Green Growth is a flawed concept

From an Article by George Monbiot, The Guardian (UK), September 29, 2021

There is a box labelled “climate”, in which politicians discuss the climate crisis. There is a box named “biodiversity”, in which they discuss the biodiversity crisis. There are other boxes, such as pollution, deforestation, overfishing and soil loss, gathering dust in our planet’s lost property department. But they all contain aspects of one crisis that we have divided up to make it comprehensible.

The categories the human brain creates to make sense of its surroundings are not, as Immanuel Kant observed, the “thing-in-itself”. They describe artefacts of our perceptions rather than the world. Nature recognises no such divisions. As Earth systems are assaulted by everything at once, each source of stress compounds the others.

Take the situation of the North Atlantic right whale, whose population recovered a little when whaling ceased, but is now slumping again: fewer than 95 females of breeding age remain. The immediate reasons for this decline are mostly deaths and injuries caused when whales are hit by ships or tangled in fishing gear. But they’ve become more vulnerable to these impacts because they’ve had to shift along the eastern seaboard of North America into busy waters.

Their main prey, a small swimming crustacean called Calanus finmarchicus, is moving north at a rate of 8km a year, because the sea is heating. At the same time, a commercial fishing industry has developed, exploiting Calanus for the fish oil supplements falsely believed to be beneficial to our health. There’s been no attempt to assess the likely impacts of fishing Calanus. We also have no idea what the impact of ocean acidification – also caused by rising carbon dioxide levels – might be on this and many other crucial species.

As the death rate of North Atlantic right whales rises, their birthrate falls. Why? Perhaps because of the pollutants accumulating in their bodies, some of which are likely to reduce fertility. Or because of ocean noise from boat engines, sonar, and oil and gas exploration, which may stress them and disrupt their communication. So you could call the decline of the North Atlantic right whale a shipping crisis, or a fishing crisis, or a climate crisis, or an acidification crisis, or a pollution crisis, or a noise crisis. But it is in fact all of these things: a general crisis caused by human activity.

Or look at moths in the UK. We know they are being harmed by pesticides. But the impact of these toxins on moths has been researched, as far as I can discover, only individually. Studies of bees show that when pesticides are combined, their effects are synergistic: in other words, the damage they each cause isn’t added, but multiplied. When pesticides are combined with fungicides and herbicides, the effects are multiplied again.

Simultaneously, moth caterpillars are losing their food plants, thanks to fertilisers and habitat destruction. Climate chaos has also knocked their reproductive cycle out of sync with the opening of the flowers on which the adults depend. Now we discover that light pollution has devastating effects on their breeding success. The switch from orange sodium streetlights to white LEDs saves energy, but their wider colour spectrum turns out to be disastrous for insects. Light pollution is spreading rapidly, even around protected areas, affecting animals almost everywhere.

Combined impacts are laying waste to entire living systems. When coral reefs are weakened by the fishing industry, pollution and the bleaching caused by global heating, they are less able to withstand the extreme climate events, such as tropical cyclones, which our fossil fuel emissions have also intensified. When rainforests are fragmented by timber cutting and cattle ranching, and ravaged by imported tree diseases, they become more vulnerable to the droughts and fires caused by climate breakdown.

What would we see if we broke down our conceptual barriers? We would see a full-spectrum assault on the living world. Scarcely anywhere is now safe from this sustained assault. A recent scientific paper estimates that only 3% of the Earth’s land surface should now be considered “ecologically intact”.

The various impacts have a common cause: the sheer volume of economic activity. We are doing too much of almost everything, and the world’s living systems cannot bear it. But our failure to see the whole ensures that we fail to address this crisis systemically and effectively.

When we box up this predicament, our efforts to solve one aspect of the crisis exacerbate another. For example, if we were to build sufficient direct air capture machines to make a major difference to atmospheric carbon concentrations, this would demand a massive new wave of mining and processing for the steel and concrete. The impact of such construction pulses travels around the world. To take just one component, the mining of sand to make concrete is trashing hundreds of precious habitats. It’s especially devastating to rivers, whose sand is highly sought in construction. Rivers are already being hit by drought, the disappearance of mountain ice and snow, our extraction of water, and pollution from farming, sewage and industry. Sand dredging, on top of these assaults, could be a final, fatal blow.

Or look at the materials required for the electronics revolution that will, apparently, save us from climate breakdown. Already, mining and processing the minerals required for magnets and batteries is laying waste to habitats and causing new pollution crises. Now, as Jonathan Watts’s terrifying article in the Guardian this week shows, companies are using the climate crisis as justification for extracting minerals from the deep ocean floor, long before we have any idea of what the impacts might be.

This isn’t, in itself, an argument against direct air capture machines or other “green” technologies. But if they have to keep pace with an ever-growing volume of economic activity, and if the growth of this activity is justified by the existence of those machines, the net result will be ever greater harm to the living world.

Everywhere, governments seek to ramp up the economic load, talking of “unleashing our potential” and “supercharging our economy”. Boris Johnson insists that “a global recovery from the pandemic must be rooted in green growth”. But there is no such thing as green growth. Growth is wiping the green from the Earth.

