Under the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act, which passed in December, the EPA must phase down the production and import of these potent greenhouse gases 85 percent over the next 15 years.

“The environmental benefits here are very large, they’re very important,” said Cindy Newberg, who directs the stratospheric protection division in the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. The new law, she added, “provides explicit authority for us to do this work, and that’s incredibly important to the agency, and for all of us.”
A new undercover investigation by an advocacy group suggests that some supermarkets are leaking climate-damaging refrigerants at an even higher rate than regulators have assumed. The industry estimates that every year supermarkets lose an average of 25 percent of their refrigerant charge — chemicals introduced in the 1990s to replace ones depleting the Earth’s ozone layer.

Armed with high-tech sensors, undercover investigators for the Environmental Investigation Agency have documented widespread leakage of HFCs at grocery stores in D.C., Maryland and Virginia. While Walmart and other supermarket companies have pledged to curb their use of these chemicals, more than half of all the stores the EIA surveyed were emitting these climate-warming refrigerants.

Out of 45 supermarkets surveyed — including 20 Walmarts as well as stores operated by ALDI, Costco, Giant, Harris Teeter, Safeway, ShopRite, PriceRite, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods — investigators found leaks in 55 percent of them. (Whole Foods is owned by Amazon, whose founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.) The investigation did not determine the exact amount of HFCs released.

“This is a systemwide, industry-wide problem,” said Avipsa Mahapatra, climate lead for the EIA, the advocacy group. “In reality, they could easily check for this.”
None of the companies contacted for this story provided a comment on the survey itself, but a few noted their commitment to curbing these pollutants.
Whole Foods said it is “proud to be a leader among U.S. supermarkets in our efforts to reduce emissions of hydrofluorocarbons.” A little more than 30 of its stores have switched to carbon-dioxide refrigerants, and it touts one market in Brooklyn that has become 100 percent HFC-free.

Walmart noted it has pledged to reach zero emissions across its operations within two decades, a goal that includes “transitioning to low-impact refrigerants for cooling and electrified equipment for heating in our stores, clubs and data and distribution centers by 2040.”

Giant said it is also transitioning its stores to less climate-damaging refrigerants as part of a plan to halve its overall carbon emissions by 2030 and is also working with suppliers to make further cuts in its supply chain. “We have committed to working with our suppliers to reduce emissions from farm to fork,” said Felis Andrade, a spokeswoman for Giant’s parent company, Ahold Delhaize USA.

Commercial refrigeration, which includes grocery stores as well as restaurants and food processing, accounts for about 28 percent of all U.S. emissions of HFCs. Air conditioning for commercial buildings and homes represents between 40 and 60 percent of emissions, according to federal data.
The EIA survey was based on a limited sample in one region of the United States. The investigators were also not able to measure the overall quantity and rate of leakage. But it suggests that large supermarket chains may be unaware of the extent of the problem, and do not have regular monitoring in place. In some cases, the leaks persisted months after they were first detected.

The investigators, who began their survey in 2019, used leak detectors that they could insert in refrigerators and freezers as well as an infrared camera that could film fugitive greenhouse gases.

Tracking environmental actions under Biden

The food retail sector represents one part of the puzzle of how to drastically cut back on emissions in the coming years. HFCs trap thousands of times more heat than carbon dioxide, and with increasing sales they are projected to represent nearly a fifth of all climate-warming emissions by mid-century. It’s a growing problem: The hotter the Earth gets, the more people need cooling infrastructure.
Imaging camera video from the Environmental Investigation Agency shows climate-warming refrigerants leaking from a grocery store refrigerator case. (Environmental Investigation Agency)

According to new data released Friday, HFC emissions in the United States rose by 4 million metric tons between 2018 and 2019. The 38,000 supermarkets in the United States use thousands of pounds of HFCs each year, according to the EPA, with each store having the equivalent climate impact of 300 cars on the road. Taken together, it is equal to 49 billion pounds of coal being burned each year.

While monitoring for leaks and upgrading refrigeration systems translate into long-term savings by reducing energy use, stores operating on tight margins cannot always afford it.

Ratio Institute co-founder Jonathan Tan, whose organization works with the food retail industry, policymakers and conservationists on the issue, estimated that while it can cost a store between $50,000 to $100,000 to make repairs to a system, transitioning from current refrigerant to a less-potent greenhouse gas like carbon dioxide can cost between $1 million and $2.5 million.

