29/06/2018

New Coal Doesn’t Stack Up – Just Look At Queensland’s Renewable Energy Numbers

The Conversation -  | 

As the name suggests, Windy Hill near Cairns gets its fair share of power-generating weather. Leonard Low/Flickr/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
As the federal government aims to ink a deal with the states on the National Energy Guarantee in August, it appears still to be negotiating within its own ranks. Federal energy minister Josh Frydenberg has reportedly told his partyroom colleagues that he would welcome a new coal-fired power plant, while his former colleague (and now Queensland Resources Council chief executive) Ian Macfarlane urged the government to consider offering industry incentives for so-called “clean coal”.
Last month, it emerged that One Nation had asked for a new coal-fired power plant in north Queensland in return for supporting the government’s business tax reforms.
Is all this pro-coal jockeying actually necessary for our energy or economic future? Our analysis suggests that renewable energy is a much better choice, in terms of both costs and jobs.

 Renewables and jobs
Virtually all new generation being constructed in Australia is solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind energy. New-build coal power is estimated to cost A$70-90 per megawatt-hour, increasing to more than A$140 per MWh with carbon capture and storage.
Solar PV and wind are now cheaper than new-build coal power plants, even without carbon capture and storage. Unsubsidised contracts for wind projects in Australia have recently been signed for less than A$55 per MWh, and PV electricity is being produced from very large-scale plants at A$30-50 per MWh around the world.
Worldwide, solar PV and wind generation now account for 60% of global net new power capacity, far exceeding the net rate of fossil fuel installation.
As the graph below shows, medium to large (at least 100 kilowatts) renewable energy projects have been growing strongly in Australia since 2017. Before that, there was a slowdown due to the policy uncertainty around the Renewable Energy Target, but wind and large scale solar are now being installed at record rates and are expected to grow further.
Left axis/block colours: renewable energy employment by generation type in Australia; right axis/dotted lines: installed wind and large-scale solar generation capacity. ABS/Clean Energy Council/Clean Energy Regulator, Author provided
As the graph also shows, this has been accompanied by a rapid increase in employment in the renewables sector, with roughly 4,000 people employed constructing and operating wind and solar farms in 2016-17. In contrast, employment in biomass (largely sugar cane bagasse and ethanol) and hydro generation have been relatively static.
Although employment figures are higher during project construction than operation, high employment numbers will continue as long as the growth of renewable projects continues. As the chart below shows, a total of 6,400MW of new wind and solar projects are set to be completed by 2020.
Renewable energy projects expected to be delivered before 2020. Clean Energy Regulator
The Queensland question
Australia’s newest coal-fired power plant was opened at Kogan Creek, Queensland in 2007. Many of the political voices calling for new coal have suggested that this investment should be made in Queensland. But what’s the real picture of energy development in that state?
There has been no new coal for more than a decade, but developers are queuing up to build renewable energy projects. Powerlink, which owns and maintains Queensland’s electricity network, reported in May that it has received 150 applications and enquiries to connect to the grid, totalling 30,000MW of prospective new generation – almost all of it for renewables. Its statement added:
A total of more than A$4.2 billion worth of projects are currently either under construction or financially committed, offering a combined employment injection of more than 3,500 construction jobs across regional Queensland and more than 2,000MW of power.
As the map below shows, 80% of these projects are in areas outside South East Queensland, meaning that the growth in renewable energy is set to offer a significant boost to regional employment.

Existing and under-construction (solid) and planned (white) wind and solar farms in Queensland. Qld Dept of Resources, Mines & Energy
Tropical North Queensland, in particular, has plenty of sunshine and relatively little seasonal variation in its climate. While not as windy as South Australia, it has the advantage that it is generally windier at night than during the day, meaning that wind and solar energy would complement one another well.
Renewable energy projects that incorporate both solar and wind in the same precinct operate for a greater fraction of the time, thus reducing the relative transmission costs. This is improved still further by adding storage in the form of pumped hydro or batteries – as at the new renewables projects at Kidston and Kennedy.
Remember also that Queensland is linked to the other eastern states via the National Electricity Market (NEM). It makes sense to build wind farms across a range of climate zones from far north Queensland to South Australia because – to put it simply – the wider the coverage, the more likely it is that it will be windy somewhere on the grid at any given time.
This principle is reflected in our work on 100% renewable electricity for Australia. We used five years of climate data to determine the optimal location for wind and solar plants, so as to reliably meet the NEM’s total electricity demand. We found that the most cost-effective solution required building about 10 gigawatts (GW) of new wind and PV in far north Queensland, connected to the south with a high-voltage cable.

