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Seafood is having its Portlandia moment

Cooking for Solutions is a delightful annual conference, fund-raiser and celebration of seafood sustainability produced every spring by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’m just back from the 2013 event, and there is reason to feel good about the progress the seafood industry is making.

Consumers, chefs and, most importantly, major retailers in the US and Europe are more aware than ever that the choices we make about what kinds of fish to eat–and not to eat–have an impact on the health and sustainability of global fisheries.

The result is that, in the last decade or so, virtually every major retailer and food service company in the US and EU has adopted a seafood sustainability policy. Some are stronger than others, but the issue is on the agenda and not going away.

“Large corporations may very well turn out to be our angels of salvation,” said Matt Elliott, an oceans expert at California Environmental Associates, which last year published a landmark report on global fishing practices.

You could say that seafood is having its Portlandia moment. I’m referring, of course, to the hilarious scene on the cable TV show in which a couple interrogate a waitress about the chicken on the menu. (“How much room did the chicken have to roam?”) Chefs who gathered last week in Monterey told me that they are asked by diners if their salmon is wild or farm-raised, and whether their shrimp is local or imported from Asia.

By themselves, consumers can’t drive changes in fishing practices. But when consumers make themselves heard, and emerge as part of a larger ecosystem that includes activist NGOs such as Greenpeace, business-friendly environmental groups such as the World Wildlife Fund, certifying bodies like the flawed but important Marine Stewardship Council and brands like Whole Foods Market and Darden, change happens. Regulation of the oceans–a public commons if ever there was one–is important, but markets, too, can drive sustainability.

The world-renowned Monterey Bay Aquarium has done as much as anyone to raise awareness about seafood choices–and it has done so relatively quickly. It was in 1999 that the aquarium launched its Seafood Watch program and began distributing wallet-sized cards that rate seafood items as green (“Best Choices”), yellow (“Good Alternatives”) and red (“Avoid”).  Since then, the aquarium has distributed more than 40 million pocket guides; its smartphone app has been downloaded nearly a million times.

Seafood Watch is an unavoidably blunt instrument. It rates species, not individual fisheries or fish farms, of which there are thousands. It can also be confusing. Consumers who pay close attention know to avoid Chilean Sea Bass. [An aquarium campaign called “Take a Pass on Sea Bass” surely helped.] But shrimp, salmon and tuna are all rated as “best,” “good” and “avoid,” depending on how and where they are caught or farmed. It’s asking a lot of even caring consumers to have them consult a pocket guide or smartphone each time they visit a supermarket or dine out.

So Seafood Watch has evolved, to engage with chefs and companies. “We started as a consumer awareness movement, and we have been forced–and it’s been a ‘good’ forced–to shift,” said Jennifer Dianto Kemmerly, the director of Seafood Watch. Big companies employ people who do nothing but buy seafood, and a lot of it, and they can influence fisheries management. In the late 2000s, the big food service companies Compass and Aramark and giant retailer Walmart all adopted seafood purchasing policies in which they promise to favor sustainable practices.

Greenpeace, which has been rating the retailers since 2008, reports progress. The “US seafood retail industry has improved significantly” since then, Greenpeace says. Last year, for the first time ever, Greenpeace gave two companies–Safeway and Whole Foods Markets–a “good” rating, citing their “progressive policy development, public support for conservation measures, and elimination of unsustainable seafood inventory items.”

A thorough foundation-funded fisheries report, called Charting a Course to Sustainable Fisheries, had this to say about the “market transformation” strategy:

Over the last 15 years, the power of the market has served as a catalyst for certain fishery reforms. We now have the ability to define and certify sustainable seafood, educate consumers, engage businesses, and channel that interest toward fishery reform. Soon, a critical mass of engagement will be reached, with major markets making sustainability a condition of entry. We anticipate that Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification of wild seafood is likely to grow to 15-20% of global fisheries, temporarily reaching a plateau at that level.

To be sure, as CEA’s Matt Elliott pointed out in Monterey, most of the world’s wild fisheries remain in a precarious state. Some corporate policies are weak; others are taking effect gradually. Most important, the strategy of using “progressive consumerism” to drive change has yet to take hold in the developing world where seafood consumption is growing rapidly.

“To what extent can we influence the future trajectory in China?”  Elliott asked. “Right now there are dozens of organizations trying to figure out whether there is a path forward.”

The encouraging news, though, is that when it comes to managing the world’s seafood supply, we know what works. Good science, consumer activism, corporate responsibility and smart regulation can help prevent overfishing and allow depleted stocks to recover. Best of all, over time, sustainable practices will deliver more and not less fish to our plates.

Worse Than Watergate: Growing Scandal Brings Nation To The Brink Of Ruin

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein points us to the ever-growing scandal that will echo through the ages:

When future generations look back on the scandals of our age, it’ll be the unchecked rise in global temperatures, not the Benghazi talking points, that infuriate them.

Yes, unchecked warming is likely to prove the greatest scandal in U.S. history.

Certainly it’s the one that will ruin the lives of the most people, far more than Watergate did if our government doesn’t act to expose what’s going on and work to put an end to it — before it puts an end to our stable climate:

Scandalous: Projected warming this century (in red, via recent literature) if humanity allows current carbon pollution trends to continue compared to the temperature change over past 11,300 years (in blue, via Science, 2013).

I know it’s not one of the scandals the major media are now obsessed with 24/7, but that is business as usual for the MSM, as Klein notes:

Things go wrong in government. Sometimes it’s just bad luck. Sometimes it’s rank incompetence. Sometimes it’s criminal wrongdoing. Most of the time you never hear about it. Or, if you do hear about it, the media eventually gets bored talking about it (see warming, global).

It was Watergate and the fame it brought Woodward and Bernstein that inspired so many journalists to enter the field. But now that post-modern cynicism reigns supreme –which is to say, much of the media acts as if their really is no objective truth or over-arching public interest — fame alone seems to drives the media.

And so this scandal goes largely unreported (see “Silence Of The Lambs 3: Media Coverage Of Climate Mixed In 2012, But Still Down Sharply From 2009“) or misreported (see “False Balance Lives“).

