1761

‘Shell oil drilling in Arctic set to get US government permission’:

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/mar/22/shell-oil-driling-in-arctic-set-to-get-us-government-permission

The US government is expected this week to give the go-ahead to a controversial plan by Shell to restart drilling for oil in the Arctic.

The green light from Sally Jewell, the interior secretary, will spark protests from environmentalists who have campaigned against proposed exploration by the Anglo-Dutch group in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off Alaska.

Jewell will make a formal statement backing the decision as soon as Wednesday, the earliest point at which her department can rubber-stamp an approval given last month given by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).

The US Interior Department had been forced to replay the decision-making process after a US federal court ruled last year, in a case brought by environmental groups, that the government had made mistakes in assessing the environmental risks in the drilling programme.

However, the BOEM, an arm of Jewell’s department, has backed the drilling after going through the process again, despite revealing in its Environmental Impact Statement “there is a 75% chance of one or more large spills” occurring.

A leading academic, Prof Robert Bea, from the engineering faculty at the University of California in Berkeley, who made a special study of the Deepwater Horizon accident, has raised new concerns that the recent slump in oil prices could compromise safety across the industry as oil producers strive to cut costs. Bea, who has worked as a consultant to BP and Shell, told the Guardian:

“We should all be concerned about tradeoffs between production and protection … With the significant reduction in the price for oil, there are equally significant pressures to reduce costs so that acceptable profitability can be maintained.”

Bea was brought in by Shell in 2004 to reviewhow the group had assessed the risks associated with the proposed drilling in the Chukchi Sea. “At the end of the week’s discussions, we agreed to disagree,” he said.

Meanwhile, Greenpeace argues that drilling in extreme Arctic conditions is always risky, especially during a period when industry is trying to reduce overheads due to a price of $50 per barrel oil.

Boo!

‘Could Oslo’s decision to divest from coal inspire bigger cities to do the same?’:

When Oslo sells the coal investments in its pension portfolio next month, it will set a historic precedent: the first capital city in the world to divest itself of that most polluting of fossil fuels. And the city is just the highest profile in a series of major urban areas that have made bold moves in recent weeks, ridding themselves of fossil fuel investments and becoming more carbon friendly.

Leichardt, Australia voted to completely divest from fossil fuels within three years, while Byron Bay announced the decision to commit to zero emissions. Smaller US cities have already gotten on board in various ways, while last week in London, the GLA passed a motion asking the mayor to approve pulling City Hall’s pension fund out of all fossil fuel holdings. The list of cities that have divested appears set to grow ever longer.

But does Oslo’s decision really mean much, given that Norway’s own pension fund – the gigantic Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG) – continues to invest in fossil fuels? Is the momentum behind municipal divestment as unstoppable as it seems? And is divestment something that should, or could, be emulated by bigger cities like London?

Hurray!

1762

And Museums are now encouraged to do the divest from fossil fuel thing:

‘US museums asked to sever ties with fossil fuel industry’:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/24/us-museums-asked-to-sever-ties-with-fossil-fuel-industry#img-1

Climate scientists and cultural figures called on national history and science museums on Tuesday to sever their ties to the fossil fuel industry, singling out a major patron from the Koch family of conservative oil billionaires.

Corporate sponsorships from the fossil fuel industry threatened the credibility of important institutions and eroded the public trust, the scientists said in a letter.

“We are concerned that the integrity of these institutions is compromised by association with special interests who obfuscate climate science, fight environmental regulation, oppose clean energy legislation, and seek to ease limits on industrial pollution,” the letter signed by nearly three dozen scientists and museum professionals said.

The letter explicitly targeted David Koch, a trustee and leading donor and exhibit sponsor of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington and the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who has also spent at least $67m (£45m) funding climate denial front groups.

“When some of the biggest contributors to climate change and funders of misinformation on climate science sponsor exhibitions in museums of science and natural history, they undermine public confidence in the validity of the institutions responsible for transmitting scientific knowledge,” the letter said.

Koch and the Smithsonian natural history museum came under attack five years ago for an exhibit sponsored by the billionaire which failed to connect the burning of fossil fuels to climate change.

1763

Yeah, the winter here in Utah was… I don’t know if I’ve seen one like it. I was wearing shorts throughout most of January, and the mountains (as viewed from the Salt Lake valley) have been mostly bare the entire season.

