History > 2015 > USA > Weather, Environment, Climate (I)

Oliver Munday

Playing Dumb on Climate Change

NYT

3.1.2015

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/opinion/sunday/playing-dumb-on-climate-change.html

Record Floods

Affect Millions in the Midwest

DEC. 30, 2015

The New York Times

By JOHN ELIGON

and RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

FENTON, Mo. — Amid the worst flood this town has ever seen, Tammy Morgan took a break Wednesday from shoveling sand into the yellow bags she hoped would save her business and pointed to a line of treetops rising from the water. There, she said, a few hundred feet away, past streets and clapboard houses now submerged, is where the Meramec River should be — not lapping at the grass a few feet away.

“It’s pretty far away,” she said. “It’s a lot to get up here, you know?”

Some of the highest flood stages ever recorded hit the Mississippi River basin, part of a band of severe flooding stretching from northern Texas to the Ohio River Valley, affecting millions of people. Neighborhoods have been evacuated, towns inundated, roads and water treatment plants closed.

In Illinois and Missouri, where the governors declared states of emergency across wide swaths of the states, officials had blamed 20 deaths on the floods.

And the trouble here continues: Rivers are not expected to peak until Thursday, at the earliest, and the flood crest will be making its way down the Mississippi well into next week. While the Mississippi was expected to remain a few feet short of its record height at St. Louis, downstream at places like Cape Girardeau and New Madrid, Mo., and at Memphis, it could approach or equal records set in the floods of 2011 and 1993, the Army Corps of Engineers and the National Weather Service reported.

“We’re not over it yet,” Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri warned after touring some of the flooded areas.

For people in this region, rising waters mean more road closures, and many people are already stranded. Ms. Morgan and her husband, Jodi, who live in Eureka, another town battling floods, feared they would be unable to make it home.

“Fenton will become an island, I’m afraid, here shortly,” said Michael D. Polizzi, its mayor.

The hardest-hit region is eastern Missouri, particularly here, in the small towns along the Meramec southwest of St. Louis, where the river winds its way toward the Mississippi. The usual declarations from victims that they had never seen anything like it somehow fell short, as the Meramec and its tributaries shattered previous flood records Wednesday. In places, the Meramec rose 27 feet above flood stage — as much as three feet higher than had ever been recorded.

“It’s of such proportions that it’s very difficult to use the correct words to tell you how bad it is,” said Mr. Polizzi, who has lived here for 20 years.

Ms. Morgan said that of all the entrepreneurial risks she envisioned when she took over Sisters Tea House, the thought that the placid river down the hill would rise up and swallow the heart of this town of 4,000 people, was not one of them.

Fenton officials made plans to deposit rocks as temporary roads into stranded subdivisions, while in parts of the town’s business district, it was hard to tell that roads ever existed. A transmission shop, a brick bungalow housing a commercial glass company, and a bar sat side by side. Each was submerged about halfway under what had essentially become a vast lake. Just up the road, people stood on a bridge spanning the river and gawked at the flotsam that raced downstream, including a roof.

The rivers here surged over their levees, evacuation orders were issued for thousands of people in several towns, and the state Department of Transportation closed a 24-mile stretch of Interstate 44, the major artery through the area, most of it under water. Emergency workers, National Guardsmen and volunteers built sandbag barriers and patrolled streets in motorboats, rescuing people and pets from rooftops, while a house that had been swept from its foundation drifted down the Meramec.

The entire town of West Alton, population 500, north of St. Louis, was evacuated, after the Mississippi topped a levee there.

The deluge struck at a time of year that usually brings snow, not rain. The region’s worst floods usually hit in spring and summer, but an unusually wet and warm fall had saturated the ground.

Then, from Saturday through Monday, a powerful line of slow-moving and unseasonably warm storms spawned a string of tornadoes near Dallas and dropped heavy rain across an arc hundreds of miles long.

A few places in southern and eastern Missouri, including the town of Union, a short drive upstream from here, recorded more than a foot of rain in two days.

Rivers went from well-controlled to severely flooded in a matter of hours, as forecasters repeatedly raised their predictions of how many feet deep rivers would become, leaving residents unsure what to believe.

“A day and a half ago, it was 39.8,” said Alan Schiller, 49, who lives here. “Yesterday, it was 42, until last night. They raised it another foot last night.”

Connie Govero, the office manager for the Olde Towne Fenton Pet Hospital, pointed out a back window of the business, toward a wooded bluff a couple of football fields away. A creek sits at the bottom of the bluff, and she said that the water was contained to the area immediately around the creek when she got to work Tuesday morning.

By the time she left at about 8 p.m. Tuesday, Ms. Govero said, the water was trickling into the hospital’s parking lot. And by Wednesday morning, the lower level was flooded.

“The water came up a whole lot faster than normal,” she said.

Since the 2011 flood, the Corps of Engineers has worked to strengthen the levee system in places that were hard-hit, like Cairo, Ill., with projects like installing underground barriers to keep water from seeping through porous soil under the levees.

“We haven’t seen any levee failures,” and that should remain true, said Rene Poche, a spokesman for the corps. But with the Mississippi spilling over levees in some places, and seeping under them in others, he cautioned, “there will be flooding.”

John Eligon reported from Fenton, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York

A version of this article appears in print on December 31, 2015, on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Record Floods Affect Millions In the Midwest.

Record Floods Affect Millions in the Midwest,
NYT, DEC. 30, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/us/missouri-flooding-st-louis-mississippi.html

When a River Runs Orange

 

AUG. 20, 2015

The New Yok Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By GWEN LACHELT

Durango, Colo. — THE recent mining pollution spill in my corner of Colorado — La Plata County — is making national news for all the wrong reasons. Beyond the spill and its impact on everyone downstream, the underlying causes are far more worrisome and dangerous than just a mistake made by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Yes, it is a cruel irony that an E.P.A. contractor, while trying to clean up pollution from old mines, instead made the problem much, much worse. The jaw-dropping before-and-after photos contrasting the pre-spill Animas River I know and love with the subsequent bright orange, acidic, heavy-metal-laden travesty are sadly accurate.

The Animas River is the heart of La Plata County. Our jobs rely on it, people the world over travel here to raft and fish it, and farmers and ranchers feed their animals and water their crops with it. But more than that, it’s a member of the community. We see it every day. We play in it. We work with it. And of course we drink it. It’s no overstatement to say that La Plata County as we know it would not exist without the Animas River.

The damage caused by this spill is all the more heartbreaking because it is part of a larger national and ongoing tragedy: the hundreds of thousands of inactive and abandoned mines that litter our country, thanks to the General Mining Law of 1872.

President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Mining Law when the nation (apart from Native Americans, who had already lived here for thousands of years) regarded the West as a frontier to be conquered. Governing hard-rock mining, mostly of metals like gold and copper, the law is a product of its time. It gave away public minerals (worth an estimated $300 billion and still counting); sold mineral-bearing public lands for less than $5 an acre; contained no environmental provisions for mining operations, and required no cleanup afterward. Apart from a few small regulatory changes in 1980, the 19th-century act is still the law of the land.

The result? A study by the environmental group Earthworks estimated that approximately 500,000 abandoned and unreclaimed mines litter the country. The E.P.A. says that mining pollutes approximately 40 percent of the headwaters of Western watersheds and that cleaning up these mines may cost American taxpayers more than $50 billion.

Why hasn’t this problem been solved, given its pervasiveness and impact?

It isn’t because we don’t know how. There are pilot reclamation projects around the West that have shown how to do it if we choose to. It isn’t because it’ll cost jobs. Montana’s experience suggests that mine reclamation can create more jobs per dollar spent than mining itself.

The problem of unreclaimed, abandoned and inactive mines remains unsolved because the mining industry stubbornly obstructs meaningful attempts to reform or replace the 1872 Mining Law. As a result, there’s simply not enough money to address the problem. The E.P.A. is operating on a shoestring budget. Despite this, an E.P.A. contractor was trying to reclaim the Gold King Mine because it was seriously polluting the Animas River before the spill. The E.P.A. was doing the best it could with what it had. But what it had wasn’t enough.

The solution to the problem is comprehensive reform of the old law, and Congress already has a bill before it that will do it: H.R. 963, the Hardrock Mining Reform and Reclamation Act of 2015, introduced by Representative Raúl M. Grijalva of Arizona.

