15/12/2017

Audit Office Slams Australia’s Dud Investments In “Clean Coal”

RenewEconomy - 

Alpha Males and the Lump of Coal.
Clean coal may be a marketing term that you can still read in the Murdoch press and hear on the ABC, but the technology remains nothing more than a fantasy – and a point of distraction and a lacquered prop for the fossil fuel industry and its proponents.
The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) has published a damning assessment of Australia’s carbon capture and storage program, noting that more than $450 million has been invested by the government over the past decade, and nothing achieved.
Not a single tonne of CO2 has been saved, no technology is ready for deployment, and the ANAO report slams the government for having no strategic direction, no oversight over the projects, and little accounting for the spending.
Australia’s CCS programs were launched by former prime minister Kevin Rudd in 2007 and 2009 as part of his climate package, and the vision then – despite enormous skepticism that the technology was a crock – was to have 20 plants up and running  by 2020, so Australia could “lead the world”.
The technology was championed by Labor energy minister Martin Ferguson and the Coalition’s Ian Macfarlane. Ferguson warned the “lights would go out” without it. Both Ferguson and Macfarlane now work for major fossil fuel lobby groups and are still campaigning relentlessly against renewables.
The ANAO report focuses on two of the federal government’s “clean coal” initiatives – the Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Flagships program, and the National Low Emissions Coal Initiative (NLECI).
“Key performance measures for the programs provide limited insight into the extent to which the programs are achieving the … strategic objective of accelerating the deployment of technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” ANAO notes.
Indeed, at one point, the only performance measure monitored by the department of science and industry was the number of programs, not what the programs were actually doing or, as it turns out, not doing.
The NLECI was assigned $500 million and given the task of demonstrating “clean coal” technologies, including CCS, by 2015, and making them available for commercial deployment by 2020.
It spent $233 million, but nothing happened, and it was a farce from the get-go. ANAO notes it had no program guidelines or risk management plans in place.
Three of the five initiatives didn’t happen because of technology and cost issues; there was no clear rationale in selection of replacement projects and there is no detailed assessment of what, if anything has been achieved.
The CCS Flagships program fared little better. The government originally proclaimed it would result in “at least 20 large-scale, integrated CCS demonstration projects” being launched globally by 2010, for broad deployment of CCS by 2020.
It was initially promised $2 billion, but this was gradually wound back, presumably as successive governments recognised what a complete boondoggle the technology was.
CCS Flagships ended up spending $217 million and another $42 million is committed. According to ANAO “none of the CCS Flagships projects met the original timeframe or reached the stage of deployable technology as originally envisaged in the program design.
“It is therefore unclear whether the program is capable of delivering on its strategic policy objective as the program is due to close in 2020 and all funding is currently committed.”
Nearly every paragraph of the report is a damning assessment of what is clearly government and bureaucratic incompetence.
Some examples:
  • “Program guidelines were not subsequently developed to provide advice to departmental staff on project selection, decision making processes, and applicant requirements.”
  • “Specific conflict of interest arrangements were not in place at the commencement of the program.”
  • “Despite the program being in operation since 2008, the first risk management plan for the program was not completed until the first quarter of 2011–12.”
Projects in NSW were closed early because, farcically, it turns out there were no storage options.
On the flagships, the government must have had a sense that most projects would fail, so it wanted to fund as many as possible. Some $4 billion was considered before being reduced to $2 billion.
In the end, a fraction of that was spent, there was “no over-arching strategy”, and nothing succeeded.
The projects funded, including the notorious Zerogen project, have all failed. “None of the projects have met the original timeframe of the program. Reasons for this include: technical feasibility; absence of suitable storage options; and financial feasibility,” ANAO notes.
The most extraordinary part of the report goes to the assessment of whether it was all worthwhile. Clearly not, but you wouldn’t know that from the program details.
As ANAO notes:
Currently, there is no transparent framework in place to publicly report program outcomes. The department has established one performance measure for each program, related to the number of projects supported (NLECI) and the number of companies supported (CCS Flagships). However, these measures provide limited insight into whether the program is achieving its strategic policy objectives.
Amazingly, the department is congratulated for having “exceeded” this, the one and only key performance indicators, because it supported more projects than it planned. Little matter that they were all complete duds.
“As shown in Table 4.7, for the period 2014–15 to 2015–16, the department has met, and for the CCS Flagships program in 2015–16 exceeded, the performance targets set for the program,” ANAO notes, before going on to suggest that the number of projects may not provide insight enough.
“The CCS Flagships program has not been evaluated despite over eight years of operation,” it notes.
That’s not surprising. It is probably too much to expect of the government department to admit – like many coal industry executives – that clean coal is a myth, and a waste of everyone’s time and money.
It takes the breath away.

