Michael Bloomberg Takes On The Coal Industry

The New Yorker - Carolyn Kormann

The former New York City mayor lays out his vision for the future of clean energy. Photograph by Ray Tamarra / GC / Getty

On Monday afternoon, Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire businessman and former three-term mayor of New York City, escaped to a deserted ballroom at the Grand Hyatt, in midtown Manhattan, to talk about climate change. Moments earlier, he had announced to attendees of the Bloomberg New Energy Finance summit that his philanthropic organization was partnering with the Canadian and British governments to expedite the global eradication of coal mining. His two new partners—Catherine McKenna, Canada’s minister of environment and climate change, and Claire Perry, the United Kingdom’s minister of state for energy and clean growth—came along for the discussion.
As the only person not representing a country, Bloomberg, in his new role as the U.N.’s special envoy for climate action, seemed like a substitute for American leadership—an alternative to the climate-denying Trump Administration, which Bloomberg called “a meshuggener.” But he immediately brushed aside the idea that the federal government, in this country, at least, can have a major impact on fuel sources or climate policy. “Coal will go away in any place where there’s a free market, for sure, because the market just forces that, the economics force it,” he told me. “O.K., the federal government can change some environmental regulations, but companies are going to put in the environmental safeguards anyway. Their stockholders are insisting on it, their employees are insisting on it, their customers are insisting on it, and, at the state level, they’re insisting on it.” Of greater concern, he said, are countries in which “the government has set the price for coal or whatever and is subsidizing it.” Last fall, McKenna and Perry founded the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which aims, in part, to help these countries adopt cleaner fuels. Sixty nations, states, cities, and companies have so far joined its polyglot roster.
At a few points during the conversation, Bloomberg returned to the idea that future targets for eliminating coal plants—2030 for developed countries; 2040 for China; 2050 for the rest of the world—don’t resonate with the public. “Twenty-anything sounds a long ways away, and so people don’t get their heads around it,” he said. “If you want people to sign on to an environmental issue, convince them that it is not climate change, it’s the environment. You say, ‘It’s your kid who’s going to go to the hospital with an asthma attack.’ ” Bloomberg drew an analogy with another of his causes, the fight against tobacco. “If you smoke—and you’ve got to be really stupid to smoke—then Darwin is at work,” he said. “The trouble with this stuff, what we’re talking about here, is you can do stupid things that hurt everybody for a long time.” McKenna noted that, in Ontario, once coal power was entirely eliminated, the province went from having fifty smog days a year to none.
One of the summit’s speakers, earlier in the day, was Rick Perry, the Secretary of Energy, who is an unashamed supporter of the coal industry. (Last week, a former D.O.E. employee petitioned for whistle-blower status, alleging “evidence of criminal corruption, obstruction of justice, and ethics violations” related to Perry’s relationship with the coal tycoon Robert Murray.) In his remarks, Perry said that his department was currently examining an emergency request from FirstEnergy Solutions, one of the largest electric utilities in the country, for help saving its struggling nuclear and coal plants. The company recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and was asking Perry to invoke an obscure provision of the Federal Power Act that would keep its plants online by guaranteeing their profits. (One of the company’s D.C. lobbyists, Jeff Miller, was the campaign manager for Perry’s 2016 Presidential run.) Critics such as Nora Mead Brownell, who served on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under George W. Bush, have argued that granting FirstEnergy’s request would be a heavy-handed intervention in a competitive power market. Brownell called the request a “real tragedy.”
“It does not help that our federal government is opposed to some rational things and is putting out some of the drivel that they do,” Bloomberg said. “But I would say that President Trump has been phenomenally helpful in galvanizing the pro-environmental people.” To date, Bloomberg Philanthropies has spent a hundred and twenty-five million dollars on its anti-coal campaigns, funnelling much of the money to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal initiative, which targets communities where coal plants are located. (Some has also gone to job-training charities in coal country, to support out-of-work miners.) Since Bloomberg first became active on the issue, in 2011, fifty per cent of this country’s coal plants have been retired. His hope, he said, is to see just a handful of coal plants left in the United States in a few years. The next thing to worry about, he continued, is the shipping industry. “They use this terrible bunker oil,” he said. He could start by addressing his own foundation’s investments: Bloomberg Philanthropies has divested its portfolios from coal but not from oil or gas.
On Tuesday, however, Perry’s old friend and campaign supporter Robert Murray, the founder and C.E.O. of Murray Energy, the biggest private coal company in the country, addressed the summit. “I’m probably the only coal guy in this room,” he said. Murray owns a large number of the domestic mines that sell coal to FirstEnergy, and he was there to make the case that coal is the only reliable fuel source that this country has—especially during extreme weather events such as this winter’s bomb cyclone. It was his opinion that the federal government must intervene. “It’s probably the only option right now,” he said. “We have the responsibility to make sure grandma doesn’t die on the operating table.” Perry, in his speech, had been more circumspect about FirstEnergy’s request. “It’s not the only way,” he said. McKenna, for her part, believes that the reliability question is a canard. “There’s this idea that you need to have coal for stability of the grid, and that’s just not true,” she said. In Canada, she noted, eighty per cent of energy is clean, meaning that the nation’s electric grid is mostly not backstopped by coal.
Murray Energy holds about three billion dollars in coal reserves. Bloomberg is worth fifty billion. Whom will the Trump Administration heed?

