The Seattle Times Opinion

Switching from coal to natural gas will not save our planet

Workers move a well casing at a Chesapeake Energy natural gas well site near Burlington, Pa. (Ralph Wilson / The Associated Press)

Bill McKibben, Special to The Times          August 8, 2017

If as little as 3 percent of natural gas leaks in the course of fracking and delivering it to the power plant through a pipe, then it’s worse than coal.

MOST magic tricks and confidence games mostly work the same way — a little bit of misdirection to get the audience looking in the wrong direction. And some of the finest magicians at large in America today are its natural-gas salesmen, who have worked hard to reassure us that they’re part of the solution to the global warming crisis. To understand why that’s a ploy — to understand why they’re in fact helping drive the heating of the planet — you have to pay close attention.

The basic move is to insist that natural gas helps cut carbon emissions. Indeed, as Dan Kirschner, the head of the Northwest Gas Association, put it in his recent Op-Ed [“The power of natural gas in the war on carbon emissions,” Aug. 3, Opinion], “the U.S. leads the world in absolute reductions in carbon emissions, due in large part to the increased availability and affordability of natural gas.”

This is true on the surface. As America’s power plants have replaced coal with fracked gas, carbon emissions have fallen because natural gas produces half as much CO2 as coal when you burn it. The problem is, carbon emissions are not the only thing that drive global warming. There’s another gas that does the job even more powerfully: CH4, or methane, which is the scientific name for natural gas. If it leaks unburned into the atmosphere, then methane traps heat about 80 times more effectively, molecule for molecule, than CO2. The point of this chemistry lesson is: If as little as 3 percent of natural gas leaks in the course of fracking and delivering it to the power plant through a pipe, then it’s worse than coal.

And, sadly, it’s now clear that leakage rates are higher than that. In January 2013, aerial surveys of a Utah fracking basin, for instance, found leak rates as high as 9 percent. Data from a Harvard satellite survey showed that between 2002 and 2014, U.S. methane emissions increased more than 30 percent.

In fact, some experts who have reviewed the data say that because of the boom in fracking and the conversion to gas, America’s total greenhouse-gas emissions may actually have gone up during the Obama years. And at least the Obama administration required drillers to keep track of how much methane they were leaking — one of the first acts of the Trump EPA was to scrap that requirement, apparently on the grounds that what you don’t know can’t hurt you.

So, to summarize, because this is a subtle point that citizens, politicians and editors need to understand, given the importance of the debate: Natural gas is not reducing the amount of greenhouse-gas emissions. It is doing nothing to slow climate change.

And worse, it’s making it much harder to take the steps that really would matter. As we get off coal because of the way it drives climate change, what we should be doing is moving to renewable energy. Solar power emits no carbon at all, which makes it the natural choice. But as long as we have cheap natural gas flooding the market, we’ll move more slowly in the direction of real renewables. Cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by burning natural gas is like dieting by eating reduced-fat cookies, explained the principal investigator of a Stanford forum that studied the explosive growth in natural gas: “If you really want to lose weight, you probably need to avoid cookies altogether.”

Which is truly sad, because the solar panel is the great have-your-cake-and-eat-it technology of all time — the real deal. It takes the power the sun sends us every day and turns it into electricity. There’s no catch, no con. It’s our Houdini escape route from climate change — but only if we catch on in time to the tawdry little three-card-monte game the fossil-fuel industry is running.

Bill McKibben is the Schumann distinguished scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and founder of the global climate campaign 350.org.

The Hill

Trump plans to roll back environmental rule everyone agrees on

Gina McCarthy and Ken Kopocis, opinion contributors August 8, 2017

© Getty Images

Whether illustrated by the recent drought in California or the lead contamination in Flint, Michigan, we are reminded daily that clean water for all is essential to our existence.

Rivers, lakes, ponds and wetlands supply and cleanse our drinking water, ameliorate storm surges, provide invaluable storage capacity for flood waters, and enhance our quality of life by providing essential habitat, recreational opportunities and important power generation.

Yet President Trump’s EPA is continuing its assault on our nation’s health, as well as states’ rights, through its latest effort to roll back the protections of the 1972 Clean Water Act.

