Pembina Institute: The oilsands in a carbon-constrained Canada

The collision course between overall emissions and national climate commitments

The oil and gas industry has made big contributions to Canadian society: providing jobs, technology and research excellence, while warming homes, fuelling cars and powering our electricity grids. Today, the oil and gas sector is facing unprecedented pressures. While dramatic fluctuations in the price of energy commodities are not new, increasing automation, adoption of new disruptive technologies, shifting market demands, and climate commitments are reshaping the future of this sector. Business-as-usual no longer applies — significant changes are necessary.

In a continuing effort to depolarize the conversation, this report seeks to help establish a basic, commonly agreed-upon set of facts about Alberta’s oilsands, their emissions performance and trajectories, and what Canada’s commitment to achieve deep decarbonization will mean for the sector.

Download the full report, or read the Executive Summary below.

Executive summary

Alberta’s oilsands are at a crossroads.

The oil and gas industry has made big contributions to Canadian society: providing jobs, technology and research excellence, while warming homes, fuelling cars and powering our electricity grids. Today, the oil and gas sector is facing unprecedented pressures. While dramatic fluctuations in the price of energy commodities are not new, increasing automation, adoption of new disruptive technologies, shifting market demands, and climate commitments are reshaping the future of this sector. Business-as-usual no longer applies — significant changes are necessary.

In a continuing effort to depolarize the conversation, this report seeks to help establish a basic, commonly agreed-upon set of facts about Alberta’s oilsands, their emissions performance and trajectories, and what Canada’s commitment to achieve deep decarbonization will mean for the sector.

Key points:

• Carbon emissions from the oilsands sector are the fastest-growing source of emissions in Canada. This continuing upward trajectory not only reduces the country’s ability to meet its 2030 reduction commitments, but is on a clear collision course with Canada’s plan to become carbon-neutral by 2050. (Figure 1.)

Figure 1. Share of the oilsands emissions in national carbon budget to meet Canada’s 2030 target

• Oilsands products are not homogeneous and there is a wide range in performance when it comes to carbon emissions intensity. As a result of variations in bitumen quality and extraction technologies, the range between the highest and lowest upstream emissions intensity per barrel is nearly threefold.
• The oilsands industry has worked toward decreasing the emissions intensity of its products in the past decades. Continuous improvements have reduced the carbon intensity of specific oilsands products, ranging from a 4% to 21% reduction since 2009.
• Despite these improvements in carbon intensity, absolute carbon emissions from the oilsands continue to increase overall, as growth in production outpaces gains from reductions in per-barrel intensity.
• Studies reviewed for this report consistently find oilsands products to be more carbon intensive than lighter, conventional oil sources. Recognizing limitations of emissions intensity research and the challenge of comparing studies, the best estimate currently available suggests a barrel of oil produced in Canada is associated on average with 70% more GHG emissions than the average crude produced globally.
• Acknowledging oil demand will not disappear overnight, most outlooks predict demand will plateau or decline within the next decade. Subsequent global shifts toward lower-intensity energy options are likely to put more carbon-intense crudes — such as the bulk of oilsands products — at risk over the next decade.
• The rapid development and deployment of breakthrough technologies — as opposed to incremental improvements — is needed for the sector to decrease its absolute carbon emissions in line with our climate commitments, and to remain competitive as global energy systems change.

Recognizing the improvements that the oilsands industry has made to date and the commitments leading companies have announced to achieve ambitious targets in the future, there is still a need for the sector to embrace its responsibility to reduce overall carbon emissions in accordance with Canada’s 2030 and 2050 targets.

The Pembina Institute calls for both the Alberta and federal government to recognize the willingness of leading companies to adopt aggressive decarbonization targets, as well as mounting investor pressure to decarbonize the sector, and implement policies that will drive toward carbon-neutral — or even carbon-negative — oilsands production.

It’s time to have a national conversation about how to reconcile oilsands emissions with Canada’s goal to decarbonize its economy by 2050. The intention of this report, carefully and explicitly supported by available evidence and research, is to further fact-based dialogue, as we all embark on this tough, but necessary Canadian conversation.

Recommendations to improve oilsands climate performance

1. Establish strong regulations to decarbonize the industry

Intentional effort is required to encourage a shift toward low- and zero-carbon production, by creating strong incentives for the development and deployment of breakthrough innovation. Recognizing the willingness of leading companies to adopt aggressive decarbonization targets, as well as mounting investor pressure to decarbonize the sector, governments need to implement policies that will drive carbon-neutral — or even carbon-negative — oilsands production.