Fortunately for the media, having largely missed the chance to report the scandal when it might have had some positive impact on the outcome, they’ll have plenty of time to become famous reporting on its consequences (see Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).

China Just Endorsed Construction Of Its Biggest Hydropower Dam Yet

Reuters reported on Wednesday that China’s environmental ministry has okayed the construction of a new hydroelectric dam on the Dadu River in the Sichuan province, which when completed will be the country’s largest.

China’s energy mix was 9.4 percent renewable as of 2011, and the Sichuan project is part of the country’s effort to boost itself to 15 percent by 2020. Hydroelectric power is anticipated to make up most of that increase.

The environmental ministry acknowledged that the project is massive enough to damage the local ecology, negatively effecting certain rare fish species and plant life. The dam’s developers have promised to try and offset those effects with “counter-measures,” and the project still requires the approval of China’s ruling cabinet.

To be built over 10 years by a subsidiary of state power firm Guodian Group, it is expected to cost 24.68 billion yuan ($4.02 billion) in investment.

The ministry, in a statement issued late on Tuesday, said an environmental impact assessment had acknowledged that the project would have a negative impact on rare fish and flora and affect protected local nature reserves.

Developers, it said, had pledged to take “counter-measures” to mitigate the effects.

Right now the title for China’s tallest dam goes to the Xiaowan project, at 292 meters, while the tallest dam in the world is currently Tajikistan’s Nurek dam, at 300 meters. The Sichuan dam will top 314 meters when all is said and done.

China has been at the forefront of hydroelectric development for a while now, with an enormous number of dams either constructed, in the works, or in the planning stages. Even individual projects can be of tremendous scale, providing in at least one instance an electrical capacity equal to nearly half of Britain’s entire national grid, and preventing 200 metric tons of carbon emissions each year. As of 2010, worldwide hydroelectric capacity was 850 to 900 gigawatts, meaning about one-fifth of the world’s electricity — and half the electricity for almost two thirds of the world’s countries — comes courtesy of hydropower. Though that use varies widely: the United States and Europe have developed 70 and 75 percent of their hydroelectric potential, while Africa has only taken advantage of 7 percent.

At the same time, the large bodies of water and massive landscape alterations that are part and parcel of large dam projects mean hydroelectricity can come with unusually significant downsides. The construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China’s Hubei province, for example, caused significant ecological damage, increased the risk of landslides, flooded a number of archeological and cultural sites, and displaced 1.3 million people. And the constricted water flow can hurt downstream populations that rely on the rivers for their fresh water supplies.

Meanwhile, climate change itself is also making hydropower less reliable, as altering weather patterns dry up some river flows, boost others, and generally make the future availability of water flows more difficult to predict.

One answer to those challenges could be small scale hydropower. Studies suggest there’s as much as 30 gigawatts of unused potential for such projects in the United States. These set-ups generally provide 10 kilowatts to 30 megawatts a piece, and don’t require damming rivers. (Or they can be built into already existing dams, the vast majority of which are not hydroelectric.) Unfortunately, regulatory red tape is in many ways the major hurdle to taking advantage of small scale hydro.

U.S. Now One Step Closer To Being Net Natural Gas Exporter

Exporting natural gas just got easier.

This afternoon, the Department of Energy approved the second application for a facility to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) worldwide. Today’s approval to export up to 1.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day goes to Freeport LNG Expansion, on Quintana Island in Texas, for 25 years. The approval process now moves to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commissions (FERC), so the company is not in the clear yet.

Several companies have received nearly two dozen permits from DoE to export LNG to countries with which the U.S. has a free trade agreement (FTA), but the approval process has been much slower for permits to export to non-FTA countries. 19 facilities that want to export LNG to non-FTA countries are still under review by the Energy Department — including a joint project between ExxonMobil and Qatar Petroleum.

The natural gas industry is booming in the United States, largely due to the practice of fracking, which opened up large parts of the country to extraction previously thought uneconomical to drill. Natural gas can be transported via pipeline across land, but when companies want to export the fuel overseas, they have to use ships. Since natural gas (mostly methane) in gas form would require a large ship to transport, it must be cooled and liquefied before it can be exported across an ocean.

In the last decade, companies built facilities to import natural gas because the U.S. expected lower production than what fracking actually allowed. Once the shale gas boom sharply increased domestic production, they have tried to turn those import terminals into export terminals. Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass terminal, the first facility to receive DoE approval to export to non-FTA countries, is one example of this.

The reason for the delay of such applications is due to opposition largely from the chemical industry, which fears that exports will lead to an increase in the price of natural gas (which it uses for industrial purposes), and those who care about carbon emissions and the environment, who point out that the U.S. still does not know the consequences that exports will have on carbon emissions.

Congressman Ed Markey, running for John Kerry’s old senate seat in Massachusetts, said today that “The Department of Energy still doesn’t even know what the impact of natural gas exports will be on domestic businesses and consumers, but they are approving more exports anyway.”

If the U.S. is increasing exports, it becomes even more critical to ensure that the natural gas obtained through hydraulic fracturing is as safe as possible, with zero fugitive emissions. Yesterday the Interior Department released draft fracking rules, and there are some easy ways (5 in fact) to make the rules adequately protect Americans and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is one thing to argue for weak safeguards to give Americans access to “cheap energy” — it is another to argue for weak rules that poison the air and water to export the energy to other countries.

The net climate effects of LNG exports depend largely on the energy currently used by the importing country — what the gas will replace. Coal-heavy economies that replace their coal with natural gas should see lower emissions, but this transition could threaten more valuable transitions to renewable energy.

The Energy Department said in today’s approval that “the exports proposed in this Application are likely to yield net economic benefits to the United States.” Left unsaid is the fact that the more fossil fuels left in the ground, the easier it is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which would benefit the economy in myriad ways.