We have no hope of emerging from this full-spectrum crisis unless we dramatically reduce economic activity. Wealth must be distributed – a constrained world cannot afford the rich – but it must also be reduced. Sustaining our life-support systems means doing less of almost everything. But this notion – that should be central to a new, environmental ethics – is secular blasphemy.

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See Also: The idea of ‘green growth’ is flawed. We must find ways of using less and wasting less energy, Michael Joy, The Conversation, May 27, 2021

As countries explore ways of decarbonising their economies, the mantra of “green growth” risks trapping us in a spiral of failures. Green growth is an oxymoron. Growth requires more material extraction, which in turn requires more energy. The fundamental problem we face in trying to replace fossil energy with renewable energy is that all our renewable technologies are significantly less energy dense than fossil fuels. This means much larger areas are required to produce the same amount of energy. And, there is much more to consider!

Plastic code for reuse applications

From an Article by Dr. Kate Raynes – Goldie, Scitech News (Australia), October 23, 2020

Hands up if you grew up thinking that recycling plastic waste is key to saving the environment. It turns out that for decades the recyclability of plastics was grossly oversold by the plastics industry.

The creation of this recycling ‘myth’ is why, despite 30 years of being diligent recyclers, we have things like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In fact, we’ve only recycled 9% of all the plastics we’ve ever produced. And, our use of plastics is still increasing every year.

The reality of the situation is that recycling plastics is actually really hard and expensive. so, how did we get to a world full of plastic?

Triangle of mistruths on plastic products

The myth created around plastic recycling has been one of simplicity. We look for the familiar triangle arrows, then pop the waste in the recycling bin so it can be reused. But the true purpose of those triangles has been misunderstood by the general public ever since their invention in the 1980s.

These triangles were actually created by the plastics industry and, according to a report provided to them in July 1993, were creating “unrealistic expectations” about what could be recycled. But they decided to keep using the codes.

Which is why many people still believe that these triangular symbols (also known as a resin identifier code or RIC) means something is recyclable.

But according to the American Society for Testing and Materials International (ASTM) – which controls the RIC system – the numbered triangles “are not recycle codes“. In fact, they weren’t created for the general public at all. They were made for the post-consumer plastic industry.

Polystyrene cups are about as far from recyclable as you can get – but they still have a resin code. In other words, the symbols make it easier to sort the different types of plastics, some of which cannot be recycled – depending on the recycling facility.

“Unfortunately, just placing your plastic into the recycling bin doesn’t mean it will get recycled,” says Lara Camilla Pinho. She is an architect and lecturer at the UWA School of Design who is researching novel uses of plastic waste.

“The recycling system is complicated and often dictated by market demand. Not all plastic is recyclable. We cannot recycle plastic bags or straws for example.”

Behind the scenes — So, what makes recycling plastics so difficult?

“Essentially, there are two types of plastics – thermoplastics and thermosets. While thermoplastics can be re-melted and re-molded, thermosets contain cross-linked polymers that cannot be separated meaning they cannot be recycled,” says Lara.

“Even thermoplastics have a limit to the amount of times we can recycle them, as each time they are recycled they downgrade in quality.” Even when plastics are recyclable, it is often more costly than simply making new plastics.

Sugar, seaweed and mushrooms — If the conventional recycling system isn’t working, what else can we do with all the plastic we’ve created?

Lara is looking for ways to add value to recycled plastics such as using it in the design and development of architectural products. She hopes to use these architectural products to help underserved communities that are disproportionately affected by plastic waste.

In addition to recycling, we also need to find ways to reduce our use of virgin petroleum-based plastics.

Bioplastic is one such product that has been getting a lot of hype over the last few years. And although they’re better than petroleum-based plastics, bioplastics also come with their own set of challenges.

“There are already a lot of bio-based alternatives to plastic, such as bagasse – a byproduct of sugar cane processing,” says Lara.

View Larger — Sugarcane-based plastics can be used to make big designs – and small ones too. LEGO released their first plant-based bricks in 2018.

Mycelium, a type of fungi we most often associate with mushrooms, are also providing an interesting plastic alternative. “In the field of architecture, mycelium is starting to be used as an alternative to plastic insulation, but also as compostable packaging and bricks,” says Lara. “The bricks take around five days to make and are strong, durable, water resistant and compostable at the end of their use.” Hy-Fi Tower, created by The Living, is an example of a building made from these bricks.

Growing up, we thought we were going to save the world by recycling. But only 9% of all plastics we’ve produced have been recycled, and our use of plastics is still increasing every year. What went wrong?

And finally, there’s seaweed — “[Seaweed is] cheap and can reproduce itself quickly without fertilisers. In architecture, there is use for seaweed as an alternative to plastic insulation but also as cladding, ” says Lara.

More money, more problems — While all these alternatives are great, the main cause of our plastic dilemma is not scientific or technological, but economic.

As long as it remains cheaper to create new plastics from fossil fuels rather than from bioplastics or from recycling, we’re going to be stuck with plastic garbage islands floating in our oceans.

The true cost to our health and our environment has yet to be included in the equation. But once it is, maybe that is when the real shift will happen.

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See also: War on plastic waste faces setback as cost of recycled material soars, Jillian Ambrose, The Guardian, October 13, 2019

For years the cost of making plastic products from recycled flakes was cheaper than relying on virgin plastics made using fossil fuels, meaning the sustainable option was an economic option too. But according to experts it is now cheaper for major manufacturers to use new plastic. (Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking have lowered fossil energy price, being practiced widely with minimal environmental regulation.)

