I think we need to bring back DDT. If you ever have had to deal with bed bugs you’d agree.
And let’s not forget, coal burning isn’t all of the problem with coal. Coal production isn’t exactly environmentally friendly either. It leaves a blasted, polluted landscape where it’s mined, apart from the worker safety concerns (because we’ll always have criminals like that Blankenship guy who sees miners as disposable people).
As a long-time corporate lawyer, I’ve seen a lot of overblown anti-corporate rhetoric since, for the most part, the largest businesses, at least in the West, are the most concerned about ethical behavior — but the mining industry is genuinely terrible, and my perception is that many executives in that industry really do think of the lives of their employees as a budgetary cost, where the financial benefit of risking a few deaths is considered worthwhile if the estimated settlement costs of the resulting damages is “manageable” – it really does seem to be an industry that more closely resembles what we’d expect in the 19th century. I’ve heard some really disturbing things from people in that industry.
I dunno, my wife works in contract law for Rio, and the impression I get from her is the opposite. They take the lives and welfare of their workers extremely seriously. Besides having OH&S procedures up the wazoo, incidents that do cause deaths are examined in minute detail so conditions and procedures can be improved and refined to remove risk and keep their workers safe. I suppose mileage may vary by geo, but this seems more like global directive. They even had internal communication regarding industry events (BHP mudslide in Brazil), providing updates, discussing ramifications, educating on their own policies for similar infrastructure, etc. They take active interest in the well being of their employees, not just provide lip service.
BHP lost five employees in 2015 globally. Whilst they (and all of us) would love that number to be zero, more people die each year just in the US at Black Friday shopping incidents.
That said, my bro does not have nice things to say about onsite safety practices during his time at a Silver City gold outfit. They could not even put out a forklift fire as every extinguisher within a couple of hundred yards (three by his account), was past expiration and failed.
And while the USA seems to be getting with the program (on the AGW issue), this article further helps to highlight just how backward looking the Tory government in the uk is on the issue:
‘George Osborne (uk Chancellor) will soon be forced to show his hand on climate change’:
Any climate change activists listening to the chancellor’sbudget speech must have perked up when George Osborne said: “I am not prepared to look back at my time here in this parliament … and say to my children’s generation: I’m sorry. We knew there was a problem … but we ducked the difficult decisions and we did nothing.”
Was the man previously known as the architect of the government’s anti-climate policies about to undergo a dramatic conversion to the green cause?
No. Osborne’s soaring commitment to future generations heralded only the announcement of a sugar tax. But crunch time is nevertheless coming for the government’s climate policies, and the chancellor will have to decide which side he is on.
Within the next few weeks, the government must announce the so-called “fifth carbon budget”, the total level of greenhouse gas emissions which the UK will generate in the period 2028-32.
Under the 2008 Climate Change Act, every five years the government must set a legally-binding cap on the nation’s total emissions for a five-year period, 10-15 years ahead. The aim is to provide certainty to businesses and consumers, to encourage low-carbon investment. The Act requires the government to take the advice of the independent Committee on Climate Change on the appropriate carbon budget level.
The Committee gave its advice on the fifth carbon budget in November, calling on the government to set an emissions target 57% below 1990 levels. This, it argued, would be the cost-effective budget to keep the UK on track towards its statutory goal of an 80% reduction by 2050.
The government does not have to follow the Committee’s advice. Last time round, in 2011, it did so only after an intense fight between Osborne – who regarded the Committee’s recommendation of a 52% cut by 2025 as economically damaging – and Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat secretary of state for energy and climate change. The result was an uneasy compromise, in which the advice was provisionally accepted, but was to be reviewed in 2014. In the event, the budget’s 52% reduction was confirmed; but the process had the unsurprising effect of damaging investor confidence in the government’s ambitions.
That confidence has been rattled even further by the bonfire of climate policies enacted by the Conservative government since the election last year.
Seventeen separate measures have weakened or reversed previous emissions reductions policies, including the blocking of new onshore windfarms, dramatic reductions in subsidies for solar power, the abolition of the zero carbon homes standard and the ending of the carbon capture and storage programme.
