China’s Xi Outshines Trump as the World’s Future Energy Leader, Failure by the two presidents to discuss climate change leaves China ahead, based on actions if not words, Scientific American By David Biello on April 11, 2017 “……Trump and China’s Pres. Xi Jinping apparently ignored climate change at their inaugural meeting last week. Although the two leaders apparently found time to discuss everything from North Korea’s nuclear capability to a potential reset of trade relations, climate change was never mentioned, even though Trump might have wanted to take the opportunity to directly fact check his Tweet from last year that China invented climate change to cripple U.S. manufacturing.
The silence was not a surprise, however, even if the focus of the summit was meant to be “global challenges around the world.” As Susan Thornton, acting assistant secretary for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the U.S. State Department, predicted, “I don’t think that [climate change is] going to be a major part of the discussion in Florida.”
That’s too bad, because China and the U.S. remain the two biggest polluters when it comes to greenhouse gases. Cooperation on climate change provided a rare area of agreement between China and the U.S. during the Obama administration. And it was in large part due to the efforts of China and the U.S. that the nations of the world agreed to combat climate change in Paris in 2015.
It is also too bad for the U.S.—because, ironically, the silence leaves China as the world’s future energy leader. As many see the Trump regime abandoning U.S. leadership in the fight to restrain global warming, China seems willing to step up, at least in rhetoric. “What should concern us is refusing to face up to problems and not knowing what to do about them,” Xi said in a speech to the World Economic Forum in January. “The Paris Agreement is a hard-won achievement which is in keeping with the underlying trend of global development. All signatories should stick to it instead of walking away from it, as this is a responsibility we must assume for future generations.”
At the same time, the Chinese have taken the lead in producing clean energy—from topping the world in the production and installation of solar power to building an entire new series of nuclear power plants, making use of the latest technology. Trump’s avoidance of the climate change problem could leave U.S. industry at a competitive disadvantage……..
Trump has already signed an executive order forcing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw the Clean Power Plan, which would have cut pollution from power plants. He is rolling back other federal efforts to combat climate change, such as reducing methane pollution from oil and gas pipelines as well as promoting a budget that could eliminate funding for clean energy research. All of which undercuts any serious effort to meet the U.S. commitment under the Paris agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
Xi’s China, by contrast, plans to implement a national cap-and-trade system to reduce CO2 pollution this year. And there are already signs that decades-long growth in China’s coal burning has slowed or even stopped, potentially fulfilling the country’s Paris pledge to reach a peak in its pollution by 2030. This change of course is not just aimed at fending off climate change but also at reducing unhealthy air pollution that even government leaders in Beijing cannot avoid breathing…….
Nowhere remains safe from climate change. The U.S. is already feeling the effects, such as weird weather upsetting the plans of American farmers. Those effects will only get worse if nothing is done to stop dumping CO2 into the sky, much less to begin to reduce concentrations that have now reached more than 400 parts per million in the air—higher than that breathed by any members of our fellow Homo sapiens in the last 200,000 years. The global warming challenge is also intimately connected to the global challenges of feeding more than seven billion people, providing drinkable water as supplies dwindle and supplying electricity to billions of people who still do not have it. None of these challenges can be solved in isolation but rather require solutions like clean energy supergrids and microgrids that address energy poverty and reduce climate change pollution at the same time.
This also holds true even for the items that were on the U.S.–China agenda at Mar-a-Lago, such as the future of war-torn Syria after Trump ordered a cruise missile strike in response to that nation’s use of chemical weapons in its civil war. A shortage of water and food in Syria helped start the horrendous conflict there, forcing refugees to flee the war and the nation—in other words, a deadly fight and flight exacerbated by climate change. The conflict in Syria may serve as a warning from a future in which Trump continues to deny the facts about global warming. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chinas-xi-outshines-trump-as-the-worlds-future-energy-leader/
April 12, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
China, climate change, politics international, USA |
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The Moapa went from suffering at the hands of coal to benefiting from the profits of renewables
Color Lines, Yessenia Funes APR 10, 2017 Tucked between scattered red desert rocks, the Moapa Band of Paiutes dwells on a little over 70,000 acres in southeastern Nevada. It’s a small tribe with a population of no more than 311, but those numbers
haven’t stopped its members from shutting down a giant coal generating station to protect their health and land.
While President Donald Trump is attempting to revive the coal industry, the Moapa Band has proven how dangerous that industry can be to health. Tribal members suffer from high rates of asthma and heart disease, though the tribe’s small size makes it difficult to accurately quantify. The coal-fired Reid Gardner Generating Station sits outside the Moapa River Indian Reservation, just beyond a fence for some tribal members who have had to deal with the repercussions of its air pollution and toxic coal ash waste for 52 years.