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To Fight The Catastrophic Fires Of The Future, We Need To Look Beyond Prescribed Burning

The Conversation - James Furlaud | David Bowman

AAP Image/ Darren Pateman
California is burning – a sentence we’ve heard far too often this year. Sydney is currently on bushfire alert, as firefighters battle a fire in the Hunter Valley region and temperatures are set to top 40℃.
A cocktail of factors, from climate change to centuries of ignoring indigenous burning practises, means that catastrophic fires are likely to become more common.
One of Australia’s favourite fire prevention measures is prescribed burning – using carefully controlled fires to clear out flammable materials. We’re almost obsessed with it. Indeed, it seems the outcome of every major inquiry is that we need to do more of it.
The Royal Commission inquiry that followed Victoria’s 2009 Black Saturday fires recommended that 5% of all public land in Victoria be treated per year – a doctrine that was subsequently dropped due to impracticality.
Yet our research, published today in the International Journal of Wildland Fire, modelled thousands of fires in Tasmania and found that nearly a third of the state would have to be burned to effectively lower the risk of bushfires.
The question of how much to burn and where is a puzzle we must solve, especially given the inherent risk, issues caused by smoke smoke and shrinking weather windows for safe burning due to climate change.

Why use computer simulations?
The major problem fire science faces is gathering data. Landscape-scale experiments involving extreme fire are rare, for obvious reasons of risk and cost. When a major bushfire happens, all the resources go into putting it out and protecting people. Nobody has the time to painstakingly collect data on how fast it is moving and what it is burning. We are therefore restricted to a few limited data sources to reconstruct the behaviour and impact of fire: we can analyse the scar on the landscape after a fire, look at case studies, or run simulations of computer models.
Most research on the effectiveness of prescribed burning has been at a local scale. We need to start thinking bigger: how can we mitigate the effect of multiple large fires in a region like Tasmania or Southeastern Australia? What is the cumulative effect of different prescribed burning strategies?
A large fuel reduction burn off on Hobart’s eastern shore. Flickr/Mike Rowe, CC BY-NC
To answer these questions, we create models using mathematical equations to simulate the behaviour of fires across actual landscapes. These models include the effects of vegetation type, terrain and fuel loads, under specific weather conditions. If we simulate thousands of these fires we can get an idea of where fire risk is the highest, and how effective prescribed burning is at reducing that risk.
The island of Tasmania offers the perfect study system. Self-contained, with a wide array of vegetation types and fire regimes, it offers an ideal opportunity to see how fire behaves across a diverse landscape. Perhaps more interestingly, the island contains large areas of flammable landscape surrounding globally unique ecosystems and numerous towns and villages. Obviously, we cannot set fire to all of Tasmania in real life, but computer simulations make it possible!
So, encouraged by the Tasmanian Fire Service, who initiated our research, we simulated tens of thousands of fires across Tasmania under a range of prescribed burning scenarios.