These measures have pushed the UK even further behind the emissions trajectory required to meet the fourth carbon budget in the 2020s, as the Department of Energy and Climate Change was forced to admit in its recent report to Parliament, and are likely to slash investment in renewables this year.
Just very depressing from the uk (and global) perspective, and it definitely is my number one reason behind why i won’t vote for the Tory party again (i did once).
That is depressing Zak. And they’ll be in office another what, four years? Ugh.
Here’s a Vox piece on Peabody coal and how they treat their workers: How your taxes ended up enriching coal executives who are betraying their workers - Vox
Peabody created a company called Patriot Coal and unloaded their liabilities to it - namely the pension and health benefits owed its Union workers. Patriot then declared bankruptcy.
And it wasted no time asking a bankruptcy judge to let it jettison all those health care liabilities. (The judge said yes, just as she said yes two weeks prior when Patriot asked for permission to pay their executives almost $7 million in “retention bonuses.”)
Luckily the Peabody executives are well taken care of though:
The Peabody executives who oversaw all those mergers and big bets on metallurgical coal — and the subsequent destruction of virtually all the company’s value — are in no danger. In fact, they’re doing great.
This 2015 report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis reveals that the top five Peabody executives pulled down about $27 million in compensation in 2011, when the stock was at its peak.
In 2014, after the company’s stockholders had lost $16 billion in value, thousands of workers had been laid off, and Peabody was headed for bankruptcy, they pulled down about … $25 million.
To atone for his sins, CEO Greg Boyce’s compensation was reduced from $10 million in 2011 to $11 million in 2014.
“Who are the worst people on earth?”
“Correct.”
“I’ll take ‘Friends of Sherman’ for $800 Alex.”
‘February was the warmest month in recorded history, climate experts say’:
Our planet went through a dramatic change last month. Climate experts revealed that February was the warmest month in recorded history, surpassing the previous global monthly record – set in December. An unprecedented heating of our world is now under way.
With the current El Niño weather event only now beginning to tail off, meteorologists believe that this year is destined to be the hottest on record, warmer even than 2015.
Nor is this jump in global temperature a freak triggered by an unusually severe El Niño, say researchers. “It is the opposite,” said Professor David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey. “This is a catch-up of a recent hiatus that has occurred in rising global temperatures. We are returning to normality: rising temperatures. This is an absolute warning of the dangers that lie ahead.”
Those dangers are now being dramatically demonstrated around the globe: drought in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, which has forced the government there to issue a state of emergency warning; France observed its warmest winter since records began; while the sea ice that has formed in the Arctic this winter is about a million square kilometres less than its average for this time of year.
This latter feature is likely to have particularly profound consequences. “A low sea-ice level in winter will definitely promote a low level of sea ice next summer,” said Vaughan. “Arctic summer ice – which is dwindling dramatically – is changing the region.”
In particular, disappearing sea ice allows more and more ships to get to once unreachable regions in high latitudes. As a result, plans to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic – a prospect that horrifies many scientists and environmental groups – are being prepared by most major oil companies.
Last month’s jump in global temperatures represents an increase of 1.35C above pre-industrial levels and takes the world close to the 1.5C rise that last year’s Paris climate deal was supposed to prevent. “Last month’s figure is a one-off and it remains to be seen if temperatures are going to continue to rise this steeply,” said Professor Richard Betts, head of climate impact research at Exeter University. “We are still not at an established 1.5C rise, but there is no doubt this is a worrying sign.”
Scientists and politicians are keen to hold global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels because they fear that a world that warms to such a level will experience severe loss of ice, particularly from Greenland’s massive shield of glaciers, and that the melting will in turn trigger considerable rises in sea levels.
Scientists warn there are many island states in the Pacific that will simply disappear if the planet undergoes that sort of warming. In addition, if the temperature increases to 1.5C, it will combine with ocean acidification driven by rising carbon dioxide emissions to dissolve the world’s already threatened coral reefs. “That is why last month’s temperature level was so significant – and worrying,” added Betts.