Links

• More than 20 Countries Launch Global Alliance to Phase Out Coal
• Sometimes Fighting Climate Change Means Breaking the Law
• There’s a Dangerous Bubble in the Fossil-Fuel Economy, and the Trump Administration Is Making It Worse
• Au Revoir: Trump Exits the Paris Climate Agreement

5 Plants and Animals Utterly Confused By Climate Change

New York Times - Livia Albeck-Ripka | Brad Plumer

Global warming is causing spring to arrive early and autumn to come late in many places, and not all species are adapting at the same rate.

Lauren Kolesinskas for The New York Times

Every year, as the seasons change, a complex ballet unfolds around the world. Trees in the Northern Hemisphere leaf out in the spring as frost recedes. Caterpillars hatch to gorge on leaves. Bees and butterflies emerge to pollinate flowers. Birds leave the Southern Hemisphere and fly thousands of miles to lay eggs and feast on insects in the north.
All of these species stay in sync with each other by relying on environmental cues, much as ballet dancers move to orchestral music.
But global warming is changing the music, with spring now arriving several weeks earlier in parts of the world than it did a few decades ago. Not all species are adjusting to this warming at the same rate, and, as a result, some are falling out of step.
Scientists who study the changes in plants and animals triggered by seasons have a term for this: phenological mismatch. And they’re still trying to understand exactly how such mismatches — like the blooming of a flower before its pollinator emerges — might affect ecosystems.
In some cases, species might simply adapt by shifting their ranges, or eating different foods. But if species can’t adapt quickly enough, these mismatches could have “significant negative impacts,” said Madeleine Rubenstein, a biologist at the United States Geological Survey’s National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center.
“If you look at the past history of climate on earth, there has never been such a dramatic, rapid, change in the climate,” said Andrea Santangeli, a postdoctoral researcher at the Finnish Museum of Natural History. “Species have to respond really fast,” he said, “that’s really unprecedented.”
Here are five examples of mismatch, just one of the many threats that species face from global warming, that scientists have discovered so far:

An orchid’s sex life turns bleak
The early spider orchid relies on deception to reproduce. Each spring, the orchid, whose bulbous crimson body looks like an insect, releases a pheromone that tricks solitary male bees into thinking the plant is a mating partner — a key step for pollination.
This ruse, which scientists call pseudocopulation, works because the orchid tends to bloom during a specific window each spring — shortly after lonely male bees emerge from hibernation but before female bees appear.
Yet with spring coming earlier, female bees are now emerging sooner and luring the male bees away from the lovelorn orchid, according to a 2014 study from Britain.
By examining data collected in herbariums and in the field over a century, the researchers found that the gap between the times when male bees and female bees emerge shrinks by about 6.6 days for each degree Celsius of warming, giving the orchid less opportunity to reproduce.
“The main finding is that things are getting increasingly bad for orchid pollination,” said Anthony Davy, a professor of biological science at the University of East Anglia, and the lead author of the paper. For this orchid — which is already rare — the future looks bleak, he said.

Spring comes early, but the flycatcher doesn’t
The European pied flycatcher runs on a tight schedule each spring.
From its wintering grounds in Africa, the bird flies thousands of miles north to Europe to lay eggs in time for the emergence of winter moth caterpillars, which appear for a few weeks each spring to munch on young oak leaves.
By timing this just right, the flycatchers ensure there’s enough food around when their hungry chicks hatch. In a series of studies in the 2000s, however, scientists in the Netherlands showed that many flycatchers were starting to miss this narrow window.
As spring temperatures warmed, oak trees were leafing out earlier and peak caterpillar season was arriving up to two weeks sooner in some places. But many flycatchers, which appear to schedule their departure from Africa based on the length of day there, were not getting to Europe early enough for their spring meals.
In the parts of the Netherlands where peak caterpillar season had advanced the fastest, the scientists later found, flycatcher populations dwindled sharply. “That was the big discovery that suggested this mismatch could have real consequences for populations,” said Christiaan Both, an ecologist at the University of Groningen.

 Scientists who study the changes in flora and fauna triggered by seasons have termed this phenomenon ‘phenological mismatch’ Getty

Birds and tractors get too close for comfort
Climate change doesn’t just cause missed connections. In some cases, the advance of warmer weather can lead to perilous meetings.
In Finland, for example, the Northern lapwing and Eurasian curlew have usually built their ground nests on barley fields after farmers have sown their crops in the spring. But as temperatures have risen, the birds are now increasingly laying their eggs before the farmers get to the fields, which means their well-concealed nests are more likely to get destroyed by tractors and other machinery.
Looking at 38 years of data, researchers found that farmers in Finland are now sowing their fields a week earlier in response to warmer temperatures, but the birds are laying their eggs two to three weeks earlier. “This has created a phenological mismatch,” said Mr. Santangeli, the lead author of the study. “The response we’ll see is declines of these birds.”

Caribou show up late for lunch
Caribou in western Greenland follow a strict seasonal diet. In the winter, they eat lichen along the coast. In the spring and summer, they venture inland to give birth to their calves and eat the Arctic plants that grow there.
As Greenland has warmed up and sea ice has declined, however, those inland Arctic plants have been emerging earlier — with some plant species now greening 26 days earlier than they did a decade ago. But the caribou have not shifted their migration as quickly. And scientists have documented a troubling trend in the region: More caribou calves appear to be dying early in years when the spring plant growth preceded the caribou’s calving season.
While that study only found a correlation between warmer temperatures and caribou calf deaths, “it’s consistent with the idea that mismatch is disadvantageous,” said Eric Post, an ecology professor at the University of California, Davis. When Arctic plants green up earlier, they may become tougher and less nutritious by the time the caribou get there and start eating them.
Why don’t the caribou speed up their migration? One possibility is that their reproductive cycles respond most strongly to seasonal signals like the length of the day, whereas plants respond more strongly to local temperatures, which are rising.
In theory, if given enough time, the caribou might eventually adjust as natural selection takes its course and favors individuals that calve earlier. But with the Arctic warming faster than the rest of the globe, Dr. Post said, “the question is whether things are changing too fast for evolution to matter.”

