(The Conversation) – Australia is one of the world’s largest exporters of fossil fuels. While this coal and gas is burned beyond our borders, the climate-warming carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions affect us all.

My colleagues and I at global research and policy institute Climate Analytics were commissioned to find out just how big Australia’s carbon footprint really is. Our detailed analysis of the nation’s fossil fuel exports and associated emissions is the most comprehensive to date. The report, released today, clearly shows Australia plays a major role in climate change.

We found Australia is the world’s third-largest fossil fuel exporter, after Russia and the United States. But it gets worse when the fuel is used. Australia exports so much coal that our nation is the second-largest exporter of fossil fuel CO₂ emissions.

Unfortunately, just when we need to be cutting emissions, Australia is doubling down on fossil gas extraction mainly for LNG production and export. Federal government policies enabling and/or promoting continued high fossil fuel exports threaten to sabotage international efforts to limit global warming.

Australia’s fossil fuel carbon footprint

Australia’s contribution to global warming can only be understood by considering its fossil fuel exports alongside its domestic emissions.

Our research found Australia’s coal and gas exports were responsible for 1.15 billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions in 2023. An additional 46 million tonnes of CO₂ were emitted domestically in the process of extracting, processing and distributing those fossil fuels purely for export. That takes the total to 1.2 billion tonnes of CO₂ attributable to fossil fuel exports.

In other words, Australia’s global fossil fuel carbon footprint is three times larger than its domestic footprint. Around 80% of the damage is done overseas.

The International Energy Agency has clearly said there should be no new fossil fuel development if the world is to limit warming to 1.5°C – the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal. Yet Australia continues to approve new fossil fuel exploration and production.

Overall, exports of Australian fossil fuels – and hence fossil fuel CO₂ emissions – are expected to continue at close to current levels through to 2035, under current government policies.

Thermal coal exports, which are burned mainly for electricity production, are expected to slightly decline by 2035 from their all-time high in 2023. But exports of metallurgical coal, used in steel-making, and LNG are expected to stay about the same in 2035 as they are today.

Blowing the carbon budget

Between 2023 and 2035, Australia’s fossil fuel exports alone would consume around 7.5% of the world’s estimated remaining global carbon budget of about 200 billion tonnes of CO₂. This is the amount of CO₂ that could still be emitted from 2024 onwards if we are to limit peak warming to 1.5°C with 50% probability.

But rather than decreasing, CO₂ emissions from Australia’s fossil fuel exports are set to increase under current government policies. In other words, in the next 11 years, by 2035, exported fossil fuel CO₂ emissions will exceed by 50% that of the entire 63 year period from 1961 to 2023.

If we include domestic CO₂ emissions from current policies, this means by 2035 Australia, with 0.3% of the world’s population, would consume 9% of the total remaining carbon budget.

Undermining the Paris Agreement

In December, at the COP28 international climate conference in Dubai, governments including Australia agreed on the first “global stocktake” of greenhouse gas emissions. It called for:

transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.

The stocktake also called on all countries to align their nationally determined contributions with the 1.5°C limit.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s response at the time was to call for Australia to be a “renewable energy superpower”. But his government appears to believe this includes embracing a gas export strategy.

Current government policy is not aligned with Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C limit. Our new report shows the government’s focus on maintaining high levels of fossil fuel exports is completely inconsistent with reducing global CO2 emissions to levels compatible with the 1.5°C goal.

Australia mainly exports fossil fuels to Japan, China, South Korea and India. These countries, which accounted for about 43% of fossil fuel CO₂ emissions in 2022, are also signatories to the Paris Agreement. So they have set 2030 emissions reduction targets and net-zero goals of their own. Continuing to import fossil fuels is incompatible with their own commitments.

Japan’s LNG imports fell 8% in 2023 to their lowest levels since 2009 and are expected to drop by a further 25% by 2030. Given the current energy security and LNG debate, it should be noted Japanese companies on-sold more LNG in 2020–22 than they purchased from Australia.

Thwarting national emissions reduction efforts

Australia’s planned expansion of fossil fuels, notably its gas exports, will add to the country’s domestic emissions and make it harder for it to meet even its own domestic target. That’s because a sizeable chunk of domestic fossil fuel CO₂ emissions (7.5%) comes from processing gas for export.

Our analysis also shows Australia’s plans are completely inconsistent with the global stocktake’s call for a transition away from fossil fuels. The government and gas industry’s arguments that more fossil gas is needed to get to net zero are also at odds with the science.

Time for a fossil fuel phase-out

Australia has a massive interest in the world as a whole decarbonising fast enough to limit warming to 1.5°C.

For example, children born in Australia today face much more extreme heat, floods and other disasters during their lifetimes than previous generations. This exposure can be very substantially reduced by limiting warming to 1.5°C. The choices Australia, as a major fossil fuel exporter, makes now in this critical decade will determine what happens to them.

By failing to initiate an orderly phase-out of fossil fuel exports, Australia also risks undermining its own stated ambition of becoming a renewable energy superpower.

It is in our nation’s interests to develop and implement an orderly exit – just as we are doing for our domestic emissions – working cooperatively with affected communities and overseas buyers. Doing anything less will only hurt us in the end.

Bill Hare, Adjunct Professor of Energy, Murdoch University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Australian Broadcast Corp Video: “Owners of NSW’s biggest coal mine have applied to extend the life of the site by 25 years”

I mean, don’t you think we humans are kinda mad? And worse yet, at some deep level, we simply can’t seem to stop. All too often, we just can’t curb our urge to destroy.

Looking back, the desire to make war and obliterate our “enemies” is a deeply ingrained and repetitive pattern in our history. Each individual example can, of course, be explained (away) in its own fashion, but the overall pattern? Hmmm…

I mean, you can certainly “understand” the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Depending on your politics, you can explain it in terms of the threatening expansion of NATO or of a country run by an autocrat willing to see countless numbers of his people die (no, I’m not even thinking about the tens of thousands of dead Ukrainians) in order to take more territory — whether in parts of Georgia (no, not that Georgia!), Ukraine, or god knows where else — and make himself ever more impressively (or do I mean depressively?) imperial. Phew! That was a long one, but explanations about war-making tend to be that way.

And yes, if you want, you also can undoubtedly explain the ongoing nightmare in Gaza, beginning with Hamas’s horrific October 7th attack on Israel and followed by the outrageous urge of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his disturbingly right-wing compatriots to slaughter the population of that strip of land right down to the smallest child. In some grim fashion, given our history, such acts seem all too sadly human.

You could also undoubtedly offer explanations for the endless — yes, that’s a reasonable word to use here! — not to speak of disastrous wars my own country has stomped into since World War II ended, first as the leader of the “free world” and then as the leader of who knows what. Those conflicts ranged from Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s to Afghanistan and Iraq, among other places, in this century. And undoubtedly it’s even possible to explain (away) the nightmarish civil war still devastating Sudan that’s already displaced more than eight million people without being noticed by much of the rest of the world.

