The Methane Thread

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Re: The Methane Thread

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jan 13, 2016 2:32 pm

no :)
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Methane Thread

Postby Iamwhomiam » Wed Jan 13, 2016 3:06 pm

ok :thumbsup
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Re: The Methane Thread

Postby Burnt Hill » Thu Feb 25, 2016 5:30 pm

http://www.rdmag.com/news/2016/02/methane-hot-spots-mapped-across-la-basin?

Methane Hot Spots Mapped Across LA Basin

Hundreds of methane-emitting hot spots have been identified across the Los Angeles Basin, including a “clean ports” truck refueling facility near the Port of Long Beach, power plants, water treatment facilities, and cattle in Chino, according to new findings by the University of California, Irvine.

Atmospheric scientists conducted a mobile survey across Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties, and their results, published this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, identify the region’s highest emitters. Methane is the second-largest known contributor to global climate change, behind carbon dioxide.

The survey was done before the Aliso Canyon gas well leak temporarily displaced thousands from their Porter Ranch homes. The findings could be used by the Southern California Gas Co. to meet orders by Gov. Jerry Brown and the state Air Resources Board to offset the gas leak by removing as much of the fast-acting greenhouse gas from the air as was emitted from the Aliso Canyon site, the researchers said.
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Re: The Methane Thread

Postby Luther Blissett » Tue Mar 15, 2016 1:44 pm

Huge Underwater Methane Craters Discovered In The Arctic

March 14, 2016 | by Robin Andrews

Craters up to a kilometer (0.6 miles) wide have been found within the Barents Sea off the northern coast of Norway. As reported by the Sunday Times, these are likely to be due to unstable build-ups of methane, a notoriously volatile and at times explosive natural gas. Details are few and far between at present, although researchers at the Arctic University of Norway are due to present their findings in detail at the annual European Geoscience Union conference this coming April.

“Multiple giant craters exist on the sea floor in an area in the west-central Barents Sea... and are probably a cause of enormous blowouts of gas,” the research team told the Sunday Times. “The crater area is likely to represent one of the largest hotspots for shallow marine methane release in the Arctic.” Although these huge methane bubbles could perhaps take out a ship or two sailing in these shallow waters, the links that several journalistic outlets are making with the Bermuda Triangle may be a bit of a stretch.

Methane under certain conditions is stored as a compound known as methane hydrate. Vast caches of it are found both beneath the seabed and in great expanses of long-term snow – known as permafrost – within tundra climates, particularly in Siberia and Alaska.

Due to man-made climate change, the world is warming at an unprecedented rate, which is beginning to unlock these caches. Melting permafrost unleashes methane gas, the second-most dangerous global warming greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, causing it to warm further. Within the oceans, the hydrates are becoming increasingly unstable due to both warming and increasing acidification.

If an entire “chunk” of these hydrates suddenly becomes unstable, a lot of methane gas can escape at once. This can generate craters, such as those found beneath the surface of the Barents Sea. It’s difficult to estimate how much energy is being released in these crater forming “explosions,” but it’s not unreasonable to suggest that – at over half a mile across each – they could be energetic enough to sink ships passing above them.

This methane forcing itself up from the depths has likely happened before, around 56 million years ago. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was a sudden and catastrophic warming event that bumped up the world’s temperature by 5 to 8°C (9 to 15°F) in just 20,000 years, and researchers have thought that a massive methane hydrates release is to blame.

However, the link with the Bermuda Triangle, which is off the eastern coast of Florida, is somewhat tenuous – this study doesn’t appear to have anything to do with this part of the world. Nevertheless, gargantuan methane bubbles have been cited before as a possible ship-sinking phenomenon in the Triangle. Even if they don’t cause a damaging blast, a methane bubble is considerably less dense than the sea around it; if it rises up beneath a ship, it could cause it to suddenly sink.

There’s just one problem with this: The Bermuda Triangle doesn’t officially exist, in that it’s not recognized by various scientific institutions of the United States. It’s statistically no more dangerous than any other stretch of ocean, and perhaps most importantly of all, there has been no methane bubbling up from beneath it for at least 15,000 years.
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Re: The Methane Thread

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Mar 23, 2016 7:26 pm

Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistry
Our leaders thought fracking would save our climate. They were wrong. Very wrong.
By Bill McKibben

 Global warming is, in the end, not about the noisy political battles here on the planet’s surface. It actually happens in constant, silent interactions in the atmosphere, where the molecular structure of certain gases traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. If you get the chemistry wrong, it doesn’t matter how many landmark climate agreements you sign or how many speeches you give. And it appears the United States may have gotten the chemistry wrong. Really wrong.

There’s one greenhouse gas everyone knows about: carbon dioxide, which is what you get when you burn fossil fuels. We talk about a “price on carbon” or argue about a carbon tax; our leaders boast about modest “carbon reductions.” But in the last few weeks, CO2’s nasty little brother has gotten some serious press. Meet methane, otherwise known as CH4.

In February, Harvard researchers published an explosive paper in Geophysical Research Letters. Using satellite data and ground observations, they concluded that the nation as a whole is leaking methane in massive quantities. Between 2002 and 2014, the data showed that US methane emissions increased by more than 30 percent, accounting for 30 to 60 percent of an enormous spike in methane in the entire planet’s atmosphere.

To the extent our leaders have cared about climate change, they’ve fixed on CO2. Partly as a result, coal-fired power plants have begun to close across the country. They’ve been replaced mostly with ones that burn natural gas, which is primarily composed of methane. Because burning natural gas releases significantly less carbon dioxide than burning coal, CO2 emissions have begun to trend slowly downward, allowing politicians to take a bow. But this new Harvard data, which comes on the heels of other aerial surveys showing big methane leakage, suggests that our new natural-gas infrastructure has been bleeding methane into the atmosphere in record quantities. And molecule for molecule, this unburned methane is much, much more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.

The EPA insisted this wasn’t happening, that methane was on the decline just like CO2. But it turns out, as some scientists have been insisting for years, the EPA was wrong. Really wrong. This error is the rough equivalent of the New York Stock Exchange announcing tomorrow that the Dow Jones isn’t really at 17,000: Its computer program has been making a mistake, and your index fund actually stands at 11,000.

These leaks are big enough to wipe out a large share of the gains from the Obama administration’s work on climate change—all those closed coal mines and fuel-efficient cars. In fact, it’s even possible that America’s contribution to global warming increased during the Obama years. The methane story is utterly at odds with what we’ve been telling ourselves, not to mention what we’ve been telling the rest of the planet. It undercuts the promises we made at the climate talks in Paris. It’s a disaster—and one that seems set to spread.

The Obama administration, to its credit, seems to be waking up to the problem. Over the winter, the EPA began to revise its methane calculations, and in early March, the United States reached an agreement with Canada to begin the arduous task of stanching some of the leaks from all that new gas infrastructure. But none of this gets to the core problem, which is the rapid spread of fracking. Carbon dioxide is driving the great warming of the planet, but CO2 isn’t doing it alone. It’s time to take methane seriously.

 To understand how we got here, it’s necessary to remember what a savior fracked natural gas looked like to many people, environmentalists included. As George W. Bush took hold of power in Washington, coal was ascendant, here and around the globe. Cheap and plentiful, it was most visibly underwriting the stunning growth of the economy in China, where, by some estimates, a new coal-fired power plant was opening every week. The coal boom didn’t just mean smoggy skies over Beijing; it meant the planet’s invisible cloud of carbon dioxide was growing faster than ever, and with it the certainty of dramatic global warming.

So lots of people thought it was great news when natural-gas wildcatters began rapidly expanding fracking in the last decade. Fracking involves exploding the sub-surface geology so that gas can leak out through newly opened pores; its refinement brought online new shale deposits across the continent—most notably the Marcellus Shale, stretching from West Virginia up into Pennsylvania and New York. The quantities of gas that geologists said might be available were so vast that they were measured in trillions of cubic feet and in centuries of supply.

The apparently happy fact was that when you burn natural gas, it releases half as much carbon dioxide as coal. A power plant that burned natural gas would therefore, or so the reasoning went, be half as bad for global warming as a power plant that burned coal. Natural gas was also cheap—so, from a politician’s point of view, fracking was a win-win situation. You could appease the environmentalists with their incessant yammering about climate change without having to run up the cost of electricity. It would be painless environmentalism, the equivalent of losing weight by cutting your hair.

 And it appeared even better than that. If you were President Obama and had inherited a dead-in-the-water economy, the fracking boom offered one of the few economic bright spots. Not only did it employ lots of people, but cheap natural gas had also begun to alter the country’s economic equation: Manufacturing jobs were actually returning from overseas, attracted by newly abundant energy. In his 2012 State of the Union address, Obama declared that new natural-gas supplies would not only last the nation a century, but would create 600,000 new jobs by decade’s end. In his 2014 address, he announced that “businesses plan to invest almost $100 billion in factories that use natural gas,” and pledged to “cut red tape” to get it all done. In fact, the natural-gas revolution has been a constant theme of his energy policy, the tool that made his restrictions on coal palatable. And Obama was never shy about taking credit for at least part of the boom. Public research dollars, he said in 2012, “helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock—reminding us that government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.”

 Obama had plenty of help selling natural gas—from the fossil-fuel industry, but also from environmentalists, at least for a while. Robert Kennedy Jr., who had enormous credibility as the founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance and a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, wrote a paean in 2009 to the “revolution…over the past two years [that] has left America awash in natural gas and has made it possible to eliminate most of our dependence on deadly, destructive coal practically overnight.” Meanwhile, the longtime executive director of the Sierra Club, Carl Pope, had not only taken $25 million from one of the nation’s biggest frackers, Chesapeake Energy, to fund his organization, but was also making appearances with the company’s CEO to tout the advantages of gas, “an excellent example of a fuel that can be produced in quite a clean way, and shouldn’t be wasted.” (That CEO, Aubrey McClendon, apparently killed himself earlier this month, crashing his car into a bridge embankment days after being indicted for bid-rigging.) Exxon was in apparent agreement as well: It purchased XTO Energy, becoming the biggest fracker in the world overnight and allowing the company to make the claim that it was helping to drive emissions down.