Jobs and growth
This kind of investment in northern Queensland has the potential to create thousands of jobs in the coming decades. An SKM report commissioned by the Clean Energy Council estimated that each 100MW of new renewable energy would create 96 direct local jobs, 285 state jobs, and 475 national jobs during the construction phase. During operation those figures would be 9 local jobs, 14 state jobs and 32 national jobs per 100MW of generation.
Spreading 10GW of construction over 20 years at 500MW per year would therefore deliver 480 ongoing local construction jobs and 900 ongoing local operation jobs once all are built, and total national direct employment of 2,400 and 3,200 in construction and operations, respectively.
But the job opportunities would not stop there. New grid infrastructure will also be needed, for transmission line upgrades and investments in storage such as batteries or pumped hydro. The new electricity infrastructure could also tempt energy-hungry industries to head north in search of cheaper operating costs.
One political party with a strong regional focus, Katter’s Australia Party, understands this. Bob Katter’s seat of Kennedy contains two large renewable energy projects. In late 2017, he and the federal shadow infrastructure minister Anthony Albanese took a tour of renewables projects across far north Queensland’s “triangle of power”.
Katter, never one to hold back, asked “how could any government conceive of the stupidity like another baseload coal-fired power station in North Queensland?” Judging by the numbers, it’s a very good question.

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Rising Seas: 'Florida Is About To Be Wiped Off The Map'

The Guardian - Elizabeth Rush*

Sea level rises are not some distant threat; for many Americans they are very real. In an extract from her chilling new book, Rising, Elizabeth Rush details how the US coastline will be radically transformed in the coming years
‘Take the six million people who live in south Florida today and divide them into two groups: those who live less than six and a half feet above the current high tide line, and everybody else.’ Photograph: Milkweed Editions
In 1890, just over six thousand people lived in the damp lowlands of south Florida. Since then the wetlands that covered half the state have been largely drained, strip malls have replaced Seminole camps, and the population has increased a thousandfold. Over roughly the same amount of time the number of black college degree holders in the United States also increased a thousandfold, as did the speed at which we fly, the combined carbon emissions of the Middle East, and the entire population of Thailand.
About 60 of the region’s more than 6 million residents have gathered in the Cox Science Building at the University of Miami on a sunny Saturday morning in 2016 to hear Harold Wanless, or Hal, chair of the geology department, speak about sea level rise. “Only 7% of the heat being trapped by greenhouse gases is stored in the atmosphere,” Hal begins. “Do you know where the other 93% lives?”

