Associated Press

New Delhi orders construction halt as pollution levels soar

AP      June 14, 2018

NEW DELHI –  New Delhi officials have ordered a two-day halt to construction in an attempt to reduce choking pollution that has cloaked the city in smog and dust.

The government’s Central Pollution Control Board rated the city’s air quality Friday as “severe” — the worst possible category — for the fourth day in a row.

New Delhi’s level of PM2.5, tiny particulate matter that can dangerously clog lungs, exceeded 170 Friday morning, more than six times higher than the World Health Organization considers safe.

The New Delhi government has made scattered attempts in recent years to try to control worsening air pollution, including stricter emission norms for cars and a tax on diesel-fueled trucks entering the city. But the pollution has only gotten worse.

Resilience

Building a world of resilient communities

Is the Trans Mountain Pipeline (and Other Fossil Fuel Investments) a Future Stranded Asset?

 By Martin Bush. Orig. pub in DeSmog Blog    June 11, 2018

Reposted with permission from ClimateZone.org.

The Dakota Access pipeline being installed between farms, as seen from 50th Avenue in New Salem, North Dakota. Credit: Tony Webster, CC By SA 2.0

Several major economies, including the U.S. and Canada, rely heavily on fossil fuel production and exports. But the surging market penetration of renewable energy technologies, energy efficiency improvements, and climate emission policies are certain to substantially reduce the global demand for fossil fuels.

In a seminal paper published a week ago in Nature Climate Change, researchers present the results of sophisticated multi-dimensional modeling of the macro-economic impacts of future technology transformations and climate change policy, as the demand for fossil fuels declines and the price of oil falls.

This is a peer-reviewed paper that was scrutinized by other experts for almost a year before it was accepted for publication. Its warnings should be taken seriously.

Irrespective of whether or not new climate policies are adopted, global demand growth for fossil fuels is already slowing due to the accelerating transition to a low carbon global economy. Given the pace of low-carbon technology market penetration, fossil fuel assets are likely to become stranded due to advances in renewable energy deployment, improvements in energy efficiency, and the electrification of the transportation sector.

There can be no doubt that a global energy transition is fully underway. Last year was another record-breaking year for renewable energy — characterized by the largest ever increase in renewable power capacity, falling costs, increased investment, and advances in enabling technologies.

Solar photovoltaic capacity installations were off the chart — nearly double those of wind power (in second place) — and adding more net capacity than coal, natural gas, and nuclear power combined. Check out the numbers.

The Paris Agreement aims to limit the increase in global average temperatures to below 2°C. Attaining this objective absolutely requires that a fraction of existing reserves of fossil fuels remain in the ground, and that a part of present production capacity remains unused — effectively becoming stranded assets.

Since investors had assumed that these reserves will be commercialized, the stocks of listed fossil fuel companies may soon be judged to be over-valued. This situation gives rise to the possibility of a “carbon bubble” — which may eventually burst with global economic consequences.

The modeling results show that the lower demand for fossil fuels leads to substantial stranded fossil fuel assets if climate change policies are not adopted. For individual countries, the effects vary depending on their  marginal costs of production, with oil production becoming concentrated in OPEC member countries–where costs are lower. Regions with higher marginal costs experience a steep decline in production (for instance Russia), or risk losing a substantial part of their oil and gas industries — like Canada and the U.S.

The Sell-out

The magnitude of the economic impact depends on a variety of factors. The analysis suggests that the behavior of low-cost producers and/or the adoption of 2°C policies can lead to an amplification of the losses. If low-cost producers decide to increase their ratio of production relative to reserves to outplay other asset owners and minimize their losses by selling out early–in effect a “sell-out” — this strategy has a major and very negative impact on higher cost producers.

The low carbon transition generates a modest GDP and employment increase in regions with limited exposure to fossil fuel production (for example, most of the EU and Japan). This is due to a reduction of the trade imbalance arising from fossil fuel imports, and higher employment arising from new investment in low carbon technologies. The improvement occurs despite the general increase in energy prices and hence costs for energy intensive industries.

However, fossil fuel exporters experience a steep decline in their output and employment due to the near shutdown of their fossil fuel industry. These patterns emerge even though there is only a modest overall impact on global GDP — indicating the impacts are primarily distributional with clear winners — the EU and China, and clear losers — the U.S. and Canada.

Gains and Losses

The figure below shows the gains and losses for major economies including the U.S. and Canada through to 2035.  The units are in trillions of U.S. dollars. The principal winners are the EU, China and India. The main losers are the U.S. and Canada.

Cumulative GDP gains and losses by country/region. Credit: Mercure et al., Nature Climate Change 2018. 

Although the U.S. losses are larger in absolute terms, the percentage loss of GDP for Canada is much larger — increasing to over 20 percent within the next ten years. Unemployment increases to around 8 percent over the same time frame. These projections are shown in the graphs below.

