AFP
Saturday, 8 January 2011
An international team of researchers has found that the atmosphere's ability to cleanse itself of pollutants and other greenhouse gases, except carbon dioxide, is generally stable.
The study, published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, comes amid a fierce debate over whether, as some experts believe, the atmosphere's self-cleaning ability was fragile and sensitive to environmental changes.
The research team, which was led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), measured levels in the atmosphere of hydroxyl radicals, which play a key role in atmospheric chemistry.
Levels of the agent only fluctuated a few percentage points from one year to the next, not 25 percent as some studies had estimated, the researchers found.
"The new hydroxyl measurements give researchers a broad view of the 'oxidizing' or self-cleaning capacity of the atmosphere," said Stephen Montzka, the study's lead author, a research chemist at the Global Monitoring Division of NOAA's Boulder, Colorado laboratory.
"Now we know that the atmosphere's ability to rid itself of many pollutants is generally well buffered or stable... This fundamental property of the atmosphere was one we hadn't been able to confirm before."
He said the finding boosted confidence in models that project future levels of pollutants in the atmosphere.
The hydroxyl radical, a compound consisting of an oxygen atom and a hydrogen atom, has such a brief lifespan in the atmosphere that it has been extremely difficult to measure on global scales.
Monday, 10 January 2011
Court backs Texas revolt against EPA's new greenhouse gas rules
SolveClimate: Texas becomes the only US state to duck new EPA regulations on carbon emissions from power plants and factories
Elizabeth McGowan for SolveClimate guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 5 January 2011 10.13 GMT
It took a somewhat fancy legal two-step, but Texas has managed to become the sole state to dance around this week's long-anticipated start-up of the Obama administration's modest efforts to curb heat-trapping gases.
That makes the Lone Star State the only place nationwide where factories and electricity-generating plants that emit a lot of greenhouse gases can't apply for the necessary permits to make modifications or begin new construction. Now it's up to federal judges to figure out how long this peculiar arrangement lasts.
Decision-makers with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had tried to avoid this anticipated stoppage two days before Christmas by declaring that they would skirt defiant Texas authorities by overseeing emissions permits themselves. But the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia put the kibosh on the move, temporarily blocking it late last week.
Texas is seeking a permanent blockage of the threatened federal takeover. The appeals court has ordered the EPA to reply to Texas's Dec. 30 petition by Thursday morning. But the judges made it clear in their one-page order that the temporary reprieve issued last Thursday "should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits" of Texas's lawsuit.
EPA officials are expecting judges to reach a decision late this week or early next week.
"This is a procedural step that allows EPA more time to prepare our response to Texas's request for a stay," Dallas-based agency spokesman Joe Hubbard told Solve Climate News in a post-interview e-mail. "It's unfortunate that Texas politicians continue to fight EPA's efforts to ensure that Clean Air Act permits in Texas can be applied for and issued in a timely way. Two separate courts have declined to stay EPA's actions and we're confident we're on sound legal footing."
Hubbard was referring to a pair of other federal court rulings in December that denied Texas's requests to delay activating the "tailoring rule."
In the meantime, every other state—even those where authorities have also filed lawsuits against the EPA—has complied with the tailoring rule that kicked in Jan. 2. The EPA has granted some states extensions to revamp or tweak their permitting structure.
Gina McCarthy, head of the EPA's Air and Radiation Office, released the final tailoring rule in June. It was the first step the agency took to rein in carbon dioxide and other pollutants emitted by large stationary sources. It was an incremental rule designed to keep apartment buildings, hospitals, schools and other nonindustrial emitters out of immediate regulatory reach.
State authorities had until early August to let the EPA know if they would need to rewrite state laws or regulations to meet the new restrictions. In a letter dated Aug. 2, Texas attorney general Greg Abbott and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality chairman Bryan Shaw announced that they had no intention of meeting the tailoring rule deadline.
Ilan Levin, a senior attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project, referred to the tailoring rule as a slow, methodical start to controlling greenhouse gases that shouldn't present a burden to any state.
