This was not an easy decision, and will be extremely difficult to implement, but needed ASAP.

Letter Update from the Climate Reality Project, December 19, 2023

Despite its many flaws and contradictions, COP 28 marks a major step forward for our movement. For the first time ever, a COP agreement explicitly acknowledges the main culprit responsible for the climate crisis: fossil fuels. While the agreement falls short of a complete phase out of fossil fuels, it urges countries to transition away from them, calling for a tripling of renewables and doubling of energy efficiency this decade.

Yes, there are caveats. The agreement lacks binding commitments, leaving countries to decide on their own pace of transition. It’s riddled with loopholes to benefit petrostates and fossil fuel lobbyists – who had more representation at the UN climate summit than every country except Brazil and the UAE – through “transitional fuels” like natural gas and unproven and expensive technologies like carbon capture and storage.

Plus, for the many island nations and climate-vulnerable countries whose very survival depends on the world holding rising temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the agreement doesn’t go nearly far enough. But our fight is far from over. If there’s anything to take away from COP 28, it’s the fact that the world is ready to leave fossil fuels behind.

The almost 130 countries supporting a phase out, the near open revolt by island nations, and the public outcry from thousands of climate advocates from around the world all point towards a future where fossil fuels are no longer king. For a recap of COP 28 and what comes next, check out our wrap-up videos at 24hoursofreality.org.

WATCH THE RECAP WITH AL GORE

The road ahead will be challenging, but we are not giving up yet. The science is clear: We need to phase out all fossil fuels to keep our goal of holding warming to 1.5 degrees within reach. Not just unabated fuels. Not just emissions. All fossil fuels.

Critically, we also have to do it fairly. The wealthy nations that got us here need to lead the transition away from coal, oil, and gas and provide the long-promised financing for developing countries to build clean energy economies of their own.

But the biggest takeaway is that now the world is talking about a future without fossil fuels. And that’s worth fighting for.

>>>Your friends at Climate Reality Project

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PS. Take action today by calling on leaders of the G20 group of major economies to end all subsidies for fossil fuel companies making billions driving climate devastation.

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PS. For the United States, it is now crystal clear that our country can no longer justify the Halliburton Loops, that is preferential environmental regulations for the fossil fuel industries. DGN

The MVP is unnecessary and an insult to the environment and climate change

Letter to Editor from Jim Kotcon, Sierra Club of West Virginia, Morgantown Dominion Post, October 9, 2022

Hoppy Kercheval’s column (“Manchin’s Miscalculation,” Sept. 30) repeats claims from Sens. Manchin and Capito, who relied on industry propaganda calling for “permitting reform” and weakening the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

NEPA has, for over 50 years, required federal agencies to objectively analyze environmental impacts of proposed projects and to involve the public who will be affected by those agency decisions. This approach is both good science and good public policy. Rational decisions are best made with all the facts, and since agencies cannot be expected to know everything about the impacts of their proposals, getting input from those with expertise and interest just makes sense.

Unfortunately, this approach requires that agencies actually listen to people and consider their concerns. Agencies get into trouble when they try to rubber-stamp a decision already made, rather than objectively considering all the issues and reasonable alternatives.

The proposed Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) is a classic example of this flawed approach. Courts tend to defer to agency expertise except when the agency is so arbitrary and capricious as to violate federal law. MVP keeps losing in court, not because environmentalists are obstructionists, but because it really is a bad idea — one that violates federal laws meant to protect all of us. The federal agencies that have pushed this have generated NEPA analyses that are so obviously flawed that courts have repeatedly asked that they be redone.

The claim that MVP is needed for domestic security and to supply Europe ignores climate change and the urgent need to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. Investing billions in a project that will not be completed in time to help Ukraine, but that will be obsolete before it pays for itself, while imposing excessive environmental costs on our land and water, is exactly the kind of bad decision that NEPA is intended to prevent.

In a democracy, legitimate permitting reform would not need to rely on a bill that would arbitrarily mandate a single project and prohibit any appeal by citizens.

>>> Jim Kotcon, W.Va. Chapter of the Sierra Club, Morgantown

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See Also: Summary of the National Environmental Policy Act, 42 U.S.C. §4321 et seq. (1969)

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was one of the first laws ever written that establishes the broad national framework for protecting our environment. NEPA’s basic policy is to assure that all branches of government give proper consideration to the environment prior to undertaking any major federal action that significantly affects the environment.

NEPA requirements are invoked when airports, buildings, military complexes, highways, parkland purchases, and other federal activities are proposed. Environmental Assessments (EAs) and Environmental Impact Statements (EISs), which are assessments of the likelihood of impacts from alternative courses of action, are required from all Federal agencies and are the most visible NEPA requirements.

Scientists, engineers, economists and political leaders have a responsibility ...

From the Article by David Shearman, The Hill ~ Energy & Environment, May 12, 2022

Human health and the natural environment are indivisible. A recent article in the journal The Lancet reminds us that “economic decisions on the environment have major impacts on human health, and health and wellness depend on a flourishing environment.”

