Repost from NPR Science Friday [Editor: In this 21-minute audio report, Science Friday host Ira Flatow interviews David Biello, Editor, Environment & Energy, Scientific American; Kate Ricke, Fellow, Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford University; and Robert Stavins, Professor, Environmental Economics & Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, Harvard Kennedy School. After you listen, CHECK OUT THE EXCELLENT links at bottom of this story. – RS]
Climate Deal or Not, Fight Against Global Warming Has Begun
Ira Flatow, December 5, 2014
The United Nations climate meetings began this week in Peru, a dress rehearsal of sorts for treaty talks in Paris next year. But whether world leaders forge a deal or not, Scientific American‘s David Biello and environmental economist Robert Stavins say the fight against climate change has already begun—at the state and local level, and in the private sector. Last year, for example, new solar plants outpaced coal installations in the U.S., and carbon-trading schemes across state and national borders have already begun.
Produced by Christopher Intagliata, Senior Producer
Guests
David Biello
Editor, Environment & Energy
Scientific American
New York, New York
Kate Ricke
Fellow, Carnegie Institution for Science
Stanford University
Stanford, California
Robert Stavins
Professor, Environmental Economics
Director, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements
Harvard Kennedy School
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Action must be taken to reduce the hazards from railroad shipments of Bakken oil
By Carolyn Heising, November 15, 2014
(Photo: CANADIAN PRESS )
Now is the time to ask: Is the growing practice of using trains to carry highly-flammable crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken shale field through communities in Iowa safe and even necessary?
Is it free of the hazards that led to the railroad accident in Quebec last year that killed 47 people and destroyed half of the town of Lac-Megantic? Or is it adding to the stress on the rail system?
Iowa is one of a number of states that have become a corridor for the shipment of Bakken crude over the past three years. Canadian Pacific Railway ships heavy loads of oil south through five eastern Iowa counties. BNSF Railway ships crude through four western Iowa counties. The oil is transported to refineries on the Gulf Coast or to pipeline connections.
No question about it, U.S. oil production is booming. The shale revolution is the dominant economic and geopolitical event of the past decade. Its effects have been transformative.
The United States is on the verge of becoming the world’s leading oil producer. OPEC is no longer the threat it once was. The growth in the U.S. energy industry has more than doubled in the past 10 years and is now worth about $1.2 trillion in gross product each year, contributing about 30 percent of the job growth for the nation, according to a study by the Perryman Group.
And the oil boom is likely to continue unless a catastrophic event brings it to a halt.
One reason environmental groups seem relatively calm about railroad shipment of crude oil is that they know what a minor event it is amid the chaos of fossil-fuel production and the dangerous and destabilizing chaos of climate change. A big part of the problem is the paradoxically positive economic effect of shale-oil production, which is loading the atmosphere with an enormous amount of global-warming carbon dioxide and methane.
What’s the answer?
Long-term we need to reduce the amount of oil we use in transportation by shifting to electric cars with batteries powered by renewable energy sources and nuclear power. Right now, action must be taken to reduce the hazards from railroad shipments of Bakken oil, which is much more flammable than conventional crude oil.
Freight railroads have gone from being a relic of the past to being a key mode of transport for oil supplies. Currently about two-thirds of North Dakota’s Bakken oil production is transported by rail. And more than 10 percent of the nation’s total oil production travels by rail.
In the last quarter of 2013, more than 71 million barrels of crude oil were shipped by rail, more than 10 times the volume of oil shipped in 2008. Over the past six months, there have been at least 10 large crude oil spills in the United States and Canada because of railroad accidents.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has responded by proposing speed limits along with a system for classifying the oil and new safety design standards for rail tanker cars.
The railroads say there have been relatively few rail accidents and not much loss of oil, considering the huge quantities of oil being shipped around the country. However, oil companies — which own the oil rail cars — are shipping much of the crude in outdated tank cars called DOT-111s that are vulnerable to puncture in a derailment.
