Octopus Overlords

The Arctic is undergoing a profound, rapid and unmitigated shift into a new climate state, one that is greener, features far less ice and emits greenhouse gas emissions from melting permafrost, according to a major new federal assessment of the region released Tuesday.

The consequences of these climate shifts will be felt far outside the Arctic in the form of altered weather patterns, increased greenhouse gas emissions and rising sea levels from the melting Greenland ice sheet and mountain glaciers.

The findings are contained in the 2019 Arctic Report Card, a major federal assessment of climate change trends and impacts throughout the region. The study paints an ominous picture of a region lurching to an entirely new and unfamiliar environment.

Especially noteworthy is the report’s conclusion that the Arctic already may have become a net emitter of planet-warming carbon emissions due to thawing permafrost, which would only accelerate global warming. Permafrost is the carbon-rich frozen soil that covers 24 percent of the Northern Hemisphere’s land mass, encompassing vast stretches of territory across Alaska, Canada, Siberia and Greenland.

There has been concern throughout the scientific community that the approximately 1,460 billion to 1,600 billion metric tons of organic carbon stored in frozen Arctic soils, almost twice the amount of greenhouse gases as what is contained in the atmosphere, could be released as the permafrost melts.

Federal regulators approved rules yesterday for the nation's largest electricity market that effectively prop up fossil fuel power plants and discourage new investments in renewable power, demand response and energy storage projects.

The much-awaited changes in PJM Interconnection's rules governing its capacity market were issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission 508 days after the agency issued a decision calling the current market rules unjust and unreasonable and directing PJM to devise a fix.

...

Jeff Dennis, general counsel at Advanced Energy Economy and former senior official at FERC, called it "unfortunate" and "a price support scheme for existing coal and natural gas power plants."

FERC Chairman Neil Chatterjee told reporters, "I don't buy it at all" that the agency's action favors coal and natural gas over renewables.

Capacity markets are used in PJM and other markets to ensure that enough electricity is available at all times. Owners of power plants bid into auctions to offer their capacity — usually three years out — and, if they clear, are provided capacity payments.

FERC's decision changes bidding rules to protect coal and natural gas plants from new renewables by making those resources bid in at a higher price than existing renewables, which are grandfathered in the agency's order.

...

During the commission meeting, Glick mused on whether Chatterjee and McNamee were part of the purported Washington "Deep State" trying to undermine the rule of law.

"The more I got to thinking about, if you do believe unelected bureaucrats are trying to change laws, trying to change court decisions, this commission has a pretty good track record on that," he said. "We have a number of unelected commissioners seeking to overturn actions of other branches of government," such as states with clean energy programs and federal appellate court rulings on greenhouse gases.

In a separate news conference, Glick said, "I can't tell you that the chairman and Commissioner McNamee got together and decided they were going to kill clean energy. It's just that that's the effect of the order."

The Trump administration plans to rewrite decades-old regulations to make it easier to build major infrastructure such as pipelines, which would have the effect of relaxing government efforts to fight the climate crisis.

President Donald Trump announced Thursday morning the changes to National Environmental Policy Act rules, which requires federal agencies to assess the environmental impact of projects such as the construction of mines, highways, water infrastructure and gas pipelines.

Trump and administration officials said the changes are necessary to speed up approval for needed infrastructure projects.
...
The proposal would set time limits on environmental assessments and changes what impacts must be considered, two significant moves that could make it easier to approve projects.

Agencies will no longer have to consider "cumulative" effects of new infrastructure under the new rule, which courts have interpreted as a mandate to study effects of emitting more greenhouse gas emissions, according to The New York Times and The Washington Post, which reported the proposals earlier Thursday. That includes the impacts of climate change, including rising sea levels.

Trump says he doesn't think global warming is a hoax (contradicting many of his past statements), then adds, "I want clear air, clean water" (which are not related to global warming)

A 2018 report by Australia’s national science agency and the Bureau of Meteorology concludes climate change has contributed to the nation’s worsening fire conditions, noting that average temperatures have risen more than 1 ˚C.

