Prof. Katharine Hayhoe brings some hope for the planet

Interview of Katharine Hayhoe – NPR Program ON BEING, October 21, 2021

Katharine Hayhoe is one of the most esteemed atmospheric scientists in the world. She’s made her mark by connecting dots between climate systems and weather patterns and the lived experience of human beings in their neighborhoods and communities.

She’s also an ambassador, if you will, between the science of climate change and the world of evangelical Christian faith and practice, which she also inhabits. To delve into that with her is to learn a great deal that refreshingly complicates the picture of what is possible and what is already happening, even across what feel like cultural fault lines. If you want to speak and walk differently on this frontier, this is a conversation for you.

Katharine Hayhoe is a professor of political science at Texas Tech University, and now Chief Scientist of the Nature Conservancy. She founded the Atmospheric Research and Consulting Firm, has been named one of Time ‘s 100 Most Influential People (2014), and serves as the climate ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance. She is an outstanding public speaker in great demand.

Her new book is ‘Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World.’

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org — Katharine Hayhoe – “Our future is still in our hands” ~ Listen (50:58 minutes) and Read the Transcript.

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NOTE ~ Consumers of information from National Public Radio contend that NPR does its job well. A study conducted by the polling firm Knowledge Networks and the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (University of Maryland at College Park) showed that those who get their news and information from public broadcasting (NPR and PBS – Public Broadcasting Service) are better informed than those whose information comes from other media outlets. In one study, NPR and PBS audiences had a more accurate understanding of the events in Iraq versus all audiences for cable and broadcast TV networks and the print media.

New book coming 12/26/17

From an Article by Marie Cusick, NPR StateImpact Pennsylvania, August 10, 2017

The severance tax recently approved by the PA state Senate is unlikely to have a major impact on drilling activity or government revenues, according to a researcher from an environmental economic think tank.

A natural gas severance tax has been a hot-button issue in Harrisburg for nearly a decade, but the plan recently approved by the PA state Senate is unlikely to have a major impact– either in terms of government revenue, or drilling company investment decisions, according to a researcher from the nonpartisan environmental economic think tank, Resources for the Future.

The severance tax is now in the GOP-controlled House where its future is uncertain. Republican legislative leaders have argued over the years it would harm the state’s economy. Yet passing the tax has been a major focus of Governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat.

The tax rate approved by the Senate last month would change, based on the average annual price of natural gas– ranging from 1.5 cents per thousand cubic feet to 3.5 cents. It’s expected to raise $100 million this year to help plug a $2.2 billion budget hole. It would be added on top of the roughly $200 million in impact fees gas companies already pay, which are based on the number of wells they drill.

StateImpact Pennsylvania talked about the new tax measure with Daniel Raimi, a senior research associate at Resources for the Future and author of the forthcoming book, The Fracking Debate:

Q: There is so much rhetoric around what a severance tax could mean for Pennsylvania. Can you explain your recent research? What’s your take?

A: Over the last several years my colleague Richard Newell and I have looked really closely at oil and gas revenues that flow to states and local governments. We’ve looked at the top 16 oil and gas producing states in the U.S. What we find is the average state collects about seven percent of the value of oil and gas revenues. Either through severance taxes, or something like a severance tax, or through property taxes collected by local governments.

Pennsylvania’s lack of a property tax is unusual. That lowers costs for drillers.

For example, if there’s $1 million of oil and gas that comes out of the ground each year, that is taxed as property. It helps fund school districts, townships, county governments, and cities. In some states property taxes make up a larger share of government revenue than severance taxes.

Pennsylvania’s impact fee structure makes up for some of that shortfall by collecting revenue from oil and gas producers and allocating a large portion of it back to the local level. That means the state government doesn’t collect as much from oil and gas production as other states do.

Q: One of the big questions around the impact fee* is whether Pennsylvania is leaving money on the table. Are we?

A: That is a hard question to answer precisely. In short, the severance tax that’s been passed by the Senate is unlikely to have a large effect on either Pennsylvania government revenues, or investment decisions by oil and gas companies. It’s a small severance tax.