Maps: Growth of cycling and bike infrastructure in Portland since 1990

Honda extracts rare earth metals from used hybrid batteries, turns them into new batteries

No Easy Fix for Broken Wind Turbine at US High School

It's status quo for the Portsmouth High School wind turbine. On Monday night, town planner Gary Crosby informed the Town Council that negotiations ceased with two possible developers interested in fixing or replacing the 336-foot-high turbine, which has been broken since June 2012.

Top 5 Things You Need To Know About Immigrants And The Environment

Anh Phan is Manager of the Anti-Hate Table in Immigration Policy and Mari Hernandez is a Research Associate in Energy Policy at the Center for American Progress. Special thanks to former American Progress staffer Jorge Madrid for his help.

Since last November’s Presidential election, immigration reform with a road map to citizenship for the 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the country has been gaining momentum. On April 16 the bipartisan Senate “Gang of 8″ introduced their immigration bill, and diverse groups such as organized labor, evangelical Christians, and business leaders have lent their support for reform.

Just last month, the board of the Sierra Club, the oldest environmental organization in the United States voted to add their voice to the movement, officially supporting immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship. In doing so they joined other well-known environmental leaders like Bill McKibben and Van Jones.

Immigration reform and environmental protection are progressive issues that are in alignment, as the Sierra Club’s support illustrates: immigrants are affected by climate change and care about the environment, and the environmental movement is in turn strengthened by the inclusion of immigrant voices.

Here are the top five things you need to know about immigrants and the environment:

1. Immigrants are already a part of the environmental movement. Immigrants and people of color have long been key players in the environmental justice movement, which has been fighting back against environmental injustice that has disproportionately affected communities of color and low-income communities. Environmental justice organizations, for example, often speak out against polluting and toxic businesses, like power plants and fuel tank facilities that are sited in or near communities of color. But while immigrants have been active in the more localized environmental justice movement, they need to have a larger role in the overall environmental movement which has all too often been criticized for a lack of diversity. In a recent Grist post, One America board member Sudha Nandagopal wrote, “… we don’t just need to add diverse faces to the crowds at environmental protests. We need inclusive strategies and a diversity of ideas. Communities of color must be equitable partners in identifying problems, crafting solutions, and pushing for change.”
2. Immigrants have a big stake in the health of the planet. Historically, immigrants and people of color have borne a greater share of environmental burdens in their communities and at their jobs. According to the Sierra Club, 43 percent of Latino voters either live or work near a toxic site (such as a power plant, refinery, highway or factory.) This figure has increased by close to 10 percent since 2008, showing a dangerous uptick in the number of Latinos potentially exposed to dangerous environmental conditions, and the need among this community for a cleaner, healthier planet.
3. Immigrants tend to lead low-carbon lifestyles. More than half of all immigrants live in large metropolitan areas, which have some of the lowest per capita emissions in the U.S. In fact, CAP analysis has found that cities with the lowest carbon footprint had an average immigrant population of 26 percent, while the 10 highest per-capita carbon emitting cities have an average immigrant population below 5 percent. In addition to living in big cities, immigrants are almost three times more likely to take public transportation and nearly two times more likely to carpool than native-born residents.
4. Immigrants are helping to drive the green economy. Immigrants are leading new businesses in the green and high-tech industries, having launched 40 percent of publicly traded, venture-backed companies and nearly half of private, venture-backed startups. Additionally, immigrants occupy many “green-collar” jobs (blue-collar jobs in the green goods and services industry) and use their skills to advance energy efficiency, clean energy and sustainability. Green-collar employment includes jobs in wind turbine manufacturing, solar power project construction, home weatherization, solar panel installation, etc.
5. Immigrants support environmental policies. A recent poll found that 7 out of 10 Latino voters support environmental protections while 9 out of 10 feel a sense of “moral responsibility” when it comes to protecting the environment. A similar study of Asian American voters in California found that 3 out of 4 are extremely or very concerned about environmental issues, and 7 out of 10 believe that environmental regulations “provide an important benefit to society and protect health, air and water.” Immigrants from Latin American and Asian countries represent more than 60 percent (over 24 million residents) of the U.S. foreign-born population and these polls indicate that they can be strong advocates for environmental protections.

In coming out in support of immigration reform, Sierra Club President Allison Chin stated, “By establishing an equitable path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in America today, we can empower those in our society who are most vulnerable to toxic pollution to fully participate in our democracy, fight back against polluters and demand public health protections and clean energy solutions.” The intersection of environmentalism and immigration reform will continue to benefit and strengthen both movements.

EU Should Scrap Energy Subsidies to Fight Warming, Poland Says

The European Union should scrap fossil fuel and renewable energy subsidies and set a target to cut oil imports to remain the leader in the fight against global warming, according to Poland's environment minister.

Brazil Auction Rules May Boost Price of Wind Power 15%

Prices for wind energy in Brazil, currently the lowest in the world, may rise at least 15 percent due to government policies designed to make the nation's power grid more reliable.

Breakdown: Penetration of Renewable Energy in Selected Markets

The penetration of renewable energy into the electricity supply mix has been much in the news recently. During the first quarter, Portugal generated three-quarters of its electricity with renewable energy. Meanwhile, in Germany, one-fifth of all electricity was generated with renewables, most of that from new sources of renewable energy, such as wind and solar. And recently, at a conference in San Francisco, attendees heard calls for generating not just 100 percent of electricity supply with renewable energy, but far more — 200 percent to 300 percent of generation — in order to meet the need for heating, cooling, and transportation as well.

U.S. Geological Survey: Warmer Springs Causing Loss Of Snow Cover Throughout The Rocky Mountains

A new U.S. Geological Survey study finds, “Warmer spring temperatures since 1980 are causing an estimated 20 percent loss of snow cover across the Rocky Mountains of western North America.”

The USGS explains, “The new study builds upon a previous USGS snowpack investigation which showed that, until the 1980s, the northern Rocky Mountains experienced large snowpacks when the central and southern Rockies experienced meager ones, and vice versa. Yet, since the 1980s, there have been simultaneous snowpack declines along the entire length of the Rocky Mountains, and unusually severe declines in the north.”

