Bernie Sanders Announces Plan to Strangle the Booming Fossil Fuel Industry in America
By Michael Hausam, November 5, 2015
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, center, and Sen. Jeff Merkley (l) announce new climate legislation, Nov. 4, 2015, during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Photo: AP)
The just-introduced “Keep It In the Ground Act,” co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders, would halt new oil and gas exploration on federal lands and offshore waters. It also would terminate any existing leases that aren’t currently producing.
The bill is also sponsored by Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Kirstin Gillibrand (D-NY), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
In an announcement at the Capitol in D.C., Sanders said that the end result of the legislation would be to make sure that:
“over 90 percent of the potential carbon emissions from oil, gas and coal on our federal lands and federal waters (would stay) underground forever.”
The motivation for the bill is to combat climate change. In Sanders’ statement at the rally, he took a shot at his Republican opponents, whom he characterized as deniers:
“But somehow — somehow! — when it comes to climate change there are massive attacks on scientists who tell us the truth about climate change. Worry less about your campaign contributions, worry more about your children and grandchildren. The debate is over.”
Of course, this bill only addresses the supply side of fossil fuels and does nothing about addressing the demand for oil and gas – other than via necessarily driving up the costs of gasoline, electricity, and others that depend on their availability.
Stopping the availability of using federal lands for fossil fuels is a key priority for the anti-fossil fuels movement.
With roughly half of the remaining unexploited fossil fuels in the U.S. being on those lands, according to Grist, the jobs and fuels from this battle will make a huge difference for groups warning about global warming, as well as people who care about cheap fuel for economic growth and prosperity.
Study finds the warmer it gets, the more world economy hurts
By SETH BORENSTEIN, Oct. 21, 2015 3:55 PM EDT
FILE – In this June 3, 2013 file photo, Pakistani laborers bathe at a leaked water hydrant at the end of a day on the outskirts of Islamabad. With each degree, unrestrained global warming will singe the overall economies of three quarters of the nations in the world and widen the north-south gap between rich and poor countries, a new economic and science study found. Compared to what it would be without more global warming, the average income globally will shrivel 23 percent at the end of the century if heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution continues to grow at current trajectories, according to a study published Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature. (AP Photo/B.K. Bangash, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — With each upward degree, global warming will singe the economies of three-quarters of the world’s nations and widen the north-south gap between rich and poor countries, according to a new economic and science study.
Compared to what it would be without more global warming, the average global income will shrivel 23 percent at the end of the century if heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution continues to grow at its current trajectory, according to a study published Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature.
Some countries, like Russia, Mongolia and Canada, would see large economic benefits from global warming, the study projects. Most of Europe would do slightly better, the United States and China slightly worse. Essentially all of Africa, Asia, South America and the Middle East would be hurt dramatically, the economists found.
“What climate change is doing is basically devaluing all the real estate south of the United States and making the whole planet less productive,” said study co-author Solomon Hsiang, an economist and public policy professor at the University of California Berkeley. “Climate change is essentially a massive transfer of value from the hot parts of the world to the cooler parts of the world.”
“This is like taking from the poor and giving to the rich,” Hsiang said.
Lead author Marshall Burke of Stanford and Hsiang examined 50 years of economic data in 160 countries and even county-by-county data in the United States and found what Burke called “the goldilocks zone in global temperature at which humans are good at producing stuff” — an annual temperature of around 13 degrees Celsius or 55.4 degrees Fahrenheit, give or take a degree.
For countries colder than that economic sweet spot, every degree of warming heats up the economy and benefits. For the United States and other countries already at or above that temperature, every degree slows productivity, Burke and Hsiang said.
The 20th-century global average annual temperature is 57 degrees, or 13.9 degrees Celsius, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Last year — the hottest on record — was 58.24 degrees and this year is almost certain to break that record, according to NOAA. Burke and Hsiang use different population-weighted temperature figures than NOAA calculates.
But the U.S. economy is humming despite the heat. When asked how that can be so, Burke said there were many factors important for growth beyond just temperature. He said one year’s temperature and economic growth in one nation isn’t telling. Instead, he and Hsiang looked at more than 6,000 “country-years” to get a bigger picture.
Burke compared the effect of global warming on economies to a head wind on a cross-country airplane flight. The effects at any given moment are small and seemingly unnoticeable but they add up and slow you down.
While it is fairly obvious that unusual high temperatures hurt agriculture, past studies show hot days even reduce car production at U.S. factories, Burke said.
“The U.S. is really close to the global optimum,” Burke said, adding that as it warms, the U.S. will fall off that peak. The authors calculate a warmer U.S. in 2100 will have a gross domestic product per person that’s 36 percent lower than it would be if warming stopped about now.
But because the U.S. is now at that ultimate peak, there’s greater uncertainty in the study’s calculations than in places like India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Nigeria and Venezuela where it’s already hot and there’s more certainty about dramatic economic harm, Hsiang said.
The authors’ main figures are based on the premise that carbon dioxide emissions will continue to rise at the current trajectory. But countries across the world are pledging to control if not cut carbon pollution as international leaders prepare for a summit on climate change in Paris later this year. If the current pledges are kept, the warming cost in 2100 will drop from 23 percent to 15 percent, Burke said.
