Tag Archives: Fossil Fuels

Climate Change, Fossil fuels, Public Health

The Lancet: Fossil Fuels Are Killing Us… Quitting Them Can Save Us

Repost from Common Dreams
[Editor:  The Lancet is one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals.  Don’t miss the Lancet Climate Commission video, far below.  – RS]

The Lancet: Fossil Fuels Are Killing Us… Quitting Them Can Save Us

Comparing coal, oil, and gas addiction to the last generation’s effort to kick the tobacco habit, doctors say that quitting would be the best thing humanity can do for its long-term health
By Jon Queally, staff writer, June 23, 2015
Quitting fossil fuels is describe in the new report as a “medical necessity.” (Image: UNICEF)

The bad news is very bad, indeed. But first, the good news: “Responding to climate change could be the biggest global health opportunity of this century.”

That message is the silver lining contained in a comprehensive newly published report by The Lancet, the UK-based medical journal, which explores the complex intersection between global human health and climate change.

The wide-ranging and peer-reviewed report—titled Health and climate change: policy responses to protect public health—declares that the negative impacts of human-caused global warming have put at risk some of the world’s most impressive health gains over the last half century. What’s more, it says, continued use of fossil fuels is leading humanity to a future in which infectious disease patterns, air pollution, food insecurity and malnutrition, involuntary migration, displacement, and violent conflict will all be made worse.

“Climate change,” said commission co-chairman Dr. Anthony Costello, a pediatrician and director of the Global Health Institute at the University College of London, “has the potential to reverse the health gains from economic development that have been made in recent decades – not just through the direct effects on health from a changing and more unstable climate, but through indirect means such as increased migration and reduced social stability. Our analysis clearly shows that by tackling climate change we can also benefit health. Tackling climate change represents one of the greatest opportunities to benefit human health for generations to come.”

Put together by the newly formed Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change—described as a major new collaboration between international climate scientists and geographers, social and environmental scientists, biodiversity experts, engineers and energy policy experts, economists, political scientists and public policy experts, and health professionals—the report is the most up-to-date and comprehensive of its kind. Though many studies have been performed on the subject, the commission argues the “catastrophic risk to human health posed by climate change” has been grossly “underestimated” by others.

The four key findings of the report include:

1. The effects of climate change threaten to undermine the last half-century of gains in development and global health. The impacts are being felt today, and future projections represent an unacceptably high and potentially catastrophic risk to human health.

2. Tackling climate change could be the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century.

3. Achieving a decarbonized global economy and securing the public health benefits it offers is no longer primarily a technological or economic question – it is now a political one.

4. Climate change is fundamentally an issue of human health, and health professionals have a vital role to play in accelerating progress on mitigation and adaptation policies.

“Climate Change is a medical emergency,” said Dr. Hugh Montgomery, commission co-chair and director of the UCL Institute for Human Health and Performance. “It thus demands an emergency response.”

With rising global temperatures fueling increasing extreme weather events, crop failures, water scarcity, and other crises, Montgomery says the report is an attempt to make it clear that drastic and immediate actions should be taken. “Under such circumstances,” he said, “no doctor would consider a series of annual case discussions and aspirations adequate, yet this is exactly how the global response to climate change is proceeding.”

In a companion paper published alongside the larger report, commission members Helena Wang and Richard Horton explained why human health impacts are an important part of the larger argument regarding climate change:

When climate change is framed as a health issue, rather than purely as an environmental, economic, or technological challenge, it becomes clear that we are facing a predicament that strikes at the heart of humanity. Health puts a human face on what can sometimes seem to be a distant threat. By making the case for climate change as a health issue, we hope that the civilizational crisis we face will achieve greater public resonance. Public concerns about the health effects of climate change, such as undernutrition and food insecurity, have the potential to accelerate political action in ways that attention to carbon dioxide emissions alone do not.

Responding to the findings and warnings contained in the report, Mike Childs, the head of policy for the Friends of the Earth-UK, said the message from one of the world’s foremost institutions on public health has given powerful new evidence to the argument that “radical action is urgently required” to avoid further climate catastrophe.

“When health professionals shout ’emergency’,” Childs said, “politicians everywhere should listen.”