Walmart, for example, said private companies would need government help in making the transition. “We also believe that private and public sector action is needed to foster innovation and enable an economically viable phasedown of HFCs globally,” it said in a statement.
Europe is making a swifter transition than the United States. Over 26,000 supermarkets in European countries are using lower-impact refrigerants, compared with 600 stores in the United States.

The EPA has regulated earlier generations of refrigerants for decades under the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the landmark global treaty aimed at repairing the ozone layer. Those compounds — chlorofluorocarbons and hydrochlorofluorocarbons — damaged the ozone layer that shields the Earth from damaging ultraviolet rays from the sun. HFCs made an appealing substitute because they didn’t deplete ozone, but they warmed the planet instead.

In 2016, the Obama administration helped broker the Kigali Amendment, where countries pledged to phase down HFCs under the treaty. But the agency’s effort to regulate the refrigerants ran aground during the Trump administration.

One rule identifying “unacceptable” uses of HFCs was partly overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2017. The administration rewrote the rule, but the same court ruled it failed to follow proper procedures and did not need to abolish the Obama-era requirements altogether. Last year, Trump officials withdrew another Obama-era rule, which required companies to detect and repair any leaks from any appliance or piece of equipment using more than 50 pounds of HFCs.

President Donald Trump declined to submit the Kigali Amendment to the Senate for ratification: President Biden signed an executive order last month instructing his secretary of state to take that step.

The federal government has pursued cases against grocery chains, and won, when it comes to leaks of older refrigerants that damage the ozone layer. In 2019, for example, Southeastern Grocers agreed to spend $4.2 million to reduce coolant leaks and pay a $300,000 civil penalty. But HFCs are in a different category.

“EPA’s recognized that it is a significant contributor to climate change and has tried to take action,” said Tom Land, a longtime agency staffer who retired in 2019 after working on both international climate negotiations and the agency’s voluntary refrigerants program, GreenChill. “It basically had to stop, it didn’t have authority.”
Food retailers that participate in the GreenChill program have a leak rate of 14.3 percent, nearly half the industry average. Kristen Taddonio, senior climate and energy adviser at the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, said in an interview that reinstating regulations mandating leak detection could help grocers make even greater reductions.

“It’s like that old adage, you can’t manage what you can’t measure,” said Taddonio, who worked on energy efficiency at the EPA and the Energy Department between 2004 and 2015.

Anu Narayanswamy contributed to this report.

The facilities added continue trends in CCS deployment that include innovative applications such as natural gas power, negative emissions and cement, as well as stacked and offshore geologic storage. Fuelled by targeted incentives and sustained government support the US adds nine facilities, while the UK adds one facility

“We are thrilled to see the diversity of CCS applications. The average capture capacity of the new facilities is 2.6 mtpa, as opposed to 2 mtpa for those already in the pipeline, indicating that new facilities are aiming for economies of scale, and strengthening CCS’ role in large-scale emissions abatement. Nonetheless, with 21 facilities operating today, we still need at least a 100-fold scale-up to reach climate goals”, adds Brad Page.

In the UK, the Drax bioenergy with CCS project aims to capture 4 mtpa from one of the existing biomass-fired power units by 2027, before converting all of its remaining biomass units to bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) by 2035. The carbon dioxide (CO2) will be transported by pipeline and stored in the southern North Sea via dedicated geological storage. The project will be an anchor for the wider Zero Carbon Humber Cluster.

The US continues to add a large number of facilities mainly as the result of the 45Q tax credit, and the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard CCS Protocol. For example, the combined incentives contribute to the economic viability of both California Resources Corporation’s (CRC) CalCapture Project, and Velocys’ and Oxy Low Carbon Ventures’ Bayou Fuels Negative Emission Project. Multiple projects were also awarded US Department of Energy (DOE) front-end-engineering-design (FEED) study grants, or part of CarbonSAFE, seeking to establish large-scale storage of 50 mtpa and more. The Zeros Project in Texas, in an important development for the CCS facilities pipeline, has also completed its FEED and entered pre-construction.

“This is an important time for CCS in the US,” says Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy Steven Winberg. “Policy incentives and research from DOE projects are working together to help industry move forward towards the goal of net-zero carbon emissions.”

>While the US does not currently have any natural gas plants equipped with CCS, the database update includes three gas plant projects: Mustang Station in Texas, Plant Daniel in Mississippi and CRC’s CalCapture facility in California. This brings the total natural gas-fuelled power plants with CCS under development globally in the database to six.