The new law, currently bottled up in committee, would create a fund to clean up abandoned and inactive mines by establishing an 8 percent royalty on all new hard-rock mines on public lands, a 4 percent royalty on existing mines on public lands and reclamation fees on all hard-rock mines, including those that were “purchased” for low prices under the 1872 Mining Law.

A similar system is already in place for abandoned coal mines, so there’s no practical reason it can’t work for hard-rock mining too. The bill would also improve both reclamation standards and requirements that mining companies financially guarantee that taxpayers aren’t on the hook for cleaning up existing mines.

What happened in La Plata County this month is a tragedy. For our ranchers and farmers, for wildlife, the tourism industry and all our local residents. The Animas River is part of our everyday life, and it needs to be protected. I’m not alone in wanting to stop this reckless pollution from endangering the rest of our communities and our environment.
 

Gwen Lachelt is a La Plata County commissioner.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 20, 2015, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: When a River Runs Orange.

When a River Runs Orange,
NYT, AUGUST 20, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/20/opinion/when-a-river-runs-orange.html

How California Is Winning the Drought

AUG. 14, 2015

The New York Times

SundayReview | Opinion

By CHARLES FISHMAN

FOR California, there hasn’t ever been a summer quite like the summer of 2015. The state and its 39 million residents are about to enter the fifth year of a drought. It has been the driest four-year period in California history — and the hottest, too.

Yet by almost every measure except precipitation, California is doing fine. Not just fine: California is doing fabulously.

In 2014, the state’s economy grew 27 percent faster than the country’s economy as a whole — the state has grown faster than the nation every year of the drought.

California has won back every job lost in the Great Recession and set new employment records. In the past year, California created 462,000 jobs — nearly 9,000 a week. No other state came close.

The drought has inspired no Dust Bowl-style exodus. California’s population has grown faster even as the drought has deepened.

More than half the fruits and vegetables grown in the United States come from California farms, and last year, the third growing season of the drought, both farm employment and farm revenue increased slightly.

Amid all the nervous news, the most important California drought story is the one we aren’t noticing. California is weathering the drought with remarkable resilience, because the state has been getting ready for this drought for the past 20 years.

The future of water is going to be turbulent for all of us — not far away, but right where we live; not in some distant decade, but next month or next spring. A sense of water insecurity is coming to many places that have never had a water worry. Here’s what California’s scorching summer of 2015 is showing us: We know what to do. We just have to do it.

Cannon Michael, 43, is a sixth-generation farmer in California’s Central Valley, growing tomatoes, cotton, melons and wheat on 10,000 acres of dirt that were part of the holdings of his great-great-great grandfather Henry Miller, a rancher who was known as the “Cattle King.”

Mr. Michael returned to work the family farm in 1998, and has gradually transformed the mix of crops and how they are grown. In the past 10 years, he has spent $10 million installing drip irrigation on about half the land. When he grows tomatoes using drip hoses that squirt water right below where the plants emerge from the ground, he uses about 35 percent less water per acre than he would with traditional irrigation. But the plants produce more tomatoes — he says that he gets at least 70 percent more tomatoes per 1,000 gallons of water.

Mr. Michael isn’t an isolated example. He’s part of a trend. Since 1980, the amount of California farmland watered by drip- or micro-irrigation has gone from almost nothing to nearly three million acres, 39 percent of the state’s irrigated fields. In perfect parallel, farmland that is flood-irrigated — using more water to produce less food — has fallen to about 3.5 million acres from more than six million.

California’s urban areas are also slowly transforming themselves. East of Los Angeles is a quietly innovative water district called the Inland Empire Utilities Agency, providing water for just under a million people.

The agency has an aggressive water recycling program, which cleans and resupplies 52 million gallons of water a day for an immediate second use, on farms, in factories and commercial laundries, in recharging the area’s groundwater.

And although it is dozens of miles from the Pacific Ocean, the agency also desalinates water. The Inland Empire sits over an aquifer that has been polluted by a legacy of careless agricultural and human habitation. The desalination process removes chemicals and salt, turning 35 million gallons a day of tainted brine into water at least as clean as tap.

Those techniques expand Inland Empire’s water supply without actually requiring any new water, and they represent the leading edge of an effort in Southern California toward “water independence.” In water terms, California is famously a kind of teeter-totter: Most of the water is in the north, most of the people are in the south, and the water flows to the people.

But across Southern California, the progress is quietly astonishing. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California now supplies roughly 19 million people in six counties, and it uses slightly less water than it did 25 years ago, when it supplied 15 million people. That savings — more than one billion gallons each day — is enough to supply all of New York City.

California’s resilience is fragile. It won’t last another two years, it might not last another year.

And to say that the state is weathering the drought is not to trivialize the damage. This summer’s wildfires — which have killed one firefighter, have already burned more acreage to date than last year’s fires and have destroyed dozens of homes — are just one example.

In the town of East Porterville, in the central part of the state, the drinking wells began to go dry a year ago or more. Many residents rely on bottled water and water distributed at the fire station. Their taps, their toilets, their showers are dry — an astonishing level of deprivation in a state with great wealth.

Farm production numbers look good partly because prices for produce are high. Irrigation water, which comes from surface water sources mostly in the north, is allocated based on history, law and availability. Despite cuts of irrigation water of up to 100 percent, farmers have continued to get water, pumping it from aquifers under their land.

California is the only state in the nation that has never regulated groundwater — farmers are largely free to pump as much as they want, without even tracking what they use. In wet years, pumping well water is generally unnecessary and expensive. In dry years, it’s survival.

In 2014, California farmers were able to substitute groundwater for 77 percent of the irrigation water they did not receive. In 2015, farmers are increasing their pumping by an astonishing one billion gallons a day, but the irrigation cuts are so severe that they will replace only 71 percent of their water.

The farmers are saving themselves now, but they are inflicting long-term damage to the vast underground water supply that is really California’s only remaining water cushion.

What can we learn from California’s resilience in this drought? The first lesson goes back 20 years before it started, when cities began to put conservation measures in place — measures that gradually changed water use and also water attitudes. If cities look at the water they have — rainwater, reservoir water, groundwater, wastewater — as different shades of one water, they quickly realize that there’s no such thing as “storm water” or “wastewater.” It’s all water. You can start giving yourself new water sources quickly by cleaning and reusing the water you’ve already got.

California’s progress has been bumpy. The second lesson is that a drought starkly reveals water absurdities that need to be fixed, often urgently.

How can the largest agricultural economy in the country not require farmers to report how much water they use — and allow them to use groundwater without limit?

How can the water-starved city of Los Angeles have an elaborate system of drains and pipes to collect the rain that does fall — often in brief, intense torrents — only to discard it in the Pacific instead of storing it?

How can it be that in Sacramento nearly half the homes have no water meters? Residents don’t know how much water they use and can’t see how much they conserve if they want to.

And the third lesson is how to use water insecurity to create its opposite. A drought like this one creates the opportunity to change things — even really big things — that couldn’t be changed without a sudden sense of vulnerability.

Last fall, prodded by Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration, the California Legislature passed a sweeping groundwater law, taking California from having the least regulated groundwater in the country to being a model. The concept is simple: No community will be allowed to pump more water from the underground aquifers than can refill those aquifers — either naturally, or with human help.

The law is so innovative, it will eventually remake water use across the state, and if other states pay attention, across the nation. The law could inspire new techniques for getting rainwater to refill overtaxed aquifers.

In a similarly future-focused move, San Francisco just passed an ordinance to require that new buildings of a certain size have on-site water recycling systems, and reuse their own wastewater. It’s the first city in the United States with such a requirement.

In May, the water district for all of Southern California decided to use the drought to change attitudes about lawns. It increased funding more than fivefold for a program that gives rebates to homeowners who replace their lawns with desert-appropriate landscaping. Las Vegas helped pioneer such “cash for grass” programs as a water-saving technique, removing 170 million square feet of turf — thousands of lawns — since 1999.

The response in Southern California, where $340 million was allocated for the program, stunned even experienced water managers. After five weeks, all the rebate money had been spoken for. The amount of turf set to be removed: about the same square footage that Las Vegas needed 16 years to take out.

