Welcome back.
With construction activities underway at the Weymouth compressor station, direct observations of environmental safety violations are piling up. We have news from that and other protests, along with an endorsement of nonviolent direct citizen action from scientists in 20 countries.
The Supreme Court of the Netherlands ordered the government to cut that nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by the end of 2020. By far the most sweeping court intervention to date on behalf of the climate. Coal plants will close. Also in that section – satellites are beginning to pinpoint and measure methane leaks from space. Great news for data collection, but the findings are alarming.
Looking at clean energy, the Massachusetts chapter of US Green Building Council released a report showing that net zero energy buildings are economical to build – busting a longstanding myth that they’re too expensive. Energy storage has a new player, with the first U.S.-located liquid air facility planned for northern Vermont. This technology could compete favorably against lithium-ion batteries for requirements exceeding four hours. Mixed news on clean transportation: President Trump just killed the hoped-for extension of the electric vehicle tax credit. The Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI) is moving along with Governor Baker’s support.
In the alternative universe where fossil fuels are king, big players want to create a U.S.-style shale boom in Argentina. That in spite of dire climate warnings and gloomy financial analysis suggesting quite the opposite. Also related: new research shows many more (and smaller) plastic pieces in the ocean than previously thought.
— The NFGiM Team
WEYMOUTH
Dirty concerns raised about Weymouth compressor station construction
By Ed Baker, Wicked Local Weymouth
December 18, 2019
Trucks are daily tracking mud from a compressor station construction site in the Fore River Basin, and the dirt could have contaminants such as arsenic, according to Alice Arena, leader of the Fore River Residents Against the Compressor Station.
Arena said a Remediation Abatement Measure by Enbridge Inc., requires construction trucks to be cleansed before they leave the work area.
“Local contractors from J.F. Price and trucking companies are delivering gravel to the site,” she said during a Dec. 16 Weymouth Town Council town meeting. “These trucks are leaving the site with mud on their tires, and they are tracking the mud onto the public access roads and Bridge Street.”
Arena said there are no required cleansing pads at the compressor site under the Remediation Abatement Measure or RAM for truck operators to cleanse their tires of the soil before exiting the premises.
» Read article
Officials, residents concerned with compressor site cleanup
By Jessica Trufant, The Patriot Ledger
December 17, 2019
WEYMOUTH — Town officials and residents are concerned that crews working to excavate contaminated fill at the site of a planned natural-gas compressor station are not following safety protocols and allowing hazardous materials to spread.
Alice Arena of Fore River Residents Against the Compressor Station, a group opposed to the project, went before town council on Monday night to raise concerns about the ongoing work to remove contamination and more than 10,000 tons of soil containing arsenic and potentially other hazards.
Algonquin, a subsidiary of Enbridge, the company building the compressor station, recently started cleanup of the contamination at the site as part of a “release abatement measure” plan.
Arena said trucks visiting the site are already tracking soil onto neighboring roads, since there is no “cleaning pad” to wash off the mud and dirt beforehand as required in the plan. She said workers have been on site with no protective gear or breathing apparatus.
Arena said Enbridge has not appointed a public liaison to call about issues at the site as required, among other ongoing issues.
» Read article
» More about the Weymouth compressor station
PROTESTS
N.H.-Bound Coal Train Kept Rolling, Despite Activists On The Tracks
By Miriam Wasser, WBUR
December 17, 2019
About a dozen activists attempting to stop a coal resupply train near Worcester were forced from the tracks when the train failed to stop Monday night.
No one was injured or arrested.
The activists — some of whom were affiliated with groups like the Climate Disobedience Center, 350 New Hampshire Action and 350 Mass Action — said in a press release that the action was part of their campaign to shut down the Merrimack Generating Station in Bow, N.H., one of the last remaining coal plants in New England.
» Read article
Scientists endorse mass civil disobedience to force climate action
By Matthew Green, Reuters
October 12, 2019
In a joint declaration, climate scientists, physicists, biologists, engineers and others from at least 20 countries broke with the caution traditionally associated with academia to side with peaceful protesters courting arrest from Amsterdam to Melbourne.
Wearing white laboratory coats to symbolize their research credentials, a group of about 20 of the signatories gathered on Saturday to read out the text outside London’s century-old Science Museum in the city’s upmarket Kensington district.
“We believe that the continued governmental inaction over the climate and ecological crisis now justifies peaceful and non-violent protest and direct action, even if this goes beyond the bounds of the current law,” said Emily Grossman, a science broadcaster with a PhD in molecular biology. She read the declaration on behalf of the group.