Other factors, such as oil and gas prices, access to infrastructure, like pipelines, and access to labor—those are all more important. If it were a severance tax of five, six, or seven percent, then maybe we’d be looking at large impacts, both in terms of the revenue for the government, and potentially deterring oil and gas investment. This severance tax would add something like 0.7 percent to the total revenue generated by natural gas production in Pennsylvania. That’s not enough to have a huge impact.

Looking back at 2015, if this severance tax had been in place it would have raised about $90 million for the state. That’s a lot of money for me and you, but in Pennsylvania that year total tax revenues were $35 billion. So, this type of severance tax would add about a quarter of a percent to state revenues.

Q: You’re using the Henry Hub natural gas spot price (in Louisiana) in your analysis. But don’t Pennsylvania gas producers often receive less?

A: That’s right. That’s a great question. Natural gas prices for producers in Pennsylvania have been lower than they are in other states. That’s primarily because of limited pipeline capacity to take the gas away to other markets.

But the severance tax proposal would use the price in Louisiana, which is surprising to me.

Q: One of the things the industry points out is that even though Texas, for example, has a severance tax, it doesn’t have Pennsylvania’s high corporate income tax rate.

A: It’s hard to compare tax policies across states. In the analysis we did, we wanted to include corporate income taxes, but we couldn’t because they are so different between different states.

In Texas, there is no corporate income tax. However, there is a gross receipts tax companies pay. That does impose a notable additional tax burden.

I think there is something to the idea that Pennsylvania’s high corporate tax rate does add costs for businesses. However, if tax rates were the only thing that mattered, we’d see companies moving more quickly to states like Ohio, where there is no corporate tax rate, but there is a gross receipts tax. These factors matter, but generally their impacts are small.

The three most important factors are the quality of the resource, the prevailing prices, and access to infrastructure—that is, pipelines.

*Note: Pennsylvania’s Independent Fiscal Office tracks the impact fee collections and calculates an annual effective tax rate. It has ranged from a high of 5.6 percent in 2011, to a low of 2.3 percent in 2014.

Paradise Gas-fired Plant -- Coal plants in the background

From a Report by Glynis Board, Ohio Valley ReSource, WFPL – NPR, July 17, 2017

‘Where Paradise Lay‘

Coal is showing its age. The average age of coal plants in the U.S. today is about 40 years and for the past couple of decades power companies have faced tough decisions about the investments needed to keep those coal-burners going in a way that meets both environmental requirements and economic competition.

Many are opting to phase out coal and instead invest in cheaper, cleaner natural gas.

Some 8,000 megawatts of coal power generating capacity will likely be retired this year. That’s roughly the equivalent of 11 Longview plants. Last year, 13,000 megawatts of coal were retired, many of those before planned retirement dates.

Economists like Walter Culver with the Great Lakes Energy Institute at Case Western Reserve University say the boom in the shale gas supply and development of high efficiency technology to burn that gas are combining to force more coal out of the market. “So now the natural efficiency of generating electricity with gas for the same amount of gas energy as coal energy is about half of the costs, basically,” he said.

That was the strong selling point for TVA President and CEO Bill Johnson, who recently addressed a crowd gathered in Paradise, Kentucky. “It’s a big part of our priority here to diversify our fleet to make sure we are making electricity at the lowest feasible rate,” he said.

David Sorrick, TVA’s senior vice president of power operations, stood near the new 1100 megawatt facility. “Directly behind me is the new Paradise combined-cycle facility,” he said. “And it’s co-located with the unit down the hill, which is our Paradise coal facility.”

Gas power produces far less soot, no mercury, and none of the combustion ash that coal power produces. It also produces 40 to 50 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions compared to the coal unit.

Operations technician Kyle Jones conducted a tour at the dedication ceremony, and proudly pointed out the efficiency features. “The combined cycle portion where we’re using all the heat possible is what makes it so efficient,” he explained. “Our exhaust leaving the stack is as cool as we can make it to use all the energy we could, the most heat transfer possible.”