For a century, California has pioneered innovations that have changed the way we all live. Without much fanfare, the state is doing that again, with water, moving to make standard what has been novel. A lawn landscaped with rocks and cactus instead of turf, morning coffee brewed matter-of-factly with recycled water, cities designed to return rainwater to the ground — these aren’t just symbols, they are how you handle water when you understand its value.

One of the wonderful ironies of water is that the more attention you pay to it, the less you have to worry about it. By the drought of 2045, the way California uses water will have been transformed again. Just as powerfully, the way ordinary Californians regard water will have been transformed. More than any water conservation practice in particular, it’s that attitude that will save the state — and the rest of us, as well.
 

Charles Fishman is the author of “The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water.”

Leave a question in the comments with this story or on the Times Opinion Facebook page for Charles Fishman about water conservation in California. He will respond to a selection next week.

How California Is Winning the Drought,
NYT, AUGUST 14, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/opinion/sunday/
how-california-is-winning-the-drought.html

Obama Takes a Crucial Step

on Climate Change

 

AUG. 3, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By RICHARD L. REVESZ

and JACK LIENKE

President Obama’s Clean Power Plan has rightly been hailed as the most important action any president has taken to address the climate crisis.

The new rule requires the nation’s power plants to cut their carbon dioxide emissions to 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Power plants are the largest source of such pollution in the United States, responsible for more than a third of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions. This greenhouse gas is the main driver of climate change, yet, until today, most plants could emit the pollutant in unlimited quantities.

The president’s plan is important not only because of the reductions it will achieve in domestic emissions. It also signals to the international community that America is serious about reining in its contribution to the global problem of greenhouse gas pollution. This message is particularly salient as the world’s nations prepare to gather in Paris in December to negotiate a new climate agreement.

Of course, not everyone is happy with the new rule. Some, like the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, a Republican from coal-producing Kentucky, have denounced it as the latest — and most damaging — attack in President Obama’s “war on coal.”

There’s no getting around the fact that a large number of coal-fired power plants are likely to close their doors in the near future. The Clean Power Plan will be at least partially responsible for many of these closings. A recent study by the United States Energy Information Administration estimated that almost 90 gigawatts of coal-fired electric generating capacity (close to 10 percent of the nation’s total) will be retired by 2020, and that just over half of that loss will be caused by the new regulation.

But the truth is that most of the coal plants at risk should have been shuttered years ago. Traditionally, the economically useful life of a coal-fired plant was thought to be about 30 years. As of 2014, coal-fired plants in the United States had been operating for an average of 42 years, and many plants had been in service far longer. Some date all the way back to the 1950s, meaning they have already been running for twice their expected life span.

Unsurprisingly, these clunkers tend to pollute at a far higher rate than more modern plants. Since 1990, a vast majority of the new electric generation capacity in the United States has been built to burn natural gas. Gas plants emit, on average, half the carbon dioxide, a third of the nitrogen oxides and a hundredth of the sulfur oxides per megawatt hour that coal plants do. The second largest source of new capacity has been wind power, which creates no air pollution at all.

Given the ready availability of newer, cleaner technology, why are we still getting our electricity from plants built in the Eisenhower era? The blame, ironically enough, rests with our nation’s most important environmental law.

Nearly 45 years ago, an almost unanimous Congress passed the Clean Air Act, which had the remarkably ambitious goal of eliminating essentially all air pollution that posed a threat to the public.

But however lofty its goals, the law contained a terrible flaw: Existing industrial facilities — most notably, electric power plants — were largely exempt from direct federal regulation. For some of the most ubiquitous pollutants, like those that form soot and smog, only newly constructed facilities would face limits on their emissions.

This “grandfathering” of old power plants didn’t seem terribly consequential at the time. Soon enough, it was thought, those plants would run out their useful lives and close down, making way for new facilities that would be subject to federal standards.

But that expectation turned out to be wrong. By instituting different regulatory regimes for new and existing plants, Congress had significantly altered the math behind decisions to retire plants. A system that subjected new plants to strict emissions controls but allowed old plants to pollute with impunity gave those old plants an enormous comparative economic advantage and an incentive for their owners to keep operating them much longer than they would have otherwise.

By the late 1980s, it was clear that the central goals of the Clean Air Act would never be achieved if these grandfathered coal plants were not regulated more stringently. Every president since then, whether a Democrat or Republican, has taken meaningful steps to slash pollution from existing plants, in most cases relying not on new legislation but on previously neglected provisions of the Clean Air Act itself. The statute has, in this sense, held the keys to its own salvation.

The Clean Power Plan follows in this bipartisan tradition. No new legislation is necessary. If the plan appears likely to spur a larger number of plant retirements than its predecessors, that is mainly because it is taking effect during a period when natural gas is affordable and abundant as never before. In the current market, shuttering old coal plants and ramping up the use of gas plants is simply many utilities’ most cost-effective option for cutting their carbon emissions.

Those who promote the “war on coal” narrative would have us believe that the president’s plan represents some sort of personal vendetta, an attempt, as Senator McConnell put it, to “crush forms of energy” the president and his allies don’t like. In reality, the rule is the latest chapter in a decades-long effort to clean up our oldest, dirtiest power plants and at last fulfill the pledge that Congress made to the American people back in 1970: that the air we all breathe will be safe.

It’s a promise worth keeping.

Richard L. Revesz is a professor and dean emeritus at the New York University School of Law, where Jack Lienke is an attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity. They are co-authors of the forthcoming book “Struggling for Air: Power Plants and the ‘War on Coal.’”

Obama Takes a Crucial Step on Climate Change,
NYT, AUGUST 3, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/opinion/
obama-takes-a-crucial-step-on-climate-change.html

Obama’s Catastrophic

Climate-Change Denial

MAY 12, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By BILL McKIBBEN

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — THE Obama administration’s decision to give Shell Oil the go-ahead to drill in the Arctic shows why we may never win the fight against climate change. Even in this most extreme circumstance, no one seems able to stand up to the power of the fossil fuel industry. No one ever says no.

By “extreme” I don’t just mean that Shell will be drilling for oil in places where there’s no hope of cleaning up the inevitable spills (remember the ineptness of BP in the balmy, accessible Gulf of Mexico, and now transpose it 40 degrees of latitude north, into some of the harshest seas on the planet).

No, what’s most extreme here is the irresponsibility of Shell, now abetted by the White House. A quarter century ago, scientists warned that if we kept burning fossil fuel at current rates we’d melt the Arctic. The fossil fuel industry (and most everyone else in power) ignored those warnings, and what do you know: The Arctic is melting, to the extent that people now are planning to race yachts through the Northwest Passage, which until very recently required an icebreaker to navigate.

Now, having watched the Arctic melt, does Shell take that experience and conclude that it’s in fact time to invest heavily in solar panels and wind turbines? No. Instead, it applies to be first in line to drill for yet more oil in the Chukchi Sea, between Alaska and Siberia. Wash, rinse, repeat. Talk about salting wounds and adding insult to injury: It’s as if the tobacco companies were applying for permission to put cigarette machines in cancer wards.

And the White House gave Shell the license. In his first term, President Obama mostly ignored climate change, and he ran for re-election barely mentioning the subject until Hurricane Sandy made it unavoidable in the closing days of the campaign.

Theoretically his second term was going to be different. The president has stepped up the rhetoric, and he’s shown some willingness to go after domestic greenhouse gas emissions. His new regulations on coal-fired power plants will be helpful, as will his 2012 rules on fuel efficiency for cars and trucks. And his nonbinding pledge that America will cut emissions in future decades may make the upcoming climate talks in Paris less of a fiasco than earlier talks in Copenhagen.

But you can’t deal with climate on the demand side alone. If we keep digging up more coal, gas and oil, it will get burned, if not here, then somewhere else. This is precisely the conclusion that a study in the journal Nature reached in January: If we’re to have any chance of meeting even Mr. Obama’s weak goal of holding temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, we have to leave most carbon underground. That paper, in particular, showed that the coal reserves in the Powder River basin in the West and the oil in Canada’s tar sands had to be left largely untouched, and that there was no climate-friendly scenario in which any oil or gas could be drilled in the Arctic.