No no no. Or, at least, it depends on where you are. In Australia, EH&S issues are taken very seriously, even at the highest levels. In the US and Canada, worker safety is fairly important, but the small independent companies can be pretty dodgy. Mining in China is genuinely playing with your life. I’ve only worked one mine in S America (in Peru), so my sample size is too small to say there.
Source: Have consulted to a bunch of mining companies, on-site at lots of mines.
Let me clear up what I was saying, as I do not disagree at all with what you or sharaleo are stating – as I said, the largest businesses, at least in the West, are often if not typically the most concerned about ethical behavior, and the amount of internal corporate bureaucracy oriented around safety and regulatory compliance is MASSIVE --the average person would have little idea of the amount of resources directed towards conducting business in the most safe and environmentally sustainable way possible.
I was taking all of that as a “given” - from the context of someone who has almost constantly, on this forum and elsewhere, been correcting misconceptions about the extent or nature of alleged corporate malfeasance. There’s a wacky anti-big western corporation perception that’s prevalent, particularly among the left, despite the fact that they care more about their workers and conducting business ethically and in compliance with applicable law than anywhere else, in any other time.
So now that I’ve reexplained all that, without presuming that people were familiar with the perspective and context set out above, I’ll reiterate the original intention of my comments, which is to state that the only time I’ve heard of some pretty flippant and cold calculations about human life have been from executives in the mining industry. I found it pretty shocking.
Maybe it was a sign of the reality of conducting what is still a pretty dangerous business relative even to other heavy industries (so they need to talk coldly about possible deaths), and not a lack of caring (and certainly not an aptitude to be negligence or indifference towards compliance), but hearing business leaders talk about deaths and the effects on profits in various scenarios was disconcerting an it’s not something I’ve otherwise heard in any other business.
FWIW - it was specifically in the context of mining in Australia.
‘Carbon emission release rate ‘unprecedented’ in past 66m years’:
Humanity is pumping climate-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere 10 times faster than at any point in the past 66m years, according to new research.
The revelation shows the world has entered “uncharted territory” and that the consequences for life on land and in the oceans may be more severe than at any time since the extinction of the dinosaurs.
It comes as the World Meteorological Organisation released its Status of the Climate Report detailing a string of weather and climate records that were broken in 2015.
“The future is happening now,” said WMO secretary-general Petteri Taalas in a statement released alongside the report. “The alarming rate of change we are now witnessing in our climate as a result of greenhouse gas emission is unprecedented in modern records.”
Scientists have already warned that unchecked global warming will inflict “severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts” on people and the natural world.
But the new research shows how unprecedented the current rate of carbon emissions is, meaning geological records are unable to help predict the impacts of current climate change. Scientists have recently expressed alarm at the heat records shattered in the first months of 2016.
“Our carbon release rate is unprecedented over such a long time period in Earth’s history, [that] it means that we have effectively entered a ‘no-analogue’ state,” said Prof Richard Zeebe, at the University of Hawaii, who led the new work. “The present and future rate of climate change and ocean acidification is too fast for many species to adapt, which is likely to result in widespread future extinctions.”
Many researchers think the human impacts on the planet has already pushed it into a new geological era, dubbed the Anthropocene. Wildlife is already being lost at rates similar to past mass extinctions, driven in part by the destruction of habitats.
“The new results indicate that the current rate of carbon emissions is unprecedented … the most extreme global warming event of the past 66m years, by at least an order of magnitude,” said Peter Stassen, a geologist at the University of Leuven in Belgium, and who was not involved in the work.
The new research, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, examined an event 56m years ago believed to be the biggest release of carbon into the atmosphere since the dinosaur extinction 66m years ago. The so-called Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) saw temperatures rise by 5C over a few thousand years.
But until now, it had been impossible to determine how rapidly the carbon had been released at the start of the event because dating using radiometry and geological strata lacks sufficient resolution. Zeebe and colleagues developed a new method to determine the rate of temperature and carbon changes, using the stable isotopes of oxygen and carbon.