The trains have captured the attention of local emergency responders by the amount of oil they carry — 100-plus tanker cars carrying up to 30,000 gallons of highly flammable fuel are not uncommon. In New Jersey, a key rail route, the trains pass within a few feet of homes and schools in highly populated areas.
Those who believe that slower train speeds alone are the answer should think again. A train hauling Bakken crude derailed in downtown Lynchburg, Va., a bustling city of 75,000 people. Three tanker cars tumbled into the James River. One of the tanker cars ruptured, spilling 30,000 gallons of crude.
Fortunately, no one was killed or injured. But local fire officials, who are accustomed to dealing with oil accidents on a much smaller scale, said the train was traveling within the speed limit. After the Quebec disaster, major rail companies agreed to reduce the maximum speed of oil trains to 40 miles per hour when they are within 10 miles of a major city. Lynchburg set its own speed limit of 25 mph. The train was going slower than 25 mph when it derailed.
Because a lot is riding on rail safety, oil companies should consider what other industries that use trains to haul hazardous cargoes have done to prevent accidents. For example, the nuclear industry uses specially-built freight cars to transport used nuclear-fuel assemblies from one nuclear plant to another. Since the 1960s, there have been thousands of trips involving the rail transport of nuclear waste in the United States, without a single serious accident.
That’s a stellar safety record which bodes well for the rail shipment of nuclear waste to a deep-geologic repository — and nuclear power’s increased use for electricity production.
Admittedly, the number of oil trains and the amount of hazardous cargo they carry is far greater than it is for nuclear companies and most other industries. But if oil companies continue to use puncture-prone tanker cars to haul highly-flammable Bakken crude in 100-car trains traveling at dangerous speeds, the ultimate consequences could be dire, and we will wind up asking ourselves why something more wasn’t done to prevent it.
THE AUTHOR:
CAROLYN D. HEISING, Ph.D., is a professor of industrial, mechanical and nuclear engineering at Iowa State University. Contact: cheising@iastate.edu.
There were a few wins for the climate movement on Tuesday night. And, alas, a greater number of losses. Here are results from a handful of the most interesting races with the most hawkiest candidates.
Winners:
Gary Peters | The Henry Ford
Gary Peters, won Michigan Senate race
Gary Peters, a Democrat who’s served in the U.S. House for the past six years, won the open Michigan Senate seat in part by emphasizing the issue of climate change. “Michigan is on the front lines of climate change with our Great Lakes and economic system,” Peters told The Washington Post this spring. “This is something elected officials should be talking about — we have to be concerned about it.” Peters also fought the Koch brothers when one of their companies dumped huge piles of filthy petcoke, or tar-sands residue, along the Detroit River; he’s credited with helping to get the piles removed.
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Brian Schatz | Schatz for Hawaii
Brian Schatz, won Hawaii Senate race
Democrat Brian Schatz was appointed to the Senate in 2012 to take the place of deceased Sen. Daniel Inouye, and in Tuesday’s special election the voters gave him the seat for another two years. While many Senate Dems say the right things and take the right votes on climate change, Schatz has emerged as a real leader on the issue. In March, he co-organized an all-night climate talkathon on the Senate floor, to raise the issue’s profile and get his fellow senators more engaged. And he wants to get average Americans more riled up about climate change too: “We need more passionate enthusiasm and engagement from the public,” he told Grist earlier this year.
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Jeanne Shaheen | Mark Nozell
Jeanne Shaheen, won New Hampshire Senate race
Democrat Jeanne Shaheen beat back carpetbagger and climate flip-flopper Scott Brown to win a second Senate term. She’s repeatedly spoken out about the need for climate action, and has cosponsored a bill that would create a national renewable energy standard. “Climate change is very real, and here in New Hampshire we are already seeing consequences,” she said earlier this year. She’s also gotten props from greens for tirelessly pushing energy efficiency, specifically an efficiency bill she’s cosponsored with Republican Rob Portman.