We received precipitation, it all just came down as rain. I think we only had two snow storms this entire winter.

1764

On the bright-ish side, Seattle isn’t forecasted to have any severe water issues resulting from this hot winter, at least not for this immediately upcoming Summer.

1765

Ugh. Gulf Stream weakens.

The precise consequences of an ongoing AMOC slowdown are hard to predict, according to Mann, but he warned that it could reduce global food security by withholding deepsea nutrients from fisheries and food chains that flourish in shallower Atlantic Ocean depths.

“The most productive region, in terms of availability of nutrients, is the high latitudes of the North Atlantic,” Mann said. “If we lose that, that’s a fundamental threat to our ability to continue to fish.”

Without the AMOC to carry heat away from the tropics and redistribute it, Mann said parts of the Northern Hemisphere could become cooler. But he also said hurricanes, Nor’easters and other storms could become more common, providing the heat with an alternative pathway along which it can travel.

1766

It’s the Atlantic Conveyor that is the big ‘lights out’ issue for western europe and the north east usa, but yeah all this stuff ‘is not good™’.

‘Wellcome Trust rejects Guardian’s calls to divest from fossil fuels’:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/25/wellcome-trust-rejects-guardians-calls-to-divest-from-fossil-fuels

And to some degree the boss of Welcome has a point, by simply opting out (divesting) you lose any influence you have as a shareholder, however how many shareholders actually care about anything more than their dividends? Not many, so it might be a bit of a pink elephant arguement (if that is a thing?).

1767

It’s us it ****s hardest, sadly.

4-5C less would, literally, be a massive killer given rising poverty here and the terrible state of so many properties.
(Over half of private rented houses are technically unfit for habitation in most areas, for instance)

Nature article link (paywalled) - http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2554.html

1768

‘Antarctic ice shelf thinning speeds up’:

Scientists have their best view yet of the status of Antarctica’s floating ice shelves and they find them to be thinning at an accelerating rate.

Fernando Paolo and colleagues used 18 years of data from European radar satellites to compile their assessment.

In the first half of that period, the total losses from these tongues of ice that jut out from the continent amounted to 25 cubic km per year.

But by the second half, this had jumped to 310 cubic km per annum.

“For the decade before 2003, ice-shelf volume for all Antarctica did not change much,” said Mr Paolo from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, US.

“Since then, volume loss has been significant. The western ice shelves have been persistently thinning for two decades, and earlier gains in the eastern ice shelves ceased in the most recent decade,” he told BBC News.

1769

‘Rockefeller Brothers Fund: it is our moral duty to divest from fossil fuels’:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/27/rockefeller-fund-chairman-moral-duty-divest-fossil-fuels

On a perfect summer day in June 2014, on the grounds of a stately home overlooking the Hudson river, a handful of the descendants of America’s most enduring business dynasty made a fateful decision: they would cut their ties to fossil fuels in order to fight climate change.

The ironies were inescapable. About half of those gathered for the board meeting were direct descendants of John D Rockefeller – founder of the oil empire that eventually became ExxonMobil – and here they were, gathered in the estate he built at Pocantico Hills, New York, surrounded by a collection of antique gas guzzlers and limousines, preparing to take a highly symbolic stand against fossil fuels.

As descendants, they had an extra burden to fight climate change, said Valerie Rockefeller Wayne, a former middle-school special education teacher and chair of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF).

“We all have a moral obligation,” she told the Guardian. “Our family in particular – the money that is for our grant-making, and what we are doing now, and that helps fund our lifestyles came from dirty fuel sources.”

On 22 September, a day after 400,000 protesters marched through the streets of Manhattan demanding action on climate change, Wayne and the RBF president, Stephen Heintz, announced the fund would immediately purge its holdings in coal and tar sands, gradually withdraw from oil and gas, and invest 10% of the endowment in clean energy.

On a day when more than 800 institutions and individual investors, controlling more than $50bn (£34bn) in assets, committed to divest, the Rockefellers were the marquee name – delivering a jolt of energy to the fossil fuel divestment movement that had been steadily expanding from college campuses to philanthropies and pension funds.

“I think it was one of the most important moments in the whole divestment campaign just because of the symbolism that is attached to the original fossil fuel fortune,” said Bill McKibben, the writer and activist who helped launch the divestment movement.