And yet Mr. Obama — acting on his own, since these are all executive actions requiring nothing from Congress — has opened huge swaths of the Powder River basin to new coal mining. He’s still studying whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, though the country’s leading climate scientists have all told him it would be a disaster. And now he’s given Shell the green light, meaning that, as with Keystone, it will be up to the environmental movement to block the plan (“kayaktivists” plan to gather this weekend in Seattle’s harbor, trying to prevent Shell from basing its Arctic rigs there).

This is not climate denial of the Republican sort, where people simply pretend the science isn’t real. This is climate denial of the status quo sort, where people accept the science, and indeed make long speeches about the immorality of passing on a ruined world to our children. They just deny the meaning of the science, which is that we must keep carbon in the ground.
 

Bill McKibben teaches environmental studies at Middlebury College and is the founder of the global climate campaign 350.org.

Obama’s Catastrophic Climate-Change Denial,
NYT, MAY 12, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/opinion/
obamas-catastrophic-climate-change-denial.html

U.S. Will Allow Drilling

for Oil in Arctic Ocean

MAY 11, 2015

The New York Times

By CORAL DAVENPORT

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Monday gave conditional approval to allow Shell to start drilling for oil off the Alaskan coast this summer, a major victory for the petroleum industry and a devastating blow to environmentalists.

The decision adds a complex new chapter to the legacy of President Obama, who has pursued the most ambitious environmental agenda of any president but has sought to balance those moves by opening up untouched federal waters to new oil and gas drilling.

Shell has sought for years to drill in the icy waters of the Chukchi Sea. Federal scientists believe the region could hold up to 15 billion barrels of oil.

The Interior Department decision angered environmentalists who for years have demanded that the administration reject offshore Arctic drilling proposals. They fear that a drilling accident in the treacherous Arctic Ocean waters could have far more devastating consequences than the deadly Gulf of Mexico spill of 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion killed 11 men and sent millions of barrels of oil spewing into the water.

Both industry and environmental groups say that the Chukchi Sea is one of the most dangerous places in the world to drill. The area is extremely remote, with no roads connecting to major cities or deepwater ports within hundreds of miles, making it difficult for cleanup and rescue workers to reach in case of an accident.

The closest Coast Guard station with equipment for responding to a spill is over 1,000 miles away. The weather is extreme, with major storms, icy waters and waves up to 50 feet high. The sea is also a major migration route and feeding area for marine mammals, including bowhead whales and walruses.

The move came just four months after the Obama administration opened up a portion of the Atlantic Coast to new offshore drilling.

Administration officials said they had taken measures to ensure that the new drilling in the Arctic would be carefully regulated.

“We have taken a thoughtful approach to carefully considering potential exploration in the Chukchi Sea,” Abigail Ross Hopper, director of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, said in a statement. She said that the administration recognized the need to establish high standards for the protection of the Arctic ecosystem as well as the cultural traditions of Alaska Natives and that the offshore exploration “will continue to be subject to rigorous safety standards.”

The Interior Department’s approval of the drilling was conditional on Shell’s receiving approval of remaining state and federal drilling permits for the project, including permits from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement and authorizations under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Curtis Smith, a spokesman for Shell, called the approval “an important milestone” for Shell and said it showed the administration’s confidence in Shell’s commitment to safety.

But environmental groups denounced the move and said Shell had not demonstrated that it could drill safely in the Arctic Ocean.

“Once again, our government has rushed to approve risky and ill-conceived exploration in one of the most remote and important places on Earth,” said Susan Murray, a vice president of Oceana, an environmental group. “Shell has not shown that it is prepared to operate responsibly in the Arctic Ocean, and neither the company nor our government has been willing to fully and fairly evaluate the risks of Shell’s proposal.”

The Obama administration had initially granted Shell a permit to begin offshore Arctic drilling in the summer of 2012. However, the company’s first forays into exploring the new waters were plagued with numerous safety and operational problems. One of its oil rigs, the Kulluk, ran aground and had to be towed to safety. In 2013, the Interior Department said the company could not resume drilling until all safety issues were addressed.

In a review of the company’s performance in the Arctic, the department concluded that Shell had failed in a wide range of basic operational tasks, like supervision of contractors that performed critical work.

The report was harshly critical of Shell management, which acknowledged that it was unprepared for the problems it encountered operating in the unforgiving Arctic environment.

But the administration said that since then, the Interior Department has significantly strengthened and updated drilling regulations. And outside experts said that while the challenges of Arctic drilling were steep, the new plan surmounted them to some extent by allowing drilling only in the summer months and in shallow waters.

“It recognizes both the economic and energy potential of the Arctic seas, but also the environmental sensitivity of the area and the challenges of responding to spills and other incidents in such a harsh climate,” said Thomas Lorenzen, who recently left the Justice Department after more than a decade as assistant chief in the environment and natural resources division, and is now a partner at the law firm of Dorsey & Whitney.

“Notably, the proposed exploration is in very shallow waters — only 140 feet deep — and thus it will not present the kinds of challenges that the Deepwater Horizon spill posed,” Mr. Lorenzen said. “That well was in water about 5,000 feet deep.”

The Obama administration has also issued new drilling safety regulations intended to prevent future accidents like the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Last month, the Interior Department proposed new rules to tighten safety requirements on blowout preventers, the industry-standard devices that are the last line of protection against explosions in undersea oil and gas wells.

The 2010 explosion was caused in part when a section of drill pipe buckled, which led to the malfunction of a supposedly fail-safe blowout preventer on a BP well.

Correction: May 11, 2015

An earlier version of this article misstated the waters in which Shell Gulf of Mexico, Inc. is conditionally approved to start drilling. It is only in the Chukchi Sea, not also in the Beaufort Sea.

A version of this article appears in print on May 12, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Will Allow Drilling for Oil In Arctic Ocean.

U.S. Will Allow Drilling for Oil in Arctic Ocean,
NYT, MAY 11, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/us/
white-house-gives-conditional-approval-for-shell-to-drill-in-arctic.html

Obama’s Strategy on Climate Change,

Part of Global Deal, Is Revealed

 

MARCH 31, 2015

The New York Times

By CORAL DAVENPORT

WASHINGTON — The White House on Tuesday introduced President Obama’s blueprint for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the United States by nearly a third over the next decade.

Mr. Obama’s plan, part of a formal written submission to the United Nations ahead of efforts to forge a global climate change accord in Paris in December, detailed the United States’ part of an ambitious joint pledge made by Mr. Obama and President Xi Jinping of China in November.

The United States and China are the world’s two largest greenhouse gas polluters. Mr. Obama said the United States would cut its emissions by 26 to 28 percent by 2025, while Mr. Xi said that China’s emissions would drop after 2030.

Mr. Obama’s new blueprint brings together several domestic initiatives that were already in the works, including freezing construction of new coal-fired power plants, increasing the fuel economy of vehicles and plugging methane leaks from oil and gas production. It is meant to describe how the United States will lead by example and meet its pledge for cutting emissions.

But the plan’s reliance on executive authority is an acknowledgment that any proposal to pass climate change legislation would be blocked by the Republican-controlled Congress.

At the heart of the plan are ambitious but politically contentious Environmental Protection Agency regulations meant to drastically cut planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s cars and coal-fired power plants. The plan also relies on a speedy timetable, which assumes that Mr. Obama’s administration will issue and begin enacting all such regulations before he leaves office.

“We can achieve this goal using laws that are already on the books, and it will be in place by the time the president leaves office,” said Brian C. Deese, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser on climate change.

But the plan has also intensified opposition from Republican lawmakers who object to Mr. Obama’s effort to build a climate change legacy. Republicans have called the rules a “war on coal” and an abuse of executive authority. Nearly every potential Republican presidential candidate has criticized Mr. Obama’s climate change agenda. The issue is expected to be important in 2016 political campaigns, with Republican candidates vowing to undo Mr. Obama’s E.P.A. regulations.

Republican leaders immediately savaged the plan Tuesday and announced their intent to weaken or undo it — and, by extension, to block the international efforts to reach a climate accord in Paris.

“Even if the job-killing and likely illegal Clean Power Plan were fully implemented, the United States could not meet the targets laid out in this proposed new plan,” said Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader and Republican from Kentucky, who has been a vocal critic of the president’s plan.