“We therefore support those who are rising up peacefully against governments around the world that are failing to act proportionately to the scale of the crisis,” she said.
» Read article
» More about protests and direct action
CLIMATE
Netherlands’ Top Court Orders Government to Act on Climate Change
By John Schwartz, New York Times
December 20, 2019
The Supreme Court of the Netherlands on Friday ordered the government to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by the end of 2020. It was the first time a nation has been required by its courts to take action against climate change.
Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Law at Columbia University Law School, said in an email: “There have been 1,442 climate lawsuits around the world. This is the strongest decision ever. The Dutch Supreme Court upheld the first court order anywhere directing a country to slash its greenhouse gas emissions.”
» Read article
Changing Seas Bring ‘Turtle Stranding Season’ to Cape Cod
By Kendra Pierre-Louis, New York Times
December 19, 2019
Mr. Prescott, who retired this summer after 40 years as director of the wildlife sanctuary in Wellfleet, spotted his first cold-stunned sea turtle in the region in 1974. “It was dead,” he said.
The following year he found two.
Other people started to walk the beaches too, after Mr. Prescott wrote about the turtle in the local paper. “By 1978, ’79, it became pretty obvious that there were turtles here every year,” he said.
“The single variable that helped explain this trend was warmer late-fall temperatures,” said Dr. Griffin, who published a study that looked into what was causing the rise in cold-stunning.
Turtles are cold-blooded and depend on surrounding temperatures to regulate their internal body temperatures, which makes them extremely sensitive to ambient temperatures.
» Read article
‘Red Lights Flashing’: Australia Smashes Heat Record Just a Day After Previous Record Hit
“I think this is the single loudest alarm bell I’ve ever heard on global heating.”
By Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams
December 19, 2019
Calls for immediate and ambitious action to tackle the climate emergency piled up Thursday in response to preliminary analysis from Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology that Wednesday smashed the nation’s temperature record by a full 1°C just one day after the previous all-time record.
The first record was set Tuesday, when Australia’s national average maximum temperature reached 40.9°C (105.6°F), eliciting alarm from climate and fire safety experts. Wednesday, the average rose to 41.9°C (107.4°F), sparking a fresh wave of warnings and demands for bold efforts to battle the planetary crisis.
For the second day in a row, Australia has broken its hottest day in recorded history.
» Read article
2°C: Beyond the limit – How we know global warming is real
By Chris Mooney , John Muyskens , Aaron Steckelberg , Harry Stevens and Monica Ulmanu, Washington Post
December 19, 2019
If early forecasting aimed to avert tragedy and economic loss, the troves of data it produced are used today to monitor a new sort of disaster, one that was scarcely foreseeable by 19th-century meteorologists but that now constitutes the single most significant fact about the planet’s environment.
It is that the world is more than 1 degree Celsius hotter than it was before industrialization began pumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere. This warming has fueled new deadly fires, strengthened hurricanes and displaced people. And many areas have warmed far more than the average.
How can that be known? How can it be possible to take Earth’s temperature, not just for this week or this year, but for decades and centuries?
The answer begins with nearly 1,500 weather stations already operating by the time Sonnblick began recording. The telegraph allowed all those readings to be collected and analyzed to show weather patterns.
» Read article
Donald Trump’s Record on Climate Change
Trump’s first term has been a relentless drive for unfettered fossil energy development. ICN’s 2020 candidate analysis looks at the president’s climate record.
By Stacy Feldman and Marianne Lavelle, InsideClimate News
December 19, 2019
As president, [Trump] has rolled back regulations on energy suppliers at a rapid clip slowed only at times by the courts, while auctioning off millions of acres of new drilling leases on public land. Last year, domestic oil production hit a record high. The result of this, among other things, was the reversal of three consecutive years of declining U.S. carbon emissions.
Trump has begun the process of withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate treaty, the agreement signed by nearly all nations to reduce fossil fuel emissions. He replaced Obama’s Clean Power Plan, intended to sharply reduce emissions from U.S. power plants. He has taken the first step to weaken fuel economy standards for cars, the single most important effort for reining in the largest driver of U.S. emissions.
His administration has undone or delayed—or tried to—most regulatory and executive actions related to climate change, while proposing new ones to accelerate fossil fuel development. Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law counts 131 actions toward federal climate deregulation since Trump took office. In the absence of any comprehensive national climate law, those moves have led to an erosion of the federal government’s main regulatory levers for cutting global warming emissions.