Something New in the Planetary Bloodstream

In a sense, war is human history. It’s been the rare moment when we’ve proven capable of not making war on ourselves somewhere on this planet. It seems to be in the bloodstream, so to speak (as in the endless streams, even rivers, of blood eternally being spilled). And in a sense, war, the urge to take someone else’s territory or simply kill endless numbers of… well, us… has certainly been in that very same bloodstream at least since the first great literary work of the Western world, The Iliad, was written. In some sense, you could say that, 3,000 years later, we’re all still in Troy.

Oh, wait, that’s both true and not, because there is indeed something new in the planetary bloodstream. And I’m not even thinking about our endless ability to find ever “better” and more devastating ways to kill one another — from the spear to the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle (reputedly now owned by one of every 20 Americans), the bow and arrow to the AI-driven drone, the hand grenade to atomic weaponry. (And don’t forget that Vladimir Putin is already threatening to use “tactical” nuclear weapons in Ukraine — never mind that some of them are significantly more powerful than the bombs that, in August 1945, obliterated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

No, what I have in mind is that other way we humans have found to potentially devastate our world: the burning of fossil fuels. Yes, it started with the massive consumption of coal during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it’s simply never ended. (China, in fact, now uses more coal than the rest of the world combined and continues to build coal power plants.) By now, with oil and natural gas added to the mix in staggering quantities, records are being set monthly as ever greater heat waves, increasingly violent storms, startling flooding, and devastating fires are becoming part of our everyday lives. Typical was Miami’s May heat index that recently hit an unheard-of 112 degrees Fahrenheit, 11 degrees higher than at any past date in May ever. That should hardly shock us, however, since, as that superb environmentalist Bill McKibben reports, “A new study out today shows that heat waves have tripled since the 1960s in this country, and that deaths from those hot spells are up 800%.” And, of course, far worse is predicted for the decades to come, as those burning fossil fuels continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at record rates.

Buy the Book

Forget what we officially call wars (anything but easy to do these days if you happen to be Gazan, Sudanese, or Ukrainian) and consider this the increasingly devastating new way we have of warring on ourselves and our planet. While there’s still a lot to learn about global warming, also known as climate change (terms far too mild for what’s actually happening), we already know far too much not to consider it the ultimate danger — other than nuclear war, of course. In fact, the difference between nuclear war and global warming could be that, since August 1945 (except for nuclear tests), such weaponry has never been used again, while the distinctly apocalyptic “weaponry” of climate change is still ratcheting up in a staggering fashion.

Image by Patou Ricard from Pixabay

A War Against the World as We’ve Known It

Climate change is certainly something Americans should know about. After all, only the other week, Donald (“drill, baby, drill“) Trump sat down with a group of fossil-fuel CEOs and reportedly suggested that, for a billion dollars in campaign financing, a bribe of the first order, he would toss out all of Joe Biden’s attempts to rein in the oil, natural gas, and coal industries and encourage them instead to make further fortunes by turning this planet into a cinder. (In truth, that wasn’t really much of an offer, since he had already made it clear that he was planning to do just that anyway, starting on “day one” of his next term in office.)

Of course, who needs Donald Trump when, as the New York Times reported recently, despite President Biden’s distinct attempts to limit the use of fossil fuels during his tenure in the White House, “oil and gas production have set records under the Biden administration and the United States is the world’s leading exporter of liquefied natural gas. Even with the [administration’s] pause on permits for new [natural gas] export terminals, the United States is still on track to nearly double its export capacity by 2027 because of projects already permitted and under construction.” And mind you, we’re talking about the country that, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “produced more crude oil than any nation at any time… for the past six years in a row,” reaching — yes, indeed! — a new record in 2023.

And despite all of what I’ve just described, consider it an irony that the only true world war of the moment (think of it, in fact, as a slow-motion World War III) doesn’t normally get enough headlines (though there are, of course, exceptions) or the attention in the mainstream media that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine so regularly have. No matter that last year was the hottest in human history and that each of the last 11 months was the warmest of its kind on record. Still, if you want to follow what’s functionally our only true world war in the mainstream world, there’s one obvious place to go, the British Guardian, which regularly highlights reporting on the subject and even has an online “climate-crisis” section.

Here, for instance, are just a few of the things you could have learned from that paper’s reporting in the last month or so and tell me they shouldn’t have been headline news everywhere. Take the Guardian‘s Oliver Milman recently writing that “the largest ever recorded leap in the amount of carbon dioxide laden in the world’s atmosphere has just occurred… The global average concentration of carbon dioxide in March this year was 4.7 parts per million (or ppm) higher than it was in March last year, which is a record-breaking increase in CO₂ levels over a 12-month period.” Or the staggering heat waves that struck across Asia this spring “causing deaths, water shortages, crop losses and widespread school closures,” as Damian Carrington, that paper’s environment editor, reported. And mind you, such searing temperatures were “made 45 times more likely in India” by the climate crisis.

Do you even remember when not passing 1.5 degrees Centigrade was the goal of the countries that put together the 2015 Paris climate accord? Well, if you don’t, no problem, since, as Carrington also recently reported, thanks to an exclusive Guardian survey, “Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels this century, blasting past internationally agreed targets and causing catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet.” And almost half of them expect it to hit 3C! Now, try to imagine that future planet of, well, I’m not sure you can say “ours” anymore, or better yet, check out another recent Carrington piece on the kinds of horrors — and they would be horrors of an unprecedented sort — such scientists now think a 3C world might hold for us.

Oh, and as Milman wrote recently, a new report suggests that “the economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought.” That’s already! And we’ve also already crept close to that 1.5C mark. But let me not go on. You get the idea. And each of those stories should have been a blazing headline across a planet that’s already feeling the heat in every sense imaginable, even if, in our normal reckoning, what’s happening doesn’t yet count as a world war (or at least a war on the world as we’ve known it).

Don’t you find all of that breathtaking (given the nature of heat)? And isn’t it amazing that, despite what it means for our future, it’s so often hardly considered headline-making news?

And mind you, there’s so much we don’t yet even know: Is the fierce tornado season that’s recently stretched from Texas through Iowa and beyond another climate-change-induced phenomenon? It’s certainly possible. Will the coming hurricane season set a series of records from hell, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is now warning us, thanks in part to the fact that the tropical waters of the Atlantic Ocean have heated to all-time-record levels? Again, we’ll have to wait (but not for long) to see what happens. And is that record rise in U.S. billion-dollar — yes, billion-dollar! — weather disasters recorded by NOAA in 2023, another climate-change-induced horror? It certainly seems likely.