Under the guise of providing “certainty for regulated entities, the States, agency staff and the public,” Trump’s EPA has proposed to repeal the 2015 Clean Water Rule, which designates federal authority over bodies of water that feed into larger waterways in instances where jurisdiction was unclear under the 1972 law.

Rolling back this rule reinstates confusion and uncertainty on how to protect water quality — which harms the joint efforts at the state and federal level that have existed for nearly 45 years. This proposal to dismantle this rule would undermine the courts in an effort to avoid implementing clear, needed protections based on solid science. Scrapping the rule would also undercut the law it is meant to improve, and input gathered through a lengthy and transparent public process.

Even more egregious, EPA has not cited any specific deficiency in the Clean Water Rule it proposes to rescind and that will take away needed protections for thousands of streams and wetlands nationwide that provide drinking water to one in three Americans. Nor is it clear that this administration will ever finalize a replacement rule. But one thing is clear. Should the Trump EPA rescind the Clean Water Rule and propose a replacement rule, the agency will pursue a strategy that runs contrary to prior court decisions.

For years, stakeholders and elected officials on both sides of the aisle have requested clarity on the Clean Water Act. The agriculture, construction and energy industries along with conservation, hunting and fishing communities have demanded more transparency from the EPA on which waters would be protected by the act and — equally important — which would not.

EPA and its partner, the Army Corps of Engineers, published the Clean Water Rule in 2015 to address these demands and reduce the costly and time-consuming case-specific analysis that resulted from a confusing Supreme Court decision in 2006.

The rule followed the best available peer-reviewed science on the impacts of upstream water quality on downstream and adjacent waters. It incorporated over 1 million comments and feedback from over 400 public meetings — but the Trump EPA ignores all of that science and public input in its proposal to withdraw the Clean Water Rule.

No one asked EPA to leave the old, confusing rules in place. Yet, that is precisely what Trump’s EPA now proposes. They ignore the extensive public process used to develop the rule, they ignore the direction of the Supreme Court, (including Chief Justice John Roberts’, calling for a new rule) they ignore transparency by limiting public input to only 30 days compared to the over 200 days for the Clean Water Rule, and they offer no science or policy justification for returning to the confusing, one-off decision making that previously existed and no one supported. If there is better science that supports repeal of the Clean Water Rule, the Trump EPA has not revealed it.

The Trump EPA has put forward a false choice that providing protection against polluting and destroying bodies of water somehow is adverse to states’ interests. States decide how clean their waters will be, and 46 of the 50 States already implement many day-to-day aspects of the Clean Water Act. Plus, a significant number of states have not challenged the Clean Water Rule and their interests are undercut by the proposed rollback.

The Clean Water Act has been a hallmark of success since it was established in 1972 by a bipartisan Congress to provide protections against polluting and destroying bodies of water. But the act’s work is far from finished. State assessments show there are thousands of impaired waters in need of reduced pollution and increased protection to ensure they can provide their essential benefits.

No one ever complains that the water in our rivers, lakes, streams and ponds is too clean, that there are too many healthy fish to catch and eat. There is no outcry that our drinking water is too clean or abundant. Trump’s EPA is turning its back on protecting our nation’s waters and public health.

Gina McCarthy was the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from 2013 to 2017.  She served as an environmental advisor to five Massachusetts Democratic and Republican administrations and was commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection.

Ken Kopocis served as the Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Office of Water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Previously, he held several senior positions on the staffs of the House of Representative’s Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

Federal Scientists Leak A Startling Climate Report To Keep Trump From Burying It

Chris D’Angelo, HuffPost      August 7, 2017

WASHINGTON — Government scientists agree that, contrary to President Donald Trump and his team’s repeated claims, climate change is already having a dramatic effect in the U.S., according to a new report.

The 543-page report, an unreleased draft published Monday by The New York Times, is written by scientists from 13 federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It concludes that temperatures in the U.S. have risen sharply, by 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit, over the last 150 years and that it is “extremely likely that most of the global mean temperature increase since 1951 was caused by human influence on climate.”

“Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,” the report states. “Thousands of studies conducted by tens of thousands of scientists around the world have documented changes in surface, atmospheric, and oceanic temperatures; melting glaciers; disappearing snow cover; shrinking sea ice; rising sea level; and an increase in atmospheric water vapor. Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate changes.”

