History > 2014 > USA > Environment, climate, weather (II)

The U.S.-China Climate Change Accord | Times Minute | The New York Times        12 November 2014

The possible effects for the coal and automobile industries

of the landmark agreement between the United States and China.

Read the story here: http://nyti.ms/1xy6xTD

Watch more videos at: http://nytimes.com/video

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmQEeDIgQ48&list=UUqnbDFdCpuN8CMEg0VuEBqA&index=3

Recycling Electronic Waste

Responsibly:

Excuses Dwindle

DEC. 31, 2014

The New York Times

MAYBE you replaced old electronics over the holidays or you’re just sweeping out the old and ushering in the New Year. Either way, you’ll need to do something with your old devices. For everyone’s sake, including Mother Nature’s, try to get rid of your old technology the right way.

Recycling electronics is becoming easier by the day. Stores like Best Buy and Staples now offer programs to take back old gadgets and recycle them. Churches and schools commonly hold e-waste collection drives, and you can even occasionally find bins for dropping off old tech on the street.

Still, most old gadgets end up in the trash. Americans alone throw away two million to three million tons of electronics yearly, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. With the life span of devices shrinking — the average phone is replaced every 18 months — the problem keeps growing worse.

The toxic waste from all those tossed gadgets causes terrible damage to soil, water and people. The Blacksmith Institute, a nonprofit organization that focuses on solving global pollution problems, estimates that so-called toxic e-waste threatens the health of 100 million people worldwide. And the United Nations Environment Program calls electronic waste the “fastest growing waste stream in the world.”

The solution is not just recycling. It’s to be sure that you’re recycling with a responsible processor. Some programs do little more than pass the load to unverified operators that then toss loads of e-waste into increasingly toxic dumps around the world.

“If you don’t know where the material goes, you could be thinking you’re doing the right thing, but it ends up being put on a ship” and contributing to global dumping, said James Kao, the chief executive of GreenCitizen, an electronics recycling company in California.

GreenCitizen is certified by the two independent standards bodies that monitor recyclers for responsible practices: eStewards and Sustainable Electronics Recycling International, whose certification program is called the R2 standard.

EStewards and S.E.R.I. use a network of auditors to make sure companies like GreenCitizen are doing what they say they’re doing.

Mr. Kao said the ultimate goal of GreenCitizen, for example, was to dispose of as little as possible. It will reuse or sell anything that still works.

The company operates drop-off facilities around the Bay Area where consumers can deposit used electronics, and it also picks up from businesses in the area.

Technicians at its facility in Burlingame, Calif., fix minor technical problems, clean up old devices, photograph them and list them on GreenCitizen’s eBay site. Mr. Kao said 30 percent of the electronics it collects were resold in some fashion, which helps pay for the operation.

If an item can’t be resold, it may be stripped for parts, which will be either sold separately or used to fix broken items like the screens of laptops or phones. And finally, anything that can’t be reclaimed will be sent to a responsible third-party vendor to be broken down or destroyed.

Organizations around the world have been certified by S.E.R.I. and eStewards. Both groups let you search their websites for local options. In New York, for example, you can take electronics to GreenChip Electronic Waste Solutions, an R2-certified recycler, or have them picked up by 4th Bin, which is certified by eStewards and also has R2 certification.

Some large companies, like Best Buy and Dell, have committed to better practices as part of a program started by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The standards for the E.P.A. program, however, aren’t as rigorous as those for eStewards and S.E.R.I. Companies that join the E.P.A.’s Electronics Challenge program pledge to collect more electronics for recycling, send them to certified recyclers and to publicly report their efforts.

There are three tiers of commitment in the E.P.A. program. Companies at the lowest tier don’t have to prove they’re doing much other than creating a collection program and sending a small percentage of electronics to responsible recyclers. But Best Buy and Dell, as well as some other big companies, participate at the highest level.

So it is worth doing a little work to look up a trustworthy source. Patty Osterberg, director of education and outreach at S.E.R.I., said she estimated that only about 25 percent of recyclers in the United States were certified by one of the two standards organizations.

Ms. Osterberg said the process of getting certified from S.E.R.I. was “arduous,” and Mr. Kao said eStewards certification was even tougher. So a Best Buy drop-off might be more convenient than finding a certified recycler in some parts of the country.

Ms. Osterberg said that since the recycling industry first began moving toward more responsible practices about 10 years ago, the mission had changed from purely recycling to a greater emphasis on intercepting usable tech.

“It used to be that people saw horrible images of kids playing on mountains of old computers and monitors, and that sparked this whole movement for responsible recycling,” she said. “If you recycle for raw materials, you get a portion of that product. But if you can reuse a cellphone, that’s the most environmentally beneficial of all.”

The R2 certification standard, she said, puts extra emphasis on the “reuse hierarchy.” Recyclers that collect e-waste have to show that they’ve tried hard to reuse products that come in — not just stripping them down and selling off individual parts, but trying to resell an entire phone, computer, printer or game console.

The second level in the hierarchy is to find parts and components that can be reused in other products. Touch screens can be sold to toy makers, for example, or circuit boards can be used in other computerized devices.

And if the entire item can’t be sold, recovering heavy metals like gold, palladium and other raw materials inside electronics is a form of “urban mining,” Ms. Osterberg said.

“Once you’ve recovered all the value, there certainly is a place for recycling for raw materials, but that’s the third step in the chain,” she said.

Of course, if you’re willing to put in a little extra work, you can cut out the middleman in the reuse hierarchy completely. Websites like Gazelle and BuyBackWorld will purchase your old devices for a flat rate, depending on condition, and Amazon lets you trade in old gadgets for gift cards. And of course, there’s always eBay.