Those living in vast cities may find this statement difficult to grasp and many economists certainly do, for the words “natural environment” have now to be changed to “natural capital” for their understanding. We live in a world where economic thinking rules our lives, whereas many believe it should be our servant in delivering an equitable and secure future.

When leaders of most Western nations continue to puff out their chests to announce their latest increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or rate of growth, they expose their impotence to manage a nation’s future by failing to recognize environmental costs.

Or as written more politely by Stephen Posner and Lydia Olander, in The Hill, “While congressional leaders debate trillions of dollars of federal spending, they have a critical blind spot” for they are “not informed by a complete accounting of the nation’s assets, leaving out many critical services that nature provides.”

After nearly 70 years of GDP in economic ideology and practice, the World Bank is having second thoughts about GDP as a measure of “growth” for it takes no account of natural and human capital used to achieve it.

Indeed the bank’s “The Changing Wealth of Nations 2021 Managing Assets for the Future” report now seriously questions the use of GDP in its present form and may at long last provide a glimmer of hope for the world to have a sustainable future.

On “natural capital,” the report states “mismanagement of nature and failure to consider the longer-term impacts of our actions can carry severe consequences, even if they might not be immediately evident. We therefore need an expanded economic toolkit, including broader measures of economic progress, to secure our collective prosperity and even sustain our existence as a species.”

The report notes that “in countries where today’s GDP is achieved by consuming or degrading assets over time, for example by overfishing or soil degradation, total wealth is declining. This can happen even as GDP rises, but it undermines future prosperity.”

In Australia with an election due on May 21, the government has proudly announced a current GDP of 4 percent, yet it may well be minus 4 percent if the loss on natural capital is accounted for, due to prodigious land clearing, urban expansion and extensive environmental damage from mining. This may also be the case in the U.S. but there has been little attempt to measure it.

The issue is of pressing importance because world food supply is threatened by war, harvest failures from climate change extreme events and by supply problems. This is a threat to one of our life support systems, the living soil, the ecology of which together with the surrounding services from biodiversity provide our food. The research of many scientists defining these threats should galvanize action.

The World Bank 2021 report may have been influenced by the report “The Economics of Biodiversity,” by eminent economist Professor Partha Dasgupta, which was cited in a previous article in The Hill. Dasgupta pointed out that GDP does not include “depreciation of assets” as such as the degradation of the biosphere. Economic progress has been based on the extraction of resources from nature and the dumping of waste back into it. When extraction and dumping exceed nature’s capacity to repair itself, natural capital shrinks as do biodiversity and the essential environmental services they provide.

A basic tenet of any policy or practice is that it should be able to measure its effect accurately so it is now vital to establish environmental accounting to place a value on natural capital as explained in an article from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Indeed, one has to ask why the U.S. has been tardy to adopt the UN System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) which commenced in 2012, when about 90 countries have already done so. The answer may be that the U.S. favors of a free-market system that embodies deregulation and is the leading instrument in disregard for the consumption of natural capital. Indeed, even recent articles from eminent business schools fail to mention the environment as it related to the U.S. economy.

It is also important to reflect that for too long we have failed to acknowledge and use the inherent knowledge of many indigenous peoples on land management. The free-market system has moved Western civilizations far from such understanding.

Reform must be initiated by a fundamental change in the thinking of economists and by politicians of both persuasions. Bipartisan reforms will become all the more necessary when climate-driven conflict emerge, and reforms could offer security, especially to rural constituencies who understand food production. Given the unprecedented impact we’ve had on land, the recent sobering UN land report is essential reading for all members of Congress as they consider economic policies — not just climate action.

A vital step in developing the World Bank’s “expanded economic toolkit” should be to educate the public and business on reform of GDP to put a value on nature so providing an incentive for government to protect it. Currently, “Real GDP” denotes GDP adjusted for inflation. Let us have “true GDP,” which encompasses environmental loss.

But we must realize that reform of GDP is only one piece of a thousand others needed to complete this jigsaw puzzle in the next few decades, if the planet is to remain viable for human life. The other pieces — including climate change, pollutions, toxic chemicals, water security, sea and land ecology, population growth, consumption, conflict — must all fit together as they are interrelated. Only in fitting together the puzzle can we ensure out survival.

>>> David Shearman (AM, Ph.D., FRACP, FRCPE) is a professor of medicine at the University of Adelaide, South Australia and co-founder of Doctors for the Environment Australia. He is co-author of “The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy” (2007) commissioned by the Pell Centre for International Relations and Public Policy.

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See Also: Americans Largely Favor U.S. Taking Steps To Become Carbon Neutral by 2050, Alec Tyson, et al., March 1, 2022

Majorities of Americans say the United States should prioritize the development of renewable energy sources and take steps toward the country becoming carbon neutral by the year 2050. But just 31% want to phase out fossil fuels completely, and many foresee unexpected problems in a major transition to renewable energy.

Marine extinction rebellion to warn and protest

From an Article by Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News, April 28, 2022

A new study suggests that warming, oxygen-starved seas could lead marine species to vanish at a rate matching the planet’s biggest extinction event on record.