By intervening late last week, he said, the federal court of appeals merely hit the pause button.
"Texas is unique and has taken the most aggressive and creative positions to thwart the EPA by saying the EPA is swooping in illegally," Levin said in an interview from his office in Austin, Texas. "It is making the legal argument that nothing can happen until December of 2011, if at all."
Texas has bristled at the tailoring rule since Day One.
In its latest salvo, state officials labeled EPA's Dec. 23 announcement that it would take over Texas's Clean Air Act permitting process as arbitrary, capricious and contrary to law. Such short notice, they say, is unfair because the Clean Air Act grants states a year to adapt before the federal government intervenes.
"(It) is particularly pernicious because it unlawfully attempts to partially disapprove Texas' environmental laws in the face of the State's admirable track record of reducing pollution and improving air quality in the State," Gov. Rick Perry, Abbott and others stated in the latest lawsuit. "This regulation accomplishes no discernable environmental benefit. The amount of greenhouse gas emissions that would be avoided under this regulation is miniscule (sic); indeed, it is impossible even to measure."
Perry is the longest-serving governor in Texas history. The Republican, who became governor in 2000 when George W. Bush resigned to become president, beat Democrat Bill White, the former three-term mayor of Houston, in last November's election.
Interestingly, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state's regulatory agency, approved a $2.2 billion coal-fired power plant less than a week before the tailoring rule went into effect.
Summit Power Group Inc. plans to build the plant in West Texas beginning in 2011. By incorporating integrated gasification combined cycle technology, company officials say they can capture 90 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions, which will be pumped underground to recover oil in nearby fields.
Company chairman Donald Hodel touted it as "overall the cleanest coal-fueled power project ever permitted in Texas" in a Fort Worth Star-Telegram article.
Utilities in Kansas and other states hurried along permits late last year to avoid new requirements of the tailoring rule, so most states aren't processing any permits now.
"Given … that we're operating completely within the law Congress passed to address air pollution, we do not expect this to lead to any permitting delays" in Texas, said Hubbard, the EPA spokesman.
He added that the agency has not yet received a permit application, nor does the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality have any permit requests in the hopper.
The court has given Texas authorities until Friday afternoon to respond to whatever documents EPA officials file to meet their Thursday morning deadline.
Levin, the attorney, said he couldn't begin to forecast the outcome of this legal tussle. Whatever the court's decision, however, he predicts that Texas will try to persist with its sidestepping strategy.
"I think it's clear the state of Texas is banking on waiting out this administration," Levin said. "They're counting on dragging this out and running out the clock."
Elizabeth McGowan for SolveClimate guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 5 January 2011 10.13 GMT
It took a somewhat fancy legal two-step, but Texas has managed to become the sole state to dance around this week's long-anticipated start-up of the Obama administration's modest efforts to curb heat-trapping gases.
That makes the Lone Star State the only place nationwide where factories and electricity-generating plants that emit a lot of greenhouse gases can't apply for the necessary permits to make modifications or begin new construction. Now it's up to federal judges to figure out how long this peculiar arrangement lasts.
Decision-makers with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had tried to avoid this anticipated stoppage two days before Christmas by declaring that they would skirt defiant Texas authorities by overseeing emissions permits themselves. But the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia put the kibosh on the move, temporarily blocking it late last week.
Texas is seeking a permanent blockage of the threatened federal takeover. The appeals court has ordered the EPA to reply to Texas's Dec. 30 petition by Thursday morning. But the judges made it clear in their one-page order that the temporary reprieve issued last Thursday "should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits" of Texas's lawsuit.
EPA officials are expecting judges to reach a decision late this week or early next week.
"This is a procedural step that allows EPA more time to prepare our response to Texas's request for a stay," Dallas-based agency spokesman Joe Hubbard told Solve Climate News in a post-interview e-mail. "It's unfortunate that Texas politicians continue to fight EPA's efforts to ensure that Clean Air Act permits in Texas can be applied for and issued in a timely way. Two separate courts have declined to stay EPA's actions and we're confident we're on sound legal footing."