“Considering that two-thirds of the U.S. federal government hasn’t even signed off on the Clean Power Plan and 13 states have already pledged to fight it,” Mr. McConnell continued, “our international partners should proceed with caution before entering into a binding, unattainable deal.”

Environmental groups praised the plan, particularly the president’s effort to work around Congress.

“The United States’ proposal shows that it is ready to lead by example on the climate crisis,” said Jennifer Morgan, an expert on international climate negotiations at the World Resources Institute, a Washington research organization. The research of Ms. Morgan’s group has concluded that the United States can substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions under existing federal authority.

However, environmental groups also said far deeper cuts are necessary beyond 2025 to stave off the most devastating effects of climate change.

“In fact the U.S. must do more than just deliver on this pledge — the 28 percent domestic target can and must be a floor, not a ceiling,” said Lou Leonard, vice president for climate change policy with the conservation group World Wildlife Fund.

Republicans also adamantly oppose Mr. Obama’s efforts to reach the United Nations accord in Paris. To bypass the Senate — which would have to ratify United States involvement in a foreign treaty — Secretary of State John Kerry and other diplomatic officials are working closely with their foreign counterparts to ensure that the Paris deal does not legally qualify as a treaty.

Senator Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, has put together legislation intended to nullify Mr. Obama’s international climate change agreements. Republican leaders may try to add that as an amendment to must-pass legislation, like a critical spending measure later this year, to force the hands of Mr. Obama and other Democrats.

“Just as we witnessed throughout recent negotiations with Iran and during the previous climate agreement with China, President Obama and his administration act as if Congress has no role in these discussions. That’s just flat-out wrong,” Mr. Blunt said in a written statement.

“We will not stand by and allow the president to unilaterally enact bad energy policies that hurt our nation’s poorest families and young people the most,” he added. “I’ll continue working with my colleagues to ensure Americans’ voices are heard.”

Todd D. Stern, the State Department’s chief envoy on climate change, is telling other countries that the elements of Mr. Obama’s plan will stay in place despite Republican opposition.

“Undoing the kind of regulation we’re putting in place is very tough,” he said.

However, the rules have already come under legal assault. Republicans intend to stress to other nations that the regulations could still fall to legal challenges.

There is also growing concern that most other countries have yet to submit similar plans. At a United Nations accord signed in Lima, Peru, in December, countries agreed to submit their plans to one of the organization’s websites by the end of March. Climate policy experts said keeping to that timetable was important, so that each government prepared and analyzed its own domestic climate change plans and those of other nations.

But as of Tuesday, only the European Union, Mexico, Norway and Switzerland had done so. Most of the rest of the world’s major polluters — including China, India, Brazil and Russia — are not expected to submit plans until at least June, and some expect delays until at least October.

The longer countries wait to submit their plans, experts say, the harder it could be to achieve a substantial agreement in December.

A version of this article appears in print on April 1, 2015, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama’s Strategy on Climate Change, Part of Global Deal, Is Revealed.

Obama’s Strategy on Climate Change, Part of Global Deal, Is Revealed,
NYT,  MARCH 31, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/us/obama-to-offer-major-blueprint-on-climate-change.html

As California Drought Enters 4th Year,

Conservation Efforts and Worries

Increase

 

MARCH 17, 2015

The New York Times

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

LOS ANGELES — The rainy season drove into California in December with wet and windy promise: soaking rain, snow, dark gray skies and a flash of hope that the drought that has scorched this region had run its course. And then came January — with record high temperatures and record low rainfall.

And now, as the end of the official rainy season approaches — this state gets 90 percent of its water from December through April, most of it in December and January — California is facing a punishing fourth year of drought. Temperatures in Southern California soared to record-high levels over the weekend, approaching 100 degrees in some places. Reservoirs are low. Landscapes are parched and blighted with fields of dead or dormant orange trees. And the Sierra Nevada snowpack, which is counted on to provide 30 percent of the state’s water supply as it melts through early summer, is at its second-lowest level on record.

The federal government has warned farmers for the second year in a row that it would not be providing any water from its Central Valley Project reservoir system. Any hope climatologists had that California would be rescued again by a wet El Niño winter weather system is fading with the arrival of spring.

State regulators voted Tuesday to impose a new round of water conservation rules, including sharp restrictions on landscape watering and orders to restaurants not to serve water to customers unless asked. Farmers said they anticipated leaving as much as one million acres fallow, nearly twice the area that went unplanted last year.

Santa Barbara is turning to a desalination plant it built in the early 1990s, but never used, to convert ocean water into drinking water, despite its expense and inefficiency. In communities like Oakland and Sacramento, water districts are reporting increased thefts by people tapping into their neighbor’s faucet or the fire hydrant on the corner.

In one sign of the kind of competition being set off by the scarcity, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a regional agency that provides water for much of the area, authorized up to $71 million to buy water from farmers in the Sacramento Valley, who get it from a state agency. In some cases, the farmers were paid three times as much as in 2010, the last time this was done. With those kinds of prices, farmers say it makes more sense to take the money and leave more land unplanted.

“This is going to affect everyone in the state,” said Paul J. Wenger, the president of the California Farm Bureau Federation. “I can’t think of any part of the state where people aren’t going to be suffering from diminished water supplies.”

Michael Anderson, the state climatologist, said rainfall had been slightly better this season in Northern California than in Southern California, meaning that reservoir levels in some communities in the north were slightly above where they were last year. But he said the level remained far below the norm. And in critical places like the San Joaquin Valley in central California, in the heart of the state’s farming region, reservoir levels were down over the same period last year — often significantly.

But the main reason for concern is the paucity of the snowpack. The March 3 measurement of the statewide snowpack was the water equivalent of five inches, or 19 percent of the average for that date. That is barely above the record low snowpack measurement from 1991, according to state officials.

“That’s pretty grim,” Mr. Anderson said. “We were hoping for the number of inches to be in the 30s.”

“It looks like we are on our way to the worst snowpack in history,” he said. “Unless we end up with some particularly good snows here in March, we are going to end up with a new lowest rank here.”

The sheets of December rain may have created additional problems, by leading people to take longer showers or to leave the tap running while brushing their teeth. That was compounded by a dry January, which prompted people to water normally dormant landscapes. The State Water Resources Control Board said that while there had been a 22 percent decline in year-to-year water consumption by urban customers in December, that figure was just 8.8 percent in January.

“Last year people thought we were in a regular three-year drought cycle and that it would rain next year,” said Felicia Marcus, the board’s chairwoman. Still, she said, it was a “9 percent reduction off last year, and we have to give credit where credit is due.”

Californians are growing increasingly convinced of the threat: 94 percent of voters in a Field Poll conducted Jan. 26 to Feb. 16 described the drought situation as serious, and 68 percent called it extremely serious. That was far more than the 51 percent who used the words “extremely serious” to describe the drought of 1976-77, one of the most severe in the state’s history. And one-third of voters said they supported water rationing.

This state has long been familiar with the give-and-take rhythms of the rain. But many scientists say the situation has been made worse by rising temperatures: The winter of 2014 was the hottest year on record for California. Last year, the average winter temperature across the state was a record 45.6 degrees, state officials said. This year’s winter average has been 47.4 degrees.

That is a large reason that the snowpack is so small. High temperatures mean more rain than snow, and rain tends to be absorbed by the ground before it reaches the reservoirs and to melt whatever snow is on the ground. Unseasonably warm weather results in increased consumption as people drink, shower and use water on landscapes more often.

“The normal cyclical conditions in California are different now from what they used to be, and that’s not because the long-term annual precipitation changed,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, which just completed a study of the interaction between high temperatures and low precipitation.

“What is really different is there has been a long-term warming in California,” he said. “And we know from looking at the historical record that low precipitation years are much more likely to result in drought conditions if they occur with high temperatures.”

The developments have stirred more concern among suffering farmers. And their options are diminishing: Several said that after last year, there was less groundwater to draw on, while the cost of buying water had become prohibitive.

“I’m going to fallow two acres of my land immediately,” said Geoffrey C. Galloway, who has a citrus grove on his ranch near Porterville, in the Central Valley. “Depending on how the season goes, we may let another four go.”

Mr. Galloway, 39, said he counted on income from his grove to support the ranch. He said he was considering whether he would have to give up his land. “I don’t want to lose it,” he said, but “this is the worst it’s been.”

