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No more fire in the kitchen: Cities are banning natural gas in homes to save the planet

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Elizabeth Weise
USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO – Fix global warming or cook dinner on a gas stove?

That’s the choice for people in 13 cities and one county in California that have enacted new zoning codes encouraging or requiring all-electric new construction.

The codes, most of them passed since June, are meant to keep builders from running natural gas lines to new homes and apartments, with an eye toward creating fewer legacy gas hookups as the nation shifts to carbon-neutral energy sources.

For proponents, it’s a change that must be made to fight climate change. For natural gas companies, it’s a threat to their existence. And for some cooks who love to prepare food with flame, it’s an unthinkable loss.

Natural gas is a fossil fuel, mostly methane, and produces 33% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas causing climate change.

“There’s no pathway to stabilizing the climate without phasing gas out of our homes and buildings. This is a must-do for the climate and a livable planet,” said Rachel Golden of the Sierra Club’s building electrification campaign.

These new building codes come as local governments work to speed the transition from natural gas and other fossil fuels and toward the use of electricity from renewables, said Robert Jackson, a professor of energy and the environment at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

“Every house, every high-rise that’s built with gas, may be in place for decades. We’re establishing infrastructure that may be in place for 50 years,” he said.

These “reach” or “stretch” building codes, as they are known, have so far all been passed in California. The first was in Berkeley in July, then more in Northern California and recently Santa Monica in Southern California. Other cities in Massachusetts, Oregon and Washington state are contemplating them, according to the Sierra Club.

Some of the cities ban natural gas hookups to new construction. Others offer builders incentives if they go all-electric, much the same as they might get to take up more space on a lot if a house is extra energy-efficient. In April, Sunnyvale, a town in Silicon Valley, changed its building code to offer a density bonus to all-electric developments.

No more gas stoves?

The building codes apply only to new construction beginning in 2020, so they aren’t an issue for anyone in an already-built home.

Probably the biggest stumbling block for most pondering an all-electric home is the prospect of not having a gas stove.

“It’s the only thing that people ever ask about,” said Bruce Nilles, who directs the building electrification program of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a Colorado-based think tank that focuses on energy and resource efficiency.

Roughly 35% of U.S. households have a gas stove, while 55%have electric, according to a 2017 kitchen audit by the NPD Group, a global information company based in Port Washington, New York.

For at least a quarter of Americans, it doesn’t matter either way. They already live in houses that are all-electric, and their numbers are rising, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s especially true in the Southeast, where close to 45% of homes are all-electric.

For the rest of the nation, natural gas is used to heat buildings and water, dry clothes and cook food, according to the EIA. That represents 17% of national natural gas usage.

But the number of natural gas customers is also rising. The American Gas Association, which represents more than 200 local energy companies, says an average of one new customer is added every minute.

“That’s exactly the wrong direction,” Nilles said.

States weigh climate change solutions

The nudge toward all-electric buildings is the type of shift Americans will begin to experience more and more in coming years. Last year, California’s governor signed an executive order directing state agencies to work toward making the entire state economy carbon-neutral by 2045.

California is not alone. New York, Hawaii, Colorado and Maine have economywide carbon-neutrality goals, and several more are debating them. More than 140 U.S. cities have committed to transitioning to carbon-neutral energy.

The natural gas industry rejects the notion that it should not be part of the nation’s energy future.

“The idea that denying access to natural gas in new homes is necessary to meet emissions reduction goals is false. In fact, denying access to natural gas could make meeting emissions goals harder and more expensive,” said American Gas Association President and CEO Karen Harbert.

The association calls the new zoning codes for new construction burdensome to consumers and to the economy. They also say it’s more expensive to run an all-electric home. A study by AGA released last year suggested that all-electric homes would pay $750 to $910 a year more for energy-related costs, as well as amortized appliance and upgrade costs.

But critics question AGA’s conclusions.

Amanda Myers, a policy analyst at Energy Innovation, a research nonprofit group focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, said AGA presumed high electricity rates because of unrealistically large increases in expected electricity use and made unusual assumptions for how any anticipated electric load growth might be met.

An analysis last year by the Rocky Mountain Institute found that in locations as diverse as Chicago, Houston and Providence, Rhode Island, all-electric new homes over a 15-year time frame could save residents as much as $260 a year compared with new homes with air conditioners powered by electricity and natural gas.

You’ll pry my cold, dead hands off my gas range

The selling point for getting away from natural gas may come from a type of electric range that, according to chefs, is just as good if not better than gas. As fundamentally attached as people might be to cooking with fire, induction stoves are making headway.

Long popular in Europe and increasingly trendy in the United States, induction cooktops are different from the kind of traditional electric range where coils become red-hot. Induction ranges use electromagnetic energy to directly heat pots and pans.

They are fast, energy-efficient and safe because there’s no open flame, and they are cool to the touch unless you’re a piece of metal.

As Reviewed.com puts it, they’re “gentle enough to melt butter and chocolate, but powerful enough to bring 48 ounces of water to a boil in under three minutes.”

The downsides are that induction cooktops are more expensive than traditional electric stoves, generally a third to half more. They also work only with pans with steel or iron bottoms.

Professional chefs say modern induction ranges are comparable to gas. The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, America’s preeminent cooking school, trains its chefs on both induction and gas stoves because they will encounter both types and must know how to use them.

“Some of the finest restaurants in Europe are often out in mountainous areas or places where there isn’t gas. They cook on induction and that works just fine,” said Mark Erickson, a certified master chef at the institute.

Regular electric stoves aren’t a deal-breaker either, said Erickson, who lives in a townhouse with one and cooks on it every night.

“If I were given the chance and if it were a choice of gas or electric, I would choose gas because it’s what I’m used to,” he said. “But in all honesty, it’s not the end of the world.”