Sea level rise: Miami and Atlantic City fight to stay above water

 A teenager, wrists lined in aquamarine beaded bracelets, rubs sleep from her eyes. Returns her head to its resting position in her palm. The man seated behind me roots around in his briefcase for a breakfast bar. No one raises a hand.
“In the ocean,” Hal continues. “That heat is expanding the ocean, which is contributing to sea level rise, and it is also, more importantly, creating the setting for something we really don’t want to have happen: rapid melt of ice.”
A woman wearing a sequined teal top opens her Five Star notebook and starts writing things down. The guy behind her shovels spoonfuls of passionfruit–flavored Chobani yogurt into his tiny mouth. Hal’s three sons are perched in the next row back. One has a ponytail, one is in a suit, and the third crosses and uncrosses his gray street sneakers. The one with the ponytail brought a water bottle; the other two sip Starbucks. And behind the rows and rows of sparsely occupied seats, at the very back of the amphitheater, an older woman with a gold brocade bear on her top paces back and forth.
A real estate developer interrupts Hal to ask: “Is someone recording this?”
“Yes.” The cameraman coughs. “Besides,” Hal adds, “I say the same damn thing at least five times a week.” Hal, who is in his early seventies and has been studying sea level rise for over 40 years, pulls at his Burt Reynolds moustache, readjusts his taupe corduroy suit, and continues. On the screen above his head clips from a documentary on climate change show glacial tongues of ice the size of Manhattan tumbling into the sea. “The big story in Greenland and Antarctica is that the warming ocean is working its way in, deep under the ice sheets, causing the ice to collapse faster than anyone predicted, which in turn will cause sea levels to rise faster than anyone predicted.”
‘Dig into geologic history and you discover this: when sea levels have risen in the past, they have usually not done so gradually, but rather in rapid surges.’ Photograph: Milkweed Editions 
According to Marco Rubio, the junior senator from Florida, rising sea levels are uncertain, their connection to human activity tenuous. And yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects roughly two feet of rise by century’s end. The United Nations predicts three feet. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates an upper limit of six and a half feet.
Take the 6 million people who live in south Florida today and divide them into two groups: those who live less than six and a half feet above the current high tide line, and everybody else. The numbers slice nearly evenly. Heads or tails: call it in the air. If you live here, all you can do is hope that when you put down roots your choice was somehow prophetic.
But Hal says it doesn’t matter whether you live six feet above sea level or sixty-five, because he, like James Hansen, believes that all of these predictions are, to put it mildly, very, very low. “The rate of sea level rise is currently doubling every seven years, and if it were to continue in this manner, Ponzi scheme style, we would have 205 feet of sea level rise by 2095,” he says. “And while I don’t think we are going to get that much water by the end of the century, I do think we have to take seriously the possibility that we could have something like 15 feet by then.”
It’s a little after nine o’clock. Hal’s sons stop sipping their lattes and the oceanographic scientist behind me puts down his handful of M&M’s. If Hal Wanless is right, every single object I have seen over the past 72 hours – the periodic table of elements hanging above his left shoulder, the buffet currently loaded with refreshments, the smoothie stand at my seaside hotel, the beach umbrellas and oxygen bars, the Johnny Rockets and seashell shop, the lecture hall with its hundreds of mostly empty teal swivel chairs – will all be underwater in the not-so-distant future.
Elizabeth Rush. Photograph: Stephanie Ewens
One of the few stories I remember from the Bible vividly depicts the natural and social world in crisis. It is the apocalyptic narrative par excellence – Noah’s flood. When I look it up again, however, I am surprised to find that it does not start with a rainstorm or an ark, but earlier, with unprecedented population growth and God’s scorn. It begins: “When human beings began to increase in number on the earth.” I read this line and think about the 6,000 inhabitants of south Florida turning into 6 million in 120 short years. “The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become.” I think about the exponential increase in M&M’s, Chobani yogurt cups and grande lattes consumed over that same span of time. The dizzying supply chains, cheap labor and indestructible plastic. “So God said to Noah, ‘I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them.’” And then the rain began.
I do not believe in a vengeful God – if God exists at all – so I do not think of the flood as punishment for human sin. What interests me most is what happens to the story when I remove it from its religious framework: Noah’s flood is one of the most fully developed accounts of environmental change in ancient history. It tries to make sense of a cataclysmic earthbound event that happened long ago, before written language, before the domestication of horses, before the first Egyptian mummies and the rise of civilization in Crete. An event for which the teller clearly held humans responsible.
Dig into geologic history and you discover this: when sea levels have risen in the past, they have usually not done so gradually, but rather in rapid surges, jumping as much as 50 feet over a short three centuries. Scientists call these events “meltwater pulses” because the near-biblical rise in the height of the ocean is directly correlated to the melting of ice and the process of deglaciation, the very events featured in the documentary footage Hal has got running on a screen above his head.
 Photograph: Milkweed Editions
He shows us a clip of the largest glacial calving event ever recorded. It starts with a chunk of ice the size of Miami’s tallest building tumbling, head over tail, off the tip of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Then the Southeast Financial Center goes, displaying its cool blue underbelly. It is a coltish thing, smooth and oddly muscular. The ground between the two turns to arctic ice dust and the ocean roils up. Next, chunks of ice the size of the Marquis Residences crash away; then the Wells Fargo Center falls, and with it goes 900 Biscayne Bay. Suddenly everything between the Brickell neighborhood and Park West is gone.
The clip begins again and I watch in awe as a section of the Jakobshavn Glacier half the size of all Miami falls into the sea.
“Greenland is currently calving chunks of ice so massive they produce earthquakes up to six and seven on the Richter scale,” Hal says as the city of ice breaks apart. “There was not much noticeable ice melt before the nineties. But now it accelerates every year, exceeding all predictions. It will likely cause a pulse of meltwater into the oceans.”
In medicine, a pulse is something regular – a predictable throb of blood through veins, produced by a beating heart. It is so reliable, so steady, so definite that lack of a pulse is sometimes considered synonymous with death. A healthy adult will have a resting heart rate of 60 to 100 beats per minute, every day, until they don’t. But a meltwater pulse is the opposite. It is an anomaly. The exception to the 15,000-year rule.
From 1900 to 2000 the glacier on the screen retreated inward eight miles. From 2001 to 2010 it pulled back nine more; over a single decade the Jakobshavn glacier lost more ice than it had during the previous century. And then there is this film clip, recorded over 70 minutes, in which the glacier retreats a full mile across a calving face three miles wide. “This is why I believe we are witnessing the beginning of the largest meltwater pulse in modern human history,” Hal says.
As the ice sheets above Hal’s head fall away and the snacks on the buffet disappear, topography is transformed from a backwater physical science into the single most important factor determining the longevity of the Sunshine State. The man seated next to me leans over. “If what he says is even half true,” he whispers, “Florida is about to be wiped off the map.”