We are, in other words, already in a mad new world of “war” (as well as the mad old version of the same). And given how possible it is that Donald Trump will become President Fossil Fuel again, we may be left to face an all too literally mad future (along with staggering new profits for the big fossil-fuel companies) in what, until recently, still passed, despite endless disastrous wars, for the greatest power on the face of the Earth. And in retrospect, in climate terms, I suspect that even Joe Biden will seem distinctly lacking and congressional Republicans mad beyond words.

Take, for instance, President Biden’s actions in relation to this planet’s other greenhouse-gas burning monster, China. (While the U.S. has historically been the greatest greenhouse gas emitter, China now tops the list.) Unlike Donald Trump, Joe Biden does indeed take climate change seriously, but he’s also supported Israel in a war from hell that’s throwing vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and, when it comes to China, his urge hasn’t truly been to cooperate. Instead, his focus has been on expanding the U.S. military presence throughout Asia, including putting Green Berets on an island just 10 kilometers off China’s coast. (Imagine how this country would react if — and it would hardly be comparable — China were to assign its version of special forces troops to Cuba!)  In other words, he’s been at work creating the conditions for a new, if not hot, then certainly all-too-warm war between the two greatest greenhouse-gas polluters on this ever-warming planet. 

Brilliant! And the Chinese response? To pal it up with Vladimir Putin! (Equally brilliant!)

As mid-2024 approaches, the question remains: Can we humans stop making war on each other or preparing for yet more of the same and begin dealing with a planet heading to hell in a proverbial handbasket? Can we face the fact that the enemy is indeed us?

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

The conviction, however, underlines that American law and politics is still primarily about property rather than about the value of human life. Both Richard M. Nixon and Donald J. Trump went down over Lockean crimes. Nixon ordered a third rate burglary (twice!). Trump arranged for a pay-off to a porn star. Both committed their crimes in furtherance of their political careers. Nixon had the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Building in Washington, D.C. burgled. Trump had a catch and kill scheme implemented for Stormy Daniels’ memoirs. Ironically, likely neither needed to commit those crimes to win.

It is a little frustrating, however, that our priorities as a society are still so parochial and twentieth-century in character, and that we are not more outraged at the truly massive damage Trump did to our planet. He should have been tried and convicted of attempted planeticide.

1. Trump took the United States out of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord in November, 2020, trashing all the pledges the country had made to reduce its massive carbon footprint. The US, with 4.2% of the world’s population, produces nearly 14% of the world’s carbon dioxide, putting out twice as much CO2 as the 27 nations of the European Union. By leaving the Paris agreement, Trump encouraged other countries to slack off on their climate commitments, endangering the whole world.

2. Trump scrapped President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, his attempt to regulate CO2 emissions, and Trump’s rules would have put an extra half a billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over a decade. When we’re trying to cut CO2 to zero by 2050, that was a step in completely the wrong direction.

MSNBC: “‘Quid pro quo:’ Trump vowed to gut climate laws in exchange for $1B from oil bosses”

3. Trump also lowered auto emissions standards, helping the big car companies avoid going electric longer and adding another 450 million tons of CO2. Now that China has more advanced electric car technology than the US and can make EVs more cheaply for the world market, it becomes clear that Trump may have knee-capped the US preeminence in the global auto-manufacturing sector, for good. Since it is increasingly clear that auto emissions cause Alzheimers, Trump also damaged our brains to be more like his own.

4. Trump actively promoted the production of the very dangerous atmospheric heating agent, methane, a greenhouse gas that prevents the heat caused by the sun’s rays from radiating back out into space at the old eighteenth-century rate. He removed government regulations requiring Big Oil to limit methane emissions from drilling.

5. Trump put a 30% tariff on solar panels, vastly slowing the expansion of solar power in the US and costing the country some 62,000 jobs in the solar industry. Since solar replaces coal and fossil gas for electricity generation, this is another way Trump promoted carbon dioxide emissions.

6. Trump’s corrupt Interior Department subsidized coal and fossil gas, but raised the rents for wind turbines on federal lands. Trump, fuelled by an irrational hatred of wind turbines, such that he falsely asserts that they cause cancer, was a constant worry to the industry all the time he was in office.

7. The sum total of all Trump’s anti-climate regulations would have added 1.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere had they not largely been reversed by the subsequent Biden administration. This one man tried to engineer an extra tonnage of CO2 emissions equal to the annual output of all of Russia.

I have suggested that we could get a better sense of how disgusting carbon dioxide and methane emissions are if we called them farts instead of using a fancy word like “emissions.” How many tons of CO2 did America fart out last year?

Trump, who spent much of his trial farting and dozing, tried to have us fart out an extra 1.8 billion tons of CO2.

Some small percentage of all the damage human-made climate change will do to the United States in the coming years will have been caused by one man. And if he can get into office again he will try to doom the planet.

Now that is an indictment.

(The Conversation) – A deadly heat wave gripped large regions of Asia for weeks in spring 2024, sending temperatures in India’s capital region over 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 Celsius) in late May. Officials in Delhi warned residents that they could face power outages and water shortages.

Earlier in the month, campaigning politicians, news announcers and Indian voters waiting in long lines had passed out in the oppressive heat.

From as far north as Japan to as far south as the Philippines, the relentless heat wreaked havoc on everyday life. Students and teachers in Cambodia were sent home from school in early May, as their hand-held fans provided little protection against the stifling heat and humidity in their poorly ventilated classrooms. Farmers in Thailand saw their crops wither and mourned the loss of livestock that perished under the punishing sun. Hundreds of people died from the heat.

Most of the planet has suffered the dire effects of extreme heat in recent years. Phoenix hit 110 F (43.3 C) or higher for 31 straight days in summer 2023, and Europe saw unprecedented heat that killed hundreds and contributed to devastating wildfires in Greece.

Regardless of where or when a heat wave strikes, one pattern has been a constant: Older adults are the most likely to die from extreme heat, and the crisis is worsening.

We study climate change and population aging. Our research documents two global trends that together portend a dire future.

More older adults will be at risk of heat stress

First, temperatures are hotter than ever. The nine-year period from 2015 and 2023 had the highest average temperatures since global records began in 1880.

CBC: “Delhi records all-time record temperature of 52.9 C”

Second, the population is aging worldwide. By 2050, the number of people ages 60 and older will double to nearly 2.1 billion, making up 21% of the global population. That proportion is 13% today.

These combined forces mean that ever-rising numbers of vulnerable older adults will be exposed to intensifying heat.

To understand the risks ahead, we developed population projections for different age groups and combined them with climate change scenarios for the coming decades. Our analyses show that by 2050, more than 23% of the world population ages 69 and older will be living in regions where peak temperatures routinely surpass 99.5°F (37.5°C), compared with just 14% today.