For a brief shining moment, you couldn’t have asked for more. As Obama told a joint session of Congress, “The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy.”

* * *

Unless, of course, you happened to live in the fracking zone, where nightmares were starting to unfold. In recent decades, most American oil and gas exploration had been concentrated in the western United States, often far from population centers. When there were problems, politicians and media in these states paid little attention.

The Marcellus Shale, though, underlies densely populated eastern states. It wasn’t long before stories about the pollution of farm fields and contamination of drinking water from fracking chemicals began to make their way into the national media. In the Delaware Valley, after a fracking company tried to lease his family’s farm, a young filmmaker named Josh Fox produced one of the classic environmental documentaries of all time, Gasland, which became instantly famous for its shot of a man lighting on fire the methane flowing from his water faucet.

This reporting helped galvanize a movement—at first town by town, then state by state, and soon across whole regions. The activism was most feverish in New York, where residents could look across the Pennsylvania line and see the ecological havoc that fracking caused. Scores of groups kept up unrelenting pressure that eventually convinced Governor Andrew Cuomo to ban it. Long before that happened, the big environmental groups recanted much of their own support for fracking: The Sierra Club’s new executive director, Michael Brune, not only turned down $30 million in potential donations from fracking companies but came out swinging against the practice. “The club needs to…advocate more fiercely to use as little gas as possible,” he said. “We’re not going to mute our voice on this.” As for Robert Kennnedy Jr., by 2013 he was calling natural gas a “catastrophe.”

In the end, one of the most important outcomes of the antifracking movement may have been that it attracted the attention of a couple of Cornell scientists. Living on the northern edge of the Marcellus Shale, Robert Howarth and Anthony Ingraffea got interested in the outcry. While everyone else was focused on essentially local issues—would fracking chemicals get in the water supply?—they decided to look more closely at a question that had never gotten much attention: How much methane was invisibly being leaked by these fracking operations?

 Because here’s the unhappy fact about methane: Though it produces only half as much carbon as coal when you burn it, if you don’t—if it escapes into the air before it can be captured in a pipeline, or anywhere else along its route to a power plant or your stove—then it traps heat in the atmosphere much more efficiently than CO2. Howarth and Ingraffea began producing a series of papers claiming that if even a small percentage of the methane leaked—maybe as little as 3 percent—then fracked gas would do more climate damage than coal. And their preliminary data showed that leak rates could be at least that high: that somewhere between 3.6 and 7.9 percent of methane gas from shale-drilling operations actually escapes into the atmosphere.

To say that no one in power wanted to hear this would be an understatement. The two scientists were roundly attacked by the industry; one trade group called their study the “Ivory Tower’s latest fact-free assault on shale gas exploration.” Most of the energy establishment joined in. An MIT team, for instance, had just finished an industry-funded report that found “the environmental impacts of shale development are challenging but manageable”; one of its lead authors, the ur-establishment energy expert Henry Jacoby, described the Cornell research as “very weak.” One of its other authors, Ernest Moniz, would soon become the US secretary of energy; in his nomination hearings in 2013, he lauded the “stunning increase” in natural gas as a “revolution” and pledged to increase its use domestically.

The trouble for the fracking establishment was that new research kept backing up Howarth and Ingraffea. In January 2013, for instance, aerial overflights of fracking basins in Utah found leak rates as high as 9 percent. “We were expecting to see high methane levels, but I don’t think anybody really comprehended the true magnitude of what we would see,” said the study’s director. But such work was always piecemeal, one area at a time, while other studies—often conducted with industry-supplied data—came up with lower numbers.

* * *

That’s why last month’s Harvard study came as such a shock. It used satellite data from across the country over a span of more than a decade to demonstrate that US methane emissions had spiked 30 percent since 2002. The EPA had been insisting throughout that period that methane emissions were actually falling, but it was clearly wrong—on a massive scale. In fact, emissions “are substantially higher than we’ve understood,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy admitted in early March. The Harvard study wasn’t designed to show why US methane emissions were growing—in other parts of the world, as new research makes clear, cattle and wetlands seem to be causing emissions to accelerate. But the spike that the satellites recorded coincided almost perfectly with the era when fracking went big-time.

To make matters worse, during the same decade, experts had become steadily more worried about the effects of methane in any quantity on the atmosphere. Everyone agrees that, molecule for molecule, methane traps far more heat than CO2—but exactly how much wasn’t clear. One reason the EPA estimates of America’s greenhouse-gas emissions showed such improvement was because the agency, following standard procedures, was assigning a low value to methane and measuring its impact over a 100-year period. But a methane molecule lasts only a couple of decades in the air, compared with centuries for CO2. That’s good news, in that methane’s effects are transient—and very bad news because that transient but intense effect happens right now, when we’re breaking the back of the planet’s climate. The EPA’s old chemistry and 100-year time frame assigned methane a heating value of 28 to 36 times that of carbon dioxide; a more accurate figure, says Howarth, is between 86 and 105 times the potency of CO2 over the next decade or two.

If you combine Howarth’s estimates of leakage rates and the new standard values for the heat-trapping potential of methane, then the picture of America’s total greenhouse-gas emissions over the last 15 years looks very different: Instead of peaking in 2007 and then trending downward, as the EPA has maintained, our combined emissions of methane and carbon dioxide have gone steadily and sharply up during the Obama years, Howarth says. We closed coal plants and opened methane leaks, and the result is that things have gotten worse.

Since Howarth is an outspoken opponent of fracking, I ran the Harvard data past an impeccably moderate referee, the venerable climate-policy wonk Dan Lashof. A UC Berkeley PhD who has been in the inner circles of climate policy almost since it began, Lashof has helped write reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and craft the Obama administration’s plan to cut coal-plant pollution. The longtime head of the Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, he is now the chief operations officer of billionaire Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate America.

 “The Harvard paper is important,” Lashof said. “It’s the most convincing new data I have seen showing that the EPA’s estimates of the methane-leak rate are much too low. I think this paper shows that US greenhouse-gas emissions may have gone up over the last decade if you focus on the combined short-term-warming impact.”

Under the worst-case scenario—one that assumes that methane is extremely potent and extremely fast-acting—the United States has actually slightly increased its greenhouse-gas emissions from 2005 to 2015. That’s the chart below: the blue line shows what we’ve been telling ourselves and the world about our emissions—that they are falling. The red line, the worst-case calculation from the new numbers, shows just the opposite.

Lashof argues for a more moderate reading of the numbers (calculating methane’s impact over 50 years, for instance). But even this estimate—one that attributes less of the methane release to fracking—wipes out as much as three-fifths of the greenhouse-gas reductions that the United States has been claiming. This more modest reassessment is the yellow line in the chart below; it shows the country reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions, but by nowhere near as much as we had thought.

Image

 The lines are doubtless not as smooth as the charts imply, and other studies will provide more detail and perhaps shift the calculations. But any reading of the new data offers a very different version of our recent history. Among other things, either case undercuts the statistics that America used to negotiate the Paris climate accord. It’s more upsetting than the discovery last year that China had underestimated its coal use, because China now appears to be cutting back aggressively on coal. If the Harvard data hold up and we keep on fracking, it will be nearly impossible for the United States to meet its promised goal of a 26 to 28 percent reduction in greenhouse gases from 2005 levels by 2025.

Image

 One obvious conclusion from the new data is that we need to move very aggressively to plug as many methane leaks as possible. “The biggest unfinished business for the Obama administration is to establish tight rules on methane emissions from existing [wells and drill sites],” Lashof says. That’s the work that Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to tackle at their conclave in March—although given the time it takes for the EPA to draft new rules, it will likely be long after Obama’s departure before anything happens, and the fossil-fuel industry has vowed to fight new regulations.

Also, containing the leaks is easier said than done: After all, methane is a gas, meaning that it’s hard to prevent it from escaping. Since methane is invisible and odorless (utilities inject a separate chemical to add a distinctive smell), you need special sensors to even measure leaks. Catastrophic blowouts like the recent one at Porter Ranch in California pour a lot of methane into the air, but even these accidents are small compared to the total seeping out from the millions of pipes, welds, joints, and valves across the country—especially the ones connected with fracking operations, which involve exploding rock to make large, leaky pores. A Canadian government team examined the whole process a couple of years ago and came up with despairing conclusions. Consider the cement seals around drill pipes, says Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes, who was a member of the team: “It sounds like it ought to be simple to make a cement seal, but the phrase we finally fixed on is ‘an unresolved engineering challenge.’ The technical problem is that when you pour cement into a well and it solidifies, it shrinks. You can get gaps in the cement. All wells leak.”

With that in mind, the other conclusion from the new data is even more obvious: We need to stop the fracking industry in its tracks, here and abroad. Even with optimistic numbers for all the plausible leaks fixed, Howarth says, methane emissions will keep rising if we keep fracking.

 And if we didn’t frack, what would we do instead? Ten years ago, the realistic choice was between natural gas and coal. But that choice is no longer germane: Over the same 10 years, the price of a solar panel has dropped at least 80 percent. New inventions have come online, such as air-source heat pumps, which use the latent heat in the air to warm and cool houses, and electric storage batteries. We’ve reached the point where Denmark can generate 42 percent of its power from the wind, and where Bangladesh is planning to solarize every village in the country within the next five years. We’ve reached the point, that is, where the idea of natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to a renewable future is a marketing slogan, not a realistic claim (even if that’s precisely the phrase that Hillary Clinton used to defend fracking in a debate earlier this month).

One of the nastiest side effects of the fracking boom, in fact, is that the expansion of natural gas has undercut the market for renewables, keeping us from putting up windmills and solar panels at the necessary pace. Joe Romm, a climate analyst at the Center for American Progress, has been tracking the various economic studies more closely than anyone else. Even if you could cut the methane-leakage rates to zero, Romm says, fracked gas (which, remember, still produces 50 percent of the CO2 level emitted by coal when you burn it) would do little to cut the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions because it would displace so much truly clean power. A Stanford forum in 2014 assembled more than a dozen expert teams, and their models showed what a drag on a sustainable future cheap, abundant gas would be. “Cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by burning natural gas is like dieting by eating reduced-fat cookies,” the principal investigator of the Stanford forum explained. “If you really want to lose weight, you probably need to avoid cookies altogether.”