Prescribed fire can be effective, in theory
The first scenario we looked at was the best-case scenario: what happens if we perform prescribed burning on all the vegetation that can handle it, given theoretically unlimited resources? It is possible this approximates the sustained and skillful burning by Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples.
Wildfire simulations following this scenario suggested that such an approach would be extremely effective. Importantly, we saw significant reductions in fire activity even in areas where prescribed burning is impossible (for example, due to the presence of people).
Unfortunately, this best-case approach, while interesting from a theoretical perspective, would require prescribed burning over more than 30% of Tasmania in one year.
We also analysed the effects of 12 more realistic scenarios. These realistic plans were less than half as efficient as the best-case scenario at reducing fire activity.
On average, 3 hectares of prescribed burning would reduce wildfire extent by roughly 1ha in grasslands and dry forests.
In other flammable Tasmanian vegetation types like buttongrass sedgelands and heathlands, the reduction in wildfire was even smaller. This is obviously better than no prescribed burning, but it highlights the fact that this is a relatively inefficient tool, and given the costs and potential drawbacks, should be used only where it is most needed.
This is a fundamental conundrum of prescribed burning: though it is quite effective in theory, the extent to which we would need to implement it to affect fire behaviour across the entire state is completely unachievable.
Therefore, it is imperative that we not just blindly burn a pre-ordained fraction of the landscape. Rather, we must carefully design localised prescribed burning interventions to reduce risk to communities.

We need a multi-tool approach
Our study has shown that while prescribed burning can be quite effective in certain scenarios, it has serious constraints. Additionally, while we analysed these scenarios under bad fire weather, we were not able to analyse the kind of catastrophic days in which the effect of prescribed burning is seriously reduced, with howling dry winds and stupefying heat.
Unfortunately, due to climate change, we are going to see a lot more catastrophic days in the future in Tasmania and indeed globally.
In Hobart this is of particular concern, as the city is surrounded by tall, wet eucalypt forests that have had fifty years grow dense understoreys since the 1967 Black Tuesday fires. These have the potential to cause some of the most intense fires on the planet should conditions get dry enough. Prescribed burning is impossible in these forests.
To combat fire risk we must take a multi-pronged approach that includes innovative strategies, such as designing new spatial patterns for prescribed burning, manually removing fuels from areas in which prescribed burning is not possible, improving the standards for buildings and defensible spaces, and most importantly, engaging the community in all of this.
Only by attacking this problem from multiple angles, and through close collaboration with the community and all levels of government, can we effectively face our fiery future.

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'Last Year I Gave The Kids Briquettes And Everyone Yelled At Me!' Christmas With Ian

The Guardian - 

 Ian the Climate Denialist Potato surprises his loved ones with a festive report on climate emissions. Or would they rather get an inflatable Greg Hunt doll?



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Judges Appear Ready To Allow Youth Climate Trial To Move Forward

Mashable - Andrew Freedman

A group of youth plaintiffs prepare to march to a news conference outside the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Dec. 11, 2017. Image: Eric Risberg/AP/REX/Shutterstock
A landmark case involving a group of 21 young Americans who are suing the federal government for its failure to protect them from the adverse consequences of climate change is inching closer to a trial date.
The case, known as Juliana v. United States, was  scheduled to go to trial in Oregon beginning on Feb. 5. That court date has been postponed due to a rare request from the federal government to have an Appeals Court step in and halt the proceedings.
On Monday, a panel of judges from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments regarding the Trump administration's move to squash the case using a little-used legal tactic known as a writ of mandamus. If granted, the writ would have the Appeals Court review a 2016 U.S. District Court decision not to dismiss the case. If the Appeals Court grants the writ, it could halt the case in its tracks, preventing a trial by declaring that the District Court made one or more errors in its consideration of the case.
However, questions from the three-judge Appeals Court panel to the Justice Department indicated they are skeptical of the need to review the District Court's decision. The Justice Department argued that this case, which seeks a remedy involving government action to address global warming, is "unprecedented" for its claims and broad scope, among other factors.
The case already broke new legal ground when a District Court judge declared the plaintiffs have a constitutional right to a stable climate.
Among the issues to be determined at trial is whether the government's actions — including its use of federal lands for energy extraction over the past several decades (the years when scientists' understanding of global warming solidified) — violated the plaintiff's constitutional rights.
Global average temperature anomalies from 2012-2016, compared to the 20th-century average.
The case asks the judicial branch to help determine the remedy to ensure the plaintiff's rights are no longer being violated. This could mean that the courts tell the government what its climate policy should be, which traditionally is the purview of the legislative and executive branches of government, not the courts. (That breach is one of the arguments put forward by the Justice Department to halt the case.)
"This court is on a collision course with the Executive Branch," said Eric Grant, a deputy assistant attorney general.
However, Julia Olson, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs who works for Our Children's Trust, an advocacy group, rejected that argument. She was accompanied in the courtroom by her co-counsel, as well as 18 of the 21 plaintiffs.
“Plaintiffs seek a judicial safeguard against the continued degradation of their rights," she said — but this safeguard could come from the appropriate branch of government, meaning that the plaintiffs are not asking the courts to set climate policy. Rather, a possible remedy would be for the court to demand that the government enact policies to cut global warming pollutants, leaving the specific details up to Congress and federal agencies.
“What the complaint alleges is that the federal defendants collectively and through the fossil fuel energy system are affirmatively depriving these young people of their rights to life, liberty, and property,” Olson said.
In response to judges' questions about whether the plaintiffs have legal standing to sue on the basis of being deprived of a stable climate, Olson said yes, because they will experience a rapidly deteriorating climate system for the rest of their lives unless action is taken soon.
“Children are disproportionately experiencing the impacts of climate change,” Olson said. She noted that children will bear the brunt of the impacts of global warming, giving them standing in their case.
“Your honor, these children will live far longer than you, they will live till the end of the century, when the seas are projected by these federal defendants to be 10 feet higher,” she said.