There’s a hidden consequence of climate change: A deadly virus that’s killing key marine species

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By Scottie Andrew, CNN

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/11/us/climate-change-deadly-virus-trnd/index.html

Updated 11:02 AM ET, Mon November 11, 2019

Arctic ice faces trouble from above and below
Arctic ice faces trouble from above and below

Arctic ice faces trouble from above and below 04:56

(CNN)Climate change means melting ice and habitat loss for animals in the Arctic. But there’s an invisible side effect of warming temperatures and rising tides, and it’s killing key marine species.

Melting Arctic sea ice has opened new pathways for Arctic and sub-Arctic species to interact, and that contact has introduced a potentially deadly virus to mammals in the Northern Pacific Ocean, according to a new study in Scientific Reports.
Over 15 years, researchers identified two new channels linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans between Russia and Alaska. Animals who live there are interacting for the first time, creating a reservoir of the deadly pathogen Phocine distemper virus.
The virus, also called PDV, was first identified in European harbor seals, killing thousands in 1988 and again in 2002. It reemerged in 2004, but this time in northern sea otters in Alaska.
It was surprising that the disease jumped to a different species in a different ocean, said study author Tracey Goldstein, associate director of One Health Institute at UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. It’s what led scientists to believe that melting ice was to blame for the infection’s spread.
“Animal health and human health and environmental health are so linked, if one deteriorates then the rest do, too,” she told CNN.

Infection peaked when ice was at its lowest

'It's all quite devastating': Documenting the rapid loss of Arctic sea ice

‘It’s all quite devastating’: Documenting the rapid loss of Arctic sea ice
To evaluate the extent of the infection, researchers took nasal swabs and blood samples from more than 2,500 ice-dwelling seals, Steller sea lions and northern sea otters from Alaska to Russia living in its marginal seas and oceans.
Widespread exposure to the infection peaked twice, in 2003 and 2009. Both outbreaks were preceded by record-low sea ice, Goldstein said.
Ice is essential for marine mammals, she said. It’s where they breed, rest and give birth. When water temperatures warm, their food likely travels deeper into the ocean, so animals are traveling further to catch them, spreading the pathogen across large swaths of northern seas.
Animals can’t keep up with the rate of their rapidly changing environments, Goldstein said, and that makes them more susceptible to disease.

PDV has already impacted people

Goldstein compared PDV to measles in humans — both are highly contagious respiratory diseases that spreads easily through contact (though PDV doesn’t infect humans).
But it’s already indirectly impacted humans who rely on the animals. It’s harder for Alaskans to hunt and maintain their livelihood as seals and fish move further off-shore, she said.
Because the Arctic is so remote, it’s difficult to discern how many species have died from the virus since the start of the study, she said. Some, particularly European harbor seals, are more vulnerable than others — up to 50% of the harbor seal population died in the first two outbreaks, she said.
Outbreaks occur every five to 10 years, typically when ice is at its lowest. Sea ice cover in the Arctic hit its second-lowest level in 2019, according to NASA — and that could mean new paths opened up, linking animals in both oceans and increasing the likelihood of the virus’s reintroduction.
Eliminating the virus may be impossible, but humans can at least stall its spread, Goldstein said. Reducing the global carbon footprint can slow the effects of climate change and give animals a chance to catch up and adapt.

Vast animal-feed crops to satisfy our meat needs are destroying planet

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The meat industry

WWF report finds 60% of global biodiversity loss is down to meat-based diets which put huge strain on Earth’s resources

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Workers on tractors harvest soybeans in the deforested land of Campo Novo do Parecis, in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.
 Workers on tractors harvest soybeans in the deforested land of Campo Novo do Parecis, in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. Photograph: Maurilio Cheli/AP

The ongoing global appetite for meat is having a devastating impact on the environment driven by the production of crop-based feed for animals, a new report has warned.

The vast scale of growing crops such as soy to rear chickens, pigs and other animals puts an enormous strain on natural resources leading to the wide-scale loss of land and species, according to the study from the conservation charity WWF.

Intensive and industrial animal farming also results in less nutritious food, it reveals, highlighting that six intensively reared chickens today have the same amount of omega-3 as found in just one chicken in the 1970s.

The study entitled Appetite for Destruction launches on Thursday at the 2017 Extinction and Livestock Conference in London, in conjunction with Compassion in World Farming (CIFW), and warns of the vast amount of land needed to grow the crops used for animal feed and cites some of the world’s most vulnerable areas such as the Amazon, Congo Basin and the Himalayas.

The report and conference come against a backdrop of alarming revelations of industrial farming. Last week a Guardian/ITV investigation showed chicken factory staff in the UK changing crucial food safety information.

Protein-rich soy is now produced in such huge quantities that the average European consumes approximately 61kg each year, largely indirectly by eating animal products such as chicken, pork, salmon, cheese, milk and eggs.

In 2010, the British livestock industry needed an area the size of Yorkshire to produce the soy used in feed. But if global demand for meat grows as expected, the report says, soy production would need to increase by nearly 80% by 2050.

“The world is consuming more animal protein than it needs and this is having a devastating effect on wildlife,” said Duncan Williamson, WWF food policy manager. “A staggering 60% of global biodiversity loss is down to the food we eat. We know a lot of people are aware that a meat-based diet has an impact on water and land, as well as causing greenhouse gas emissions, but few know the biggest issue of all comes from the crop-based feed the animals eat.”

With 23bn chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks and guinea fowl on the planet – more than three per person – the biggest user of crop-based feed globally is poultry. The second largest, with 30% of the world’s feed in 2009, is the pig industry.

In the UK, pork is the second favourite meat after chicken, with each person eating on average 25kg a year in 2015 – nearly the whole recommended yearly intake for all meats. UK nutritional guidelines recommend 45-55g of protein per day, but the average UK consumption is 64-88g, of which 37% is meat and meat products.