Last year, at least 400,000 acres went unplanted, and farmers reported losses of $2.2 billion, said Mr. Wenger, the head of the farm bureau, who owns a farm in Modesto. “This year we could see easily 50 percent more,” he said. “We are probably going to be looking at well over a million acres.”

Ms. Marcus said the State Water Resources Control Board was moving toward adding new restrictions as well as extending ones that had been due to expire. “The question becomes, ‘What do we need to do to motivate people to do more?’ ” she said.

Pushing for more conservation, the Sacramento City Council voted last month to order faster installation of water meters across the city; the deadline has been moved to 2020 from 2024.

And with paucity and increased prices has come water theft. John A. Coleman, a member of the board of directors of the East Bay Municipal Utility District in Oakland and president of the Association of California Water Agencies, said the East Bay agency wanted to impose serious fines on water thieves for the first time.

“It’s a problem, and it’s becoming more of a problem as the drought intensifies,” he said. “I’m not one who is big on penalties, but this is not right.”

In Santa Barbara, the desalination plant is being taken out of mothballs at a cost of about $40 million.

“Desalination is our absolute last resort,” said Helene Schneider, the mayor. “Unfortunately, given the way the drought is going, we are now at that last resort.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 18, 2015, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Alarm Rises For a State Withered By Drought.

As California Drought Enters 4th Year, Conservation Efforts and Worries Increase, NYT, MARCH 17, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/18/us/as-california-drought-enters-4th-year-conservation-efforts-and-worries-increase.html

Obama Will Move

to Protect Vast Arctic Habitat in Alaska

 

JAN. 25, 2015

The New York Times

By CORAL DAVENPORT

WASHINGTON — President Obama will ask Congress to increase environmental protections for millions of acres of pristine animal habitat in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, in a move that has already led to fierce opposition from the state’s Republican lawmakers.

The White House announced Sunday that Mr. Obama would ask Congress to designate 12 million of the refuge’s 19 million acres as wilderness. The wilderness designation is the strongest level of federal protection afforded to public lands, and would forbid a range of activity that includes drilling for oil and gas and construction of roads.

If the proposal is enacted, the area would be the largest wilderness designation since Congress passed the Wilderness Act over 50 years ago. But the proposal seems unlikely to find support in Congress.

“Designating vast areas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness reflects the significance this landscape holds for America and its wildlife,” Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said in a statement. “Just like Yosemite or the Grand Canyon, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is one of our nation’s crown jewels, and we have an obligation to preserve this spectacular place for generations to come.”

The White House proposal was first reported Sunday by The Washington Post.

The Arctic refuge is home to a vast and diverse array of wildlife, including caribou, polar bears, gray wolves and musk oxen. But it is also believed to hold significant oil and gas reserves. Ever since President Jimmy Carter signed a 1980 law creating the refuge, Alaska lawmakers have fought to open the area for drilling and development.

Among the fiercest Republican opponents of the plan is Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, chairwoman of the Senate Energy Committee.

“What’s coming is a stunning attack on our sovereignty and our ability to develop a strong economy that allows us, our children and our grandchildren to thrive,” Ms. Murkowski said.

“It’s clear this administration does not care about us, and sees us as nothing but a territory,” she added. “The promises made to us at statehood, and since then, mean absolutely nothing to them. I cannot understand why this administration is willing to negotiate with Iran, but not Alaska. But we will not be run over like this. We will fight back with every resource at our disposal.”

Environmentalists cheered the proposal, even though enactment appears unlikely.

“This is a big deal,” said Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters.

“Big oil has long wanted to get its hands on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” he said, adding that Fish and Wildlife Service scientists have said that the area “is just too special to drill in. We wholeheartedly agree and celebrate this announcement by the Obama administration.”

The administration is expected to release a series of policies on conservation and oil and gas drilling soon. As early as Monday, the Interior Department is expected to release a five-year plan outlining where federal waters will be open to or protected from offshore drilling.

A version of this article appears in print on January 26, 2015, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Will Move to Protect Vast Arctic Habitat in Alaska.

Obama Will Move to Protect Vast Arctic Habitat in Alaska,
JAN 25, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/26/us/politics/obama-to-seek-to-protect-millions-of-acres-of-arctic-habitat.html

Inequality in the Air We Breathe?

JAN. 21, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Charles M. Blow

I grew up in the small town of Gibsland, in northern Louisiana. It is dirt poor, but proud. And it’s an overwhelmingly African-American community.

(There are fewer than 1,000 people in Gibsland; more than 80 percent of them are black; the median household income is $27,292, little over half the national average of $51,939; and the poverty rate is 28 percent, compared with the national rate of 15 percent.)

My mother, one of my brothers and a raft of relatives still live in Gibsland. Another brother moved to the next town over, Minden, a big city relatively speaking (it has 13,000 people), where he is a high school teacher. Minden, just west of Gibsland, is also majority African-American and relatively poor — 55 percent of the residents are black, the median household income is $30,411 and 24 percent of the residents are poor.

For years, one of the largest employers in that area was the Louisiana Army Ammunition Plant, about four miles from Minden. The Environmental Protection Agency eventually listed the plant as a Superfund site because for more than 40 years “untreated explosives-laden wastewater from industrial operations was collected in concrete sumps at each of the various load line areas,” and emptied into “16 one-acre pink water lagoons.” It was determined that the toxic contamination in soil and sediments from the lagoons was a “major contributor” to toxic groundwater contamination.

But wait, it gets worse.

When the plant ceased production, as The Times-Picayune of New Orleans pointed out, “the Army awarded now-bankrupt Explo Systems a contract in 2010 to ‘demilitarize’ the propellant charges for artillery rounds” on the site. The company conducted “operations” there “until a 2012 explosion sent a mushroom cloud 7,000 feet high and broke windows a mile away in Doyline,” another small community in the area.

But wait, it gets worse.

According to The Shreveport Times, “investigation by state police found the millions of pounds of propellant stored in 98 bunkers scattered around” the site. It turned out that when Explo went bankrupt, it simply abandoned the explosives, known as M6. Now there was a risk of even more explosions, so there was need for a plan to get rid of the M6, and quickly.

(By the way, Shreveport is the largest city near the site, and it, too, is majority black, has a median household income well below the national average and a poverty rate well above it.)

But wait, it gets worse.

According to the website Truthout:

“After months of bureaucratic disputes between the Army and state and federal agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) recently announced an emergency plan to burn 15 million pounds of M6 — up to 80,000 pounds a day over the course of a year — on open ‘burn trays’ at Camp Minden, a disposal process that environmental advocates say is outdated and has been outlawed in other countries. The operation would be one of the largest open munitions burn in U.S. history.”

Indeed, Robert Flournoy, an environmental toxicologist and former Louisiana Tech professor, wrote in The Shreveport Times this week:

“The E.P.A. says this is a safe way to destroy the propellant. I strongly disagree with their decision and their safety statement. I have over 42 years of environmental experience and can say without a doubt the open-tray method is not safe. The E.P.A. has produced no data to the safety of such a burn and repeatedly ignores requests for such data from media, citizens, state officials and environmental professionals. In addition to the air contamination risk, we have three other issues: explosive detonation, groundwater contamination and soil contamination.”

And yes, again, it gets worse.

A local television news station, KTBS in Shreveport, pointed out last week:

“It’s expected to be the nation’s largest open burn in history. And now, it seems there’s even more explosive material at Camp Minden than we all previously thought. We’ve all heard the number 15 million pounds of explosives, but documents from the E.P.A. show there’s millions more pounds.”

This week, a group of “71 social and environmental justice organizations” across the country sent a letter of protest to the E.P.A.’s assistant administrator Cynthia Giles, saying in part:

“By definition, open burning has no emissions controls and will result in the uncontrolled release of toxic emissions and respirable particulates to the environment.”

Feeling the pressure from local citizen and environmentalist rightly concerned about the immediate and long-term health implications, the E.P.A. recently delayed the burn by 90 days to allow the state’s department of environmental quality and the National Guard to “select their own alternative for disposing of the explosive material,” according to The Times-Picayune.

Still, these little places in the woods aren’t yet out of the woods. It’s still not clear what will eventually happen with the explosives.