In turn, these huge fires are fueling climate change. As trees and plants burn, they release the carbon stored in their trunks, leaves, branches, and roots. That creates a vicious feedback loop, as the very impacts of climate change further exacerbate it, complicating our ability to get ahead of the problem.

Defiant wrote: ↑Sat Jan 11, 2020 11:59 am

Trump says he doesn't think global warming is a hoax (contradicting many of his past statements), then adds, "I want clear air, clean water" (which are not related to global warming)

The Trump administration on Thursday will finalize a rule to strip away environmental protections for streams, wetlands and other water bodies, handing a victory to farmers, fossil fuel producers and real estate developers who said Obama-era rules had shackled them with onerous and unnecessary burdens.

From Day 1 of his administration, President Trump vowed to repeal President Barack Obama’s “Waters of the United States” regulation, which had frustrated rural landowners. His new rule, which will be implemented in the coming weeks, is the latest step in the Trump administration’s push to repeal or weaken nearly 100 environmental rules and laws, loosening or eliminating rules on climate change, clean air, chemical pollution, coal mining, oil drilling and endangered species protections.

...

The new water rule will remove federal protections from more than half the nation’s wetlands, and hundreds of thousands of small waterways. That would for the first time in decades allow landowners and property developers to dump pollutants such as pesticides and fertilizers directly into many of those waterways, and to destroy or fill in wetlands for construction projects.

“This will be the biggest loss of clean water protection the country has ever seen,” said Blan Holman, a lawyer specializing in federal water policy at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “This puts drinking water for millions of Americans at risk of contamination from unregulated pollution. This is not just undoing the Obama rule. This is stripping away protections that were put in place in the ’70s and ’80s that Americans have relied on for their health.”

“The toxics or poisons that lie dormant will still be there when the streams are reactivated,” he said. “They will still get into the larger bodies of water.”

Government scientists, even those appointed by the Trump administration, say those concerns are justified. The E.P.A.’s Scientific Advisory Board, a panel of 41 scientists responsible for evaluating the scientific integrity of the agency’s regulations, concluded that the new Trump water rule ignores science by “failing to acknowledge watershed systems.” They found “no scientific justification” for excluding certain bodies of water from protection under the new regulations, concluding that pollutants from those smaller and seasonal bodies of water can still have a significant impact on the health of larger water systems.

Zaxxon wrote: ↑Sat Jan 11, 2020 12:06 pm It might surprise you to learn that Donald Trump is not a smart person.

noxiousdog wrote: ↑Fri Jan 24, 2020 1:01 pmRegardless, cut back on your beef if you want to reduce your carbon footprint.

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Fri Jan 24, 2020 1:04 pm It's not controversial science, yet remains controversial politics.

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Wed Oct 19, 2016 2:55 pm Seaweed

Professor of aquaculture at James Cook University in Townsville, Rocky De Nys, has been working with the CSIRO studying the effects seaweed can have on cow's methane production.

They discovered adding a small amount of dried seaweed to a cow's diet can reduce the amount of methane a cow produces by up to 99 per cent.

"We started with 20 species [of seaweed] and we very quickly narrowed that down to one really stand out species of red seaweed," Professor De Nys said.

The species of seaweed is called asparagopsis taxiformis, and JCU researchers have been actively collecting it off the coast of Queensland.

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Fri Jan 24, 2020 1:23 pm We just need to feed them more seaweed:

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Wed Oct 19, 2016 2:55 pm Seaweed

Professor of aquaculture at James Cook University in Townsville, Rocky De Nys, has been working with the CSIRO studying the effects seaweed can have on cow's methane production.

They discovered adding a small amount of dried seaweed to a cow's diet can reduce the amount of methane a cow produces by up to 99 per cent.

"We started with 20 species [of seaweed] and we very quickly narrowed that down to one really stand out species of red seaweed," Professor De Nys said.

The species of seaweed is called asparagopsis taxiformis, and JCU researchers have been actively collecting it off the coast of Queensland.

