How Science Got Trampled in the Rush to Drill in the Arctic

Every year, hundreds of petroleum industry executives gather in Anchorage for the annual conference of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, where they discuss policy and celebrate their achievements with the state’s political establishment. In May 2018, they again filed into the Dena’ina Civic and Convention Center, but they had a new reason to celebrate. Under the Trump administration, oil and gas development was poised to dramatically expand into a remote corner of Alaska where it had been prohibited for nearly 40 years.

Tucked into the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a bill signed by President Donald Trump five months earlier, was a brief two-page section that had little to do with tax reform. Drafted by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, the provision opened up approximately 1.6 million acres of the vast Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas leasing, a reversal of the federal policy that has long protected one of the most ecologically important landscapes in the Arctic.

The refuge is believed to sit atop one of the last great onshore oil reserves in North America, with a value conservatively estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars. For decades, the refuge has been the subject of a very public tug of war between pro-drilling forces and conservation advocates determined to protect an ecosystem crucial to polar bears, herds of migratory caribou, and native communities that rely on the wildlife for subsistence hunting. The Trump tax law, for the first time since the refuge was established in 1980, handed the advantage decisively to the drillers.


A visitor and a lone caribou watch each other on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain, an area in the north of the refuge known for its rich biodiversity. | Nathaniel Wilder for Politico Magazine

One of the keynote speakers at the conference that afternoon was Joe Balash, a top official at the Department of the Interior. Balash, who grew up in a small town outside Fairbanks and describes himself as “a local kid,” referred to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a “jewel,” and predicted that the entire North Slope region was “about to change in some pretty astounding ways.” The executives were there to hear him talk about what was going to come next: Before development could begin, Interior needed to complete a review of potential environmental impacts, and then get the first leases sold to industry. He recounted for the audience that on his second day on the job—right around when the tax bill was passed—then-Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt sat him down and told him that he would be “personally responsible” for completing the legally complex environmental review process for the wildlife refuge and “having a successful lease sale.”

“No pressure,” Balash said to audience laughter.

The pressure, in fact, couldn’t be greater.

Continue reading at: How Science Got Trampled in the Rush to Drill in the Arctic

Europe Sees 1.9GW Offshore Wind Boost | Offshore Wind

Europe added 1.9GW of new offshore wind capacity in the first half of 2019, up from the 1.1GW installed in the same period last year, according to WindEurope.
Countries that contributed to the new installations are the UK with 931MW, including Ørsted's Hornsea Project One offshore wind farm, Denmark with 374MW, Belgium with 370MW and Germany with 252MW.

The combined installations of new offshore and onshore wind capacity amounted to 4.9MW in H1 2019, which is an increase from the 4.5GW added in the same period last year.
Europe invested EUR 8.8 billion in the construction of future wind farms, with EUR 2.4 billion dedicated to offshore wind. These investments will result in 5.9GW being installed and connected over the next two to three years, WindEurope said.
At the end of last year, Europe set the target to have at least 32% of electricity produced by renewable energy by 2030.
According to WindEurope, Europe is also talking about a net-zero economy by 2050, but the rate of installations so far this year will not bring to the target.
Continue reading at: Europe Sees 1.9GW Offshore Wind Boost | Offshore Wind

UK solar power pioneer Solarcentury profit grows 860% in a year

Profits from subsidy-free solar farms have helped to connect millions in Africa to cheap lighting
A UK solar power pioneer has grown its profits eight-fold by investing in subsidy-free solar farms, a portion of which will help connect homes in Africa to small-scale solar-powered lighting systems.
Solarcentury, one of the UK’s fastest growing renewable energy companies, will report profits of £14.4m for the year ending in March, compared with £1.5m the year before.
A 5% share of the record profits will be channelled into SolarAid, a charity that has helped connect 2m homes in Africa to reliable electricity since it was founded by Solarcentury in 2006.
The rapidly rising profits follow a four-year growth strategy in which the company has invested heavily in building and running subsidy-free solar projects in southern Europe, Latin America and Africa.

A project manager for Solarcentury walks the lines of solar panels at a solar farm near Truro in Cornwall. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
Continue reading at: UK solar power pioneer Solarcentury profit grows 860% in a year

How plastic-industry pollution threatens Gulf seafood [Opinion] - HoustonChronicle.com

From Padre Island to the Florida Keys, the Gulf of Mexico is turning into a plastic soup. Researchers are finding microplastic trash in almost every water sample collected from the Gulf, at some of the highest concentrations reported in the world. And the situation is about to get far worse — off the Texas coast and in other U.S. waterways.