Eighteen of the 21 youth-plaintiffs who were before the 9th Circuit in San Francisco challenging the U.S. Government for not protecting them from climate change.

“The significance of the harm, the monumental threat that these injuries pose to these plaintiffs is very distinguishable from the rest of the country.”
Once the Ninth Circuit rules on the writ of mandamus, the case will either proceed to trial in District Court in Oregon, or head down another unprecedented path.
Many experts have consistently underestimated the likelihood that this suit would reach this far, considering how other judicial approaches to address climate change have failed.
If the 21 young people succeed in getting a judge to order the Trump administration to alter its pro-drilling, climate denial policies, they will have succeeded where no environmental activists or international allies have, simply by alleging a constitutional violation of their rights.
While this is an unlikely outcome, it gets more and more plausible with each passing legal proceeding.

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14/12/2017

How Trump’s Reckless Climate Policy Invites A Judicial Backlash

Vox - David Bookbinder*

The worst way to do policy is through the courts. But that could be where we’re headed.
Southern Greenland. Education Images/UIG via Getty Images
Along with his fellow climate-denial zealots in the Trump administration, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt appears hell-bent on rolling back virtually every limit on greenhouse gas emissions he can get his hands on.
And while the administration’s dismantling of these measures is an environmental setback in the short term, the potential silver lining is that in the long term, the result may be precisely the opposite of what Pruitt & Co. intend.
While (quite literally) the rest of the world acknowledges that climate change is (again, literally) an existential threat, Congress continues to ignore the crisis. And now the executive branch is moving aggressively to scrap almost all previous efforts to reduce emissions. Like nature, policy abhors a vacuum, and we have seen some reaction already in the form of increased state regulatory efforts. Virginia is preparing to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the nine-state cap-and-trade system for power plant emissions, for instance, and Phil Murphy, New Jersey’s incoming Democratic governor, has promised to do likewise.
But there is another player waiting in the wings to step in to deal with the policy mess the Trump administration has created: the courts. Judges have done this before — think of civil rights, when Washington’s failure to tackle the problem of racial inequality in education led ultimately to Brown v. Board of Education — a sweeping intervention belatedly supplemented by Congress a decade later by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Washington’s climate policy failure may inspire similar a judicial move. Indeed, two new types of cases are beginning to wend their way through the system, both of which have the potential for dramatic impacts extending far beyond the wrangling over the legality of each particular EPA action (or inaction).
(The enviros have won the opening rounds in those fights: EPA was judicially shot down after it attempted to declare by fiat that certain Obama-era rules would not go into effect — including a new methane-emissions standard for oil and gas production. But Pruitt has hired Bill Wehrum, who has been busy litigating for industry against the Obama climate measures, as his assistant administrator for air, precisely to oversee their formal rollback. Environmental groups have limited tools to stop that formal process.)