*Elizabeth Rush is the author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore and Still Lifes from a Vanishing City: Essays and Photographs from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work explores how humans adapt to changes enacted upon them by forces seemingly beyond their control, from ecological transformation to political revolution.

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Study Of Reefs Reveals Benefits Of Keeping Global Warming In Check

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Keeping global temperature increases to the lower end of the Paris climate accord would make a dramatic difference to the severity of coral bleaching by mid-century, according to research to be presented to the UN's World Heritage Committee.
The study, conducted by scientists including Australians, found only four of the 29 World Heritage reefs are projected to experience severe bleaching twice a decade from heat stress by the second half of this century if warming can be kept to 1.5 degree, compared with pre-industrial levels.

Fish swim past a coral formation on Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef – one of the World Heritage reefs at risk. Photo: Bloomberg
That projection, in an update report to the First Global Scientific Assessment of the World Heritage reefs,  compares with an assessment last year that projected 25 of those 29 sites – including the Great Barrier Reef – would suffer severe bleaching twice a decade by 2040 if global greenhouse gas emissions were allowed to increase under business-as-usual conditions.
"Coral reefs are one of the more sensitive ecosystems and so the impacts [of climate change] are unveiled earliest," said Scott Heron, lead author of the report, and an oceanographer with Coral Reef Watch, run by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Action on greenhouse gas emissions ... is critical at this stage."
Corals suffering sustained heat stress typically expel algae known as zooxanthellae, losing their main source of energy and colour.
Unprecedented back-to-back coral bleaching in the summers of 2015-16 and 2016-17 triggered the deaths of about half the corals on the Great Barrier Reef alone.
Of the World Heritage-listed natural coral reef properties, 15 were exposed to repeated severe heat stress between 1985-2013, while 25 of the 29 suffered bleaching in the subsequent three years, according to the assessment published last year.
The Turnbull government's handling of the Great Barrier Reef's health has lately been controversial following a decision to direct $444 million of reef research funding in the budget for the year ending this month to the little known privately funded Reef Foundation.
Keeping global warming to under 1.5 degrees, though, will be a difficult task given the roughly 1-degree increase so far and the timelag effect of the carbon pollution already emitted. Dr Heron's report notes the low-emissions scenario modelled implies pollution peaks during the 2010-2020 decade.
Even a low-carbon track, however, won't be enough to spare the Phoenix Islands Protected Area in Kiribati, which will be among the four sites likely to suffer severe coral bleach twice a decade by 2038, the report said. The other three are protected sites off Cocos Islands, the Galapagos Islands and Panama.
Dr Heron, who is a researcher at James Cook University and supported by the Australian Marine Conservation Society, will release his report at this week's World Heritage Committee meeting in Bahrain.
He is also planning to unveil a new Climate Vulnerability Index assessment tool to highlight the climate action needed to save all of the 1000-plus culture and natural World Heritage-listed sites world.
"There's not really the capacity within the World Heritage process to address [climate change]," said Dr Heron. "These are the best of the best places to protect."
Climate change impacts "have the potential to overwhelm any efforts that we put into local management", he said.
Separately, Hilde Heiner, President of the Marshall Islands, will on Thursday announce the first online political leaders summit to drum up support for lifting the emissions goals pledged at the 2015 Paris climate accord.
The summit is due to be held after the expected release in October of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's  special report on the impacts of a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees.