Losers
Rick Weiland | Rickweiland.com
Rick Weiland, lost South Dakota Senate race
Democrat Rick Weiland never had much of a chance in conservative South Dakota, where he was up against former Gov. Mike Rounds (R). But he put up a good fight. And unlike other Democrats running in red states, Weiland offered an aggressively green agenda. As Ben Adler reported last week, Weiland called for a carbon price, opposed the Keystone XL pipeline, and argued that we need campaign finance reform to tamp down the influence of Big Oil and other polluters on our elections.
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Mark Udall | Mark Udall
Mark Udall, lost Colorado Senate race
After serving one term in the Senate, Democrat Mark Udall, a climate hawk, got beat by Republican Rep. Cory Gardner, a climate wobbler. As Ben Adler noted earlier this year, Udall “unequivocally supports efforts to address climate change, and he’s pushing to renew tax credits for wind energy.” At the same time, “he also backs his state’s fossil fuel industries, including the booming fracking sector.” That carefully calibrated moderation — and more than $12 million of spending by green groups — didn’t help him keep his seat.
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Shenna Bellows
Shenna Bellows, lost Maine Senate race
Democrat Shenna Bellows waged an unsuccessful long-shot campaign against popular incumbent Susan Collins, arguably the most moderate Republican in the Senate. Even the mainstream environmental groups backed Collins, who has called for climate action and in 2010 sponsored a cap-and-dividend bill. But Bellows was clearly the greener candidate, which is why she got the backing of the Climate Hawks Vote PAC. As the PAC explained in its endorsement, “She will seek limits on carbon emissions. She opposes the Keystone XL pipeline. And — unlike Collins — she’s taken a firm stand [against] the proposed Portland Montreal Pipeline Reversal, a plan to re-engineer an existing pipeline to carry carbon-intensive tar sands from Canada to Portland, Maine and then to the global marketplace.”
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Paul Clements | Paul Clements for Congress
Paul Clements, lost House race in Michigan’s 6th district
“Climate change is the greatest threat to Michigan and to the world in the 21st century,” said Paul Clements, the Democrat who challenged Rep. Fred Upton. Clements campaigned on creating clean energy jobs. “Clements is a bona fide climate hawk,” David Roberts wrote last week — and, indeed, he won an endorsement from the Climate Hawks Vote PAC. Upton, chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, used to say sane things about climate change, then turned tail after the Tea Party rose up. Starting late last month, it looked like Clements might pose a real threat, but ultimately the voters sent Upton back to the House, where he’ll keep on serving the interests of Big Fossil Fuels.
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Charlie Crist | Kelly Walker
Charlie Crist, lost Florida governor’s race
Back when Charlie Crist was the Republican governor of Florida, from 2007-2010, he was quite good on climate change and energy issues. That, among other things, meant he was too liberal for the Republican Party; he left to become an Independent, then a Democrat. He became even more outspoken on climate change as he mounted a challenge this year against incumbent Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who’s been terrible on enviromental issues. But even though climate change poses a particularly huge threat to Florida, that didn’t sway enough voters to Crist’s side; Scott squeaked through with a reelection win.
U.N. Panel Issues Its Starkest Warning Yet on Global Warming
By JUSTIN GILLIS, NOV. 2, 2014
Machines digging for brown coal in front of a power plant near Grevenbroich, Germany, in April. Credit Martin Meissner/Associated Press
COPENHAGEN — The gathering risks of climate change are so profound that they could stall or even reverse generations of progress against poverty and hunger if greenhouse emissions continue at a runaway pace, according to a major new United Nations report.
Despite growing efforts in many countries to tackle the problem, the global situation is becoming more acute as developing countries join the West in burning huge amounts of fossil fuels, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said here on Sunday.
Failure to reduce emissions, the group of scientists and other experts found, could threaten society with food shortages, refugee crises, the flooding of major cities and entire island nations, mass extinction of plants and animals, and a climate so drastically altered it might become dangerous for people to work or play outside during the hottest times of the year.
“Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems,” the report found.
In the starkest language it has ever used, the expert panel made clear how far society remains from having any serious policy to limit global warming.