That even reduces the amount of water needed from the nearby Green River. Steam is returned to liquid form in cooling towers. Huge fans pass air over droplets to cool water until it can be reused.

Jones started at the Paradise coal facility a decade ago and worked his way from conveyer operator to unit operator and now a job at the new gas facility.
“I love it,” he said of the new plant. “It’s a whole lot more clean and makes a world of difference in terms of the work I do.”

Others in the community, however, see trouble in Paradise. At the nearby Paradise Cafe, a stone monument to Kentucky’s coal miners greets visitors at the door. Inside, patrons talked over burgers and BLTs about looming concerns over job losses, either at the TVA facility or the nearby coal mine that supplies it.

The TVA is eager to calm those fears. Sorrick pointed out that even though two coal units were retired here, a third one remains in operation and likely will for decades. However, the new gas facility employs fewer people than the coal plant did. Some employees found work elsewhere in the TVA system.

Health Effects of Power Plants

When John Prine put Paradise on the popular culture map, he was writing about the visible effects of strip mining.

But what Prine couldn’t see then were some of the profound public health effects of burning coal, effects that would take years to measure.

The TVA has been burning coal in Paradise for fifty years. But it started burning a lot more of it in the 1980s, after the public’s opinion of nuclear power changed dramatically. “It was completely related to the partial nuclear meltdown of Three Mile Island in 1979,” Carnegie Mellon University researcher Edson Severnini noticed.

When the TVA took some of its nuclear power generators off line, the power gap was met with coal, specifically, a big increase in the output from the Paradise Fossil Plant. That swap in power generation in the mid 80s provided Severnini an opportunity to study public health impacts in places where coal power generation increased.

He found a striking relationship between the uptick in coal burning at Paradise and a decrease in the size of babies born downwind. “Where Paradise coal-fired power plant was located there was a huge increase in coal-fired power generation, a high increase in air pollution,” he said. “And in that particular location there was a decrease in birth weight by 5.4 percent.”

Severnini’s study was published in the journal Nature in April. He looked at recorded birth weight in the first 18 months after the region’s switch to coal. It was accessible data and birth weight is a good indicator of human health outcomes later in life. Severnini explained that low birth weight can be linked to shorter life spans, higher susceptibility to disease, and even a person’s ability to thrive socially.

“What I wanted people to think about is: What are the consequences of energy choices?” he said.

The Paradise coal facility is now far cleaner than it was in the 80s thanks to stronger requirements under the Clean Air Act and pollution control technology TVA installed. But no matter how you burn it, coal is an organic material dug from the ground and will produce emissions. Recent environmental studies indicate that despite progress in pollution control, soot from coal power plants still accounted for an estimated 7,000 premature deaths each year in the U.S. as of 2014. That’s a lot fewer deaths than the country saw just a decade earlier.

“The cleaner you get that carbon-containing compound you’re burning, the better it is,” said University of Pittsburgh physician and public health expert Dr. Bernard Goldstein. “There are cleaner forms of coal, but none of them are as clean as, say, natural gas.”

Goldstein said despite a lack of data to understand the full health effects of the natural gas industry, it is a significantly cleaner fossil fuel to burn. And gas drillers probably face fewer health risks than coal miners.

“Anytime we’ve had areas that have switched from coal to natural gas there are far less particulates in the air and so the pollution levels have decreased because of that switch,” he said.

Uncertainty Exists Over Gas

But while natural gas offers improvements compared to coal, its environmental effects are proving difficult to fully measure.

Goldstein said he thinks the gas industry, which is highly fragmented, has missed opportunities to clearly address concerns about its own environmental effects. Those include air and water pollution near drilling sites, disposal concerns related to drilling waste, and the greenhouse gas emissions that result from methane leakage.

As a result, any health effects remain to be clearly understood. “For natural gas, the major uncertainties are weighing on the people who live next door,” he said.