The report, completed this year and part of the National Climate Assessment, has already been approved by the National Academy of Sciences, according to the Times. Its release hinges on the Trump administration’s approval, and one scientist who worked on the report told the Times that he and others feared the president would withhold it.

The report also finds that the average annual temperature will continue to rise throughout the century. Even if humans ceased burning fossil fuels altogether, global temperatures would climb another half a degree Fahrenheit (0.30 degrees Celsius) over this century.

With “very high confidence,” the scientists concluded that “the magnitude of climate change beyond the next few decades depends primarily on the additional amount of greenhouse gases emitted globally.”

Also, the frequency of extreme weather events, including heavy rain and heat waves, have increased and are very likely to continue to do so. And since 1880, global sea levels have risen 8 to 9 inches — roughly 3 of those inches since 1990 — with human activity playing a substantial role, according to the report.

In a post to Twitter, Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that nothing in the report is surprising for people working in the field but that it may be “shocking to those that think [climate change] is just a future problem.”

The report delivers a strikingly different message than the one being pushed by Trump and his Cabinet members, who continue to downplay the urgency of the threat as they work toward “energy dominance.” Since taking office, Trump — who famously called climate change “bullshit” and a Chinese “hoax” — has moved quickly to derail America’s actions to combat climate change, including rolling back President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, a policy limiting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. Trump has pegged himself as a savior of America’s dying coal industry and has vowed to increase oil and gas production, opening now protected areas of the Arctic and Atlantic oceans to drilling.

In June he announced plans to pull the U.S. out of the historic Paris Agreement on climate change ― the international accord in which nearly 200 countries committed to slashing carbon emissions in an effort to prevent global temperatures from increasing 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the line scientists say the world must stay below to stave off the very worst effects of climate change.

Meanwhile, his Cabinet members have refused to say whether Trump believes climate change is real and continue to question how much the scientific community understands about the threat and the role humans play in observed changes.

In March, Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt told CNBC, “No, I would not agree that [carbon dioxide is] a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.” And in June, Energy Secretary Rick Perry echoed Pruitt’s comments, saying “no” when asked by CNBC whether he believes carbon dioxide “is the primary control knob for the temperature of the Earth and for climate.”

“Most likely the primary control knob is the ocean waters and this environment that we live in,” Perry said. “I mean, the fact is, this shouldn’t be a debate about, ‘Is the climate changing? Is man having an effect on it?’ Yeah, we are. The question should be, you know, just how much, and what are the policy changes that we need to make to affect that?”

Perry went on to defend his and others’ climate change denial, suggesting that those who question the scientific community’s findings are more intelligent.

Also in June, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said glaciers in Montana’s Glacier National Park started melting “right after the end of the Ice Age” and that it has “been a consistent melt.” He also dismissed the notion that government scientists can predict with certainty how much warming will occur by 2100 under a business-as-usual scenario.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.

New York Times

Scientists Fear Trump Will Dismiss Blunt Climate Report

By Lisa Friedman       August 7, 2017

Photo

The coal-burning Plant Scherer in Juliette, Ga., is one of the top emitters of carbon dioxide in the United States. A draft report by government scientists concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. Credit Branden Camp/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration.

The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies, which has not yet been made public, concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. It directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects is limited.

“Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,” a draft of the report states. A copy of it was obtained by The New York Times.

The authors note that thousands of studies, conducted by tens of thousands of scientists, have documented climate changes on land and in the air. “Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change,” they wrote.

The report was completed this year and is a special science section of the National Climate Assessment, which is congressionally mandated every four years. The National Academy of Sciences has signed off on the draft report, and the authors are awaiting permission from the Trump administration to release it.

One government scientist who worked on the report, Katharine Hayhoe, a professor of political science at Texas Tech University, called the conclusions among “the most comprehensive climate science reports” to be published. Another scientist involved in the process, who spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity, said he and others were concerned that it would be suppressed.

Document

Read the Draft of the Climate Change Report

A draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies, which has not yet been made public but was obtained by The New York Times, concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now.

OPEN Document

The White House and the Environmental Protection Agency did not immediately return calls or respond to emails requesting comment on Monday night.