We reported on that previous work in 2011 — see “USGS: Global Warming Drives Rockies Snowpack Loss Unrivaled in 800 Years, Threatens Western Water Supply.” The USGS explained back then:

The warming and snowpack decline are projected to worsen through the 21st century, foreshadowing a strain on water supplies. Runoff from winter snowpack – layers of snow that accumulate at high altitude – accounts for 60 to 80 percent of the annual water supply for more than 70 million people living in the western United States.

What’s most worrisome is that we now have three major trends driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases that threaten to significantly worsen drought and water problems in the West and Southwest:

1. Less precipitation in many areas (see here)
2. Less snowpack, as the USGS studies have found
3. Hotter temperatures (see “We’re Already Topping Dust Bowl Temperatures — Imagine What’ll Happen If We Fail To Stop 10°F Warming“).

Assuming the anti-science crowd continue to block any serious action, these catastrophic changes will last a long, long time (see NOAA: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe).

For the record, it was the possibility of losing the Sierra snowpack in the second half of the century that led then Energy Secretary Chu to warn in 2009, “Wake up,” America, “we’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.”

Geophysical Research Letters published the new research, “Regional patterns and proximal causes of the recent snowpack decline in the Rocky Mountains” (subs. req’d). Here are the key points from the USGS news release:

The new study has teased apart and quantified the different influences of winter temperature, spring temperature, and precipitation on historic snowpack variations and trends in the region. To distinguish those varying influences, the researchers implemented a regional snow model that uses inputs of monthly temperature and precipitation data from 1895 to 2011.

“Each year we looked at temperature and precipitation variations and the amount of water contained within the snowpack as of April,” said USGS scientist Greg Pederson, the lead author of the study. “Snow deficits were consistent throughout the Rockies due to the lack of precipitation during the cool seasons during the 1930s – coinciding with the Dust Bowl era.  From 1980 on, warmer spring temperatures melted snowpack throughout the Rockies early, regardless of winter precipitation. The model in turn shows temperature as the major driving factor in snowpack declines over the past thirty years.”

… The timing of snowmelt affects not only when water is available for crop irrigation and energy production from hydroelectric dams, but also the risk of regional floods and wildfires. Earlier and faster snowmelt could have repercussions for water supply, risk management, and ecosystem health in western watersheds.

… [Greg] McCabe, co-author of the study, explains that “recent springtime warming also reduced the extent of snow cover at low to middle elevations where temperature has had the greatest impact.”

What’s particularly worrisome is that we’ve seen these dramatic and harmful changes already — and we’ve only warmed about a degree and a half Fahrenheit in the past century.  The problem for our children and grandchildren is that if we continue anywhere near our current greenhouse gas emissions pathway, we are on track to warm five times times that or more this century (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

Another 2011 study, “The Last Drop: Climate Change and the Southwest Water Crisis,” found that drought and reduced precipitation in the U.S. SW alone could cost up to $1 trillion by century’s end.

The time to act was a long time ago, but now is still better than later.

Moniz Unanimously Confirmed As New DOE Chief

Ernie Moniz has been unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the next Secretary of Energy, in a 97-0 vote (with three nonvoters). He succeeds Stephen Chu who held the position for four years.

Over 100 ‘Clean Air Ambassadors’ Call On Congress To Clean Up Its Act

A coalition of over 100 “clean air ambassadors” — including nurses, physicians, clergy members, labor leaders, tribal leaders, and social justice activists — descended on Capitol Hill Wednesday to call on Congress to protect children, the elderly, the poor, and other vulnerable Americans from the health threats of air pollution, smog, and rising carbon emissions.

They represented a range of groups from all fifty states, as well as Puerto Rico, all organized under the “50 States United For Healthy Air” campaign. They spoke this week with elected officials to call for several needed changes:

1) Finalize new carbon limits for new power plants, and establish limits for existing power plants. The regulations for new plants are in the works, driven by a Supreme Court ruling that the executive branch has the power and legal obligation to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. The Obama Administration hasn’t decided yet what to do about emissions from already existing plants, but the National Resources Defense Council recently came up with an impressive proposal. And this can all be done without the need for legislative approval from Congress.

As the “50 States United For Healthy Air” campaign notes, the rising temperatures driven by climate change intensify the damaging health effects of smog and other pollutants. On top of that, climate change can alter the spread of diseases and increase deaths due to heat waves, and all these effects fall harder on poorer and more vulnerable populations.

2) Finalize federally enforceable coal ash rules. Coal ash is created whenever coal is burned, and generators often then dump the toxic residue in landfills — which have given way on more than one occasion, leading to spills that are hazardous to both the environment and human health. Meanwhile, the EPA’s regulations of coal ash have been stuck in limbo for years.

3) Strengthen standards limiting air pollution and smog. Along with carbon dioxide, the burning of fossil fuels emits all sorts of other pollution into the air we breath, driving up rates of asthma, heart and lung disease, hospital visits and premature deaths. Again, these harms fall hardest on children, the old, the poor, and minorities.

Estimates of new EPA rules to crack down on these pollutants suggest the limits could prevent 21,600 premature deaths, 12,540 hospitalizations, 199,000 asthma cases each year. The rules include standards for power plants and industrial emitters, as well as the still-being -developed “Tier 3″ standards for motor vehicles. But again, the rules are still awaiting finalization.

“50 States United For Healthy Air” includes representatives from the American Nurses Association, Earthjustice, the Hip Hop Caucus, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Council of Churches, the National Latino Coalition on Climate Change, and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Five Things That Are Needed In New Fracking Rules

The Department of the Interior is about to propose a revised version of rules to govern the practice of hydraulic fracturing of oil and gas wells on federal lands. The department’s Bureau of Land Management oversees drilling on 700 million acres of land, including almost 60 million acres of private land where the agency owns the mineral rights.

It has been a year since the BLM took its first stab at this task — and fell short of what is required. As CAP’s chair and counselor John Podesta said on May 4, 2012, about that effort:

Natural gas is a key component to establishing a clean energy future in the United States, but the public must be confident that it is done safely and responsibly, and the proposed rule released today by the Department of the Interior misses the mark.