The snowshoe hare has a wardrobe malfunction
Climate change doesn’t just cause mismatches in the spring. Consider the snowshoe hare, whose fur coat has evolved to change from brown to white during the winter for camouflage. As the earth has warmed, however, snow cover in the hare’s habitat melts sooner, leaving the animal more exposed to predators.
“Camouflage is critical to keep prey animals alive,” said L. Scott Mills, a professor of wildlife biology at the University of Montana who studies the impacts of camouflage mismatch on species like the snowshoe hare.
For every week the hare is mismatched, Dr. Mills and his colleagues found, it had a 7 percent higher chance of being killed by predators like the lynx.
Currently, the hare is only mismatched by a week or two. But by midcentury, Dr. Mills said, that could extend up to eight weeks. If that were to happen, he said, the hare “would start declining toward extinction.”
There is some good news for the snowshoe hare, however. Where evolution was previously thought to take millions of years, scientists now think an animal like the hare could adapt in five to 10 generations, especially if those parts of the hare population which are more adaptable are protected.
“It does give us an avenue for hope,” Dr. Mills said. “It’s not a foregone conclusion that species with phenological mismatch are going to go extinct.”

Links

• Climate Change Denialists Say Polar Bears Are Fine. Scientists Are Pushing Back.
• Shell predicted dangers of fossil fuels and climate change in 1980s
• Washington's cherry blossoms bloom later this year
• Fiji’s existence threatened by ‘frightening new era’ of climate change
• Warm water rapidly melting Antarctica from below due to climate change

Climate Change Is Slowing Atlantic Currents That Help Keep Europe Warm

The Conversation - Peter T. Spooner

Natalie Renier/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Author provided

The ocean currents that help warm the Atlantic coasts of Europe and North America have significantly slowed since the 1800s and are at their weakest in 1600 years, according to new research my colleagues and I have conducted. As we’ve set out in a new study in Nature, the weakening of this ocean circulation system may have begun naturally but is probably being continued by climate change related to greenhouse gas emissions.
This circulation is a key player in the Earth’s climate system and a large or abrupt slowdown could have global repercussions. It could cause sea levels on the US east coast to rise, alter European weather patterns or rain patterns more globally, and hurt marine wildlife.
We know that at the end of the last major ice age, rapid fluctuations in the circulation led to extreme climate shifts on a global scale. An exaggerated (but terrifying) example of such a sudden event was portrayed in the 2004 blockbuster film The Day After Tomorrow.


The Day After Tomorrow - Official® Trailer

The recent weakening we have found was likely driven by warming in the north Atlantic and the addition of freshwater from increased rainfall and melting ice. It has been predicted many times but, until now, just how much weakening has already occurred has largely remained a mystery. The extent of the changes we have discovered comes as a surprise to many, including myself, and points to significant changes in the future.
The circulation system in question is known as the “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation” (AMOC). The AMOC is like a giant conveyor belt of water. It transports warm, salty water to the north Atlantic where it gets very cold and sinks. Once in the deep ocean the water flows back southwards and then all around the world’s oceans. This conveyor belt is one of the most important transporters of heat in the climate system and includes the Gulf Stream, known for keeping western Europe warm.
Climate models have consistently predicted that the AMOC will slow down due to greenhouse gas warming and associated changes in the water cycle. Because of these predictions – and the possibility of abrupt climate changes – scientists have monitored the AMOC since 2004 with instruments strung out across the Atlantic at key locations. But to really test the model predictions and work out how climate change is affecting the conveyor we have needed much longer records.

Looking for patterns
To create these records, our research group – led by University College London’s Dr David Thornalley – used the idea that a change in the AMOC has a unique pattern of impact on the ocean. When the AMOC gets weaker, the north-eastern Atlantic Ocean cools and parts of the western Atlantic get warmer by a specific amount. We can look for this pattern in past records of ocean temperature to trace what the circulation was like in the past.
Another study in the same issue of Nature, led by researchers at the University of Potsdam in Germany, used historical observations of temperature to check the fingerprint. They found that the AMOC had reduced in strength by around 15% since 1950, pointing to the role of human-made greenhouse gas emissions as the primary cause.
In our paper, which also forms part of the EU ATLAS project, we found the same fingerprint. But instead of using historical observations we used our expertise in past climate research to go back much further in time. We did this by combining known records of the remains of tiny marine creatures found in deep-sea mud. Temperature can be worked out by looking at the amounts of different species and the chemical compositions of their skeletons.


Introduction to ATLAS

We were also able to directly measure the past deep ocean current speeds by looking at the mud itself. Larger grains of mud imply faster currents, while smaller grains mean the currents were weaker. Both techniques point to a weakening of the AMOC since about 1850, again by about 15% to 20%. Importantly, the modern weakening is very different to anything seen over the last 1,600 years, pointing to a combination of natural and human drivers.
The difference in timing of the start of the AMOC weakening in the two studies will require more scientific attention. Despite this difference, both of the new studies raise important questions regarding whether climate models simulate the historical changes in ocean circulation, and whether we need to revisit some of our future projections.
However, each additional long record makes it easier to evaluate how well the models simulate this key element of the climate system. In fact, evaluating models against these long records may be a crucial step if we hope to accurately predict possible extreme AMOC events and their climate impacts.

