’re using coal that is not clean technology.”
“My point is, don’t sign an agreement and then expect us to stay in an agreement if you’re not going to really participate and be part of it,” he added. “The United States has taken actions to affect in a positive way. I’m not going to tell the president of the United States, ‘Let’s just walk away from the Paris accord,’ but we probably need to renegotiate it and they need to get serious about it.”
Read more at Energy Secretary Rick Perry Supports Paris Climate Agreement, but Wants to Tweak It
