Media laments Trump/North Korea summit ‘could have a negative effect on global warming’ – Would increase coal exports

Sounds like they fear global warming more than nuclear war.  What monomaniacs!

The May 21, 2018 article in E&E News by Jean Chemnick, reports:

“The anticipated meeting between President Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un could put the former real estate tycoon eye to eye with a reviled autocrat who appears more in line with global thinking on one issue: climate change. North Korea is a party to the Paris Agreement, the 2015 pact that Trump plans to withdraw the United States from despite an uproar from allies around the world.

That’s because if sanctions against North Korea are lifted, the hermit nation’s coal could flow onto the world market, with the bulk of it ending up in South Korea, Japan and China.

The E&E article notes that North Korea is making very impressive commitments to reduce it’s CO2 emissions and featured Kim hurling insults at Trump for not staying in the UN Paris agreement:

E&E News: North Korea — whose carbon emissions rank in the bottom half of nations worldwide — put forward a hefty commitment to cut its greenhouse gases 37.4 percent compared with 1990 levels. And as Trump was pulling the United States out of the agreement last June, Kim described Trump’s decision as “the height of egotism.’

Of course, it is not surprising that Kim supports the UN Paris agreement which purports to control the climate of the earth.  Kim believes he can control the weather:

According to North Korea’s state media, Kim Jong Un controlled the weather when he scaled a sacred mountain…The state media claimed that it was snowing because the mountain wanted to give a “warm welcome” to Kim Jong Un. According to the report, Mount Paektu wanted to “show joy at the appearance of the peerlessly illustrious commander who controls the nature.”

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Tom Steyer Spends $2 Million To Force Expensive Green Energy On Mich. Power Customers

Michigan residents will likely be paying more for their electricity after a well-funded ballot initiative prompted the state’s largest utilities to adopt higher renewable energy usage.

On Friday, DTE Energy and Consumers Energy — Michigan’s two biggest utility companies — announced a compromise with a ballot committee to dramatically increase their renewable portfolio standards.

DTE and Consumers have agreed to establish a goal of at least 50 percent clean energy by 2030, which includes a pledge that 25 percent of their electricity sales originate from renewable sources by that same year.

In return, Clean Energy, Healthy Michigan will essentially drop its campaign to require at least 30 percent of a provider’s electricity sales come from renewable energy by 2030.

The agreement raises the bar for electricity providers in Michigan. Under the state’s current mandate, utilities were expected to reach 15 percent renewable energy by the end of 2021.

Environmentalists launched Clean Energy, Healthy Michigan in February to collect enough signatures to bring the ballot initiative to voters. The group was prepared to submit over 350,000 signatures it had collected over the past few months.

Assuming enough petitions were valid, the measure would have gone to Michigan Legislature then the November ballot if lawmakers did not act.

Under pressure, DTE and Consumers agreed to the slightly more flexible mandate of 25 percent.

The compromise comes as a major win for billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer. NextGen Climate Action, an organization he funds and operates, burned over $1.8 million in direct and in-kind contributions into the initiative.

“The agreement between Clean Energy, Healthy Michigan and DTE Energy and Consumers Energy is a win for the people of Michigan,” Steyer said in a statement Friday. “Every American deserves the right to clean air and water. With this agreement, Michigan has become a national example of how consumers, public interest advocates, and energy companies can work together to find real solutions to combat climate change.”

Clean Energy, Healthy Michigan is led by John Freeman, a former Democratic state legislator and union organizer who has led other progressive initiates in the past — such as leading a failed attempt in 2008 to put a universal health care proposal on the Michigan ballot. Freeman will continue to push renewables in the state, he said.

However, the sweeping agreement is being set without input from Michigan lawmakers, the Michigan Public Service Commission or even Michigan voters, critics argue.

“It’s disconcerting that Michigan’s monopoly utilities have become so confident in their ability to independently establish energy policy for the state that they don’t appear to have sought approval for this groundbreaking agreement from the Michigan Public Service Commission before going public with it,” Jason Hayes said in a statement to Detroit News.