Several of those actions, including rollbacks of significant rules on methane, cross-state air pollution regulations and energy efficiency, have been blocked or delayed by judges who have questioned the administration’s broad view of its legal authority. Some of those setbacks may be temporary, though, and the courts have yet to rule on the most consequential deregulatory actions. According to the administration’s agenda for 2020, the president will try to fast-track as many more as possible before the end of his first term.
» Read article
A Methane Leak, Seen From Space, Proves to Be Far Larger Than Thought
By Hiroko Tabuchi, New York Times
December 16, 2019
The first satellite designed to continuously monitor the planet for methane leaks made a startling discovery last year: A little known gas-well accident at an Ohio fracking site was in fact one of the largest methane leaks ever recorded in the United States.
The findings by a Dutch-American team of scientists, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, mark a step forward in using space technology to detect leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, from oil and gas sites worldwide.
The scientists said the new findings reinforced the view that methane releases like these, which are difficult to predict, could be far more widespread than previously thought.
» Read article
» Read report ($10 download fee)
U.N. Climate Talks End With Few Commitments and a ‘Lost’ Opportunity
By Somini Sengupta, New York Times
December 15, 2019
In what was widely denounced as one of the worst outcomes in a quarter-century of climate negotiations, United Nations talks ended early Sunday morning with the United States and other big polluters blocking even a nonbinding measure that would have encouraged countries to adopt more ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions next year.
Because the United States is withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, it was the last chance, at least for some time, for American delegates to sit at the negotiating table at the annual talks — and perhaps a turning point in global climate negotiations, given the influence that Washington has long wielded, for better or worse, in the discussions.
The Trump administration used the meeting to push back on a range of proposals, including a mechanism to compensate developing countries for losses that were the result of more intense storms, droughts, rising seas and other effects of global warming.
» Read article
COP25: Anger Over Lack of Action for Vulnerable States as Climate Talks Conclude
By Sophie Yeo, DeSmog Blog
December 13, 2019
Climate activists have found plenty to be angry about at this year’s UN climate talks, which are scheduled to conclude in Madrid tonight. From youth groups to indigenous people, civil society has been more riled than in previous years, as the disconnect grows between momentum on the streets and the slow progress of the negotiations.
“It’s like two parallel worlds,” says Sara Shaw, part of the Friends of the Earth International delegation at the meeting, known as COP25. “It’s so stark, the contrast between climate breakdown, the potential of massive expansion of fossil fuels, using markets to game the system, the access polluters have to these talks when civil society is really marginalised. I think it’s just coming together in a huge amount of frustration at the injustice of it all.”
Two issues have proved particularly contentious: the role of carbon markets, and lack of finance for countries that are already suffering the impacts of climate change – known in the negotiations as “loss and damage”.
» Read article
» More on climate
CLEAN ENERGY ALTERNATIVES
Zero energy buildings are not high cost
They make sense environmentally and economically
By Meredith Elbaum, CommonWealth Magazine
November 3, 2019
The latest report from the Massachusetts chapter of US Green Building Council, Zero Energy Buildings in MA: Saving Money from the Start, combats the common, but incorrect, notion of high upfront costs for building green. As the report describes how many types of zero energy buildings can be built with little or no added upfront cost and some zero energy commercial buildings can see return on investment in as little as one year. With zero energy buildings being more affordable than typically thought and within reach for many municipalities across the state, cities and towns can play a critical role in furthering green building in our Commonwealth.
» Read article
» Read USGBC-MA report
» More on clean energy alternatives
ENERGY STORAGE
First US long-duration liquid air storage project planned in Vermont
By Kavya Balaraman, Utility Dive
December 18, 2019
Lithium-ion batteries have dominated the advanced energy storage market in recent years, but there is a broad understanding in the space that other technologies will become more competitive as the need for longer-duration storage grows, Finn-Foley told Utility Dive.
“That’s the sort of market niche that a lot of long-duration players, including Highview, are pursuing,” he said.
Liquid air storage involves cleaning and compressing air with excess or off-peak electricity, liquefying it and storing it in cold insulated tanks. During peak periods on the grid, the air is warmed, causing it to expand and turn a turbine, “thus generating energy that can be used at peak times when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing,” Highview Power Storage said in a press release.
» Read article
» Read press release
» More on energy storage
CLEAN TRANSPORTATION
Trump’s Christmas Gift to Big Oil: Killing Hopes of Electric Car Tax Credit Extension
By Dana Drugmand, DeSmog Blog
December 18, 2019
The oil industry, a staunch opponent of electric vehicles (EVs), received an early Christmas present from the White House as President Trump reportedly intervened to quash an EV tax credit expansion from inclusion in a government spending package.