 Of course, if you’re a cookie company, that’s not what you want to hear. And the Exxons have a little more political juice than the Keeblers. To give just one tiny example, during his first term, Obama’s then–deputy assistant for energy and climate change, Heather Zichal, headed up an interagency working group to promote the development of domestic natural gas. The working group had been formed after pressure from the American Petroleum Institute, the chief fossil-fuel lobbying group, and Zichal, in a talk to an API gathering, said: “It’s hard to overstate how natural gas—and our ability to access more of it than ever—has become a game changer, and that’s why it’s been a fixture of the president’s ‘All of the Above’ energy strategy.” Zichal left her White House job in 2013; one year later, she took a new post on the board of Cheniere Energy, a leading exporter of fracked gas. In the $180,000-a-year job, she joined former CIA head John Deutch, who once led an Energy Department review of fracking safety during the Obama years, and Vicky Bailey, a commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under Bill Clinton. That’s how it works.

* * *

There was one oddly reassuring number in the Harvard satellite data: The massive new surge of methane from the United States constituted somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of the global growth in methane emissions this past decade. In other words, the relatively small percentage of the planet’s surface known as the United States accounts for much (if not most) of the spike in atmospheric methane around the world. Another way of saying this is: We were the first to figure out how to frack. In this new century, we’re leading the world into the natural-gas age, just as we poured far more carbon into the 20th-century atmosphere than any other nation. So, thank God, now that we know there’s a problem, we could warn the rest of the planet before it goes down the same path.

Except we’ve been doing exactly the opposite. We’ve become the planet’s salesman for natural gas—and a key player in this scheme could become the next president of the United States. When Hillary Clinton took over the State Department, she set up a special arm, the Bureau of Energy Resources, after close consultation with oil and gas executives. This bureau, with 63 employees, was soon helping sponsor conferences around the world. And much more: Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that the secretary of state was essentially acting as a broker for the shale-gas industry, twisting the arms of world leaders to make sure US firms got to frack at will.

To take just one example, an article in Mother Jones based on the WikiLeaks cables reveals what happened when fracking came to Bulgaria. In 2011, the country signed a $68 million deal with Chevron, granting the company millions of acres in shale-gas concessions. The Bulgarian public wasn’t happy: Tens of thousands were in the streets of Sofia with banners reading Stop Fracking With Our Water. But when Clinton came for a state visit in 2012, she sided with Chevron (one of whose executives had bundled large sums for her presidential campaign in 2008). In fact, the leaked cables show that the main topic of her meetings with Bulgaria’s leaders was fracking. Clinton offered to fly in the “best specialists on these new technologies to present the benefits to the Bulgarian people,” and she dispatched her Eurasian energy envoy, Richard Morningstar, to lobby hard against a fracking ban in neighboring Romania. Eventually, they won those battles—and today, the State Department provides “assistance” with fracking to dozens of countries around the world, from Cambodia to Papua New Guinea.

So if the United States has had a terrible time tracking down and fixing its methane leaks, ask yourself how it’s going to go in Bulgaria. If Canada finds that sealing leaks is an “unresolved engineering challenge,” ask yourself how Cambodia’s going to make out. If the State Department has its way, then in a few years Harvard’s satellites will be measuring gushers of methane from every direction.

* * *

Of course, we can—and perhaps we should— forgive all that past. The information about methane is relatively new; when Obama and Clinton and Zichal started backing fracking, they didn’t really know. They could have turned around much earlier, like Kennedy or the Sierra Club. But what they do now will be decisive.

There are a few promising signs. Clinton has at least tempered her enthusiasm for fracking some in recent debates, listing a series of preconditions she’d insist on before new projects were approved; Bernie Sanders, by contrast, has called for a moratorium on new fracking. But Clinton continues to conflate and confuse the chemistry: Natural gas, she said in a recent position paper, has helped US carbon emissions “reach their lowest level in 20 years.” It appears that many in power would like to carry on the fracking revolution, albeit a tad more carefully.

Indeed, just last month, Cheniere Energy shipped the first load of American gas overseas from its new export terminal at Sabine Pass in Louisiana. As the ship sailed, Cheniere’s vice president of marketing, Meg Gentle, told industry and government officials that natural gas should be rebranded as renewable energy. “I’d challenge everyone here to reframe the debate and make sure natural gas is part of the category of clean energy, not a fossil-fuel category, which is viewed as dirty and not part of the solution,” she said. A few days later, Exxon’s PR chief, writing in the Los Angeles Times, boasted that the company had been “instrumental in America’s shale gas revolution,” and that as a result, “America’s greenhouse gas emissions have declined to levels not seen since the 1990s.”

The new data prove them entirely wrong. The global-warming fight can’t just be about carbon dioxide any longer. Those local environmentalists, from New York State to Tasmania, who have managed to enforce fracking bans are doing as much for the climate as they are for their own clean water. That’s because fossil fuels are the problem in global warming—and fossil fuels don’t come in good and bad flavors. Coal and oil and natural gas have to be left in the ground. All of them.
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Re: The Methane Thread

Postby MacCruiskeen » Sun Sep 04, 2016 3:24 pm

From July:

Scores of City-Sized Siberian Wildfires Spew 2,500 Mile-Long Plume of Smoke Over Northern Hemisphere


Today’s satellite pass by NASA’s LANCE MODIS array tells a dire story that practically no one in the global mainstream media is talking about. Northern and Central Siberia is burning. Scores of massive fires, some the size of cities and small states, are throwing off a great pall of smoke 2,500 miles long.

The vast boreal forests are lighting off like climate-change-enhanced natural fireworks. The tundra and permafrost lands — some of them frozen for hundreds of thousands to millions of years — are thawing and igniting. But for all of the loudly roaring fires, most of the major media reporting agencies have thus far produced only deafening silence.

Country-Sized Swath of Siberia is Covered With Wildfires

[...]

https://robertscribbler.com/2016/07/18/ ... emisphere/


Image


More photos here:

http://siberiantimes.com/ecology/casest ... s-burning/

See also:


Russian anthrax outbreak blamed on climate change

2016-08-06 17:23

Moscow - Russian authorities have confirmed that two people have died after an outbreak of anthrax in Siberia.

Unusually warm weather is believed to be behind the release of the bacteria, which has resulted in the death of a boy and his grandmother.

Another 90 people have been hospitalised on suspicion of anthrax infection and over 2 300 reindeer have died, a report says.

The defence ministry said it had sent more than 200 specialist troops to the region to decontaminate the infected area and burn the corpses of infected animals

[...]

http://www.news24.com/Green/News/russia ... e-20160805
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Re: The Methane Thread

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Jul 31, 2017 4:59 pm

Release of Arctic Methane "May Be Apocalyptic," Study Warns
Thursday, March 23, 2017
By Dahr Jamail, Truthout

A scientific study published in the prestigious journal Palaeoworld in December issued a dire -- and possibly prophetic -- warning, though it garnered little attention in the media.

"Global warming triggered by the massive release of carbon dioxide may be catastrophic," reads the study's abstract. "But the release of methane from hydrate may be apocalyptic."

The study, titled "Methane Hydrate: Killer Cause of Earth's Greatest Mass Extinction," highlights the fact that the most significant variable in the Permian Mass Extinction event, which occurred 250 million years ago and annihilated 90 percent of all the species on the planet, was methane hydrate.

To see more stories like this, visit "Planet or Profit?"

In the wake of that mass extinction event, less than 5 percent of the animal species in the seas lived, and less than one-third of the large land animal species made it. Nearly all the trees died.

Methane hydrate, according to the US Office of Fossil Energy, "is a cage-like lattice of ice inside of which are trapped molecules of methane, the chief constituent of natural gas."

While there is not a scientific consensus around the cause of the Permian Mass Extinction, it is widely believed that massive volcanism along the Siberian Traps in Russia led to tremendous amounts of CO2 being added to the atmosphere. This then created enough warming to cause the sudden release of methane from the Arctic sea floor, which kicked off a runaway greenhouse effect that led to sea-level increase, de-oxygenation, major oceanic circulation shifts and increased acidification of the oceans, as well as worldwide aridity on land.

The scenario that humans have created by way of the industrial growth society is already mimicking these eventualities, which are certain to worsen.

"The end Permian holds an important lesson for humanity regarding the issue it faces today with greenhouse gas emissions, global warming, and climate change," the abstract of the recent study concludes.

As the global CO2 concentration continues to climb each year, the threat of even more abrupt methane additions continues to escalate along with it.

The Methane Time Bomb

The methane hydrate situation has, for years now, been referred to as the Arctic Methane Time Bomb, and as been studied intensely.

A 2010 scientific analysis led by the UK's Met Office, published in the journal Review of Geophysics, states clearly that the time scale for the release of methane in the Arctic would be "much shorter for hydrates below shallow waters, such as in the Arctic Ocean," adding that "significant increases in methane emissions are likely, and catastrophic emissions cannot be ruled out.… The risk of rapid increase in [methane] emissions is real."

A 2011 study of the Eastern Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS), conducted by more than 20 Arctic experts and published in the Proceedings of the Russian Academy of Sciences, concluded that the shelf was already a powerful supplier of methane to the atmosphere. The conclusion of this study stated that the methane concentration in the atmosphere was at levels capable of causing "a considerable and even catastrophic warming on the Earth."

Scientists have been warning us for a number of years about the dire consequences of methane hydrates in the Arctic, and how the methane being released poses a potentially disastrous threat to the planet. There has even been a study showing that methane released in the Arctic could trigger "catastrophic climate change" that would cost the global economy $60 trillion.

Of course, that level of planetary heating would likely extinguish most life on the planet, so whatever the economic costs might be would be irrelevant.