Links

• Anomalously weak Labrador Sea convection and Atlantic overturning during the past 150 years
• What Caused the Younger Dryas Cold Event?
• On The Driving Processes Of The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (pdf)
• Introduction to ATLAS

Australia’s 2017 Environment Scorecard: Like A Broken Record, High Temperatures Further Stress Our Ecosystems

The Conversation - Albert Van Dijk | Madeleine Cahill

It was a hot year for many Australians. ABCNews/David McMeekin

While rainfall conditions were generally good across Australia in 2017, record-breaking temperatures stressed our ecosystems on land and sea, according to our annual environmental scorecard. Unfortunately, it looks like those records will be broken again next year – and again in the years after that.

National Environmental Indicators: Change From 2016

Indicators of Australia’s environment in 2017 compared to the previous year. Similar to national economic indicators they provide a summary, but also hide regional variations, complex interactions and long-term context.

National Scorecard
Our terrestrial environment has done relatively well in 2017, mainly thanks to good rainfall and leftover soil moisture from the year before. However, such a short summary for a country the size of a continent is bound to hide large regional differences. 2017 was no exception.
Western Australia and the Northern Territory received good rains, with vegetation growth, river flows and wetland area all coming in above average. By contrast, Queensland and particularly New South Wales saw a reversal of the previous year’s gains.

Environmental Condition Score in 2017 by state and territory. The large number is the score for 2017, the smaller number the change from the previous year. Based on data on www.ausenv.online

Climate change is here to stay
There was good news and bad news for our atmosphere in 2017. Humanity’s collective action to fix the hole in the ozone layer is proving successful. The hole is the smallest it has been since 1988.
On the other hand, global carbon dioxide concentrations rose again, by 0.5%. While this was less than in the previous two years, it was still far from enough to stop accelerating global warming.
Globally, 2017 was the second-warmest year on record after 2016. It was the third-warmest year for Australia, and the hottest year on record in southern Queensland. These statistics are all the more remarkable because 2017 was not an El Niño year, during which high temperatures more commonly occur.
The world’s oceans were the hottest they’ve been since measurements started. Sea levels rose by 6.4mm, and sea ice cover at the poles reached another record low. In short, our planet is warming.

The main events
Last year broke the most high-temperature records since 2009, which was at the height of the Millennium Drought – the worst drought since European settlement.
Queensland and northern New South Wales were affected most, with summer heatwaves in February and a second round of bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. In March, Cyclone Debbie rammed into the Great Barrier Reef and the Queensland coast, bringing torrential rains and widespread flooding in its wake. The cyclone helped cool down the shallow reef waters but also ravaged delicate corals in its path, stirred up sediment and caused rivers to flush more damaging sediment and nutrients out to sea.
Winter was dry and the warmest on record and September also set heat records. Experts predicted the risk of a bad summer fire season, which did not happen, thanks to a combination of mild weather and well-timed rainfall. Nationally though, the number and size of fires were still above average, mainly due to good growing conditions in WA’s arid rangelands.

Tree growth hides loss of forests
Perhaps the most recognisable impact on our terrestrial ecosystems is the disappearance of mature vegetation after fire, drought or land clearing. We should have good data on such important changes, but we don’t.
Australia is large and poorly surveyed, so national mapping relies on satellite image interpretation. We used machine-learning algorithms to update national forest maps with more recent satellite images. These updated maps estimate a nationwide increase in forest area of 510,000ha, roughly the size of Kangaroo Island.
However, this increase is the difference between much larger gains and losses. Most of the forest increases occurred in dry woodlands in NSW and Queensland, most likely due to regrowth after a relatively wet 2016.
Unfortunately, these numbers do not paint a clear picture of the state of our ecosystems. Far more is lost from removing a hectare of dense native forest than is gained from a hectare of regrowth or new planting.
The current national mapping is insufficient to make these distinctions. We now have the satellite mapping data and technologies to do a better job. This should be a priority if we are to understand how our environment is changing and meet our international commitments.

Australia’s Environment Explorer (http://www.ausenv.online) provides summaries of environmental condition by location or region. This example shows local government areas where vegetation cover in 2017 was above average (blue colours) or below average (red colours).

Slow changes can still be deadly
While our climate is clearly changing, it is less clear how rising temperatures are impacting on our ecosystems. Many of our species are well adapted to heat, so the effects of slowly rising temperatures may go unnoticed until it is too late.
Temperatures in excess of 42℃ can kill large numbers of flying foxes, and this happened again in 2017. We know this because they roost together in their thousands and we can count the corpses under the trees.
What heat stress does to other species is far less known. There is evidence of koalas and some large birds suffering from hot days, but we barely understand how increasing temperatures may be chipping away at the cornerstones of our ecosystems: plants, bacteria, fungi, insects and other uncharismatic creatures.
At sea, we can see the impact of high sea temperatures through coral bleaching, visible even from space. Sea surface temperatures also reached record highs off the coast of southeast Australia for the second year in a row.
On top of the steady rise of ocean temperature, sea level and acidity, the East Australian Current is strengthening and reaching ever further into the Tasman Sea. The current carries tropical reef species to Sydney and yellowtail kingfish to Tasmania. The warmer water also ravages the remaining kelp forests and stresses Tasmania’s abalone, oyster and salmon industries.

