The Biden administration Friday announced the nation’s first move in curbing greenhouse gas emissions with plans to fine oil and gas companies for excess methane pollution.
The potent gas contributes 80 times more pollution than carbon dioxide, which is the only greenhouse gas more abundant than methane.
Penalties on the fossil fuel companies for methane emissions begin at $900 per ton for emissions which exceed federal limits, increasing to $1,500 per ton by 2026.
The New York Times reports:
The fee is the second part of new methane restrictions the Biden administration is imposing on the oil and gas industry. Last month, the E.P.A. announced it would require companies for the first time to detect and fix leaks of methane from wells, pipelines and storage facilities and that it would mostly ban the practice of flaring, except in emergencies. Congress also has authorized more than $1 billion in grants and other spending to help companies and communities improve methane monitoring and data collection, and to find and repair leaks.
“Off the charts” warming of the world’s oceans in 2023 caused severe weather events around the world, according to a new study published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.
In 2023, the ocean absorbed 90% of the excess heat from global warming, leading to record-breaking sea surface temperatures.
In 2023, an additional 15 zettajoules of heat was taken up by the oceans, compared with 2022. By comparison, humanity uses about half a zettajoule of energy a year to fuel the entire global economy. In total, the oceans absorbed 287 zettajoules in 2023. www.theguardian.com/...
(A zettajoule is a unit of energy that is 1 joule with 21 zeros after it. One zettajoule is equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules.)
“The ocean is the key to telling us what’s happening to the world and the data is painting a compelling picture of warming year after year after year,” said University of St Thomas in Minnesota Professor John Abraham.
A Global Water Monitor (GWM) report determined warm ocean water was responsible for exceptionally powerful cyclones that impacted Mozambique and Malawi, Myanmar, Greece, Libya, New Zealand and Australia.
Prof Albert Van Dijk of GWM said: “We saw cyclones behave in unexpected and deadly ways. The longest-lived cyclone ever recorded battered south-eastern Africa for weeks. Warmer sea temperatures fuelled those freak behaviours, and we can expect to see more of these extreme events going forward.” www.gao.gov/...
Oceans are expected to warm even more in 2024. The warming water also poses catastrophic threats to marine plants and animals and contributes to rising sea levels.
The US Government Accountability Office foresees a catastrophic future with heat absorption changing the ocean currents that transfer heat globally in ways that are not yet understood by scientists.
“We’re already facing the consequences and they will get far worse if we don’t take action,” [Abraham] said. “But we can solve this problem today with wind, solar, hydro and energy conservation. Once people realise that, it’s very empowering. We can usher in the new energy economy of the future, saving money and the environment at the same time.”
A sampling of key points from Carbon Brief’s State of the Climate 2023:
- Global surface temperatures: It was the warmest year on record by a large margin – at between 1.34C and 1.54C above pre-industrial levels across different temperature datasets.
- Exceptional monthly temperatures: Global temperatures set a new record each month between June and December. September smashed the prior record for the month by a “gobsmacking” 0.5C.
- Regional warming: It was the warmest year on record in 77 countries – including China, Brazil, Austria, Bangladesh, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, South Korea and Ukraine – and in areas where 2.3 billion people live.
- Comparison with climate models: Observations for 2023 are above the central estimate of climate model projections in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sixth assessment report, but well within the model range.
Bill McKibben writes in The Crucial Years that “We're reaching the point where the climate crisis slows the machine...”
Excerpts from the article Friction is growing:
Homeowners unable to get affordable insurance is a problem in and of itself, but what it really presages is what the Harvard team described: a drag on the economy that eventually causes real change. Insurance sounds like a boring topic, until you think about it a little: it’s the (enormous) part of the economy that’s assigned to understand risk. And to do so it developed one of the most powerful technologies in all of human history: the actuarial table. Using it, the industry can predict what’s going to happen—predict it accurately enough to allow everyone else to affordably hedge against that risk. Without that hedge, investment—in a house or a company—becomes almost impossible. Climate change is wrecking that tool, because an actuarial table depends for its power on the world behaving more or less as it has in the past. As the Journal put it, succintly, “climate change has made it harder for insurers to measure their risks, pushing some to demand even higher premiums to cushion against future losses.”
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I think even the powers that be are starting to recognize our peril—Sourcing Journal, (“the largest, most comprehensive and authoritative B2B resource for executives working in the apparel, textile, home and footwear industries”) warned last week that “extreme weather” was now the greatest threat to supply chains. (You read about attacks on ships in the Red Sea, but the big story in logistics right now is the drought that’s so lowered the water level in the Panama Canal that shippers have to send their cargoes on rail across the isthmus). And as the world’s leaders jet into Davos this week, the World Economic Forum has decided that even amidst AI and war, climate presents the greatest risk to our prosperity.