"Highly Possible at Any Time"

The ESAS is the largest ice shelf in the world, encompassing more than 2 million square kilometers, or 8 percent of the world's total area of continental shelf.

In 2015, Truthout spoke with Natalia Shakhova, a research associate professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks' International Arctic Research Center, about the ESAS's methane emissions.

"These emissions are prone to be non-gradual (massive, abrupt) for a variety of reasons," she told Truthout. "The main reason is that the nature of major processes associated with methane releases from subsea permafrost is non-gradual."

Shakhova warned that a 50-gigaton -- that is, 50-billion-ton -- "burp" of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost beneath the ESAS is "highly possible at any time."

This, Shakhova said, means that methane releases from decaying frozen hydrates could result in emission rates that "could change in order of magnitude in a matter of minutes," and that there would be nothing "smooth, gradual or controlled" about it. She described it as a "kind of a release [that] is like the unsealing of an over-pressurized pipeline."

In other words, we could be looking at non-linear releases of methane in amounts that are difficult to fathom.

A study published in the prestigious journal Nature in July 2013 confirmed what Shakhova had been warning us about for years: A 50-gigaton "burp" of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost beneath the East Siberian sea is highly possible.

Such a "burp" would be the equivalent of at least 1,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide. (For perspective, humans have released approximately 1,475 gigatons in total carbon dioxide since the year 1850.)

The UK's Met Office considers the 50-gigaton release "plausible," and in a paper on the subject added, "That may cause ∼12-times increase of modern atmospheric methane burden, with consequent catastrophic greenhouse warming."
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Re: The Methane Thread

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Fri Aug 25, 2017 4:15 pm

Alaska's 'always-frozen ground' is starting to melt, and scientists are very, very concerned
August 23, 2017

As the climate continues to warm, the permanently frozen ground underneath much of Alaska is starting to thaw. While the loss of permafrost would obviously have big consequences for the state's population, wildlife, and infrastructure, perhaps even more alarmingly, it would also have a huge impact on the already increasing global temperature, The New York Times reported Wednesday:

Starting just a few feet below the surface and extending tens or even hundreds of feet down, it contains vast amounts of carbon in organic matter — plants that took carbon dioxide from the atmosphere centuries ago, died and froze before they could decompose. Worldwide, permafrost is thought to contain about twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere.

Once this ancient organic material thaws, microbes convert some of it to carbon dioxide and methane, which can flow into the atmosphere and cause even more warming. Scientists have estimated that the process of permafrost thawing could contribute as much as 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit to global warming over the next several centuries, independent of what society does to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels and other activities. [The New York Times]

The complete thaw of the Arctic's "always-frozen ground" is estimated to be millennia away, but already the melting ground is believed to be contributing to rising carbon emissions in the region. One calculation estimates that right now, thawing permafrost worldwide emits about 1.5 billion tons of fossil fuel annually, which the Times noted is "slightly more than the United States emits from fossil-fuel burning."

“There's a massive amount of carbon that's in the ground, that's built up slowly over thousands and thousands of years," said Max Holmes, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center studying Alaska's permafrost melt. "It's been in a freezer, and that freezer is now turning into a refrigerator."
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Re: The Methane Thread

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Aug 25, 2017 11:29 pm

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Re: The Methane Thread

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Aug 29, 2019 3:43 pm

Trump moves to accelerate climate change — and it’s even more evil than it first appears

Image

Written by Martin Longman Washington Monthly August 29,2019

Methane levels in the environment have been rising sharply since 2008, and there is probably more than one contributing factor. A lot of methane is trapped under ice sheets which are melting at a rapid pace. But some researchers see the new popularity of fracking as a prime culprit.

The boom in the US shale gas and oil may have ignited a significant global spike in methane emissions blamed for accelerating the pace of the climate crisis, according to research.


Scientists at Cornell University have found the “chemical fingerprints” of the rising global methane levels point to shale oil and shale gas as the probable source…

…Robert Howarth, the author of the paper published in the journal Biogeosciences, said the proportion of methane with a “carbon signature” linked to traditional fossil fuels was falling relative to the rise of methane with a slightly different carbon make-up…

…“This recent increase in methane is massive,” Howarth said. “It’s globally significant. It’s contributed to some of the increase in global warming we’ve seen and shale gas is a major player.”



Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but it exists in smaller quantities and dissipates more quickly in the atmosphere. It’s actually easier to make headway against climate change by reducing methane rather than carbon dioxide emissions, but that requires strict regulation of the shale gas fields where methane is released both intentionally and unintentionally during the hydraulic fracturing process. In 2016, the Obama administration sought to do this by announcing new rules.

The new rules are part of the Obama administration’s goal to cut methane emissions from the oil and gas industry by up to 45 percent by 2025. They affect newly-drilled hydraulically fractured oil wells, which studies show are significant sources of leaking methane. At least one-third of human-caused methane emissions in the U.S. come from the oil and gas industry.

The regulations require companies to find and contain leaks with the goal of reducing methane pollution by the equivalent of 11 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2025, or roughly the same as the emissions from 2.34 million passenger cars.

The EPA is beginning work on regulating methane leaks from existing oil and gas wells by requiring energy companies to provide data to the agency under an “information collection request.” The request will require the companies to inform the EPA about their emissions and technology they could use to stop methane leaks.



Since 2016, climate scientists have been revising their estimates of the pace and severity of climate change, and the problem today looks more severe than their worst-case scenarios from three years ago. This would support revisiting the Obama administration’s rules on methane and fracking to see if they should be strengthened. But that’s not what the Trump administration is doing:

Oil and gas companies would face looser controls on emissions of potent climate-changing methane gas under a proposal expected from the Trump administration as soon as Thursday, oil industry and environmental groups say.

The government’s plan would ease requirements on oil and gas sites to monitor for methane leaks and plug them
.


This plan is actually even more evil than it might first appear, as the Washington Post reports:

Just as important, according to an EPA document obtained by The Washington Post, the proposal will challenge the agency’s earlier position that the federal government has the authority to regulate methane without first making a determination that it qualifies as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. The Trump administration has taken several steps to limit the government’s ability to regulate climate pollutants in the future, including in a recently-finalized rule curbing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.



They want to free up frackers to release as much methane into the environment as they want, but they also want to make it harder for any future administration to reverse their decision. To get an idea of how truly egregious this step is, consider that the oil and gas industry isn’t uniformly behind it.

The [EPA] estimates the proposed changes, which will be subject to public comment for 60 days after they are published, would save the oil and natural gas industry between $17 million and $19 million a year.

But several of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies, including Exxon, Shell and BP, have opposed the rollback and urged the Trump administration to keep the current standards in place. Collectively, these firms account for 11 percent of America’s natural gas output
.



Since the industry has already adapted to the Obama Era rules, there’s really no reason to eviscerate them. But it seems that this administration will pursue almost anything if it’s a bad enough idea.
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"We had to destroy the lifeboat to save the lifeboat."

Postby Harvey » Thu Aug 29, 2019 5:53 pm

But why make Trump the hook? Have we forgotten Hilary's fracking tour of Europe or Obama's fracked gas/shale oil boom? This isn't about Trump. To make it so defuses the possibility and urgency of engaging an entire establishment entirely at odds with any survival future. Probably why so many of these fucks are building bunkers from the wealthier suburbs to the country estates. Somebody ought to clue them in to the likely timescale of recovery after such a catastrophe, many millions of years. There's no imaginable escape for these idiots. We're living on the fucking lifeboat, there isn't another.
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Re: The Methane Thread

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 29, 2019 6:08 pm

The 6 things you most need to know about Trump’s new climate plan
It could actually increase air pollution, and it’s a pretty bad deal.

David RobertsAug 19, 2019, 12:42pm EDT

The IPCC says we’re almost out of time to close coal plants like this one to limit warming to 1.5ºC.
The Trump climate plan, basically.
Shutterstock
In June, the Trump administration unveiled its proposed replacement for the Clean Power Plan, Obama’s program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants. Last week, a coalition of 29 states and cities filed a lawsuit to block the rule, claiming that it violates Trump’s obligations under the Clean Air Act.

And on Sunday, nonpartisan research firm Resources for the Future, along with researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Syracuse University, and the Boston University School of Public Health, released new research showing that even Environmental Protection Agency’s meager projected pollution reductions from its rule are likely overestimated.

The story of EPA carbon regulations is long and tangled, but if you’re in a hurry, here’s the short version: The president’s plan is the bare minimum the EPA thinks it can get away with. It won’t reduce emissions much; in fact, it is likely to increase both carbon dioxide and local air pollutants, along with their health impacts, in more than a dozen states. (Seriously.) And the EPA is going to have a hell of a time justifying it to a court.

Now let’s walk through the longer version of the story. Most coverage so far has focused on the plan’s striking weakness (for obvious reasons), but there are several other aspects of the fight over power plant emissions that are worth understanding. How these policy and legal questions get resolved will have enormous influence on what the next administration — if we ever make it to another administration — can do to address climate change.

So, with that in mind, here are the six things you need to know about Trump’s Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) plan.

1) Trump’s EPA is regulating carbon because it has to, not because it wants to

The Trump administration has repeatedly expressed skepticism toward climate change, hostility toward regulation, and an all-consuming hatred for anything with former President Barack Obama’s fingerprints on it. If it had its druthers, it wouldn’t regulate carbon emissions at all.

But it has to. In 2007’s Massachusetts v. EPA, the Supreme Court ruled that if the EPA finds that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health, it must regulate them as air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. In 2009’s Endangerment Finding, the EPA found that, yes, greenhouse gases are a danger to public health.

Those twin developments created a set of legal obligations for the agency. It must:

regulate mobile sources of greenhouse gases, i.e., vehicles — that was Obama’s fuel economy standards, which Trump is busy gutting;
regulate new stationary sources of greenhouse gases, i.e., power plants and refineries — that was Obama’s 2013 limits on new sources, which Trump is busy gutting;
regulate existing stationary sources of greenhouse gases — that was the Clean Power Plan (CPP), which Trump is now gutting.
Some of the wackier denialists in the conservative coalition were pressing the EPA to challenge the endangerment finding (and former Administrator Scott Pruitt considered it). If successful, that would negate all these obligations. But, perhaps perceiving how futile and silly such an effort would be, the EPA elected not to.


