These are the stories I have found for this roundup:
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A US small-town mayor sued the oil industry. Then Exxon went after him
- The climate disaster is here
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Deforestation Is a Crime
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Climate change can impact your finances. The government wants to come up with solutions
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Can the World’s Most Polluting Heavy Industries Decarbonize?
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Justice Is With Us!': Climate Groups Cheer French Court Order to Cut Emissions
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When the Place You Live Becomes Unlivable
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Chevron’s climate plan: Use wind and solar power to drill for oil
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The decreasing cost of renewables unlikely to plateau any time soon
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Taking Stock of the Energy Storage Boom Happening Right Now
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What are the world’s most polluting industries and how do they plan to decarbonise?
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Fossil Fuel Expansion in Africa 'Not Compatible With a Safe Climate Future': Report
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Carbon-Capturing Sunglasses Offer a View of Fashion's Future
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Raging Flood Waters Driven by Climate Change Threaten the Trans-Alaska Pipeline
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Letting Carbon Sink with the Fishes
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Environmental Groups Don’t Like North Carolina’s New Energy Law, Despite Its Emission-Cutting Goals
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Drought in northern Kenya pushes millions towards hunger
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At Climate Summit, Can the World Move from Talk to Action?
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South Sudanese refugees homeless again after Sudan floods
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Biden administration plans for offshore wind everywhere
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Indigenous Climate Activists Arrested After ‘Occupying’ US Department of Interior
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Manchin Threatening Key Climate Provision: Reports
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Environmental and Labor Groups Urge Canada to Support Just Transition
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Carbon emissions from rich countries rose rapidly in 2021
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Students’ solar-powered camper van turns heads on 1,800-mile road trip
This Is An Open Thread
A US small-town mayor sued the oil industry. Then Exxon went after him
Serge Dedina is a surfer, environmentalist and mayor of Imperial Beach, a small working-class city on the California coast.
He is also, if the fossil fuel industry is to be believed, at the heart of a conspiracy to shake down big oil for hundreds of millions of dollars.
ExxonMobil and its allies have accused Dedina of colluding with other public officials across California to extort money from the fossil-fuel industry. Lawyers even searched his phone and computer for evidence he plotted with officials from Santa Cruz, a city located nearly 500 miles north of Imperial Beach.
The problem is, Dedina had never heard of a Santa Cruz conspiracy. Few people had.
“The only thing from Santa Cruz on my phone was videos of my kids surfing there,” Dedina said. “I love the fact that some lawyer in a really expensive suit, sitting in some horrible office trying to find evidence that we were in some kind of conspiracy with Santa Cruz, had to look at videos of my kids surfing.”
The climate disaster is here
The enormous, unprecedented pain and turmoil caused by the climate crisis is often discussed alongside what can seem like surprisingly small temperature increases – 1.5C or 2C hotter than it was in the era just before the car replaced the horse and cart.
These temperature thresholds will again be the focus of upcoming UN climate talks at the COP26 summit in Scotland as countries variously dawdle or scramble to avert climate catastrophe. But the single digit numbers obscure huge ramifications at stake. “We have built a civilization based on a world that doesn’t exist anymore,” as Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University and chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, puts it.
The world has already heated up by around 1.2C, on average, since the preindustrial era, pushing humanity beyond almost all historical boundaries. Cranking up the temperature of the entire globe this much within little more than a century is, in fact, extraordinary, with the oceans alone absorbing the heat equivalent of five Hiroshima atomic bombs dropping into the water every second.
Deforestation Is a Crime
The world doesn’t agree on many things, but one of them is that global deforestation is a problem. If deforestation were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest source of climate-warming pollution, after the United States and China. (It would also be a terrible place to live—bulldozers everywhere and no shade to speak of.) Parts of the Amazon now emit more carbon pollution than they capture because of deforestation, a recent study found.
Knowing about a problem is, of course, different from knowing what to do about it. Two years ago, the world watched some 40,000 fires burn across the Amazon rainforest, more than twice the usual rate, producing so much smoke that they darkened the sky of São Paulo, Brazil, hundreds of miles away. The fires risked damaging the roughly 3 million species that live in the Amazon—or, worse still, triggering a feedback loop of dieback in the forest. These fires were mostly man-made: Farmers and ranchers were setting them illegally so that they could expand their cattle operations. World leaders pressured Brazil to end the fires and offered their support, but Jair Bolsonaro, the country’s president, declined any help.