The tax credit is meant to help offset the upfront cost of electric vehicles and boost the EV market. Consumers who purchase an EV can currently claim a credit up to $7,500, and the credit phases out once auto manufacturers sell 200,000 qualifying vehicles. Tesla and General Motors have both hit the 200,000-vehicle cap and had lobbied for an extension. A bipartisan proposal called for allowing a $7,000 credit for an additional 400,000 vehicles sold.
That proposal, introduced earlier this year as the Driving America Forward Act, was rolled into a broader package of incentives for renewable energy that proponents hoped to pass as part of an end-of-year spending deal. But groups tied to the Koch network and backed by oil industry funding worked hard to kill the clean energy incentives. These groups sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell last week urging the Senate to oppose any bill that includes an EV tax credit extension.
Ultimately the EV provision was dropped from the spending package. According to Forbes, “In last-minute negotiations over a massive package of spending bills designed to avert a government shutdown, the EV provision was lost in the shuffle and that was the outcome Republicans and President Trump wanted.”
» Read article
TCI could up gas prices 5 to 17 cents a gallon in 2022
Modeling shows costs and benefits of carbon pricing
By Andy Metzger, CommonWealth Magazine
December 17, 2019
OFFICIALS DEVELOPING A new regional approach to reducing tailpipe emissions on the East Coast are considering policies that would add between 5 cents and 17 cents to the cost of a gallon of gasoline, generating over $1 billion in the first year spread among all the participating states.
No price is set in stone yet, and it’s an open question how many of the roughly one dozen states will sign at the bottom once the agreement is finalized. On Tuesday afternoon, after the announcement, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu announced his state would not participate in the collective approach, tweeting that TCI is a “financial boondoggle” and “drivers will bear the brunt of the artificially higher gas prices.”
Championed by Gov. Charlie Baker, the transportation and climate initiative, dubbed TCI, aims to syphon money from gasoline and diesel wholesalers and pump it into other transportation priorities. The initiative is supposed to go into effect in two years, and Baker has said half of the Bay State’s proceeds would be steered into the Commonwealth Transportation Fund and the other half to unspecified local transportation priorities.
The “cap and invest” program for the transportation sector would be similar to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that has helped drive coal plants out of the electricity market while funding popular efficiency programs such as Mass Save.
» Read article
Baker’s walk on the wild side
Leads the charge for TCI and higher gas prices
By Bruce Mohl, CommonWealth Magazine
December 17, 2019
GOV. CHARLIE BAKER’S all-in embrace of the transportation climate initiative is another step away from his shrinking Republican base and a tacit admission that the state needs more transit funding.
The transportation climate initiative, or TCI, places a price on the carbon contained in gasoline and diesel fuels and requires wholesale distributors to pay allowances for the right to sell their product. The cost of the allowances will likely be passed on to drivers in the form of higher prices at the pump, and the revenue from the allowances will flow back to the participating states to be used for efforts to deal with climate change.
» Read article
New Hampshire pulls out of regional Transportation & Climate Initiative agreement that could bring $500 million a year to Massachusetts
By Tanner Stening, MassLive.com
December 17, 2019
Following the release of a memorandum of understanding Tuesday outlining a vision for the Transportation & Climate Initiative, one state has already pulled out of the effort.
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu tweeted that his state will not be participating in the regional agreement to curb transportation emissions, saying he “will not force Granite Staters to pay more for their gas just to subsidize other state’s crumbling infrastructure.”
The regional policy could bring in some $7 billion in new funds across the region, and about $500 million a year in Massachusetts, according to estimates shared Tuesday. Those proceeds would then be invested in clean transportation solutions as each state sees fit.
» Read article
» More on clean transportation
FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY
While Talking up Climate Action, Oil Majors Eye Argentina’s Shale Reserves
By Nick Cunningham, DeSmog Blog
December 19, 2019
Even as international climate negotiators tried to make progress at the UN climate summit in Madrid in early December, fossil fuel production and consumption has continued to rise, and major oil companies have been seeking new horizons to exploit.
The industry is not slowing down, even in the face of the worsening climate crisis. Although many oil companies signed on to the Paris Climate Agreement, they have simultaneously poured $50 billion into projects since 2018 that are not aligned with climate targets. The industry also has plans to invest $1.4 trillion in new oil and gas projects around the world over the next five years, despite the fact that existing projects contain enough greenhouse gases to use up the remaining carbon budget.
In other words, the oil majors are actively betting on, and are heavily invested in, blowing past climate targets and burning as much carbon as possible, despite protestations from company executives that they are good-faith actors.