Scott Pruitt resigned in 2018 after a cascade of alleged ethics violations.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
So it was forced to replace, not just cancel, Obama’s fuel economy standards, replace, not just cancel, Obama’s regulations on new power plants, and replace, not just cancel, the Clean Power Plan. Thus, ACE.

2) The legal question at the heart of the dispute over CPP has never been decided by courts

The Clean Air Act (specifically, Section 111) calls upon the EPA to set air pollution standards by determining “the degree of emission limitation achievable through the application of the best system of emission reduction … adequately demonstrated.”

Just what constitutes the “best system of emission reduction” is at the heart of the dispute between CPP proponents (environmentalists and Democrats) and critics (polluting industries and Republicans).

After studying the issue for several years, Obama’s EPA realized a few things. First, power plants do not operate in isolation; they are parts of a large, interconnected grid, a single machine, and their operations are determined by its needs. And second, states are already busy reducing greenhouse gas emissions using a variety of policy tools connected to grid operations — fuel-switching from coal to natural gas, adding renewables, energy efficiency, etc.

The EPA concluded that the “best” (most efficient and economical) way to reduce power plant emissions is to support those efforts by requiring states to reduce the average carbon intensity of their overall power sectors. They could reduce the emissions of individual plants, or increase energy efficiency, or build more renewables, or replace coal plants with natural gas. In the argot, the plan allowed emission reductions “beyond the fenceline” of individual power plants.

By setting targets at the aggregate level, rather than at the level of individual power plants, the CPP gave states maximum flexibility (something conservatives ostensibly support in general). It left them more than one tool for compliance.

The alternative — requiring only emission reductions “within the fenceline,” at individual plants — was seen as untenable. The fact is, an individual fossil fuel power plant just doesn’t have the capacity to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions much (absent carbon capture and sequestration, which is still wildly expensive). It can operate more efficiently, getting more power per unit of fuel, but those are improvements at the margin. The only practical way to get substantial reductions from the power sector is to require aggregate reductions.

As soon as the CPP was proposed, a large coalition of 24 states, along with several companies and other groups, sued. (There were actually multiple suits that eventually got consolidated into one.)

The main legal critique was simple: By regulating beyond the fenceline, the EPA had exceeded its statutory authority. (For an in-depth look at the fenceline question, you can read this post.)

In January 2016, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals denied a motion to stay the CPP while it was under legal consideration. Just a few weeks later, in February, the Supreme Court overrode that decision with a 5-4 decision of its own, issuing a stay on the CPP until the litigation was settled.

Although both sides had already made their case in circuit court, the court agreed to the EPA’s request that it withhold judgment until EPA issues a replacement plan. Since, as was inevitable, that replacement plant has sparked a lawsuit, it will end up in court anyway.

Long story short: Despite what you’d think from listening to Trump administration rhetoric, no court has yet ruled on the fenceline question. And a court eventually must.

Supreme Court building
Where climate laws go to die?
Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Obama’s EPA did its homework, and beyond-the-fenceline proponents are confident of their case, at least in circuit court. But the case is likely to go back to the Supreme Court, and, well, we all know how that’s going.

If courts end up rejecting the Trump EPA’s inside-the-fenceline interpretation, it would throw the agency into chaos. But it would give a Democratic successor administration free rein to issue a new, stronger CPP (which the Resources for the Future analysis says could reduce electricity sector emissions 37 percent above the baseline case by 2030).

If courts accept the narrow interpretation, it would be an enormous blow to Democratic efforts on climate change going forward, putting the Clean Air Act, at least Section 111, out of reach as a carbon reduction tool.

3) ACE is so weak, it could potentially lead to higher emissions

Trump’s EPA accepted the inside-the-fenceline restriction that Obama’s EPA found untenable, so ACE only applies to individual plants. Consequently, it won’t reduce carbon emissions much.

The CPP did not set mandatory carbon reduction targets, but the EPA calculated that if states opted for the most stringent pollution control plans, the CPP would yield electricity sector emission reductions of 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. (Since EPA’s 2015 analysis, progress on clean energy has been incredibly rapid. We now know that most of the emission reductions CPP targeted were going to happen anyway. Thus the need for an updated CPP.)

ACE, on the other hand, might not reduce emissions at all relative to baseline. It might even raise them. Yes, you read that right: Trump’s pollution rule might produce more pollution than no rule at all.

How is that possible? Well, remember, ACE applies only to individual power plants (coal plants, mostly), and the only way to improve the emissions performance of individual power plants is through efficiency upgrades. But efficiency upgrades — heat rate improvements (HRI), in the lingo — make those plants cheaper to run.

If they’re cheaper to run, utilities will run them more often. That will increase their net emissions. Resources for the Future refers to this as “rebound” and says the EPA underestimates it in several ways.

First, the agency plans changes to New Source Review — pollution standards that must be met by new or upgraded plants — to make it easier to upgrade coal plants without triggering new standards. (See No. 4, below.) That will have the effect of boosting HRI. In the initial draft release of ACE, those standards changes were included. But in the final rule, they were left out, enabling the EPA to lowball HRI.

But the agency still plans to make those changes to New Source Review; by failing to include them in its analysis of ACE, it is deliberately hiding the ball.

Second, in its analysis, the EPA excluded two of the best technologies for HRI (blade path upgrades and redesign/replace economizers — don’t ask). And third, the agency’s analysis excludes the Section 45Q tax credit passed by Congress, which would offer tax credits for carbon capture and sequestration.

Long story short, even the administration’s paltry project carbon emission reductions from ACE — between 0.7 and 1.5 percent lower than baseline — are likely overstated. In fact, coal plants are likely to run more than EPA estimates, will means CO2 will fall less (or not at all) and other local air pollutants will increase in many states, with all their concomitant health effects.

coal plant
Polluting more efficiently.
Shutterstock
A final note: reductions of 0.7 to 1.5 percent are basically a rounding error and they hinge entirely on the market fate of coal plants. Resources for the Future ran an analysis of several different market scenarios and found that even small changes in market assumptions — demand, the price of natural gas, etc. — could wipe out those gains.

Basically, ACE isn’t a serious plan to reduce carbon emissions. It’s more of a statement by Trump’s EPA that it doesn’t have the power to reduce power sector carbon emissions.

4) Gutting New Source Review (which goes along with ACE) could also raise emissions

From an environmental perspective, the original sin of the Clean Air Act (at least the 1970 and 1990 amendments to the CAA) was grandfathering.

The presumption was that new power plants would be built with modern pollution controls and old plants would gradually phase out and close down. So existing plants were grandfathered in — they didn’t have to meet the new standards.

To ensure that existing plants didn’t increase their pollution in the meantime, the CAA standards applied not only to new plants but to existing plants that made substantial upgrades that would increase their pollution. More specifically, “any physical change in, or change in the method of operation of, a stationary source which increases the amount of any air pollutant emitted by such source or which results in the emission of any air pollutant not previously emitted” would trigger the standards.

Any utility planning a new plant or a plant upgrade has to submit to the New Source Review to ensure they’re meeting pollution standards.

So if utilities built new plants, they had to meet modern pollution standards. If they upgraded old plants, they had to meet modern pollution standards. But if they just kept their polluting old plants running and running forever, without upgrades, they didn’t have to meet modern pollution standards. And so that’s what they did.

Consequently, the US has been saddled with a large, old fleet of dirty coal plants for decades, with utilities making just enough repairs to keep them in operation but not enough modifications and upgrades to trigger New Source Review. The average age of a US coal plant is 39 years — roughly its rated life span.

A chart showing power plant age. EIA
Environmentalists have complained about these plants for ages, saying that utilities should shut them down. Utilities have also complained, saying the prohibitive costs of NSR are preventing them from upgrading their fleets.

Obama’s CPP was supposed to finally get at those old plants. Given the way NSR has traditionally worked, ACE would have too. It would have forced plants to make efficiency improvements, which would have triggered NSR, which would have triggered tighter standards. (By EPA’s own estimate, 80 percent of coal-fired power plants do not meet current NSR standards for local air pollutants.)

Trump’s EPA doesn’t want utilities to face the terrifying prospect of being forced to clean up their old fleets (“enormous new permitting burdens”), so it plans to “reform” New Source Review. It will no longer be an increase in total emissions that triggers the review — only an increase in a plant’s hourly emissions rate. If a plant reduces its hourly emissions rate, increases its total runtime, and thus increases its total emissions, no problem.

New Source Review is one of the very few regulatory tools available to reach these existing, dirty plants, and EPA wants to take it off the table. Long-term, that could free lots of utilities to update their dirty old coal plants (to comply with ACE) and keep them running even longer.

5) Even after torturing the numbers, the EPA couldn’t make ACE look like a good deal

The awkward fact for Republicans has always been that air quality regulations work. They produce social, economic, and health benefits well in excess of their compliance costs. There is a robust literature and a long practical history showing as much. (See here for the EPA’s cost-benefit analyses on the CAA, which links to dozens of independent sources.)

At every new round of regulations, conservatives and polluting industries complain that they are too onerous, that they will destroy the economy, cost jobs, raise energy prices. And every time, it doesn’t happen. Compliance proves cheaper than expected, the economy continues growing, and public health improves.

Republicans have not responded to this reality by accepting that they were wrong about air quality regulations. Instead, they’ve responded by trying to game the numbers, massaging cost-benefit calculations to give more amenable outcomes.

That continues in the ACE proposal. As Brad Plumer reported in a great New York Times piece, the EPA no longer counts climate benefits that occur outside US borders, which is both morally and atmospherically daft.

But even more daft, rather than the Obama administration’s 3 percent discount rate, Trump’s EPA is using a discount rate of 7 percent.