The federal rules governing the controversial well stimulation technique commonly called fracking — which haven’t been updated since 1988 — should be a model of thorough, transparent and workable government oversight.

Most of the lands where they will be applied belong to all Americans, a birthright that we hold in trust for generations to come. That alone requires the Interior Department and the Obama administration to not cut corners in deference to the oil and gas industry. Unfortunately there are numerous indications that, as Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) said last week, “The Interior Department seems to be making the rule weaker, not stronger.”

The tests that the new rules should meet include the following:

• Maximum transparency. Chemicals used in fracking must be disclosed to the public to the greatest extent possible. While it is common in states that require disclosure to allow exemptions for trade secrets held by individual companies, this exception has in some cases been stretched to become a loophole. In the new federal rules there should be thorough oversight so that only truly legitimate trade secrets are protected. And even real trade secret information should be disclosed to regulators and medical professionals who may have to respond to health emergencies.
• Disclosure through a government website. The public must have access to full information on where fracking is occurring, and what substances are being used, through a government-run website, not one that is industry supported. The FracFocus website managed by an Oklahoma non-profit with industry ties has numerous flaws. It doesn’t collect and publish some of the information that individual states require be disclosed, and it is very difficult for users of the site to aggregate and analyze information.
• Disclosure before drilling. The public must know before drilling begins, and not only after it is completed, what chemicals are being injected underground. Early disclosure will allow the public and nearby private landowners to assess risks to their health and to document conditions that exist before drilling begins so they can make comparisons if accidents or spills occur.
• Baseline and post-drilling water testing. The Department of the Interior should require that nearby water supplies be tested both before and after drilling.
• State of the art well construction standards. Protection of underground water supplies cannot be guaranteed without application of the highest possible industry standards for well integrity and testing of cement casings.

With the unveiling of the new rules on fracking on public lands the Interior Department under new Secretary Sally Jewell — and the Obama administration as a whole — will be laying down an important marker about how they will manage fossil fuel development on the public’s lands.

Other tests lie ahead. They include whether the administration can build on the progress made during the first term in reforming oil and gas leasing so the program does a better job of cohesive planning over large landscapes and of avoiding conflicts with other resources and uses such as recreation and municipal watersheds. The administration should also make good on its promise to raise decades-old royalty rates paid by oil and gas companies, should adopt a clean resources standard for public lands to re-direct energy development more towards clean energy, and should take into account climate change impacts when doing environmental reviews of energy projects.

Finally, an administration which has been aggressive about increasing fossil fuel production from federal lands should be equally aggressive about conserving public lands that have great value for things other than commercial development. As we have shown in the past, the administration’s record in that regard is insufficient, and lags far behind some of its recent predecessors.

The First Cuts Are the Deepest: Sequester Cuts Increase Health, Climate Risks

“I don’t know whether it’s [sequester] going to hurt the economy or not. I don’t think anyone quite understands how the sequester is really going to work.” – John Boehner, 3/3/13

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) claims he did not know whether the automatic budget cuts (or sequester) imposed by the Budget Control Act would hurt Americans, but he must not have been paying attention. In February, the Center for American Progress predicted that “Sequester Will Expose Americans to Greater Health Risks and Other Perils.”

Ten weeks after the budget sequester took effect on March 1, the House Appropriations Committee Democrats released “Report on Sequestration Effects and Efforts to Mitigate its Impact.” This brand new analysis confirms many of our predictions that the sequester cuts threaten Americans’ health, safety and well-being.

The sequester cuts in energy and environment related programs generally have had the following impacts so far:

• Less ability to fight wildfires
• Greater exposure to climate related extreme weather
• Less protection from air pollution
• Reduced protection for national parks and other protected places

Climate Progress Deputy Editor Ryan Koronowski described the impact of budget cuts on our ability to fight wildfires this summer in what many experts believe will be quite a vicious fire season.

The sequester will expose Americans to additional risks from climate change. The House Appropriations Committee Democrats report that

The sequester will result in a cut of at least $50 million from NOAA’s geostationary weather satellite program, which provides continuous monitoring to track severe weather. The cut will cause a 3-6 month satellite launch delay, increasing the likelihood of having fewer than two operational geostationary weather satellites in the 2017 timeframe, increasing the risk of inaccurate forecasts for hurricanes, tornadoes, and severe thunderstorms, with further risks to public safety and costs from weather-related damage.

In addition, NASA’s science budget cuts will affect “climate research satellites.”

These cuts follow two years when the 25 most severe climate related floods, drought, storms, heat waves, and wildfires took 1,107 lives and caused $188 billion in damages. A CAP analysis estimated that taxpayers spent a total of $136 billion on relief and recovery for these and other disasters that occurred in 2011-2012 — about $400 per home per year. The reduction in weather forecasting and climate research will hamper our ability to warn vulnerable communities about future extreme weather events, increasing their risk.

The House report also found that the Environmental Protection Agency will have less ability to protect people from air pollution.

EPA plans to delay the implementation of monitoring sites for dangerous air pollutants and cut grants to State regulators. The result will be reduced enforcement of air pollution rules, potentially overturning years of public health benefits from increasing air pollution.

For instance, this will reduce the number of “off-road monitors” that measure levels of smog-forming chemicals. In addition, cuts will make it more difficult for state agencies to enforce restrictions on pollution, according to the National Association of Clean Air Agencies.

Federal enforcement of environmental safeguards is also impaired. Doug Parker, the director of EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) warned that:

There are areas where there were boots on the ground where there are no longer boots on the ground…. There are significant geographic regions we can no longer cover.

Polluters know that if there are fewer cops on the beat then they can emit more toxic and other harmful pollutants with less risk of discovery.

As Climate Progress has repeatedly noted, it is imperative that we speed the conversion from fossil fuels to efficiency and renewable energy. But we will continue to rely on oil and natural gas to fuel our transportation and electricity, respectively, while this transition is underway. It is to our economic and security benefit to produce these fuels here, including from public lands and waters set aside for that purpose (though not through allowing drilling in currently protected places). Yet the House report determined that the U.S. will produce less domestic fuel due to the sequester.