Public attention moved on, but the ranching problem did not. The United States now imports nearly 60,000 tons of Brazilian beef a year. A cow raised on that deforested land may now be in your cheeseburger, Rick Jacobsen, a commodities expert at the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), told me. Brazil simply has no way to track individual cattle through its maze of ranches, some of which are on illegally deforested land.
Climate change can impact your finances. The government wants to come up with solutions
Climate change can have a direct impact on your wallet.
Not only can it affect your bills, from insurance to food and utilities, but if you are hit by an event like a wildfire or hurricane, you can lose your home, income or both.
The U.S. Treasury Department is now taking steps to better understand the financial risks of climate change and climate transition to Americans, especially in low-income and historically disadvantaged communities, a senior administration official told CNBC.
It is part of the Biden administration’s overall effort to tackle climate change.
Can the World’s Most Polluting Heavy Industries Decarbonize?
We know how to decarbonize energy production with renewable fuels and land transportation with electric vehicles. Blueprints for greening shipping and aircraft are being drawn up. But what about the big industrial processes? They look set to become decarbonization holdouts—the last and hardest CO2 emissions that we must eliminate if we are to achieve net-zero emissions by mid-century. In particular, how are we to green the three biggest globally-vital heavy industries: steel, cement, and ammonia, which together emit around a fifth of anthropogenic CO2?
Our modern urban environments are largely constructed from concrete—which is made from cement—and steel. Most of our food is grown through the application of fertilizer made from ammonia. These most ubiquitous industrial materials are produced at huge expense of energy and carbon dioxide emissions.
Justice Is With Us!': Climate Groups Cheer French Court Order to Cut Emissions
Climate campaigners across France celebrated Thursday after the administrative court of Paris ordered the French government to honor its commitments to cut planet-heating emissions and "repair the ecological damage for which it is responsible" by the end of next year.
The Case of the Century, or l'Affaire du Siècle, was launched three years ago by four advocacy groups: Oxfam France, Notre Affaire à Tous, Fondation pour la Nature et l’Homme, and Greenpeace France.
"We won," tweeted Oxfam France executive director Cécile Duflot. "The state must not only make up for the delay but also repair the damage!"
When the Place You Live Becomes Unlivable
“New Orleans is the only ship I’d go down with,” my friend Ben wrote on Facebook in the hours before Hurricane Ida upended southeast Louisiana. He rode out the storm in the city—“hunkering down,” in standard hurricane parlance. Anxious but safe, I read his post at a splash pad in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. My family and I had evacuated New Orleans the day before, on August 28—two dogs, two kids, and two adults—our destination determined by the projected path of the storm and the availability of an animal-friendly rental. Though far from the “ship,” we monitored Ida’s movements obsessively. The updates weren’t encouraging: The storm intensified at an unprecedented rate, and by the time it reached Grand Isle, the only inhabited barrier island in Louisiana, wind was blasting at 150 mph, making it just shy of a Category 5, the highest in our hurricane-rating system.
Three weeks earlier, my daughter had contracted COVID-19 at her day care, so my kids and I had been in isolation. But my husband, Yussef, an infectious-disease doctor, had continued to see patients, a necessity at his overburdened hospital. Then the hurricane arrived just as the state’s fourth coronavirus wave crested, prompting Louisianans to scatter across the poorly vaccinated South. Yussef and I framed our evacuation as a lark—surprise vacation!—but our daughter detected our worry. As he parked our rental car in downtown Tuscaloosa, Yussef turned to me and asked: “Would any of this be happening if we lived somewhere else?”
Chevron’s climate plan: Use wind and solar power to drill for oil
Earlier this year, Chevron faced a reckoning when 61 percent of the company’s shareholders backed a nonbinding resolution asking it to cut its emissions. The oil and gas giant had previously announced goals to make its operations less carbon-intensive, but at its annual general meeting in May, shareholders effectively crossed their arms and shook their heads, demanding that the company cut emissions from the use of its products, too.
