Today’s “Joint Statement on Climate, Energy, and Arctic Leadership” by President Obama and Canada’s new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, contained lots of welcome environmental commitments, particularly on curbing emissions of methane leaking from existing oil and gas infrastructure. They pledged to cut such emissions 40 to 45 percent below 2012 levels by 2025 from the oil and gas sector.
To the naked eye, no emissions from an oil storage tank are visible. But viewed with an infrared lens, escaping methane is evident.Credit U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Years of additional monitoring and analysis have been done since, as Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said in a related blog post today: Read more…
Gary Braasch, a photographer chronicling climate change, at work in Utah. He died on March 7 on the Great Barrier Reef.Credit Lynne Cherry
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Gary BraaschCredit Lynne Cherry
Gary Braasch was a gifted photographer passionately devoted to chronicling climate change. I only met him a handful of times, and always, regrettably, in passing. On Monday, word rapidly spread through environmental circles that he had died at age 70 while snorkeling with a companion near Lizard Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
Gary Braasch took the first photographs of the Shell oil rig Kulluk in the Beaufort Sea as it prepared to drill an exploratory well in October 2012.Credit Gary Braasch
Two of Braasch’s longtime friends and collaborators sent reflections on his life and legacy. Below you can read an appreciation by Joshua Wolfe, a photographer who has developed a variety of media and online projects related to climate change and energy.
A coal-fired power plant in Winfield, W.Va. The E.P.A.’s Clean Power Plan, which aims to shift away from coal, has faced stiff opposition from politicians and corporations.Credit Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg
Updated, 3:13 p.m. | Back in January, Eban Goodstein, the director of the Bard College Center for Environmental Policy, distributed an invitation to college students and faculty across the United States to participate in “Power Dialog,” an exciting effort to mesh learning and civic engagement around the nation’s efforts to curtail power plant emissions of carbon dioxide, the main human-generated gas contributing to global warming.*
The focus is the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. Despite the Supreme Court ruling delaying the plan, not to mention the turbulent presidential race, the plan’s mix of regulation and regional flexibility is likely to persist well into the future. The academic effort, which is nonpartisan, centers on a nationwide series of meetings in state capitals April 4 in which students can offer their views to top state officials.
Goodstein, in an email on Sunday, said the focus has broadened since the Supreme Court ruling. “The Power Dialogs are now focused on what states can do to support the U.S. Paris climate commitment,” he said. “There are multiple policies supporting renewables and energy efficiency in many states, red and blue. This is a chance for students to learn about solutions, instead of being demoralized by partisan gridlock.”**
Updated, 9:58 p.m. | Much has been written about the remarkable achievements of NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and his Russian counterpart, cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, during their (340-day) Year in Space mission aboard the International Space Station. Daniel Victor had a fine overview on Tuesday and make sure to revisit Kenneth Chang’s fascinating package on Kelly and the long mission, in which, as he notes, Kelly and Kornienko experienced 10,880 sunrises* and sunsets in those 340 days.
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Scott Kelly, the NASA astronaut who commanded the “Year in Space” mission on the Space Station, posted 1,000 photographs on Twitter and Instagram over 340 days. Explore them all at WindowsonEarth.org.Credit NASA
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A selfie by NASA astronaut Scott Kelly during his 340-day mission aboard the International Space Station.Credit NASA
This post is simply a brief note of thanks to Kelly, in particular, for sharing 1,000 images of Earth shot from the space station and posted on Twitter and Instagram using the #yearinspace hashtag.
Given how such imagery has become so commonplace, I found myself wondering this week whether such views of Earth have retained the ability to inspire and meaningfully engage people back on the surface with the reality that all of our triumphs and tragedies, dreams and defeats are limited to a tiny “pale blue dot,” as Carl Sagan so eloquently put things two decades ago (it was this phrase that inspired the name of this blog back in 2007).
Various updates | Is worry worthwhile in confronting a challenge as complex and sprawling — in time and geography — as greenhouse-driven climate change?