Next door to gas drilling, that is. Put another way, the health and environmental risks for the industry’s host communities may take years to observe and measure. And the people of the Ohio Valley may well bear the brunt of those effects to come, just as they have with the effects of coal in the past.

See also: Why Are G20 Governments Financing Coal Over Renewables?

Acosta Deep Mine, Jennerstown, PA, for metallurgical coal

FACT CHECK: Is President Trump Correct That Coal Mines Are Opening?

From an Article by Reid Frazier of the Allegheny Front, National Public Radio, June 2, 2017

As he announced his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, President Trump said he was putting American jobs ahead of the needs and desires of other countries.

“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” he said Thursday. Trump said the agreement was “very unfair” for the U.S., especially the U.S. coal industry. And he alluded to some recent good news for the battered industry: the development of new mines.

The Claim

“The mines are starting to open up, having a big opening in two weeks. Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, so many places. A big opening of a brand-new mine. It’s unheard of. For many, many years that hasn’t happened. They asked me if I’d go. I’m going to try.”

Short Answer

Yes, mines are beginning to open up, including a new one in Pennsylvania. But that doesn’t reverse the overall decline of the coal mining industry from its glory days.

Long Answer

The coal mines that are opening up produce a special kind of coal used in steelmaking and are opening largely because of events unrelated to federal policy, experts say. The market for the kind of coal used in electricity — the biggest use for coal — remains down relative to where it was several years ago.

In other words, the industry has rebounded slightly after years of layoffs and closures caused mainly by competition from cheap natural gas. And a handful of new mines in Wyoming, Alabama, Pennsylvania and West Virginia are either opening or slated to open in the next few years.

The coal mine Trump referred to is the Acosta Deep Mine in Jennerstown, Pa., about an hour east of Pittsburgh. It is scheduled to have an opening ceremony next week, but there’s no word yet on whether the president will be there for the ribbon-cutting.

“We’re staffing up,” George Dethlefsen, CEO of Corsa Coal Corp., which owns the mine, told Bloomberg in February. The mine plans to employ about 70 people.

Betty Rhoads, the owner of the nearby Coal Miner’s Cafe, in Jennerstown, says she has seen an uptick in business from miners at the mine since last year. “You’ll see a group of 12 or 20 of them come in and have a big breakfast after their shift is over,” she says. “It helps the cook get paid. It helps the waitress get paid. It helps us pay our electric bills.”

The mine, as are many of the others slated to open, will produce metallurgical coal, a special type of coal that is used in steelmaking. This is different from “steam” coal, which is used to generate electricity. “Met” coal makes up about 15 percent of worldwide coal production, according to the International Energy Agency.

The Acosta Deep Mine is one of a handful of metallurgical coal mines opening up around the country to take advantage of very high prices for metallurgical coal, says Art Sullivan, a mining consultant and former coal miner in Washington, Pa. He says the uptick in met coal is related to events oversees that have little to do with U.S. policy or politics.

One of these factors is that Australia, the far and away leader in metallurgical coal, has experienced disruptions to its supply chain. There have been problems with rail transport of coal, and Cyclone Debbie further hurt the coal industry there, Sullivan says. Those disruptions, combined with greater-than-expected demand for steel in China — the world’s leading steelmaker — caused prices of this special coal to soar to $300 per ton, triple the price of met coal from three years ago.

“With the disruptions in Australia and continuing high level of demand in China, there has been this upsurge in the U.S. with the planning, development and production from metallurgical coal mines,” Sullivan says.

James Stevenson, director of the coal team at IHS Markit, says the metallurgical coal boom has helped the coal industry rebound. The rest of the coal industry has also benefited from higher natural gas prices.

“I think that the broad-brush characteristic is that things have really improved from the bottom,” Stevenson says. “We really saw the bottom of the U.S. coal market in early 2016.” Since then, the industry has picked up a bit. Several large coal companies have begun to emerge from bankruptcy, buoying the industry.