Trump Takes Steps to Implement Withdrawal From Paris Climate Accord

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The Trump administration notified the United Nations Monday that it would withdraw the U.S. from the historic Paris climate agreement, starting a year-long process to leave the international pact to fight the climate crisis. The United States — the world’s largest historic greenhouse gas emitter — will become the only country outside the accord. Trump’s announcement of the withdrawal came on the first day possible under the agreement’s rules. From Middlebury, Vermont, we speak with Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org. “The decision of the United States to be the only country on Earth … unwilling to take part in a global attempt at a solution to the greatest crisis we’ve ever faced — there’s a lot to be ashamed of in the Trump years and a lot of terrible things that have happened — it’s pretty hard to top that,” says McKibben.

TRANSCRIPT

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The Trump administration has formally notified the United Nations that it will withdraw the U.S. from the historic Paris climate agreement, starting a year-long process to leave the international pact to fight the climate crisis. The U.S., the world’s largest historic greenhouse gas emitter, will become the only country outside of the agreement. The 2015 agreement aims to limit global temperature rise to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius, a target that would prevent the worst effects of catastrophic climate change. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the news Monday, tweeting, quote, “Today we begin the formal process of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. The U.S. is proud of our record as a world leader in reducing all emissions, fostering resilience, growing our economy, and ensuring energy for our citizens. Ours is a realistic and pragmatic model.”

The announcement comes as the effects of the climate crisis are already being felt around the world, from the wildfires raging in California to extreme drought in parts of Central America to a worsening monsoon season in South Asia. Last week, a new study published in Nature Communications warned that 300 million people are at risk of being displaced due to rising sea levels by 2050. According to the report, global sea levels are expected to rise between two to seven feet, and possibly more, wiping some coastal cities off the map.

AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. withdrawal from the climate accord was declared on the first day possible under the accord’s rules and will take a year to take effect, meaning the process will conclude the day after the 2020 presidential election.

Well, for more, we’re joined via Democracy Now! video stream by Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org. His latest book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? He’s joining us from Middlebury, Vermont, where he lives.

Bill, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you talk about the significance of the formal pulling out of the U.S. climate agreement, Pompeo and Trump announcing?

BILL McKIBBEN: Well, look, this has been coming for a year since Trump announced his initial decision. In some sense, it’s no surprise. Mike Pompeo is the congressman who took more money from the Koch brothers than any other member of Congress, which is not an easy sweepstakes to win. I mean, this is, in one sense, what was expected. In another sense, it’s deeply historic. When people look back, if they’re able to, and write the story of this time, the decision of the United States to be the only country on Earth — let’s be clear, the only country on Earth — unwilling to take part in a global attempt at a solution to the greatest crisis we’ve ever faced — there’s a lot to be ashamed of in the Trump years and a lot of terrible things that have happened — it’s pretty hard to top that.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Bill, you’ve said that the decision to withdraw is the greatest success of the, quote, “denial machine” that the fossil fuel industry launched 30 years ago. Could you elaborate on that?

BILL McKIBBEN: Sure, sure. We now know, from great investigative reporting, that the fossil fuel industry knew everything there was to know about climate change in the 1980s. Exxon was the biggest company on Earth. They had great scientists. Their product was carbon. Of course they were going to study it. And their scientists told them, with uncanny accuracy, what the temperature and the CO2 concentration would be in 2019. Understanding that this was a threat to the world, but also a threat to their business, they took the second more seriously than the first and began this decade-long process of climate — decades-long of climate denial and delay and obfuscation, setting in motion all these kind of fake think tanks and so on and so forth.

That’s what came to a head with this withdrawal from Paris. It was the ultimate conclusion of all that work at disinformation. From one point of view, it was extremely successful: The fossil fuel industry had its most profitable years in the last three decades. On the other hand, we’re now missing half the sea ice in the summer Arctic. The Great Barrier Reef is half-dead. You know, the oceans are 30% more acidic. California is on fire more weeks than not. We’re in deep, deep trouble. And the idea that we’re just going to put our hands over our eyes, over our ears or over our mouth at this point is about as depressing as it’s possible to get.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Bill, I wanted to ask you, in terms of the direct effects that people are feeling here of climate refugees, about — I wanted to ask you about the situation in Central America. The immigration battle has not paid much — few few people have paid attention to the ongoing crisis in Central America, the drought that has now been really affecting that region since about 2014, and it’s continued to get worse, to the point that the World Food — the U.N.’s World Food Program recently said that levels of food insecurity that have not been previously seen in the region exist there. You could argue that many of the people coming from Honduras, from Guatemala and from El Salvador, where the dry corridor of that region is, are, in effect, the first real climate refugees that we’re seeing coming into the United States.

BILL McKIBBEN: Juan, I’m so glad you brought that up. I mean, I got arrested at an immigration protest in August, just because I wanted to draw attention precisely to the link that you’re describing. If you go look at a map, Central America is one of the few places on the planet where there are big oceans on both sides of a narrow strip of land. The oceans are warming much faster than the land surface. That’s where most of the heat is going. And that means that those who are close bordered to them, especially on both sides, are dealing with some very powerful and freakish effects. The droughts are extraordinarily deep in the highlands of Honduras, Guatemala, and that’s one of the things that’s driving people north to the border, just as the huge drought in Syria a decade ago helped set the stage for the trauma, turmoil and refugees we’ve seen there.

Here’s how to put this in perspective. The U.N. estimates that we could see a billion climate refugees in the course of this century. And that’s a number that may have gone up in the last week or so. This very scary new study on sea level rise is one that everyone should be paying attention to. It’s not about, in this case, an increase in the rate at which the sea level is rising. It’s about a recalibration of how high most of the world’s coastal cities are. It turns out that the radar was — satellite data was misleading people, and many of these cities and regions are much lower to the ocean than people had thought. And when you look at the maps of where we’re going to be by 2050, they show things like almost all of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam underwater. That’s one of the most important rice-growing regions on the planet, if not the most — well, one of them, anyway. This is truly terrifying to look at those pictures and to realize just how fast this is coming now.

AMY GOODMAN: And then you have, with the mass protests against inequality in Chile, the Chilean president announcing he’s canceling COP, and Madrid now taking up the responsibility of the December U.N. climate summit. The significance of this, Bill McKibben?