Or consider whether you really need to upgrade that phone, tablet or laptop at all. If it works well enough to sell to someone else, do you really need a new one?
 

A version of this article appears in print on January 1, 2015, on page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Recycling Tech Waste Responsibly: Excuses Dwindle.

    Recycling Electronic Waste Responsibly: Excuses Dwindle,
    NYT, 31.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/01/technology/personaltech/
    recycling-electronic-waste-responsibly-excuses-dwindle.html

Climate Change Threatens to Strip

the Identity of Glacier National Park

 

NOV. 22, 2014

The New York Times

By MICHAEL WINES

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Mont. — What will they call this place once the glaciers are gone?

A century ago, this sweep of mountains on the Canadian border boasted some 150 ice sheets, many of them scores of feet thick, plastered across summits and tucked into rocky fissures high above parabolic valleys. Today, perhaps 25 survive.

In 30 years, there may be none.

A warming climate is melting Glacier’s glaciers, an icy retreat that promises to change not just tourists’ vistas, but also the mountains and everything around them.

Streams fed by snowmelt are reaching peak spring flows weeks earlier than in the past, and low summer flows weeks before they used to. Some farmers who depend on irrigation in the parched days of late summer are no longer sure that enough water will be there. Bull trout, once pan-fried over anglers’ campfires, are now caught and released to protect a population that is shrinking as water temperatures rise.

Many of the mom-and-pop ski areas that once peppered these mountains have closed. Increasingly, the season is not long enough, nor the snows heavy enough, to justify staying open.

What is happening here is occurring, to greater or lesser extents, in mountains across the North American West. In the Colorado Rockies, the median date of snowmelt shifted two to three weeks earlier from 1978 to 2007. In Washington, the Cascades lost nearly a quarter of their snowpack from 1930 to 2007. Every year, British Columbia’s glaciers shed the equivalent of 10 percent of the Mississippi River’s flow because of melting.

The retreat is not entirely due to man-made global warming, though scientists say that plays a major role. While the rate of melting has alternately sped up and slowed in lock step with decades-long climate cycles, it has risen steeply since about 1980.

And while glaciers came and went millenniums ago, the changes this time are unfolding over a Rocky Mountain landscape of big cities, sprawling farms and growing industry. All depend on steady supplies of water, and in the American West, at least 80 percent of it comes from the mountains.

“Glaciers are essentially a reservoir of water held back for decades, and they’re releasing that water in August when it’s hot, and streams otherwise might have low flows or no flows,” Daniel B. Fagre, a United States Geological Survey research ecologist, said in an interview. “As glaciers disappear, there will be a reduction in the water at the same time that demand is going up. I think we’re on the cusp of bigger changes.”

But shrinking glaciers are only the visible symptom of much broader and more serious changes. “We’re a snow-driven ecosystem, and glaciers are just a part of that,” Dr. Fagre said. “The way the snow goes is the way our ecosystem goes.”

Lately, the snows are not going well.

Mountain snowpacks are shrinking. In recent decades, rising winter temperatures have increasingly changed snows to rain. Rising spring temperatures are melting the remaining snow faster.

“Imagine turning on your faucet in your sink and all your water runs out in an hour’s time,” Thomas Painter, a research scientist and snow hydrologic expert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in an interview. “Loss of snowpack earlier in the year compresses runoff into a shorter period of time.”

Glaciers and year-round snowfields — accumulations of snow in colder locations, like shadowed mountainsides, that never fully melt — pick up the slack in summer. But they, too, are vanishing: In Glacier National Park, the number of days above 90 degrees has tripled since early last century, and the summertime span in which such hot days occur has almost doubled, to include all of July and most of August.

Winters are warmer, too: A century ago, the last brutally cold day typically occurred around March 5. By last decade, it had receded to Feb. 15.

Dr. Fagre, the park’s resident expert on snowpacks, glaciers and climate change, can see the changes firsthand. Grinnell Glacier, one of the park’s most studied ice sheets, feeds a frigid lake on the flanks of Mount Gould, more than 6,000 feet above sea level. “At the beginning, we had a 25-foot-high wall of ice that we were actually concerned about from a safety standpoint,” he said. “And now the entire glacier simply slopes into the water, with no wall of ice whatsoever.

“All of that has melted just within the last 10 years.”

At Clements Mountain, with a summit some 8,800 feet above sea level, what used to be a glacier is now a shrinking snowfield surrounded by 30- and 40-foot heaps of moraine, stones piled up by the ice as it pushed its way forward. One recent fall day, freshets of melted snow tumbled over rock ledges and down hills, past stands of Rocky Mountain firs.

But that will change.

“This snowfield will vanish,” Dr. Fagre said. “When that happens, this whole area will dry up a lot. A lot of these alpine gardens, so to speak, are sustained entirely by waterfalls and streams like this. And once this goes, then some of those plants will disappear.”

For wildlife, Dr. Fagre said, the implications are almost too great to count. Frigid alpine streams may dry up, and cold-water fish and insects may grow scarce. Snowfall may decline, and fewer avalanches may open up clearings for wildlife or push felled trees into streams, creating trout habitats. Tree lines may creep up mountains, erasing open meadows that enable mountain goats to keep watch against mountain lions. A hummingbird that depends on glacial lilies for nectar may arrive in spring to find that the lilies have already blossomed.

Trekking across what is left of the Clements snowfield, Dr. Fagre unexpectedly encountered a long-clawed paw print: from one of perhaps 300 wolverines said to remain in the lower 48 states. These solitary, ferocious animals have come back after trappers nearly eliminated them decades ago, but conservationists and federal wildlife experts are sharply at odds over whether rising temperatures imperil them.