“The CalCapture project offers multiple benefits including substantial emissions reductions, prolific positive economic impacts across the California economy, and development of a key technology needed worldwide to meet future energy transition targets. The FEED for the Cal Capture project is expected to be completed by the end of 2020, which would position the project for permitting, construction and commissioning by mid-decade”, said Shawn Kerns, CRC Executive Vice President of Operations and Engineering.

Moreover, two projects, the San Juan Generating Station and CRC’s CalCapture facility, are also evaluating plans for stacked storage, using both geologic storage with enhanced oil recovery, as well as dedicated storage in saline formations.

Oxy Low Carbon Ventures (LCV) has teamed up with LaFarge Holcim and Total to evaluate the capture of CO2 from a cement plant in Colorado, and Oxy LCV also intends to store CO2 from Velocys’ biofuel production, delivering negative emissions.

The facilities update comes on the heels of continued momentum for CCS, including the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line becoming fully operational, a positive investment decision by Equinor, Shell, and Total for the Northern Lights project, supportive policy momentum in Australia, and a $131 million funding announcement by the US Department of Energy.

View the Global CCS Institute database at co2re.co

Lucy Temple-Smith (Melbourne): +61 466 982 068 lucy.temple-smith@globalccsinstitute.com
Guloren Turan (London): + 44 782 505 7765 guloren.turan@globalccsinstitute.comAbout the Global CCS Institute: The Global CCS Institute is an international think tank whose mission is to accelerate the deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS), a vital technology to tackle climate change and provide energy security. For more information, visit http://www.globalccsinstitute.com

https://www.globalccsinstitute.com/news-media/press-room/media-releases/carbon-capture-and-storage-pipeline-grows-by-10-large-scale-facilities-globally/

Location(s):
CCS Projects

The technique, known as enhanced rock weathering, involves spreading finely crushed basalt, a natural volcanic rock, on fields to boost the soil’s ability to extract CO2 from the air.

In the first nation-by-nation assessment, published in Nature, scientists have demonstrated the method’s potential for carbon drawdown by major economies, and identified the costs and engineering challenges of scaling up the approach to help meet ambitious global CO2 removal targets. The research was led by experts at the University of Sheffield’s Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation, and the University’s Energy Institute.

Meeting the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global heating to below 2C above pre-industrial levels requires drastic cuts in emissions, as well as the active removal of between two and 10 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. This new research provides a detailed initial assessment of enhanced rock weathering, a large-scale CO2 removal strategy that could make a major contribution to this effort.

The authors’ detailed analysis captures some of the uncertainties in enhanced weathering CO2 drawdown calculations and, at the same time, identifies the additional areas of uncertainty that future work needs to address specifically through large-scale field trials.

The study showed that China, the United States and India – the highest fossil fuel CO2 emitters – have the highest potential for CO2 drawdown using rock dust on croplands. Together, these countries have the potential to remove approximately 1 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere, at a cost comparable to that of other proposed carbon dioxide removal strategies (US$80-180 per tonne of CO2).

Indonesia and Brazil, whose CO2 emissions are 10-20 times lower than the US and China, were also found to have relatively high CO2 removal potential due to their extensive agricultural lands, and climates accelerating the efficiency of rock weathering.

The scientists suggest that meeting the demand for rock dust to undertake large-scale CO2 drawdown might be achieved by using stockpiles of silicate rock dust left over from the mining industry, and are calling for governments to develop national inventories of these materials.

Calcium-rich silicate by-products of iron and steel manufacturing, as well as waste cement from construction and demolition, could also be processed and used in this way, improving the sustainability of these industries. These materials are usually recycled as low value aggregate, stockpiled at production sites or disposed of in landfills. China and India could supply the rock dust necessary for large-scale CO2 drawdown with their croplands using entirely recycled materials in the coming decades.

The technique would be straightforward to implement for farmers, who already tend to add agricultural lime to their soils. The researchers are calling for policy innovation that could support multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals using this technology. Government incentives to encourage agricultural application of rock dust could improve soil and farm livelihoods, as well as reduce CO2, potentially benefiting the world’s 2.5 billion smallholders and reducing poverty and hunger.