Hayes serves as director of environmental policy for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, a free market group. “I am left wondering: who granted Steyer, [Consumers] and [DTE] the authority to single-handedly set Michigan’s energy policy in this fashion, especially when the people of Michigan are the ones who will have to foot the bill for all of this?”

Over 62 percent of voters in the state already rejected a 25 percent renewable standard ballot proposal back in 2012, Hayes also noted.

Beyond spending his fortune on climate change initiatives all across the country, Steyer is also leading a campaign to impeach President Donald Trump.

His Need to Impeach campaign aims to elect enough Democrats in 2018’s midterms in order to flip the House of Representatives and begin impeachment proceedings.

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Someone in Asia (guess who!) is making a banned chemical that destroys the ozone layer, scientists suspect

Emissions of a banned, ozone-depleting chemical are on the rise, a group of scientists reported Wednesday, suggesting someone may be secretly manufacturing the pollutant in violation of an international accord.

Emissions of CFC-11 have climbed 25 per cent since 2012, despite the chemical being part of a group of ozone pollutants that were phased out under the 1987 Montreal Protocol.

“I’ve been making these measurements for more than 30 years and this is the most surprising thing I’ve seen,” said Stephen Montzka, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who led the work. “I was astounded by it really.”

It’s a distressing result for what’s widely seen as a global environmental success story, in which nations – alarmed by a growing “ozone hole” – collectively took action to phase out chlorofluorocarbons.

The finding seems likely to prompt an international investigation into the mysterious source.

Officially, production of CFC-11 is supposed to be at or near zero – at least, that is what countries have been telling the United Nations body that monitors and enforces the Protocol. But with emissions on the rise, scientists suspect someone is making the chemical in defiance of the ban.

“Somebody’s cheating,” said Durwood Zaelke, founder of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development and an expert on the Montreal Protocol, in a comment on the new research. “There’s some slight possibility there’s an unintentional release, but . . . they make it clear there’s strong evidence this is actually being produced.”

But for now, the scientists don’t know exactly who, or where, that person would be. A U.S. observatory in Hawaii found CFC-11 mixed in with other gases that were characteristic of a source coming from somewhere in east Asia, but scientists could not narrow the source down any further.

Zaelke said he was surprised by the findings, not just because the chemical has long been banned, but also because alternatives already exist, making it hard to imagine what the market for CFC-11 today would be.

The research was led by researchers with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with help from scientists in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Their results were published in the journal Nature.

There is a small chance that there is a more innocent explanation for the rise in CFC-11 emissions, the scientist say.

They considered a range of alternative explanations for the growth, such as a change in atmospheric patterns that gradually remove CFC gases in the stratosphere, an increase in the rate of demolition of buildings containing old residues of CFC-11, or accidental production.

But they concluded these sources could not explain the increase, which they calculated at about 13 billion grams per year in recent years. Rather, the evidence “strongly suggests” a new source of emissions, the scientists wrote.

“These considerations suggest that the increased CFC-11 emissions arise from new production not reported to UNEP’s Ozone Secretariat, which is inconsistent with the agreed phase-out of CFC production in the Montreal Protocol by 2010,” the researchers wrote.

CFC-11, used primarily for foams, can lasts up to 50 years in the atmosphere once it’s released. It is only destroyed in the stratosphere, some 9 to 18 miles above the planet’s surface, where the resulting chlorine molecules engage in a string of ozone-destroying chemical reactions. That loss of ozone, in turn, weakens our protection from UV radiation at the Earth’s surface.

The chemical is also a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.

The paper’s findings are “environmentally and politically quite serious,” said Robert Watson, the former NASA scientist who organized bracing flights high into the Antarctic stratosphere to study ozone depletion in the 1980s, in an emailed statement.