“Wolverines need deep snows to build their winter dens,” Dr. Fagre said. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen to them.”

For people, the future is somewhat clearer.

Rising temperatures and early snowmelt make for warmer, drier summers as rivers shrink and soils dry out. That is already driving a steady increase in wildfires, including in the park, and disease and pest infestations in forests.

But in the long term, the ramifications are more ominous than a mere rise in fires or dying trees.

Moisture loss from early snowmelt is worsening a record hydrological drought on the Colorado River, which supplies water to about 40 million people from the Rockies to California and Mexico; by 2050, scientists estimate, the Colorado’s flow could drop by 10 percent to 30 percent.

In the usually arid West, where reservoirs are vital, earlier and bigger snowmelt will disrupt the task of balancing water demand and supply. Experts anticipate an increase in disputes over water rights as a growing population competes for a shrinking resource. And farming, a major industry across much of the Rockies, will become even more of a gamble than fickle weather makes it.

Indeed, complications have already surfaced. Dennis Iverson runs a 140-head cow-and-calf operation on several thousand acres about 25 miles northeast of Missoula, Mont. Five hundred acres are hayfield, irrigated with water from the Blackfoot River about one and a half miles away.

Twenty years ago, the water flowed through an open ditch, and from the time the irrigation pumps were started on May 20, “we were able to irrigate the whole ranch,” he said. “There was always enough water, even to do some irrigating in July and August.”

Now, Mr. Iverson starts the pumps on May 10, because a hotter spring has already dried out his pasture. The open irrigation ditch has been converted into an 8,000-foot underground pipe to prevent evaporation. “If we hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t even be getting water to the ranch,” he said. “There’s that much less water in the stream than there was 20 years ago.”

Correction: November 23, 2014

A picture caption in an online slide show with this story incorrectly stated that a photograph shown by Daniel Fagre, a United States Geological Survey research ecologist, was from the 1880s. It was taken in 1928.

A version of this article appears in print on November 23, 2014, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Climate Change Threatens to Strip the Identity of Glacier National Park.

    Climate Change Threatens to Strip the Identity of Glacier National Park,
    NYT, 22.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/us/
    climate-change-threatens-to-strip-the-identity-of-glacier-national-park.html

In Climate Deal With China,

Obama May Set 2016 Theme

NOV. 12, 2014

The New York Times

By CORAL DAVENPORT

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s landmark agreement with China to cut greenhouse gas pollution is a bet by the president and Democrats that on the issue of climate change, American voters are far ahead of Washington’s warring factions and that the environment will be a winning cause in the 2016 presidential campaign.

A variety of polls show that a majority of American voters now believe that climate change is occurring, are worried about it, and support candidates who back policies to stop it. In particular, polls show that majorities of Hispanics, young people and unmarried women — the voters who were central to Mr. Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 — support candidates who back climate change policy.

But Republicans are betting that despite the polls, they can make the case that regulations to cut greenhouse pollution will result in the loss of jobs and hurt the economy.

“This announcement is yet another sign that the president intends to double-down on his job-crushing policies no matter how devastating the impact for America’s heartland and the country as a whole,” said Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio.

President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China announced a climate change agreement on Wednesday that includes a new goal for U.S. carbon emissions and a commitment by China to curb its emissions and increase the share of its energy consumption that comes from renewable and nuclear sources.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the soon-to-be majority leader, was no less critical. “This unrealistic plan, that the president would dump on his successor, would ensure higher utility rates and far fewer jobs,” he said in a statement.

Mr. McConnell’s remarks were a hint of a line of attack Republicans are certain to use on Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is expected to run for president in 2016. The architect of Mr. Obama’s climate change plan is none other than his senior counselor, John D. Podesta, who is likely to leave the White House next year to work as the chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.

The climate plan that Mr. Podesta has drafted for Mr. Obama is expected to serve as a blueprint for Mrs. Clinton’s climate change policy, should she run.

Since the deal Mr. Obama made with China calls for the United States to cut its planet-warming carbon pollution by as much as 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025, he has effectively placed the obligation on his successor to meet that goal.

That dynamic sets up climate change as a potentially explosive issue on the 2016 campaign trail, which may pit Mrs. Clinton against a field of Republican candidates who question and deny the science that human activity causes global warming. A number of prospective Republican presidential candidates have already attacked what they say is Mr. Obama’s “war on coal.”

Mr. Obama has muscled through his climate change agenda almost entirely with executive authority, bypassing a Congress that has repeatedly refused to enact sweeping new climate change laws. In addition to the agreement with China announced Wednesday in Beijing, Mr. Obama has used the 1970 Clean Air Act to issue ambitious Environmental Protection Agency regulations intended to cut pollution from vehicle tailpipes and power-plant smokestacks.

Mr. Podesta, a political veteran who was also President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, devised the 2025 targets to ensure that they could be reached without new action from a future Congress. Abandoning them would require the next president to overturn them. From the Republican point of view, a Democratic candidate who might instead issue still more environmental regulations would be a ripe target for 2016.
Continue reading the main story

“They’re giving Republicans fertile ground for attack,” said Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican strategist. “Overregulation is clearly a job killer and jobs and the economy and middle-class wages are going to be a huge issue in the 2016 presidential. And it does seem like an inside job, with Podesta setting up Hillary’s position. Politically, they’re going to put themselves in a weak position on this.”

As evidence, Republican strategists point to their recent wave of victories in this year’s midterm elections, when they campaigned aggressively against Mr. Obama’s E.P.A. regulations.