The Bureau of Land Management is forced to slow down approval of oil and gas drilling permits and cancel lease sales to meet the spending reductions required by the sequester. 300 to 400 fewer drilling permits will be processed, 150 fewer leases issued, and two lease sales cancelled this year, all as a direct result of the sequester. There will be an estimated $150 million in revenue losses to the States and U.S. Treasury because of these reduced lease sales and drilling permits.

The sequester will also curtail Americans ability to hunt, fish, hike, boat, and otherwise enjoy our millions of acres of wild places. The House report found that:

The public should be prepared for reduced hours and services this year at our nation’s 401 national parks, 155 national forests, 561 national wildlife refuges, and more than 258 public land units. For the National Park Service alone, the sequester means that 900 permanent positions are being left unfilled and 1000 fewer seasonal workers are being hired this year.

Fewer employees means fewer staff at visitor centers, and less interpretive talks and campfire programs that the public has come to expect when they visit these special wild places.

These are just some of the risks posed by this meat ax approach to cutting government spending at a time when the federal budget deficit is already shrinking. Americans can’t afford more of this untargeted austerity.

May 17 is Bike to Work Day! No excuses this year!

Study Finds 97% Consensus on Human-Caused Global Warming in the Peer-Reviewed Literature

By Dana Nuccitelli and John Cook via Skeptical Science.

A new survey of over 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers by our citizen science team at Skeptical Science has found a 97 percent consensus in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are causing global warming.

Lead author John Cook created a short video abstract summarizing the study.

The Abstracts Survey

The first step of our approach involved expanding the original survey of the peer-reviewed scientific literature in Oreskes (2004). We performed a keyword search of peer-reviewed scientific journal publications (in the ISI Web of Science) for the terms ‘global warming’ and ‘global climate change’ between the years 1991 and 2011, which returned over 12,000 papers. John Cook created a web-based system that would randomly display a paper’s abstract (summary). We agreed upon definitions of possible categories: explicit or implicit endorsement of human-caused global warming, no position, and implicit or explicit rejection (or minimization of the human influence).

Our approach was also similar to that taken by James Powell, as illustrated in the popular graphic below. Powell examined nearly 14,000 abstracts, searching for explicit rejections of human-caused global warming, finding only 24. We took this approach further, also looking at implicit rejections, no opinions, and implicit/explicit endorsements.

We took a conservative approach in our ratings. For example, a study which takes it for granted that global warming will continue for the foreseeable future could easily be put into the implicit endorsement category; there is no reason to expect global warming to continue indefinitely unless humans are causing it. However, unless an abstract included (either implicit or explicit) language about the cause of the warming, we categorized it as ‘no position’.

Note that John Cook also initiated a spinoff from the project with a survey of climate blog participants re-rating a subset of these same abstracts. However, this spinoff is not a part of our research or conclusions.

The Team

A team of Skeptical Science volunteers proceeded to categorize the 12,000 abstracts — the most comprehensive survey of its kind to date. Each paper was rated independently at least twice, with the identity of the other co-rater not known. A dozen team members completed most of the 24,000+ ratings. There was no funding provided for this project; all the work was performed on a purely voluntary basis.

Once we finished the 24,000+ ratings, we went back and checked the abstracts where there were disagreements. If the disagreement about a given paper couldn’t be settled by the two initial raters, a third person acted as the tie-breaker.

The volunteers were an internationally diverse group. Team members’ home countries included Australia, USA, Canada, UK, New Zealand, Germany, Finland, and Italy.

The Self-Ratings

As an independent test of the measured consensus, we also emailed over 8,500 authors and asked them to rate their own papers using our same categories. The most appropriate expert to rate the level of endorsement of a published paper is the author of the paper, after all. We received responses from 1,200 scientists who rated a total of over 2,100 papers. Unlike our team’s ratings that only considered the summary of each paper presented in the abstract, the scientists considered the entire paper in the self-ratings.

The 97% Consensus Results

Based on our abstract ratings, we found that just over 4,000 papers expressed a position on the cause of global warming, 97.1% of which endorsed human-caused global warming. In the self-ratings, nearly 1,400 papers were rated as taking a position, 97.2% of which endorsed human-caused global warming.

We found that about two-thirds of papers didn’t express a position on the subject in the abstract, which confirms that we were conservative in our initial abstract ratings. This result isn’t surprising for two reasons: 1) most journals have strict word limits for their abstracts, and 2) frankly, every scientist doing climate research knows humans are causing global warming. There’s no longer a need to state something so obvious. For example, would you expect every geological paper to note in its abstract that the Earth is a spherical body that orbits the sun?

This result was also predicted by Oreskes (2007), which noted that scientists

“… generally focus their discussions on questions that are still disputed or unanswered rather than on matters about which everyone agrees”

However, according to the author self-ratings, nearly two-thirds of the papers in our survey do express a position on the subject somewhere in the paper.

We also found that the consensus has strengthened gradually over time. The slow rate reflects that there has been little room to grow, because the consensus on human-caused global warming has generally always been over 90% since 1991. Nevertheless, in both the abstract ratings and self-ratings, we found that the consensus has grown to about 98% as of 2011.

Percentage of papers endorsing the consensus among only papers that express a position endorsing or rejecting the consensus. From Cook et al. (2013).

Our results are also consistent with previous research finding a 97 percent consensus amongst climate experts on the human cause of global warming. Doran and Zimmerman (2009) surveyed Earth scientists, and found that of the 77 scientists responding to their survey who are actively publishing climate science research, 75 (97.4%) agreed that “human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures.” Anderegg et al. (2010) compiled a list of 908 researchers with at least 20 peer-reviewed climate publications. They found that:

“≈97% of self-identified actively publishing climate scientists agree with the tenets of ACC [anthropogenic climate change]“

In our survey, among scientists who expressed a position on AGW in their abstract, 98.4% endorsed the consensus. This is greater than 97% consensus of peer-reviewed papers because endorsement papers had more authors than rejection papers, on average. Thus there is a 97.1% consensus in the peer-reviewed literature, and a 98.4% consensus amongst scientists researching climate change.