BILL McKIBBEN: Well, you know, it was probably inevitable that Chile was going to cancel this, because, at some level, dealing with climate change is about dealing with justice and equity, and those may have been concepts that the Chilean government were not too eager to have people focusing on too much right now.

The U.N. process is going to limp forward, but, you know, it does it without the active participation of the U.S. — in fact, with the U.S. really trying to sabotage the process. We’re the world’s biggest economy. It’s pretty hard to ask China and India to take up the slack here to provide the leadership the U.S. should be providing. But, essentially, that’s what people are doing. To some degree, they’re living up to it. The Chinese are installing renewable energy at a breakneck pace. But we need — I mean, look, as you know, it’s not like the Paris climate accord was an amazing document. At best, it offered us the possibility of keeping enough momentum going to maybe begin to catch up to physics at some point. That momentum has been broken now by the Trump administration and by its handlers in the fossil fuel industry.

So now we’re in — you know, we’re in a place where we’re relying on civil society, on mass movements, to do what they can to reset the zeitgeist and to do it quickly. Thank heaven for the young people who have come forward in the last year. Thank heaven for everybody rallying behind them. We’re going to need a lot more of that in the year to come.

AMY GOODMAN: And we will be broadcasting, of course, from the U.N. climate summit in Madrid, as we do every year. Juan?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, Bill, I wanted to ask you about the response of corporate America, specifically the automobile makers, General Motors, Toyota and Fiat Chrysler. They’ve sided now with President Trump in his continuing battle with California over auto emission standards. Your take on that?

BILL McKIBBEN: It is shortsighted in the extreme. They’re playing the same game as everybody else, trying to get another year or two out of their business model, which at the moment is selling people ever bigger SUVs, and so they’ve been willing to side with the Trump administration to try and make sure we don’t really do anything about fuel economy. It’s obviously shortsighted. It’s obvious that they’re opening up the door even wider for the Europeans, for Tesla Motors, for all the people who are actually working on the next generation of mobility, not to mention the people who are working on bike paths and bus lanes.

But the problem is not that we won’t get there eventually, Juan. The problem is that this is a time test. Look, the scientists in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change a year ago, in their last report, pretty much gave us a deadline. They said that if we hadn’t made fundamental transformations in our energy economy by 2030, then our chances of meeting even the modest targets we set at Paris were essentially nil. That means we don’t have four-year presidential terms to waste. It means we don’t have five-year product development cycles to waste. It means everybody has to be going as hard as they can right now.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, corporate America is divided, Bill, and if you can talk about this? On the one hand, you have General Motors, Toyota, Fiat Chrysler siding with the Trump administration against California. But then you have this slew of other automakers, including Ford, Honda and Volkswagen, which have sided with California’s right to set pollution limits. Why this division?

BILL McKIBBEN: Well, it pretty much reflects who’s most scared of Trump and who’s furthest along in coming up with cars that can meet emission requirements. Look, all the automakers know better. They were all embarked on a course of lower emissions since the Obama administration. General Motors, Toyota, those people are just trying to suck up some more gravy for a few more years. And it’s a disgrace. But the same disgrace is happening in the utility industry. It’s happening in agribusiness. It’s happening everywhere where everyone is trying to maintain their business model just a little while longer. That just a little while longer are the years that will break the climate system of the planet.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s stick with California for a minute. On Sunday, Trump threatened to pull federal funding for the wildfires raging across California. In a Twitter exchange with Governor Newsom, Trump tweeted, “Every year, as the fire’s rage & California burns, it is the same thing-and then he comes to the Federal Government for $$$ help. No more. Get your act together Governor. You don’t see close to the level of burn in other states…” Governor Newsom responded, “You don’t believe in climate change. You are excused from this conversation,” Newsom said. Last year Trump suggested California’s forest floors should be cleaned, claiming Finland prevents fires by raking forest areas. So, your recent piece in The Guardian, Bill, is headlined “Has the climate crisis made California too dangerous to live in?” Your response to what’s happening? And what exactly do you mean?

BILL McKIBBEN: Well, first of all, don’t blame writers for headlines. The piece didn’t say that people needed to leave California. What it did was quote a remarkable story in the San Francisco Chronicle in the day that the fires were raging at their worst in Sonoma. And the piece in the Chronicle was just a straight-ahead news story, said that, you know, experts were now beginning to worry that areas of California had become too dangerous to inhabit. We’ve had one wildfire after another now, year after year after year, and they’ve gotten bigger and more dangerous. And the reason is pretty clear. It’s gotten so hot and so dry in California that it just turns to tinder. California has always had wildfire, but not like this. And there’s a study coming out today indicating that just the dryness alone is making these kinds of big combustible wildfires four or five times more likely around the world. One’s heart goes out so much to people who, year after year, have to live through this kind of fear, anxiety and tension, in a place where, you know, a generation ago, we still thought of California as the kind of ideal of ease and relaxation and chill. It’s not that anymore, at least not in the months every year when people are smelling the smoke in the air.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Bill McKibben, we want to thank you so much for being with us. Bill is co-founder of 350.org, his latest book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?, speaking to us from his home in Middlebury, Vermont.

And by the way, on Friday night, I will be one of the moderators of the first-ever Presidential Forum on Environmental Justice. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, also Tom Steyer and other candidates will be taking part in the forum at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg. Democracy Now! will be live-streaming and broadcasting the presidential town hall starting at 6 p.m. Eastern. Tune into democracynow.org.

When we come back, an undocumented mother from Honduras who’s recovering from stage IV oral cancer is fighting imminent deportation in Georgia. She’s been locked up in an immigration jail since being arrested for a minor traffic violation in August. We’ll speak to the person at the forefront of her fight, of the fight for her to be released. It’s her son, Yale Ph.D. student, DACA recipient. Stay with us.