Professor David Beerling, Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation at the University of Sheffield and lead author of the study, said: “Carbon dioxide drawdown strategies that can scale up and are compatible with existing land uses are urgently required to combat climate change, alongside deep and sustained emissions cuts.

“Spreading rock dust on agricultural land is a straightforward, practical CO2 drawdown approach with the potential to boost soil health and food production. Our analyses reveal the big emitting nations – China, the US, India – have the greatest potential to do this, emphasizing their need to step up to the challenge. Large-scale Research Development and Demonstration programs, similar to those being pioneered by our Leverhulme Centre, are needed to evaluate the efficacy of this technology in the field.”

Professor Steven Banwart, a partner in the study and Director of the Global Food and Environment Institute, said: “The practice of spreading crushed rock to improve soil pH is commonplace in many agricultural regions worldwide. The technology and infrastructure already exist to adapt these practices to utilize basalt rock dust. This offers a potentially rapid transition in agricultural practices to help capture CO2 at large scale.”

Professor James Hansen, a partner in the study and Director of the Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions Program at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, said: “We have passed the safe level of greenhouse gases. Cutting fossil fuel emissions is crucial, but we must also extract atmospheric CO2 with safe, secure and scalable carbon dioxide removal strategies to bend the global CO2 curve and limit future climate change. The advantage of CO2 removal with crushed silicate rocks is that it could restore deteriorating top-soils, which underpin food security for billions of people, thereby incentivizing deployment.”

Professor Nick Pidgeon, a partner in the study and Director of the Understanding Risk Group at Cardiff University, said: “Greenhouse gas removal may well become necessary as we approach 2050, but we should not forget that it also raises profound ethical questions regarding our relationship with the natural environment. Its development should therefore be accompanied by the widest possible public debate as to potential risks and benefits.”

Reference: “Potential for large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands” by David J. Beerling, Euripides P. Kantzas, Mark R. Lomas, Peter Wade, Rafael M. Eufrasio, Phil Renforth, Binoy Sarkar, M. Grace Andrews, Rachael H. James, Christopher R. Pearce, Jean-Francois Mercure, Hector Pollitt, Philip B. Holden, Neil R. Edwards, Madhu Khanna, Lenny Koh, Shaun Quegan, Nick F. Pidgeon, Ivan A. Janssens, James Hansen and Steven A. Banwart, 8 July 2020, Nature.

https://scitechdaily.com/shockingly-simple-how-farmland-could-absorb-an-extra-2-billion-tonnes-of-co2-from-the-atmosphere-each-year/

Meantime, a study at ETH Zurich suggests that a massive expansion of the world’s forests by 1/3 could be the most effective way to tackle climate change. That’s the opposite of cutting forests for biomass purposes. Let the trees stay in place and suck up CO2. (Source: Billions of Extra Trees May Give Us 20 Years to Tackle Climate Change, NewScientist, July 4, 2019).

According to the study, the influx of 1/3 more trees would buy humanity time by adding 20 years to meet climate targets. By keeping that many additional trees rather than felling, it effectively “locks-up 205 gigatonnes of CO2.” It’s significant as humanity emits 37 gigatonnes per year. Additionally, the “scale up of the world’s forests by one-third” helps meet IPCC guidelines to hold temp rises to 1.5°C pre-industrial, assuming temperatures are not already overshooting, an issue of some contention. Which depends a lot upon which baseline is used.

The tradeoff between “saving/enlarging forests” rather than “burning trees” is consequential for several reasons, including, the U.S. Energy Information Agency estimates that for each 1% added to current U.S. electricity production from forest biomass an additional 18% increase in U.S. forest harvest is required. At that rate, by the time woody biomass is a meaningful slice of electricity production, the nation’s forests would be leveled.

How long does it take forests to regrow?

Furthermore, is it really possible to regrow a natural efficient forest ecosystem once it has been denuded of key organic life? No.

A Columbia University study argues for leaving trees alone: “Is Biomass Really Renewable?” State of the Planet, Earth Institute/Columbia University, Updated October 19, 2016, to wit: “Cutting or clearing forests for energy, either to burn trees or to plant energy crops, releases carbon into the atmosphere that would have been sequestered had the trees remained untouched, and the regrowing and thus recapture of carbon can take decades or even a century. Moreover, carbon is emitted in the biomass combustion process, resulting in a net increase of CO2.”