Percentage change in GDP. Credit: Mercure et al., Nature Climate Change 2018. 

For Canada, the higher marginal costs of oil sands production (including transport to tidewater via pipelines or oil trains) doom the industry to a future of increasingly curtailed production and stranded assets.

It’s in the context of these long term macroeconomic projections that the proposed Trans Mountain Expansion pipeline should be viewed. Within a decade there will be no market for the oil sands production of heavy oil and bitumen. Low-cost producers, sensing the end of an era, will start to sell off their assets. Oil prices will tumble.

It makes no sense to build a pipeline intended to increase production from the oil sands when even maintaining the existing level of production is seriously in doubt.

Justin Trudeau, now the proud owner of an obsolete and very expensive pipeline, should check the fine print.

Maybe he’s still got a few days where he can change his mind.

CNBC

Capitalism is killing the planet and needs to change, says investor Jeremy Grantham

“Capitalism and mainstream economics simply cannot deal with these problems. Mainstream economics largely ignore [them],” Grantham says.

“We deforest the land, we degrade our soils, we pollute and overuse our water and we treat air like an open sewer, and we do it all off the balance sheet,” he adds.

By Fred Imbert         June 13, 2018

Getty Images

Jeremy Grantham, the longtime investor famous for calling the last two major bubbles in the market, is urging capitalists and “mainstream economists” to recognize the looming threat of climate change.

“Capitalism and mainstream economics simply cannot deal with these problems. Mainstream economics largely ignore [them],” Grantham, who co-founded GMO in 1977, said Tuesday in an impassioned speech at the Morningstar Investment Conference in Chicago. “We deforest the land, we degrade our soils, we pollute and overuse our water and we treat air like an open sewer, and we do it all off the balance sheet.”

This negligence is due in large part to how short-sighted corporations can be, Grantham said. “Anything that happens to a corporation over 25 years out doesn’t exist for them, therefore, as I like to say, grandchildren have no value” to them, he said.

        Getty Images

2016 is likely to have been the hottest year since global temperatures were recorded in the 19th century.

Grantham has been outspoken about his concerns over climate change for years. In 1997, he started the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, which gives money to entities that look to protect the environment. Grantham’s company also launched the GMO Climate Change fund last year, which invests in wind and solar companies.

Throughout his presentation, Grantham cited a slew of data showing how climate change is impacting soil, grains, temperature as well as general human health. Those numbers, coupled with Grantham’s speech delivery, scared a lot of people in attendance at the conference.

Grantham also pointed out that many of the problems with how capitalists deal with climate change stem from the very nature of corporations. “A corporation’s responsibility is to maximize profit, not to spend money and figure out how to save the planet,” he said.

But Grantham added: “We’re racing to protect much more than our portfolios. … We’re racing to protect our grandchildren and our species, so get to it.”

Grantham correctly called the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2000 as well as the sharp market downturn in 2008. These calls helped solidify his reputation in the investment world as a legendary investor. However, Grantham’s GMO has taken massive hits in recent years. The firm’s assets under management have dropped to $71 billion in March from about $124 billion in June 2014 following big bets on emerging markets.

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UPI – Home / Science News

Rising CO2 poses bigger climate threat than warming, study says

New research suggests geo-engineering efforts designed to encourage cooling and reduce rising temperatures are likely to do little to prevent damaging weather extremes.

By Brook Hays     June 12, 2018

New research suggests CO2 concentrations are a better predictor of the extreme weather events associated with global warming. Photo by Reinhard Tiburzy/Shutterstock

June 12 (UPI) — Even if global warming is curbed and the increase in global temperature is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, scientists warn rising CO2 concentrations could still trigger a dangerous increase in extreme weather.

Broadly speaking, more CO2 translates to higher temperatures, but the relationship between atmosphere and climate is complex, and scientists say there are scenarios in which warming could be limited to 1.5 degrees, despite a sizable increase in atmospheric CO2.

New climate models developed by researchers at the University of Bristol and the University of Oxford suggest CO2 levels, not global temperatures, are a better predictor of the most damaging consequences of climate change.

“Future work is needed to confirm exactly why we see this direct CO2 effect, but current research points to a combination of circulation and cloud cover changes, and an increase in the amount of direct radiation on the Earth’s surface due to simply having more CO2 in the atmosphere,” Hugh Baker, a PhD student in physics at Oxford, said in a news release.

In a new study, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists argued climate change mitigation agreements need set targets for atmospheric CO2.

The new research suggests geo-engineering efforts designed to encourage cooling and reducing rising temperatures are likely to do little to prevent damaging weather extremes.

“Geo-engineering techniques that reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth’s surface are increasingly thought of as a way of achieving the Paris Goals because they decrease surface temperature,” said Bristol scientist Dann Mitchell. “However, our results show that for extreme climate such as heatwaves, changing the global mean temperature is not enough, you need to reduce CO2 concentrations themselves.”

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