But Democrats are increasingly emboldened by polls showing that in national elections, candidates who push climate change policies will win support from voters.

According to a 2013 poll by Stanford University, 73 percent of Americans believe that the earth has been warming over the past 100 years, while 81 percent of Americans think global warming poses a serious problem in the United States. In addition, 81 percent think the federal government should limit the amount of greenhouse gases that American businesses can emit.

Twenty-one percent of Americans think producing electricity from coal is a good idea, while 91 percent of Americans think making electricity from sunlight is a good idea.

A 2014 poll by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, meanwhile, found that majorities of women, minorities and young people support candidates who strongly endorse climate action. That poll found that 65 percent of Hispanics, 53 percent of blacks and 53 percent of unmarried women support candidates who back climate change action.

It found that 44 percent of people in their 20s favor candidates who support climate change action, compared with 17 percent who oppose climate action.

“These groups were hugely important in the 2008 and 2012 elections,” said Anthony A. Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale project. “And they will be more important in 2016, because they are starting to make up a greater portion of the electorate.”

Mrs. Clinton has not laid out a specific climate change policy that she might pursue as president, but she has enthusiastically supported efforts to reduce carbon pollution — including Mr. Obama’s regulations. At a September conference on clean energy in Nevada she called climate change “the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face as a nation and a world,” and said that Mr. Obama’s E.P.A. regulations put the United States in “a strong position” in international negotiations.

Democrats also believe that Wednesday’s announcement weakens at least one crucial Republican argument against climate action. For years, Republicans have argued that the United States should not take unilateral action on climate change because it would hamstring the economy while China, the world’s largest carbon polluter, failed to act. But the agreement with China undercuts that argument.

For Republicans, the issue of climate change, like immigration and same-sex marriage, is one that potential candidates and their advisers are starting to grapple with as they try to carve a path to the presidency, while winning support from a new generation of more diverse voters.

Republicans who seek to win their presidential nomination will have to win support from their conservative base — white and older voters, who, polls show, are less likely to believe that climate change is a problem. More important, Republicans do not want to be targeted by conservative outside groups like Americans for Prosperity, the political advocacy group funded by the libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch.

Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, has said that his group intends to aggressively attack any Republican candidate in the 2016 primaries who endorses carbon regulations.

But some Republican strategists worry that the position on climate change that could help win them their party’s nomination could hurt them in a general election, particularly in a contest with a larger number of young and minority voters.

Ashley Parker contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on November 13, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
In Climate Deal, Obama May Set A Theme for 2016.

    In Climate Deal With China, Obama May Set 2016 Theme,
    NYT, 12.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/world/asia/
    in-climate-deal-with-china-obama-may-set-theme-for-2016.html

China, America and Our Warming Planet

John Kerry: Our Historic Agreement With China

on Climate Change

 

NOV. 11, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By JOHN KERRY

BEIJING — The United States and China are the world’s two largest economies, two largest consumers of energy, and two largest emitters of greenhouse gases. Together we account for about 40 percent of the world’s emissions.

We need to solve this problem together because neither one of us can solve it alone. Even if the United States somehow eliminated all of our domestic greenhouse gas emissions, it still wouldn’t be enough to counteract the carbon pollution coming from China and the rest of the world. Likewise, even if China went down to zero emissions, it wouldn’t make enough of a difference if the United States and the rest of the world didn’t change direction.

That’s the reality of what we’re up against. That’s why it matters that the world’s most consequential relationship has just produced something of great consequence in the fight against climate change.

Today, President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping are jointly announcing targets to reduce carbon emissions in the post-2020 period. By doing this – together, and well before the deadline established by the international community – we are encouraging other countries to put forward their own ambitious emissions reduction targets soon and to overcome traditional divisions so we can conclude a strong global climate agreement in 2015.

Our announcement can inject momentum into the global climate negotiations, which resume in less than three weeks in Lima, Peru, and culminate next year in Paris. The commitment of both presidents to take ambitious action in our own countries, and work closely to remove obstacles on the road to Paris, sends an important signal that we must get this agreement done, that we can get it done, and that we will get it done.

This is also a milestone in the United States-China relationship, the outcome of a concerted effort that began last year in Beijing, when State Councilor Yang Jiechi and I started the United States-China Climate Change Working Group. It was an effort inspired not just by our shared concern about the impact of climate change, but by our belief that the world’s largest economies, energy consumers and carbon emitters have a responsibility to lead.

The targets themselves are also important. Ambitious action by our countries together is the foundation to build the low-carbon global economy needed to combat climate change. The United States intends to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 – a target that is both ambitious and feasible. It roughly doubles the pace of carbon reductions in the period from 2020 to 2025 as compared to the period from 2005 to 2020. It puts us on a path to transform our economy, with emissions reductions on the order of 80 percent by 2050. It is grounded in an extensive analysis of the potential to reduce emissions in all sectors of our economy, with significant added benefits for health, clean air, and energy security.

Our target builds on the ambitious goal President Obama set in 2009 to cut emissions in the range of 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. We are on track to meet that goal, while creating jobs and growing the economy, with the help of a burgeoning clean energy sector. Since the president took office, wind energy production has tripled and solar energy has increased by a factor of ten. This summer, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed the first carbon pollution standards for existing power plants, which account for a third of United States carbon pollution.

The Chinese targets also represent a major advance. For the first time China is announcing a peak year for its carbon emissions – around 2030 – along with a commitment to try to reach the peak earlier. That matters because over the past 15 years, China has accounted for roughly 60 percent of the growth in carbon dioxide emissions world-wide. We are confident that China can and will reach peak emissions before 2030, in light of President Xi’s commitments to restructure the economy, dramatically reduce air pollution and stimulate an energy revolution.