The future is already here
Last year made it abundantly clear that climate change is here now, and here to stay. We will be seeing new heat records for years to come and, sadly, some species and ecosystems are unlikely to survive the onslaught.
But there are still things we can do to limit the damage. Reducing carbon emissions will still help limit future warming. Avoiding the destruction of native ecosystems should be a no-brainer.
That isn’t just about clearing farm land, which is often singled out. Australia’s population has grown by 31% since 2000. We’re adding the equivalent of a city the size of Canberra every year.
Each of us uses space, infrastructure and resources and produces waste at levels far above the global average. If we want our land and oceans to support our privileged lifestyle in future, we have to learn to tread more lightly, and learn it fast.

Links

• Australia’s Environment in 2017
• Climate change's signature was writ large on Australia's crazy summer of 2017
• Southern Australia Seasonal Bushfire Outlook 2017-18: November update
• Native forests can help hit emissions targets – if we leave them alone
• Killer climate: tens of thousands of flying foxes dead in a day
• Things warm up as the East Australian Current heads south
• Five key lessons other cities can learn from Cape Town’s water crisis
• The BOM outlook for the weather over the next three months is ‘neutral’ – here’s what that really means
• Black skies and raging seas: how the First Fleet got a first taste of Australia’s unforgiving climate
• On dangerous ground: land degradation is turning soils into deserts

‘We Are Not A Force To Be Ignored’: Young People Take Up Climate Activism

Reuters - Nicole Hoey

LONDON - Aru Shiney-Ajay first became genuinely worried about climate change when she visited family members in India, and found the streams and grass where she had played as a child had shriveled as a result of drought.

Participant at a workshop organised by Dejusticia in Bogota, November 25, 2017. DEJUSTICIA via THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION

“Someplace that I knew really well turned into something unrecognizable,” said Shiney-Ajay, now 20 and a student at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
So she turned to the Sunrise Movement, a U.S.-based youth network that aims to “build an army of young people to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process”.
“When I think of climate change, I am driven by fear and anger,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview.
But her activism – including occupying the office of Republican House Representative Patrick Meehan of Pennsylvania last December with other Sunrise Movement members – has given her a feeling she can make a difference.
The sit-in, she said, was an attempt to stop Meehan from voting on a tax bill that would provide tax cuts to fossil fuel billionaires, among others. Meehan voted for the bill anyway, which passed last December – but Shiney-Ajay now knows how to take a stand.
Her generation is ready to act on climate change, which is a “preventable crisis”, she said. That’s particularly true because younger people – who will live to see the more severe impacts of climate change – have more at stake.
Half the world’s population is now under 30 years old – and those youth are becoming increasingly powerful political and social advocates for action, including on climate change, according to a 2017 World Economic Forum study that questioned youths from 180 countries.
Youth-led climate organizations are springing up around the globe. Their desire for change stems from personal experience of and worry about climate change, as well as a desire to hold their governments to account for failing to act swiftly enough on the problem, their members say.

‘Grown-Ups Have Failed’
Many young people say they are searching for ways to make a difference in their own futures – and some are having early successes.
Camila Bustos, 25, for instance, is a member of Dejusticia, a Colombian youth organization that has sued Colombia’s government, saying its failure to stop deforestation in the Amazon – a driver of climate change – was violating the constitutional right of young people to a healthy environment.
“Grown-ups have failed – maybe not failed completely, but are still slow to act” to curb climate change, Bustos, a researcher for the non-profit, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Last week, the organization had an unprecedented victory: Colombia’s highest court ruled the government must take urgent action to stem rising deforestation, in response to the suit by 25 young plaintiffs, the youngest 7 years old.

Participant at a workshop organised by Dejusticia in Bogota, November 25, 2017. DEJUSTICIA via THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION

Under the ruling – the first of its kind in Latin America – the government has four months to produce a plan to reduce deforestation in the Amazon, according to a Dejusticia statement.
“This affects us, my children, my grandkids, my great-grandkids,” Bustos said. “We are taking care of the planet we love.”
Around the world, youth-led lawsuits, peaceful protests and environmental action events are gathering pace, as younger generations use the most powerful tool they have at their disposal: their voice.
Sophia Zaia, 23, another member of the Sunrise Movement, remembers how her family had to drag home buckets of water from their local convenience store after a major drought dried up their home well in Texas while she was in middle school.
At the time, she remembers thinking: “How is this something that not everyone is talking about?”
Zaia felt that her community’s response – digging deeper wells to get more water – didn’t go far enough to deal with looming water shortages as a result of climate change.
Last month, she and 11 other students blocked entrances to a meeting of fracking lobbyists at Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C.
To counter U.S. President Donald Trump’s assertion that global warming is a hoax and his link to fossil fuel corporations, Sunrise Movement members shared personal stories of climate change for two hours before they were removed from the scene, Zaia said.

A Sense Of Belonging
Finding an avenue to take action on their fears about climate change can be hugely helpful for young people, activist leaders say.
“It’s quite empowering to be something in your global community,” said Melanie Mattauch, the European communications coordinator for 350.org, a group working to build a global grassroots movement to demand action on climate change.
Since 2012, the organization has worked with university students to help them demand their institutions become greener and cut use of fossil fuels, Mattauch said in an interview.
Students at about 850 universities are now part of the network, including in cities ranging from New York to Berlin and Paris to Cape Town.
“What we do now will determine what civilization will look like in 20, 30 years from now, which is still in their lifetime,” said Mattauch.
PUSH Sweden, another youth organization pushing sustainability goals, says social media and the internet now make it easier for young people to work together.
“PUSH Sweden is creating somewhere young people can meet, not dependent on where they live,” said Tove Lexén, 23, a board member of the organization.