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28/06/2018

A More Resilient World: The Role Of Population And Family Planning In Sustainable Development

Environmental Change and Security Program - 

Girls in Jigjiga, Jila Alu Kebele on their way to fetch water from the nearby water point, April 2016. Courtesy of UNICEF Ethiopia/Tesfaye
“Community mobilization, local capacity-building, and innovation are the cornerstones of successful development. And that for us includes resilience,” said Franklin Moore, Africare’s Chief of Programs, at a Wilson Center event on family planning and sustainable development.
As rapid population growth intersects with challenges like food insecurity and water scarcity, communities in developing countries need not only the capacity to absorb short-term shocks, they also need transformative capacity to address long-term challenges.
Tailored education campaigns can engender lasting change, said Moore. In the Sahel region, Africare’s “husband schools” teach men about the health and nutrition benefits of child-spacing.
Such efforts help communities “make some transitions and behavioral shifts and to adopt new innovations,” said Moore. “Transformative capacity is where we find the innovations and institutional reform, behavior shift, and cultural change.”

Securing Water to Ensure Stability
Water security means “providing water for a multiplicity of users to support life on this planet and to support human activities,” said Eric Viala, Director of the Sustainable Water Partnership. Water is essential for life, but also for public health, energy production, and agriculture.
 Each person in the developed world uses enough water to fill an Olympic swimming pool every year, said Viala—and as the world’s population grows, so will the total demand for water.
The ongoing water crisis in Pakistan, where the population is predicted to reach 300 million by 2050, “has brought the population issue also on to the table,” said Zeba Sathar of the Population Council, who spoke from Islamabad via Skype.
This conversation—“between people who work on water issues, food issues, and population issues [has been] largely absent,” she said. It is “the shortage of water that’s bringing home the crisis of both water shortages and, of course, population growth and unmet need.”



Changing Farms to Feed Families
“Seventy percent of water we use on this planet goes to food production,” said Viala. “If you don’t have the water to produce food, you can’t eat.” Severe droughts can lead to hunger, even famine; while too much water—floods—can swamp farmland.
Families in many developing countries depend on subsistence farming for both food and livelihoods. As families grow, “that family farm…will have to be divided—so if they are struggling with the plot of land they have now, they’re cutting it in half,” said Jason Bremner of Family Planning 2020. Due to population growth, “the hectares per family farm has declined over time,” he said, threatening food security and economic development.
To help communities adapt, Africare works with farmers to plant drought-resistant cowpea as well as forage sorghum, which can be used to feed livestock in times of drought.
Through its community-led food security and distribution groups, Africare provides information not only on farming, but also on nutrition, health, and family planning, which helps members to both “make changes that relate to child-spacing and changes in agricultural practices that increase the nutritious food they are producing both for mothers and pregnant women,” said Moore.