Energy attorney Jessica Thompson

From an Article by David Beard, Morgantown Dominion Post, October 25, 2018

PITTSBURGH — F e n c e l i n e monitoring is a way to monitor emissions from well pads and other gas industry sites. It’s been talked about in West Virginia for several years, though the state has done nothing about it. Several experts talked about its potential benefits, its limitations and its apparent inevitability during a panel session at the 2018 Shale Insight C o n f e r e n c e.

Fence line monitoring involves setting up air- and weather-monitoring equipment at the edge of well pads to get a handle on what’s escaping from the site into the surrounding community. WVU Professor Michael McCawley recommended to the Legislature several years ago that it’s a good way to track not only air quality, but noise, dust and light pollution. His recommendation came from a study mandated by the Legislature, but the Legislature never did anything with it.

During the panel discussion, energy attorney Jessica Sharrow Thompson explained what fenceline monitoring is. Across all industries — not just natural gas — the EPA’s Air Toxics Initiative and enforcement efforts are leading to fenceline monitoring to reduce hazardous air p o l l u t a n t s. EPA’s action has picked up since 2016, she said, though there are no current federal or state mandates to do it. “But it’s likely to start coming.”

Four factors are driving that movement, she said: air quality and public health data gaps; what EPA terms “citizen science,” which is encouraging people to collect their own data, unfortunately with low cost sensors and monitors that generate unreliable data; community concerns; and EPA’s air quality enforcement and national compliance initiative. Along with addressing those issues, she said, fenceline monitoring can help provide transparency to the public and allow operators to track their data and refine site emissions estimate. But there are risks, too, she said. Among them, the public and agencies can misunderstand and even misuse the data.

Lisa Bailey, senior toxicologist with environmental consulting firm Gradient Corp., talked about public health and the limitations of fenceline monitoring.

“It’s important to think about exposure and also to think about risk,” she said. It has to be understood, she said, that toxic substance concentrations at the monitor won’t be the same as at the source, or out in the community. Concentrations will decrease moving away from the s o u rc e. Data will be affected by other air sources: industry, cars and so on, she said, along with wind and weather. “That has to be considered when considering health impacts.” Out in the community, it’s hard to distinguish wh at ’s coming from the site from what’s coming from other sources such as industry and vehicles, she said. Monitors should also be installed at point in the community, although that data will be affected by other sources, too.

And evaluating the data and how site emissions might affect public health also poses a challenge, she said, because other factors will play a role — such as exposure to other pollutants, smoking and so on. Christopher Rimkus, managing general counsel for MPLX/MarkWest, shared the real life example of adequate data providing a payoff when a citizen complained about site emissions and EPA stepped in with threats of enforcement. “What we assumed to be true was in fact true,” he said. “Folks were safe.” But that was just one site. “There’s still a lack of trust. We need data to inform the public, to inform our operations, to inform rulemaking.”

Having adequate data and sharing it assures the regulators and the public, he said. “We need to gather it in a way where there’s t r a n s p a r e n c y. ” It has to be available to everyone.

Remains of IEI Warehouse as PLASTICS burn in Ohio River valley

From an Article by Chris D’Angelo, Huffington Post News, October 26, 2017

WASHINGTON, WV — A fire continued to smolder at a plastics warehouse in Parkersburg, West Virginia, on Thursday evening, nearly six days after it erupted. Local officials have yet to pinpoint what types of chemicals and materials went up in the flames.

The 420,000-square-foot facility, formerly the Ames Tool Plant, is owned by Intercontinental Export Import Inc. and was being used to store various plastics and other items, according to state officials. The building caught fire early Saturday morning, and firefighters have been working to put it out ever since.

The state’s Department of Environmental Protection on Thursday ordered the owner of the facility to “immediately” provide a detailed inventory of all materials that had been stored there, as well as at its other facilities.

The 27-page order details numerous violations at the warehouse in recent years. In 2008, two volunteer firefighters warned in a report about the potential for a fire at the facility, saying they had “extreme concerns,” the Charleston Gazette-Mail reported Thursday.

State officials say air samples have detected pollutants “at levels comparable to or lower than what is typically seen in urban areas.” “We have done multiple, multiple, multiple testings of the air and all. So far, the multiple testings are OK,” Republican Gov. Jim Justice said at a news conference Tuesday.

Local residents, however, are concerned about potential threats to their health.

David Wright told HuffPost that “the smell of burnt plastic comes and goes with the wind.” And like his neighbors, he’s worried about what may have made it into the air. “Now that it’s died down a little bit,” he said of the blaze, “I wonder who is going to pay for all the firefighting efforts.”

Jessica Scritchfield Wooten, a medical field employee who had a baby in Parkersburg while the warehouse was burning, said the stench was “awful.” “The air was so bad we had to open our door to ventilate the smell out of our [hospital] room,” she wrote via Facebook.

On Monday, Justice declared a state of emergency in response to the inferno. And at a news conference the following day, he said he was concerned about potential long-term pollution. “We need all the king’s horses and all the king’s men — the experts from the federal government,” in case they might know something that state officials have missed, he said.