It revealed that at the start of the PETM, no more than 1bn tonnes of carbon was being released into the atmosphere each year. In stark contrast, 10bn tonnes of carbon are released into the atmosphere every year by fossil fuel-burning and other human activity.
‘Climate change warnings for coral reef may have come to pass, scientists say’:
After almost two years of coral bleaching, with some reefs bleaching twice and possibly three times since 2014, scientists have said that dire predictions of global coral decline made almost two decades ago may now be manifest.
The rolling underwater heatwave has now arrived upon the Great Barrier Reef, with mass die-offs expected along the northern quarter of the world’s preeminent coral ecosystem.
Professor Nick Graham of Lancaster University said the devastation worldwide was probably now on the same scale as the worst ever bleaching on record, which occurred during 1997-98 and wiped out 16% of the world’s reefs in a single year.
“This is the big one that we’ve been waiting for. This is the 1997-98 equivalent, which we’ve been anticipating for a long time,” said the coral scientist. The full impact could not be known until the event had finally ended, added Graham. Models predict it will now head west into the Indian Ocean and could continue in the Pacific until early 2017.
Dr Mark Eakin, the head of the US government’s Coral Reef Watch programme, said this year’s massive bleach conformed with a prediction made by Australian scientist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg in the wake of the 1998 event. Back then, Hoegh-Guldberg predicted coral reefs would catastrophically decline by the middle to end of this century as oceans warmed and bleaching events became an annual occurrence on most reefs.
“What we’re seeing now is unfortunately saying that Ove’s paper was not alarmist,” said Eakin. “This year is especially telling. In the past, big bleaching events happened pretty much during the course of a year. This current bleaching event started in mid-2014.”
Eakin said many scientist had predicted two or three-year-long events would not begin occurring until the 2020s: “Yet here we are now with back-to-back to sometimes-back-again bleaching.”
Coral bleaching occurs when the ocean temperature surpasses a natural threshold causing the tiny animals, called zooxanthellae, that give coral its brilliance to desert their polyp homes – leaving them bone white. Recovery tends to be patchy and slow. The concern that coral scientists hold for the future is that bleaching events will pile one atop the other, giving reefs no time to rebuild.
538 takes a look at the hottest February in history in an overall context:
Last month, the Earth endured a heat wave that has had no equal in the hundred-plus years humans have been keeping close track of our home planet’s climate. Take data from NASA, which showed that February was (by far) the most unusually warm month since it began keeping records: 1.35 degrees Celsius above the 1951-80 global temperature average and, depending on how you do the math, as much as 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels…
…The current warming surge amounts to what’s called a step change — a practically instantaneous shift in our planet’s climate. In the Arctic, it’s kicked off fresh concern about melting permafrost — which could further exacerbate global warming through the release of vast quantities of carbon dioxide and methane and induce permanent changes in the region’s ecosystem. This sudden shift in temperature has arrived because of a confluence of events: Long-term global warming, the multiyear effect of El Niño, and extreme weather — including persistent heat waves at the regional scale.
The major cause of February’s exceptional warmth is global warming, and we know that because it fits the pattern that’s long been expected: Among other indicators, the Arctic is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the planet, and land areas are warming faster than the oceans.
The Times, they are a changing.
That dovetails with a recent paper from retired NASA scientist James Hansen that warns that major impacts from climate change may be sooner than we think.
Specifically, the authors believe that fresh water pouring into the oceans from melting land ice will set off a feedback loop that will cause parts of the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica to disintegrate rapidly
That claim has intrigued some experts who say the paper may help explain puzzling episodes in Earth’s past when geological evidence suggests the climate underwent drastic shifts. Yet many other scientists are unconvinced by some of the specific assertions the authors are making.
“Some of the claims in this paper are indeed extraordinary,” said Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “They conflict with the mainstream understanding of climate change to the point where the standard of proof is quite high.”