Shrimp infused with microplastics? The pollutants are making their way onto our dinner plates.

Photo: Lauri Patterson, Contributor / Getty

That’s because the petro-plastic industry is embarking on a reckless expansion boom. Determined to turn the country’s oversupply of fracked natural gas into more throwaway packaging and products, industry plans to build or expand 80 facilities that turn fracked gas into plastic, including 48 in Texas.

Continue reading at: How plastic-industry pollution threatens Gulf seafood [Opinion] - HoustonChronicle.com

World Hunger Is on the Rise - Heated

Let’s face it: The U.S. is not feeding the world

kuarmungadd for Getty Images

For the third straight year, U.N. agencies have documented rising levels of severe hunger in the world, affecting 820 million people. More than 2 billion suffer “moderate or severe” food insecurity. During the same period, the world is experiencing what Reuters called a “global grains glut,” with surplus agricultural commodities piled up outside grain silos rotting for want of buyers.

Obviously, growing more grain is not reducing global hunger.

Yet every day, some academic, industry, or political leader joins the Malthusian chorus of warnings about looming food shortages due to rising populations and strained natural resources. For example, here’s Richard Linton, dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at North Carolina State University, sounding the familiar alarm: “We’ve got to find a way to feed the world, double the food supply,” he said. “And we all know if we don’t produce enough food, what the outcome is: it’s war, it’s competition.”

“How will we feed the world?” calls the preacher. “Increase our bounty,” responds the choir.

There is so much wrong with that answer. And even with the question, which is profoundly arrogant.

How will “we” feed “the world?” We know who we mean when we ask that question: rich countries, with high-yield seeds and industrial-scale agriculture. The United States thinks it’s feeding the world now. It is not.



Continue reading at: World Hunger Is on the Rise - Heated

Climate change: Arctic permafrost now melting at levels not expected until 2090 | The Independent

My comment: One of the tipping points I posted about earlier. Things are speeding up. 10-15 years may be too optimistic?

Series of 'anomalously warm summers' caused ground to thaw, researchers say

Permafrost hs begun thawing in the Canadian Arctic more than 70 years early because of climate change, according to new research.

A "series of anomalously warm summers” has dramatically accelerated melting rates at three sites despite average annual ground temperatures remaining low. Ponds and hillocks have formed as a result. 

It had been thought that the permafrost - ground that remains frozen for at least two years - would remain until at least 2090.

But the study found thawing levels were above 150 to 240 per cent above historic levels. 

Researchers called this a “truly remarkable amount".



Mould Bay on Prince Patrick Island was the worst-affected site, according to the study, published on the journal Geophysical Research Letters. 

There, permafrost thawing levels were 240 per cent higher than historic levels and the ground sank 90cm over the course of the study which ran for over 12 years, between 2003 and 2016.

Researchers also recorded thawing at depths not expected until air temperatures rose to levels that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted it would reach in 2090...

Continue reading at: Climate change: Arctic permafrost now melting at levels not expected until 2090 | The Independent

It’s the End of the World as They Know It – Mother Jones

The distinct burden of being a climate scientist

STORY BY DAVID CORN; PHOTOS BY DEVIN YALKINJULY 8, 2019



On election night 2016, Kim Cobb, a professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, was on Christmas Island, the world’s largest ring-shaped coral reef atoll, about 1,300 miles south of Hawaii. A climate scientist, she was collecting coral skeletons to produce estimates of past ocean temperatures. She had been taking these sorts of research trips for two decades, and over recent years she had witnessed about 85 percent of the island’s reef system perish due to rising ocean temperatures. “I was diving with tears in my eyes,” she recalls.



In a row house made of cinder blocks on the tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, she monitored the American election results, using a satellite uplink that took several minutes to load a page. When she saw Donald Trump’s victory, she felt shock and soon descended into severe depression. “I had the firm belief that Washington would act on climate change and would be acting soon,” the 44-year-old Cobb says. “When Trump was elected, it came crashing down.”

Continue reading at: It’s the End of the World as They Know It – Mother Jones