Still, despite this uptick, the industry isn’t going back to its glory days of a few years ago, regardless of Trump’s pro-coal policies, Stevenson says. He expects natural gas prices to fall and the shortage of met coal to ease. “The direction is downward,” Stevenson says.

“There’s not a whole lot a government can do to change economics, so we don’t really expect a whole lot of change to the coal demand outlook from what any administration really can do,” he says. “Most analysts would agree [Trump's pro-coal policies] are probably a case of slowing the decline [rather than generating] any real upside.”

Coal production reached a 30-year low in 2015, and the number of U.S. coal miners fell from 90,000 in 2012 to 50,000 in 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of U.S. coal mines dropped from 1,831 in 2006 to 1,159 in 2015, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Overall, coal industry analysts say this rebound will pick the industry up, but not to the levels seen at its height around 2011. Blame fracking.

“Natural gas is the big reason why coal use for electric power has declined,” says Jay Apt, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. Apt says natural gas from the fracking boom has replaced coal on the electric grid; natural gas recently overtook coal as the largest source of electricity in the country.

A recent Columbia University study found that regulations accounted for 3.5 percent of coal’s decline, while competition from natural gas accounted for around 49 percent.

Trump’s pro-coal policies certainly won’t hurt the industry, but the broad trends pushing the industry down are likely to continue, experts say. It’s simple economics.

To: NPR -- Think Twice About Fracking

National Public Radio should think twice about their “sponsors”

From a Post by Environmental Action, November 2014

Most Americans consider NPR an independent media organization, so it might surprise you that one of its biggest corporate sponsors is the American Natural Gas Alliance, a front group that exists only to promote some of the worst energy polluters in America.

The ANGA has been an NPR corporate sponsor for months, using its airtime to promote the misleading ‘think about it’ campaign that is in fact a promotion for the dangerous and destructive drilling process known as fracking.

NPR’s financial dependence on the fracking industry could be fouling its news coverage, just like fracking fouls up our air, water and climate. Fracking puts America on a path toward a bleak energy future, with polluted land, flammable tap water and earthquakes.

Meanwhile, clean, green energy sources like wind and solar can provide 99 percent of our electric, transportation and manufacturing power needs. No fracking required. Even better — every time we choose renewable energy over oil, coal and gas, we reduce emissions, lower the cost of energy and create jobs.

When trusted news outlets like NPR take money from ANGA and repeat their deceptive marketing claptrap — on OUR airwaves — we have to question their objectivity. Sign up here to tell NPR that when it comes to fracking, don’t even think about it.

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NPR is airing pro-fracking ads on our public radio stations and reducing their environmental reporting team by 80%.

When NPR started airing pro-fracking messages, I was annoyed. But now that they’ve also announced plans to close down virtually all their environmental coverage — leaving just one part time reporter to cover fracking, the climate crisis, and more —now I’m frankly alarmed.

Do you agree that public radio needs to reject money from the fossil fuel industry, and spend more time covering fracking and the climate crisis?

NPR has always said that we shouldn’t worry about the fracking ads, because they won’t impact news coverage. But last month, they announced plans to dramatically reduce their staff covering the environment and climate change.*

All this week, dozens of protesters have been sitting in, speaking out and even getting arrested over at the offices of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which is just a few blocks from NPR’s office. But they couldn’t spare a reporter even one day this week to cover the fact that FERC rubber stamping fracking projects that destroy towns, and being met with hundreds of protesters everywhere they go.**

We need to tell NPR that this is not acceptable. We need to show them that radio covering the fracking boom and the climate crisis is engaging, smart, and essential. And we need to ask the local affiliates from New York to Sacramento and everywhere in between, to join us in sending that message.

Thanks for tuning in to the planet, and tuning out pollution,

Signed: Drew Hudson and the team at Environmental Action

* Joe Romm, NPR Guts Its Environment And Climate Reporting Team, Becomes ‘Part Of The Problem’, Think Progress, October 24, 2014
** Hannah Northey, More activists arrested as climate demonstration continues at FERC, Energy and Environment News Greenwire, November 4, 2014