‘Global coal and gas investment falls to less than half that in clean energy’:
Global investment in coal and gas-fired power generation plants fell to less than half that in renewable energy generation last year, in a record year for clean energy.
It was the first time that renewable energy made up a majority of all the new electricity generation capacity under construction around the world, and the first year in which the financial investment by developing countries in renewables outstripped that of the developed world.
Catherine Mitchell, professor of energy policy at the University of Exeter, said the developments were “extremely significant” and showed a new trend. She said: “We are looking at serious sums of money being invested in clean energy, with the dirtiest forms of fossil fuels the losers. This is the direction of travel that we need to see to have a chance of escaping the worst impacts of climate change.”
About $286bn (£200bn) was invested globally in renewable energy last year, more than the previous peak of $278bn reached in 2011, according to research published on Thursday by the UN Environment Programme (Unep). The figures exclude investment in large hydroelectric plants but include solar, onshore and offshore wind and biomass.
China alone accounted for 36% of the global total, as the country pins it hopes on clean energy as a means of combating air pollution. Chinese investment rose 17% from 2014 to 2015, totalling $103bn.
This surge is likely to continue for years to come, as China’s recently-unveiled new five-year plan places a strong emphasis on new renewable energy.
The rise in renewable investment comes even as fossil fuel prices suffered sharp falls last year. However, as the report covers 2015 it may not have fully captured the continued depression in fossil fuel prices, which may have further effects on investment in new generation in future.
In the US, money committed to renewables rose strongly as new rules took effect. Although investment was up by a fifth, to $44bn, it was still less than half of China’s.
Europe, once world leader in clean energy, gave one of the worst showings. Investment fell by a fifth to $49bn, despite a surge in offshore wind, according to the report, which was co-authored by Bloomberg New Energy Finance and the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.
It’s a start :)
'Sea levels set to ‘rise far more rapidly than expected’:
Sea levels could far more rapidly than expected in coming decades, according to new research that reveals Antarctica’s vast ice cap is less stable than previously thought.
The UN’s climate science body had predicted up to a metre of sea level rise this century - but it did not anticipate any significant contribution from Antarctica, where increasing snowfall was expected to keep the ice sheet in balance.
According a study, published in the journal Nature, collapsing Antarctic ice sheets are expected to double sea-level rise to two metres by 2100, if carbon emissions are not cut.
Previously, only the passive melting of Antarctic ice by warmer air and seawater was considered but the new work added active processes, such as the disintegration of huge ice cliffs.
“This [doubling] could spell disaster for many low-lying cities,” said Prof Robert DeConto, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who led the work. He said that if global warming was not halted, the rate of sea-level rise would change from millimetres per year to centimetres a year. “At that point it becomes about retreat [from cities], not engineering of defences.”
As well as rising seas, climate change is also causing storms to become fiercer, forming a highly destructive combination for low-lying cities like New York, Mumbai and Guangzhou. Many coastal cities are growing fast as populations rise and analysis by World Bank and OECD staff has shown that global flood damage could cost them $1tn a year by 2050 unless action is taken.
The cities most at risk in richer nations include Miami, Boston and Nagoya, while cities in China, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Ivory Coast are among those most in danger in less wealthy countries.
The new research follows other recent studies warning of the possibility of ice sheet collapse in Antarctica and suggesting huge sea-level rises. But the new work suggests that major rises are possible within the lifetimes of today’s children, not over centuries.
Get your dingy ready.
Bring back Lake Bonneville! I want a lake house without the trouble of actually having to move to a lake.
I’m somewhat more concerned about the acidification of the oceans due to the CO2 rise than the sea levels. That and how it might affect thermohaline circulation.
What continues to surprise me is that Obama hasn’t aggressively pushed for Nuclear power plant construction. Anyone who is serious about this issue should be pushing this immediately while solar matures further.
A political stance I agree with strongly. Sadly the anti nuclear lunacy has taken hold in certain circles, predominantly on the left, to make this proposal a non starter. It makes me mad. It is probably my greatest issue with the broadly defined American ‘left’.