If greenhouse gas pollution remains unchecked, global warming could trigger the most catastrophic extinction of ocean species since the end of the Permian age, about 250 million years ago, scientists warned in a new study today. During the end-Permian Extinction, researchers estimate up to 90 percent of marine organisms died out in overheated, acidic and deoxygenated oceans.

The Great Dying, as it’s sometimes called, the worst known mass extinction event in the history of the Earth, wiped out more than half of all biological families, including more than 70 percent of land-dwelling vertebrates, leaving a clear mark in the fossil record.

That cataclysmic change may have resulted from giant volcanic eruptions that went on for 2 million years. But a 2021 study suggested that carbon dioxide emissions from current human activity are twice as high as those that caused the Permian climate to shift.

Ocean temperatures and oxygen levels are already approaching deadly thresholds for some organisms, such as corals and Arctic cod, and potentially threaten thousands more species, said Curtis Deutsch, a Princeton University geoscientist who co-authored the new research published on Thursday in Science.

One of the reasons the researchers chose the Permian extinction as a basis for comparison was that its causes “seemed most clearly related to the kind of climate changes we are seeing now,” he said. “There were enough important similarities, the CO2-driven warming, the loss of oxygen, and the big response in the marine biosphere, that it seemed like the right comparison to start with.”

Additionally, the researchers wanted to measure their results against “the clearest, biggest magnitude of signal in the geologic record,” he said. “When you think about 90 percent of ocean species disappearing, it’s extreme.”

Extinction is Hard to Measure

Human impacts, including global warming, may have already triggered a sixth mass extinction of an as-yet to be determined scope. Just in the last few years, there have been the first documented climate extinctions of species, like a tiny Australian rodent believed to have died out in 2019, and global waves of mass amphibian and insect die-offs. A study published this week in Nature reported that 21 percent of reptiles are threatened with extinction.

But uncertainty about the total number of species on the planet makes it hard to calculate the magnitude of the recent die-offs as compared to past extinctions. If the starting quantity is unknown, it’s hard to measure what’s being lost.

Tracking extinctions in the oceans is even harder. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the world’s top ocean research institutions, states it is impossible to know the exact number of species that live there because more than 80 percent of the oceans are unobserved and unexplored.

To overcome those challenges, Curtis Deutsch and study co-author Justin Penn, a geoscientist at Princeton University, used a decades-long database of marine animals’ tolerance of warming water and decreasing oxygen. With that data, they created 10 groups of simulated marine species types with similar tolerance characteristics to create a global biogeography of marine life, and modeled how different levels of warming will change the distribution of species and potentially wipe some out.

They chose two very different emissions scenarios to show that today’s climate policy choices will make a big difference in the long run, Deutsch said. A high emissions path with up to 4 degrees Celsius warming by 2100 leads toward a mass extinction of ocean species that “would leave a clearly visible mark on the fossil record,” he said. But the path delineated by the Paris Agreement, keeping warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius, could avert the devastation of ocean biodiversity. “We can pretty much avoid a mass extinction,” he said. “It’s not going to look like a biotic collapse in the fossil record.”

Some climate scientists have recently questioned whether the high emissions scenario is still a useful metric. Rapid growth of renewable energy and new government and business promises to reduce emissions could hold warming to about 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, but policies to make that happen are still not in place.

Global greenhouse gas concentrations are reaching new record levels each year, and Deutsch said that, given the political and economic uncertainties highlighted by events like the invasion of Ukraine, the possibility that diplomatic efforts to curb warming could fizzle can’t be ruled out.

Malin Pinsky, a Rutgers ecologist and evolutionary biologist who wrote a Perspective article about the new research by Deutsch and Penn, said global policy choices the last few decades have already prompted massive and rapid ocean changes, such as sea level rise, ocean acidification and global shifts of species, which are affecting food security in developing countries. More than half of all human-caused CO2 produced since 1750 have been emitted in just the last 30 years.

“We already know marine life is on the front lines, with species moving faster toward the poles than on land,” he said, citing the black sea bass, a fish species that has moved from offshore Virginia to offshore New Jersey in just a few decades. “It’s part of a massive reorganization of life on earth, and this paper really does a nice job of making clear the stark choices in front of us,” he said.

The findings are important and sobering, said Michael Burrows, a marine ecologist with the Scottish Association for Marine Science, who was not involved in the study. Projecting long-term changes in dynamic and naturally variable ocean ecosystems for which there is very little monitoring is tough to begin with, Burrows said, and “a big problem with such projections, based on the present-day associations between species occurrence and climate (usually temperatures), is that the future climate conditions don’t exist anywhere on Earth right now.”

But biodiversity has responded to climatic changes of similar magnitude in the past, he said. “By showing that their model of projected losses produces changes similar to that seen in past mass extinctions associated with similar climatic changes, the research has resulted in a more credible forecast of the upcoming extinctions due to anthropogenic climate change,” he said.

Has It Already Started?

Oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped on the Earth’s surface by greenhouse gas pollution, building up at a rate equivalent to five atom bomb explosions per second. The average ocean temperature has reached record highs almost yearly, and its surface waters have grown 30 percent more acidic in the past 200 years.