“It makes a very clear point that engaging with fossil fuel companies to somehow get them to change their ways is unlikely to work if the family of the founder can’t get Exxon to shift.”

1770

Some good news is that we may have hit peak carbon as even with economic growth carbon emissions were flat per some reports I saw. Economic growth is key because richer countries are better suited to address the issue.

I would like to see the world ag policy redone so as not to promote wasteful resources in countries and states that don’t make sense to grow certain crops. Water should be more expensive in the Us for example especially in stricken areas like CA.

1771

Yeah CA is up shot creek in terms of water, and they pretty much stole all the water from the indians somewhere already iirc. Man made climate change is going to hurt pretty bad.

1772

Lol, for all the drum beating (and it is ‘good’ drum beating i should say) that the Guardian has been doing re the Divestment thing, THEY have their own money invested in fossil fuels and have only just recently down ‘divesting’ themselves! It might have been nice if they had their house in order first perhaps? Anyway it is a good read on just how hard divestment actually is:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/keep-it-in-the-ground-blog/2015/apr/02/the-guardian-media-groups-decision-divest-thanks-to-our-readers

1773

‘Keep it in the ground: why this is a matter of basic ethics’:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/13/keep-it-in-the-ground-why-this-is-a-matter-of-basic-ethics

If the purpose of your existence is to make the world a better place, why would you invest billions of dollars in companies that make the greatest contribution to global climate change? That’s the simple question behind the Guardian’s Keep it in the Ground campaign. But is there a simple answer?

Sadly, perhaps there isn’t. We could ascribe all of these investments to some kind of misplaced avarice. But that doesn’t make sense: it is not as if buying shares in these companies is some kind of “get rich quick” scheme. Indeed, oil and gas companies have significantly underperformed on the market as a whole over one year, three years, five, even 10 years. The real answer is more a complicated case of priorities, politics, pragmatism and portfolios.

Trusts such as Wellcome and the Gates Foundation tend to have a very wide gap between the people investing their assets and those spending them. In the case of the Gates Foundation all the assets are managed by a separate entity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust. Those managing the money are not guided solely by profit maximisation: there’s an investment philosophy saying no money will be put into tobacco or Sudan.

But the reason for the separation of responsibilities is clear. The job of the investment managers is not to directly make the world a better place; that’s the job of the foundation. The money managers need to be good stewards of the foundation’s assets. The greater the amount of money the foundation has, this theory says, the more good it can do in spending that money.

It is therefore seen as counterproductive for the investment arm of any foundation to care, at an ethical or idealistic level, about what exactly it invests in. By cutting off potential investment, the amount of cash available for programmes could be hit.

Foundation portfolio managers can make these arguments easily. Those who manage foundations’ billions are highly paid professional money managers, generally very good at what they do. They scour the world for investments and try to invest on the “efficient frontier”, where you can get the perfect *balance of high returns and low risk.

But to do that they need to be able to move their money around more or less at will. The more no-go areas there are, the further away from the efficient *frontier they will find themselves.

An earlier version of the Gates investment philosophy explained why the foundation was wary of divestment campaigns. Much of it was a “slippery slope” argument: if the Gates Foundation divested from every firm which failed social responsibility tests, soon there’d be almost nothing left to invest in.

That last sentence says it all really, in terms of the impact modern Capitalism has on the world imho.

1774

So I’ve been thinking about this for the last few days, and how it’s significantly affected the weather in the pacific northwest:

http://www.king5.com/story/news/local/seattle/2015/04/10/blob-and-weather/25613961/

As a completely baseless and unsubstantiated guess, is there any chance that this is related to Fukushima? Same with the California drought?

1775

Not a chance. The amount of radioactivity needed to warm that much water would have sterilized Japan, the Pacific, and probably the planet.

1776

I’m far from an expert but I can’t even remotely see how this can be caused by Fukushima at all. Fukushima radiological contamination is going to be mostly local, and not that significant once the incident was contained (workers and people who lived relatively close to the incident would be the most affected). I know people who work in nuclear security and they have been very frank with me when discussing the issue. They were really shocked and alarmed by Fukushima, but what they were alarmed for (their worst case) is way milder than what people fear (and we got far less than the worst case, it seems).

My baseless and unsubstantiated guess is that this is due to climate change. That is, it might be not a nuclear energy plant accident that caused this, but regular operations of other (conventional) energy sources.