Climate crisis: 11,000 scientists warn of ‘untold suffering’

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/05/climate-crisis-11000-scientists-warn-of-untold-suffering

Statement sets out ‘vital signs’ as indicators of magnitude of the climate emergency

A man uses a garden hose to try to save his home from wildfire in Granada Hills, California, on 11 October 2019.
 A man uses a garden hose to try to save his home from wildfire in Granada Hills, California, on 11 October 2019. Photograph: Michael Owen Baker/AP

The world’s people face “untold suffering due to the climate crisis” unless there are major transformations to global society, according to a stark warning from more than 11,000 scientists.

“We declare clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency,” it states. “To secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live. [This] entails major transformations in the ways our global society functions and interacts with natural ecosystems.”

There is no time to lose, the scientists say: “The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.”

The statement is published in the journal BioScience on the 40th anniversary of the first world climate conference, which was held in Geneva in 1979. The statement was a collaboration of dozens of scientists and endorsed by further 11,000 from 153 nations. The scientists say the urgent changes needed include ending population growth, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, halting forest destruction and slashing meat eating.

Prof William Ripple, of Oregon State University and the lead author of the statement, said he was driven to initiate it by the increase in extreme weather he was seeing. A key aim of the warning is to set out a full range of “vital sign” indicators of the causes and effects of climate breakdown, rather than only carbon emissions and surface temperature rise.

“A broader set of indicators should be monitored, including human population growth, meat consumption, tree-cover loss, energy consumption, fossil-fuel subsidies and annual economic losses to extreme weather events,” said co-author Thomas Newsome, of the University of Sydney.

Other “profoundly troubling signs from human activities” selected by the scientists include booming air passenger numbers and world GDP growth. “The climate crisis is closely linked to excessive consumption of the wealthy lifestyle,” they said.

As a result of these human activities, there are “especially disturbing” trends of increasing land and ocean temperatures, rising sea levels and extreme weather events, the scientists said: “Despite 40 years of global climate negotiations, with few exceptions, we have have largely failed to address this predicament. Especially worrisome are potential irreversible climate tipping points. These climate chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable.”

“We urge widespread use of the vital signs [to] allow policymakers and the public to understand the magnitude of the crisis, realign priorities and track progress,” the scientists said.

“You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to look at the graphs and know things are going wrong,” said Newsome. “But it is not too late.” The scientists identify some encouraging signs, including decreasing global birth rates, increasing solar and wind power and fossil fuel divestment. Rates of forest destruction in the Amazon had also been falling until a recent increase under new president Jair Bolsonaro.

They set out a series of urgently needed actions:

  • Use energy far more efficiently and apply strong carbon taxes to cut fossil fuel use
  • Stabilise global population – currently growing by 200,000 people a day – using ethical approaches such as longer education for girls
  • End the destruction of nature and restore forests and mangroves to absorb CO2
  • Eat mostly plants and less meat, and reduce food waste
  • Shift economic goals away from GDP growth

“The good news is that such transformative change, with social and economic justice for all, promises far greater human well-being than does business as usual,” the scientists said. The recent surge of concern was encouraging, they added, from the global school strikes to lawsuits against polluters and some nations and businesses starting to respond.

A warning of the dangers of pollution and a looming mass extinction of wildlife on Earth, also led by Ripple, was published in 2017. It was supported by more than 15,000 scientists and read out in parliaments from Canada to Israel. It came 25 years after the original “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” in 1992, which said: “A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided.”

Ripple said scientists have a moral obligation to issue warnings of catastrophic threats: “It is more important than ever that we speak out, based on evidence. It is time to go beyond just research and publishing, and to go directly to the citizens and policymakers.”

Who is holding up the war on global warming? You may be surprised

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BY RICHARD RICHELS, GARY YOHE AND HENRY JACOBY, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS — 11/02/19 06:00 PM EDT  830

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
Who is holding up the war on global warming? You may be surprised
© Getty Images

The good news is that the American public finally appears to accept that global warming is a problem. The bad news is that a substantial percentage of the public is unwilling to pay much to do anything about it. At first glance these may seem to be contradictory messages. But the public may be reacting to the initial symptoms of a warming planet rather than the dire consequences envisioned by the scientific community if global warming remains unchecked.

This explanation is supported by recent findings that a majority of Americans believe that the weather-related disasters we have been experiencing are becoming more severe and that the main culprit is a warmer global climate. But what the public foresees for the future is unclear. The outlook may be unambiguous to climatologists. But does the public buy into what the science shows about the implications of failure to reduce greenhouse emissions?

If the answer to this question is “no,” then it may help explain why a substantial share of the public gives such low priority to efforts to address longer-term climate change risk. Many people simply do not yet believe that continued procrastination will likely have catastrophic consequences for society and the environment. Perhaps a well-paid opposition has been more successful in sowing doubt than we had feared.

But in any event, if the adage “to see is to believe” plays a dominant role in shaping public attitudes, we are in trouble. Due to lags in the climate system, it will take decades for many of the effects of today’s emissions to play themselves out. By then, we will likely have committed the planet to much of the damage we fear the most.

Most troublesome is that, if the public is fixated on what they can see on a given day, season or year, they will be vulnerable to the machinations of those who see cold snaps as confirming that global warming is a ruse. They argue that short-term deviations are explained by the natural variability in local weather.

For example, a U.S. senator once brought a snowball on to the Senate floor as proof that climate change is a hoax. That year (2015) turned out to be the hottest in recorded history until that time.

So, what has the public seen to date? The government provides an exhaustive accounting of deaths, direct economic losses and other impacts for natural disasters whose frequency and intensity are associated with climate warming. Those disasters include heat waves, severe storms, hurricanes, droughts, floods, wildfires, famines and sea level rise. Accounts of such events are also increasingly reaching the public eye, either when people look out their kitchen windows or when they turn on the evening news. What is stunning is how fast damages have risen over the past four decades.

So what can we do? Much has been written about the need for better communication and better education. Those are no-brainers. But there is other work to be done, including addressing this fundamental question: What is driving current public attitudes about climate change? That’s where we need to focus more of our resources. Good natural science is critical, but so is research into the behavioral science behind the public’s attitudes.