We have to stop and ask: How was this allowed to come to such a pass in the first place? How could this plant have been allowed to contaminate the groundwater for 40 years? How could the explosives have been left at the site in the first place? How is it that there doesn’t seem to be the money or the will to more safely remove them? Can we imagine anyone, with a straight face, proposing to openly burn millions of pounds of explosives near Manhattan or Seattle?

This is the kind of scenario that some might place under the umbrella of “environmental racism,” in which disproportionately low-income and minority communities are either targeted or disproportionately exposed to toxic and hazardous materials and waste facilities.

There is a long history in this country of exposing vulnerable populations to toxicity.

Fifteen years ago, Robert D. Bullard published Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality. In it, he pointed out that nearly 60 percent of the nation’s hazardous-waste landfill capacity was in “five Southern states (i.e., Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas),” and that “four landfills in minority ZIP codes areas represented 63 percent of the South’s total hazardous-waste capacity” although “blacks make up only about 20 percent of the South’s total population.”

More recently, in 2012, a study by researchers at Yale found that “The greater the concentration of Hispanics, Asians, African-Americans or poor residents in an area, the more likely that potentially dangerous compounds such as vanadium, nitrates and zinc are in the mix of fine particles they breathe.”

Among the injustices perpetrated on poor and minority populations, this may in fact be the most pernicious and least humane: the threat of poisoning the very air that you breathe.

I have skin in this game. My family would fall in the shadow of the plume. But everyone should be outraged about this practice. Of all the measures of equality we deserve, the right to feel assured and safe when you draw a breath should be paramount.

Inequality in the Air We Breathe?,
NYT,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/22/opinion/
charles-blow-inequality-in-the-air-we-breathe.html

Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction,

Broad Study Says

JAN. 15, 2015

The New York Times

A team of scientists, in a groundbreaking analysis of data from hundreds of sources, has concluded that humans are on the verge of causing unprecedented damage to the oceans and the animals living in them.

“We may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event,” said Douglas J. McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of the new research, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

But there is still time to avert catastrophe, Dr. McCauley and his colleagues also found. Compared with the continents, the oceans are mostly intact, still wild enough to bounce back to ecological health.

“We’re lucky in many ways,” said Malin L. Pinsky, a marine biologist at Rutgers University and another author of the new report. “The impacts are accelerating, but they’re not so bad we can’t reverse them.”

Scientific assessments of the oceans’ health are dogged by uncertainty: It’s much harder for researchers to judge the well-being of a species living underwater, over thousands of miles, than to track the health of a species on land. And changes that scientists observe in particular ocean ecosystems may not reflect trends across the planet.

Dr. Pinsky, Dr. McCauley and their colleagues sought a clearer picture of the oceans’ health by pulling together data from an enormous range of sources, from discoveries in the fossil record to statistics on modern container shipping, fish catches and seabed mining. While many of the findings already existed, they had never been juxtaposed in such a way.

A number of experts said the result was a remarkable synthesis, along with a nuanced and encouraging prognosis.

“I see this as a call for action to close the gap between conservation on land and in the sea,” said Loren McClenachan of Colby College, who was not involved in the study.

There are clear signs already that humans are harming the oceans to a remarkable degree, the scientists found. Some ocean species are certainly overharvested, but even greater damage results from large-scale habitat loss, which is likely to accelerate as technology advances the human footprint, the scientists reported.

Coral reefs, for example, have declined by 40 percent worldwide, partly as a result of climate-change-driven warming.

Some fish are migrating to cooler waters already. Black sea bass, once most common off the coast of Virginia, have moved up to New Jersey. Less fortunate species may not be able to find new ranges. At the same time, carbon emissions are altering the chemistry of seawater, making it more acidic.

“If you cranked up the aquarium heater and dumped some acid in the water, your fish would not be very happy,” Dr. Pinsky said. “In effect, that’s what we’re doing to the oceans.”

Fragile ecosystems like mangroves are being replaced by fish farms, which are projected to provide most of the fish we consume within 20 years. Bottom trawlers scraping large nets across the sea floor have already affected 20 million square miles of ocean, turning parts of the continental shelf to rubble. Whales may no longer be widely hunted, the analysis noted, but they are now colliding more often as the number of container ships rises.

Mining operations, too, are poised to transform the ocean. Contracts for seabed mining now cover 460,000 square miles underwater, the researchers found, up from zero in 2000. Seabed mining has the potential to tear up unique ecosystems and introduce pollution into the deep sea.

The oceans are so vast that their ecosystems may seem impervious to change. But Dr. McClenachan warned that the fossil record shows that global disasters have wrecked the seas before. “Marine species are not immune to extinction on a large scale,” she said.

Until now, the seas largely have been spared the carnage visited on terrestrial species, the new analysis also found.

The fossil record indicates that a number of large animal species became extinct as humans arrived on continents and islands. For example, the moa, a giant bird that once lived on New Zealand, was wiped out by arriving Polynesians in the 1300s, probably within a century.

But it was only after 1800, with the Industrial Revolution, that extinctions on land really accelerated.

Humans began to alter the habitat that wildlife depended on, wiping out forests for timber, plowing under prairie for farmland, and laying down roads and railroads across continents.

Species began going extinct at a much faster pace. Over the past five centuries, researchers have recorded 514 animal extinctions on land. But the authors of the new study found that documented extinctions are far rarer in the ocean.

Before 1500, a few species of seabirds are known to have vanished. Since then, scientists have documented only 15 ocean extinctions, including animals such as the Caribbean monk seal and the Steller’s sea cow.

While these figures are likely underestimates, Dr. McCauley said that the difference was nonetheless revealing.

“Fundamentally, we’re a terrestrial predator,” he said. “It’s hard for an ape to drive something in the ocean extinct.”

Many marine species that have become extinct or are endangered depend on land — seabirds that nest on cliffs, for example, or sea turtles that lay eggs on beaches.

Still, there is time for humans to halt the damage, Dr. McCauley said, with effective programs limiting the exploitation of the oceans. The tiger may not be salvageable in the wild — but the tiger shark may well be, he said.

“There are a lot of tools we can use,” he said. “We better pick them up and use them seriously.”

Dr. McCauley and his colleagues argue that limiting the industrialization of the oceans to some regions could allow threatened species to recover in other ones. “I fervently believe that our best partner in saving the ocean is the ocean itself,” said Stephen R. Palumbi of Stanford University, an author of the new study.

The scientists also argued that these reserves had to be designed with climate change in mind, so that species escaping high temperatures or low pH would be able to find refuge.

“It’s creating a hopscotch pattern up and down the coasts to help these species adapt,” Dr. Pinsky said.

Ultimately, Dr. Palumbi warned, slowing extinctions in the oceans will mean cutting back on carbon emissions, not just adapting to them.

“If by the end of the century we’re not off the business-as-usual curve we are now, I honestly feel there’s not much hope for normal ecosystems in the ocean,” he said. “But in the meantime, we do have a chance to do what we can. We have a couple decades more than we thought we had, so let’s please not waste it.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on January 16, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says.

Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction, Broad Study Says,
NYT, JAN 15, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/16/science/earth/
study-raises-alarm-for-health-of-ocean-life.html

Environment

2014 Was Hottest Year on Record,

Surpassing 2010

 

JAN. 16, 2015

The New York Times

By JUSTIN GILLIS

Last year was the hottest in earth’s recorded history, scientists reported on Friday, underscoring scientific warnings about the risks of runaway emissions and undermining claims by climate-change contrarians that global warming had somehow stopped.

Extreme heat blanketed Alaska and much of the western United States last year. Several European countries set temperature records. And the ocean surface was unusually warm virtually everywhere except around Antarctica, the scientists said, providing the energy that fueled damaging Pacific storms.

In the annals of climatology, 2014 now surpasses 2010 as the warmest year in a global temperature record that stretches back to 1880. The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1997, a reflection of the relentless planetary warming that scientists say is a consequence of human emissions and poses profound long-term risks to civilization and to the natural world.

Of the large inhabited land areas, only the eastern half of the United States recorded below-average temperatures in 2014, a sort of mirror image of the unusual heat in the West. Some experts think the stuck-in-place weather pattern that produced those extremes in the United States is itself an indirect consequence of the release of greenhouse gases, though that is not proven.