Seeking Shelter From the Storm
As population grows, so does the number of people affected by extreme weather—particularly in the most vulnerable parts of the world, including coastal areas, arid regions, and flood zones. For example, Nigeria—the most populous African country—is growing rapidly.
“There are 200 million today, and there are going to be around 400 million by 2050,”said Bremner. The severe drought in the Lake Chad region, combined with the ongoing violence from Boko Haram, has contributed to the country’s millions of internally displaced people, said Bremner, pushing some to leave the country: Nigeria was the largest origin country for migrants to Italy in 2016, he said.
In Pakistan, severe flooding in 2010 destroyed homes and livelihoods, forcing many residents along the Indus River to seek safety or employment elsewhere.
A unique study conducted by the Population Council found that women affected by the flooding not only increased female employment, but also increased access to family planning and maternal health care, due to the presence of international relief organizations.
 Women were “able to absorb new changes in behavior,” which manifested in “a sharp uptick in contraceptive use” and “greater involvement in economic work,” said Sathar.
 
Integrated Approaches for Interlinked Challenges
“Most leaders understand that population growth has a major impact on stability,” said Viala. The African Union, for example, has seen success “linking the reduction in fertility, and favorable birth spacing patterns, with a demographic dividend…with positive development outcomes,” said Sathar.
To build more resilient communities, “it is really critical that we understand these interlinked challenges and we find new ways of doing business, as business as usual—standard family planning programs, our standard efforts of reaching communities with water and environmental issues—are going to be further stressed,” said Bremner. “Until we find different ways of doing business, then we will continue to see interconnectedness as innovation, instead of interconnectedness as being the way of doing business.”

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Trump's Lasting Damage To The Environment

Deutsche Welle -  Dave Keating

A new report concludes that the damage already done by the Trump administration to the environment, and the US agency that regulates it, will result in 80,000 deaths each decade.

This week, it was announced that copper and cobalt mining will begin in the formerly protected federal US lands of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument of Utah. The mining is now possible after Donald Trump removed protection from 2.2 million acres of federal land in Utah - the largest elimination of protected areas in US history.
It is only a fraction of the protections Trump has removed from federal lands since taking office in January 2017 - part of a general campaign promise to dismantle American environmental law, which Trump says is stifling economic growth.
The promises were not only made in campaign stump speeches. They were also set in the official Republican Party Platform adopted at the party's convention in August 2016. "The environmental establishment has become a self-serving elite, stuck in the mindset of the 1970s," the platform stated. "Their approach is based on shoddy science, scare tactics, and centralized command-and-control regulation."
Now, 18 months into the Trump regime, experts have concluded that the changes already made to environmental law will cause damage that would be difficult for a future administration to undo, and could result in 80,000 extra health-related deaths in each of the next decades.
An analysis essay published in June by two Harvard University scientists, David Cutler and Francesca Dominici, looked specifically at the health impacts of changes to the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) policies on air pollutants and toxic chemicals. They came up with the 80,000 deaths figure by analyzing the EPA's own data. The deaths would result from increased diseases from bad air and water quality, and would be in addition to the deaths that would have resulted from those diseases anyway under the previous trajectory before Trump scrapped the protections.
"This sobering statistic captures only a small fraction of the cumulative public health damages associated with the full range of rollbacks and systemic actions proposed by the Trump Administration," they said. The EPA has responded by saying the essay is "not a scientific article, it's a political article".
According to an analysis by the New York Times using Harvard Law School's Environmental Regulation Rollback Tracker, which is keeping a running tally of the regulatory dismantling program, the Trump administration has so far initiated the reversal of 67 environmental laws.