That means that as many as 250 million additional older adults will be exposed to dangerously high temperatures.

Mapping the data shows that most of these older adults live in lower- and middle-income countries with insufficient services and limited access to electricity, cooling appliances and safe water.

In historically cooler regions in the Global North, including North America and Europe, rising temperatures will be the main force driving older adults’ heat exposure. In historically hotter regions in the Global South such as Asia, Africa and South America, population growth and increases in longevity mean that steeply rising numbers of older adults will be exposed to intensifying heat-related risks.

Policymakers, communities, families and older residents themselves need to understand these risks and be prepared because of older adults’ special vulnerabilities to heat.

Extreme heat is especially harmful to older adults

High temperatures are oppressive for everyone, but for older adults they can be deadly.

Extreme heat worsens common age-related health conditions such as heart, lung and kidney disease and can cause delirium. Older people don’t sweat as much as younger people, which makes it harder for their bodies to cool down when temperatures spike. These problems are intensified by common prescription medications, such as anticholinergics, which further reduce the capacity to sweat.

Spending time outdoors in hot humid weather can cause dehydration, a problem worsened by the side effects of prescription medications such as diuretics and beta-blockers. Dehydration can make older adults weak and dizzy, increasing their risk of falls and injury. These threats are even worse in regions lacking access to safe and affordable drinking water.

Poor air quality makes it difficult to breath, especially for those who already have lung problems such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD.

For older adults with physical health problems, temperatures as low as 80 F (26.7 C) can pose significant danger. And when humidity is as high as 90%, even 78 F (25.6 C) can be hazardous to older adults.

Nighttime heat is especially harmful for older adults whose homes lack air conditioning or who can’t afford to run their air conditioners for long periods. The ideal temperature for older adults’ restful sleep is between 68 and 77 F (20 and 25 C), and sleep quality diminishes as temperatures rise. A night of restless sleep can make an older adult more depressed and confused during their waking hours. Medications also can lose their effectiveness if stored in places much warmer than 77 F (25 C).

Older adults also may suffer emotionally during stifling heat waves

Being stuck indoors when temperatures are unbearable can make older adults bored, depressed and isolated. People with cognitive impairments may underestimate the dangers of extreme heat or may not understand the heat advisories.

Those who have physical mobility limitations or lack access to transportation can’t easily travel to public cooling centers – if there is one nearby – or find relief in nearby “green and blue areas,” such as parks and lakes.

These threats are especially dire in low- and middle-income nations, where older adults are more likely to live in substandard housing and lack access to high-quality health care or ways to cool down in the heat. We talk about this as “systemic cooling poverty.”

What can be done?

Policymakers can work to cut greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels in vehicles, power plants and factories, which drive global warming, and develop effective plans to protect older people from heat risk. Older adults and their caregivers also can take steps to adapt.

But efforts to help need to be tailored to each region and population.

Wealthy municipalities can increase public investments in early warning systems and ride services to cooling centers and hospitals. They can use geographic information systems to identify neighborhoods with high concentrations of older adults and expand power grids to manage increasing demand for air conditioning.

In regions with substandard housing, limited access to clean water and few public supports such as cooling centers, much larger changes are necessary. Providing better health care, water and housing and reducing air pollution that can mitigate health problems during heat waves require significant changes and investments many countries struggle to afford.

The World Health Organization and Pan American Health Organization warn that this decade will be critical for preparing communities to handle rising heat and the risk to aging populations. Across all regions, researchers, practitioners and policymakers could save lives by heeding their call.

This article, originally published May 22, 2024, has been updated with extreme heat in Delhi.

Deborah Carr, A&S Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Innovation in Social Science, Boston University; Enrica De Cian, Professor of Environmental Economics, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice; Giacomo Falchetta, Research Scholar in Energy, Climate and Environment, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and Ian Sue Wing, Professor of Earth and Environment, Boston University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Florida is among the states most vulnerable to deadly human-caused climate change. Here are the top three climate disasters DeSantis is bringing down on Floridians’ heads and from which he is trying to hide by sanitizing state web sites. I don’t think Mother Nature reads web sites.

1.

Sea level rise in the entire US southeast is accelerating with frightening rapidity. It was rising 2 millimeters a year throughout the twentieth century. NASA says it is now rising 10 millimeters a year, five times the rate of the previous century. The world’s seas are rising everywhere because of melting surface ice at the poles. But the waters around Florida are rising twice as fast as the global average. The seas around Florida have risen eight inches since 1950, and could rise another six inches by 2040. Fourteen inches may not sound like much, but it is over a foot and just imagine that your house was at sea level in 1950 and now there is over a foot of water standing in your living room.

Why is this happening? NASA says it is in part because of the increasingly hot water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast of the southeast. Hot water expands and fills up more space than cold water, so if you live on the coast it is coming for your kitchen. That is on top of ice melt. Then, there’s a local situation not being caused by climate change, having to do with wind and water circulation in the Gulf. But nearly half of the accelerated sea level rise around Florida is on us, on human beings burning fossil fuels and putting heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

“Wicked Witch of the Southeast,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream / Dreamworld v.3 / PS Express, 2024.

2.

Hurricanes. Scientists already expect 2024 to see a higher than normal number of hurricanes in the Southeast, as many as 23 named storms. The unusually hot water in the Gulf of Mexico this spring, the unusually hot water in the Atlantic, and the end of the El Nino and beginning of La Nina, all play into this danger. La Nina, a cooling pattern, will weaken pressure in the Gulf and so more Atlantic hurricanes will be drawn west.

The problem is not, however, just a matter of this year. Hurricanes are becoming more powerful, with an increase in the number of category 4 and category 5 storms. In fact, some scientists are saying we need to expand the scale with a category 6. The hotter the water, the more powerful the hurricane, and the water is getting hotter and hotter. Such hurricanes over very hot sea water move slowly. Moreover, hot water puts more water vapor into the air above it, which hurricanes then cause to precipitate, so the severity of the downpours is also increasing. And the hurricanes move slowly now, so they just hover over land and drench the land below. There is more flooding and more storm surges. Florida gets more hurricanes than any other state, and twice as many hit there as hit Texas.

3.

Heat waves. The heat index for Miami is 112° F. Palm Beach county is right now under a heat advisory because the heat index will be 108° F. for over two hours. But you know that saying, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity?’ It is correct. The temperature will be 94° F. (96° F. in Ft. Lauderdale), which is eight to ten degrees higher than the average for late May. But if you add in the humidity, you get the heat index. The humidity is 73% in West Palm Beach today.