Hot water is already killing marine life, and has perhaps already resulted in extinctions of regionally endemic species, especially during extreme events like marine heat waves. There’s not enough data to know if the sixth great extinction is already underway in the oceans, but there are clear warning signs that global biodiversity is collapsing under the weight of human activities.

Scientists estimate that more than 1 billion sea creatures, including birds, died during last summer’s extreme heat wave in the Pacific Northwest. The 2003 heat wave that killed about 70,000 people in Europe also extended over the Mediterranean Sea, where it triggered a series of mass die-offs of different ocean species, including rare corals. Recent global assessments suggest 40.7 percent of amphibians, 25.4 of mammals and 13.6 of birds are threatened with extinction.

Elsewhere around the planet, warming seas have driven many coral reef ecosystems to the point of functional extinction. Other signs of disruption include increasing jellyfish invasions and rapidly expanded Sargassum seaweed in the Caribbean. Hot water was also implicated in a mass die-off of starfish along the West Coast of North America, diminishing kelp forests and a federally designated “unusual mortality event” for gray whales lasting from 2019 into 2022.

“There is some evidence that extinctions have started ticking up already, but other human impacts are larger threats at the moment,” Pinsky said. But the new paper shows that global warming will soon overshadow other impacts like direct habitat degradation or pollution, he added. “What we do know is that extirpations, local extinctions already happen,” he said. “We do have evidence from a coral reef that even short periods of low oxygen can result in permanent displacement of a species from that reef.”

Sabine Mathesius, with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, worked on a 2015 study showing that long-term plans to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere won’t do much to protect marine organisms from ocean acidification. By the time any large-scale atmospheric CO2 removal happens, some species sensitive to acidification could already be gone, she said. “I think there are many demonstrated impacts of warming and acidification, especially the impacts of warming,” she said. “There have been these huge coral bleaching events, so that’s reason for great concern.”

Bleaching occurs when ocean water temperatures become too warm and cause corals to expel the algae living in their tissues, turning their color white. But reducing emissions, rather than removing them from the atmosphere, can lower the possibility of a mass extinction, Deutsch said. “Species go extinct naturally all the time,” he said. “If we were to take that optimistic scenario and start reducing emissions now, it’s possible that we don’t really see a significant bump in extinction rates.”

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An Interview with the Ocean, Transcript

From the Living On Earth, PRX, April 29, 2022

As we close out Poetry Month, we share the timeless poem “I Go Down to the Shore” read by the late Mary Oliver, and a sound rich performance of a creative piece it inspired. Author Kate Horowitz wrote “An Interview with the Ocean” and joined Living on Earth’s Aynsley O’Neill to bring it to the airwaves.

West Virginia is still not ready to embrace climate change

CURWOOD: From PRX and the Jennifer and Ted Stanley Studios at the University of Massachusetts Boston, this is Living on Earth. I’m Steve Curwood.

[MUSIC: Miles Davis “Milestones” on Milestone, Sony Music Entertainment Inc.]

CURWOOD: Each Earth Day marks an important milestone for Living on Earth. In April of 1991 Living on Earth started broadcasting weekly on public radio, and we’ve been hitting the airwaves ever since. Biologist and Woods Hole Research Center founder George Woodwell helped inspire me to start this show when he told me that global warming from burning fossil fuels and forests would likely melt the Arctic. He explained that as the permafrost released its CO2 and methane, those added greenhouse gases would cause more warming and melt the arctic even more, which would add yet more carbon to the atmosphere. At some point these self-reinforcing reactions, this feedback loop, would be beyond human control.

CURWOOD: As a journalist it seemed to me that if what George described was allowed to get out of hand, little else would matter much for society. So I decided that climate change and so many other environmental stories needed reporting, and here we are. Now, many things have changed since 1991 and science has made some amazing advances. The human genome was sequenced, and gene therapy began. The Hubble telescope gave us fantastic views of deep space. Technology gave us the world wide web, which made e-commerce, Google and Facebook possible, and the invention of the smart phone put the world in our pocket. And in politics and society, South Africa ended apartheid and freed Mandela and the US elected its first president of direct African descent, Barack Obama.

But the numbers show we are still failing to preserve the climate. Over the last 30 years human-caused emissions have increased by 60 percent. Today the atmosphere holds the equivalent of about 500 parts per million of CO2. That is not good news. We began the industrial age in 1760 with concentrations of CO2 at about half those levels and we are now living through the hottest decade in modern human history.

As a result we are seeing record breaking heat waves and wildfires from California to Siberia, floods, rising sea levels and shrinking Arctic sea ice. Not to mention, record-breaking Atlantic hurricane seasons, searing droughts and massive tornado clusters. And all this climate disruption is a result of just a single degree centigrade rise in average earth surface temperatures since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

But our broadcast today is not simply a look back or lament. We are also looking ahead, to shine a light on some possibilities to head off climate disruption before civilization as we know it becomes untenable. We will consider the possibilities of economics, politics, applied science and technology to address climate disruption, though so far they have fallen short.