Several scientists said the most remarkable thing about the 2014 record was that it occurred in a year that did not feature El Niño, a large-scale weather pattern in which the ocean dumps an enormous amount of heat into the atmosphere.

Longstanding claims by climate-change skeptics that global warming has stopped, seized on by politicians in Washington to justify inaction on emissions, depend on a particular starting year: 1998, when an unusually powerful El Niño produced the hottest year of the 20th century.

With the continued heating of the atmosphere and the surface of the ocean, 1998 is now being surpassed every four or five years, with 2014 being the first time that has happened in a year featuring no real El Niño pattern. Gavin A. Schmidt, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, said the next time a strong El Niño occurs, it is likely to blow away all temperature records.

“Obviously, a single year, even if it is a record, cannot tell us much about climate trends,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, head of earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “However, the fact that the warmest years on record are 2014, 2010 and 2005 clearly indicates that global warming has not ‘stopped in 1998,’ as some like to falsely claim.”

Such claims are unlikely to go away, though. John R. Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who is known for his skepticism about the seriousness of global warming, pointed out in an interview that 2014 had surpassed the other record-warm years by only a few hundredths of a degree, well within the error margin of global temperature measurements.

“Since the end of the 20th century, the temperature hasn’t done much,” Dr. Christy said. “It’s on this kind of warmish plateau.”

NASA and the other American agency that maintains long-term temperature records, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, issued separate data compilations on Friday that confirmed the 2014 record. A Japanese agency had released preliminary information in early January showing 2014 as the warmest year.

The last scientific group that curates the world’s temperature record, in Britain, is scheduled to report in the coming weeks.

“Why do we keep getting so many record-warm years?” Dr. Schmidt asked in an interview. “It’s because the planet is warming. The basic issue is the long-term trend, and it is not going away.”

February 1985 was the last time global temperatures fell below the 20th-century average for a given month, meaning that no one younger than 30 has ever lived through a below-average month.

The contiguous United States set its temperature record in 2012. But, mainly because of the unusual chill in the East last year, 2014 was only the 34th warmest year on record for the lower 48 states.

That cold was brought into the interior of the country by a loop in a current called the jet stream that allowed Arctic air to spill southward. But an offsetting kink allowed unusually warm tropical air to settle over the West, large parts of Alaska and much of the Arctic.

A few recent scientific papers say that such long-lasting kinks in the jet stream have become more likely because global warming is rapidly melting the sea ice in the Arctic, disturbing longstanding weather patterns. But many leading scientists are not convinced on that point.

Whatever the underlying cause, last year’s extreme warmth in the West meant that Alaska, Arizona, California and Nevada all set temperature records. Some parts of California had basically no winter last year, with temperatures sometimes running 10 or 15 degrees above normal for the season.

Those conditions exacerbated the severe drought in California, which has been alleviated only slightly by recent rains. Some small towns have run out of water, the sort of impact that scientists fear will become commonplace as global warming proceeds in the coming decades.

2014 Was Hottest Year on Record, Surpassing 2010,
JAN 16, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/17/science/earth/2014-was-hottest-year-on-record-surpassing-2010.html

Playing Dumb on Climate Change

JAN. 3, 2015

The New York Times

SundayReview | Opinion

By NAOMI ORESKES

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — SCIENTISTS have often been accused of exaggerating the threat of climate change, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that they ought to be more emphatic about the risk. The year just concluded is about to be declared the hottest one on record, and across the globe climate change is happening faster than scientists predicted.

Science is conservative, and new claims of knowledge are greeted with high degrees of skepticism. When Copernicus said the Earth orbited the sun, when Wegener said the continents drifted, and when Darwin said species evolved by natural selection, the burden of proof was on them to show that it was so. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this conservatism generally took the form of a demand for a large amount of evidence; in the 20th century, it took on the form of a demand for statistical significance.

We’ve all heard the slogan “correlation is not causation,” but that’s a misleading way to think about the issue. It would be better to say that correlation is not necessarily causation, because we need to rule out the possibility that we are just observing a coincidence. Typically, scientists apply a 95 percent confidence limit, meaning that they will accept a causal claim only if they can show that the odds of the relationship’s occurring by chance are no more than one in 20. But it also means that if there’s more than even a scant 5 percent possibility that an event occurred by chance, scientists will reject the causal claim. It’s like not gambling in Las Vegas even though you had a nearly 95 percent chance of winning.

Where does this severe standard come from? The 95 percent confidence level is generally credited to the British statistician R. A. Fisher, who was interested in the problem of how to be sure an observed effect of an experiment was not just the result of chance. While there have been enormous arguments among statisticians about what a 95 percent confidence level really means, working scientists routinely use it.

But the 95 percent level has no actual basis in nature. It is a convention, a value judgment. The value it reflects is one that says that the worst mistake a scientist can make is to think an effect is real when it is not. This is the familiar “Type 1 error.” You can think of it as being gullible, fooling yourself, or having undue faith in your own ideas. To avoid it, scientists place the burden of proof on the person making an affirmative claim. But this means that science is prone to “Type 2 errors”: being too conservative and missing causes and effects that are really there.

Is a Type 1 error worse than a Type 2? It depends on your point of view, and on the risks inherent in getting the answer wrong. The fear of the Type 1 error asks us to play dumb; in effect, to start from scratch and act as if we know nothing. That makes sense when we really don’t know what’s going on, as in the early stages of a scientific investigation. It also makes sense in a court of law, where we presume innocence to protect ourselves from government tyranny and overzealous prosecutors — but there are no doubt prosecutors who would argue for a lower standard to protect society from crime.

When applied to evaluating environmental hazards, the fear of gullibility can lead us to understate threats. It places the burden of proof on the victim rather than, for example, on the manufacturer of a harmful product. The consequence is that we may fail to protect people who are really getting hurt.

And what if we aren’t dumb? What if we have evidence to support a cause-and-effect relationship? Let’s say you know how a particular chemical is harmful; for example, that it has been shown to interfere with cell function in laboratory mice. Then it might be reasonable to accept a lower statistical threshold when examining effects in people, because you already have reason to believe that the observed effect is not just chance.

This is what the United States government argued in the case of secondhand smoke. Since bystanders inhaled the same chemicals as smokers, and those chemicals were known to be carcinogenic, it stood to reason that secondhand smoke would be carcinogenic, too. That is why the Environmental Protection Agency accepted a (slightly) lower burden of proof: 90 percent instead of 95 percent.

In the case of climate change, we are not dumb at all. We know that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, we know that its concentration in the atmosphere has increased by about 40 percent since the industrial revolution, and we know the mechanism by which it warms the planet.

WHY don’t scientists pick the standard that is appropriate to the case at hand, instead of adhering to an absolutist one? The answer can be found in a surprising place: the history of science in relation to religion. The 95 percent confidence limit reflects a long tradition in the history of science that valorizes skepticism as an antidote to religious faith.

Even as scientists consciously rejected religion as a basis of natural knowledge, they held on to certain cultural presumptions about what kind of person had access to reliable knowledge. One of these presumptions involved the value of ascetic practices. Nowadays scientists do not live monastic lives, but they do practice a form of self-denial, denying themselves the right to believe anything that has not passed very high intellectual hurdles.

Moreover, while vigorously denying its relation to religion, modern science retains symbolic vestiges of prophetic tradition, so many scientists bend over backward to avoid these associations. A vast majority of scientists do not speak in public at all, and those who do typically speak in highly guarded, qualified terms. They often refuse to use the language of danger even when danger is precisely what they are talking about.

Years ago, climate scientists offered an increase of 2 degrees Celsius (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) as the “safe” limit or ceiling for the long-term warming of the planet. We are now seeing dangerous effects worldwide, even as we approach a rise of only 1 degree Celsius. The evidence is mounting that scientists have underpredicted the threat. Perhaps this is another reason — along with our polarized politics and the effect of fossil-fuel lobbying — we have underreacted to the reality, now unfolding before our eyes, of dangerous climate change.

Naomi Oreskes is a professor of the history of science at Harvard and the author, with Erik M. Conway, of “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on January 4, 2015, on page SR2 of the New York edition with the headline: Playing Dumb on Climate Change.

Playing Dumb on Climate Change,
NYT,
3 JANUARY 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/opinion/sunday/
playing-dumb-on-climate-change.html