Hubbard was referring to a pair of other federal court rulings in December that denied Texas's requests to delay activating the "tailoring rule."
In the meantime, every other state—even those where authorities have also filed lawsuits against the EPA—has complied with the tailoring rule that kicked in Jan. 2. The EPA has granted some states extensions to revamp or tweak their permitting structure.
Gina McCarthy, head of the EPA's Air and Radiation Office, released the final tailoring rule in June. It was the first step the agency took to rein in carbon dioxide and other pollutants emitted by large stationary sources. It was an incremental rule designed to keep apartment buildings, hospitals, schools and other nonindustrial emitters out of immediate regulatory reach.
State authorities had until early August to let the EPA know if they would need to rewrite state laws or regulations to meet the new restrictions. In a letter dated Aug. 2, Texas attorney general Greg Abbott and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality chairman Bryan Shaw announced that they had no intention of meeting the tailoring rule deadline.
Ilan Levin, a senior attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project, referred to the tailoring rule as a slow, methodical start to controlling greenhouse gases that shouldn't present a burden to any state.
By intervening late last week, he said, the federal court of appeals merely hit the pause button.
"Texas is unique and has taken the most aggressive and creative positions to thwart the EPA by saying the EPA is swooping in illegally," Levin said in an interview from his office in Austin, Texas. "It is making the legal argument that nothing can happen until December of 2011, if at all."
Texas has bristled at the tailoring rule since Day One.
In its latest salvo, state officials labeled EPA's Dec. 23 announcement that it would take over Texas's Clean Air Act permitting process as arbitrary, capricious and contrary to law. Such short notice, they say, is unfair because the Clean Air Act grants states a year to adapt before the federal government intervenes.
"(It) is particularly pernicious because it unlawfully attempts to partially disapprove Texas' environmental laws in the face of the State's admirable track record of reducing pollution and improving air quality in the State," Gov. Rick Perry, Abbott and others stated in the latest lawsuit. "This regulation accomplishes no discernable environmental benefit. The amount of greenhouse gas emissions that would be avoided under this regulation is miniscule (sic); indeed, it is impossible even to measure."
Perry is the longest-serving governor in Texas history. The Republican, who became governor in 2000 when George W. Bush resigned to become president, beat Democrat Bill White, the former three-term mayor of Houston, in last November's election.
Interestingly, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state's regulatory agency, approved a $2.2 billion coal-fired power plant less than a week before the tailoring rule went into effect.
Summit Power Group Inc. plans to build the plant in West Texas beginning in 2011. By incorporating integrated gasification combined cycle technology, company officials say they can capture 90 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions, which will be pumped underground to recover oil in nearby fields.
Company chairman Donald Hodel touted it as "overall the cleanest coal-fueled power project ever permitted in Texas" in a Fort Worth Star-Telegram article.
Utilities in Kansas and other states hurried along permits late last year to avoid new requirements of the tailoring rule, so most states aren't processing any permits now.
"Given … that we're operating completely within the law Congress passed to address air pollution, we do not expect this to lead to any permitting delays" in Texas, said Hubbard, the EPA spokesman.
He added that the agency has not yet received a permit application, nor does the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality have any permit requests in the hopper.
The court has given Texas authorities until Friday afternoon to respond to whatever documents EPA officials file to meet their Thursday morning deadline.
Levin, the attorney, said he couldn't begin to forecast the outcome of this legal tussle. Whatever the court's decision, however, he predicts that Texas will try to persist with its sidestepping strategy.
"I think it's clear the state of Texas is banking on waiting out this administration," Levin said. "They're counting on dragging this out and running out the clock."
Dirty Business film debunks 'clean coal' myth
Documentary reveals the true cost of US dependence and the murky realities of marketing 'clean coal' technology
Felicity Carus guardian.co.uk, Friday 7 January 2011 15.25 GMT
Dirty Business, the new documentary from the Centre for Investigative Journalism, began its nationwide screening tour last night in Berkeley, California, with the aim of debunking the myth of "clean coal" and kick-starting a debate on the future of energy in the US.