Public opinion isn’t the only barrier to action. Lawmakers need to play a far greater role in combatting this existential challenge. They naturally carefully judge the mood of the public, with eyes on polls that reflect their electability. When a sufficient fraction of their constituents tilt towards action, they will be happy to jump to the front of the parade. Hopefully, when that finally happens it will not be too late.

‘The climate doesn’t need awards’: Greta Thunberg declines environmental prize

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The teen activist implored politicians and people in power to ‘listen to the best available science’ in an Instagram post

Agence France-Presse in Stockholm

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/29/greta-thunberg-declines-award-climate-crisis
Greta Thunberg, teen climate activist, was honoured by the Nordic Council with an environmental award which she declined.
 Greta Thunberg, teen climate activist, was honoured by the Nordic Council with an environmental award which she declined. Photograph: Canadian Press/Rex/Shutterstock

The Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has refused to accept an environmental award, saying the climate movement needed people in power to start to “listen” to “science” and not awards.

The young climate activist, who has rallied millions to her “Fridays for Future” movement, was honoured at a Stockholm ceremony held by the Nordic Council, a regional body for inter-parliamentary cooperation.

She had been nominated for her efforts by both Sweden and Norway and won the organisation’s annual environment prize.

But after it was announced, a representative for Thunberg told the audience that she would not accept the award or the prize sum of 350,000 Danish kroner (about $52,000 or €46,800), the TT news agency reported.

She addressed the decision in a post on Instagram from the United States.

“The climate movement does not need any more awards,” she wrote.

“What we need is for our politicians and the people in power start to listen to the current, best available science.”

While thanking the Nordic Council for the “huge honour”, she also criticised Nordic countries for not living up to their “great reputation” on climate issues.

“There is no lack of bragging about this. There is no lack of beautiful words. But when it comes to our actual emissions and our ecological footprints per capita … then it’s a whole other story,” Thunberg said.

Still only 16 years old, Thunberg rose to prominence after she started spending her Fridays outside Sweden’s parliament in August 2018, holding a sign reading “School strike for climate”.

Study casts doubt on carbon capture

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by Taylor Kubota, Stanford University

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Credit: CC0 Public Domain

https://phys.org/news/2019-10-carbon-capture.html

One proposed method for reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere—and reducing the risk of climate change—is to capture carbon from the air or prevent it from getting there in the first place. However, research from Mark Z. Jacobson at Stanford University, published in Energy and Environmental Science, suggests that carbon capture technologies can cause more harm than good.

Jacobson, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, examined public data from a coal with carbon capture  and a plant that removes carbon from the air directly. In both cases, electricity to run the carbon capture came from natural gas. He calculated the net CO2 reduction and total cost of the carbon capture process in each case, accounting for the electricity needed to run the carbon capture equipment, the combustion and upstream emissions resulting from that electricity, and, in the case of the coal plant, its upstream emissions. (Upstream emissions are emissions, including from leaks and combustion, from mining and transporting a fuel such as coal or natural gas.)

Common estimates of carbon capture technologies—which only look at the carbon captured from energy production at a fossil fuel plant itself and not upstream emissions—say carbon capture can remediate 85-90 percent of carbon emissions. Once Jacobson calculated all the emissions associated with these  that could contribute to global warming, he converted them to the equivalent amount of  in order to compare his data with the standard estimate. He found that in both cases the equipment captured the equivalent of only 10-11 percent of the emissions they produced, averaged over 20 years.

This research also looked at the social cost of carbon capture—including air pollution, potential health problems, economic costs and overall contributions to climate change—and concluded that those are always similar to or higher than operating a fossil fuel plant without carbon capture and higher than not capturing carbon from the air at all. Even when the capture equipment is powered by renewable electricity, Jacobson concluded that it is always better to use the renewable electricity instead to replace coal or natural gas electricity or to do nothing, from a social cost perspective.

Given this analysis, Jacobson argued that the best solution is to instead focus on renewable options, such as wind or solar, replacing fossil fuels.

Efficiency and upstream emissions

This research is based on data from two real carbon capture plants, which both run on natural gas. The first is a coal plant with carbon capture equipment. The second plant is not attached to any energy-producing counterpart. Instead, it pulls existing carbon dioxide from the air using a chemical process.

Jacobson examined several scenarios to determine the actual and possible efficiencies of these two kinds of plants, including what would happen if the carbon capture technologies were run with renewable electricity rather than natural gas, and if the same amount of  required to run the equipment were instead used to replace coal plant electricity.

While the standard estimate for the efficiency of carbon capture technologies is 85-90 percent, neither of these plants met that expectation. Even without accounting for upstream emissions, the equipment associated with the coal plant was only 55.4 percent efficient over 6 months, on average. With the upstream emissions included, Jacobson found that, on average over 20 years, the equipment captured only 10-11 percent of the total carbon dioxide equivalent emissions that it and the coal plant contributed. The air capture plant was also only 10-11 percent efficient, on average over 20 years, once Jacobson took into consideration its upstream emissions and the uncaptured and upstream emissions that came from operating the plant on natural gas.

Due to the high energy needs of carbon capture equipment, Jacobson concluded that the social cost of coal with carbon capture powered by natural gas was about 24 percent higher, over 20 years, than the coal without carbon capture. If the  at that same plant were replaced with wind power, the social cost would still exceed that of doing nothing. Only when wind replaced coal itself did social costs decrease.

For both types of plants this suggests that, even if carbon capture equipment is able to capture 100 percent of the carbon it is designed to offset, the cost of manufacturing and running the equipment plus the cost of the air pollution it continues to allow or increases makes it less efficient than using those same resources to create renewable energy plants replacing coal or gas directly.

“Not only does carbon capture hardly work at existing plants, but there’s no way it can actually improve to be better than replacing coal or gas with wind or solar directly,” said Jacobson. “The latter will always be better, no matter what, in terms of the social cost. You can’t just ignore health costs or climate costs.”