The report concludes that even if humans immediately stopped emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the world would still feel at least an additional 0.50 degrees Fahrenheit (0.30 degrees Celsius) of warming over this century compared with today. The projected actual rise, scientists say, will be as much as 2 degrees Celsius.

A small difference in global temperatures can make a big difference in the climate: The difference between a rise in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius and one of 2 degrees Celsius, for example, could mean longer heat waves, more intense rainstorms and the faster disintegration of coral reefs.

Among the more significant of the study’s findings is that it is possible to attribute some extreme weather to climate change. The field known as “attribution science” has advanced rapidly in response to increasing risks from climate change.

The E.P.A. is one of 13 agencies that must approve the report by Aug. 18. The agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt, has said he does not believe that carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming.

“It’s a fraught situation,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geoscience and international affairs at Princeton University who was not involved in the study. “This is the first case in which an analysis of climate change of this scope has come up in the Trump administration, and scientists will be watching very carefully to see how they handle it.”

Scientists say they fear that the Trump administration could change or suppress the report. But those who challenge scientific data on human-caused climate change say they are equally worried that the draft report, as well as the larger National Climate Assessment, will be publicly released.

The National Climate Assessment “seems to be on autopilot” because of a lack of political direction, said Myron Ebell, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The report says significant advances have been made linking human influence to individual extreme weather events since the last National Climate Assessment was produced in 2014. Still, it notes, crucial uncertainties remain.

It cites the European heat wave of 2003 and the record heat in Australia in 2013 as specific episodes where “relatively strong evidence” showed that a man-made factor contributed to the extreme weather.

In the United States, the authors write, the heat wave that broiled Texas in 2011 was more complicated. That year was Texas’ driest on record, and one study cited in the report said local weather variability and La Niña were the primary causes, with a “relatively small” warming contribution. Another study had concluded that climate change made extreme events 20 times more likely in Texas.

Based on those and other conflicting studies, the federal draft concludes that there was a medium likelihood that climate change played a role in the Texas heat wave. But it avoids assessing other individual weather events for their link to climate change. Generally, the report described linking recent major droughts in the United States to human activity as “complicated,” saying that while many droughts have been long and severe, they have not been unprecedented in the earth’s hydrologic natural variation.

Worldwide, the draft report finds it “extremely likely” that more than half of the global mean temperature increase since 1951 can be linked to human influence.

In the United States, the report concludes with “very high” confidence that the number and severity of cool nights have decreased since the 1960s, while the frequency and severity of warm days have increased. Extreme cold waves, it says, are less common since the 1980s, while extreme heat waves are more common.

Graphic: How Americans Think About Climate Change, in Six Maps

The study examines every corner of the United States and finds that all of it was touched by climate change. The average annual temperature in the United States will continue to rise, the authors write, making recent record-setting years “relatively common” in the near future. It projects increases of 5.0 to 7.5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.8 to 4.8 degrees Celsius) by the late century, depending on the level of future emissions.

It says the average annual rainfall across the country has increased by about 4 percent since the beginning of the 20th century. Parts of the West, Southwest and Southeast are drying up, while the Southern Plains and the Midwest are getting wetter.

With a medium degree of confidence, the authors linked the contribution of human-caused warming to rising temperatures over the Western and Northern United States. It found no direct link in the Southeast.

Additionally, the government scientists wrote that surface, air and ground temperatures in Alaska and the Arctic are rising at a frighteningly fast rate — twice as fast as the global average.

“It is very likely that the accelerated rate of Arctic warming will have a significant consequence for the United States due to accelerating land and sea ice melting that is driving changes in the ocean including sea level rise threatening our coastal communities,” the report says.

Human activity, the report goes on to say, is a primary culprit.

The study does not make policy recommendations, but it notes that stabilizing the global mean temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius — what scientists have referred to as the guardrail beyond which changes become catastrophic — will require significant reductions in global levels of carbon dioxide.

Nearly 200 nations agreed as part of the Paris accords to limit or cut fossil fuel emissions. If countries make good on those promises, the federal report says, that will be a key step toward keeping global warming at manageable levels.

Mr. Trump announced this year that the United States would withdraw from the Paris agreement, saying the deal was bad for America.