The film shows scarred mountains, abandoned family homes on remote hillsides, water courses toxic with sludge, respiratory fatalities and children whose growth has been stunted by pollution as some of the side effects of coal extraction and the power stations that burn it. And, of course, it shows the effect of coal combustion on global temperatures.
The film is narrated by Jeff Goodell, Big Coalauthor and contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine, who compares the first time he saw an open-top mine in West Virginia like the "first time you look into an abattoir after a lifetime of eating animals".
Coal, says Goodell, is "the rock that built America".
Not only was America's past built on that rock, but so is its future, say some scientists and politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, including the US president.
"One quarter of the world's coal reserves are found within the United States – coal is also the workhorse of the nation's electric power industry, supplying more than half the electricity consumed by Americans," says the US Department of Energy. "Coal-fired electric generating plants are the cornerstone of America's central power system."
That cornerstone is supplied by some 600 coal-fired power stations around the country. This National Public Radio map shows the majority of them located in the "rust belt" states, where heavy industries deliberately located close to the natural resource that would power their manufacturing.
These power stations churn out 1.9bn tonnes of CO2 - equivalent to 81% of CO2 emissions from the total electric power sector.
But as President Barack Obama faces calls from the international community to reduce carbon emissions, pressure to secure America's future energy supply and delaying tactics from the Republicans on the Environmental Protection Agency's greenhouse gas regulations, "clean coal" – which involves capturing and storing the fossil fuel's carbon emissions – appears to be a crowd pleaser that can only offend die-hard environmentalists.
Julio Friedman, who leads the carbon management programme at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said at the screening last night that it was vital to get carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects up and running as soon as possible. "I want to disabuse people of this idea that we burn coal for fun and profit to line the pockets of businessmen," he said. "We burn it because it's a good source of energy."
Obama has endorsed "clean coal" throughout his political career and CCS projects have benefited from $3.4bn of the $80bn earmarked for federal energy funding as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act 2009.
Such huge federal support has sparked something of a coal dash as companies compete for the opportunity to take federal dollars to fund their pilot schemes - and extract more coal. Even Friedman himself admits that CCS plants will need one-third more coal to power the sequestration technology.
US Energy Information Agency figures suggest that there is no problem finding coal on American soil. Data from 2009 revealed that coal stocks increased by 16.4% or 33.7m tonnes to a record level of 238.8m tonnes.
But other scientists warn that CCS deployment will not be able to keep pace with America's appetite for coal.
Vaclav Smil, professor at the faculty of environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, estimates that the infrastructure of networks of pipelines for CCS would have to be twice that for oil and gas.
He says: "Clearly you don't have to know anything about anything to realise that industry like that is not going to be created in five or 10 years and still it would contain only 10% of [emissions] we are generating today. The problem of scale is immense. It's not a technical problem, it's not a storage problem, it's just a problem scaling it up to a level where it would make a difference."
Aside from the problem of building an infrastructure of a technology not yet operating at an economic scale, the real dirty business, as the film suggests, is the murky work of lobbyists, who pay large sums of money to influence political direction.
Up to June last year, members of the 111th Congress had received more than $14.8m from the oil, gas and coal industries, according to the Price of Oil website. Newly elected Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski received $172,896 from the coal industry, and John Boehner, the new speaker in the Congress, received $107,150, the site claims.
Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch , estimates that the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) spent between $30-$40m in 2008 on PR promoting "clean coal".
The film brings out the heroes (Jim Hansen) and villains (Myron Ebell) of the coal debate. But perhaps the most moving contribution comes from Maria Gunnoe, who was awarded the Goldman environmental activism prize in 2009 for opposing mountaintop mining near her home in the Appalachian mountains.
"The cleaner the power stations get, the dirtier it gets here," she says, looking into a pond of toxic coal sludge. "We're losing our rights to our health, life and future of our children. There is no such thing as clean coal whatever comes out of the stacks."
Felicity Carus guardian.co.uk, Friday 7 January 2011 15.25 GMT
Dirty Business, the new documentary from the Centre for Investigative Journalism, began its nationwide screening tour last night in Berkeley, California, with the aim of debunking the myth of "clean coal" and kick-starting a debate on the future of energy in the US.