We humans cool down by sweating. The moisture on our skin evaporates, which has a cooling effect. A heat index of 112° F. makes it hard for us to cool down that way. The heat and moisture in the air mean that the sweat doesn’t evaporate as much. So here’s the thing. If the temperature reaches 120° F. and the humidity at the same time reaches 80%, and you are out in that for several hours, it will kill you dead. But the heat index can become unhealthy well below those numbers. Florida’s average temperature will likely increase by at least 6° F. over the next few decades, but that is the average. On some days in some places, you could hit a heat index that is fatal to some residents. Florida is at risk for being part of a new and growing deadly American heat belt where quality of life plummets. Helpfully, the DeSantis regime has passed a law forbidding local governments to require water and heat breaks for workers laboring outside in the heat, which for some may be a death sentence.

(The Conversation) – Since April 2024, wide areas of south and south-east Asia, from Pakistan to the Philippines, have experienced prolonged extreme heat. Covering some of the most densely populated regions in the world, the series of heatwaves has affected everything from human health and wellbeing to the economy and education.

Many pupils in India, Bangladesh, and Philippines have been told to stay at home for days due to a severe health risk from extreme heat, while the heatwaves are becoming a major issue in India’s election. Bangladesh even closed all primary schools for weeks while the temperature reached 43.8°C on April 30.

Once the temperature goes above 38°C, it exceeds the core human body temperature (about 37°C) and the chance of heat exhaustion and even heatstroke increases dramatically. This is compounded by increasing humidity in the region which puts additional heat stress on the human body, as sweat is not able to evaporate as effectively (the primary mechanism for cooling the human body).

That is why extreme heat in a tropical country can be less pleasant and more dangerous than the same temperature in a desert.

Tens of millions of people have been exposed to such health threatening conditions in south and south-east Asia in April and May so far, and this extreme heat has substantially affected labour productivity.

Unusually prolonged periods of extreme heat:

Now shifting westwards:

How it got so hot

Extreme heat is driven by several processes, operating from global down to local scales. At the local level, less vegetation and soil moisture tends to mean more heat, while cities of concrete and asphalt are hotter than the surrounding countryside thanks to the urban heat island effect. Other local and regional factors include the wind, and whether conditions are ripe for clouds to form.

Then there are the more global factors: El Niño, and of course global warming. El Niño refers to the warm phase of a natural fluctuation of temperatures in the tropical Pacific (its opposite side is La Niña).

Voice of America Video: “Heatwave shatters Southeast Asia records in April”

The Pacific has been in an El Niño phase since May 2023, releasing additional heat and exacerbating global warming in many regions. In parts of Asia, this leads to periods of extreme heat happening more often, lasting longer and being even more extreme in addition to global warming contribution.

This is particularly dangerous for the many cities in south and south-east Asia being hit by the current series of heatwaves, which over the past 85 years have already experienced long-term increase in the number of days in April with such dangerously high temperatures.

Short term noise, long term trends:

Occurrences of extreme heat days over years typically looks rather noisy when plotted on a graph. Some years may have many days of extreme heat, others only few or none. But over a longer timescale of multiple decades, a clear trend emerges of more and more very hot days, driven by climate change.

Indeed, scientists from the World Weather Attribution team recently described the latest heatwaves as “impossible” without climate change.

Action needed

April and May are typically the hottest months in south and south-east Asia. As the climate keeps warming, is the region ready for extreme heat?

The projected increases in extreme hot temperatures demands rapid adaptation measures, along with the obvious global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That means heat action plans that are tailored to address the specific climate, public health and socioeconomic conditions in a given region. What works in Singapore (urban, wealthy, incredibly humid) might not be appropriate in drier, poorer and more rural parts of India.

We have to combine estimates of environmental hazards with exposure and vulnerabilities information on population and assets to provide actionable risk assessment and formulate efficient temperature mitigation measures for different levels of extreme heat.

Some countries in south and south-east Asia are making progress with their heat action plans in response to extreme heat they have already experienced. However, there is room for further improvement and a more targeted approach at the district level. This is critical as we expect that disruptive extreme heat events in this part of the world will become more frequent, widespread, and intense.

Neven S. Fučkar, Senior Researcher, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Everyone talks about ending fossil fuel production, but almost no one is doing anything about it. Here are some exceptions.

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. This quip by the American essayist Charles Dudley Warner applies to fossil fuels as well. Everyone talks about ending fossil fuel production, but almost no one is doing anything about it.

Take the example of the Biden administration. It has launched the most ambitious effort by the United States to leave fossil fuels behind and enter the new era of renewable energy. And yet, in 2023, the United States produced more crude oil than ever before: 12.9 million barrels per day compared to the previous record from 2019 of 12.3 million barrels a day.

Or take the example of Brazil, where the progressive politician Lula da Silva won back the presidency in 2022. His predecessor was a big fan of drilling for fossil fuels. Lula has made it clear that he will take a very different approach. For instance, he wants Brazil to join the club of oil-producing countries in order to lead it into a clean-energy future. And yet, in 2023, Brazil’s production of oil increased by 13 percent and gas by over 8 percent, both new records.

Given all this Green rhetoric and crude (oil) action, it’s hard to find examples around the world where people are actually doing something to end fossil fuel production.

One of those places is Ecuador, which held a referendum last August about keeping oil under the ground of a certain plot of land in the Yasuní national park. “Yasuní is the most important park in Ecuador,” observes Esperanza Martínez, of Acción Ecológica in Ecuador. “It has been recognized as the most biodiverse region in the world, and it’s also home to many indigenous peoples.”

Thanks to the work of several collectives, Ecuadorans voted 54 to 37 percent in the August referendum to stop all operations to explore for and extract oil from Block 43—also known as ITT—within the park. Since the referendum, however, an election brought in a new president who has threatened to ignore the results of the referendum in order to raise funds to address the country’s security crisis.

Another example of effective action, this time at the international level, comes from the organizers of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty (FFNPT), an effort to roll back fossil fuels at the global level, reports. Currently, 12 countries have endorsed the initiative, including a number of small island states but also, most recently, Colombia.

“Colombia is the first continental country to sign, with more than a century of petroleum extraction,” one of those organizers, Andrés Gómez O, one of the FFNPT organizers, points out. “So, this is a very important game-changer in the battle.”

One of the backers of the this Treaty, the one with the largest economy, is the U.S. state of California, which has been a leader in the United States in terms of expanding the renewable energy sector. There is so much energy generated by solar panels on sunny days in California that sometimes the net cost of that electricity drops below zero.

But as Raphael Hoetmer of Amazon Watch points out, California is also the largest importer of oil from the Amazon. In 2020, the United States imported nearly 70 percent of the oil produced by Amazonian countries, mostly Ecuador but a small amount from Colombia and Peru as well. And California is the state that’s importing by far the largest amount of this oil. So, shutting down the production of fossil fuels in Ecuador and elsewhere also requires addressing the largest consumers of those resources.