Discount rates refer to how much future benefits are “discounted” when expressed in today’s dollars — or more colloquially, how highly we value future benefits. (A higher rate means we value them less; a lower rate, more. A rate of zero means we value them equally as much as present benefits.)

A 7 percent discount rate is at the high end of what markets and governments use for personal investments, i.e., how much individual investors value their future profits. But applied to intergenerational investments, i.e., how much sacrifice we’re collectively willing to impose on future generations, it is sociopathic.

“If you use a rate above 5 percent,” Maureen Cropper, an economist at the University of Maryland, told Plumer, “you’re essentially saying that we shouldn’t worry today about anything that happens 100 years from now.” (If you want to dig deeper, here is a post I once did on discount rates, using otters.)

Using these tricks and others, all of which make the rule more legally vulnerable, EPA cut its estimate of the “social cost of carbon” — the total societal value of a ton of GHG emission reductions — from around $50 (the Obama administration’s median number, arrived at after an extensive interagency process that Trump has tried to cancel) to between $1 and $7 (a value rectally extracted by Trump’s EPA over the course of months).

Naturally, that makes cutting greenhouse gases look a lot less attractive. But here’s the first twist.

Even if the climate benefits of the CPP are cut close to nothing, the other benefits, primarily in reductions of local air pollutants like SO2 and NOx, still more than pay for it. That’s true even though the EPA ignored many benefits it claimed to be unable to quantify.

Taylor Kuykendall

@taykuy
EPA says they are "unable to quantify the economic value of changes in exposure to mercury, carbon monoxide, SO2, and NO2, ecosystem effects or visibility impairment" in regulatory impact analysis https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/fi ... 018-08.pdf

4
9:20 AM - Aug 21, 2018
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EPA just couldn’t make the numbers work for it.

And so, as Lisa Friedman first reported for the New York Times, according to the EPA’s analysis, “the new rules could also lead to as many as 1,400 premature deaths annually by 2030 from an increase in the extremely fine particulate matter that is linked to heart and lung disease, up to 15,000 new cases of upper respiratory problems, a rise in bronchitis, and tens of thousands of missed school days.” (And the Resources for the Future analysis shows that those numbers are almost certainly conservative.)

Yes, the EPA is proposing a policy that it concedes will lead to 1,400 premature deaths, 48,000 new cases of “exacerbated asthma,” and at least 21,000 new missed days of school every year, through 2030. That should be fun to justify to a court.

And as Nathanael Johnson noted in Grist, EPA’s analysis shows that ACE’s net costs outweigh its net benefits:

EPA’s press officers aren’t exactly highlighting the findings that the proposal would leave Americans worse off. In a fact sheet, for example, the EPA trumpets its finding that ACE could save power plants up to $6.4 billion in compliance costs. But wade into the details to look up that scenario (check out table 18 on page 165), and you see that the EPA weighs that $6.4 billion against health costs that run between $16.6 billion and $75 billion.

“When an agency wants to do something that’s harmful to the American people, it typically tries to hide it,” Richard Revesz of the Institute for Policy Integrity told Johnson. “What’s unusual here is that the EPA just comes out and says it.”

However — and here’s the second twist — Trump’s EPA is currently working to rectify the situation.

As Friedman smartly notes, the massive study upon which EPA bases much of its work on the health effects of particulates (the famous Harvard “Six Cities” study) would be excluded from EPA consideration if the administration’s daffy “secret science” proposal goes through.

As Vox’s Umair Irfan reported, the proposal would exclude from EPA analysis any study in which participants’ identities are concealed — which is most big public health studies, for obvious reasons. Experts are almost unanimously horrified by the proposal, including the EPA’s science advisers, but it appears to be moving forward.

So enjoy this particular EPA analysis (yet another triumph of career staff over their political hack bosses). The next time EPA runs cost-benefit analysis on an air rule, it won’t include many of the health benefits of pollution reductions, because it will have consciously prevented itself from knowing about them.

A diagram of how particulate matter is inhaled and has negative effects on a person’s body.
“Ignore this,” the EPA seems to say.
Utah Dept. of Health
6) We may have already reached the CPP’s 2030 goal; it’s time for more ambition, not less

According to the Sustainable Energy In America Factbook, US power sector emissions are down 28 percent from 2005 levels. The researchers at Rhodium Group estimate that they will be down 37 percent by 2025.

That means the CPP reach target for 2030 — 32 percent reduction — will likely be achieved in the next few years, just based on current market trends.

This extraordinary progress has been hard-won, utility by utility, and the CPP — even though it never went into effect! — was a big part of that. The tangible prospect of federal regulations got every state and utility, even those with no interest in climate change, thinking, talking, and planning around carbon reductions. And guess what? When utilities start looking around in earnest, they find that cutting carbon is pretty easy.

Reducing electricity sector emissions has proven much cheaper and easier than envisioned even by the optimists at Obama’s EPA. The sensible thing to do in this situation is to boost the plan’s ambition.

In comparing the ACE to the CPP, remember that the emissions baseline has changed a lot since 2014 thanks to cheap renewables and natural gas. @EPA could have responded to this by raising the ambition bar. Instead, they lowered it. pic.twitter.com/REdDtPiy9x

— Trevor Houser (@TrevorGHouser) August 21, 2018
It is difficult to know just how much the weakening of CPP into ACE will blunt that progress — how much progress still depends on policy and how much it has taken on a market momentum of its own. (One thing upon which virtually every expert agrees: US coal is going to continue dying.)

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University took a look at prospects for the electricity sector hitting Paris climate targets without the CPP. They found that it basically depends on natural gas prices. If they stay low or fall further, there’s a chance of hitting 2025 and 2030 Paris targets. Even if they rise a bit, Paris targets are still within reach, though “it becomes essential for many of the existing regulatory and tax inducements to be retained, and perhaps enhanced.” (In particular, they mention renewing federal renewable energy tax credits, which are set to expire.)

But there is broad consensus in the energy community that even if the electricity sector can limp past the 2030 finish line without (much) supportive federal policy, there’s no way the US will get on track for its longer-term carbon targets (80 percent reductions by 2050) without concerted policy support.

Depending on how courts rule on the fenceline issue, it’s possible that a Democratic administration that takes power in January 2021 could almost immediately issue a strengthened CPP, targeting, say, 80 percent electricity sector reductions by 2030, which will definitely wipe out all the coal and rein in natural gas.

Alternatively, if a Supreme Court decision with Brett Kavanaugh restricts the EPA to inside the fenceline, the prospect of substantially reducing carbon emissions using EPA regulations will basically be off the table, leaving federal legislation — or action at the state and local level — the only road forward on climate change.

Even more alternatively, if Trump wins reelection, the EPA by 2024 is likely to be a thoroughly degraded agency, its rules and staff stacked in favor of industry and most of its institutional memory and expertise lost. And the US will be out of the global climate effort entirely, a rogue actor lurching in the direction of myopic greed during the years the world most needs solidarity.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/ ... p-6-things