I went through three or four completely different drafts and settled on a narrative starting with how I’ve come to deal with two immovable realities — my own mortality and the inevitability of extensive climate change even as humanity endeavors to expand energy access while limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Rather than generating worry, both of these profound subjects elicit in me a seemingly incompatible mix of urgency and patience. For me, that combination distills down to sustained engagement. But it also means normalizing an issue that has long been portrayed as a crisis.
I spoke about the story, and the torturous process of writing it, at the Koshland Science Museum of the National Academies on Monday, in an onstage chat with the editors, Lee Gutkind, an evangelist for narrative, and Dan Sarewitz, Professor of Science and Society at Arizona State University.
Then came a valuable question-and-answer period. Peter C. Griffith, a NASA scientist focused on Arctic change, asked the most challenging question of the night — and one I’d asked myself as I began grappling with the essay:
Tell me why I shouldn’t worry that you’re not worried.
Here’s a (slightly smoothed) version of my answer:
What would you want me to do differently?
I think I’m telling the story that says this is such a big and profound change in the planetary system that it’s largely beyond our control with what we know about ourselves now…. What could help propel more change is to work on the least predictable element in this whole matrix — which is the human element….
I’ve moved away from numbers to looking at what are the capacities in society or individuals where — if I or others work on boosting those capacities or traits — I know we have a better chance of having innovative spirit. Not just in laboratories to have some great breakthrough on a fusion reactor, but also, as Harish Hande, this energy entrepreneur in India, has made a breakthrough with a financial model for how to go into a village and bring in enough solar power so they can run their sewing machines and get less poor.
Below are his answers to a few of the hundreds of questions he received on The Times and on Facebook, covering everything from artificial meat to Americans’ gas guzzling driving preferences (with some light editing of his dictated responses):
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Shoppers in Hollywood, Fla., looking at a Jeep Wrangler sport utility vehicle. Sales of Jeep vehicles soared nearly 40 percent last December as more consumers chose to buy S.U.V.s and trucks.Credit Joe Raedle/Getty Images
How do we get the public to stop buying gas guzzlers when fuel is so cheap? I am vested in the fight for our planet but so many are complacent or living for the short term …. Even when they can financially afford alternatives.
— Cathy Charles
Bill Gates: Fuel-efficiency standards have been very effective at driving engineering and innovation. Unfortunately, the average car size has offset somewhat those mile-per-gallon improvements. And so, having it be more acceptable to get a more modest sized car helps. For a while, light trucks were exempted from the fuel efficiency, and there was a big market shift towards those trucks. They have now fixed that. We’ve now got more comprehensive regulation, which has helped us import less oil and drive more engineering. It’s a very good thing. We also have electric cars that, if those batteries can be made two to three times better, will start to move into the mainstream.
For the full solution to the climate problem, we need such a dramatic reduction in emissions that only getting fuel from biofuels or by converting to electricity and then having the power grid generate no CO2 is the full solution. In the meantime, the less gasoline we’re burning the better off we are.
Why does Gates ignore market-ready solutions that are at hand and ready to deploy? In so doing, he ignores hundreds of studies and scientists. While we need more research, Gates does a disservice by diminishing the potential for today’s solutions. —Andy OlsenRead more…
Bill Gates has recruited a batch of billionaires to invest for the long haul in search of big advances in nonpolluting energy.Credit Jessey Dearing for The New York Times
Bill Gates added clean energy and climate change to his agenda in 2010 with a TED talk on the need for “energy miracles,” during which he uncapped a jarful of blinking fireflies in place of the mosquitoes he liberated in a malaria talk the year before.
And just in case the energy revolution doesn’t happen quickly enough, he’s also investing in systems that might someday be able to remove the long-lasting planet-warming emission from fuel burning, carbon dioxide, from the air at large scale.
I recently had a 45-minute conversation with Gates in the Seattle headquarters of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to explore what drove him to focus so much time and money in pursuit of energy breakthroughs.
Gates is making a particular effort this year to reach young people. This year’s Gates Letter – the annual mission statement of Bill and Melinda Gates — is shaped as a call to high school students to center their studies and careers on energy innovation and other ways to boost prospects for more than a billion people whose energy poverty locks them into an unhealthy and time-sapping scrabble for existence.