But even after the majority shareholder vote, Chevron is barely budging.
On Monday, Chevron announced a new “aspiration” to reduce emissions from its upstream operations to net-zero by 2050, along with a separate target of reducing the carbon intensity of its products by 5 percent by 2028. That mouthful of words means the company plans to keep producing just as much oil as it always has, if not more, but emit less carbon per barrel.
The decreasing cost of renewables unlikely to plateau any time soon
Past projections of energy costs have consistently underestimated just how cheap renewable energy would be in the future, as well as the benefits of rolling them out quickly, according to a new report out of the Institute of New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford.
The report makes predictions about more than 50 technologies such as solar power, offshore wind, and more, and it compares them to a future that still runs on carbon. “It’s not just good news for renewables. It’s good news for the planet,” Matthew Ives, one of the report’s authors and a senior researcher at the Oxford Martin Post-Carbon Transition Programme, told Ars.
The paper used probabilistic cost forecasting methods—taking into account both past data and current and ongoing technological developments in renewables—for its findings. It also used large caches of data from sources such as the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and Bloomberg. Beyond looking at the cost (represented as dollar per unit of energy production over time), the report also represents its findings in three scenarios: a fast transition to renewables, a slow transition, and no transition at all.
Taking Stock of the Energy Storage Boom Happening Right Now
Global energy storage development is increasing so quickly and on such a large scale that it’s sometimes difficult to grasp the significance of what’s happening.
The energy research firm Wood Mackenzie reports in its most recent forecast that, globally, 12.4 gigawatts of energy storage capacity will come online in 2021, up from 4.9 gigawatts in 2020, which was then a record. Almost all the new storage systems are batteries.
To help put that into perspective, the world reached a landmark 1 gigawatt of new energy storage capacity in 2016. Five years later, that record year is what happens in a good month.
The growth in energy storage is just getting started. Wood Mackenzie projects that new global storage capacity will increase each year, to 70 gigawatts in 2030.
What are the world’s most polluting industries and how do they plan to decarbonise?
Shipping, aviation and steel are three of the world’s most polluting industries. Together they emit close to six gigatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere every year.
But they are often ignored in the national climate plans, known as Nationally Determined Contributions, that form the basis of negotiations at COP.
Now more than 300 corporate leaders from seven industries that are difficult to decarbonise have come together to develop a plan. Called the Mission Possible Partnership (MPP), it wants to steer companies, customers and financial institutes towards a clear path to net-zero by 2050.
Fossil Fuel Expansion in Africa 'Not Compatible With a Safe Climate Future': Report
Fossil fuel corporations have plans to expand dirty energy extraction in Africa—proposing more than a trillion dollars worth of new oil, gas, and coal projects over the next three decades—even though such an undertaking would exacerbate climate chaos and create "stranded assets that leave behind unfunded clean-up, shortfalls of government revenue, and overnight job losses."
That's according to a new report published Thursday by Oil Change International in partnership with Oilwatch Africa, Africa Coal Network, 350Africa.org, Health of Mother Earth Foundation, WoMin African Alliance, and Center for International Environmental Law.
"Fossil fuel industry plans to sink USD $230 billion into the development of new extraction projects in Africa in the next decade—and USD $1.4 trillion by 2050—are not compatible with a safe climate future," note the authors, who advocate instead for a just transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Carbon-Capturing Sunglasses Offer a View of Fashion's Future
LEATHER IS A controversial material, and not just because cows have to die to produce it. Or because tanning leather requires toxic chemicals like chromium, which is sometimes dumped straight into local waterways. No, the worst part about leather, according to environmental activists, is that it’s a major contributor to climate change.
Animal agriculture is estimated to be responsible for 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Kering, the luxury fashion conglomerate that owns such storied leather-loving brands as Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, said in its 2020 environmental report that the production and processing of leather is by far the biggest contributor to its carbon footprint. And when the Amazon was on fire in 2019, the blazes were blamed at least partially on cattle ranching operations, and several large brands including H&M and Timberland vowed to stop sourcing leather from the region.
Raging Flood Waters Driven by Climate Change Threaten the Trans-Alaska Pipeline
It rained hard at the headwaters of the Sagavanirktok River in northern Alaska’s Brooks Range late in the summer of 2019, an unusually harsh downpour that was likely supercharged by climate change.