It is unclear what role, if any, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has had in the response. As of Thursday evening, the agency had not put out a public statement on the situation. According to state officials, however, the EPA is involved in ongoing air quality monitoring.

The EPA and Intercontinental Export Import did not respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment Thursday. See a survey video of this fire here.

Eric Engle, who lives just north of town and is chairman of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action, said area schools have been closed all week. State workers have been told to stay home. And residents of Parkersburg and the surrounding counties are anxiously awaiting answers, he said.

“The majority of the people I know have left town,” many to stay with family and friends away from the smoke, he said.

On Thursday, the Mid-Ohio Valley Health Department warned people to “avoid contact with the smoke and remain indoors if possible with windows and doors closed until the smell is no longer detectable.”

Parkersburg, whose population is about 31,000, is no stranger to industrial pollution. The town was the focus of a lengthy 2015 piece in HuffPost Highline.

industrial pollution from ethane cracker chemical plant

From an Article by Remy Samuels, The Pitt News, October 5, 2015

Despite the promise of creating 600 permanent jobs, the ethane cracker plant being built about 40 minutes northwest of Pittsburgh by car continues to face scrutiny from environmental groups.

Shell Chemical Appalachia decided in 2012 that Beaver County would be the site of a new $6 billion plant to manufacture plastics. Shell chose the Beaver County location because of its proximity to natural gas supplies and because the majority of North American polyethylene — the most common plastic — customers are in a 700-mile radius of Pittsburgh.

In a statement published on its website, Shell said it expects to employ around 6,000 people for the facility’s construction, support 600 permanent employees and create an economic boom in Southwestern PA.

The plan to build the plant — dubbed a cracker plant because it takes oil and gas and “cracks” it into smaller molecules to produce ethylene, a building block for plastic — concerns environmentalists who say this plant will emit excessive pollution, which will increase Pittsburgh’s already high pollution levels. In the American Lung Association’s 2017 report, Pittsburgh ranked eighth for annual particle pollution out of 184 metropolitan areas.

Junior Sarah Grguras — a sustainability program assistant in Pitt’s Student Office of Sustainability and an environmental studies and ecology and evolution double major — is familiar with current and historical air pollution issues in Pittsburgh. She said pollution from the plant is going to diminish Pittsburgh’s air quality.

“It’s going to turn Pittsburgh into cancer alley,” Grguras said. “It’s not a long-term help, and it’s not a sustainable industry.”

Following a lawsuit, the Clean Air Council and the Environmental Integrity Project — two environmental advocacy groups — made a deal with Shell to install four “fenceline” monitors, or pollution detectors, along the perimeter of the facility. This will allow the surrounding community to receive updates on a public website if the plant’s emissions are linked to air pollution and exceed a certain threshold.

Based in Philadelphia, Joseph Minott, 63, who is both the executive and chief counsel for Clean Air Council, said even though this deal was made and Shell will install monitors, pollution will still occur.

“What our lawsuit did was try to make sure that the technology they use at the plant is the best technology, so it will minimize the impact on the local citizenry,” Minott said. “But it does not ensure that the plant will not be emitting any pollution.”

When asked specifically about the precautions Shell Oil Company is taking in order to prevent pollution, Ray Fisher, a spokesperson for Shell Oil Company, wrote in an email that the plant will utilize the “best technology available to control emissions along with fenceline monitoring” and Shell will make the data available to the public.

“In addition, we worked with the Commonwealth to offset emissions in a manner that will create better air quality over time,” Fisher wrote in the email. Fisher did not answer specific questions regarding how Shell plans to prevent shale emissions.

Emeritus Professor of Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health Bernard Goldstein, 78, is concerned about the impacts the plant will have on the environment and public health. Goldstein explained the plant utilizes the nearby wet gas from Marcellus Shale — a unit of sedimentary rock that contains untapped natural gas reserves — to convert methane and other gases into plastics.

Since the petrochemical plant is so large, it will be subject to both state and federal regulations, including those from the Environmental Protection Agency. Goldstein said he is not as concerned about the plant itself because of this oversight.

“The pollution that I’m most concerned about comes out of the drilling and obtaining the shale gas, which is then used as feedstock for this chemical plant,” Goldstein said.

Goldstein said the construction of the cracker plant will create more sources of shale gas emissions. Goldstein and Evelyn Talbott, an epidemiology professor at Pitt, agree that, because the drill sites are small — but numerous — these sites are not regulated as well.

“When you’ve got 20,000 sites, how could you possibly check them everyday?” Talbott said.

Shell did not respond to questions about the specific types of pollution detectors it will use around the plant and whether these small drilling sites can produce additional shale emissions.

The EPA has standards that regulate six different air pollutants. Talbott said ozone (O3) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) are two pollutants that the plant could potentially emit, which could lead to health problems.

“Ozone … is bad for your lungs and is related to asthma. Nitrogen dioxide is also a pulmonary irritant that can cause pulmonary and respiratory disease,” Talbott said. “If you boil water and turn on your gas stove, there is a certain amount of NO2 that is a fossil fuel emission, so in the Marcellus Shale industry there’s bound to be nitrogen dioxide.”