2. Define and enforce sector emissions targets for 2030 and 2050, with five-year increments

Meeting our 2030 and 2050 climate targets will require all sectors of our economy — and all Canadians — to do their fair share to contribute to the global effort of limiting the average temperature increase to 1.5°C. Decreasing GHG emissions reduction targets need to be set for the oil and gas sector, in five-year increments that would allow Canada to meet its 2030 national objective and its pledge to become a net-zero carbon emitter by 2050.

3. Support an innovation ecosystem to deliver breakthrough technologies

A robust ecosystem to support innovation, research and development, needs to be funded and fostered so it can deploy solutions aimed at delivering breakthrough reductions — beyond incremental improvements — in emissions of current oilsands projects, as well as non-combustion uses of Alberta’s oil and gas resources.

4. Improve emissions monitoring and reporting

Existing measurement, monitoring and reporting processes for oilsands emissions must be reviewed, strengthened and standardized in order to produce coherent data and enhance the transparency of the sector. As well, further analysis looking at existing and upcoming technology pathways is required to better situate oilsands products’ carbon intensity on the global supply curve.

5. Appoint credible and effective energy regulators

Effective energy regulators are needed both provincially and federally. They must be transparent and independent, with the ability to incorporate robust environmental and climate considerations into their decision-making, while having both the mandate to enforce regulations and the capacity to follow through on that enforcement. SOURCE

Oil and Gas May Be a Far Bigger Climate Threat Than We Knew

Emissions from human activity like the burning of fossil fuels may have been sharply underestimated.Credit…Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times

Oil and gas production may be responsible for a far larger share of the soaring levels of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, in the earth’s atmosphere than previously thought, new research has found.

The findings, published in the journal Nature, add urgency to efforts to rein in methane emissions from the fossil fuel industry, which routinely leaks or intentionally releases the gas into air.

“We’ve identified a gigantic discrepancy that shows the industry needs to, at the very least, improve their monitoring,” said Benjamin Hmiel, a researcher at the University of Rochester and the study’s lead author. “If these emissions are truly coming from oil, gas extraction, production use, the industry isn’t even reporting or seeing that right now.”

Atmospheric concentrations of methane have more than doubled from preindustrial times. A New York Times investigation into “super emitter” sites last year revealed vast quantities of methane being released from oil wells and other energy facilities instead of being captured.

The extent to which fossil fuel emissions, as opposed to natural sources, are responsible for the rising methane levels has long been a matter of scientific debate. Methane seeps from the ocean bed, for instance, and also spews from land formations called mud volcanoes.

Emissions from human activity like the burning of fossil fuels may have been sharply underestimated.Credit…Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times

To shed light on the mystery, researchers at Rochester’s Department of Earth and Environmental Studies examined ice cores from Greenland, as well as data from Antarctica stretching back to about 1750, before the industrial revolution.

They found that methane emissions from natural phenomena were far smaller than estimates used to calculate global emissions. That means fossil-fuel emissions from human activity — namely the production and burning of fossil fuels — were underestimated by 25 to 40 percent, the researchers said.

The scientists were helped in their analysis by different isotopes found in methane emissions from natural sources, compared to emissions from the production of fossil fuels. Isotopes are versions of an element that have very slight differences, allowing the researchers to differentiate between them.

They used a melting chamber with a set of high-power burners to melt more than 2,000 pounds of ice cores to extract and examine air samples from the past. “It looked like a little rocket ship,” said Vasilii Petrenko, a co-author of the Nature study and an associate professor at Rochester. “Think of a rocket engine, but except the flames pointing at the device.”

Robert Howarth, an earth system scientist at Cornell University who was not involved with the research, called it “a very important study.” He said it was consistent with recent research, like a study he published last year that estimated that North American gas production was responsible for about a third of the global increase in methane emissions over the past decade.

“Emissions from fossil sources are correspondingly larger than many have been estimating,” Dr. Howarth said. “I find it very convincing.

A device used to extract ice cores, which were melted and studied by the researchers. Credit…Benjamin Hmiel

Daniel J. Jacob, professor of atmospheric chemistry and environmental engineering at Harvard University, also described the findings as significant. Current estimates of methane from geological sources “were widely considered too high by atmospheric modelers such as myself,” he wrote in an email.