This study did not consider what happens to carbon dioxide after it is captured but Jacobson suggests that most applications today, which are for industrial use, result in additional leakage of carbon dioxide back into the air.

Focusing on renewables

People propose that carbon capture could be useful in the future, even after we have stopped burning , to lower atmospheric carbon levels. Even assuming these technologies run on renewables, Jacobson maintains that the smarter investment is in options that are currently disconnected from the fossil fuel industry, such as reforestation—a natural version of air capture—and other forms of climate change solutions focused on eliminating other sources of emissions and pollution. These include reducing biomass burning, and reducing halogen, nitrous oxide and methane emissions.

“There is a lot of reliance on carbon capture in theoretical modeling, and by focusing on that as even a possibility, that diverts resources away from real solutions,” said Jacobson. “It gives people hope that you can keep fossil fuel power plants alive. It delays action. In fact,  and direct air capture are always opportunity .”

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Renewables are a better investment than carbon capture for tackling climate change

Many Animals Can’t Adapt Fast Enough to Climate Change

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Climate change has thrown our beautifully balanced planet into chaos. As oceans and forests transform and ecosystems go into shock, perhaps a million species teeter on the edge of extinction. But there may still be hope for these organisms. Some will change their behaviors in response to soaring global temperatures; they might, say, reproduce earlier in the year, when it’s cooler. Others may even evolve to cope—perhaps by shrinking, because smaller frames lose heat more quickly.

For the moment, though, scientists have little idea how these adaptations may be playing out. A new paper in Nature Communications, coauthored by more than 60 researchers, aims to bring a measure of clarity. By sifting through 10,000 previous studies, the researchers found that the climatic chaos we’ve sowed may just be too intense. Some species seem to be adapting, yes, but they aren’t doing so fast enough. That spells, in a word, doom.

Matt Simon covers cannabis, robots, and climate science for WIRED.

To determine how a species is adjusting to a climate gone mad, you typically look at two things: morphology and phenology. Morphology refers to physiological changes, like the aforementioned shrinking effect; phenology has to do with the timing of life events such as breeding and migration. The bulk of the existing research concerns phenology.

The species in the new study skew avian, in large part because birds are relatively easy to observe. Researchers can set up nesting boxes, for instance, which allow them to log when adults lay eggs, when chicks hatch, how big the chicks are, and so on. And they can map how this is all changing as the climate warms.

By looking at these kinds of studies together, the authors of the Nature Communications paper found that the 17 bird species they examined seem to be shifting their phenology. “Birds in the Northern Hemisphere do show adaptive responses on average, though these adaptive responses are not sufficient in order for populations to persist in the long term,” says lead author Viktoriia Radchuk of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research.

In other words, the birds simply can’t keep up. By laying their eggs earlier, they’re encouraging their chicks to hatch when there are lots of insects to eat, which happens once temperatures rise in spring. But they’re not shifting quickly enough.

This isn’t a phenomenon exclusive to human-caused climate change. Life on Earth is so diverse because it’s so adaptable: Temperatures go up or down, and a species might move into a new habitat and evolve to become something different over time. But what we humans have unleashed on this planet is unparalleled. “We’re experiencing something on the order of 1,000 times faster change in temperature than what was seen in paleo times,” says Radchuk. “There are limits to these adaptive responses, and the lag is getting too big.”

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Many Animals Cant Adapt to Climate Change Fast Enough
The WIRED Guide to Climate Change

Which means now more than ever, we have to aggressively conserve habitats to help boost species. “I think the results of this paper really add an abundance of caution, that we shouldn’t hope that species will adapt to changing climate and changing habitats, that we don’t need to do anything,” says Mark Reynolds, lead scientist for the Nature Conservancy’s migratory bird program, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Indeed, this paper is a terrifying window into what might be happening to ecosystems at large. A bird doesn’t live in a vacuum—it preys and is preyed upon. An ecosystem is unfathomably complex, all sorts of creatures interacting, which makes these dynamics extremely difficult to study, especially when Earth’s climate is changing so quickly.

“It’s not an internet type of network, it’s not an electrical grid,” says Peter Roopnarine, curator of geology and paleontology at the California Academy of Sciences, who wasn’t involved in this work. “These are systems that have very specific structures and configurations to them. We have poor documentation of that.”

On a very basic level, if insects start breeding earlier in the year because the planet is warming, birds have to shift their life cycles. That means the birds’ predators do, too. “One phenological change in one species can have a ripple effect through the system,” says Roopnarine.

Another major consideration here is generation length. Species that more rapidly produce offspring tend to adapt better to change. That’s why bacteria can so quickly evolve resistance to antibiotics: They proliferate like mad, and individual bacteria with the lucky genetics to survive the drugs win out and pass those genes along. Something like an elephant, which may not reproduce until she’s 20 years into a 50-year lifespan, is working with way longer timescales and may struggle to adapt to change.

What’s so troubling about this study is that, by comparison to other animal families, birds are relatively adaptable in their phenology: They can tweak the timing of their migrations, for instance. A less mobile critter like a frog has no such luxury. But what these researchers have found is that flexibility is no longer enough for salvation.

Burger King Linked to a Whopping Million-Plus Acres of Deforestation

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https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/green-life/burger-king-linked-whopping-million-plus-acres-deforestation?fbclid=IwAR2b-tkgOmSerfZ9kVipZEQ942A2YXsdAo-g76_GKReuhQzOv1ynw62Av7A#.XWJ2pKN-kxZ.facebook

Deforestation in the Cerrado

Half of Brazil’s savanna is already gone, and big soy has taken over

ALL PHOTOS BY JIM WICKENS/ECOSTORM

DEFORESTATION IN THE CERRADO

BY JOANNA NIX | MAR 20 2017

You might think soy is just a green, harmless alternative for those trying to steer away from meat and toward a plant-based diet. Not exactly: Three-quarters of the world’s soy is used for animal feed, and about half of it is exported from South America—grown on deforested land that has been cleared away for massive soy fields.