» Read article
Energy Analysts Deliver More Bad News for US Fracking Industry’s Business Model
By Justin Mikulka, DeSmog Blog
December 17, 2019
This month, the energy consulting firm Wood MacKenzie gave an online presentation that basically debunked the whole business model of the shale industry.
In this webinar, which explored the declining production rates of oil wells in the Permian region, research director Ben Shattuck noted how it was impossible to accurately forecast how much oil a shale play held based on estimates from existing wells.
“Over the years of us doing this, as analysts, we’ve learned that you really have to do it well by well,” Shattuck explained of analyzing well performance. “You cannot take anything for granted.”
For an industry that has raised hundreds of billions of dollars promising future performance based on the production of a few wells, this is not good news. And particularly for the Permian, the nation’s most productive shale play, located in Texas and New Mexico.
» Read article
These Cities Want to Ban Natural Gas. But Would It Be Legal?
Cambridge, Massachusetts, got a surprise warning as it considered a natural gas ban to reduce its climate impact.
By Phil McKenna, InsideClimate News
December 12, 2019
Berkeley, California, passed the first such ban in the country this past summer, and other West Coast cities have since followed with similar restrictions.
But in Massachusetts, as Cambridge discovered on Wednesday, it might be harder—if not impossible—to do.
The reason: the city ordinances and town bylaws in Massachusetts may conflict with existing regulations that are governed by the state. During a Cambridge City Council committee meeting Wednesday, the city’s attorney advised that a proposed gas ban there might not stand up to legal scrutiny. The state attorney general’s office is also reviewing the legality of a ban approved last month by the Boston suburb of Brookline on natural gas heating in new buildings.
» Read article
Argentina Wants a Fracking Boom. The US Offers a Cautionary Tale
By Nick Cunningham, DeSmog Blog
December 12, 2019
Argentina’s President Alberto Fernandez takes office in the midst of an economic crisis. Like his predecessor, he has made fracking a centerpiece of the country’s economic revival.
Argentina has some of the largest natural gas and oil reserves in the world and “possibly the most prospective outside of North America,” according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. If some other country is going to successfully replicate the U.S. shale revolution, most experts put Argentina pretty high on that list. While the U.S. shale industry is showing its age, Argentina’s Vaca Muerta shale is in its early stages, with only 4 percent of the acreage developed thus far.
The country feels a sense of urgency. Declining conventional production from older oil and gas fields has meant that Argentina has become a net importer of fuels over the past decade. Meanwhile, Argentina’s economy has deteriorated badly due to a toxic cocktail of debt, austerity, inflation, and an unstable currency.
For these reasons — a growing energy deficit, a worsening economic situation, and large oil and gas reserves trapped underground — there is enormous political support for kick-starting an American-style fracking boom in Argentina.
» Read article
» More on fossil fuels
PLASTICS, HEALTH & ENVIRONMENT
Microplastics a million times more abundant in the ocean than previously thought, Scripps study suggests
Mini-microplastics uncovered in the stomachs of filter-feeding marine organisms
By Chase Martin, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
December 03, 2019
Nothing seems safe from plastic contamination. It is pulled from the nostrils of sea turtles, found in Antarctic waters and buried in the fossil record. But a new study by researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego suggests there could be a million times more pieces of plastic in the ocean than previously estimated.
Biological oceanographer Jennifer Brandon found some of the tiniest countable microplastics in surface seawater at much higher concentrations than previously measured. Her method unveiled that the traditional way of counting marine microplastics is likely missing the smallest particles, suggesting the number of measured microplastics in the ocean is off by five to seven orders of magnitude.
On average, Brandon estimates the ocean is contaminated by 8.3 million pieces of so-called mini-microplastics per cubic meter of water. Previous studies measuring larger pieces of plastic found only 10 pieces per cubic meter.
Her discoveries about mini-microplastics, completed while a graduate student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, was published Nov. 27 in a special issue of Limnology and Oceanography Letters devoted to research on microplastics and microfibers.
» Read article
» Read published study
» More on plastics in the environment
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Arsenic And Diesel As Thick As Peanut Butter: What’s Below The Future Weymouth Compressor?
World’s Oceans Are Losing Oxygen Rapidly, Study Finds
How Aramco’s Huge I.P.O. Fell Short of Saudi Prince’s Wish
4 arrested as protesters block entrance as work begins at Weymouth compressor station
Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Irreversible Change
Transportation Climate Initiative Draws Opposition from Oil and Gasoline Business Groups
Fight or Switch? How the Low-carbon Transition Is Disrupting Fossil Fuel Politics
No Fracked Gas in Mass 