Gary Yohe, an environmental economist at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, praised the study as significant and thorough, saying Burke and Hsiang “use the most modern socio-economic scenarios.” But Richard Tol, an economist at the University of Sussex in England, dismissed the study as unworthy to be published in an economics journal, saying “the hypothesized relationship is without foundation.”
Other experts found good and bad points, with MIT’s John Reilly saying it will spark quite a debate among economists.
Scientists say widespread wildfires can make global warming worse
Washington Post, October 20, 2015 7:26pm
Firefighters assess whether they can protect a property during a 2014 wildfire in Soldotna, Alaska. south of Anchorage. Photo: Rashah McChesney, Associated Press
In not much more than a month, leaders from around the world will assemble in Paris in order to — hopefully — find a way to cap the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and bring them down to safe levels.
But there’s a problem. There are some greenhouse gas sources that these leaders can’t fully control — and in some cases, reasons to think that these sources may grow in the future. The point is being driven home this year by raging peat fires in Indonesia, which have already contributed more than a billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions to the atmosphere — as much as Japan produces in a year from fossil fuels.
Indonesia isn’t the only part of the world where fires — which in many areas are expected to be worsened by climate change — could provide a new net source of emissions to the atmosphere. Another region of major worry is the world’s boreal or northern forests, which store a gigantic amount of carbon in trees as well as soils and frozen permafrost layers beneath the surface. Permafrost is a repository of carbon that has accumulated over many thousands of years, but could now be released back to the atmosphere on a much shorter time scale.
Alaska’s dramatic wildfire season this year — where more than 5 million acres of largely black spruce forests burned — raised great concerns about how events such as this could make global warming worse. The fear here is of a sort of triple whammy — forests release the carbon stored in trees back to the atmosphere when they burn; the forests contain a deep upper soil layer that also burns off, releasing more carbon; and finally, beneath all of that is the carbon rich permafrost, which becomes exposed after fires and can then thaw and start to emit.
And now, a new study in Nature Climate Change reaffirms these concerns about the emissions of northern fires. The study, led by Ryan Kelly of the University of Illinois at Urbana, looked at a particular Alaskan region that has seen intensive burning of late — the remote Yukon Flats. The researchers confirmed that the recent fires have been releasing much of the carbon that has been stored up over hundreds of years.
In addition, the researchers also determined that over time, change in fires patterns were by far the largest factor in how much carbon the ecosystem stored.
The new research reaffirms that fire is a powerful determinant of how much carbon resides in land, rather than in the air, across our globe.
Letter received by email from the author, Lawrence (Larnie) Reid Fox
To the Benicia City Planning Commission and City Council:
By Larnie Fox, October 12, 2015
I’m writing to request that you oppose Valero’s Crude Oil by Rail project.
The Revised Draft EIR states that:
Potential train derailment would result in significant and unavoidable adverse effects to people and secondary effects to biological, cultural, and hydrological resources, and geology.
Impacts to air quality would be significant and unavoidable because the Project would contribute to an existing or projected air quality violation and result in a cumulatively considerable increase in ozone precursor emissions.
Impacts to greenhouse gas emissions would be significant and unavoidable because the Project would generate significant levels of GHG and conflict with plans adopted for reducing GHG emissions.
What more do you need to know?
There have been more crude-by-rail explosions and spills in the last two years than in the previous 40 years. The new crudes are demonstrably more hazardous than the crudes that have been processed in our community in the past, and have led to many horrendous accidents in other parts of North America. Accidents can and will happen.
The Revised Draft EIR states that Valero proposes to use non-jacketed Casualty Prevention Circular (CPC)-1232-compliant tank cars.
The National Transportation Safety Board has said that the CPC-1232 standard is only a minimal improvement over the older tank DOT-111s. NTSB officials say they are “not convinced that these modifications offer significant safety improvements.”
There is overwhelming and passionate opposition to the project here in Benicia. There is also strong opposition from hundreds of individuals who live up-rail and from all over our state, and also from government entities including the Sacramento Area Council of Governments and our state’s Attorney General.
If there is a spill or an explosion and fire, I for one, do not want my community to be culpable. We need to show the state and the world that we stand for safety and environmental responsibility, even if it cuts into corporate profits and tax revenues.
The bottom line is that fossil fuels are going away, sooner or later, and Benicia will need to adapt, sooner or later. We need to take a longer-term and wider-scope view of the issue. We may reap short-term local gains by approving this project, but the cost is unacceptably high. In doing so, we would be putting our Industrial Park at risk, and inconveniencing them with the long trains. This area should be the economic engine for the next 100 years. We would be ignoring the legitimate concerns of communities up-rail from us. We would be responsible for putting environmentally sensitive areas at risk. We would be contributing to global warming and thus sea level rise, which poses a clear threat to our community and the rest of the world as well. We would be contributing to decimation of the old-growth forests in Northern Canada.
It’s up to us to guard our own welfare, and also, as a City, to be responsible citizens of California, the USA and our fragile planet.