The first line of legal attack against the Trump administration
Last year a group of children sued the government in federal court in Oregon (Juliana v. United States), claiming that they had a constitutional right to a climate capable of supporting human life, and that the government has a “trustee” responsibility to maintain the atmosphere free of “substantial impairment.” Their goal is to get the government to draft, and then execute, a comprehensive plan to dramatically reduce US emissions using the full panoply of federal authority.
The government’s response to the suit was, in part, to describe its “strong” and “substantial” efforts to tackle the problem via various regulatory measures, and to urge the court to therefore “decline Plaintiff’s invitation to short-circuit” this process. But District Court Judge Ann Aiken did not buy it. Refusing to defer to the government (the outcome you might expect), she held that the case could go forward, and in doing so, noted, “Federal courts too often have been cautious and overly deferential in the arena of environmental law, and the world has suffered for it.”
This week, Monday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear argument on that decision. Pruitt has been targeting almost all previous efforts to reduce emissions, including vehicle tailpipe standards and emissions limits at coal- and gas-fired power plants. None of the developments since Judge Aiken’s decision are likely to persuade the Ninth Circuit that she got it wrong.
Nor is the Ninth Circuit the only court in which the Trump administration’s climate rollbacks will be an issue. On November 6, Pennsylvania’s Clean Air Council filed a similar case in federal court in Philadelphia (Clean Air Council v. United States), alleging that the government has violated its constitutional duty to maintain a stable climate system, and violated its trust responsibility to preserve natural resources — including the atmosphere. A solid 16 pages of the complaint describe the administration’s war on climate science and its reversal of the Obama administration’s (unfortunately modest) climate efforts. The plaintiffs argue that these actions “increase the clear and present danger of climate change.”
Ultimately, of course, the Juliana plaintiffs would have to convince the Supreme Court. And while they’d have a steeply uphill battle if the high court were asked to vote today, the dynamic will change as the climate problems get worse, and as the record grows richer as lower courts review the facts and weigh the legal issues.
The constitutional claim that would demand a particular climate policy remains an extreme long shot, but courts have been sympathetic to the view that the government has a “public trust” duty with respect to natural resources. Five years from now, the Juliana plaintiffs might well have a chance of swaying five justices.
Trump and Pruitt. AP Photo/Andrew Harnik


Meanwhile, suits in state courts seek compensation for the costs of adapting to climate change
While Juliana and Clean Air Council seek a serious and comprehensive government regulatory effort, another set of cases seek to effect change by going after a different set of actors: corporations contributing to global warming. Local governments along the California coast have filed five cases under the centuries-old “public nuisance” doctrine. Here, the plaintiffs seek to get the fossil-fuel industry to help pay for the expense of adapting to sea-level rise caused by climate change.
Importantly, these nuisance cases are in state court, which means they will likely avoid this Supreme Court, which has zero interest in holding corporations accountable for their environmental externalities. Importantly, at bottom these cases are about property — not complex constitutional jurisprudence or abstruse concepts like the public trust doctrine. Judges are extremely familiar with property; the root of the common law could be summed up as, “You did something that damaged my property and so now you have to pay for it.”
If and when those claims reach the California Supreme Court — they are currently locked in jurisdictional wrangling — the Trump administration’s actions will not make those judges any more inclined to leave this issue to the fools in Washington.
Thus, ironically, the Trump climate agenda, by making judges sympathetic to arguments that might have seem far-fetched a while ago, may help save the planet after all. That’s the good news. The bad news is that, from a national policy perspective, it will do so in the least efficient way imaginable.
Climate policy is no different than most other national issues. The best solution is tailored congressional legislation. The second-best solution is a regulatory program using existing agencies and legal authority.