“It is not clear why any country would want to start to produce, and inadvertently release, CFC-11, when cost effective substitutes have been available for a long while,” Watson continued.

“It is therefore imperative that this finding be discussed at the next Ministerial meeting of Governments given recovery of the ozone layer is dependent on all countries complying with the Montreal Protocol (and its adjustments and amendments) with emissions globally dropping to zero.”

Watson suggested that aircraft flights might be necessary to better identify the source of the emissions.

Keith Weller, a spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program, which administers the Montreal Protocol, said the findings will have to be verified by the scientific panel to the Protocol, and then would be put before the treaty’s member countries.

“If these emissions continue unabated, they have the potential to slow down the recovery of the ozone layer,” Weller said in a statement. “It is therefore, critical that we take stock of this science, identify the causes of these emissions and take necessary action.”

Unreported production of CFC-11 outside of certain specific carve-out purposes in the treaty would be a “violation of international law,” Weller confirmed, though he said that the Protocol is “non-punitive” and the remedy would probably involve a negotiation with the offending party, or country.

But Zaelke thought the finding could promote tougher action.

“This treaty cannot afford not to follow its tradition and keep its compliance record,” he said.

“They’re going to find the culprits. This insults everybody who’s worked on this for the last 30 years. That’s a tough group of people.”

Overall, it is important to underscore that the ozone layer is slowly recovering and ozone-depleting substances are still declining. But the apparent increase in emissions of CFC-11 has slowed the rate of decrease by about 22 percent, the scientists found. This, in turn, will delay the ozone layer’s recovery, and in the meantime leave it more vulnerable to other threats.

“Knowing how much time and effort and resources have gone into healing the ozone layer, and to see this is a shocker, frankly,” said Montzka.

SOURCE





Owner seeks extra charge to keep Massachusetts power plant running

They can't compete with subsidized "renewables"

Think your electricity bill is high now? Another charge could be on the way, but it’s one that might be crucial to keeping the lights on.

That’s because the massive Mystic power plant in Everett is on track to be shut down. Its owner, Exelon, says it’s no longer economical to run. But ISO New England, which oversees the region’s electric grid, fears that supplies could be compromised on frigid days — think rolling blackouts — and it has asked Exelon to keep the fires burning beyond a projected closure date in mid-2022.

The Chicago-based company says it needs more money to do so. So this week it sought approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for an extra charge that could be baked into electric bills to cover its costs, if necessary — one that the company says probably won’t exceed $1 a month for a typical residential customer in New England. The goal: to keep its two main gas-fired Mystic turbines operating through mid-2024, with the hope that reforms to electricity market rules could keep Mystic operating beyond that date.

Exelon says it can’t calculate its revenue for that time period, so it’s impossible to know the size of any operating shortfall now.

The two Mystic units together can generate about 1,400 megawatts of power, or enough electricity for more than 1 million homes. Exelon plans in 2022 to retire a third turbine, with 575 megawatts of capacity, and a much smaller oil-fired unit used only at peak times.

A spokeswoman said Exelon is already in talks with developers to acquire most of the 69-acre property, land it won’t need when the plant is reduced to two turbines.

The Mystic plant is integral to the region’s grid. It’s the largest in Massachusetts and is in a strategic position, at Boston’s doorstep.

There’s something else that makes the two units at Mystic so unusual: Their fuel comes directly from imported liquefied natural gas that arrives by ship, not pipeline. This reliance is a liability because LNG is often much more expensive than domestic gas. Exelon recently decided to buy the nearby Distrigas terminal to avoid a protracted contract dispute. But the LNG fuel is also an asset: On chilly winter days, much of the region’s pipeline gas gets consumed for heating purposes, not electricity. LNG acts as a hedge, an insurance policy of sorts, during cold snaps.

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Birds are dropping dead off Australia's coast, and it's all our fault (?)

