Climate Liability News - Marco Poggio
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| A new tool to track emissions from every power plant could bolster claims to hold polluters accountable for climate change. Photo credit: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images |
Artificial intelligence coupled with satellite imagery could soon
deliver plaintiffs in climate litigation real-time data on carbon
dioxide emissions from power plants around the world. It potentially
opens a new front in holding the energy industry accountable for the
impacts of those emissions on the climate.
WattTime, an Oakland-based
nonprofit, developed a system that will produce actual carbon dioxide
measurements by combining image feeds from satellites in low Earth
orbit. The end result will be a massive trove of data, which will then
be shared with the public.
Supporters of the project say the data will provide new ammunition to
plaintiffs in climate liability cases by showing how much of global
warming can be attributed to particular sources.
“This will have massive far-reaching implications in the evidence to
back some of those claims, or back some of those potential plaintiffs in
court, if it comes to that,” Chiel Borenstein, the director of
operations at WattTime, told Climate Liability News.
“You’ll have a central data set that’s reliable and that’s as empirical and precise as possible, and is readily available.”
WattTime officials said some of the data may be available free of charge to the public, but it may charge for deeper access.
Shaun Goho, deputy director of the Emmett Environmental Law and
Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School said the technology could make it
easier for plaintiffs to establish that power plants are violating their
permit limits. It would depend on whether judges accept its results as
reliable, he said.
“I am sure that defendants would contest it at first, but if courts
start to accept the data from this technology, then it could lighten the
information-gathering burden on plaintiffs,” Goho said.
A more accurate and independent monitoring system could help develop
better regulations of those emissions, as well as help enforce
compliance, said
Michael Wara, a lawyer and the director of the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.
“We need to come up with new tools, new approaches on carbon,” Wara
said. “An improving measurement is the beginning of progress. This is
the direction we need to be taking and it’s very exciting to see it
happening.”
Wara said traditional carbon emissions monitoring, such as sensors
installed in smokestacks of power plants, are prone to tampering.
Satellite imaging will help overcome that problem. It will also create
an objective measuring system that applies uniformly across the world,
transcending individual countries’ interests, and making it more
difficult to cheat.
“This is a way to have data that everyone believes, no matter what country they’re from,” Wara said.
Currently, climate liability cases rely largely on research called the
Carbon Majors report
to link carbon pollution to particular emitters. That research,
spearheaded by Richard Heede of the Climate Accountability Institute,
first revealed in 2013 that the majority of carbon pollution could be
traced to 100 companies, the Carbon Majors. It was
updated in 2017
with data that showed 71 percent of global warming gases were produced
by the Carbon Majors, and pinpointed 25 of them as responsible for more
than half of all greenhouse gases emitted from 1988-2015.
With that data already in hand, Katrina Fischer Kuh, a professor of
environmental law at Pace Law School, said the new technology isn’t
likely to break new ground in litigation, but will allow more accurate
monitoring of pollutants to help enforce environmental laws.
“We should be excited about it. I don’t think we necessarily need it
for the climate nuisance litigations, but in terms of our ability to
regulate and control greenhouse gas emissions and craft effective public
policy to do that, it’s extraordinarily helpful,” Kuh said.
Kuh said satellite imagery will prove more helpful in legal cases
centered on pollutants other than CO2—methane, for example, which is
harder to detect—and could help litigants meet the burden of proof with
more precise data on individual emitters. But she said the real legal
challenge is the cause-effect connection between emissions and harm
done, not on the amount of emissions.
“At least right now, that hasn’t been the aspect of causation that
has really been troubling,” she said. “The defendants aren’t disputing
that they are responsible for the emissions of a lot of the greenhouse
gases.”
The new technology can also provide a boost to measuring compliance
with the Paris Climate Agreement, said Sean Hecht, a professor at UCLA
School of Law and the co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on
Climate Change and the Environment. He said WattTime’s technological
capabilities will help in countries that produce a large quantity of CO2
emissions but have weak regulations and questionable monitoring.
“The technology seems interesting. Assuming that it’s reliable, the
main impact it’s going to have probably isn’t going to be in liability
but on the ability to verify emissions and compliance for regulatory
purposes, which is a big deal,” Hecht said.
The data collected and shared by WattTime will be particularly useful
in monitoring pollutants other than greenhouse gases, he said.
“Anything that helps people to understand what the nature sources of
emissions are helps us figure out better how to manage pollution,” Hecht
said. “To me, that’s what the promise of that kind of technology is.”
Satellite imaging has been used in recent years to track pollutants and the field is evolving.
Just last week, NASA
deployed
a new instrument, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 3, which will measure
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere while orbiting the Earth connected to
the International Space Station.
The European Space Agency will decide in November the timeframe for
launching a CO2 monitoring satellite, according to a spokesman for
Copernicus, the European Earth-observing satellite program.
The
World Resources Institute
(WRI), a global research nonprofit promoting sustainability initiatives
including the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, relies on a vast number of
satellites that currently track pollutants.
Earlier this month, WattTime received a $1.7 million grant from Google as part of the
Google Artificial Intelligence Impact Challenge to work with WRI and
Carbon Tracker,
a London-based nonprofit, to harness existing satellite imagery and
infrared technology to measure emissions from all power plants nearly in
real time.
WRI already has an open-source
database of nitrogen dioxide emitted by power plants around the world using satellite imagery and aims to do the same with CO2.
“We are in the process of estimating CO2 on an annual level and
publishing it as part of the database,” said Johannes Friedrich, a
senior associate at WRI. “This information combined with machine
learning algorithms WattTime would like to use aim to fill gaps in CO2
emissions around the globe.”
In recent days, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere
exceeded 415 parts per million, the highest in recorded history.
Five of the warmest years
on record occurred in the past six years, 20 of the warmest have
happened in the past 22 and 2019 is on track to be hotter than last
year, according to the
World Meteorological Organization. More accurate tracking of emissions is clearly a starting point in reducing them.
WattTime will use high-resolution feeds from government-owned satellite networks—
Landsat in the U.S. and Copernicus, its European Union counterpart—but also some owned by the private companies, such as
DigitalGlobe, which currently sells its imaging products to various industries, including operators of oil and gas pipelines.
Michael Brauer, a professor at the School of Population and Public
Health at the University of British Columbia who contributed to the
creation of the State of Global Air
report,
said the technology WattTime is developing is promising, but noted that
the software would only track pollution from power plants, which
account for a fraction of global emissions.
“Pollutants emissions from power plants, we know that pretty well,”
Brauer said, “I don’t think this is really our biggest need from the
data side.”
While CO2 emissions from U.S. power plants are tracked by the
Environmental Protection Agency, other countries have fewer regulations
and transparency. WattTime will prove crucial in bridging that divide,
Borenstein said.
“This has massive implications in terms of access, in terms of
transparency, and accountability from the perspective of holding
organizations and the biggest emitters accountable for their actions,”
he said.
In the first week after its initiative was announced, WattTime said
it received pledges of varying levels of support from 85 stakeholders,
including non-governmental organizations, nonprofits and
satellite-owning companies.
“It’s an exciting time for our organization,” Borenstein said. “It’s an exciting time for the world.”
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