These three Latin American experts on the challenge of ending the international addiction to fossil fuels presented their findings at an April 2024 seminar sponsored by the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South and Global Just Transition. They not only discussed the appalling state of affairs in the world of energy and environment but also explained how some people are actually doing something about it.

The Example of Yasuní

“Rigged,” Digital, Dream/ Dreamworld v. 3, PS Express, By Juan Cole, 2024.

The effort to preserve the biodiversity of Yasuní in the Ecuadoran Amazon and keep out the oil companies has been going on for more than a decade. In 2007, then-president Rafael Correa floated a plan for international investors to essentially pay Ecuador to keep its oil in the ground. When the international community didn’t pony up the $3.5 billion, Correa abandoned his plan and pledged to move forward with drilling.

That’s when Esperanza Martínez and others began to organize the first referendum to keep that oil in the ground. They collected 850,000 signatures, 25 percent more than was necessary to trigger a vote. But the National Electoral Council threw out the petition, arguing that 60 percent of the signatures were fakes.

“We spent ten years fighting in tribunals and legal proceedings,” Martínez relates. “And what the National Electoral Council did was a fraud. We could prove that it was a fraud.”

The August 2023 referendum was a dramatic vindication for the Yasunídos. “Five million Ecuadorans said that it was right to leave the crude oil underground,” she continues. “This was a campaign that had never been seen before in the country to stop oil companies from extracting oil from the ground and preventing the negative impacts on the health and environment. We won!”

In the same referendum, voters also decided to stop mining activities in the “El Chocó” biosphere reserve in the capital city of Quito. The campaign, “Quito sin mineria,” opposed mining projects in the Metropolitan District of Quito and the Chocó Andino region, which comprises 124,000 hectares.

But the referenda on Yasuní and El Chocó were not the only elections that took place on that day in Ecuador. Voters also went to the polls to vote for a new president. In a later second round, businessman Daniel Noboa won. Noboa had supported the Yasuní referendum, pointing out that a ban on extraction actually made economic sense since it would cost $59 a barrel to extract the oil, which would sell for only $58 a barrel on the international market. After his election, he said that he would respect the results.

But then, in January 2024, he reversed himself, calling instead for a year moratorium on the ruling. Ecuador, Noboa argued, needed the money to address its worsening security situation: a surge in narcotrafficking, a skyrocketing murder rate, and a descent into gang warfare.

The Yasunídos argue that even this perilous situation should not affect the results of the referendum. “In Ecuador, nature is the subject of rights,” Martínez says, referring to the fact that Ecuador was the first country in the world in 2008 to include the rights of nature in its constitution. “The discussion is no longer if this part of the park should be closed or not, but how and when.”

Looking at the Amazon

The Amazon rainforest is a powerful symbol of biodiversity all around the world, even for people who can’t identify the countries through which the Amazon river flows.

“It’s the world’s largest tropical rainforest,” reports Raphael Hoetmer of Amazon Watch in Peru. “It houses up to 30 percent of the world species and contains one-fifth of the world’s fresh water. It is home to 410 indigenous nationalities, 82 of them living in isolation by choice, all of them helping in global climate regulation.”

But the Amazon region also contains an abundance of natural resources: timber, gold, and fossil fuels. “Any just transition requires ending the extraction of oil—and not only oil—from the Amazon,” Hoetmer continues. “It also requires ending the system that is behind this extraction.”

The degradation of the Amazon rainforest is reaching a tipping point. The estimate is that when deforestation reaches 20-25 percent of the biome, the area can’t recover. Hoetmer reports that deforestation is now approaching 26 percent.

Fossil fuel extraction is contributing to that deforestation is several ways. Millions of hectares are currently slated for oil and gas extraction. The drilling itself requires deforestation, but so do the new roads established to reach those sites. Those roads in turn open the region up to other forms of exploitation such as logging and agribusiness.

Then there are the oil spills that contaminate vast stretches of land. Several major pipeline breaks have dumped oil into the Ecuadorian Amazon, and the Ecuadorian environmental ministry estimates that there have been over a thousand “environmental liabilities” and over 3,000 sites “sources of contamination.” Between 1971 and 2000, Occidental Petroleum dumped 9 billion gallons of untreated waste containing heavy metals into Peru’s rivers and streams, leading to a lawsuit against the company by indigenous Peruvians that resulted in an out-of-court settlement. Colombia’s oil industry has been involved in over 2,000 episodes of environmental contamination between 2015 and 2022.

Shutting down oil and gas production in the Amazon requires looking beyond the producers to the investors and the consumers. California, since it absorbs nearly half of all Amazon oil exports, is a major potential target. On the financing side, Amazon Watch’s End Amazon Crude campaign is working to stop new financial flows into, for instance, Petroperú, the country’s state-run oil company. Campaigners are targeting major banking institutions in the Global North, including JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and Bank of America. Community-led protests have taken place in the United States, Chile, and Germany. By raising the costs of investment into Amazonian extraction, campaigners are pushing lenders to remove Amazonian oil from their portfolios.

Another strategy is strengthening territorial sovereignty in indigenous lands. “One of the processes that gives us hope is this proposed proposal to reconstruct the Amazon based on strengthening the self-governance of Amazonian people,” Hoetmer notes. “The notion of Autonomous Territorial Governments started with the Wampis peoples but has now expanded to over 10 indigenous nations. The Autonomous Territorial Governments defend their territories  against illegal mining as well as land invasions and fossil fuel extraction, demand and build intercultural education, and negotiate public services with the Peruvian state.”

The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty

Frontline communities particularly those from the Global South are paying the highest price of fossil fuel exploitation and climate change, yet they are the least responsible. All over the world and for decades, frontline struggles have shown leadership in resisting the plundering of their territories. Today, for many communities around the world—and for some whole countries—continued fossil fuel extraction and climate change represent an existential crisis.

In response to this crisis, an early proposal came from officials and civil society leaders in the Pacific for a moratorium and binding international mechanisms specifically dedicated to phasing out fossil fuels in the Pacific. In 2015, in the Suva Declaration on Climate Change issued from the Pacific Islands Development Forum Third Annual Summit held in Suva, Fiji, decision-makers called for: “a new global dialogue on the implementation of an international moratorium on the development and expansion of fossil fuel extracting industries, particularly the construction of new coal mines, as an urgent step towards decarbonising the global economy.”

In 2016, following a summit in the Solomon Islands, 14 Pacific Island nations discussed the world’s first treaty that would ban new coal mining and embrace the 1.5C goal set at the Paris climate talks.

Initiated by island countries most at risk from rising waters, the movement for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty has now been endorsed by a dozen countries and more than 2,000 civil society organizations as well as a number of cities and states like California and more than 100 Nobel laureates.