The Sag, as it’s commonly called, swelled and began to tear at its banks, gnawing away at the tundra. Chucks of earth crumpled into the churning water 22 miles south of Prudhoe Bay.
In August, the surging water jumped the riverbank and chewed away 100 feet of the land on the west side of the Sag, to within 30 feet of a buried segment of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the four-foot diameter conduit that carries an average of 20 million gallons of crude oil a day from the Prudhoe Bay oil fields.
Letting Carbon Sink with the Fishes
Fisheries generate their share of environmental concerns, but carbon emissions are rarely among them.
Gaël Mariani, a PhD candidate in marine ecology at the University of Montpellier in France, was wondering if ocean fisheries might emit more carbon than one might think. Specifically, he was researching natural marine processes that policymakers might leverage to sequester excess carbon, when he became curious if catches were short-circuiting one such process: the carbon pump that kicks in when fish die naturally in the ocean, instead of snagged in nets and on hooks.
Most marine corpses, including fish, fall to the seabed. (Dead whales are referred to as “whale falls,” and smaller bits of decayed organisms fall as “marine snow.”) This movement channels some carbon out of the upper ocean and sequesters it in the deep for hundreds, even thousands, of years. But what if the fish is caught instead?
Environmental Groups Don’t Like North Carolina’s New Energy Law, Despite Its Emission-Cutting Goals
In a year of landmark energy actions by states, the law signed this week in North Carolina is notable for the way clean energy advocates have responded with faint praise or even criticism rather than adulation.
House Bill 951 requires electric utilities to cut carbon emissions by 70 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, and reach carbon neutrality by 2050.
But the law doesn’t spell out the specifics of how utilities are supposed to reach those targets, or provide any penalties for those that fall short. Instead, it says that the North Carolina Utilities Commission will figure out the details and issue a plan by the end of next year, a process that consumer and environmental groups say is not nearly strong enough.
Drought in northern Kenya pushes millions towards hunger
In northern Kenya, the ribs of dead sheep stretch towards the blazing sun as parched herders trudge past, a day's march from water. The value of their skinny goats is falling as fast as the prices scrawled on the sacks in the market are shooting up.
More than 465,000 children under five and over 93,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women are malnourished in Kenya's northern region, the U.N. says.
Food prices are climbing. In Marsabit County, they are 16% above average, data from the National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) shows.
At Climate Summit, Can the World Move from Talk to Action?
Glasgow, once the second city of the British Empire and the biggest shipbuilder on the planet, next month hosts the 26th conference of nations aiming to halt dangerous climate change. The negotiators face the challenge of turning the aspiration of the 2015 Paris Agreement to achieve “net zero” emissions by mid-century into the detailed near-term action plans necessary to turn those hopes into reality in time to halt warming at or near 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
Sadly, while aspiration is going well, progress on action is slow, say scientists. Most big emitters have in recent months promised to achieve national net-zero targets by 2050, allowing the British hosts to claim that Glasgow will “keep 1.5 alive.” But scientists warn that such ambition remains hot air. They say we have to all but halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, or net zero by 2050 will slip out of sight. Yet most of the national plans unveiled so far do little more than prevent further rises in emissions over the coming decade.
The question for delegates meeting in Scotland comes down to this: Should the focus be on 2050 aspiration or 2030 action, on “keeping 1.5 alive” or on delivering credible plans to make it happen?
South Sudanese refugees homeless again after Sudan floods
Heavy rains and flash floods have hit 13 of Sudan’s 18 states, affecting more than 288,000 residents and refugees, according to the United Nations.
In neighbouring South Sudan, the deluge affected and displaced about 426,000 people, exacerbating the swelling humanitarian needs in Sudan, the UN said.
In Sudan, thousands of refugees were relocated to different camps, while others took shelter in villages that were spared, but many are now living on the streets.
“They have become homeless,” said Ibrahim Mohamed, a senior official at Sudan’s refugee commission.