“The whole tribe was suffering from it,” says Vernon Lee, a tribal member and former council member who worked at the plant 15 years ago. “It’s just bad stuff. We all knew that.”
Coincidentally, the day after the station last stopped operating (on March 17), the Moapa Band of Paiutes launched the Moapa Southern Paiute Solar Project, the first-ever solar project built on tribal land, in partnership with large-scale solar operator First Solar. Companies started approaching the tribe about leasing its land around the same time their organizing took off, and things essentially fell into place.
Despite all this—and the impending closure of the coal-fired Navajo Generating Station in Arizona, also run by NV Energy and impacting Navajo Nation members who work there or live nearby—President Trump is pushing forth with a coal-first energy agenda……..
the tribe’s prevalence of cardiovascular and respiratory issues are consistent with what is generally caused by air pollution, says C. Arden Pope III, an environmental epidemiologist who currently teaches economics at Brigham Young University but has served on the EPA Science Advisory Board and chairs the EPA Advisory Council on Clean Air Compliance Analysis.
Coal releases heavy carbon dioxide emissions, but it also emits a cocktail of pollutants dangerous to health: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, mercury, particulates and fly ash that is then placed into nearby ponds. Lee calls them “chemical soup ponds.” These pollutants can lead to respiratory issues, heart problems, as well as neurological and developmental damage.
Pope has examined the health of the Moapa Band. Back in 2012, he attempted to conduct a study on the tribe but was unable to establish conclusive findings because the tribe’s numbers are so small. Then, there was the issue of no valid control group because, as Pope put it, “they all lived so very close to the power plant that…they were all being exposed.”
Still, Pope did collect a lot of data, and the health impacts were enough for him to have a strong opinion about how the generating station was impacting their health: “Do I think that the exposure to air pollution likely had adverse impacts on their health? The answer to that is yes.”
And he says that their high rates of respiratory and cardiovascular issues are in line with greater empirical research on air pollution. Without a conclusive study, however, it was difficult for government officials to take tribal members seriously.
“But we wouldn’t care,” chairwoman Simmons says. “We smelled it and felt it.”
Then, in 2010, they met Vinny Spotleson, who was working with the Sierra Club at that time. That changed everything.
It all started with letters. That’s how tribal members first thought they’d give the EPA and state agencies like the state’s Division of Environmental Protection a piece of their mind. “People wrote [many] letters,” Simmons tells me, adding that they never got a response.
When they met Spotleson in 2010, Simmons realized that they finally had the support needed to be taken seriously by officials. Before then, Simmons says government agencies would shoot back with numbers from air quality reports she and other Moapa people didn’t fully understand. But Spotleson introduced them to lawyers and scientists. From there, all the Moapa had to do was tell their stories. Simmons remembers Spotleson telling her, “Just say how you feel, and they’ll never be able to prove you wrong.”……
with the help of the Sierra Club, the Moapa Band of Paiutes entered into a legal battle against the Bureau of Land Management for approving the expansion project in Moapa Band of Paiutes, et al v. BLM, et al. Part of their campaign involved growing public awareness. The residents in Las Vegas whose homes were powered by the plant had no idea where it was or that it even existed—much less what it was doing to the Moapa.
“We did see a lot of people in the community, in Las Vegas, in southern Nevada, really engaging and making this campaign their own,” says Elspeth DiMarzio, another Sierra Club campaign organizer who worked with the Moapa. “Once they were aware of the issue, they could see that their neighbors in Moapa were suffering because of an energy that they were receiving.”……
the tribe ultimately lost that case in 2013—but they didn’t lose everything.
Legislators introduced Senate Bill 123 in February 2013, which would require certain utilities (like NV Energy, the one behind Reid Gardner) to reduce their coal-based greenhouse gas emissions by eliminating at least 800 megawatts of electricity by 2019 and replacing part of that lost energy with 350 megawatts of renewable energy like solar or wind. This came after these three years of organizing by the Moapa and its allies.
By April, NV Energy gave its support for SB 123. In June 2013, the bill became law—with a stamp of approval from NV Energy and the Moapa.
The plant shuttered for good March 2017…….
The tribe now leases its land to Capital Dyanmics, which owns the Moapa Southern Paiute Solar Project. The plant provided 115 construction jobs for tribal members and employs two permanently as field technicians.
The power goes to Los Angeles, and the tribe receives revenue from leasing their land. But they’ve been discussing and attempting to find bidders for two other solar projects with the thought of launching one that would bring that power into their homes.
They have a new revenue stream and are still deciding on the best way to use it. “We’ve never been in this position before or had these [solar] projects before,” Simmons says. “It’s hard to take off and start spending everything we do have because we want to plan and spend accordingly.”