Why is this Important?

Several studies have shown that people who correctly perceive the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming are more likely to support government action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. This was most recently shown in McCright et al. (2013), recently published in the journal Climatic Change. People will defer to the judgment of experts, and they trust climate scientists on the subject of global warming.

However, research has also shown that the public is misinformed on the climate consensus. For example, a 2012 poll from US Pew Research Center found less than half of Americans thought that scientists agreed that humans were causing global warming. One contributor to this misperception is false balance in the media, particularly in the US, where most climate stories are “balanced” with a “skeptic” perspective. However, this results in making the 3 percent seem much larger, like 50 percent. In trying to achieve “balance”, the media has actually created a very unbalanced perception of reality. As a result, people believe scientists are still split about what’s causing global warming, and therefore there is not nearly enough public support or motivation to solve the problem.\

Such false balance has long been the goal of a dedicated misinformation campaign waged by the fossil fuel industry. Just as one example, in 1991 Western Fuels Association conducted a $510,000 campaign whose primary goal was to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact).” These vested interests have exploited the media desire to appear “balanced.”

Open Access for Maximum Transparency

We chose to submit our paper to Environmental Research Letters because it is a well-respected, high-impact journal, but also because it offers the option of making a paper available by open access, meaning that for an up-front fee, the paper can be made free for anybody to download. This was important to us, because we want our results to be as accessible and transparent as possible.

To pay the open access fee, in keeping with the citizen science approach, we asked for donations from Skeptical Science readers. We received over 50 donations in less than 10 hours to fully crowd-fund the $1,600 open access cost.

Human-Caused Global Warming

We fully anticipate that some climate contrarians will respond by saying “we don’t dispute that humans cause some global warming.” First of all, there are a lot of people who do dispute that there is a consensus that humans cause any global warming. Our paper shows that their position is not supported in the scientific literature.

Second, we did look for papers that quantify the human contribution to global warming, and most are not that specific. However, as noted above, if a paper minimized the human contribution, we classified that as a rejection. For example, if a paper were to say “the sun caused most of the global warming over the past century,” that would be included in the less than 3% of papers in the rejection categories.

Many studies simply defer to the expert summary of climate science research put together by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which states that most of the global warming since the mid-20th century has been caused by humans. According to recent research, that statement is actually too conservative.

Of the papers that specifically examine the human and natural causes of global warming, virtually all conclude that humans are the dominant cause over the past 50 to 100 years.

Net human and natural percent contributions to the observed global surface warming over the past 50-65 years according to Tett et al. 2000 (T00, dark blue), Meehl et al. 2004 (M04, red), Stone et al. 2007 (S07, light green), Lean and Rind 2008 (LR08, purple), Huber and Knutti 2011 (HK11, light blue), Gillett et al. 2012 (G12, orange), Wigley and Santer 2012 (WS12, dark green), and Jones et al. 2013 (J12, pink).

Most studies simply accept this fact and go on to examine the consequences of this human-caused global warming and associated climate change.

Another important point is that once you accept that humans are causing global warming, you must also accept that global warming is still happening; humans cause global warming by increasing the greenhouse effect, and our greenhouse gas emissions just keep accelerating. This ties in to our previous posts noting that global warming is accelerating; but that over the past decade, most of that warming has gone into the oceans (including the oft-neglected deep oceans). If you accept that humans are causing global warming, as over 97% of peer-reviewed scientific papers do, then this conclusion should not be at all controversial. With all this evidence for human-caused global warming, it couldn’t simply have just stopped, so the heat must be going somewhere. Scientists have found it in the oceans.

Spread the Word

Awareness of the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming is a key factor in peoples’ decisions whether or not to support action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, there is a gap here due to the public’s lack of awareness of the consensus. Thus it’s critical that we make people aware of these results. To that end, design and advertising firm SJI Associates generously created a website pro-bono, centered around the results of our survey. The website can be viewed at TheConsensusProject.com, and it includes a page where relevant and useful graphics like the one at the top of this post can be shared. You can also follow The Consensus Project on Twitter @ConsensusProj.

Quite possibly the most important thing to communicate about climate change is that there is a 97 percent consensus amongst the scientific experts and scientific research that humans are causing global warming. Let’s spread the word and close the consensus gap.

– By Dana Nuccitelli and John Cook. This piece was originally published at Skeptical Science and was reprinted with permission.

Mosaic: Solar power, people power

Solar panels on the roof of the Wildwoods Convention Center

I’ve never been to Wildwood, New Jersey. Most likely, I’ll never go. But with a click or two on my laptop, I just invested $100 in a 487 kw solar project on the roof of the Wildwoods Convention Center in Wildwood, on the Jersey shore, thanks to Mosaic.

Like Kickstarter, which enables ordinary people to support a variety of projects that grab their attention, Mosaic is an Internet crowdfunding platform.  But Mosaic for now focuses exclusively on solar energy and, unlike Kickstarter, it promises its investors a return–in my case, a 4.5 percent annual yield over the next 110 months.  That’s a lot better than 10-year US Treasury bonds that currently return just 1.66 percent a year, and a whole lot better than my money market fund at Vanguard which current returns 0.01 percent. [Of course, investing in solar is also more risky than buying a money market fund--see the addendum below.]

What’s more, I get to support solar power–which won’t work on the roof of my own home in Bethesda, Md., because it is surrounded by tall trees.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Mosaic since last September when I met one of its founders, Billy Parish, in Washington, D.C.  Billy subsequently came to Fortune Brainstorm Green this month, and we caught up the other day by phone. Since Mosaic began offering solar investments to a broad public in January, the company has raised about $2.1 million from about 1,500 investors. That’s impressive.

“The idea is that people should be able to invest in, and own clean energy,” Billy told me. “We need trillions of dollars in the coming decades to invest in clean energy. We just substitute the crowd for the bank.”