Out, and on the way out
The EPA does not deny that it is dismantling US environmental regulations. Trump appointed Scott Pruitt, the agency's head, to do just that. As Oklahoma Attorney General, Pruitt was a fierce foe of the EPA and initiated several lawsuits against the agency to stop it putting into place environmental regulation. Pruitt, who has denied the existence of climate change in the past, believes the agency is a large bloated monster producing regulation for regulation's sake, stifling industry with red tape.
Last week, Pruitt moved to kill an Obama-era Clean Water Rule, watering it down in a way that environmentalists say make it completely toothless. The effort was launched last year but has had to overcome legal challenges. It is only the latest piece of regulation to be undone. According to the Regulation Rollback Tracker, 33 environmental rules have already been overturned outright, while 34 are in the process of being rolled back.
The most significant of these is the Obama-era Clean Power Plan. It sought to overcome Congressional inaction on climate change by giving the EPA the power to regulate carbon emissions by classifying it as a pollutant. With the plan rescinded, there will be no instrument for the US to lower emissions in line with its commitments under the Paris Agreement – which Trump has pledged to pull the US out of in 2020.
This week, Trump signed an executive order to revoke Obama-era protections for US oceans, coastlines and Great Lakes waters. The change will open these waters to energy extraction, fishing, trade and national security activities.
Also significant is the administration's move to scrap Obama-era emissions standards for cars. This could cause US automakers to fall behind in the clean vehicle innovation race with automakers in China and Europe, which both have such emissions standards.
Lukas Ross, a climate and energy campaigner with Friends of the Earth US, says the rollbacks at the EPA are part of a broader dismantling being undertaken across the administration.
"Trump filled his cabinet and government agencies with unqualified corporate cronies whose devastating impact on our environment cannot be understated," he told DW. "Appointees like Scott Pruitt at the EPA and Ryan Zinke at the Department of the Interior use their positions of power to hand our government over to the fossil fuel industry."
As well as rolling back policies that protect air and water, he highlighted decisions to open American national monuments for drilling and mining exploration.
"These attacks on environmental and public health protections will have a disastrous impact on generations of Americans," he said.
Out of the changes made so far, Ross says the opening up of public lands for drilling and mining and rolling back clean air and water protections would be the hardest moves to undo. "These changes will have real-world consequences that once done, cannot be undone," he said. "New pipelines and oil rigs can be shuttered by a different administration, but not the toxins and pollutants in our air, water and soil".

EPA in ruins
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is embroiled in a corruption scandal
Even more difficult, experts say, would be restoring the EPA to its previous health under a new administration. The agency has been hit with mass resignations and firings since Pruitt took control and began cutting departments and programs.
The administration has sent intimidating memos asking for the names of climate change experts used by federal agencies, looking for environmental sympathizers within policymaking, and silencing EPA scientists.
The agency has been staffed with Trump loyalists, right down to the media relations office. After an initial EPA media blackout, new press office personnel have allegedly focused on intimidating reporters. Jahan Wilcox, an EPA spokesperson, reportedly told a reporter for the Atlantic earlier this month, "you have a great day, you're a piece of trash," when she requested comment on the fact that four top EPA officials had resigned in a week.
Pruitt himself is surrounded by one of the most extensive corruption scandals in US political history, accused of using agency resources for personal gain. Despite the ongoing scandal, President Trump has refused to call for Pruitt's resignation.
"Trump continues to support a fundamentally corrupt man as the head of the institution," says Ross. "Pruitt has wasted millions in taxpayer dollars on his lavish lifestyle instead of protecting our environment."
Pundits in the US doubt that Pruitt can stick it out at the agency much longer given the enormity of the accusations against him. But Ross warns that even if he were replaced by someone who cut back on the deregulation agenda, the damage has already been done. Even a future administration would have difficulty restoring the gutted agency to its previous health and staffing levels any time soon.
"A new administration would need a truly environment-focused agenda to reverse much of Pruitt's damage," he says.

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Judge Tosses City Climate Change Lawsuits Against Big Oil

Bloomberg -  | 
  • San Francisco jurist says solution needed on ‘more vast scale’
  • BP, Exxon, Chevron backed by President Trump on dismissal bid

Fighting Climate Change, Without the U.S.

BP Plc, Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. escaped blame for the public costs of global warming when a U.S. judge ruled that lawsuits by cities against oil companies aren’t the answer to climate change.
“The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup wrote Monday in dismissing complaints by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland, California.
Litigation by local governments in the U.S. including New York City, Boulder, Colorado, and eight California cities and counties is a new front in the global fight against climate change. The suits thrown out Monday sought to recover the cost of infrastructure needed to protect against rising sea levels. ConocoPhillips and Royal Dutch Shell Plc were also among the defendants.
The judge said it’s “true” that carbon dioxide released from fossil fuels has contributed to global warming, but on the other hand, “development of our modern world has literally been fueled by oil and coal.”