The Moapa went from suffering at the hands of coal to benefiting from the profits of renewables……http://www.colorlines.com/articles/how-one-small-tribe-beat-coal-and-built-solar-plant
April 12, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
indigenous issues, renewable, USA |
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Sub-Arctic wastelands is more vulnerable than thought, scientists say, http://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/climate-change/subarctic-wastelands-is-more-vulnerable-than-thought-scientists-say/news-story/1a825e5872728267754c4544148ba57a APRIL 11, 2017, FROZEN, sub-Arctic wastelands loaded with planet-heating greenhouse gases are more susceptible to global warming than previously understood, scientists warned on Monday.
Even stabilising the world’s climate at 2C above pre-industrial levels — the daunting goal laid down in the 196-nation Paris Agreement — would melt more than 40 per cent of permafrost, or an area nearly twice the size of India, they reported in the journal Nature Climate Change.
That could take centuries or longer, but would eventually drive up global temperatures even further as more gases escaped into the air.
Sometimes called a climate change time bomb, the northern hemisphere’s 15 million square kilometres of increasingly misnamed permafrost contains roughly twice as much carbon — mainly in the form of methane and carbon dioxide (CO2) — as Earth’s atmosphere.
Currently, the atmosphere holds about 400 parts per million of CO2, 30 per cent more than when warming caused by human activity started in the mid-19th century.
“We estimate that four million square kilometres — give or take a million — will disappear for every additional degree of warming,” said co-author Sebastian Westermann, a senior lecturer at the University of Oslo.
“That’s about 20 per cent higher than previous estimates,” he said.
Human-induced global warming has already caused the planet to heat up by 1C, and is on track to add at least another 2C by century’s end unless global emissions are slashed in the coming decades, the UN’s climate science panel has concluded.
BACK TO BASICS Those calculations do not include the possible impact of melting permafrost. The most recent report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) “talks mainly about the uncertainties,” and discounts the likelihood that gases released from melting soils will significantly add to warming by 2100.
But climate models — which vary depending on predicted levels of greenhouse gas emissions — are all over the map in forecasting the future of permafrost.
To sidestep some of these uncertainties, a team of scientists led by Sandra Chadburn of the University of Leeds used a “back to basics” approach based on observations.
“Our method allows for a projection of how much permafrost will be lost at what temperature — but it doesn’t tell us how long that will take,” said Westermann.
The findings should serve as a benchmark for future climate change models, he added.
“If climate models show something very different, scientists will have to explain why it is not in agreement with the observations.”
Permafrost is found in a wide belt between the Arctic Circle to the north and boreal forests to the south, across northern Europe, Russia, Alaska and Canada.
It can vary in depth from a few metres to more than 100, but most carbon stocks are thought to reside fairly close to the surface.
Roughly 35 million people live in the permafrost zone, some in large cities where buildings risk collapsing in the next two decades as the ground softens.
April 12, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
ARCTIC, climate change |
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Why you’ll hear nuclear emergency sirens sounding in N.J., Del. http://www.nj.com/salem/index.ssf/2017/04/why_youll_hear_nuclear_emergency_sirens_sounding_i.html By Bill Gallo Jr. | For NJ.com April 11, 2017 LOWER ALLOWAYS CREEK TWP. — The 70-plus emergency sirens around the Artificial Island nuclear generating complex will be tested Tuesday night, officials say.
The sirens located within the 10-mile radius of the three reactors operated by PSEG Nuclear, are scheduled to sound at 7:20 p.m., according to company spokesman Joe Delmar.
The sirens — 34 in New Jersey and 37 in Delaware –will sound for three minutes. They are part of the alert system that would inform those living near the Artificial Island complex in case of an emergency at one of the nuclear plants.
Parts of Salem and Cumberland counties in New Jersey and in New Castle and Kent counties in Delaware all fall within the 10-mile radius of the plants.
During the siren tests residents are not required to do anything. n an emergency, such as the accidental release of a large amount of radiation, the sirens would alert those living near the generating complex to tune to radio stations WENJ-FM 97.3 or Marine Channel 16 in New Jersey for official information on what steps they should take.
The stations in Delaware include WKNZ-FM 88.7, WDEL-AM 1150, WDDE-FM 91.1, WSUX-AM 1280, WDSD-FM 94.7, WWTX-AM 1290, WSTW-FM 93.7, WDOV-AM 1410, WRDX-FM 92.9, WILM-AM 1450, WJBR-FM 99.5 and Marine Channel 16.
These radio stations are part of the Emergency Alert System.
Depending on the emergency, residents in the 10-mile zone could be directed to shelter in place or evacuate.
Information about what to do in an emergency is also available online. he three reactors operated by PSEG Nuclear at Artificial Island make up the second-largest commercial nuclear complex in the U.S. in terms of power output. Only the Palo Verde complex in Arizona produces more electricity.
Bill Gallo Jr. may be reached at bgallo@njadvancemedia.com.
April 12, 2017
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
safety, USA |
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