13 April 2016, Vox, Why Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal company, just went bankrupt. The US coal industry is imploding. And here’s the biggest casualty yet: Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private-sector coal company, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in St. Louis on Wednesday. It’s hard to overstate what a seismic shift this is. Peabody has been a giant in the mining industry seemingly forever, after starting out in Chicago in 1880 with just a wagon and two mules. A decade ago, coal provided fully half of America’s electricity, much of it dug up by Peabody in Illinois, Kentucky, Wyoming, Colorado. At its peak in 2008, the company had a market cap of $20 billion, supplying coal to 26 countries worldwide. But then came the fall. The rise of fracking and cheap shale gas in the United States, coupled with stricter environmental regulations, has helped push hundreds of coal-fired power plants out of business in recent years. US coal production has nosedived from 1.17 billion metric tons in 2008 to just 752.5 million in 2016. Coal consumption in China, another crucial market, has also cooled off of late. Between 2012 and 2015, Peabody laid off more than 20 percent of its global workforceand started closing some of its US mines. Today, the company is saddled with $10.1 billion in debt and its future looks much bleaker than it once did. Hence the bankruptcy filing. Read More here
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12 April 2016, Carbon Brief, In-depth: Experts assess the feasibility of ‘negative emissions’. To limit climate change to “well below 2C”, as nations agreed to do in Paris last December, modelling shows it is likely that removing carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere later on this century will be necessary. Scientists have imagined a range of “negative emissions” technologies, or NETs, that could do just that, as explained by Carbon Brief yesterday. But are any of them realistic in practice? Carbon Brief reached out to a number of scientists, policy experts and campaigners who have studied both the necessity and feasibility of negative emissions. We sent them the following identical email: The Paris Agreement calls for “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels”. However, as the IPCC AR5 report showed, the majority of modelling to date assumes a significant global-scale deployment of negative emissions technologies in the second half of this century, if such temperature limits are to be achieved.
1) What negative emissions technologies offer the most promise – and why?
2) Is it feasible to achieve the scale of deployment required to meet the aims of the Paris Agreement? If so, how? If not, why?
These are the responses we received, first as sample quotes, then, below, in full: Read More here
11 April 2016, Springer Link, Significant implications of permafrost thawing for climate change control. Large amounts of carbon are stored as permafrost within the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. As permafrost thaws due to climate warming, carbon dioxide and methane are released. Recent studies indicate that the pool of carbon susceptible to future thaw is higher than was previously thought and that more carbon could be released by 2100, even under low emission pathways. We use an integrated model of the climate and the economy to study how including these new estimates influence the control of climate change to levels that will likely keep the temperature increase below 2 °C (radiative forcing of 2.6 Wm−2). According to our simulations, the fossil fuel and industrial CO2 emissions need to peak 5–10 years earlier and the carbon budget needs to be reduced by 6–17 % to offset this additional source of warming. The required increase in carbon price implies a 6–21 % higher mitigation cost to society compared to a situation where emissions from permafrost are not considered. Including other positive climate feedbacks, currently not accounted for in integrated assessment models, could further increase these numbers. Read More here
7 April 2016, Carbon Brief, Analysis: the ‘highly unusual’ behaviour of Arctic sea ice in 2016. The decline of Arctic sea ice is already setting records in 2016, with the winter peak in March clocking in as the lowest since satellite records began, scientists say. A new and fuller summary of this year’s Arctic winter by the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) confirms the preliminary announcement last week that sea icereached its annual maximum extent on 24 March this year. Covering an area of 14.52m square kilometers, this year’s peak winter extent is a shade smaller than the previous record low set in 2015. But the new NSIDC report adds a lot more detail about what it calls a “highly unusual” and “most interesting” Arctic winter. With abnormally warm conditions right across the Arctic, some regions experienced temperatures 4-8C higher than average. While this meant slower ice growth in some places, in others it caused a dramatic thinning by 30cm in one week, according to early model results. Reaching a peak Arctic sea ice ebbs and flows with the seasons, reaching a maximum extent for the year in February or March and a minimum in September, at the end of the summer melt period. This year, scientists were still waiting expectantly at the end of March, explains the NSIDC report: “Very early in the month, extent declined, raising anticipation that an early maximum had been reached. However, after a period of little change, extent slowly rose again, reaching the seasonal maximum on March 24.” As late as a week ago, scientists still hadn’t ruled out the possibility of a late season surge. But sea ice extent has dropped off quite a bit since then, suggesting the peak has been and gone. You can see this year’s sea ice behaviour in the graph below from NSIDC, which shows sea ice extent over the 2015/6 winter (blue line) up to 3 April compared to previous years. Read More here