Fossil Fuels
"All of us have benefited,” Alsup wrote. “Having reaped the benefit of that historic progress, would it really be fair to now ignore our own responsibility in the use of fossil fuels and place the blame for global warming on those who supplied what we demanded?"
The judge concluded in his 16-page ruling that the issue is best addressed by the government’s legislative and executive branches. The Trump administration made that argument in urging the judge to toss the suits, even while the administration has opposed efforts worldwide to fight climate change.
“While it remains true that our federal courts have authority to fashion common law remedies for claims based on global warming, courts must also respect and defer to the other co-equal branches of government when the problem at hand clearly deserves a solution best addressed by those branches,” Alsup wrote.
A spokesman for the San Francisco city attorney said the office is reviewing the judge’s order and will decide next steps shortly.
“We’re pleased that the court recognized that the science of global warming is
no longer in dispute,” John Cote said in an emailed statement. “Our litigation forced a public court proceeding on climate science, and now these companies can no longer deny it is real and valid.”
Oakland City Attorney Barbara Parker said the city is weighing whether to appeal.
“Our lawsuit presents valid claims and these defendants must be held accountable for misleading the American people about the catastrophic risks to human beings and all forms of life on this planet caused by fossil fuel-driven global warming and sea level rise,” she said in an email.
A request by the oil companies for dismissal of the New York City case is pending in Manhattan federal court.
The cases are People of the State of California v. BP P.L.C. 17-cv-06011 and 17-cv-06012, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).

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Here’s Why The Bay Area Lost Its Lawsuit Against Big Oil

Grist - 

REUTERS / Joshua Lott
The judge who famously convened a climate tutorial threw out a case against Big Oil on Tuesday. San Francisco and Oakland had sued BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell to help pay for the costs of building seawalls and other projects to adapt to climate change.
This decision dims hopes for those pursuing lawsuits against companies for damages tied to climate change. At least nine other cities and counties have brought similar lawsuits, including New York City, Boulder, Colorado, and King County, Washington.
From the beginning, U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup took an expansive approach. He had each side fly in experts to give him a personal masterclass on climate change in his San Francisco courtroom. During that tutorial, he seemed sympathetic to the argument that oil companies have done real harm. You can glimpse that sympathy in his 16-page decision : “[T]his order accepts the science behind global warming. So do both sides. The dangers raised in the complaints are very real.”
So why throw out the lawsuit?
Well, Alsup sees a danger that worries him more than climate change — the danger of a single unelected judge deciding that countries around the world are better off without oil.
Alsup wrote that a ruling against Big Oil would trigger a cascade of other lawsuits, and eventually put petroleum producers out of business. And this, he argued, would trample on the policies of countries that are actively encouraging oil production. While the harms of fossil fuels are clear, so are the benefits, Alsup argued. “Without those fuels, virtually all of our monumental progress would have been impossible,” he wrote. “All of us have benefitted.”
San Francisco and Oakland’s lawsuit, Alsup wrote, is effectively asking the court to “conduct and control energy policy on foreign soil.” If any branch of government is going to do something as big as shutting down global oil production, Alsup reasons, it needs to be done by elected representatives, not one judge and jury making a decision for the entire world.
This isn’t the first time a lawsuit seeking climate-change damages has run afoul of the courts. In fact, Alsup wrote, “No plaintiff has ever succeeded” in this kind of case. The California cities could appeal to a higher court. But for the moment, their lawyers are taking heart in the fact that this case set a non-legal precedent, said John Cote, a spokesman for the San Francisco city attorney, in a statement. “Our litigation forced a public court proceeding on climate science, and now these companies can no longer deny it is real and valid.”
After hearing from all sides, Alsup concluded: “The issue is not over science. All parties agree that fossil fuels have led to global warming and ocean rise and will continue to do so.”
Now that we’ve got that sorted out, we can all move on to the most reasonable solutions, right? Right?

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