But he took issue with the suggestion that emissions from fossil fuel production were larger than previously estimated. Fossil fuel emissions are “based on fuel production rates, number of facilities, and direct measurements if available. The natural geological source is irrelevant for these estimates,” he said.

The disagreement reflects an overall discrepancy between what are called “bottom-up” measurements of emissions, those from individual oil and gas sites, as opposed to “top-down” calculations like the ones carried out by the Rochester researchers. “Bottom-up” measurements can be unreliable because of a lack of data from individual oil and gas sites. With “top-down” measurements, on the other hand, the exact source of

The findings come as oil and gas companies face increased pressure to rein in greenhouse gas emissions from their operations to address rising concerns about climate change.

Methane, the main component of natural gas, is of particular concern, because it can warm the planet more than 80 times as much as the same amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. On top of fossil fuel production, livestock, landfills and other sources linked to human activity also emit methane.

Last week, the British oil giant BP set an ambitious climate change goal, saying it aimed to eliminate or offset by 2050 all planet-warming emissions from its oil and gas production, as well as emissions caused by the burning of the oil and gas it pumps from the ground. The company provided few details on how it would achieve that feat, however.

Adding to climate concerns, the Trump administration is moving forward with a plan that effectively eliminates requirements that oil companies install technology to detect and fix methane leaks from oil and gas facilities. By the Environmental Protection Agency’s own calculations, the rollback would increase methane emissions by 370,000 tons through 2025, enough to power more than a million homes for a year.

Dr. Petrenko, one of the Rochester study’s authors, said that the huge undertaking of studying giant ice cores meant the study relied on a small sampling of data. “These measurements are incredibly difficult. So getting more data to help confirm our results would be very valuable,” he said. “That means there’s quite a bit more research to be done.” SOURCE

Critics Say the Green New Deal Is Too Costly. Here’s the Cost of the Status Quo.

Taxpayers are spending billions subsidizing polluting industries.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Edward Markey (D-MA) at a press conference introducing a resolution calling for a Green New Deal, February 7, 2019. Source: Senate Democrats

To hear the Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel tell it, the Green New Deal would spend trillions of dollars while eliminating jobs, travel, delicious food and family time.

The Green New Deal “means every Democrat in Washington will get to go on the record in favor of abolishing air travel, outlawing steaks, forcing all American homeowners to retrofit their houses, putting every miner, oil rigger, livestock rancher and gas-station attendant out of a job, and spending trillions and trillions more tax money,” Strassel wrote after progressive Democrats put forward a resolution calling for a bold plan to zero out U.S. carbon emissions. “No jet fuel, no trips to see granny…[The Democrats] may not prove able to eradicate ‘fully’ every family Christmas or strip of bacon in a decade, but that’s the goal.”

In the weeks since the introduction of the Green New Deal, much of the right-wing pushback has mirrored Strassel’s. Pundits have dismissed the projected costs and panicked that a shift to clean energy will eradicate the hallmarks of American life. A lot of this hysteria has been in bad faith, based not on the resolution, but on a tongue-in-cheek FAQ that has since been deleted.

Right-wing pundits worried about costly policies that threaten our quality of life might take a look at some of the laws that are already on the books. Taxpayers are currently spending billions to support industrial agriculture, incentivize pollution-intensive air travel, and keep fossil fuels in business. A Green New Deal might actually cut some costs while delivering cleaner energy and healthier food.

Cows. Source: Pexels

Beef and Dairy

Let’s start with dinner. The steaks and bacon Strassel is so concerned about might carry a greater price for taxpayers than she realizes. From pasture to plate, the meat and dairy industries enjoy substantial government support. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation routinely makes a stink about agricultural subsidies.

It starts with raising cows. Ranchers get a big discount from the government to graze on public lands. A 2015 analysis from the Center for Biological Diversity found that taxpayers subsidized grazing on federal lands at a cost of $125 million in 2014.

Commercial cows raised for beef spend the last months of their lives in feedlots, where they feed on corn, soy and grain to fatten up for market. All this food comes at a steep discount: A 2016 analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that the Federal Crop Insurance Program cost taxpayers $22 billion total — much of it devoted to corn and soy production — between 2016 and 2018. What’s more, these subsidies tend to disproportionately benefit the largest and wealthiest farmers instead of protecting smaller farms from weather disasters and unpredictable crop prices, as they were intended to do.