“Our treaty is based on other treaties that have talked about nuclear weapons, mines, and gasses like the Montreal Protocol on phasing out ozone-depleting substances,” relates Andrés Gómez O.

“What’s clear is that we don’t have time for business as usual,” the FFNPT organizers argue. “The International Energy Agency determined that there needs to be a decline of fossil fuel use from four-fifths of the world’s energy supply today to one-fifth by 2050. The fossil fuels that remain will be embedded in some products such as plastics and in processes where emissions are scarce.”Critical to this process is action by richer countries. “Countries that are better off economically can support other countries to step away from the fossil fuel system,” Gómez continues.

A key strategy, he adds, would be “the Yasunization of territories.” He explains that “this means, first, making this park a utopia for the country. Then we localize this approach in different provinces in Ecuador where we say, okay, in this province we have our own Yasuní.” This local approach has had some precedents. The Ecuadoran city of Cuenca, for instance, held a referendum in 2021 banning future mining project.

The treaty appeals not only to the environmental movement. By connecting the struggle to the experiences of local communities—the violence associated with extraction, the cancer cases, the oil spills—“we are not just interested in convincing the already existing movements,” he says, “We also have to move the whole society.”

He concludes succinctly: “We are not just about saying no—to fossil fuels, to extractivism. We are about saying a very big yes: to life!”

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

( Michigan Advance ) – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday released a sweeping set of rules aimed at cutting air, water and land pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants.

Environmental and clean energy groups celebrated the announcement as long overdue, particularly for coal-burning power plants, which have saddled hundreds of communities across the country with dirty air and hundreds of millions of tons of toxic coal ash waste. The ash has leached a host of toxins – including arsenic, mercury, lead, cadmium, radium and other pollutants – into ground and surface water.

“Today is the culmination of years of advocacy for common-sense safeguards that will have a direct impact on communities long forced to suffer in the shadow of the dirtiest power plants in the country,” said Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, one of the nation’s oldest and largest environmental organizations. “It is also a major step forward in our movement’s fight to decarbonize the electric sector and help avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”

But some electric industry and pro-coal organizations blasted the rules as a threat to jobs and electric reliability at a time when power demands are surging. They also criticized the rule’s reliance on largely unproven carbon capture technologies.

America’s Power, a trade organization for the nation’s fleet of about 400 coal power plants across 42 states, called the number of new rules “unprecedented,” singling out the new emissions standards that will force existing coal plants to cut their carbon emissions by 90% by the 2032 if they intend to keep running past 2039.  Michelle Bloodworth, the group’s president and CEO, called the rule “an extreme and unlawful overreach that endangers America’s supply of dependable and affordable electricity.”

‘This forces that’

Many experts expect the regulations to be litigated, particularly the carbon rule, since the last time the EPA tried to restrict carbon emissions from power plants, a group of states led by West Virginia mounted a successful legal challenge that went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

But Julie McNamara, deputy policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the agency took great pains to conform the rule to the legal constraints outlined by the court.

“This rule is specifically responsive to that Supreme Court decision,” she said. “Which doesn’t mean that it won’t go to the courts but this is so carefully hewn to that decision that it should be robust.”

The four rules EPA released Thursday mainly target coal-fired power plants.

“By developing these standards in a clear, transparent, inclusive manner, EPA is cutting pollution while ensuring that power companies can make smart investments and continue to deliver reliable electricity for all Americans,” EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said.

In some ways, they attach a framework to a sea change in electric generation that is already well under way, McNamara said.

Coal accounted for just 16% of U.S. electric generation in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In 1990, by comparison, it comprised more than 54% of power generation. However, some states are more reliant on coal power than others.

In 2021, the most coal-dependent states were West Virginia, Missouri, Wyoming and Kentucky, per a 2022 report by  the EIA.

AES Indiana’s Petersburg Generating Station in Petersburg, Indiana, has been burning coal since the 1960s but will shutter all of its coal-firing units over the next few years. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday released a sweeping set of rules aimed at cutting air, water and land pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants. (Robert Zullo/States Newsroom)

“This rulemaking adds structure to that transition,” McNamara said. “For those who have chosen not to assess the future use of their coal plants, this forces that.”

Heather O’Neill, president and CEO of the clean energy trade group Advanced Energy United, said the new regulations are a chance for utilities to embrace cheaper, cleaner and more reliable options for the electric grid.

“Instead of looking to build new gas plants or prolong the life of old coal plants, utilities should be taking advantage of the cheaper, cleaner, and more trusty tools in the toolbox,” she said.

The carbon rule 

In 2009, the EPA concluded that greenhouse gas emissions “endanger our nation’s public health and welfare,” the agency wrote, adding that since that time, “the evidence of the harms posed by GHG emissions has only grown and Americans experience the destructive and worsening effects of climate change every day.”

The new carbon emissions regulation will apply to existing coal plants and new natural gas plants. Coal plants that plan to operate beyond 2039 will have to capture 90% of their carbon emissions by 2032. New gas plants are split into three categories based on their capacity factor, a measure of how much electricity is generated over a period of time relative to the maximum amount it could have produced. The plants that run the most (more than 40% capacity factor) will have to capture 90% of their carbon emissions by 2032. Existing gas plants will be regulated under a forthcoming rule that “more comprehensively addresses GHG emissions from this portion of the fleet,” the agency said.

Michelle Solomon, a senior policy analyst for Energy Innovation, an energy and climate policy think tank, predicts that most coal plants will close rather than install the costly technology to capture carbon emissions.

“Climate goals aside, the public health impacts of the rules in securing the retirement of coal fired power plants is so important,” she said. Coal power in the U.S. has been increasingly pressured by cheaper gas and renewable generation and mounting environmental restrictions, but some grid operators have still been caught flat-footed by the pace of coal plant closures.

“I think the role of this rule, to provide that certainty about where we’re going, is so crucial to get the entities that have control over the rate of the transition to start to take action here,” she said. But the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association’s CEO, Jim Matheson, called the rules “unlawful, unrealistic and unachievable” noting that it relies on technology “that is not ready for prime time.”

And Todd Snitchler, president and CEO of the Electric Power Supply Association, a trade group for competitive power suppliers, called the rule “a painful example of aspirational policy outpacing physical and operational realities” because of its reliance on unproven carbon capture and hydrogen blending technologies to cut emissions.

A beefed up Mercury and Air Toxic Standards rule

The EPA called the revision to the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards  “the most significant update since MATS was first issued in February 2012.” It predicted the rule would cut emissions of mercury and other air pollutants like nickel, arsenic, lead, soot, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and others. It cuts the mercury limit by 70% for power plants fired by lignite coal, which is the lowest grade of coal and one of the dirtiest to burn for power generation.