From an economic standpoint, companies such as Marcellus Shale Coalition see this project as a game changer. President of Marcellus Shale Coalition, David Spigelmyer, released a statement June 7, 2016, saying that Shell’s decision to build the plant is “welcomed news.” The Pitt News called the Marcellus Shale Coalition several times and did not receive a response over the course of four business days.

However, environmentalists Grguras and Minott said there are other ways to create jobs without harming the earth. They said evidence supports more long-term jobs will be with green energy — such as solar, wind and geothermal.

“The green economy, where other countries are way ahead of us, produces far less pollution, employs more people and is more sustainable,” Minott said. “We seem stuck on fossil fuels in Pennsylvania.”

Many are worried about the fate of Pittsburgh’s air, but at the same time, many see the promise of jobs as a positive outcome.

“It’s a trade-off,” Talbott said. “Everyone wants jobs and for our economy to flourish, but I think there’s a lot of concern by environmental groups that the pollution is not going to be curbed and it could be a problem.”

Plastic debris is clogging the oceans

Pollution is now as dense in the northernmost ocean as it is in the Atlantic and Pacific.

From an Article by Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic Monthly, April 20, 2017

The Arctic Ocean is small, shallow, and—most importantly—shrouded. Unlike the other large oceans of the world, it is closely hemmed in by Asia, Europe, and North America, with very few watery entrances in and out. Some oceanographers call it the “Arctic Mediterranean Sea,” a nod both to its between-the-terra-ness and its similarity to that smaller ocean.

Often, that remoteness has played to its ecological advantage. Very few ships pass through the area (with all their attendant pollution and environmental disruption), at least compared to nearby waterways like the Bering Sea. It also helps that much of the Arctic freezes over every winter.

But a paper released this week in Science Advances argues that its location is now harming it. The first survey of the region has found that roughly 300 billion pieces of floating plastic, most of them tiny but visible to the unaided eye, have clogged the planet’s northernmost sea. The plastic, having been carried to the pole over decades, now has very few ways out.

In other words, the Arctic Ocean has become the Northern Hemisphere’s “dead end” for floating plastic.

“Our data demonstrate that the marine plastic pollution has reached a global scale after only a few decades using plastic materials,” said Andrés Cózar Cabañas, a biologist at the University of Cádiz. It is, he said, “a clear evidence of the human capacity to change our planet. This plastic accumulation is likely to grow further.”

The survey was carried out while the research vessel Tara circumnavigated the pole in late 2013. The same Tara cruise also surveilled local plankton populations and observed the aurora.

It found a couple key differences in how plastic pollution works in the Arctic. To the south, in the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, plastic tends to accumulate in enormous subtropical “trash patches.” While these are not the dense and churning gyres of garbage that many people imagine, they can be accurately described as parts of the ocean with a lot of garbage in them. In a way, they’re like the asteroid belt, an otherwise void place in the world-ocean where plastic is much more likely to accumulate.

The Arctic does not so much have trash patches inside it; it is giant trash patch. The Arctic Ocean has about the same median density of plastic as the Atlantic and Pacific do. But unlike in the southern oceans, where plastic has unevenly congregated in certain areas, it has spread itself throughout the entirety of the Arctic.

Sometimes, though, it is quite dense: In the seas north of Iceland and western Russia, there are hundreds of thousands of pieces of plastic per square kilometer.

Martha Buckley, an oceanographer at George Mason University, agrees with the authors that plastic is not coming from the Arctic itself. This is “intuitive,” she writes: Few people live around that ocean’s coast, there is little ship traffic there, and most of the plastic is tiny enough that it seems to have spent several years in the ocean. (The paper’s authors estimate that it takes one to three years for plastic from the North Atlantic to make it to the Arctic.)

“It is pretty clear that this plastic has been transported by ocean currents. How the plastics are entering the Arctic is not as clear,” she told me in an email. The paper, for instance, doesn’t discuss transport through the ocean’s vertical currents. Over the last few years, research has suggested that gyres in the subtropics and subpolar regions are linked by deeper currents.

Ocean currents matter because they’ll help researchers learn if the plastic is trapped in the Arctic permanently or whether it will eventually work its way out. Other scientists are still trying to come up with solutions to the world’s long-term plastic problem. In the meantime, says Cabañas, the only way to fix the problem is to mitigate its scale. Countries and coastal communities should work harder to keep plastic from winding up in the ocean.

“We should properly manage the plastic waste at its source,” he told me. “Once the plastic enters the ocean, its destination and impacts are uncontrollable.”

Very Large Ice Crack (upclose)

A Really Big Crack In An Antarctic Ice Shelf Just Got Bigger

From a News Report of WAMU,  Rae Ellen Bichell, National Public Radio, January 6, 2017

Right now, a big chunk of Antarctic ice is hanging on by a frozen thread. British researchers monitoring the crack in the Larsen C ice shelf say that only about 12 miles now connect the chunk of ice to the rest of the continent.

“After a few months of steady, incremental advance since the last event, the rift grew suddenly by a further 18 km [11 miles] during the second half of December 2016,” wrote Adrian Luckman in a statement Thursday by the MIDAS Project, which is monitoring changes in the area.