There’s enough excess cheese in the US to wrap around the Capitol building. Source: Pixabay

The billions of dollars in subsidies for industrial farming indirectly support dairy production, which benefits from additional government support. To offer one small example, in 2016, the USDA bought $20 million of cheddar — equivalent to 11 million pounds —from dairy farmers who were facing a 90 million-pound surplus of cheese. And, as Bloomberg Businessweek recently reported, a government-sponsored marketing group is busy helping fast food companies develop cheese-packed new products, like Taco Bell’s Quesalupa, for which the chain bought millions of pounds of cheese.

Unfortunately, last year’s wasn’t a one-off cheese buy. As Americans cut down on their dairy consumption, analysts say that continued subsidies from the government are keeping demand artificially high and are not allowing supply to fall naturally. As of January 2019, the industry still has a record-high amount of cheese on its hands — 1.4 billion pounds, enough cheese to wrap around the Capitol building in Washington.

The Green New Deal might eliminate these costly subsidies while also bringing some relief to farmers by encouraging healthier farming practices. And politicians and voters concerned about the decline of beef and dairy operations might listen to the vice president of the Indiana Farmers Union, Randy Dugger, who wrote in The Hill this week that the legislation “calls for support of independent family farms, sustainable farming, and healthy land practices and food systems” while keeping farming from “lining the pockets of corporate agribusiness.” Spending less money on wasted cheese could mean more help for the farm next door.

An airport. Source: Pixabay

Air Travel

Like meat and dairy, air travel is also propped up by taxpayer dollars. Commercial air travel in the United States was jumpstarted by the Air Mail Act of 1925, which allowed the air mail industry to get off the ground — literally — through a contract with the federal government to deliver mail. Public money is still being used to support the commercial airline industry — just take a look at the $2 billion being spent on LaGuardia’s remodel.

Or consider the Essential Air Service program, which subsidizes flights from more than 160 rural cities where airlines otherwise would not fly. While Americans living in rural and remote places rely on this air travel, the program costs more than $200 million, and subsidized seats on many flights are routinely left empty. The program was targeted for elimination by the Trump administration in its 2018 budget, but it was ultimately saved by the House.

Airplanes are a significant source of carbon pollution. Source: Pixabay 

Certainly there’s an easier, cheaper, cleaner way to get folks from point A to point B. The history of the airline industry itself shows that the government subsidizing an expensive new form of transportation can work to create a new cross-country travel system. Rather than subsidize flight, which is a huge source of emissions, the federal government might put money into high-speed rail.

“High-speed rail between New York and Los Angeles will never make sense,” writes travel and tech analyst Geoffrey Morrison in CNET. “But between New York and Chicago? Portland and Vancouver via Seattle? Houston and Dallas? There are many city pairs that do make sense for high-speed rail.

“My guess is most people in the US would also appreciate the option of not having to go through the hassle of an airport to take shorter trips,” Morrison continues. “A reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is an added bonus. It just comes down to a serious desire and push to do it, which is one thing the Green New Deal wants to create.”

The coal gasification plant in Kemper, Missouri. Source: XTUV0010

Coal Power

In early February, the week the Green New Deal was introduced, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial on a failed wind farm deal in Falmouth, Massachusetts. “Democrats are pushing a Green New Deal to end the use of fossil fuels and rely entirely on renewable energy,” it began, positing that the example of Falmouth “offers a cold gust of reality on such ambitions with its experience on a $10 million wind-energy investment.”

Ten million dollars is a lot for one town to waste, but it pales in comparison to the hundreds of millions of dollars ratepayers in two Southern communities have had to pay to support just two failed “clean” coal plants.

In late 2010, utility Mississippi Power trumpeted that it had broken ground on an innovative new plant in Kemper County, Mississippi. The project would provide hundreds of jobs while “securing long-term, reliable, low-cost energy” for the county once it got up and running four years later, a press release claimed.

Seven years later, the plant finally opened after spending double the projected budget due to a combination of corruption, hubris and technological failures. After the Department of Energy kicked in more than $380 million in grants and the state decreed that $800 million in costs could be charged to ratepayers, the plant finally whirred to life. It ran on clean coal for a grand total of five days before the utility decided natural gas would be less expensive

Coal. Source: Pixabay

Taxpayers in Edwardsport, Indiana faced a lower up-front price tag for their clean coal project, but they are paying a different kind of cost. After the plant collected nearly $400 million from ratepayers to finance the project, Duke Energy opened up the Edwardsport coal plant in 2013. Unlike Kemper, the clean-coal technology is still working in Edwardsport — which may actually be worse for the people living there.