CLIMATE
84 Environmental Rules Being Rolled Back Under Trump
By NADJA POPOVICH, LIVIA ALBECK-RIPKA and KENDRA PIERRE-LOUIS UPDATED Aug. 29, 2019
President Trump has made eliminating federal regulations a priority. His administration, with help from Republicans in Congress, has often targeted environmental rules it sees as burdensome to the fossil fuel industry and other big businesses.
A New York Times analysis, based on research from Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School and other sources, counts more than 80 environmental rules and regulations on the way out under Mr. Trump.
Our list represents two types of policy changes: rules that were officially reversed and rollbacks still in progress. The Trump administration has released an aggressive schedule to try to finalize many of these rollbacks this year.
49 35 84
ROLLBACKS COMPLETED ROLLBACKS IN PROCESS TOTAL ROLLBACKS
Air pollution and emissions 10 13 23
Drilling and extraction 9 9 18
Infrastructure and planning 12 1 13
Animals 8 2 10
Toxic substances and safety 3 2 5
Water pollution 4 3 7
Other 3 5 8
The Trump administration has often used a “one-two punch” when rolling back environmental rules, said Caitlin McCoy, a fellow in the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School who tracks regulatory rollbacks. “First a delay rule to buy some time, and then a final substantive rule.”
But the process of rolling back regulations has not always been smooth. In some cases, the administration has failed to provide a strong legal argument in favor of proposed changes or agencies have skipped key steps in the rulemaking process, like notifying the public and asking for comment. In several cases, courts have ordered agencies to enforce their own rules.
Several environmental rules — summarized at the bottom of this page — were rolled back and then later reinstated, often following legal challenges. Other rollbacks remain mired in court.
All told, the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks could significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions and lead to thousands of extra deaths from poor air quality every year, according to a recent report prepared by New York University Law School's State Energy and Environmental Impact Center.
Here are the details for each of the policies targeted by the administration so far. Are there rollbacks we missed? Email climateteam@nytimes.com or tweet @nytclimate.
Air pollution and emissions
COMPLETED
1. Canceled a requirement for oil and gas companies to report methane emissions.
Environmental Protection Agency | Read more
2. Revised and partially repealed an Obama-era rule limiting methane emissions on public lands, including intentional venting and flaring from drilling operations.
Interior Department | Read more
3. Loosened a Clinton-era rule designed to limit toxic emissions from major industrial polluters.
E.P.A. | Read more
4. Stopped enforcing a 2015 rule that prohibited the use of hydrofluorocarbons, powerful greenhouse gases, in air-conditioners and refrigerators.
E.P.A. | Read more
5. Repealed a requirement that state and regional authorities track tailpipe emissions from vehicles traveling on federal highways.
Transportation Department | Read more
6. Reverted to a weaker 2009 pollution permitting program for new power plants and expansions.
E.P.A. | Read more
7. Amended rules that govern how refineries monitor pollution in surrounding communities.
E.P.A. | Read more
8. Directed agencies to stop using an Obama-era calculation of the “social cost of carbon” that rulemakers used to estimate the long-term economic benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
Executive Order | Read more
9. Withdrew guidance that federal agencies include greenhouse gas emissions in environmental reviews. But several district courts have ruled that emissions must be included in such reviews.
Executive Order; Council on Environmental Quality | Read more
10. Lifted a summertime ban on the use of E15, a gasoline blend made of 15 percent ethanol. (Burning gasoline with a higher concentration of ethanol in hot conditions increases smog.)
E.P.A. | Read more
IN PROCESS
11. Proposed rules to end federal requirements that oil and gas companies install technology to inspect for and fix methane leaks from wells, pipelines and storage facilities.
E.P.A. | Read more
12. Proposed weakening Obama-era fuel-economy standards for cars and light trucks. The proposal also challenges California’s right to set its own more stringent standards, which other states can choose to follow.
E.P.A. and Transportation Department | Read more
13. Announced intent to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement. (The process of withdrawing cannot be completed until 2020.)
Executive Order | Read more
14. Proposed repeal of the Clean Power Plan, which would have set strict limits on carbon emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants. In April 2019, the E.P.A. sent a replacement plan, which would let states set their own rules, to the White House for budget review.
Executive Order; E.P.A. | Read more
15. Proposed eliminating Obama-era restrictions that in effect required newly built coal power plants to capture carbon dioxide emissions.
E.P.A. | Read more
16. Proposed a legal justification for weakening an Obama-era rule that limited mercury emissions from coal power plants.
E.P.A. | Read more
17. Proposed revisions to standards for carbon dioxide emissions from new, modified and reconstructed power plants.
Executive Order; E.P.A. | Read more
18. Began review of emissions rules for power plant start-ups, shutdowns and malfunctions. In April, the E.P.A. filed an order reversing a requirement that 36 states follow the emissions rule.
E.P.A. | Read more
19. Proposed relaxing Obama-era requirements that companies monitor and repair methane leaks at oil and gas facilities.
E.P.A. | Read more
20. Proposed changing rules aimed at cutting methane emissions from landfills. In May, 2019, a federal judge ruled against the E.P.A. for failing to enforce the existing law and gave the agency a fall deadline for finalizing state and federal rules. E.P.A. said it is reviewing the decision.
E.P.A. | Read more
21. Announced a rewrite of an Obama-era rule meant to reduce air pollution in national parks and wilderness areas.
E.P.A. | Read more
22. Weakened oversight of some state plans for reducing air pollution in national parks. (In Texas, the E.P.A. rejected an Obama-era plan that would have required the installation of equipment at some coal-burning power plants to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions.)
E.P.A. | Read more
23. Proposed repealing leak-repair, maintenance and reporting requirements for large refrigeration and air conditioning systems containing hydrofluorocarbons.
E.P.A. | Read more
Drilling and extraction
COMPLETED
24. Made significant cuts to the borders of two national monuments in Utah and recommended border and resource management changes to several more.
Presidential Proclamation; Interior Department | Read more
25. Rescinded water pollution regulations for fracking on federal and Indian lands.
Interior Department | Read more
26. Scrapped a proposed rule that required mines to prove they could pay to clean up future pollution.
E.P.A. | Read more
27. Withdrew a requirement that Gulf oil rig owners prove they could cover the costs of removing rigs once they have stopped producing.
Interior Department | Read more
28. Approved construction of the Dakota Access pipeline less than a mile from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. Under the Obama administration, the Army Corps of Engineers had said it would explore alternative routes.
Executive Order; Army | Read more
29. Revoked an Obama-era executive order designed to preserve ocean, coastal and Great Lakes waters in favor of a policy focused on energy production and economic growth.
Executive Order | Read more
30. Changed how the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission considers the indirect effects of greenhouse gas emissions in environmental reviews of pipelines.
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission | Read more
31. Permitted the use of seismic air guns for gas and oil exploration in the Atlantic Ocean. The practice, which can kill marine life and disrupt fisheries, was blocked under the Obama administration.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more
32. Loosened offshore drilling safety regulations implemented by the Obama administration following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill. The revised rules include reduced testing requirements for blowout prevention systems.
Interior Department | Read more
IN PROCESS
33. Completed preliminary environmental reviews to clear the way for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Congress; Interior Department | Read more
34. Proposed opening most of America’s coastal waters to offshore oil and gas drilling, but delayed the plan after a federal judge ruled that Mr. Trump’s reversal of an Obama-era ban on drilling in the Arctic Ocean was unlawlful.
Interior Department | Read more
35. Lifted an Obama-era freeze on new coal leases on public lands. But, in April 2019, a judge ruled that the Interior Department could not begin selling new leases without completing an environmental review. A month later, the agency published a draft assessment that concluded restarting federal coal leasing would have little environmental impact.
Executive Order; Interior Department | Read more
36. Repealed an Obama-era rule governing royalties for oil, gas and coal leases on federal lands, which replaced a 1980s rule that critics said allowed companies to underpay the federal government. A federal judge struck down the Trump administration’s repeal. The Interior Department is reviewing the decision.
Interior Department | Read more
37. Proposed “streamlining” the approval process for drilling for oil and gas in national forests.
Agriculture Department; Interior Department | Read more
38. Ordered review of regulations on oil and gas drilling in national parks where mineral rights are privately owned.
Executive Order; Interior Department | Read more
39. Recommended shrinking three marine protected areas, or opening them to commercial fishing.
Executive Order; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more
40. Ordered review of regulations on offshore oil and gas exploration by floating vessels in the Arctic that were developed after a 2013 accident. The Interior Department said it was “considering full rescission or revision of this rule.”
Executive Order; Interior Department | Read more
41. Approved the Keystone XL pipeline rejected by President Barack Obama, but a federal judge blocked the project from going forward without an adequate environmental review process. Mr. Trump later attempted to side-step the ruling by issuing a presidential permit, but the project remains tied up in court.
Executive Order; State Department | Read more
Infrastructure and planning
COMPLETED
42. Revoked Obama-era flood standards for federal infrastructure projects, like roads and bridges. The standards required the government to account for sea-level rise and other climate change effects.
Executive Order | Read more
43. Relaxed the environmental review process for federal infrastructure projects.
Executive Order | Read more
44. Revoked a directive for federal agencies to minimize impacts on water, wildlife, land and other natural resources when approving development projects.
Executive Order | Read more
45. Revoked an Obama executive order promoting “climate resilience” in the northern Bering Sea region of Alaska, which withdrew local waters from oil and gas leasing and established a tribal advisory council to consult on local environmental issues.
Executive Order | Read more
46. Revoked an Obama executive order that set a goal of cutting the federal government’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent over 10 years.
Executive Order | Read more
47. Reversed an update to the Bureau of Land Management’s public land use planning process.
Congress | Read more
48. Withdrew an Obama-era order to consider climate change in managing natural resources in national parks.
National Park Service | Read more
49. Restricted most Interior Department environmental studies to one year in length and a maximum of 150 pages, citing a need to reduce paperwork.
Interior Department | Read more
50. Withdrew a number of Obama-era Interior Department climate change and conservation policies that the agency said could “burden the development or utilization of domestically produced energy resources.”
Interior Department | Read more
51. Eliminated the use of an Obama-era planning system designed to minimize harm from oil and gas activity on sensitive landscapes, such as national parks.
Interior Department | Read more
52. Eased the environmental review processes for small wireless infrastructure projects with the goal of expanding 5G wireless networks.
Federal Communications Commission | Read more
53. Withdrew Obama-era policies designed to maintain or, ideally improve, natural resources affected by federal projects.
Interior Department | Read more
IN PROCESS
54. Proposed plans to streamline the environmental review process for Forest Service projects.
Agriculture Department | Read more
Animals
COMPLETED
55. Opened nine million acres of Western land to oil and gas drilling by weakening habitat protections for the sage grouse, an imperiled bird with an elaborate mating dance.
Interior Department | Read more
56. Overturned a ban on the use of lead ammunition and fishing tackle on federal lands.
Interior Department | Read more
57. Overturned a ban on the hunting of predators in Alaskan wildlife refuges.
Congress | Read more
58. Ended an Obama-era rule barring hunters on some Alaska public lands from using bait to lure and kill grizzly bears.
National Park Service; Interior Department | Read more
59. Withdrew proposed limits on the number of endangered marine mammals and sea turtles that people who fish could unintentionally kill or injure with sword-fishing nets on the West Coast. In 2018, California issued a state rule prohibiting the use of the nets the rule was intending to regulate.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more
60. Amended fishing regulations for a number of species to allow for longer seasons and higher catch rates.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | Read more
61. Rolled back a roughly 40-year-old interprentation of a policy aimed at protecting migratory birds, potentially running afoul of treaties with Canada and Mexico.
Interior Department | Read more
62. Overturned a ban on using parts of migratory birds in handicrafts made by Alaskan Natives.
Interior Department | Read more
IN PROCESS
63. Proposed stripping the Endangered Species Act of key provisions.
Interior Department | Read more
64. Proposed relaxing environmental protections for salmon and smelt in California’s Central Valley in order to free up water for farmers.
Executive Order; Interior Department | Read more
Toxic substances and safety
COMPLETED
65. Narrowed the scope of a 2016 law mandating safety assessments for potentially toxic chemicals, like dry-cleaning solvents and paint strippers. The E.P.A. will focus on direct exposure and exclude air, water and ground contamination.
E.P.A. | Read more
66. Reversed an Obama-era rule that required braking system upgrades for “high hazard” trains hauling flammable liquids, like oil and ethanol.
Transportation Department | Read more
67. Removed copper filter cake, an electronics manufacturing byproduct comprised of heavy metals, from the “hazardous waste” list.
E.P.A. | Read more
IN PROCESS
68. Rejected a proposed ban on chlorpyrifos, a potentially neurotoxic pesticide. In August 2018, a federal court ordered the E.P.A. to ban the pesticide, but the agency is appealing the ruling.
E.P.A. | Read more
69. Announced a review of an Obama-era rule lowering coal dust limits in mines. The head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration said there were no immediate plans to change the dust limit, but the review is continuing.
Labor Department | Read more
Water pollution
COMPLETED
70. Revoked a rule that prevented coal companies from dumping mining debris into local streams.
Congress | Read more
71. Withdrew a proposed rule aimed at reducing pollutants, including air pollution, at sewage treatment plants.
E.P.A. | Read more
72. Withdrew a proposed rule requiring groundwater protections for certain uranium mines.
E.P.A. | Read more
73. Weakened federal rules regulating the disposal and storage of coal ash waste from power plants. (A second phase of this rollback is still under way.)
E.P.A. | Read more
IN PROCESS
74. Proposed rolling back protections for certain tributaries and wetlands that the Obama administration wanted covered by the Clean Water Act.
E.P.A.; Army | Read more
75. Delayed by two years an E.P.A. rule regulating limits on toxic discharge, which can include mercury, from power plants into public waterways.
E.P.A. | Read more
76. Ordered the E.P.A. to re-evaluate a section of the Clean Water Act and related guidance that allows states to reject or delay federal projects – including pipelines and other fossil fuel facilities – if they don't meet local water quality goals.
Executive Order; E.P.A. | Read more
Other
COMPLETED
77. Prohibited funding environmental and community development projects through corporate settlements of federal lawsuits.
Justice Department | Read more
78. Announced intent to stop payments to the Green Climate Fund, a United Nations program to help poorer countries reduce carbon emissions.
Executive Order | Read more
79. Reversed restrictions on the sale of plastic water bottles in national parks desgined to cut down on litter, despite a Park Service report that the effort worked.
Interior Department | Read more
IN PROCESS
80. Proposed limiting the studies used by the E.P.A. for rulemaking to only those that make data publicly available. (The move was widely criticized by scientists, who said it would effectively block the agency from considering landmark research that relies on confidential health data.)
E.P.A. | Read more
81. Proposed repealing an Obama-era regulation that nearly doubled the number of light bulbs subject to energy-efficiency standards set to go into effect next year.
Energy Department | Read more
82. Proposed changes to the way cost-benefit analyses are conducted under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and other environmental statutes.
E.P.A. | Read more
83. Proposed withdrawing efficiency standards for residential furnaces and commercial water heaters designed to reduce energy use.
Energy Department | Read more
84. Initially withdrew then delayed a proposed rule that would inform car owners about fuel-efficient replacement tires. (The Transportation Department has scheduled a new rulemaking notice for 2020.)
Transportation Department | Read more
10 rules were reinstated, often following lawsuits and other challenges