The crack in question has been growing for years and is now a total of roughly 70 miles long. When the fissure reaches the far side of the shelf, an iceberg the size of Delaware will float off, leaving the Larsen C 10 percent smaller.

A NASA scientist  (John Sonntag) with project IceBridge took this photo of the crack in November.

“This event will fundamentally change the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula,” Luckman wrote. Ice shelves are important because they provide a buffer between the sea and the ice that sits on land, in this case on the Antarctic Peninsula. Without a healthy ice shelf, water from melting glaciers can flow straight to the sea, raising the sea level.

It’s normal for the front of an ice shelf to crack and break off, known as calving. But it’s unusual for that to happen faster than the ice shelf can refreeze.

Some scientists worry that the missing piece will destabilize the whole ice shelf. A smaller ice shelf, Larsen B, completely splintered in a little over a month in 2002, a process that started with a similar crack. Another ice shelf, Larsen A, had disintegrated a few years before.

“Larsen C may eventually follow the example of its neighbour Larsen B,” wrote Luckman. Larsen C is Antarctica’s fourth-largest ice shelf.

Crack at Larsen C Ice Sheet

“If it doesn’t go in the next few months, I’ll be amazed,” he told BBC News.

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Nearly all coral reefs will be ruined by climate change

From an Article by Katie Herzog, The Grist, January 6, 2017

According to a study in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, 99 percent of the world’s reefs will be affected by coral bleaching by the end of this century if climate change continues apace.

When water is above ideal temperatures, coral expels the symbiotic algae that reside in its tissue and provide it with nutrients. This turns the reefs a ghostly white, and while the coral is not exactly dead at that point, it is more susceptible to disease — and death. A bleaching event on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef last year, for instance, left 67 percent of its shallow-water coral dead.

This isn’t just bad for the reefs themselves; it’s bad for the vast, biodiverse ecosystems that depend on them. That includes the humans who fish these reefs and who cater to reef-loving tourists. The National Marine Fisheries Service estimates that the commercial value of fisheries near coral reefs is over $100 million in the U.S. alone, and reef-related tourism generates billions of dollars a year.

Even if aggressive actions are taken to combat climate change, such as those pledged during the Paris climate talks, it could be too late to prevent mass bleaching events at many reefs, according to the study. Divers, you might want to book those trips sooner rather than later.

Conventional GTL Processing

Velocys Postpones Northeast Ohio GTL Facility, Citing Project Financing Challenges

From an Article by Jamison Cocklin, NGI News, July 7, 2016

United Kingdom-based Velocys plc said Thursday that it would postpone the development of its small-scale 5,000 b/d gas-to-liquids (GTL) plant in Northeast Ohio, citing the commodities downturn and the effects it’s had on the company’s ability to raise capital for the project.

“Given the challenges in raising equity for capital projects of this nature at present, and in order to defer costs, Velocys has put its development of Ashtabula on hold, pending reassessment as part of the broad review of the strategy of the business that the company is currently undertaking,” Velocys said.

The company acquired Houston-based Pinto Energy LLC in an all-stock deal in 2014. Pinto first announced the GTL facility in Ashtabula, OH, in 2013. The facility would be located on an 80-acre site near ports and refineries on Lake Erie and would convert Marcellus and Utica shale natural gas into specialty products such as solvents, lubricants, waxes and transportation fuels.

Velocys, which develops, licenses and supplies small-scale GTL technology, had said early last year that it would soon make a final investment decision on the project. The company said an analysis of the wax market conducted in the first half of this year showed that the plant still remains economically viable, but didn’t say when it might consider moving forward with development.

Velocys formed a joint venture in 2014 with Waste Management Inc., NRG Energy Inc. and Ventech Engineers International LLC to develop GTL facilities in the United States, Canada, the UK and China. The JV broke ground last year for the Envia Energy GTL plant in Oklahoma City at Waste Management’s East Oak Landfill. That plant will use landfill gas to produce clean diesel fuel, synthetic waxes and naphtha.

Velocys said Thursday that construction at the site is ongoing. All modular process units, cooling towers and other major equipment have been installed. Velocys has sent a team of its engineers to the site to aid Ventech, the engineer, in the plant’s start-up and commissioning. Velocys added that it continues to pursue other opportunities in the United States and said it has completed its part of an engineering study for a national gas company in Central Asia for a project there.

Velocys technology is in the early stages of commercialization.Its equipment is significantly smaller, which enables the modular plants to be deployed more cost-effectively in remote regions that wouldn’t otherwise be able to accommodate larger refinery-sized GTL facilities that have been built on coastlines overseas. Just a handful of the larger, conventional GTL plants are operating globally, with capacities ranging up to 140,000 b/d. Those facilities can cost billions of dollars to construct, while smaller-scale facilities cost about $100 million, according to an estimate provided last year by Velocys.

Other GTL plants have been proposed for the Appalachian Basin in recent years, but none have been completed. They include Marcellus GTL LLC’s 84,000 gallon/d facility in Blair County that was announced in 2013; EmberClear Corp.’s 500,000 gallon/d plant in Southeast Pennsylvania that was announced in 2014, and Primus Green Energy Inc.’s proposal this year to build a small-scale GTL plant somewhere in the basin that would use Marcellus Shale gas to make methanol.