“Ratepayers of Duke Energy in Indiana are getting royally screwed” by the pricey plant, said David Schlissel of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). An analysis conducted by IEEFA last year finds that the cost of power averaged $145 per megawatt-hour from Edwardsport since its opening, compared to market averages of $32 per megawatt-hour. Edwardsport ratepayers are shelling out more than four times as much for power than other Hoosiers.

Schlissel, who has testified in court with regards to various coal closings, said that the industry invokes the idea of clean coal in bad faith when defending their plants. “The industry would say, ‘Our plant is carbon-capture-ready,’” he said. “What it meant is it had the physical space to put the technology in their plant” — not that the technology itself was ready.

The future, Schlissel says, is clear to those watching the markets.“We will have existing coal plants for decades, but there’s no future. The future is wind, solar, storage, some natural gas.”

The 2014 People’s Climate March in NYC. Source: South Bend Voice

With or without sweeping legislative change, the U.S. economy is already chugging towards a green future. By 2020, renewable power is projected to be cheaper than gas and coal. That doesn’t mean, however, that falling prices are going to usher in a clean-energy revolution in time to avert a climate catastrophe. To do its part to keep warming in check, the United States will need to radically overhaul its energy system in just a few short years. The question remains as to whether lawmakers will do what’s necessary to stave off calamity.

The Green New Deal offers an answer. It doesn’t just look at what will work for the next five years, but what will work for the next generation. The Green New Deal, as it stands, is not a roadmap or a set of instructions, but the beginning of an economic reckoning — or, as Washington Post columnist Philip Bump put it, an “intersectionalist delineation of a new U.S. economy, predicated on the existent threats of a warming world.” It aims to invest in projects that will keep us healthy and prosperous while slashing funds spent on polluting industries. Critics say we can’t afford such a proposal, but we are already paying dearly for the status quo. Perhaps we can’t afford not to. SOURCE

 

Youth lawsuit draws attention to climate crisis

 

Children shouldn’t have to march in the streets or take their governments to court. But in times of crisis people have to do what they can to get the many available and emerging solutions implemented.(Photo: Robin Loznak)

Children and teens are at a disadvantage. They can’t vote and have little say in many plans and policies that will determine their futures. The political decisions made today will affect their lives profoundly.

Scientists worldwide have warned we only have a decade to get emissions down substantially or face the well-known consequences of rapidly accelerating global heating. The costly effects are already being felt — from contaminated air and water to increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events to melting permafrost and species extinction.

With no real say in the political process, children and youth are taking to the streets worldwide, demanding that those in power do more to address this very real crisis. The message appears to be getting through. Climate disruption and plans to deal with it became a key issue in the recent Canadian election.

But instead of doing everything possible to ensure these young people have a secure, healthy future, governments here and elsewhere continue to expand fossil fuel infrastructure, arguing — as they have for decades — that we can’t get off fossil fuels overnight. It’s kind of like an addict who really isn’t ready to quit.

A group of young people has decided marching isn’t enough. The 15 youth, ranging in age from seven to 19, and hailing from Vancouver Island to the Northwest Territories to Nova Scotia, are taking the federal government to court “to protect their charter and public trust rights from climate change harms,” claiming the federal government’s failure to take actions consistent with the scientific evidence violates their rights to life, liberty and security of the person under section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and for failing to protect essential public trust resources.

Since climate change disproportionately affects youth, they’re also alleging that government’s conduct violates their right to equality under section 15 of the charter. The youth are supported by the David Suzuki Foundation, Pacific Centre for Environmental Law and Litigation, and Our Children’s Trust and represented by law firms Arvay Finlay LLP and Tollefson Law Corporation.

They aren’t seeking money. Rather, they’ll ask for a Federal Court order requiring Canada’s government to prepare a plan to redress charter and public trust doctrine violations by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and making a sufficient contribution to preventing, mitigating, and redressing dangerous climate change.

As 13-year-old Sáj Starcevich from Saskatchewan says, “The planet is dying. The animals are dying. We will all die if we don’t act. As an Indigenous vegan, I fight for Earth and her inhabitants. The youth have to step up because no one else has. We need you to join us to end this climate crisis.”

A gradual transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy and energy efficiency and conservation would have been possible had we taken the climate crisis seriously even in the 1980s, when scientists including NASA’s James Hansen were sounding the alarm. But, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change points out, we”ve now pumped so many greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere that we’ve locked in many inevitable consequences.