1. Reinstated a rule aimed at improving safety at facilities that use hazardous chemicals following a federal court order.
E.P.A. | Read more
2. Reversed course on repealing emissions standards for “glider” trucks — vehicles retrofitted with older, often dirtier engines — after Andrew Wheeler took over as head of the E.P.A.
E.P.A. | Read more
3. Delayed a compliance deadline for new national ozone pollution standards by one year, but later reversed course.
E.P.A. | Read more
4. Suspended an effort to lift restrictions on mining in Bristol Bay, Alaska. But the Army Corps of Engineers is performing an environmental review of an application for mining in the area.
E.P.A.; Army | Read more
5. Delayed implementation of a rule regulating the certification and training of pesticide applicators, but a judge ruled that the E.P.A. had done so illegally and declared the rule in effect.
E.P.A. | Read more
6. Initially delayed publishing efficiency standards for household appliances, but later published them after multiple states and environmental groups sued.
Energy Department | Read more
7. Delayed federal building efficiency standards until Sept. 30, 2017, at which time the rules went into effect.
Energy Department | Read more
8. Reissued a rule limiting the discharge of mercury by dental offices into municipal sewers after a lawsuit by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group.
E.P.A. | Read more
9. Re-posted a proposed rule limiting greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft, after initially changing its status to “inactive” on the E.P.A. website. In May 2019, the agency confimed it would issue the rule.
E.P.A. | Read more
10. Removed the Yellowstone grizzly bear from the Endangered Species List, but the protections were later reinstated by a federal judge. (The Trump administration appealed the ruling in May 2019.)
Interior Department | Read more

http://archive.is/ESRII
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Methane Thread

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Oct 29, 2019 7:58 pm

:shock2: :shock2: :shock2:

First pictures and video of the largest methane fountain so far discovered in the Arctic Ocean

By The Siberian Times reporter

28 October 2019

Subsea permafrost thaws faster than previously thought, Russian scientists say.

Image

Unexpectedly high level of subsea permafrost degradation was recorded by a Russian-led scientific expedition that spent more than a month in the seas of the eastern Arctic.
A record high methane gas emission in a shape of an underwater ‘fountain’ was registered at the beginning of October east of Bennett island in the East Siberian Sea.
‘It was a needle in a haystack chase, to find an exact place of a methane seep in dark sea waters, but we found it!
'Just right off the Academician Keldysh scientists noticed a spot of emerald-coloured water, with gas rushing to surface in thousands of bubble threads’, said expedition member Sergey Nikiforov, a communications experts of the Tomsk Politechnical University.
The area of the fountain covered about five metres, with water ‘so violently boiling with methane bubbles’ that scientists skipped using plastic cones for sampling and instead collected the gas in buckets.
‘This was the most powerful seep I have ever observed. No one has ever recorded anything similar’ said head of the expedition Igor Semiletov, who has participated in 45 Arctic expeditions.

Unexpectedly high speed of degradation of subsea permafrost has been recorded.
'In some areas the roof of subsea permafrost thawed to the stability horizons of gas hydrates. Moreover, it has been proved that over the past 30 years speed of vertical degradation of subsea permafrost doubled compared to previous centuries and reached 18 centimetres per year which is significantly higher than in earlier estimates', said professor Semiletov.
'This result makes us reconsider the belief that subsea permafrost is stable and can only thaw by a few metres by the end of 21st century', he stressed.

KEY FACTS
Expedition set off from Arkhangelsk, northwest Russia, on September 17.
It was organised by Shirshov Institute of Oceanography (Moscow) with the Ilyichev Pacific Ocean Institute of Oceanography (Vladivostok).
65 scientists from 12 research organisations across 7 countries (Russia, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Italy, UK, USA) were on board of Academician Keldysh research vessel.
Researchers studied seas of the eastern Arctic: East Siberian sea, Laptev sea and Kara sea.
Aims of the expedition were
To study state of subsea (underwater) permafrost;
To study flows of greenhouse gases in the Arctic atmosphere;
To study ecological state of waters and seabed sediments along the Northern Sea Route (NSR).
What they actually established
High levels of degradation of subsea permafrost.
Speed of vertical degradation of subsea permafrost has doubled compared to previous centuries and turned out to be higher than earlier estimates.
Microplastic has been discovered in seas of the eastern Artic thousands miles away from residential settlements.
What else did researchers say?
Elena Kudryashova, rector of Northern Federal University, Arkhangelsk: 'Another important subject of our research was study of various types of microplastic in the seas of the eastern Arctic.
'It is important to compare and analyse results of all expeditions because microplastic represents a serious threat to organisms and sea ecosystems as a whole.'


Sorry, I'm not able to copy the pictures here. But here's the video:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MaT8RsFrqo
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
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Re: The Methane Thread

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 29, 2019 8:13 pm

information_items_7720.jpg

2.jpg



Oktoberfest 'produces 10 times as much methane as Boston'
First analysis of environmental impact of Munich festival reveals extent of emissions

Ian SampleLast modified on Sun 27 Oct 2019 14.21 EDT
5253.jpg

People at Oktoberfest
Oktoberfest is attended by millions whose burps and flatulence contribute towards its emissions. Photograph: Christof Stache/AFP/Getty Images
For the millions of people who descend on Munich for the annual bash, Oktoberfest is a celebration of beer, bands and bratwurst.

But as the dust settles for another year on the world’s largest folk festival, and die Bierleichen (“beer corpses”) return to the land of the living, environmental scientists have released the first analysis of methane emissions from the 16-day party.

Researchers at Technical University in Munich walked and cycled around the perimeter of the festival last year with mobile sensors aloft. The instruments found the event emitted nearly 1,500kg of methane – 10 times the amount that wafted off Boston, Massachusetts, in the same period.

The scientists attributed most of Oktoberfest’s emissions to leaks and incomplete combustion in cooking and heating appliances. Though an appreciable part of the rise in the gas, about 10%, was attributed to the flatulence and burps of attendees.

Jia Chen, who studies greenhouse gases in urban environments, said: “The observed methane concentrations cannot solely be explained by biogenic sources.

“We have strong indications that fossil fuel methane emissions by gas grills and heating appliances are major sources.”

After carbon dioxide, methane is the second most common greenhouse gas emitted by human activity. Though shorter-lived, it is more effective than carbon dioxide at heating the atmosphere and accounts for about 20% of global heating due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions since 1750. Atmospheric levels of the gas have surged in recent years for reasons scientists cannot fully explain.

Having noticed a spike in Munich’s methane levels during Oktoberfest in previous years, Chen and her colleagues decided to monitor the event to see whether major festivals made important contributions to greenhouse gas emissions.

More than six million people visit Oktoberfest each year and make their way through more than seven million litres of beer, 100,000 litres of wine, half a million chickens and a quarter of a million sausages.

To Chen’s surprise, on average, every square metre of Oktoberfest in 2018 released 6.7 micrograms of methane per second. Less than 10% was calculated to come from festivalgoers in the form of flatulence and burps, according to a paper submitted to the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

Chen believes the work can help festival organisers draw up policies to reduce their methane emissions. The study concludes the releases of methane are high enough for major festivals to be considered greenhouse gas sources in local emissions inventories.

“Large but time-limited festivals, like Oktoberfest, are sources that have not been accounted for in existing emission inventories, even though, as we have seen, the methane emissions are significant,” Chen said. “Inaccurate or incomplete emission inventories are a problem, because many decisions
are based on this data.”

With people travelling to Oktoberfest from more than 50 countries, methane leaks from the Theresienwiese site are not the greatest environmental concern. But improving gas appliances to reduce methane emissions still makes sense, Chen said. “Small steps can bring us closer to achieving the world climate goals,” she added.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... nvironment
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