So, we will look to see what they may be missing. And since we humans have caused the climate emergency, we’ll also consider how we can think differently about our place on this planet. For some clues we’ll look to some ancient wisdoms and contemporary anthropology.

[MUSIC: Brian Rolland’s “Along the Amazon” on Dreams of Brazil, On The Full Moon Productions]

CURWOOD: Correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, but there are two striking trends that run parallel to the alarming rise in global warming gases. One is the astonishing growth of economic wealth, and in recent years that increase in wealth in the US has been confined to the very richest. In fact, most families in the US have seen little or no gain, with many losing economic power, as many young adults today can’t afford to buy homes like the ones they grew up in.

The other trend is the loss of confidence in government action at the national and local levels and the failure of international rules governing climate change emissions to go beyond the honor system. The concentration of economic and political power related to those trends has historically thrived on the extraction and burning of fossil resources. Climate policy critics including Van Jones, Kristina Karlsson and Bill McKibben say that has to change, if we are to halt our present march toward climate Armageddon.

Kristina Karlsson is a program manager for the climate and economic transformation team at the Roosevelt Institute.

JONES: The first industrial revolution hurt the people and the planet, too. And, the next industrial revolution has to help the people and the planet.
KARLSSON: Meaningfully addressing climate requires an economic transformation in basically all corners of our economy.
MCKIBBEN: I think we’re reaching a turning point. I think that the political power of the fossil fuel industry has begun to wane after a century or two of waxing. And our job is to accelerate that to push hard for really rapid, rapid change.

CURWOOD: But right now despite pledges and promises from businesses and governments the nascent momentum for rapid change has been put on ice with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The resulting spike in oil and natural gas prices now has the Biden Administration saying drill baby, drill.

ORESKES: The war should be a reminder to us of how many good reasons there are to act on climate besides just the climate system itself. Europe is essentially hostage to Russian gas. And this is one of those things that breaks my heart.

CURWOOD: Naomi Oreskes is a Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University.

ORESKES: Because if we had started the process of transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. If we started that process back in 88, when the IPCC was first gathered, or in 1990, when they first issued their report, or 1992, when the world’s nations signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, we could have made that transition by now 30 years is a long time in the history of technology. It’s enough time to build solar farms and wind farms, and improve your electricity grid. We could have fixed this problem.

Instead now we’re essentially hostage to the fossil fuel industry. So at this very moment of crisis, when we absolutely need to stop using fossil fuels. We’re in a situation where the Europeans are saying, well, well, we can’t live without fossil fuels. So this is really a kind of, it’s kind of a tragedy of historic proportions. I do think historians will be writing about this for years to come.

Kindle electronic edition now available at Amazon.com

From the Publisher’s Weekly Review, Amazon Website, Spring, 2022

As a sequel to “Notes from a Dying Planet, 2004-2006,” Brown’s eye-opening and often terrifying survey explores what has happened to Earth regarding overpopulation, mass extinction, and climate change in the last two decades.

Aiming to provoke action, Brown painstakingly– and unstintingly– lays out the evidence, drawn from hundreds of articles and studies, of what he calls the “planetary death,” detailing the uptick in extreme weather and climate-related catastrophes, the warning signs that too often languish unheeded, and the likely increasingly horrific disasters we can expect in the future. While he never sugarcoats anything, Brown also offers guidance to steps that readers can take to mitigate these compounding dangers — if we as a species really do want to continue living on the planet we call home.

Brown’s core message — that we have very little time to make massive, life-altering changes in order to save life on the planet as we know it — is delivered alongside copious links covering topics that range from media misinformation to political movements. He never shies away from his fears that we have gone too far as a species to be able to reign in the incredible damage already done, which means the book may prove too wrenching for readers who prefer a sunnier outlook.

Brown sounds a resonant alarm about what’s likely to come if immediate action is not taken, and his advice about alternative personal habits and choices that any of us can make are welcome, though some of the recommendations are challenging. Brown suggests humans stop procreating, arguing “there will be enough younger people to carry on due to accidental pregnancies and births,” and he advises an immediate end to mass tourism that results in unaffordable ecological damage. His writing will spark a fear for the future, but readers will walk away empowered to make personal changes to thwart some of the most dire consequences of resource waste and pollution.

Takeaway: A stark analysis of the threats to our planet, with a provocative call to action for environmentally aware readers.

–
REFERENCE~ “NOTES FROM A DEAD PLANET: Please Prove Me Wrong,” by Paul Brown, PhD

Jacob Fourier in France understood the “greenhouse effect” in 1824.

From Tom Rodd, Executive Director, WV Center on Climate Change, March 21, 2022

Here’s our final reminder about the upcoming Wednesday, March 23 @ 7 PM live climate science program from Morgantown, WV — featuring a great speaker, Dr. Julie Brigham-Grette.

§§§ — Details and registration are here.

Julie Brigham-Grette is a world-renowned scientist who studies the polar regions. She is tremendously alarmed at the ongoing environmental collapse of these areas that are so vital to our planetary well-being. See her recent article on this topic here.

Dr. Brigham-Grette will be speaking and answering questions about how the polar climate has already changed, what we can expect as global climate change continues, and why we urgently need to address the climate crisis to protect humanity’s future.