The film shows scarred mountains, abandoned family homes on remote hillsides, water courses toxic with sludge, respiratory fatalities and children whose growth has been stunted by pollution as some of the side effects of coal extraction and the power stations that burn it. And, of course, it shows the effect of coal combustion on global temperatures.
The film is narrated by Jeff Goodell, Big Coalauthor and contributing editor of Rolling Stone magazine, who compares the first time he saw an open-top mine in West Virginia like the "first time you look into an abattoir after a lifetime of eating animals".
Coal, says Goodell, is "the rock that built America".
Not only was America's past built on that rock, but so is its future, say some scientists and politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, including the US president.
"One quarter of the world's coal reserves are found within the United States – coal is also the workhorse of the nation's electric power industry, supplying more than half the electricity consumed by Americans," says the US Department of Energy. "Coal-fired electric generating plants are the cornerstone of America's central power system."
That cornerstone is supplied by some 600 coal-fired power stations around the country. This National Public Radio map shows the majority of them located in the "rust belt" states, where heavy industries deliberately located close to the natural resource that would power their manufacturing.
These power stations churn out 1.9bn tonnes of CO2 - equivalent to 81% of CO2 emissions from the total electric power sector.
But as President Barack Obama faces calls from the international community to reduce carbon emissions, pressure to secure America's future energy supply and delaying tactics from the Republicans on the Environmental Protection Agency's greenhouse gas regulations, "clean coal" – which involves capturing and storing the fossil fuel's carbon emissions – appears to be a crowd pleaser that can only offend die-hard environmentalists.
Julio Friedman, who leads the carbon management programme at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said at the screening last night that it was vital to get carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects up and running as soon as possible. "I want to disabuse people of this idea that we burn coal for fun and profit to line the pockets of businessmen," he said. "We burn it because it's a good source of energy."
Obama has endorsed "clean coal" throughout his political career and CCS projects have benefited from $3.4bn of the $80bn earmarked for federal energy funding as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act 2009.
Such huge federal support has sparked something of a coal dash as companies compete for the opportunity to take federal dollars to fund their pilot schemes - and extract more coal. Even Friedman himself admits that CCS plants will need one-third more coal to power the sequestration technology.
US Energy Information Agency figures suggest that there is no problem finding coal on American soil. Data from 2009 revealed that coal stocks increased by 16.4% or 33.7m tonnes to a record level of 238.8m tonnes.
But other scientists warn that CCS deployment will not be able to keep pace with America's appetite for coal.
Vaclav Smil, professor at the faculty of environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, estimates that the infrastructure of networks of pipelines for CCS would have to be twice that for oil and gas.
He says: "Clearly you don't have to know anything about anything to realise that industry like that is not going to be created in five or 10 years and still it would contain only 10% of [emissions] we are generating today. The problem of scale is immense. It's not a technical problem, it's not a storage problem, it's just a problem scaling it up to a level where it would make a difference."
Aside from the problem of building an infrastructure of a technology not yet operating at an economic scale, the real dirty business, as the film suggests, is the murky work of lobbyists, who pay large sums of money to influence political direction.
Up to June last year, members of the 111th Congress had received more than $14.8m from the oil, gas and coal industries, according to the Price of Oil website. Newly elected Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski received $172,896 from the coal industry, and John Boehner, the new speaker in the Congress, received $107,150, the site claims.
Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch , estimates that the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) spent between $30-$40m in 2008 on PR promoting "clean coal".
The film brings out the heroes (Jim Hansen) and villains (Myron Ebell) of the coal debate. But perhaps the most moving contribution comes from Maria Gunnoe, who was awarded the Goldman environmental activism prize in 2009 for opposing mountaintop mining near her home in the Appalachian mountains.
"The cleaner the power stations get, the dirtier it gets here," she says, looking into a pond of toxic coal sludge. "We're losing our rights to our health, life and future of our children. There is no such thing as clean coal whatever comes out of the stacks."