1777

Radiation doesn’t really work that way.

You’re thinking of it like a nuclear reactor and there it isn’t really the radiation, it’s the intense heat of the reaction. You could detonate a hundred thermonuclear devices and it wouldn’t generate enough heat. The ocean is just too massive, it would dissipate even all that heat. Maybe if you set one off every day for years, but even then it probably wouldn’t do much. The only reason pollution is an issue is we’re pumping literally gigatons of CO2 every year for going on centuries. Enough to change how the planet dissipates heat from the sun. To do that with nuclear reactions would take a whole shitload going off at once - and even then it wouldn’t be radiation it would be the dust blocking out the sun. The radiation would happen, but it wouldn’t matter much at least as far as temperature.

1778

Not to mention that if the leakage from Fukushima had caused something this massive, then the 1950s nuke tests in the South Pacific (Bikini Atoll, etc.) would have eliminated winter entirely. And Chernobyl would have turned Ukraine into the tropics.

1779

On the other hand, a runaway melting core would generate lots of heat (not that this happened in Fukushima, though, just arguing to the shake of arguing) but again surely not nearly enough to heat that much water…

1780

It’s probably something Obama is putting in the water to pretend man made climate change is real, or something. African Communists hate us driving our fuel hungry cars as much as they hate Freedom ;)

‘BP dropped green energy projects worth billions to focus on fossil fuels’:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/16/bp-dropped-green-energy-projects-worth-billions-to-focus-on-fossil-fuels

BP pumped billions of pounds into low-carbon technology and green energy over a number of decades but gradually retired the programme to focus almost exclusively on its fossil fuel business, the Guardian has established. At one stage the company, whose annual general meeting is in London on Thursday, was spending in-house around $450m (£300m) a year on research alone - the equivalent of $830m today.

The energy efficiency programme employed 4,400 research scientists and R&D support staff at bases in Sunbury, Berkshire, and Cleveland, Ohio, among other locations, while $8bn was directly invested over five years in zero- or low-carbon energy. But almost all of the technology was sold off and much of the research locked away in a private corporate archive.

Facing shareholders at its AGM, company executives will insist they are playing a responsible role in a world facing dangerous climate change, not least by supporting arguments for a global carbon price. But the company, which once promised to go “beyond petroleum” will come under fire both inside the meeting and outside from some shareholders and campaigners who argue BP is playing fast and loose with the environment by not making meaningful moves away from fossil fuels.

In 2015, BP will spend $20bn on projects worldwide but only a fraction will go into activities other than fossil fuel extraction. An investigation by the Guardian has established that the British oil company is doing far less now on developing low-carbon technologies than it was in the 1980s and early 1990s. Back then it was engaged in a massive internal research and development (R&D) programme into energy efficiency and alternative energy.

Even before the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had put climate change on the international political map with a landmark speech in 1988, the company was doing ground-breaking work into photovoltaic solar panels, wave power and domestic energy efficiency as part of a wider drive to understand how greenhouse gas emissions could be curbed.

Two houses on the site at Sunbury were used in experiments. One was retrofitted with special insulation, ground source heat pumps and other systems which have now become mainstream. “All the reports that we produced were filed away and contain a huge mass of information. We had been researching alternative energies for years going back to the early 1980s,” said one senior scientist involved in the BP programme who did not want to be named.

A major cost-cutting drive in 1993 forced the end of R&D as a standalone department. It was reduced in scale, merged with the engineering department and told to concentrate on oil and chemical research. Much of the renewable energy research is now kept in a formal BP archive based at the Modern Records Centre, a part of the main library at Warwick University, which describes itself as “a history of the modern world”.

The oil company employs its own librarians at the site who insist that only pre-1976 material on issues such as solar power are available to journalists and the public. A spokesman for BP insisted that the company was now spending $660m on research, half of that in-house at locations such as Sunbury and he denied that any energy efficiency drive was being wound down. 20% of R&D is still said to be going towards “a low-carbon transition” . But he accepted that the company had retreated from renewable energy which had once had its own separate headquarters and chief executive, saying it was up to others to do that work.

Greenpeace said it was time that BP handed over all the research it had gained from its decades of work. “By keeping this wealth of research under lock and key BP is putting narrow corporate interests before humanity’s hopes to tackle one of its greatest challenges, said a spokesman.

BP behaving like an Oil Company.