Dr. Brigham-Grette will be joined by two West Virginia University Professors, Dr. Amy Weislogel, Associate Professor of Sedimentary Geology, and Dr. Christopher J. Russoniello, Assistant Professor of Geology. More information on all of these speakers is here at the registration page.

Wednesday, March 23rd @ 7 PM — The in-person venue will be a “smart conference room” at the WVU Media Innovation Center, in the Evansdale Crossing Building, 62 Morrill Way, Morgantown WV 26506. There will be audience seating, cameras and microphones for online participation, and a large screen displaying online speakers and audience questions. Doors open at 6:30 PM USET, and the online program will go from 7:00 to 8:00 PM USET. Reservations are not required. WVU COVID protocols currently require masking.

Don’t miss this unique chance to engage with these outstanding scientists who are joining this program to discuss the most important challenge of our time. The stakes could not be higher — let’s make them welcome!

We have more than 130 registrants so far – and for anyone in the Morgantown area, this will be a special gathering with other climate-concerned folks! Please share this invitation with your friends, and I hope to see you, in-person or online!

>>> Tom Rodd, Director, West Virginia Center on Climate Change

### ~ To attend and participate in this program — either online or in person — register here. For more information, email info@wvclimate.org. Thanks for your climate concerns!

P.S. Please share this message with others who might be interested! They will appreciate it!

In our oceans, yes, and in our rivers, yards and our own bodies

From an Article by Tik Root, Washington Post, March 2, 2022

For the first time, the international community has agreed on a framework to curb the world’s growing plastic problem. A resolution adopted March 2nd by the United Nations lays out an ambitious plan for developing a legally binding treaty by the end of 2024 to “end plastic pollution.”

“With plastic pollution getting worse every day, there is no time to waste,” said Rwandan Environment Minister Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya. “This decision is a historic milestone in the global effort to prevent our planet from drowning in plastics.”

The resolution came on the third day of the biennial U.N. Environment Assembly in Nairobi, where more than 150 countries are represented. It calls for the creation of an intergovernmental negotiating committee to hash out details of a treaty by the end of 2024.

“This is just an amazing show of what the world can do when we work together,” said U.S. delegate Monica Medina, the assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs. Choking back tears, she added, “It is the beginning of the end of the scourge of plastic on this planet. … I think we will look back on this as a day for our children and grandchildren.”

U.S. is top contributor to plastic waste, report shows

The committee’s mandate includes all phases of the plastic life cycle — from design and production to waste management. It comes at a time when the world produces billions of pounds of plastic waste annually — about 353 million tons in 2019, according to a recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and amid mounting scientific concerns about issues such as marine plastic debris and the potential impact of microplastics.

Millions of tons of plastic end up in the oceans each year, leading to alarming images of turtles and other wildlife caught in the waste. Even Mount Everest has not escaped microplastics pollution. The United States contributes most to this deluge, according to a National Academy of Sciences study, generating about 287 pounds of plastics per person.

“The high and rapidly increasing levels of plastic pollution represent a serious environmental problem at a global scale,” noted the U.N. resolution, which also acknowledged “the urgent need to strengthen global coordination, cooperation and governance to take immediate actions toward the long-term elimination of plastic pollution.”

Some countries, states and municipalities have taken action to curb plastic waste. Rwanda, for instance, has had a ban on plastic bags for more than a decade. In the United States, Sens. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) have led congressional efforts on plastic pollution, including the Save Our Seas 2.0 Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law in 2020. But this latest move is the most concerted international effort yet to tackle the problem of plastic pollution.

Environmental activists and industry representatives alike welcomed the agreement. “It has all the critical components we thought were necessary at this stage in the process,” said Erin Simon, the head of plastic waste and business at the World Wildlife Fund. In a statement, the International Council of Chemical Associations, a trade association, wrote, “We commend the governments that spent long days finding common ground to develop a meaningful resolution to address plastic pollution.”

The U.N. resolution was years in the making, said David Azoulay, a lawyer at the Center for International Environmental Law. He says he remembers the idea first surfacing at the 2016 iteration of the U.N. Environment Assembly in the context of marine plastic. “Envisioning a treaty was unthinkable,” Azoulay said. But, he added, Wednesday’s resolution has gone even beyond that early focus.

“The issue is not just plastic in the ocean; the issue is plastic pollution throughout its life cycle,” Azoulay said. “There is very little in there that I wish wasn’t in there. Everything we need to have the conversations that will lead to a good treaty is in there.”

Azoulay was glad that among the achievements in the resolution, its final version specifically charged the negotiating committee with looking at plastic production, included the option for a dedicated fund to help finance the treaty and mentioned human health impacts of plastic pollution.

The world created about 8 million tons of pandemic plastic waste, and much of it is now in the ocean

“There were efforts to weaken the language on health that failed,” said Bjorn Beeler, the international coordinator at the International Pollutants Elimination Network, an advocacy and research group. Although he said he would have liked a more explicit mention of the chemical additives in plastics, that language was “negotiated out.” An aspect about which Simon is excited is the call for national action plans from each participating country. More harmonized and standard data is “critical,” she said but acknowledged that “the proof is in the action we take from here on out.”