Going from diagnosis to prescribing a remedy, the doctors and scientists involved with the report—who equated the human health emergency of climate change with previous physician-led fights against tobacco use and HIV/AIDS—argue the crisis of anthropogenic climate change demands—as a matter of “medical necessity”—the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels (with special emphasis on coal) from the global energy mix. In addition, the authors say their data on global human health support a recommendation for an international carbon price.

“The health community has responded to many grave threats to health in the past,” said another commission co-chair, Professor Peng Gong of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. “It took on entrenched interests such as the tobacco industry and led the fight against HIV/AIDS.  Now is the time for us to lead the way in responding to another great threat to human and environmental health.”

The Commission argues that human health would vastly improve in a less-polluted world free from fossil fuels. “Virtually everything that you want to do to tackle climate change has health benefits,” said Dr. Costello. “We’re going to cut heart attacks, strokes, diabetes.”

The following video, produced by the Commission and released alongside the report, also explains:

As Wang and Horton conclude in their remarks, “Climate change is the defining challenge of our generation. Health professionals must mobilize now to address this challenge and protect the health and well-being of future generations.”

Clean energy, Fossil fuels, Public utilities, Renewable energy, Solar energy

Utilities using “divide and conquer” to turn back the clean-energy revolution

Repost from EarthTalk

The Making of an Energy Ghetto

Utilities efforts to turn back the clean-energy revolution would block low-income communities from realizing the benefits
By Denise Fairchild, 07/01/2015

The clean-energy revolution is underway, and so is the war against it. As with every other major economic transition, this battle will have winners and losers. For low-income communities of color, the stakes are especially high: Will they reap the benefits of the emerging clean-energy economy or will they be locked into energy ghettos?

smoke stackHere’s the context. Renewable energy — solar and wind — is quickly replacing fossil fuels as the preferred energy source. It is now cheaper than coal and most other fossil fuels. Innovative financing mechanisms have eliminated out-of-pocket costs for installing these technologies, enabling homeowners to save and even earn money from energy production. For example, “net metering” lets solar-powered households sell their surplus energy back to the grid for a profit — sending their electric meters spinning counterclockwise.

The utility sector is not happy with these developments, and it is fighting back. A recent Washington Post article cites utilities’ efforts to influence legislators, state public service commissions and — of particular concern — minority organizations. They want to eliminate net metering and assess households with solar-power systems a monthly surcharge to offset the utilities’ sunk capital investments and maintenance costs. And they have convinced some minority organizations that, without the surcharge, the poor will pay more through rate hikes as clean-energy and net-metering schemes benefit only well-to-do families.

This is a specious argument with potentially dangerous and unfortunate consequences, particularly for low-income residents. Eliminating net metering or placing a surcharge on households that migrate off the grid would foster a two-tiered energy society. These steps would render solar power unaffordable for low-income households, locking in historical racial and class hierarchies. The problems are analogous to the forces that created and sustained central-city ghettos.

Specifically, the surcharges are a form of redlining that limits or otherwise makes community infrastructure investments prohibitively expensive and fosters infrastructure obsolescence. This is similar to the benign neglect and the discriminatory practices that created urban ghettos of the mid-20th century.

The deterioration and blight that afflicts ghettos results principally from the lack of public and private investments needed to maintain, modernize and develop basic infrastructure, such as houses, roads, water and sewer lines. Our energy infrastructure — the “grid” — remains similarly neglected. National investments in local distribution peaked in 2006 and have declined to levels not seen since1991, according to a 2013 report by the American Association of Civil Engineers.

While the utility industry suggests that the surcharge it is seeking would prevent grid disinvestment, the reality is that revenue from such a fee would amount to but a trickle of what’s needed to build a modern, resilient energy infrastructure. Public-housing residents in New York City know about resilient energy infrastructure — or, rather, the lack of it. After Superstorm Sandy, some of the city’s most vulnerable people were off the grid for weeks with no alternative source of power.

Net metering surcharges are also akin to restrictive covenants, which legally prohibited certain races from the benefits of living in American suburbs, locking African-Americans and other ethnic groups into urban ghettos. Surcharges similarly lock the poor and people of color out of the emerging clean-energy future, including not only cleaner, cheaper and newer energy options but also the “green” jobs that these new industries are creating.

Finally, imposing surcharges or eliminating net metering would solidify and accelerate wealth disparities. Net-metering policies generate wealth by turning property owners and communities into energy producers, offering a rare opportunity for residents of low-income communities to build personal wealth. Surcharges will only block poor families from owning their own energy assets.