Participants at a workshop organised by Dejusticia in Bogota, November 25, 2017. DEJUSTICIA via THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION

 In 2015, for instance, the group held an online Climate Confusion event, with videos and a live panel talking about climate change, bringing together youth from several Swedish cities.
The group is currently preparing for Sweden’s autumn election, deciding which issues – from climate change to food sustainability – they want to make a priority, Lexén said.
“We have the resources and knowledge to gather youths,” Ahmed Al-Qassam, PUSH Sweden’s former president, said in a telephone interview.
Getting busy young people together can take work, the French Network of Students for Sustainable Development (REFEDD), admits. But last year, the group drew over 400 young people to two-day sustainability workshops.
Quentin Zins, 22, REFEDD project manager, said self interest is one driver in students’ desire to act on climate change, with 81 percent of students they surveyed saying they want “sustainable” jobs.
Often students are persuaded to turn to activism when they begin to discover the connections between climate change impacts and their own lives, at which point getting involved is “easy and natural”, said Al-Qassam of PUSH Sweden.
“In Sweden, there is a tradition and culture of engaging in organizations,” he said.

‘Not A Force To Be Ignored’
At the foundation of nearly all the youth climate movements is an urge to fight for a better, more livable future for generations to come.
Having youth involved in the fight to curb climate change means that the people most affected by decisions around the issue become a key part of the conversation, said Isabella Munson, communications leader for Zero Hour, a youth-run U.S. group focused on taking concrete action against climate change.
“We have a duty to the earth and every generation to come to protect our home,” she said in an interview. “There are billions of young people in this world. We are not a force to be ignored.”

Links

• Young Americans Want to Save You From Climate Change
• Young People's Coping Strategies Concerning Climate Change
• Humor can get young people fired up about climate change
• Young people are about to utterly transform climate politics
• half a million youth around the world taking action on climate change

Why Australia’s Wind And Solar Market Could Grind To A Halt

RenewEconomy - Giles Parkinson | Sophie Vorrath

The lack of any policy to meet the climate targets agreed to in Paris will mean that Australia’s large-scale wind and solar boom will quickly come to an end, even as wind and solar costs fall further below the benchmark price of the grid.
Kobad Bhavnagri, the chief analyst for Bloomberg New Energy Finance in Australia, says the current investment boom to meet the federal renewable energy target – $8 billion committed in 2017, and $5 billion in 2018 – will quickly slow as the target is met.
By 2020, investment will slow to around $2 billion, and for the next decade – without any changes to stated federal policy – the only drivers for the uptake of large-scale renewables will be state schemes, such as Victoria’s, and the emerging corporate market.
The proposed National Energy Guarantee, Bhavnagri says, will add little to demand because the 26-28 per cent emissions reduction will be met almost entirely by the LRET by 2020 (23 per cent), leaving little to be done over the next 10 years.

“That’s a very weak target,” Bhavnagri said, noting that according to his company’s analysis, it will mean less in the way of new wind and solar capacity by 2030 than business as usual. (See chart above)
Bhavnagri said this would be true whatever the policy – a carbon price, an emissions intensity scheme or a clean energy target; if the ambition is low, then little new renewables would be built because there would be no driver to displace existing coal and gas.
And it is clear that the current government has every intention of trying to keep existing power generators, including ageing coal plants, in the system as long as possible, dramatically reducing the need for new supply.
This bleak assessment is broadly consistent with other analyses, most notably by Reputex, which also said last month that the emissions reduction target is actually worse than business as usual.
However, Bhavnagri said there re a couple of factors that should be cause for optimism for the renewables industry, and this was based largely around economics.

It was clear now, he said, that the cost of new renewable – large-scale wind and solar – was already below wholesale electricity prices.
Wind and solar were being built at or around $60/MWh, and would continue to fall in cost in the coming five years.
After a brief fall in wholesale prices as the current surge in wind and solar investment had its impact on the market, the course of wholesale prices would then resume their upward curve.
This meant that wind and solar would be attractive, not just for big utilities looking to loosen their reliance on fossil fuels (Origin has pledged an exit from coal by 2032), but also for the growing corporate market.
On the subject of policy choices, amid all the criticism of the proposed NEG, Bhavnagri said that if it was accompanied by meaningful remissions reductions targets, then it would do the job.

“What really matters is ambition,”Bhavnagri said. “If the NEG were to be configured to 45 per cent, recommended for 2°C pathway, which has been adopted by Labor, the outlook for investment would be much stronger.”
As this graph above illustrates, that would result in 1GW less coal, but 4GW more large-scale wind, and 10GW of large-scale solar – according to BNEF’s estimates.
The only constant through the two scenarios (ambition or no ambition) is small-scale solar – which BNEF expects to add at least 1GW a year out to 2030 – taking the total installed capacity across the nation to 19GW by 2030, overtaking coal.
Tristan Edis, from Green Energy Markets, said for the NEG to work then the policy would have to be designed the right way, and it would have to be accompanied by more aggressive emission reduction targets.

“What about the NEG? The answer to that, quite simply, is that Malcolm Turnbull needs to grow a spine on this particular issue, if it’s going to be meaningful,” Edis said.

But, as John Grimes, the head of the Smart Energy Council said, there is just no chance of that anytime soon because of the secret deal that Turnbull signed with the far right when they agreed, reluctantly, to have him replace Tony Abbott.

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Innovative Greenhouses Help Farmers Adapt to Climate Change

National Geographic - Janice Cantieri

In India, a simple greenhouse is transforming lives—creating jobs for women and arming growers against unpredictable weather.