There is no doubt of the problem but its real cause is getting the Nelson's telescope treatment.  The marine plastic debris does NOT come from developed countries such as Australia.  Such countries have efficient waste collection systems (garbage trucks) which take the waste to a place where it can be dissposed of responsibly. So the debris is not from Western countries.  It comes from AFRICA and ASIA -- where people dispose of their rubbish by tossing it into their local river -- whence it flows to sea.

But reforming Africans and Asians is "too hard" so the do-gooders pretend that the problem is where it is not.  To admit its real source would be politically incorrect.

If they could bear for any length of time to admit reality, they MIGHT be able to do something useful for the problem -- putting garbage collection barriers across the mouths of the major African and Asian rivers.  But that would be too practical, of course.  Much more attractive to go around finger-pointing and criticizing your own society.


Deep in their burrows, hungry shearwater chicks on Lord Howe Island await a meal. Their parents have been scouring the sea in search of fish and squid. Instead, they return to feed their babies clothes pegs, bottle tops and Lego pieces.

The flesh-footed sheerwater population at Lord Howe Island is dwindling due to a tidal wave of marine plastic being mistaken for food.

After 90 days the fledglings emerge from their burrows, stomachs bulging with plastic. They prepare for their first flight. Many are so malnourished they die outside the nest. Others make it to the beach, but their undeveloped wings flap in vain and waves engulf them.

Ian Hutton, a naturalist and museum curator on Lord Howe Island, pulls the bodies off the beach. Researchers slice open their stomachs to confirm the cause of death. Once, they found 274 plastic fragments.

“It’s so upsetting to think this bird has been reared by its parents, it’s been fed and it should have a chance to go to sea but it’s died,” he said.

‘When you cut the stomach open and pull out the plastic, some people actually cry when they see it.”

The flesh-footed shearwaters embody what the United Nations has called a “planetary crisis” posed by an unremitting tide of marine plastic.

In the few decades since mass production began in the 1950s, plastic waste is overwhelming rivers and oceans – tossed into waterways, carried by stormwater and winds, and lost overboard from boats.

In Australia 1.5 million tonnes of plastic were used in the year to June 2013 - about 65 kilograms for each person. Only 20 per cent was recycled [The rest went to a proper tip]

Brisbane City Council this week committed to banning plastic straws, single-use plastic bottles and helium balloons from all council events. Environmentalists say other federal, state and local governments can do much more.

University of Tasmania marine eco-toxicologist Jennifer Lavers said the birds “are not picky eaters” and easily tricked by ocean plastic. She said the birds’ numbers are declining due to a range of pressures.

NSW Greens MP Justin Field, who travelled to Lord Howe Island this month, said single-use plastic items such as straws or utensils were often unnecessary and could be limited through stronger regulation.

“It is going to require much more than a recycling mentality. It might even include banning single-use plastics,” he said. “It wasn’t that long ago that food courts had ceramic plates and stainless steel knives and forks. We need to return to that type of thinking.”

A Senate report in 2016 presented 23 recommendations, including developing alternatives to plastic packaging and urgently putting marine plastic pollution on the Council of Australian Government agenda.

The federal government has not responded to the report. It is developing a threat abatement plan to reduce the impact of debris on marine life – a draft version of which Mr Angel described as “unbelievably weak”.

A NSW Environment Protection Authority spokeswoman said the government’s Return and Earn scheme will help meet the state goal of reducing litter volumes by 40 percent by 2020, and 320 million drink containers had so far been returned.

Most major supermarkets will voluntarily phase out lightweight plastic shopping bags this year and NSW was taking part in a national microbead phase-out. The mass release of gas filled balloons is against the law in NSW.

The federal Department of the Environment and Energy said a recent meeting of environment ministers agreed all Australian packaging should be recyclable, compostable or reusable by 2025 or earlier, that Australia’s recycling capabilities be increased and waste reduction be encouraged through consumer awareness, education and industry leadership. A national waste policy will be updated this year and government agencies will prioritise projects that convert waste to energy.

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