Doing so would require leaving the vast majority of the world’s reserves of fossil fuels in the ground or, alternatively, developing methods to capture and bury the emissions resulting from their use, the group said.
If governments are to meet their own stated goal of limiting the warming of the planet to no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius, above the preindustrial level, they must restrict emissions from additional fossil-fuel burning to about 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide, the panel said. At current growth rates, that budget is likely to be exhausted in something like 30 years, possibly less.
Yet energy companies have booked coal and petroleum reserves equal to several times that amount, and they are spending some $600 billion a year to find more. Utilities and oil companies continue to build coal-fired power plants and refineries, and governments are spending another $600 billion or so directly subsidizing the consumption of fossil fuels.
By contrast, the report found, less than $400 billion a year is being spent around the world to reduce emissions or otherwise cope with climate change. That is a small fraction of the revenue spent on fossil fuels — it is less, for example, than the revenue of a single American oil company, ExxonMobil.
The new report comes just a month before international delegates convene in Lima, Peru, to devise a new global agreement to limit emissions, and it makes clear the urgency of their task.
Appearing Sunday morning at a news conference in Copenhagen to unveil the report, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, appealed for strong action in Lima.
“Science has spoken. There is no ambiguity in their message,” Mr. Ban said. “Leaders must act. Time is not on our side.”
Yet there has been no sign that national leaders are willing to discuss allocating the trillion-ton emissions budget among countries, an approach that would confront the problem head-on, but also raise deep questions of fairness. To the contrary, they are moving toward a relatively weak agreement that would essentially let each country decide for itself how much effort to put into limiting global warming, and even that document would not take effect until 2020.
“If they choose not to talk about the carbon budget, they’re choosing not to address the problem of climate change,” said Myles R. Allen, a climate scientist at Oxford University in Britain who helped write the new report. “They might as well not bother to turn up for these meetings.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a scientific body appointed by the world’s governments to advise them on the causes and effects of global warming, and potential solutions. The group, along with Al Gore, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for its efforts to call attention to the climate crisis.
The new report is a 175-page synopsis of a much longer series of reports that the panel has issued over the past year. It is the final step in a five-year effort by the body to analyze a vast archive of published climate research.
It is the fifth such report from the group since 1990, each finding greater certainty that the climate is warming and that human activities are the primary cause.
“Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, and in global mean sea-level rise; and it is extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” the report said.
A core finding of the new report is that climate change is no longer a distant threat, but is being felt all over the world. “It’s here and now,” Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the panel, said in an interview. “It’s not something in the future.”
The group cited mass die-offs of forests, such as those killed by heat-loving beetles in the American West; the melting of land ice virtually everywhere in the world; an accelerating rise of the seas that is leading to increased coastal flooding; and heat waves that have devastated crops and killed tens of thousands of people.
The report contained the group’s most explicit warning yet about the food supply, saying that climate change had already become a small drag on overall global production, and could become a far larger one if emissions continued unchecked.
A related finding is that climate change poses serious risks to basic human progress, in areas such as alleviating poverty. Under the worst-case scenarios, factors like high food prices and intensified weather disasters would most likely leave poor people worse off. In fact, the report said, that has already happened to a degree.
In Washington, the Obama administration welcomed the report, with the president’s science adviser, John P. Holdren, calling it “yet another wake-up call to the global community that we must act together swiftly and aggressively in order to stem climate change and avoid its worst impacts.”
The administration is pushing for new limits on emissions from American power plants, but faces stiff resistance in Congress and some states.
Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton University and a principal author of the new report, said that a continuation of the political paralysis on emissions would leave society depending largely on luck.
If the level of greenhouse gases were to continue rising at a rapid pace over the coming decades, severe effects would be avoided only if the climate turned out to be far less sensitive to those gases than most scientists think likely, he said.
“We’ve seen many governments delay and delay and delay on implementing comprehensive emissions cuts,” Dr. Oppenheimer said. “So the need for a lot of luck looms larger and larger. Personally, I think it’s a slim reed to lean on for the fate of the planet.”
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