LawBeefaroni wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2020 3:44 pm Where is all the low-impact, vat-grown beef we were promised?

A wind turbine’s blades can be longer than a Boeing 747 wing, so at the end of their lifespan they can’t just be hauled away. First, you need to saw through the lissome fiberglass using a diamond-encrusted industrial saw to create three pieces small enough to be strapped to a tractor-trailer.

The municipal landfill in Casper, Wyoming, is the final resting place of 870 blades whose days making renewable energy have come to end. The severed fragments look like bleached whale bones nestled against one another.

“That’s the end of it for this winter,” said waste technician Michael Bratvold, watching a bulldozer bury them forever in sand. “We’ll get the rest when the weather breaks this spring.”

Tens of thousands of aging blades are coming down from steel towers around the world and most have nowhere to go but landfills. In the U.S. alone, about 8,000 will be removed in each of the next four years. Europe, which has been dealing with the problem longer, has about 3,800 coming down annually through at least 2022, according to BloombergNEF. It’s going to get worse: Most were built more than a decade ago, when installations were less than a fifth of what they are now.

Built to withstand hurricane-force winds, the blades can’t easily be crushed, recycled or repurposed. That’s created an urgent search for alternatives in places that lack wide-open prairies. In the U.S., they go to the handful of landfills that accept them, in Lake Mills, Iowa; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and Casper, where they will be interred in stacks that reach 30 feet under.

“We now need to work hard to make sure that 2019 is remembered as a definitive peak in global emissions, not just another pause in growth,” Dr. Fatih Birol, the Executive Director of the IEA, said in a statement. “We have the energy technologies to do this, and we have to make use of them all. The IEA is building a grand coalition focused on reducing emissions – encompassing governments, companies, investors and everyone with a genuine commitment to tackling our climate challenge.”

Daehawk wrote: ↑Thu Feb 06, 2020 4:39 pmBuilt to withstand hurricane-force winds, the blades can’t easily be crushed, recycled or repurposed. That’s created an urgent search for alternatives in places that lack wide-open prairies. In the U.S., they go to the handful of landfills that accept them, in Lake Mills, Iowa; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and Casper, where they will be interred in stacks that reach 30 feet under.

Paingod wrote: ↑Fri Jan 24, 2020 1:15 pm super easy now, barely an inconvenience.

Brian wrote: ↑Mon Feb 17, 2020 12:55 pm

Paingod wrote: ↑Fri Jan 24, 2020 1:15 pm super easy now, barely an inconvenience.

I know it's almost a month after the fact but...

Wow, wow, wow. Switching to vegetarianism for climate change reasons is TIGHT!

A 19-year-old German climate change sceptic who has been described by her supporters as “the antidote to Greta Thunberg”, is gaining support from right-wing organisations, including Germany’s far-right party AfD party, and a think tank with links to The White House.

The organisation, which reportedly “has the ear of the Trump administration”, and held its 2019 International Conference on Climate Change at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, recently hired Ms Seibt as the face of its climate denial campaign.

In a video put out by the Heartland Institute, titled “Naomi Seibt vs Greta Thunberg: Whom Should We Trust?”, Ms Seibt begins: “Science is entirely based on intellectual humility and it is important that we keep questioning the narrative that it out there instead of promoting it, and these days climate change science really isn’t science at all.”

Daehawk wrote: ↑Tue Feb 25, 2020 10:25 pm Man if only there was a virus that targeted the stupid.

Michelle Narang cried when she first saw a sticker of what appears to be a drawing of teen activist Greta Thunberg being sexually assaulted and the name of an oilfield company printed boldly across the bottom of the decal.

...

A friend who works in the oil industry sent an image of the sticker to Narang. They spoke to HuffPost Canada on a condition of anonymity, fearing repercussions at their job. The sticker, reading “X-Site Energy Services,” was handed out recently as promotional material at job sites to be worn on hard hats, the worker said.

Although the actual stickers weren’t distributed at their workplace, they said the graphic image was circulating among their colleagues on Wednesday. The worker said the company was asked if it would be interested in a similar sticker.