China is also announcing today that it would expand the share of total energy consumption coming from zero-emission sources (renewable and nuclear energy) to around 20 percent by 2030, sending a powerful signal to investors and energy markets around the world and helping accelerate the global transition to clean-energy economies. To meet its goal, China will need to deploy an additional 800 to 1,000 gigawatts of nuclear, wind, solar and other renewable generation capacity by 2030 – an enormous amount, about the same as all the coal-fired power plants in China today, and nearly as much as the total electricity generation capacity of the United States.

There is no question that all of us will need to do more to push toward the de-carbonization of the global economy. But in climate diplomacy, as in life, you have to start at the beginning, and this breakthrough marks a fresh beginning. Two countries regarded for 20 years as the leaders of opposing camps in climate negotiations – have come together to find common ground, determined to make lasting progress on an unprecedented global challenge. Let’s ensure that this is the first step toward a world that is more prosperous and more secure.

John Kerry is the secretary of state of the United States.

    China, America and Our Warming Planet, NYT, 11.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/opinion/
    john-kerry-our-historic-agreement-with-china-on-climate-change.html

‘Moment of Truth’ on Emissions

OCT. 6, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

In March, the Obama administration issued a white paper as part of its Climate Action Plan entitled “Strategy to Reduce Methane Emissions.” A big part of the strategy was built around cutting down on the methane emissions that result from oil and gas production, particularly the hydraulic fracturing method of extracting natural gas from the ground — a.k.a., fracking. In the white paper, the administration said that the Environmental Protection Agency would decide by the fall how best to go about it.

Fall is now here. More to the point, the word is that the E.P.A. and the White House are in the process of deciding what tack to take in reducing methane emissions (though any announcement will probably have to wait until after the November elections). If the administration takes the right course, methane emissions could likely be reduced by 40 percent or 50 percent over the next five years — enough to make natural gas a genuinely cleaner alternative to coal and a critical component in reducing greenhouse gasses. But if it doesn’t — if the government decides to back away from regulation, or allow industry to reduce emissions voluntarily — then the promise of natural gas as a cleaner fuel could well go unrealized.

“It’s the moment of truth,” says Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund and a strong proponent of regulating emissions.

Methane emissions, as I’ve written before, are fracking’s Achilles’ heel. Methane is the primary ingredient in natural gas, and, when it is burned, it is considerably less dirty than coal. The problem is that methane too often leaks at various points in the production and distribution process. And when methane gets into the atmosphere, it is 84 to 86 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over a 20-year span. (After two decades, its potency is greatly reduced.) Not surprisingly, anti-fracking environmentalists have put methane leakage near the top of the list of their reasons that fracking should be banned altogether.

That, to be blunt, is never going to happen. The natural gas boom that has resulted from fracking has become hugely important to the American economy, providing jobs and a plentiful supply of a low-cost fuel. President Obama himself is on record as being pro-natural gas.

It also turns out that lowering methane emissions does not require enormously expensive new technology. It can be done with technology that already exists and at fairly minimal cost. I’ve seen estimates that it would add a penny to the current price of natural gas. What’s more, a 50 percent reduction in methane emissions is the equivalent to closing 90 coal-fired power plants, according to the Environmental Defense Fund.

In February, Colorado became the first state in the nation to impose regulations on the natural gas industry aimed at reducing methane emissions. The regulations included using valves that don’t allow methane to leak, regular checks and repairs of leaks and a variety of other rules. Four of the largest natural gas developers in the state supported the regulations — in part because they saw the public relations value in it, but also because the regulations Colorado imposed made sense. “What we were looking for were rules that wouldn’t just add paperwork or documentation but would make a quantifiable difference,” said Doug Hock, a spokesman for the Encana Corporation, one of the companies that supported the regulations. He noted that the company was already using, in Wyoming, a special infrared camera that detects methane leaks — which is now required by Colorado — and “we could see the benefit of the rules.” He added, “It really puts a very disciplined process around regular maintenance.”

The problem, however, is that while fracking is currently regulated by the states, not every state is rushing to follow Colorado’s lead. What’s more, there are an enormous number of companies in the fracking business — literally thousands. Fracking practically screams out for federal regulation.

Which brings me back to the White House. President Obama has said that he wants to put in place policies that will lower greenhouse gasses by 17 percent by the year 2020. To that end, in 2012, he set fuel mileage standards that will increase fuel economy to more than 50 miles per gallon by 2025. More recently, the E.P.A. announced rules that would reduce carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants by 30 percent by the year 2030. The environmentalists I spoke with say that these moves, while significant, won’t get the president — or the nation — to that 17 percent goal. But adding methane emission regulation could well get us over the goal line.

Is industry pushing back? Of course. But oil and gas companies should be welcoming sensible regulation. There is so much mistrust of fracking in the country that rules that made the process demonstrably safer could well have the effect of ameliorating some of that mistrust.

Smart regulation to reduce methane emissions could help industry — and help the planet as well.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 7, 2014,
on page A29 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Moment of Truth’ on Emissions.

    ‘Moment of Truth’ on Emissions, NYT, 6.10.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/opinion/
    joe-nocera-moment-of-truth-on-emissions.html

A Group Shout on Climate Change

 

SEPT. 27, 2014

The New York Times

SundayReview | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The marchers and mayors, the ministers and presidents, have come and gone. So what is the verdict on Climate Week, the summit meeting on global warming convened by the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, in New York?

The meeting was not intended to reach a global agreement or to extract tangible commitments from individual nations to reduce the greenhouse gases that are changing the world’s ecosystems and could well spin out of control. Its purpose was to build momentum for a new global deal to be completed in December 2015, in Paris.