For all coal plants, the emissions limit for toxic metals is reduced by 67%. The EPA says the rule will result in major cuts in releases of mercury and other hazardous metals, fine particulate matter, nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide.  The agency projects “$300 million in health benefits,” including reducing risks of heart attacks, cancer and developmental delays in children and $130 million in climate benefits.

Stronger wastewater discharge limits for power plants

Coal fired power plants use huge volumes of water, and when the wastewater is returned to lakes, rivers and streams it can be laden with mercury, arsenic and other metals as well as bromide, chloride and other pollution and contaminate drinking water and harm aquatic life.

The new rule is projected to cut about 670 million pounds of pollutants discharged in wastewater from coal plants per year. Plants that will cease coal combustion over the next decade can abide by less stringent rules.

“Power plants for far too long have been able to get away with treating our waterways like an open sewer,” said Thomas Cmar, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization, during a briefing on the new rules earlier this week.

Closing a coal ash loophole

Coal ash, what’s left after coal has been burned for power generation, is one the nation’s largest waste streams. The 2015 EPA Coal Combustion Residuals rule were the first federal regulations for coal ash. But that rule left about half of the ash sitting at power plant sites and other locations – much of it in unlined disposal pits – unregulated because it did not apply to so-called “legacy impoundments” that were not being used to accept new ash.

“We’re going to see a long-awaited crackdown on coal ash pollution from America’s coal plants, and it’ll be a huge win for America’s health and water resources,” said Lisa Evans, a senior attorney with Earthjustice. “They are all likely leaking toxic chemicals like arsenic into groundwater and most contain levels of radioactivity that can be dangerous to human health.”

Groundwater monitoring data shows that the vast majority of ash ponds at coal plants are contaminating groundwater, said Abel Russ, a senior attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project. Butunder the old rule, Russ said, facilities could dodge cleanup requirements by blaming contamination on older ash dumps not covered by the regulation.

“This is a huge loophole,” Russ said. “You can’t restore groundwater quality if you’re only addressing half of the coal ash sources on site.”

However, several attorneys on the Earthjustice briefing said the new rules, which will require monitoring at clean up and hundreds of more ash sites, will only be as good as the enforcement.

“It’s meaningful only if these utilities obey the law. Unfortunately to date, many of them have not,” said Frank Holleman, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Robert Zullo

Robert Zullo is a national energy reporter based in southern Illinois focusing on renewable power and the electric grid. Robert joined States Newsroom in 2018 as the founding editor of the Virginia Mercury. Before that, he spent 13 years as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Louisiana. He has a bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. He grew up in Miami, Fla., and central New Jersey.

 

Published under under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. 

Via Michigan Advance

A heat wave in Greenland and a storm in Antarctica. These kinds of individual weather “events” are increasingly being supercharged by a warming climate. But despite being short-term events they can also have a much longer-term effect on the world’s largest ice sheets, and may even lead to tipping points being crossed in the polar regions.

We have just published research looking at these sudden changes in the ice sheets and how they may impact what we know about sea level rise. One reason this is so important is that the global sea level is predicted to rise by anywhere between 28 cm and 100cm by the year 2100, according to the IPCC. This is a huge range – 70 cm extra sea-level rise would affect many millions more people.

Partly this uncertainty is because we simply don’t know whether we’ll curb our emissions or continue with business as usual. But while possible social and economic changes are at least factored in to the above numbers, the IPCC acknowledges its estimate does not take into account deeply uncertain ice-sheet processes.

Sudden accelerations

The sea is rising for two main reasons. First, the water itself is very slightly expanding as it warms, with this process responsible for about a third of the total expected sea-level rise.

Second, the world’s largest ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are melting or sliding into the sea. As the ice sheets and glaciers respond relatively slowly, the sea will also continue to rise for centuries.

Photo by Cassie Matias on Unsplash

Scientists have long known that there is a potential for sudden accelerations in the rate at which ice is lost from Greenland and Antarctica which could cause considerably more sea-level rise: perhaps a metre or more in a century. Once started, this would be impossible to stop.

Although there is a lot of uncertainty over how likely this is, there is some evidence that it happened about 130,000 years ago, the last time global temperatures were anything close to the present day. We cannot discount the risk.

To improve predictions of rises in sea level we therefore need a clearer understanding of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. In particular, we need to review if there are weather or climate changes that we can already identify that might lead to abrupt increases in the speed of mass loss.

Weather can have long-term effects

Our new study, involving an international team of 29 ice-sheet experts and published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, reviews evidence gained from observational data, geological records, and computer model simulations.

We found several examples from the past few decades where weather “events” – a single storm, a heatwave – have led to important long-term changes.

The ice sheets are built from millennia of snowfall that gradually compresses and starts to flow towards the ocean. The ice sheets, like any glacier, respond to changes in the atmosphere and the ocean when the ice is in contact with sea water.

These changes could take place over a matter of hours or days or they may be long-term changes from months to years or thousands of years. And processes may interact with each other on different timescales, so that a glacier may gradually thin and weaken but remain stable until an abrupt short-term event pushes it over the edge and it rapidly collapses.

Because of these different timescales, we need to coordinate collecting and using more diverse types of data and knowledge.

Historically, we thought of ice sheets as slow-moving and delayed in their response to climate change. In contrast, our research found that these huge glacial ice masses respond in far quicker and more unexpected ways as the climate warms, similarly to the frequency and intensity of hurricanes and heatwaves responding to changes with the climate.

Ground and satellite observations show that sudden heatwaves and large storms can have long-lasting effects on ice sheets. For example a heatwave in July 2023 meant at one point 67% of the Greenland ice sheet surface was melting, compared with around 20% for average July conditions. In 2022 unusually warm rain fell on the Conger ice shelf in Antarctica, causing it to disappear almost overnight.

These weather-driven events have long “tails”. Ice sheets don’t follow a simple uniform response to climate warming when they melt or slide into the sea. Instead their changes are punctuated by short-term extremes.

For example, brief periods of melting in Greenland can melt far more ice and snow than is replaced the following winter. Or the catastrophic break-up of ice shelves along the Antarctic coast can rapidly unplug much larger amounts of ice from further inland.

Failing to adequately account for this short-term variability might mean we underestimate how much ice will be lost in future.

What happens next

Scientists must prioritise research on ice-sheet variability. This means better ice-sheet and ocean monitoring systems that can capture the effects of short but extreme weather events.

This will come from new satellites as well as field data. We’ll also need better computer models of how ice sheets will respond to climate change. Fortunately there are already some promising global collaborative initiatives.

We don’t know exactly how much the global sea level is going to rise some decades in advance, but understanding more about the ice sheets will help to refine our predictions.

Edward Hanna, Professor of Climate Science and Meteorology, University of Lincoln and Ruth Mottram, Climate Scientist, National Centre for Climate Research, Danish Meteorological Institute

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.