He also addressed concerns expressed by some energy investors who say energy miracles are already occurring with deployment of today’s solar, wind and other non-polluting energy technologies. (Interestingly, Gates’s gambit in Paris seems to be prompting a friendly competition with other wealthy investors. See the end of the post for some details.)
Here’s the full conversation we had, both the video and a transcript with some light editing for syntax and clarity, some contextual links added by me, some related artwork and culminating reflections: Read more…
To convey the scope of the leak, the environmental group Earthworks used infrared imagery, in which methane (the main constituent of natural gas) appears opaque.Credit Earthworks
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A view of the hilltop site of a prolonged natural gas leak and nearby homes in Porter Ranch, a suburb of Los Angeles, shot from an aircraft monitoring gas levels.Credit Stephen Conley, U.C. Davis
What does it take to jog federal and state leaders to toughen rules curbing industrial pollution? When the industry is energy and the pollutant, methane, is invisible to the naked eye, it seems to take an awful lot.
Will the natural gas gusher that blossomed for nearly 100 days over the hills outside Los Angeles before it was stanched on Feb. 11 make a difference? We’ll see.
A visit to the area on Tuesday by President Obama’s energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, offered, at best, hints of a shift, when it could have provided the administration with a fresh starting line for a push on a new approach to prodding a reluctant industry to invest in a cleaner future. You can read his relevant remarks below.
Over all, the White House has yet to make a convincing case that Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy includes the necessary oversight.
For many years, the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental scientists and campaigners have pointed to the value — to the environment, climate and economy — in curbing leaks and stray emissions of natural gas from wells, pipelines, compressors, storage systems and other infrastructure. Natural gas is the best fossil fuel there is if it stays in a pipeline, but the methane it contains is a potent contributor to climate change if it escapes.
We did what we could here at The Times in 2009 when I was still on the news side. I found promising examples of industry workers relentlessly pursuing leak reductions. (Can someone clone Gene Desaulniers of BP?) But I kept hearing that it was easier in the gas and oil industry to get the green light from top executives for drilling new wells than fixing old ones, and industry lobbyists in Washington have relentlessly fought stricter oversight.
Raymond Pierrehumbert, a climate scientist and the Halley Professor of Physics at Oxford University.Credit Eva Dalin, Stockholm University
This finding, and the patient investments and effort through which it was produced, came up in the context of humanity’s global warming challenge in an email exchange a few days ago with Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a veteran climate scientist who was recently appointed the Halley Professor of Physics at Oxford University.*
The common context is the importance of sustained engagement on a big challenge — whether it is intellectual, as in revealing spacetime ripples, or potentially existential, as in pursuing ways to move beyond energy choices that are reshaping Earth for hundreds of generations to come.
I reached out to Pierrehumbert because he is one of many authors of “Consequences of twenty-first-century policy for multi-millennial climate and sea-level change,” an important new Nature Climate Change analysis reinforcing past work showing a very, very, very long impact (tens of millenniums) on the Earth system — climatic, coastal and otherwise — from the carbon dioxide buildup driven by the conversion, in our lifetimes, of vast amounts of fossil fuels into useful energy.
The core conclusion:
This long-term view shows that the next few decades offer a brief window of opportunity to minimize large-scale and potentially catastrophic climate change that will extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far. [Read the Boston College news release for even more.]**
Humans have been burning fossil fuels for only about 150 years, yet that has started a cascade of profound changes that at their current pace will still be felt 10,000 years from now.
Time references updated, Feb. 14, 8:01 a.m. | Tens of thousands of words will flow in the coming days on the significance of the life and death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at a Texas resort. Adam Liptak leads Times coverage here.
His death came just a few days after an unprecedented move by the court put a roadblock in the way of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan regulating carbon dioxide from power plants. (David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council does a good job here of dissecting the meaning of the stay in the context of a broad suite of factors driving greenhouse gas reductions in the United States.)
I won’t delve in depth on Scalia’s untimely passing. There were so many facets to the man and his interpretations of the Constitution. I simply want to draw your attention to a fascinating exchange I was lucky to witness during 2012 commencement activities at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: Read more…