In that respect, it clearly moved the ball forward, not so much in the official speeches but on the streets and in the meeting rooms where corporate leaders, investors, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and state and local officials pressed the case for stronger action.

It was important to put climate change back on the radar screen of world leaders, whose last effort to strike a deal, in Copenhagen five years ago, ended in acrimonious disaster. President Obama, for one, was as eloquent as he has ever been on the subject: “For all the immediate challenges that we gather to address this week — terrorism, instability, inequality, disease — there’s one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other, and that is the urgent and growing threat of a changing climate.”

But most of the positive energy at this gathering came from people closer to the ground, like the 300,000 activists who marched last Sunday. They included mayors like New York’s Michael Bloomberg and his successor, Bill de Blasio, who both spoke of the critical role that cities can play in reducing emissions. They included governors like California’s Jerry Brown, who is justly proud of his state’s pathbreaking efforts to control automobile and power plant pollution. And they included institutions like Bank of America, which said it would invest in renewable energy, and companies like Kellogg and Nestle, which pledged to help stem the destruction of tropical forests by changing the way they buy commodities like soybeans and palm oil.

Underlying all these declarations was a palpable conviction that tackling climate change could be an opportunity and not a burden, that the way to approach the task of harnessing greenhouse gas emissions was not to ask how much it would cost but how much nations stood to gain by investing in new technologies and energy efficiency.

This burst of activity comes at a crucial time. A tracking initiative called the Global Carbon Project recently reported that greenhouse gas emissions jumped 2.3 percent in 2013, mainly because of big increases in China and India. This means it is becoming increasingly difficult to limit global warming to an upper boundary of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels. Beyond that point, scientists say, a world already suffering from disappearing glaciers, rising seas and persistent droughts could face even more alarming consequences.

Avoiding such a fate is going to require a revolution in the way the world produces and consumes energy, which clearly has to involve national governments, no matter how much commitment there is on the streets and in the boardrooms. The odds are long that a legally binding treaty will emerge from Paris. Congress is unlikely to ratify one anyway. The smart money now is on a softer agreement that brings all the big polluters on board with national emissions caps, and there are reasons for hope that this can be done.

Mr. Obama is in a much stronger leadership position than he was at Copenhagen, having engineered a huge increase in automobile fuel efficiency and proposed rules that will greatly reduce the United States’ reliance on dirty coal. The Chinese, in part because their own air is so dirty, have been investing heavily in alternative energy sources like wind and solar, and they are giving serious consideration to a national cap on coal consumption. The cooperation of these two countries could by itself create the conditions for a breakthrough agreement. But what might really do the trick — if Climate Week is any guide — is the emergence of a growing bottom-up movement for change.


A version of this editorial appears in print on September 28, 2014, on page SR10 of the National edition with the headline: A Group Shout on Climate Change.

    A Group Shout on Climate Change, NYT, 27.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/opinion/sunday/
    a-group-shout-on-climate-change.html

Let the River Run Wild

 

SEPT. 7, 2014

By JOHN WALDMAN,

KARIN E. LIMBURG

and AMY ROE

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributors

IF the Chesapeake Bay is America’s Estuary, then its largest tributary, the Susquehanna River, could arguably be called America’s River. But we certainly don’t treat it as a national treasure: This once magnificent watercourse, which runs through New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland toward the coast, is today an ecological disaster — largely thanks to four hydroelectric dams, built along its lower reaches between 1904 and 1931.

An impending license renewal by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for two of these dams will lock in another half-century of measures woefully inadequate to remediating the dams’ environmental consequences. Instead, all four should be removed.

The Susquehanna’s 27,000-square-mile watershed was once home to remarkable runs of migratory fishes — and none more so than the American shad, a type of herring. In 1827, one net hauled in was said to have contained an astounding 15 million shad and river herring. A commercial fishing operation on the river stationed a sentry on a hillside to watch for the moving bulge in the waters that signaled another huge school approaching. Shad were such a mainstay of regional diets that traveling fishmongers would blow horns and shout “shad-o” to announce the availability of this delicacy.

Despite efforts to create “ladders” and “elevators” for fish to travel past them, the dams have devastated shad migrations. The official goal remains the passage of two million shad beyond the fourth dam so they can reach suitable spawning grounds — a modest target, given the original run sizes. In 2014, exactly eight shad made it past the fourth dam. That’s an improvement over 2011, when none did.

This isn’t an isolated occurrence: Ladders and elevators along other Atlantic Coast rivers have failed as well, and as badly for shad and other migratory species. But the four-step obstacle course on the Susquehanna is especially harmful, cumulatively confounding and slowing the migrations, so that very little reproduction actually occurs. Nevertheless, the federal government is doubling down on these failed approaches, with a new plan that makes at best minor changes to the existing, futile array of fish-passage devices.

The destruction of enormous fish migrations is bad enough. But it gets worse. Because the sprawling Susquehanna drainage is unusually sediment-laden, the reservoirs behind each dam have been filling with voluminous quantities of sand and muck; three of them have reached their sediment-holding capacity and the fourth, the Conowingo Reservoir, is quickly approaching it. If nothing is done soon, the sediment will no longer be trapped and will travel past the dams into the Chesapeake Bay.

This would mean ecological devastation for the bay, which is already overenriched and would choke on the nutrient-packed sediment suddenly thrust on it. The only other answer is expensive, continuing dredging — and blind hope against an erosive storm or hurricane that would overload the dams and release the sediment.