We need to rethink grid investments, but not at the expense of a clean-energy future. The clean-energy transition is as profound and disruptive to the status quo as the changes in the music and telecommunications industries. And it’s exciting: It can strengthen our energy, economic and health security. That’s a vision that minority communities fully support — and our leaders should too.

Clean energy, Fossil fuels, Renewable energy

Study shows record year for renewable power

Repost from U.S. News & World Report

Renewable energy shows record growth in power sector

By KARL RITTER, Associated Press, June 17, 2015 | 6:07 p.m. EDT
The Associated Press
This May 6, 2013 file photo shows a wind turbine farm near Glenrock, Wyo. The growth of renewable energy outpaced that of fossil fuels in the electricity sector last year, with a record 135 gigawatts of capacity added from wind, solar, hydropower and other natural sources, a new study shows. The annual report released early Thursday, June 18, 2015 in Europe by Paris-based REN21, a non-profit group that promotes renewable energy, underscored how China, the world’s top consumer of coal, has become a global leader in clean energy, too. (AP Photo/Matt Young, File)

STOCKHOLM (AP) — The growth of renewable energy outpaced that of fossil fuels in the electricity sector last year, with a record 135 gigawatts of capacity added from wind, solar, hydropower and other natural sources, a new study shows.

That’s more than the generating capacity of all nuclear reactors in the United States and slightly less than Germany’s installed capacity from all power sources.

The annual report released early Thursday in Europe by Paris-based REN21, a nonprofit group that promotes renewable energy, underscored how China, the world’s top consumer of coal, has become a global leader in clean energy, too.

It also highlighted that while renewables now account for 28 percent of the world’s electricity-generating capacity, they still account for only a tiny share of how we heat and cool buildings and fuel our means of transportation.

“The share of renewables in the power sector will continue to grow. We see that already, especially in emerging economies,” said Christine Lins, executive secretary of REN21. “But we need attention to the heating-cooling sector and transport.”

Renewable energy’s share in all forms of energy consumption — currently about 10 percent — will have to increase dramatically to fulfill the vision that President Barack Obama and other leaders of the Group of Seven wealthy economies endorsed last week. To fight climate change, they called for deep cuts in heat-trapping carbon emissions and all but eliminating them by the end of the century.

Meanwhile, global energy production must surge to meet the demands of developing economies and a growing world population. The fossil fuel industry and many energy experts say that can’t happen without fossil fuels, even in the electricity sector, where coal remains the top fuel.

“Renewables will grow but that doesn’t mean coal is going away,” said Benjamin Sporton, head of the World Coal Association.

Sporton said India is commissioning 20GW of coal-fired power generation every year. “And they have a further 118GW under construction or approved,” he added.

Supporters of renewable energy say the world is already “decoupling” carbon emissions from economic growth, pointing to preliminary data from the International Energy Agency showing that carbon emissions from the energy sector didn’t rise last year even though the global economy grew by 3 percent.

However, earlier this week the IEA said that, among other measures, investments in renewables need to increase from $270 billion last year to $400 billion in 2030 to support a transition to a low-carbon economy.

Paolo Frankl, the head of IEA’s Renewable Energy Division, said REN21’s figures matched research by his own agency, confirming a clear upward trend in renewables.

The REN21 report said renewables accounted for almost 60 percent of the global power capacity added in 2014. Wind power made the biggest jump among the renewables in 2014, with 51GW of new capacity, almost half of it in China.

“This shows that countries are turning towards clean energy to meet their energy needs, rather than fossil fuels that are driving climate change,” said Jake Schmidt of the Natural Resource Defense Council, a U.S. environmental advocacy group.

Solar power also expanded, but from a low level; it accounts for only 1 percent of global electricity production.

Geothermal power added just 700MW of capacity, half of it in Kenya. Other renewable sources, such as ocean energy from tidal forces, are not yet having any significant impact.

In heating and cooling of buildings and industry, which accounts for about half of global energy consumption, there was little change from the year before, with renewables representing about 8 percent, mostly biomass.