EmberClear dropped its plans last year for its Southeast Pennsylvania plant, citing administrative concerns and local opposition. Marcellus GTL’s facility is expected to be complete this year, according to the company’s website.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

<< Taxes/fees/controls on fracking are justified >>

Goodies for the oil and gas industry may be the dumbest idea yet

An Essay by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor & Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

An article entitled “Oil plunge sparks calls for Congress to act,” published in The Hill on January 10 is making the rounds now. The Hill bills itself “a top US political website, read by the White House and more lawmakers than any other site — vital for policy, politics and election campaigns.” It is considerably overbalanced to the right, and the piece under consideration is found under “opinion.”

The first line give the thesis of the article: As the price of oil plunges to its lowest point in 12 years — and threatens to drag the broader U.S. economy down with it — lawmakers say Congress should consider helping teetering energy companies with policy fixes beyond the decision to lift the oil-export ban.

The kind of fixes suggested include: (1) expediting the process for exporting liquefied natural gas; (2) easing environmental and other regulations; (3) taking retaliatory trade measures against Saudi Arabia; (4) pushing legislation to allow companies to gather natural gas from oil wells on federal land; and (5) help our industry compete by having infrastructure. That means the right mix of pipelines, transmission lines, rail, roads, i. e., have the government build it for them.

Facts listed in the article are essentially correct, it is the unsaid facts that are not taken into account that destroy the argument. There are several facts of overwhelming importance. First is that the U. S.  is a huge importer of oil. For the month of October, 2015, our total imports were 273,000,000 barrels. What does export mean when we are importing that much oil?

How can you export fracked oil when fracking entails using so much energy, equipment, materials and chemicals.  Facking costs an extra $20 to $40 per barrel, compared to conventional recovery. Deep sea drilling is similar, as is arctic drilling, which hasn’t even been proved feasible. How does this extra cost stack up against the $20 a barrel total extraction cost for Saudi Arabia, mentioned in the article?

“Oil plunge sparks calls for Congress to act” hypothesizes that the Saudi kingdom is keeping up production (world price was below $32 when this was written) in a bid to expand market share and undercut competitors. That’s a strange complaint from a “conservative.” Aren’t the markets supposed to do that sort of thing? If you read around, others have said they want to attack Iran, infringe on Russia (the second leading exporter of natural gas), and the U. S. fracking industry, which is doubtless the least likely target, with its high extraction costs. It already has the $20 – 40 disadvantage.

Now the claim about Russia being in second place. Russia exported 10.5% of the total exported (in 2014), while Saudi Arabia exported 18.5%. Incidentally Canada, in fourth place, exported 6.1%  mostly to the U. S. This author thinks Saudi Arabia may have been telling the truth that they were keeping up production because they didn’t want their oil to be “stranded,” left in the ground when hydrocarbons are no longer the main source of energy. The progress of solar and wind power will not be discussed here.

What so many people seem unwilling to realize is that the U. S. covers only about 4 percent of the dry land on Earth. We supplied the rest of the world for decades, being first to develop the technology to remove oil. Now we are getting to the last dregs, and using so much ourselves we really are not is a position to export from the point of view of the public interest. We have relatively more natural gas, but do not stack up well in comparisons with other nations. Russia has five and a half times as much, Iran has nearly four times as much as the U. S. (Yes, we have more gas than Saudi Arabia, 6% more. See the CIA World Fact Book, which is on line.)

The truth is that fracking’s extra costs are small compared to its vast externalized costs. This includes multiple factors, such as depreciated value of property where fracking takes place, obvious from the beginning, but just now beginning to be documented. More than one of these studies now exist, with comparable conclusions. Losses to other industries such as farming, recreation, forestry, the retirement industry, are ignored. Health effects on the surrounding population is another cost just now being studied and recognized. Long time environmental costs, effects on water quality, loss of aquifers, and the formation of mini-brownfields where the soil is poisoned and treated as if they did not exist.

Then there is the two billion dollar debt mountain that belongs to the industry. As of January 7, 2016, there have been 38 bankruptcies in the exploration and production (E&P) section of the industry, amounting to $18 billion. These have been Chapter 11 bankruptcies (restructuring). These wipe out shareholders, but keep key executives in place to seek funds and go ahead. The last resort are Chapter 7 bankruptcies, which are still to come, which eliminate management so the company is wiped out and gives the remaining value to shareholders. The other 21 E&P companies risk this fate.

The industry has been losing money for those who speculate in stored oil. They bought high and have been forced to sell low.  And it’s not likely to get better for a while.

All Congress can do is increase these externalized costs. There is no way they can reduce the monetary cost of the fracking process. (It would be against conservative principles to provide government funding for the cost of infrastructure to promote these industries: pipelines, railroads, roads, storage tanks, etc. Those are costs of doing business.)

Businessmen and legislators should accept the fact that fracking is an expensive, dirty, dangerous way to get oil and gas. No amount of propaganda will change that.

Keep Fossil Fuels in the Ground

Climate Protestors Take on Public Land Leasing

From Steve Curwood, Living On Earth, September 18, 2015

<The Powder River Basin in Wyoming has massive coal deposits.>

A labor-green-faith-native rights coalition of 400 groups is demanding President Obama end fossil fuel leasing on public lands as part of a new climate activism campaign. Rainforest Action Network’s Ruth Breech tells host Steve Curwood, cutting off the extraction of fossil fuels from public lands would be the single greatest action that President Obama could take to tackle greenhouse gas emissions and take on climate change.

