14 January 2016, New York Times, In Climate Move, Obama Halts New Coal Mining Leases on Public Lands. The Obama administration announced on Friday a halt to new coal mining leases on public lands as it considers an overhaul of the program that could lead to increased costs for energy companies and a slowdown in extraction. “Given serious concerns raised about the federal coal program, we’re taking the prudent step to hit pause on approving significant new leases so that decisions about those leases can benefit from the recommendations that come out of the review,” said Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. “During this time, companies can continue production activities on the large reserves of recoverable coal they have under lease, and we’ll make accommodations in the event of emergency circumstances to ensure this pause will have no material impact on the nation’s ability to meet its power generation needs.” The move represents a significant setback for the coal industry, effectively freezing new coal production on federal lands and sending a signal to energy markets that could turn investors away from an already reeling industry. President Obama telegraphed the step in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night when he said “I’m going to push to change the way we manage our oil and coal resources so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet.” Read More here
Category Archives: The Mitigation Battle
3 January 2016, Client Earth, End of business as usual for carbon intensive industry. Scrutiny of carbon intensive companies’ reporting could mean an unprecedented number of complaints to financial regulators from environmental lawyers ClientEarth in 2016. ClientEarth will be poring over annual reports of carbon intensive UK and EU companies and reporting them to the Financial Reporting Council if they are failing to disclose to investors how the post COP21 business outlook could affect their operations. The agreement aims to limit the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, with an ambition for 1.5 degrees. It will have a huge effect on companies in carbon intensive sectors such as energy, mining and utilities. Dave Cooke, Company and Financial lawyer for ClientEarth, said: “The Paris agreement represents a huge change for the world. We are now in a transition to a low carbon economy. Business as usual is no longer an option for carbon intensive companies. “We will be looking at how those carbon intensive companies disclose the risks that they face and where they’re not disclosing them effectively and appropriately we will submit complaints to the regulator to take action.” The move comes amid growing consensus in the business community that climate change is changing the landscape beyond recognition. Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, made a major intervention in September, when he identified climate change as one of the biggest risks to economic stability. Read more here
31 December 2015, Climate News Network, Paris fails to revive the nuclear dream. Charlatans, or planetary saviours? Post-Paris views on the nuclear industry suggest few experts believe it will bring closer a world rid of fossil fuels. In Paris, in early December, the advocates of nuclear power made yet another appeal to world leaders to adopt their technology as central to saving the planet from dangerous climate change. Yet analysis of the plans of 195 governments that signed up to the Paris Agreement, each with their own individual schemes on how to reduce national carbon emissions, show that nearly all of them exclude nuclear power. Only a few big players – China, Russia, India, South Korea and the United Kingdom – still want an extensive programme of new–build reactors. To try to understand why this is so the US-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists asked eight experts in the field to look at the future of nuclear power in the context of climate change. One believed that large-scale new-build nuclear power “could and should” be used to combat climate change, and another thought nuclear could play a role, although a small one. The rest thought new nuclear stations were too expensive, too slow to construct and had too many inherent disadvantages to compete with renewables. Industry in distress Amory Lovins, co-founder and chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute, produced a devastating analysis saying that the slow-motion decline of the nuclear industry was simply down to the lack of a business case. The average nuclear reactor, he wrote, was now 29 years old and the percentage of global electricity generated continued to fall from a peak of 17.6% in 1996 to 10.8% in 2014. “Financial distress stalks the industry”, he wrote. Lovins says nuclear power now costs several times more than wind or solar energy and is so far behind in cost and building time that it could never catch up. The full details of what he and other experts said are on the Bulletin’s site, with some of their comments below. Read More here
23 December 2015, Carbon News Network, Improving soils cuts carbon and grows more food. One straightforward way to combat both climate change and mass hunger is to replace carbon lost from the soil. All sorts of clever, expensive and downright daft ideas for removing carbon from the atmosphere have been suggested, but one of the simplest and most effective – building up carbon in the soil – hardly rates a mention. It is a process that happens naturally, but intensive agriculture, deep ploughing, heavy artificial fertiliser use and cutting down forests have impoverished soils worldwide. If the process could be reversed by adding extra organic matter to the soil each year, then the worst effects of climate change could be averted. Although the issue was hardly raised in the two weeks of negotiations on theParis Agreement in early December, behind the scenes the way farmers produce crops remains central to knowing whether we can hope to avoid the full impact of the warming climate. More than 100 of the 196 countries present in Paris which submitted plans beforehand on how to reduce their own carbon emissions put agriculture, forestry and replacing carbon in soils into their programmes. Better yields Also, on the fringes of the conference, the CGIAR Consortium, a partnership of leading agricultural research organisations, announced a US$225 million five-year plan to mitigate climate change by putting carbon back into the soil while improving developing world agricultural yields. This is part of a much longer-running international initiative started by France,the 4% Initiative, which aims to increase the carbon content of soil by four parts per thousand each year, enough to counteract human interference with the climate from the continued burning of fossil fuels. Read More here