Think about it–Mosaic is financing distributed energy, using distributed funders, collected over the Internet, the ultimate distributed platform. This is decentralized power at its best.

Billy Parish

Billy, who is 32, dropped out of Yale about 10 years ago after spending a summer in India, and visiting a glacier in the Himalayas which feeds the Ganges River.

“I was already thinking about climate and energy, and it all came together,” he said. “Here I was on the other side of the world seeing that the source of fresh water for billions of people was at risk. It was, hey, we are all connected. This is the challenge of our generation.”

He joined the Energy Action Coalition, a student organization, and worked on organizing young people through most of the 2000s until turning his attention to the solar business. Based in Oakland, CA, Mosaic was started by a group of young activists, and currently has about 15 full-time employees, including, importantly, Greg Rosen, a former vice president of solar finance at Union Bank who is the firm’s chief investment officer. He vets all the projects that get financing from Mosaic.

For lenders, the process is simple. Investors can browse solar projects on the Mosaic website and, after registering with the company, put a minimum of $25 into a project. (The biggest investment so far has been $250,000, Billy told me.) The solar projects makes money by selling electricity, typically through long-term guaranteed contracts. Investors are paid back with interest each month. As the website notes, Mosaic investments are “not guaranteed or insured by any governmental agency or any third party, and investors could lose some or all of their investment.”

Most of the solar projects on the site today are fully funded, but more are on the way. “We’re feeling really good about the pipeline of projects that we’ll be bringing onto the platform,” Billy said.

Because of SEC rules, Mosaic is currently available only to accredited investors, who meet minimum standards of income and assets, in most of the US. In California and New York, the company can make its investments available to anyone. So far, Mosaic has investors in 42 states, ranging in age from 18 to 95.

Mosaic itself got started with government help–a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy “Sunshot” initiative, aimed at getting the cost of solar below $0.06 per kilowatt-hour by 2020. (Mosaic helps accomplish that by lowering financing costs.) The company has also raised about $6 million in venture funding, with Spring Ventures as the lead investor.

This week, Mosaic will roll out a social media campaign to spread the word about its work. Here’s a cool graphic about the Wildwoods project:

An addendum: A reader has pointed out to me that this column could be read as promoting an investment in Mosaic’s projects. I’m hoping Mosaic is successful, and I believe that it has excellent prospects. But I’m not an investment advisor. If you are considering investing in one of Mosaic’s projects, please read all the materials carefully, including the prospectus, which includes cautionary language like this:

THESE ARE SPECULATIVE SECURITIES. INVESTMENT IN THE NOTES INVOLVES SIGNIFICANT RISK. YOU SHOULD PURCHASE THESE SECURITIES ONLY IF YOU CAN AFFORD A COMPLETE LOSS OF YOUR INVESTMENT

Put simply, Mosaic has to pay higher interest rates than treasuries because it’s riskier.

Worsening A Warming-Fueled Wildfire Season, Sequestration Threatens Firefighting Efforts

Due to sequestration, the federal government will be at least $115 million short of normal wildfire fighting capacity during this year’s wildfire season. This is particularly problematic as large portions of the U.S. face a serious drought and extremely dry conditions. As the Washington Post reported, Agriculture Secretary Vilsack said “I hope we can get through this fire season without any fatalities.”

A new report from the House Appropriation committee Democrats found that the Forest service “will have 500 fewer firefighters, 50-70 fewer fire engines, and two fewer aircraft because of sequestration.” Some of the equipment it does still have is outdated — such as the 50-years-old-on-average tanker planes that have crashed multiple times in the last decade, killing 14 people.

A Fox News radio AM talk show expressed incredulity that President Obama and Agriculture Secretary Vilsack “could not find $115 million of fat in the budget so they cut firefighters.” One of the more harmful aspects of sequestration is that the cuts take place “across-the-board” and do not permit the same flexibility in moving funds around within an agency.

Because last year’s wildfire season was so severe, the USDA Forest Service faced a $400 million shortfall for active firefighting and had to borrow money from fire prevention programs to cover the costs. These programs included paying for brush removal from public lands and protecting against invasive plants, disease, insect infestations, and fires. Eventually Congress reimbursed the Forest Service for the shortfall via the 2013 Continuing Resolution but the delays hurt prevention efforts. Last year’s fire season consisted of 67,700 fires burned 9 million acres.

This year, as of May 3, there have been 13,115 wildfires, burning 153,000 acres. Compounding the restraints posed by the inflexible sequester, agencies foresee a $700 million deficit in direct firefighting activities, so similar programs will be de-funded (such as a hazardous-fuels-reduction program to remove long-burning combustible materials from the path of fires).

Congress calculates wildfire suppression funds by averaging the cost over the last ten years. As climate change worsens drought year after year, this calculation becomes deficient. The wildfire season used to range between June and September, but has now expanded to include May and October.

The Western U.S. faces low mountain snowpack, and the most recent U.S. Seasonal Drought Monitor Outlook finds that “drought is forecast to either develop or persist across the western contiguous U.S. as this region enters its dry season.”

Dry conditions in nearly half the country make hampered fire management budgets and sequestration cuts even more dangerous for residents and will lead to even more shortfalls this season. A recent report found that climate change will double the area burned by wildfires by 2050.

Drought and wildfires, in addition to harming people and property, also have dramatic impacts on insects like monarch butterflies, as well as mammals, birds, reptiles, and nearly every plant in the region.

Local communities are trying to face climate adaptation issues alongside the federal government. Texas is preparing for record drought by creating a “rainy day” infrastructure water fund, though none of the legislators acknowledge that climate change is a primary cause of increasing droughts.

A recent report from the General Accounting Office found that the federal government needs to do a better job helping local governments adapt to climate change and integrate climate impacts into infrastructure planning. The report identified roads, bridges, wastewater systems, and federal facilities as particularly vulnerable. Sequestration makes it nearly impossible for the federal government to help local communities adapt to and prepare for climate change-fueled extreme weather and wildfires.