Transcript

CURWOOD: This is Living on Earth. I’m Steve Curwood. Science now tells us that if all the known fossil fuel left on Earth were burned, it would raise sea levels as much as 160 feet as ice melted, so activists are now demanding that it stay in the ground. And on September 15th a coalition of some 400 groups converged on the White House to call on the President to stop leasing federal lands and the coastal seabed for the extraction of coal and petroleum. They are taking on a big business: for example, in recent times some 400 million tons of coal a year have been mined from federal lands, much of that for export. We called up Ruth Breech, a senior campaigner with RainForest Action Network, as she came back from the demonstration at the White House. Welcome to Living on Earth.

BREECH: Great, thanks for having me.

CURWOOD: So what is your basic message here?

BREECH: We’re telling President Obama…we’re asking him if he really wants to leave a climate legacy and address the crisis that is in front of us right now, then he needs to stop leasing federal fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – and keep our carbon reserves in the ground.

CURWOOD: How much global warming is related to the extraction of fossil fuels from public lands in the US, including offshore federal territory?

BREECH: Right. When the Obama administration decides to stop federal fossil fuel leasing, we can keep up to 450 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions in the ground. Compare this to Obama’s recent announcement with the clean power plan initiatives — so this is the emissions reductions coming out of power plants — and that’s only six billion tons of emissions and this is 450 billion — so on orders of magnitude this is much larger. So this is a big bold act and it’s critical.

<< Much of the coal from the Powder River Basin is getting exported through coal terminals in the Pacific Northwest. >>

CURWOOD: Now, of course there’s federal land in every state, but what parts of America most contribute to fossil fuel production from public lands?

BREECH: Most of the contributions to fossil fuel production is coming from the west, so this would be Montana and Wyoming — there’s a region there called the Power River Basin; northern New Mexico and Arizona and the Navajo nation. A lot of the public lands are adjacent to, if not within the boundaries of, Native American reservations. We’re also looking at offshore areas, so this would be the Gulf coast, the Arctic, the Atlantic. These are hotspots that industry wants to mine, drill or frack.

CURWOOD: How much power does President Obama have to halt the leasing of fossil fuel extraction on federal lands if he decides he wants to?

BREECH: He has all the power. The Center for Biological Diversity just issued a report last week and outlined his legal authority to issue an executive order to stop the program today. He could also too if he didn’t want to be that active, he could just decide to not approve things, he could have not approved, it could have just sat on his desk for the next 18 months, Arctic drilling; he could have not approved the Atlantic leases that will be coming up the next few months. He could just leave them alone and leave them on his desk.

CURWOOD: Sally Jewell is the Secretary of the Interior, and that’s the organization that actually conducts leasing for energy extraction from public lands for the very most part, and she’s been quoted saying that the President certainly is mindful of global warming, but that we need these fossil fuels to run our economy right now. Your reaction?

<< A significant portion of oil drilling on US public lands is happening offshore. >>

BREECH: I think it’s shortsighted. What you hear from Sally Jewell and other administrative officials in that capacity is that they somehow think that their mission is to balance industry’s interest with that of the planet, and if you really think about it is like short-term profit versus long-term sustainability. So I really would like to see her looking longer-term. What does this look like in 10 years, 20 years? Because fossil fuels are eventually going to go away. Coal is already dying. The gas boom is not as big as we originally thought. This is their opportunity to really get ahead of this. What is their plan? How are we going to use our lands appropriately? How are we going to use our resources, and how are we going to address this climate change crisis that we have on our hands right now?

CURWOOD: Ruth, how much presidential politics is in this? The Democratic candidates are out in front of President Obama on the subject already. Hillary Clinton has already called for a halt on offshore drilling in the Arctic, and I can only guess that Bernie Sanders would be even more sympathetic to your call.

BREECH: Right, we’d love to see that. Ideally this would happen within this presidency, I think Obama has the power and the timing is ripe right now. Folks are already reaching out to candidates to get their views on it, I love that Hillary came out against Arctic drilling. I think that was bold. So I think if the candidates are smart then they’re going to address this in their debates. They are going to address this in their platforms, and they’re going to make a decision about it, and they are going to have a plan coming into office if this issue has not already been addressed.

<< “Kayaktivists” protest the government’s decision to allow oil drilling by Shell in the arctic.

CURWOOD: Ruth, what happens next?

BREECH: This is the next bold ask coming from the climate movement. We’re seeing unprecedented unity in the coalition. We’ve got big greens — frontline organizations, climate justice groups working alongside labor unions, faith groups all coming together and showing how much power there is in the grassroots. This is just the beginning. We have to address the climate crisis, and for President Obama to stop fossil fuel leasing on public lands would be the way to establish his climate legacy. It would move us at a whole other level of magnitude in addressing these issues.

CURWOOD: Ruth Breech is a Senior Campaigner with the Rainforest Action Network. Thanks so much for taking the time with us today, Ruth.

BREECH: Thank you.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

>>> Keep Fossil Fuels in the Ground — Keep It In The Ground

>>> See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net