To prevent runaway impacts, we have to cut emissions immediately and protect and restore forests, wetlands and other natural systems, including oceans, that sequester carbon.

Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for a long time, while gases like methane remain for less time but have a greater effect on rising global temperatures. Everything we pump into the air now will remain for decades, causing the planet to continue heating for years. To prevent runaway impacts, we have to cut emissions immediately and protect and restore forests, wetlands and other natural systems, including oceans, that sequester carbon.

As adults, we’ve helped create this mess through rampant consumerism and lack of attention to the problems our pollution is causing. We owe it to the children to help clean it up, to push for the kinds of changes the scientific evidence calls for. We can’t leave it to the youth, because by the time they grow up, Earth could well have reached the tipping point for climate catastrophe.

Children shouldn’t have to march in the streets or take their own governments to court. But in times of crisis — which this surely is — people have to do what they can to get the many available and emerging solutions implemented.

Let’s listen to the kids and leave them a brighter future! SOURCE

Fossil Fuel Companies Knew How Hard Keeping to IPCC’s ‘Unprecedented’ 1.5C Limit Would Be — And Did Nothing

Image: Andreas Habich/Wikimedia Commons CC BY–SA 3.0

The scientists are clear: “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” are needed if the humans are going to prevent the world warming by more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

This news — emanating from the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) mammoth new special report —  comes as a surprise to almost no-one. Least of all the fossil fuel industry, which has known for decades that the carbon budget that keeps that goal within reach has been rapidly depleting thanks to its products.

So how did we get here, to a place where plotting a path to keep planetary warming within this highly desirable limit requires changes on a scale for which “there is no documented historic precedent”?

Exxon Knew, Shell Knew

Fossil fuel companies have known for decades that their products would lead us to this point.

Back in 1982, Exxon published this graph, which shows a probable temperature rise of 1.5°C some time between 2030 and 2040:

Source: Graph from an internal 1982 Exxon briefing document

Today’s report confirms how scarily accurate that prediction is likely to be — it says that on current trends, the world is expected to wam by 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052. It also shows that the world has already currently warmed by about 1°C since pre-industrial levels thanks to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

Exxon wasn’t the only fossil fuel company to commit resources to understanding this problem in the early days. An internal document from 1988 shows Shell also knew back that fossil fuel emissions were likely to lead to 1.5°C to 3.5°C of warming. On current trends, they’d be right — under current policies, the world is expected to warm by about 3.1°C to 3.7°C.

Source: Clipping from a 1988 internal Shell document entitled, ‘The Greenhouse Effect’

‘Unprecedented Changes’

The IPCC’s special report is the result of a huge collaboration between 91 authors and 114 co-authors, with 42,000 comments on drafts of the document, Climate Home reports.

The report says that if the world is going to keep to 1.5°C of warming without ‘overshooting’ — passing the limit then using technology to bring warming back down — then “rapid and far -reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure” are needed.

“These systems transitions are unprecedented in terms of scale, but not necessarily in terms of speed, and imply deep emissions reductions in all sectors, a wide portfolio of mitigation options and a significant upscaling of investments in those options”, the scientists say.

…But the IPCC says the benefits of delivering that more ambitious target are big, and worth pursuing.

But the IPCC report has confirmed an inconvenient truth for the industry: that if temperature rises are going to be held to safe level, there is little space for fossil fuels.

The report says that if warming is going to be limited to 1.5°C, with limited or no overshoot, renewables will need to provide 70 to 85 percent of electricity in 2050.  MORE

 

Vast subsidies keeping the fossil fuel industry afloat should be put to better use

(MENAFN – The Conversation) Capitalism has often been identified as the underlying cause of theclimate crisis . A leading voice on the subject is Naomi Klein, one of the climate movements most influential thinkers, whose seminal book onclimate changewas subtitled Capitalism vs. the Climate. She is one of many voices identifying capitalism as the cause of climate change.

Often central within the capitalism versus the climate framing is the idea that the heart of capitalist ideology – free market fundamentalism – has fuelled the climate crisis. But this line of argument often glosses over the fact that energy markets are not free from government intervention. In fact, the fossil fuel industry is deeply and increasingly reliant on government support to survive.

Ina forthcoming book chapter , I detail case studies from the world’s worst climate polluting countries. I show that the fossil fuel industry depends on an egregious amount of government support, which makes the public foot the bill for a harmful – and increasingly uncompetitive – industry.