Biden administration plans for offshore wind everywhere
Shortly after taking office, President Joe Biden announced a major effort to jump-start the offshore wind industry in the US, with the stated goal of going from roughly zero to 30 GW of capacity before the decade is over. To that end, the Biden administration has given final approval to Vineyard Wind near Massachusetts and has been involved with three large wind projects that will be sited off New Jersey.
But even with the massive size of those projects, the US would be left with about 4 GW of offshore wind—nowhere close to the 30 GW goal. So on Wednesday, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland laid out an ambitious roadmap that will see all coastal areas of the contiguous 48 states evaluated for leasing, with lease deals being completed before the end of Biden's term in 2024.
A multi-year process
At the federal level, the leasing process is far more involved than simply finding a site that has strong, consistent winds. Federal regulators have to consider environmental impacts, conflicts with other users, damage to historical sites, and the needs of any Native American groups in the area, among other factors. It's only after these hurdles are overcome that the lease sale can begin.
Indigenous Climate Activists Arrested After ‘Occupying’ US Department of Interior
Dozens of Indigenous climate activists were arrested and removed from the U.S. Department of the Interior in Washington on Thursday after taking over a lobby of the department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs for several hours.
Videos posted by activists from inside the building showed a large circle of protesters sitting on the floor with their hands zip-tied together to make it harder to be removed.
The protest at the Stewart Lee Udall building on C St. NW was largely peaceful, but skirmishes between activists and law enforcement erupted outside the building. Pushing and shoving resulted in “multiple injuries” sustained by security personnel, with one officer being transported to a nearby hospital, said Jim Goodwin, a spokesman for U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service. Two medics who were with the protesters were tased during the altercation, Joye Braun, an Indigenous activist, said. Other protesters were hit with batons, according to media reports.
Manchin Threatening Key Climate Provision: Reports
Advocates for bold action to slash planet-heating emissions expressed concern Friday and Saturday following reports that a key climate program in the still-evolving reconciliation package may be neutered or taken out completely.
Resistance to the program's inclusion is coming from Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who, along with fellow rightwing Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, has been a major obstacle to Democrats securing the 50 votes needed for Senate passage of the Build Back Better package.
The new reporting centers on the Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP), which Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) described in a Saturday tweet as "the most impactful part of the Build Back Better Act from a climate perspective" and "puts our electric sector on a path to zero emissions."
Environmental and Labor Groups Urge Canada to Support Just Transition
Canada has not provided a transition pathway for its fossil fuel workers to move into other industries, and as global demand for oil and gas wanes, tens of thousands of workers could lose their jobs, say the authors of a new report.
Roughly 167,000 people are directly employed in Canada’s oil and gas industry, but increased automation combined with the energy transition and climate policy mean that half of those jobs are slated to disappear by the end of the decade, according to a report published on October 13 by the Climate Action Network Canada and Blue Green Canada, which is a coalition of labor and environmental groups.
The report said there is potential to transition many of these workers into cleaner industries, but action is needed by the federal and provincial governments to ease the pathway.
Carbon emissions from rich countries rose rapidly in 2021
Carbon emissions are rebounding strongly and are rising across the world's 20 richest nations, according to a new study.
The Climate Transparency Report says that CO2 will go up by 4% across the G20 group this year, having dropped 6% in 2020 due to the pandemic.
China, India and Argentina are set to exceed their 2019 emissions levels.
The authors say that the continued use of fossil fuels is undermining efforts to rein in temperatures.
With just two weeks left until the critical COP26 climate conference opens in Glasgow, the task facing negotiators is stark.
Students’ solar-powered camper van turns heads on 1,800-mile road trip
A team of students from the Netherlands are due to complete an 1,800-mile (3,000km) road trip across western Europe in a solar-powered camper van that they designed and built themselves.
The Stella Vita is designed for two passengers and has a kitchen, sitting area, bed, shower and toilet. Using solar energy alone, the vehicle can cover up to 450 miles on a sunny day, reaching a top speed of 75mph, as well as powering all the inside amenities, a TV and a laptop.
The vehicle has solar panels on the roof that can be expanded into a sun cover when parked. The van can also be charged through electric charging ports.
“The technology is there, we just have to change the way we think,” said 20-year-old Tijn ter Horst, one of the Eindhoven University of Technology students onboard. “If 22 students can design and build a vehicle like this in one year, then I’m sure companies could as well.”