Intervention by the courts isn’t a great way to make policy, but it may be all we’ve got
The third-best solution, by far, is leaving this to whichever state and federal judges are randomly assigned to these cases, to rule on the specific claims raised by a given set of plaintiffs against whichever defendants they’ve sued, and awarding whatever relief is appropriate for the particular facts, legal claims, and parties are in their courtroom. (Full disclosure: I’ve written an amicus brief on the public trust doctrine in Juliana, and have been consulting with lawyers working on the nuisance cases.)
But that third-best option may be the only avenue now open. Back in 2007, when the Supreme Court held that CO2 was a pollutant that could be regulated under the Clean Air Act, Republicans bemoaned the “regulatory train wreck” that would come from just EPA Clean Air Act regulation. And that was a single agency using its authority under one statute. Trump’s election put that effort on hold, but the day may come when those Republicans wish they could rewind time and accept that train wreck.
Consider the range and complexity of the legal attacks on those who refuse to act to ameliorate global warming. Judge Aiken is being asked to order the entire federal government to come up with a plan to phase out fossil fuel use; the Pennsylvania case asks for an order ending the regulatory rollbacks.
Two of the California cases assert a single claim in an effort to make five oil companies pay for San Francisco’s and Oakland’s cost of building seawalls and other infrastructure made necessary by to sea level rise, while the other three California cases assert eight separate legal grounds for why some three dozen fossil fuel defendants should not only pay their adaptation costs, but punitive damages as well.
Additional local government cases — both in California and elsewhere — are in the works. Each state, and each state’s laws, represents a separate opportunity to establish liability, improving the likelihood of success somewhere. And entire states are contemplating the same sort of cases against the fossil fuel companies that they brought against the tobacco industry. (The suits would analogize the costs of adapting to a changing climate to the increased health care costs that they were forced to bear due to smoking.)
In other words, with the government unwilling to deal with climate issues, lots of clever lawyers are busy thinking up new and exciting ways to screw with the fossil fuel companies.
There you have it: The Trump administration’s climate policy (for want of a better word), may precipitate a judicial reaction eventually leading to greater restrictions on fossil fuels than anything contemplated under the regulatory program Scott Pruitt inherited. And if that happens, it will achieve this in a far more fragmented, ad hoc, uncoordinated — and thus significantly more expensive — manner than any such regulatory program.
Unintended consequences, indeed.

*David Bookbinder is the chief counsel at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank in Washington, DC.

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Beyond Our Control: An Alternative Approach To Climate Change

The Conversation - *

Patrick Stollarz/AFP
The COP23 took place in Bonn, Germany, from November 6-17. Participants in these annual climate conferences are driven by the idea that they can control the global rise in temperatures with resources and willpower. The recent proposal for a Global Pact for the Environment is also founded on this premise.
The same belief in control applies more generally to flows generated in all areas of human activity: since they are man-made, we assume that we can simply stop, unplug the machine so to speak, and the flows will cease. Numerous systems (relating to waste, data, capital, and populations) are built around this idea.
But it is an illusion. Stakeholders – that is, states, businesses and individuals – are increasingly overwhelmed by the flows they themselves triggered.

Climate change
Greenhouse gases are a perfect illustration of this loss of control: once released into the atmosphere, they are beyond the reach of humans as they accumulate and move freely above us.
Stakeholders in climate negotiations – such as the COPs – strive to wait out the (lengthy) period over which the existing gases will dissipate and to reduce current and future emissions.
But while the second point may appear to depend solely on the will of negotiators, it is in fact highly conditional, since it is not sufficient for one country, company or person to drastically reduce emissions. Everyone must take action if we are to achieve the desired effect worldwide.
The possibility of a scenario beyond human control prompts us to posit the existence of “total uncontrolled flows” and establish a theory of their [governance].
When applied to climate change, this perspective calls for a new platform for global discussion and negotiation, based on the assumption of a loss of control.

A brand new way of debating
Current efforts in climate negotiations are concentrated on public policy and civic measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. These measures aim to bring global warming below a 1.5°C threshold, with a maximum limit of 2°C set for 2030. The idea is to use the intervening time to help endangered areas (under threat from rising sea levels, for instance) adapt to the problem.
Given the possibility of a scenario beyond human control, a second significant round of discussions and negotiations should be undertaken within the COPs.
These talks would focus on the following question: how can we prepare for scenarios in which the global flows of greenhouse gases reach uncontrollable (meaning higher than currently anticipated) levels? Within these discussions, there would be no pretence that either the causes or effects of the phenomenon can be contained. Instead, their total and uncontrollable nature would be faced head on.