Polluters market

In my chapter, I show that governments the world over favour fossil fuel interests throughpublic financing ,financial subsidies , andbailouts . In addition, the fossil fuel industry is helped bycorrupt governance systems . Together this forms what I call a system of fossil fuel welfare and protectionism.

To hide this reality, the fossil fuel industry has invested ina massive public relationsscheme (read: propaganda campaign) to paint itself as the defender of the free market. In the US, the fossil fuel industry has even,quite successfully , duped Evangelicals into associating the fossil fuel industry with free markets, and free markets with God’s will. Thus, attacks on the fossil fuel industry become attacks on God’s will. But if God’s will was really aligned with the free market, then the fossil fuel industry would be doing the devil’s work.

Take South Africa, for example, the biggest carbon polluter on the African continent. It used to be home to the world’sfastest growing renewable energy sector , but government intervention to protect polluting coal interests set back these advances. Under President Cyril Ramaphosa the government is now taking steps to allowsmall amountsof new renewable energy into the market. But government actions continue to slowthe immense potentialSouth Africa has for a low-cost, renewable energy revolution.

Arecent studyreported that South Africa subsidises coal by R56,6 billion per year – propping up a polluting industry with taxpayer money. South Africa continues to subsidise coal despite studies showing that renewable energy was helpingto prevent energy blackouts , wassaving South Africa billions on energyand that a renewable energy future is the country’slowest costenergy pathway.

On the other side of the Atlantic, a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) study showed that the US, the world’s largest historic greenhouse gas emitter, givesten times more to fossil fuel subsidies than it does to education . Without such subsidies half of future oil production in the USwould be unprofitable .

As for coal, even the Wall Street Journal admits that US coalsimply can’t compete on a level playing field , and is losing out despite its major subsidies.Studies revealthat without regulation to shield them from market forces, about half of the coal plants in the US would be going bankrupt.

The fossil fuel industry is increasingly relying on the heavy hand of the government to protect fossil fuels from competition. Subsidies and protective policies shield fossil fuels from the reality that renewable energy has become the cheapest energy sourceworldwide.

MORE

Shine On: Solar power is eclipsing coal, oil, gas and nuclear energy with rapid growth and cost reductions

A heatwave across Europe was a reminder of the dangers of climate breakdown, but also of the enormous opportunities for tapping into the clean renewable energy that can replace the fossil fuels that drive global warming.

Ever since 2013, the installation of new renewable energy capacity has outstripped all other major energy generating sources combined, coal, oil, gas and nuclear. There are impressive figures for all renewables but the growth and fall in costs of solar power has stunned even seasoned industry observers.

Since its invention in 1954 in the United States, the photovoltaic (PV) cell has offered access to the sun’s energy for free. But it is only in the last decade that the cost of manufacturing solar panels has plummeted dramatically, making them not only affordable but sometimes even the cheapest form of electricity, outcompeting fossil fuels. The City of Los Angeles is negotiating a 25 year power purchase agreement that would deliver solar PV generated electricity at 2¢/kWh and battery storage at 1.3¢/kWh. In the response, the leading authority on renewable energy, Prof of civil and environmental engineering, Mark Z Jacobson, commented, “Goodnight natural gas, goodnight coal, goodnight nuclear.” According to Forbes magazine, this is half the cost of electricity generated from a new natural gas plant, often touted as the efficient, acceptable face of fossil fuels. MORE

Lessons for a rapid transition

1. Governments play a vital part in stimulating industries that advance zero carbon technologies with tax incentives and other forms of financial support to encourage early uptake.
2. Bringing down costs is vital for the widespread adoption of any technology, and once scaled up the fall in costs can be dramatic.
3. Solar power offers unique opportunities to poorer energy consumers in the global South, with its high levels of sunshine and often patchy energy networks.

Is Planting Trees The New Carbon Fighting Technology?

One has to wonder why it has taken so long to discover that tree-planting done on a massive global scale is likely to become one of the most effective tools in the carbon-fighting toolbox. A new study just out in Science journal claims that reforestation is “our most effective climate change solution to date.” This is mind-boggling. We are spending precious time and billions on technologies to suck carbon dioxide out the air we breathe. And trees can do this—for nothing. The following article by Stephen Leahy was first published in National Geographic. (Editor’s intro)

Planting Lots of Trees

An area the size of the United States could be restored as forests with the potential of erasing nearly 100 years of carbon emissions, according to the first ever study to determine how many trees the Earth could support.