Getting from resolution to treaty will not be easy. “The fact that they are headed toward binding rules I take as a very good sign,” said Steven Blackledge, who runs the conservation program at the nonprofit group Environment America. “The devil is in the details.”

The U.N. negotiating committee will have a multitude of specifics to wade through in a relatively short time. Among the many items, any treaty will have to tackle reporting standards, financing mechanisms and, perhaps the thorniest issue, plastic production. “The million-dollar question is how much we’ll talk about reducing the production of virgin plastic,” Azoulay said.

That topic is likely to prove contentious. Ahead of the conference, Joshua Baca, the vice president for plastics at the American Chemistry Council, the trade association for chemicals manufacturers, called restricting and regulating the production of plastic “a very shortsighted approach.”

With such major hurdles left to clear, Beeler said he is skeptical that the timeline will hold. “As you get into it, it’s going to be a monster. I don’t fathom how you can get a deal within two years,” he said. “This is meaningful; this is significant. But this is really the first step.”

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SEE ALSO: Spotlight on United Nations Environment Assembly With Legally Binding Pact to Address Plastic Pollution | The Weather Channel, March 2, 2022

On the third and final day at the resumed fifth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly taking place at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) headquarters in Kenya, all eyes are on the establishment of an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to work towards a global and legally binding agreement to address plastic pollution.

The challenges of carbon dioxide capture & storage persist here (click to expand)

From an Article by Audrey Carleton, VICE Communications, February 8, 2022

The fossil fuel industry has a new plan for Appalachia: Blue hydrogen.

An alliance between some of the largest corporations in the energy business — Shell, General Electric Gas Power, EQT Corporation, Equinor, Mitsubishi, US Steel and Marathon Petroleum — announced in a press release late last week their plan to create a “hydrogen industrial hub” in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Their plan is to work with local stakeholders in the process, creating “a national model for sustainable energy and production systems.”

The companies are putting their faith in an element that’s gained traction as an energy form in recent months, as the bipartisan infrastructure bill includes billions of dollars to build out clean hydrogen energy development. Hydrogen is also the most abundant element in the universe, existing in water, alcohols, and the like.

Producing hydrogen as an energy source requires separating H atoms from other elements in the molecules where it naturally occurs (so, removing the H from H2O, for example). This is most commonly done commercially using steam to separate hydrogen from methane in natural gas; the finished product is referred to as ‘blue hydrogen,’ because it is emissions-free when burned, but is made with polluting sources of energy. (Its green counterpart, ‘green hydrogen’ is made by separating hydrogen atoms from water using renewable sources of energy, like wind and solar.)

Matt Kelso, manager of data and technology at the non-profit environmental watchdog FracTracker Alliance sees the investment in hydrogen as “an extension of the existing polluting industries, by the exact same companies that are polluting our air, land, and water today.”

“It is an excuse to keep drilling, obfuscated under a new identity, in an environment where there is increasing awareness of the damages that oil and gas extraction has caused to the region,” said Kelso, who lives in Pittsburgh, near southwest Pennsylvania’s oil and gas hub.

The plan will capitalize on the region’s natural gas stores, largely trapped in the Marcellus Shale geologic formation, untapped during the fracking boom of the early 2010s. The technique, which involves thrusting drilling fluid deep into rock formations, first vertically, then horizontally, to reach gaps in which natural gas is stored and release it. At the time, fracking promised to resuscitate the oil and gas industry, bringing an economic renaissance to the region.

In reality, these plans didn’t pan out: Actual job numbers paled in comparison to those promised. A 2021 economic analysis by the non-profit think tank Ohio River Valley Institute found that jobs in Appalachian fracking counties climbed by merely 1.6 percent in the 2010s, compared to the 450,000 jobs that industry estimates from the early 2010s laid out. It also led to an oversupply of natural gas that the industry is now trying to offload (most notably by pushing plastics).

The companies are positioning the move as an environmentally-sound one, or a way to achieve “aggressive net zero carbon goals,” Bill Newsom, president and CEO of Mitsubishi Power said in a press release. In fact, the fossil fuel industry more broadly has rallied around using carbon capture and sequestration as a technique to eliminate emissions from steam-methane reforming in the hydrogen production process.

These emissions are substantial. An August, 2021 report out of Cornell and Stanford Universities found that the carbon footprint that comes with creating blue hydrogen is 20 percent larger than that of burning natural gas and coal for heat and 60 percent greater than burning diesel oil for the same purpose.

Thus, carbon capture and storage — in which carbon dioxide is collected at the source of emissions and shot underground into stores — is essential to the fossil fuel companies’ plan if it is to be ‘net zero.’ But CCS comes with its own set of risks; pipelines carrying captured carbon have, in the past, exploded, and in the Marcellus Shale, where oil and gas wells, many abandoned, dot the landscape, shooting it underground could prove geologically risky — pressure from two wells interacting could lead to explosions.