“The soybeans connected to deforestation are making their way to the feed of the chickens, pigs, and cows that people all around the world eat,” says Glenn Hurowitz, CEO of the campaign group Mighty Earth. “Almost every international company that sells meat has some connection to deforestation in their supply chain.”

Enter Burger King.

Using satellite and supply-chain mapping tools, Mighty Earth connected the fast-food giant to a whopping million-plus acres of forest-clearing. In its new report, “The Ultimate Mystery Meat,” the global campaign organization identified two of Burger King’s biggest soy suppliers as the culprits: Cargill, the largest privately owned company in the United States, and Bunge, one of the biggest players in South America.

“The destruction of tropical forests causes something around one-fifth of the world’s total climate pollution, and deforestation also threatens some of the most endangered species in the world,” says Hurowitz.

Ground zero for deforested land is the Cerrado, a 500-million-acre savanna in Brazil. Home to 5 percent of the world’s biodiversity, including threatened species like the jaguar and the giant anteater, half of it has been destroyed—mostly for soy production. In contrast, the Amazon—the Cerrado’s more-famous neighbor to the north and the focus of decades of conservation efforts—has seen a quarter of its ecosystem chopped down.

The Cerrado areas in which Cargill operates experienced more than 320,000 acres of deforestation between 2011 to 2015, while those in which Bunge operates had more than 1.4 million acres cleared. Not all of the deforestation was driven by soy, but much of it was, according to the report.

Also affected were forests in Bolivia, where Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) are the major players. One of the most biodiverse countries in the world, Bolivia’s forests are home to thousands of plant and animal species, including three-toed sloths, macaws, and pink river dolphins. One report Mighty Earth cited places Bolivia’s deforestation rate at more than 700,000 acres per year from 2010 to 2015.

Bolivian woman left homeless by forest fires

WOMAN LEFT HOMELESS BY FOREST FIRES IN THE SANTA CRUZ REGION OF BOLIVIA

Agribusiness isn’t only tearing away the homes of sloths and birds—it’s also uprooting human lives. In 2014, more environmental defenders were killed in Brazil than in any other country, according to Global Witness. Mighty Earth visited the Ayoreo indigenous community in Bolivia, which has been increasingly surrounded by soy fields and forced to endure planes spraying pesticides just a few hundred yards from their village. In the report, one member of the community speaks of an incident when several children died from drinking water contaminated with pesticides.

It’s not just the soy traders that are to blame—Burger King carries much of the responsibility. The company has no serious plan to eliminate deforestation from its supply chain; the “Corporate Responsibility” page of its website doesn’t mention deforestation or human rights. Last year, when the Union of Concerned Scientists scored the country’s biggest beef sellers on their deforestation commitments and practices, it gave Burger King a zero—well below competitors like McDonald’s and Wendy’s.

“The tragedy of the continued deforestation for me is it’s entirely avoidable,” says Hurowitz. “There are about 500 million acres of degraded land across Latin America where agriculture can be extended without impacting native ecosystems.”

In fact, the Soy Moratorium, a voluntary zero-deforestation agreement enacted in 2006 and renewed indefinitely last year, brought clearcutting in the Amazon to historically low levels. (There was an uptick in the rate there last year.) But while deforestation in the Amazon plunged, agricultural production expanded. Mighty Earth and others point to the Soy Moratorium as a win-win for all stakeholders; they, as well as José Sarney Filho, Brazil’s minister of the environment, want to extend the moratorium to include the Cerrado.

Since the report’s release last month, Burger King, Cargill, and Bunge have been tight-lipped. They still have not come out in support of extending the Soy Moratorium to the Cerrado or beyond. The report cites Abiove—the Brazilian soy trade organization that represents Cargill, Bunge, and others—which said in October that “there is no crisis that justifies a [soy] moratorium in the Cerrado.”

A dead hawk surrounded by forest clearance in Brazil

DEAD HAWK SURROUNDED BY FOREST CLEARANCE IN BRAZIL

Hurowitz decries Cargill’s past declarations against deforestation as “green-washing.” The company signed the New York Declaration on Forests as part of the 2014 UN Climate Summit; the declaration called on the private sector to eliminate deforestation from the production of agricultural commodities like soy and palm oil by 2020. However, Cargill’s website describes a less ambitious goal, saying the company is working to cut its deforestation in half by 2020 and eliminate it by 2030. Hurowitz says 2030 is far too late; if Cargill chopped down hundreds of thousands of acres in South America over five years, think of how much it could do in 13. Cargill’s 2017 forest report is similarly disappointing; when detailing the company’s progress with regard to reducing its deforestation, it focuses on its support for Brazil’s Rural Environmental Registry, or CAR, a government agency that likely won’t begin enforcing its forest code until December.

Bunge, to its credit, seems to have slightly better policies than Cargill when it comes to deforestation—but it’s not clear whether those policies have had any positive impact on its practices. It has worked with the Nature Conservancy since 2013 to identify suitable lands for expansion, but has given itself until “between 2020 and 2025” to completely eliminate deforestation from its supply chain. Bunge’s website makes no mention of the Cerrado or any other South American forests besides the Amazon as places where it won’t expand.

Bunge says Mighty Earth’s report is misleading and overstates the potential impact that any of its actions alone would make on the soy industry and South America’s forests. “Deforestation is a complex problem related to global market demand, economic development, property rights, and a lack of sufficient compensation for land owners—from the marketplace or from governments—that would provide incentives to conserve the environment,” writes a representative. “Controlling it will require government, industry, farmers, local communities, and civil society to develop new systems. Bunge will continue to be an active participant in these efforts.”

Neither Cargill nor Burger King responded to requests for comment.

What can you do? Sign Mighty Earth’s petition, for starters. And then take a field trip.

“We really strongly encourage people to go to their local Burger King and talk to the manager about what’s happening, and ask them to contact corporate headquarters,” says Hurowitz.

In other words, instead of ordering a burger, order some change.