Canadian regulation, Fossil fuels, G7, United Nations

Canada commits to G7 plan to end use of fossil fuels

Repost rom the Globe and Mail, Toronto

Canada commits to G7 plan to end use of fossil fuels

‎Steven Chase, KRÜN, Germany, Jun. 09, 2015 1:16AM EDT

Canada has joined other Group of Seven leaders in pledging to stop burning fossil fuels by the end of the century, but Canadian officials are playing down the promise as an “aspirational” target and Stephen Harper says it will only be reached through advances in technology.

In their end-of-meeting statement, G7 leaders called for an end to fossil-fuel use by the global economy by 2100 as well as cuts to greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 that lower them as much as 70 per cent from 2010 levels.

The G7 statement represents a watered-down goal from what German Chancellor Angela Merkel as host of the‎ summit had sought. Ms. Merkel had been pushing for a commitment to a low-carbon economy, or relatively light use of fossil fuels, by 2050.

A Western diplomat said European countries in the G7 went into the meeting looking for stronger language about moving to a global low-carbon economy, and it was Canada, a net exporter of energy, along with Japan, who wanted to push back the stated timelines for that ambition. In the end, one diplomat noted, the G7’s final communiqué, which calls for decarbonisation of the global economy “over the course of this century,” allows each country to put a different interpretation on whether that would happen nearer to 2050 or 2100. But the notion of decarbonisation, at least, was agreed upon.

Lutz Weischer, the team leader for international climate policy at Germanwatch, a non-government organization that advocates sustainable development, said, ultimately, Canada didn’t want to be seen as “a one-country minority.”

The Prime Minister’s Office denied that Canada had been trying behind the scene to soften language and commitments on fighting climate change. “There was a consensus and Canada supported that outcome,” PMO spokesman Stephen Lecce said.

By having the G7 leaders present a united front on climate, Ms. Merkel did achieve her goal to lay the groundwork for an international agreement on climate, to be discussed in Paris in December.

“Mindful of this goal … we emphasize that deep cuts in global greenhouse-gas emissions are required with a decarbonisation of the global economy over the course of this century,” the leaders of the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Japan, Italy and Canada said in a communiqué.

G7 member countries agreed to a goal of limiting the increase in global temperature to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

For Mr. Harper, a politician from petroleum-rich Alberta, the pledge comes as a surprise, since it amounts to slapping to an expiry sticker on one of Canada’s major economic drivers, including the oil sands. But these commitments impose no firm obligations on Mr. Harper’s government in the short term and he said results will be achieved through technology, not economic sacrifice.

“I don’t think we should fool ourselves. Nobody is going to start to shutdown their industries or turn off the lights,” Mr. Harper told reporters after the G7 summit wrapped up in Germany’s Bavarian Alps. “To achieve these kinds of milestones over the decades to come will require serious technological transformation,” he said.

A senior Canadian government official tried to allay the impression that Mr. Harper had written off the oil patch, calling the G7 statement an “aspirational target” and repeating the Prime Minister’s comments that it’s up to technology to save the day.

In the oil sands, scores of companies have abandoned expansion projects in response to the sharp drop in commodity prices.

But others are pushing ahead with plans to substantially boost production for decades to come, confident that new technologies will offset more stringent environmental controls, should they be imposed on the sector.

They include Suncor Energy Inc., which is building a $13.5-billion oil sands mine it says will pump 180,000 barrels a day for 50 years, starting in 2017. Imperial Oil Ltd., a unit of U.S. oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp., plans to more than double output from an existing mine and says it could add some 4.7 billion barrels of new resource to its Alberta reserves by 2030.

“The challenge we all face is how to reduce [greenhouse-gas] emissions while global demand for energy is increasing and we transition to lower carbon energy over the next several decades,” Tim McMillan, president and chief executive of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said in a statement. “While it is impossible to tie technological breakthroughs to a timetable, our industry is focused on technological innovation and have already reduced our GHG emissions per barrel by about 30 per cent since 1990.”

Mr. Harper has long resisted ambitious action on climate change His government, for instance, promised to cut carbon emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020. But last fall, the federal government’s commissioner of the environment warned there’s growing evidence “the target will be missed.”

David Mc‎Laughlin, the former head of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, a federal environmental agency, said ‎the commitment to phase out fossil fuels is so far off it imposes no burden of responsibility on the Harper government. The Conservatives have not made sufficient investment in technological research to generate the breakthroughs that will be needed to move beyond fossil fuels, he said.

With reports from Jeff Lewis in Calgary and Campbell Clark in Ottawa