A farmer tends a greenhouse in Depalle, a village about 75 kilometers southwest of Hyderabad. The village is a research and development station for Kheyti, a nonprofit group helping India's small-scale farms adapt to climate change. Photograph by Sara Hylton, National Geographic 

Yadav Bhavanth grows vegetables on family land in the south-central Indian state of Telangana. On this small farm in a drought-prone region, his crop production—and income—depend heavily on seasonal rainfall.
In 2015 and 2016, water shortages threatened his crops. And when the rains came, they were often so heavy that they damaged even the hardier plants, causing disease or infestation.
Some of the extreme weather patterns can be attributed to climate change. As global temperatures increase, extended periods of drought, heat waves, and unpredictable rainfall have intensified. The crop losses and mounting debt carry a human toll: More than 3,000 farmers committed suicide in Telangana during a three-year drought. (Learn more about this problem across India.)
But 2017 was different for Yadav. The 37-year-old farmer began using a greenhouse to conserve water and protect crops from harsh downpours. Instead of trapping heat, these greenhouses are made with breathable, aluminum-coated cloth netting that reflects some of the sunlight, reducing inside temperatures. The greenhouses are also fitted with drip-irrigation systems that allow farmers to use an average of 90 percent less water than their neighbors.

Left: Yadav Bhavanth, 37, picks moringa, also called drumsticks, on the family farm near Laxmapur, a village in the state of Telangana. Nicknamed for their shape, moringa withstand harsh conditions. Their pods, seeds, and leaves are all used as vegetables.Right: Bhavanth and wife Bujji, 32, tend tomatoes. The couple was part of pilot program for greenhouse cultivation.
Photograph by Sara Hylton, National Geographic

“Outside, we are not as sure whether the crops will dry up—there is no guarantee,” Yadav says. “Inside [the greenhouse], the plants grow very fast,” he adds. “The [produce] quantity and quality is also the best.”

Venkatesh Appala, 45, grows bell peppers in Laxmapur. He started his greenhouse operation in January 2017, and estimates a profit of 46,000 rupees (just over $700) in his first year. He's using the extra income to save for his daughter's dowry, which can run up to $10,000. Photograph by Sara Hylton, National Geographic

Grassroots Greenhouses
Yadav purchased his greenhouse for $2,500 from Kheyti, an Indian non-profit that is developing the structures and facilitating loans to buy them—through a program aimed at helping small farms adapt to climate change.
Greenhouses have long been used in India for commercial flower and vegetable production, but standard designs are too large and expensive for farmers like Yadav. Kheyti has created several scaled-down versions that range from 258 to 553 square yards, an area that takes up just two to five percent of a typical small farm there. The size reduces the investment risk—farmers are still able to grow other crops on the rest of their land.

Vikram Bhavanth, 13, peers through the family's greenhouse. Kheyti collaborated with engineering students at Northwestern University and Stanford University’s Design for Extreme Affordability course to develop a prototype. After multiple iterations, they settled on a metal-frame structure with an overlay of shade netting and insect-proof netting on the sides. Photograph by Sara Hylton, National Geographic 

Kheyti’s greenhouse costs a fraction of the $30,000-plus for a conventional half-acre greenhouse. Yet because many farmers still wouldn’t be able to afford $2,500, Kheyti works with banks to get loans on the farmers' behalf, says cofounder Saumya (she doesn’t use a surname). She started the project with support from the Institute for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern University.
Kheyti recently partnered with the Bank of Baroda, India's second largest bank, to broaden the reach of the program. Participating farmers make a down payment of 30,000 rupees [$471 dollars] and then installments of 15,000 rupees [$233 dollars] after each growing season, typically every three months, until the greenhouse is paid off.

Some farmers have used the funds from greenhouse production to further the education of their children, including these eighth standard classes (middle school) for girls and boys, where Vikram Bhavanth is seated (center). Photograph by Sara Hylton, National Geographic

The 15 farmers who piloted the Kheyti greenhouse program have just finished their first year, growing cucumbers for three and a half months and bell peppers for eight months. Most were able to produce between five and eight times more within the greenhouse. Some used the income to advance their children’s education.
“We are able to produce inside the greenhouse [258 square yards] what we are producing outside in an acre [4,840 square yards],” said Narayana Yellabonia, one of Kheyti’s first farmers. “School has started, so the money has helped out with that.”

One of Yadav Bhavanth’s relatives, Biki Malavath holds her great-granddaughter, nicknamed Milky, the youngest member of Laxmapur Thanda. The village is home to the Lambadi people, a "scheduled tribe"—defined as one of India's marginalized and socioeconimically disadvantaged communities. Photograph by Sara Hylton, National Geographic 

Inspired by the success, there are now 50 farmers growing with Kheyti in Yadav's village, Laxmapur, and in nearby Narayanpur, and the initiative has expanded into a neighboring state. Working with the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP), Kheyti will reach 1,000 low-income female farmers in Andhra Pradesh. SERP, a joint venture between the World Bank and the state government, will help Kheyti identify participants, provide loans, and fund training programs. These participants would make a down-payment of only 10,000 rupees [$154 dollars] to qualify for the loan. Kheyti launched the program with the first 50 farmers earlier this year.
Kheyti’s leaders hope to expand throughout India, but they’re taking it slow. “We are very proud of the culture we have built, but we don’t want to have that lost when we scale,” says cofounder Sathya Raghu Mokkapati.