With all this in mind, policy makers need to take the only responsible step and remove the dams. True, they produce valuable electricity that would be tough to replace. But there are alternatives. By our calculations, a solar park built on the drained floor of the empty Conowingo Reservoir could allow the river to run beside it and replace the 575 megawatts the dam generates. And low-head hydropower arrays — devices that pull energy from the river without impeding it — could add even more.

It’s hard to look at something as large as a dam and not think of it as a permanent part of the landscape. But that’s an illusion: Eventually the dams will deteriorate, and will someday have to be removed for safety reasons. Indeed, across the country people are starting to reckon with the environmental costs of large hydropower dams, and several have been removed already. In 1999, the federal government allowed the removal of the Edwards Dam on Maine’s Kennebec River, a precedent-setting action that brought much of the river back to life.

Removing the four lowermost dams on the Susquehanna and the sediments behind them would be a huge and expensive undertaking — but one that we think is critical to restoring one of our most compromised rivers. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once wrote that “a river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.” The Susquehanna has been little more than an amenity for far too long.

John Waldman is a professor of biology at Queens College and the author of “Running Silver: Restoring Atlantic Rivers and Their Great Fish Migrations.” Karin E. Limburg is a professor of environmental and forest biology at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Amy Roe is an independent conservation advocate.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 8, 2014, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Let the River Run Wild.

    Let the River Run Wild, NYT, 7.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/opinion/let-the-susquehanna-river-run-wild.html

Swirls of Dust and Drama,

Punctuating Life in the Southwest

 

AUG. 29, 2014

The New York Times

By FERNANDA SANTOS

PHOENIX — The best way to explain a haboob is to say it is a tsunami of sand, in the sense that there is no stopping it or outrunning it. It is a supreme spectacle. The fierce winds that precede it make the leaves on palm trees stand as if they are hands waving an effusive goodbye, the sky darkens and the world takes the color of caramel as the dust swallows everything in its path.

Last week, a dense dust storm turned daytime into night in Palm Springs, Calif., “blowing so bad that I could not even see 20 feet in front of my Jeep,” Scott Pam, a local photographer, wrote on his Facebook page. The last haboob struck Phoenix in late July; streetlights came on as it rolled over the city’s center, even though it was still afternoon.

Coping with a haboob becomes a way of life in the Southwest, so frequent are dust storms in the region’s driest parts. But it takes time for newcomers to learn to pull to the side of the road and turn off the headlights at the first sign of such a storm.

On the road, visibility goes from normal to zero in seconds, and it is hard to prepare because the dust storms often strike with little warning. Children are taught what to do as early as preschool; a firefighter might visit a classroom to deliver the message “When there’s a dust storm, stop and stay in the car.”

The Arizona Department of Transportation has run its “Pull Aside, Stay Alive” campaign for three years, though for the first time this year, it is going to stretch its public service announcements through the fall, as some of the deadliest dust storms of recent years have struck well past the end of summer.

“In simple terms,” said Ken Waters, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Phoenix, dust storms happen “because you have a very strong wind moving out from a thunderstorm and a lot of dust lying around.”

The largest one on record here happened on July 5, 2011, rising 5,000 to 8,000 feet and stretching about 50 miles, from Goodyear, Ariz., to the west, to Apache Junction, Ariz., to the east. A moist coat of dust on counters and floors is inevitable after a storm, big or small. And, no, it does not matter if windows and doors are tightly shut.

Summers in the Southwest are always punctuated by extremes: extreme heat, extreme dust and extreme rain. Last week, 4.6 inches of rain fell just outside of Phoenix, or almost three times as much rain as the metropolitan Phoenix region got all of last summer. In minutes, dried paths turned into gushing rivers, which flooded, dragged or damaged freeways, cars and homes. In other parts of the area, it only drizzled.

But it is the monster waves of dust that seem to generate the most drama — traveling hundreds of miles and rising thousands of feet into the sky, turning daytime into night. The blaring beeps of cellphone weather alerts might well be the soundtrack of the season, when dust coats and monsoons drench selectively.

Some dust storms are so huge that meteorologists had to reach into the driest corners of Iraq and Sudan to find an equivalent — and, in turn, to find a name that suits them: haboob. It is Arabic for “blowing,” which sort of describes what it feels like when those storms roll along.

Mr. Waters, the meteorologist, compared the experience of driving through one of them to that of “a pilot who is not trained on instruments and has to land the plane under heavy fog.” (He avoided using the word “haboob” to describe those vast dust storms, and the term has met some resistance in Arizona because of its Middle Eastern origin.)

Last October, three people lost their lives and 12 were hospitalized in multiple crashes involving 19 vehicles caught in a dust storm on Interstate 10 about 75 miles east of Phoenix. Almost at the same spot, in October 2011, one man died and 23 were injured in pileups also set off by a dust storm.

“What motorists sometimes fail to understand is that if they’re driving, they’ve got to slow down, get completely off the roadway, as far as they can go off the roadway, stop, take their foot off the brake, and turn off their hazard lights and any other lights in their car,” said Timothy Tait, a spokesman for the Transportation Department. Because the last thing they would want, he said, “is for other drivers to follow your lead, thinking you’re driving along when you have already stopped.”

So the department has tried to spread safety tips in creative ways and through nontraditional channels, hoping that somehow the message will stick. Its #haboobhaiku contest is billed as “the one and only contest to mix an ancient form of poetry with dust storm safety,” and has drawn thousands of entries. (One recent submission reads, “You’re not a Jedi/This is not Tatooine, Luke/Pull over now, man.”)

“We wanted people to really focus on driving behavior and tips,” Mr. Tait said. “And it seems like it’s easier to make those things stick if people are having fun.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 30, 2014,
on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline:
Swirls of Dust and Drama, Punctuating Life in the Southwest.