Published [recently] in Science, “The global tree restoration potential” report found that there is enough suitable land to increase the world’s forest cover by one-third without affecting existing cities or agriculture. However, the amount of suitable land area diminishes as global temperatures rise. Even if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the area available for forest restoration could be reduced by a fifth by 2050 because it would be too warm for some tropical forests.

“Our study shows clearly that forest restoration is the best climate change solution available today,” said Tom Crowther, a researcher at ETH Zürich, and senior author of the study.

Not a substitute for phasing out fossils

That does not alter the vital importance of protecting existing forests and phasing out fossil fuels since new forests would take decades to mature, Crowther said in a statement.

“If we act now, this could cut carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by up to 25 percent, to levels last seen almost a century ago,” he says.

It could take more than a hundred years to add enough mature forest to get sufficient levels of carbon reduction. Meanwhile 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels are being added to the atmosphere every year, said Glen Peters, research director at Norway’s Center for International Climate Research. MORE

Call of the Forest: The Forgotten Wisdom of Trees

Forests are one of the world’s most significant sources of food, new medicines and oxygen. Scientist and author Diana Beresford-Kroeger explores our profound biological and spiritual connection with trees, and meets people who are taking the lead to replant, restore and protect the last of the planet’s great ancient forests. WATCH THE VIDEO  (52:07)

Varshini Prakash of the Sunrise Movement on Climate Justice, the Green New Deal, and Revolution

“We didn’t ask to have the responsibility of protecting human civilization on our shoulders. But we’re stepping up to the plate.”

Sunrise Movement co-founder Varshini Prakash addresses The Road to the Green New Deal Tour final event at Howard University on May 13, 2019. (AP Photo / Cliff Owen)

It was on a Sunday in March 2014 when I first heard Varshini Prakash fire up a crowd. Several hundred young people were crammed into a quadrangle on the Georgetown University campus, ready to march to the White House—where nearly 400 of them would be arrested protesting the Keystone XL and other tar-sands pipelines. A junior at UMass-Amherst at the time, organizing the (successful) fossil-fuel divestment campaign, Prakash, bullhorn in hand, had an emphatic message for Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

“We don’t want half-baked solutions!” she declared with attention-getting intensity. “We can’t gamble with false promises! We won’t settle for an ‘all-of-the-above’ energy policy when what this looming crisis demands is a none-of-the-above approach to fossil fuels!”

By the fall of 2015, Prakash and a small group of experienced young climate-justice activists had reached the conclusion, correctly, that what they and most of the climate movement were doing wasn’t enough. They realized, as she told me when we sat down for a conversation at a Boston coffee shop in May, “We need a new movement in America for young people.”

What Prakash and her 11 co-founders went on to build is now known to the world as the Sunrise Movement. Last November, with a media-savvy, hundreds-strong sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s office on Capitol Hill, they famously launched the fight for the game-changing Green New Deal—and reshaped the landscape of the 2020 election campaign. Thanks to their resilience and steely resolve, a carefully considered organizing strategy focused on electoral politics, some fortuitous timing, and the help of—among many other people—a rock-star rookie congresswoman named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they have injected an unprecedented urgency and seriousness into the climate debate in this country. MORE

Jagmeet Singh’s call for fossil fuels ban leapfrogs the Leap Manifesto

“The NDP is coming late to the issue of dealing comprehensively with climate change. Can it compete effectively with Elizabeth May’s Greens on this front? We shall see.” – Thomas Walkom

Jagmeet Singh’s New Democrats have discovered climate change. 

The party had been reluctant to take too uncompromising a stand on global warming for fear of alienating potential voters. That reluctance has gone.

Now the NDP is calling for an end to the entire fossil-fuel industry in Canada.

“The future of our country cannot involve fracking,” Singh said Monday in Ottawa, referring to a controversial method of drilling for oil and natural gas. “It cannot involve the burning of any fossil fuel.”

He said Canada must adhere to carbon reduction targets that are much stricter than those proposed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government if it to seriously fight climate change.

And he declared that he now opposes ambitious plans by British Columbia’s NDP government to build a massive liquefied natural gas project in the province’s north.

[In the past] the Leap Manifesto’s call to ban any new fossil-fuel energy projects, from pipelines to fracking, was seen as too radical. No more. Now, with his call for a Canada free of fossil fuels, Singh has outleapt the Leapers. MORE