Though the nuances of the ‘blue hydrogen hub’ plan remain opaque, and it is not clear how close any of these corporations are to receiving the permits required to see it through, they have a topline goal to generate “thousands of new jobs” and “protect current jobs,” per the release on the hub.

Matt Kelso remains dubious of this claim. “Based on the past actions of the industry, I would be highly skeptical with whatever figure they put forth,” he said, citing a Shell ethane cracker plant in Pennsylvania that was touted as generating 17,000 jobs but actually created 600. “The economic promises were knowingly inflated by several orders of magnitude, which undoubtedly helped secure better state investment offers,” he said of the project.

Even so, much of the landscape of Appalachia has yet to be reclaimed from already-dying industries; abandoned coal mines continue to leach into waterways and abandoned oil wells sit uncapped, leaking planet-warming methane all the while. The quick shift to a new energy form begs the question of whether a region is ready for a new wild west era, as the remnants of old ones have yet to be cleaned up.

BASF and partners using pyrolysis process (Beware of CO2).

From an Article by Karen Laird, Plastics News, Feb. 16, 2022

Chemical recycling is setting itself up to be a very big player in the future. German consulting firm Ecoprog GmbH says that as of the end of 2021, there were more than 90 chemical recycling projects in various stages of development worldwide.

More than 20 plants were in operation, although, the study said, most were not commercial plants but mainly served to advance the knowledge of this technology. [So called “pilot plants” or “demonstration facilities.”]

Chemical recycling is a topic of controversial debate within the waste management sector. Supporters argue that in the future, chemical recycling will allow plastics of all kinds to be recycled without downcycling. The element various technologies have in common is that they enable the recovery of contaminated and mixed waste streams that currently cannot be recycled mechanically. That considerably expanda the range of potentially circular plastics.

Critics mainly find fault with the high CO2 emission rates associated with chemical recycling. They also fear that waste streams are being diverted from a more climate-friendly mechanical recycling process in order to be chemically processed.

Controversy aside, the chemical recycling space is a dynamic one, with the overwhelming majority of new projects in planning in Europe. This market development is being driven, said the study, by the potential to recycle a far broader range and quality of plastics combined with the various quotas and targets for recyclability and recycled content use.

However, for this to truly impact on these targets, chemical recycling must first be recognized in the waste hierarchy, the study points out. That is the move favored by the coalition German Traffic-light. Also, planned projects are not the same as executed projects, especially where investments of the magnitude needed for the realisation of a chemical recycling plant are concerned.

Moreover, challenges, such as high energy consumption and uncertainty regarding various technical issues, remain to be overcome. This relates in particular to the purification of the output from depolymerization, such as pyrolysis oil, from contaminants and additives. The discussion about the political classification of chemical recycling is other factor threatening to hinder its implementation.

Regardless, the report concludes that chemical recycling is “a potential key technology in the future production of plastics,” able to generate “large market shares” in the coming years.

These technologies will mainly affect the business model of today’s raw materials producers and the mineral oil industry, which currently supplies the fossil-based building blocks for the plastics industry to these raw materials producers.

This explains the interest of these companies in chemical recycling and why they are the ones that are particularly active in exploring these technologies.

Other active players in the sector are waste management companies – who provide the waste material streams required – and start-ups, whose founding ideas relate to the technical aspects of the process.

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“Trend Study – Chemical Recycling” by ecoprog examines the technical fundamentals, market factors, development status, plant inventory, projects and competition in the field of chemical recycling worldwide. The study can be ordered at: www.ecoprog.de

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SEE ALSO: BASF, Quantafuel and REMONDIS want to cooperate on chemical recycling of plastic waste. Pyrolysis oil derived from plastic waste is fed into BASF’s Verbund production, thereby saving the same amount of fossil resources, April 30, 2021

BASF, Quantafuel and REMONDIS have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to jointly evaluate a cooperation in chemical recycling including a joint investment into a pyrolysis plant for plastic waste. It is intended that REMONDIS, one of the world’s leading waste and water management companies, supplies suitable plastic waste to the plant, and BASF uses the resulting pyrolysis oil as feedstock in its production Verbund as part of its ChemCyclingTM project. Quantafuel intends to provide the technology and to operate the plant. The company is a specialist for the pyrolysis of mixed plastic waste and the purification of the resulting pyrolysis oil; the technology is jointly developed and being held with BASF. The location of the pyrolysis plant will be evaluated together.

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SEE ALSO: TotalEnergies to use recycled feedstock from Honeywell, Plastics News, February 17, 2022

Honeywell International has agreed to supply TotalEnergies with recycled polymer feedstock from a chemical recycling facility it is building with Sacyr in Spain. “Plastics demand will continue to grow, so it’s critical to create a linkage between waste management and plastics production to strengthen a circular flow of plastics,” said Honeywell executive Ben Owens.

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SEE ALSO: New catalytic hydrocracking tech made for mixed plastics, Plastics Recycling Update, February 16, 2022

A new catalytic hydrocracking process out from a team at Johns Hopkins University turns mixed plastics into a mix of benzene, toluene and xylene, or BTX, that can be used in polystyrene, polycarbonate and other applications. The team is launching a new startup known as CUPTech to bring the technology to market.