    Swirls of Dust and Drama, Punctuating Life in the Southwest,
    NYT, 29.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/30/us/
    swirls-of-dust-and-drama-punctuating-life-in-the-southwest.html

Losses From California Quake

Could Top $1 Billion

 

AUG. 24, 2014

The New York Times

By QUENTIN HARDY

and IAN LOVETT

NAPA, Calif. — Early Sunday morning, Franz Oehler’s house blew apart.

“My girlfriend and I were thrown straight in the air, and the windows exploded,” said Mr. Oehler, a 44-year-old creative director, whose home is nestled among some of the country’s most celebrated vineyards.

A magnitude-6.0 earthquake hit the Napa Valley at 3:20 a.m. Sunday — the strongest temblor in the San Francisco Bay Area in a quarter-century — destroying both opulent and modest homes, rupturing dozens of water and gas mains and causing injuries, mostly minor, to more than 100 people.

Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency, and directed state resources toward a recovery effort in Napa.

The shaking was felt as far off as Salinas, almost 120 miles away, and the United States Geological Survey estimated that economic losses could be up to $1 billion.

Despite the widespread damage, scientists said California was fortunate to escape greater devastation from the earthquake, which exposed gaps in the state’s preparedness. The historic 1906 San Francisco earthquake was about 500 times larger than Sunday’s temblor.

“It is truly small — small compared to what California has experienced in its recorded history,” said Ross S. Stein, a geophysicist at the United States Geological Survey.

“We owe wine country in part to earthquakes,” which created the Napa Valley terrain that is so suitable to vineyards, he said. “We all want to enjoy the fruits of the quakes, so we all have to prepare for the downside, too.”

However geologically small, the earthquake unleashed chaos in many parts of the Napa Valley, a serene escape known for its fine dining.

At Mr. Oehler’s home, a skylight shattered and stone sculptures flew into the air. The swimming pool cracked open, flooding his steep hillside. “There was noise everywhere from the earthquake and the walls cracking,” he said.

From the terrace he said he saw flames rising in the valley below.

Several fires broke out following the earthquake, including one at a mobile home park that destroyed six homes, the authorities said.

Two residents of the park, Lynda and Bob Castell-Blanch, both 60, were jarred awake by a loud thump, followed by rolling. The park soon shot up in flames.

“It was violent,” said Mr. Castell-Blanch, whose home was not among those that burned. “Things were flying all over the place. There was a woman screaming from one of the houses, so loud it was total mayhem.”

Because a nearby water main had ruptured, however, firefighters were unable to tap into the hydrant to fight the fire, and had to truck in water from elsewhere.

The Castell-Blanchs said they had enough time to gather their cats and Mr. Castell-Blanch’s vintage guitars before fleeing. “That was all we had time for,” he said.

They went to a nearby store, the Ranch Market, to try to buy water, but the shelves had been emptied. The smell of wine from broken bottles wafted through the store.

Arik Housley, the store’s owner, estimated at least $100,000 in damage at the two markets he owned in the area. Like many people, he said he did not carry earthquake insurance because the premium was high.

By Sunday evening, more than 10,000 people remained without power, and parts of the city still smelled of natural gas. About 600 homes were without water.

Much of the heaviest damage was in downtown Napa, where large sections of brick had fallen from the county courthouse and other historic buildings. Three of the buildings that sustained severe damage had not been retrofitted to withstand earthquakes, city officials said, while the retrofits on some other older buildings did not hold, and large sections of brick and concrete collapsed onto the sidewalks.

More than 30 buildings across the city were deemed uninhabitable.

“Certainly, a few of the retrofits didn’t fare that well,” said a Napa County supervisor, Mark Luce. He added that many more buildings, including the county administrative building, had interior damage including broken sprinkler lines and fallen ceilings that would be costly to repair. “The newer buildings that met current standards fared better, but there’s still a lot of mess to clean up inside,” he said.

“We’ll look at what happened with these couple buildings where we saw these failures, and see if there’s anything we missed,” Mr. Luce added. “We’ve had a live test of what a 6.0 earthquake will do.”

Kelly Houston, a spokesman for the California Emergency Management Agency, said the quake was also a reminder that virtually the entire state — not just Los Angeles and San Francisco — was at risk.

“This is definitely a wake-up call, especially for the people in Napa Valley,” Mr. Houston said. “Maybe folks there think they don’t have to worry as much because they don’t live in San Francisco.”

In the hills outside this city, winemakers like David Duncan, whose family owns the Silver Oak Winery, rued the loss of “irreplaceable” wine that fell from the shelves in one of its cellars.

“It was everything — hundreds of bottles of broke,” Mr. Duncan said.

Mr. Oehler, as he picked his way through shards of marble and glass, also counted an irreplaceable loss, his home.

“We spent a lot of money and love on this place” he said. “It’s all gone now. It’s cracking and sliding down the hill.”
 

Correction: August 25, 2014

An earlier version of this article, and an accompanying headline and photo caption, misstated the nature of the $1 billion toll predicted from the earthquake. The United States Geological Survey estimated that total economic losses, not damage, could be up to $1 billion.

Quentin Hardy reported from Napa, Calif., and Ian Lovett from Los Angeles. Rick Rojas contributed reporting from New York, and Jim Kerstetter from Napa.

A version of this article appears in print on August 25, 2014, on page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Earthquake Strikes in California’s Napa Valley.

    Losses From California Quake Could Top $1 Billion, NYT, 24.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/us/
    strong-earthquake-shakes-bay-area-in-california.html