A necessary utopia
Here are three of the various reasons that explain why this approach would be valuable.
  1. The problem could be examined from a distance, well before we are confronted with the issue of managing the crises that will occur if “point-of-no-return” thresholds are exceeded.
  2. The extreme risks would no longer be denied. While it is clearly impossible to know in advance precisely when and how a disaster scenario may occur, they can be monitored and, to a certain extent, measured.
  3. Conducting analysis based on a loss of control would also provide an opportunity to think about how we can respond to the violence that would be unleashed should thresholds be exceeded. This would open up debate on the adoption of strict anticipatory measures, such as a global ban on the use of certain energy sources, or a worldwide tax on said sources, which would destabilize the economic models underpinning them.
Such dramatic scenarios may seem utopian, but they must be examined now so that all stakeholders face up to their responsibilities.

*This article was published in partnership with the online review La pensée écologique, headed by Dominique Bourg. It is an excerpt of an article on global climate change governance.

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Bringing Women Together To Fight Climate Change

Salon - Lauryn Higgins*

In Asheville, the Collider is changing the climate conversation — by including female voices
Credit: Lauryn Higgins
“We’ve come a long way, baby,” Marjorie McGuirk, the president of CASE Consultants International, tells me. It’s a Friday morning in Asheville, North Carolina, and McGuirk is mingling among other professionals at The Collider’s monthly coffee hour.
The Collider, a non-profit organization founded in March of 2016, is one of the first of its kind. A self-proclaimed innovation center that offers co-working, event space, monthly mixers and networking opportunities, all for companies focused on creating climate change solutions, it's located in the heart of Climate City.
Its tagline, “Where business and science collide,” might sum it up best.
For business owners like McGuirk, The Collider provides opportunities not only for business ventures, but for a dialogue to be had. “There’s no denying climate change is real. That conversation is over, and now we must direct it towards creating solutions.”
While the discussion surrounding climate change has come a long way, McGuirk’s earlier remarks refer to another issue that has plagued the field of science and business for far too long — the lack of women at the table.
Eileen Shea, the current Pacific Islands Regional Coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, recounts her early career days of being the only woman in the room. "Back before cellphones were a thing, if someone would call the front desk of an office and ask to speak with me, the receptionist would ask how to identify me. The person calling would always say, 'Eileen's the only woman in the room or the meeting, you can't miss her.'"
Shea's extensive education and career in weather and climate related science make her an anomaly amongst her peers, but one could argue the city that houses The Collider and women like Shea and McGuirk is also an exception to the rule.


The youngest staff member, 17-year-old Molly Pruett, found The Collider through a summer space camp. When she heard about an opening for an events assistant, she submitted her application the same day.
She recounts, "Asheville is certainly an outlier, especially in regard to gender roles. There's been a lack of female representation in science for a long time, but I'm seeing the shift and I'm excited to be a part of it."
Pruett attends the Nesbitt Discover Academy, a highly selective and application for entry public STEM high school in Buncombe County that gives students college credit for coursework as early as their freshmen year.
Pruett's inspired by the all-female in-house staff at The Collider and the women who have paved the way, but she notes, "When using your voice, regardless of what you are speaking for, you should do so eloquently and do it well. I think that applies to everything in life, but it's definitely something I'm taking with me in my career."
The Collider's executive director, Megan Robinson, notes that women are not only a necessity to providing climate change solutions in the field of science, but in every field. "Providing basic education for women and girls everywhere can be the way we change the trajectory of climate change and climate science."
A recent study by Project Drawdown cited that educating women is "one of the most powerful levers available for avoiding emissions by curbing population growth. Women with more years of education have fewer and healthier children, and actively manage their reproductive health." Robinson adds, "It's encouraging to see women in all fields of climate science emerging into leadership roles and it's changing the course for what is to come."
Shea wraps up the coffee hour by finishing her story about the days as the only woman in the room. She finishes with, "We're not alone anymore, but that doesn't mean we have to stop taking care of one another. We're an asset to our communities and that in and of itself is empowering. Science is simply the common denominator. "

*This feature is part of Salon’s Young Americans initiative, showcasing emerging journalists reporting from America’s red states. Read more Young Americans stories.

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