Founders of the nonprofit Kheyti, Saumya (who doesn't use a surname), 28, Kaushik Kappagantulu, 31, and Sathya Raghu Mokkapati, 32, pose with Yadav. Haunted by an encounter with a destitute farmer eating mud out of desperation, Sathya had longed to find a way to help those who eke out a living from the land. Kheyti worked with nearly 8,000 farmers to test different methods and crops in order to determine what worked best for the region. Photograph by Sara Hylton, National Geographic 

Roots of Inspiration
Sathya had longed to find a way to help India’s farms since he was 17, after he encountered a destitute farmer eating mud out of desperation. The experience stayed with him, and in 2009, Sathya left his corporate job in accounting to start a project that would boost agricultural production. Over a year and a half, he visited dozens of farming villages to understand the challenges they face. He saw inequity—annual family incomes ranged wildly, from 10,000 rupees [$157 dollars] to 10 million rupees [$157,107 dollars].
The disparity was rooted in resources, including whether a farmer had access to a reliable source of water and to technologies like drip irrigation that improve growing conditions. Being able to secure the finances to invest in a farm and having the ability to transport and sell crops at a market also played a role.

Sathya runs a meeting with farmers in Laxmapur. In addition to supplying the greenhouses and training, Kheyti's services include transportation to market, loan servicing, fertilizers, and connections to vendors. The farmers also become part of a collective and gather weekly to share knowledge and challenges. Photograph by Sara Hylton, National Geographic

But across the board, Sathya saw the impacts of climate change making problems worse. Farmers faced intensifying droughts that often hit back to back, and the higher average temperatures caused an increase in pests and diseases.
To learn more, Sathya and another Kheyti cofounder, Ayush Sharma, spent the next three and a half years farming on a hundred-acre plot in Depalle, another village in Telangana. They worked with nearly 8,000 farmers to test out different farming methods and crops to determine what worked best for the region.
But some factors were out of their hands. “When we made an honest assessment of the impact of our work, we realized that while we were trying to do a lot of stuff, ultimately the impact on the farmers was limited because of climate change,” Sathya says.

Goats graze on tomatoes in an empty field. Outdoor crops are vulnerable to extended periods of drought, pests, and unpredictable rains. Photograph by Sara Hylton, National Geographic 

Confronting Climate Change
Farms had to be outfitted to face the increasing weather extremes; greenhouses could regulate the environment. “The solution has to be climate-smart farming,” Sathya says. “And it has to be full-circle, with end-to-end services to connect farmers to banks and to markets.”
In 2015 the four Kheyti cofounders (including Kaushik Kappagantula) worked with engineers and agronomists to create an affordable, water-conserving greenhouse that reduces the interior temperature by reflecting sunlight.
They tested out several designs—first, a bamboo structure, but it couldn’t withstand heavy winds. They collaborated with engineering students at Northwestern University and as part of Stanford University’s Design for Extreme Affordability course on the design and to reduce costs and make them easier to install. After multiple iterations, they settled on a metal-frame structure with an overlay of shade netting and insect-proof netting on the sides.

Katikala Shyamala, 43, the village sarpanch, or headwoman, is pictured in her office and out talking to villagers in Laxmapur. A widowed mother of two, she was the first woman to sign up for a Kheyti greenhouse and is now recruiting others. Photograph by Sara Hylton, National Geographic

Building Self-Reliance
Kheyti’s services go beyond simply supplying the greenhouses, including training and daily check-ins with farmers, plus help with transportation to market, loan servicing, fertilizers, and connections to vendors. The farmers also become part of a collective and gather weekly to share knowledge and discuss challenges, creating a sense of collaboration—and healthy competition.
“We discuss how to solve problems, how much each farmer produced that week, and how much money they earned,” said Katikala Shyamala, the Laxmapur village sarpanch, or headwoman.
Shyamala, a widowed mother of two, was the first woman to sign up for a Kheyti greenhouse. Even though she had little farming experience, the intensive training and support network helped her success.

Female farmers pose outside a test farm near Depalle. Kheyti is focusing on bringing more women into the program. Photograph by Sara Hylton, National Geographic

“From seed to plant, from harvest to the market, they are with us and looking after everything,” Shyamala said.
Kheyti helps transport her vegetables to market, checks on her plants, and advises on fertilizers to use. As a result, Shyamala is able to manage her farm, put her two children through school, and stay on top of her responsibilities as the village sarpanch (she’s a liaison between government officials and the community). Other women have since followed her example.

A new day dawns at Bowenpally Market in Hyderabad, a wholesale vegetable market that sells produce from Kheyti farmers to local street vendors. Photograph by Sara Hylton, National Geographic 

Promoting opportunities for women and marginalized groups is a goal of the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers, where Pramod Aggarwal is a program leader for the region. He points out that sustainable agriculture must build capacity to adapt to climate variability, so that farmers can conserve resources during years of good rainfall and harvests to adjust for years with poor production. A good project also involves partnering with local governments, he said, to ensure stability.
“In developing countries, climate variability has always been a challenge and will continue to be,” Aggarwal says. “Climate change has brought more focus to this issue, which is intricately linked to poverty, social tensions, and migration.”
Larger-scale innovation to make staple crops like rice, which is labor- and resource-intensive, and maize more climate-resilient is essential for the future because “not everyone can be growing vegetables—it’s not taking care of food security,” he says.
But for now, vegetables provide a simple solution.

Yadav Bhavanth's son Santosh, 11, picks moringa drumsticks. Moringa has been called a superfood by some; it's a staple in the Indian diet, used in curry dishes, sambar sauce, and to add spice. Other parts of the tree are used for medicinal purposes. Photograph by Sara Hylton, National Geographic 

Links

• Fresh Hope for Combating Climate Change
• Climate Change Is Suffocating Large Parts of the Ocean
• Climate Change May Shrink the World’s Fish
• Climate Change Is Moving the North Pole
• Effects of Global Warming
• Hidden Costs of Climate Change Running Hundreds of Billions a Year