Additionally, according to the Columbia study: “Most of the new biomass electricity generating plants being proposed in the U.S. will burn wood. Plants in the Southeast U.S. are churning out wood pellets to meet Europe’s increasing need for wood. Last year, wood pellet exports from the Southeast increased 70 percent; the Southern U.S. is now the largest exporter of wood pellets in the world. Since there isn’t enough logging residue to meet the increased demand for biomass, many fear that more standing trees will be chopped and more forests clear-cut.”

The overriding issue is that woody biomass negatively impacts climate change, the health of people, and the overall environment. Yet, the market is growing by leaps and bounds in Europe and the U.S. Go figure!

According to Earth Institute, woody biomass power plants actually produce more “global warming CO2” than fossil fuel plants, i.e., 65% more CO2 per megawatt hour than modern coal plants and 285% more CO2 than natural gas combined cycle plants (which use both a gas and steam turbine together). This analysis confirms the conclusion of several similar university-level studies that woody biomass is inefficient and thus a sensible rationale for outright banning of woody biomass.

Furthermore, according to Earth Institute, burning wood biomass emits as much, if not more, air pollution than burning fossil fuels — particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, lead, mercury, and other hazardous air pollutants — which can cause cancer or reproductive effects.

The “air pollution emitted by biomass facilities,” which the American Heart Association and the American Lung Association have called “a danger to public health,” produces respiratory illnesses, heart disease, cancer, and developmental delays in children.” (Earth Institute)

Nevertheless, in 2009 the EU committed to 20% renewable energy by 2020, including biomass (heavily sourced by forests, especially from Canada and the U.S.) as a renewable energy, which it categorized as “carbon neutral.” This was done to meet obligations under the Paris climate agreement of 2015. Several other countries followed with commitments to “subsidize” biomass development.

As a result, today 50% of EU renewable energy is based upon biomass, and it is on the rise. Expect a command performance of massive growth by biomass in upcoming years.

For example, in the UK, the Drax Group converted 4 of 6 coal-generating units to biomass, powering 12% of UK electricity for 4 million households. The Drax biomass plant has an enormous appetite for wood, e.g., in less than two hours an entire freight train of wooden pellets goes up in smoke, spewing out smoke signals that spell “O Canada” and “Say, can you see. . . By the dawn’s early light.”

According to Drax’s PR department, their operation has slashed CO2 by over 80% since 2012, claiming to be “the largest decarbonization project in Europe.” (Source: Biomass Energy: Green or Dirty? Environment & Energy – Feature Article, Jan. 8, 2020)

Ahem! When scientists analyzed Drax’s claims, they do not hold up. Not even close!

When wood pellets burn, Drax assumes the released carbon is “recaptured instantly by new growth.” That is a fairy tale.

According to John Sherman, an expert on Complex Systems Analysis at MIT: The carbon debt payback time for forests in the eastern US, where Drax’s wood pellets originated, compared to burning coal, under the best-case scenario, when all harvested land regrows as a forest, the wood pellet “payback time” is 44 to 104 years. Whoa!

Alas, not only is the carbon payback nearly a lifetime when using wood, but according to Sherman: “Because the combustion and processing efficiencies for wood are less than coal, the immediate impact of substituting wood for coal is an increase in atmospheric CO2 relative to coal. This means that every megawatt-hour of electricity generated from wood produces more CO2 than if the power station had remained coal-fired.”

Study after study after study finds that burning coal instead of woody biomass reduces the impact of CO2 atmospheric emissions. Coal is the winner, but problematically coal has already been cast into no-man’s land as a horrific polluter. Therefore, this scenario is a massive complexity as countries have committed to using trees to meet carbon neutral status, but the end results are diametrical to their stated intentions.

Therefore, a preeminent question arises: Why continue using woody biomass if it emits more CO2 per kilowatt-hour than coal?

Alas, not only is it insane to burn trees, but burning “forest residues” rather than whole trees also produces a net emissions impact of 55%-79% greater than direct emissions after 10 years. This is based upon analysis by Mary Booth, an ecosystem ecologist and a director of the Partnership for Policy Integrity, Pelham, Massachusetts.

According to scientist Bill Moomaw, co-author of the Nobel Peace Prize-Winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and co-author of four additional IPCC reports and widely recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on “carbon sinks”: “If we let some of our forests grow, we could remove an additional 10 to 20 percent of what we emit every year. Instead, we’re paying subsidies to have people cut them down, burning them in place of coal, and counting it as zero carbon.” (Source: Europe’s Renewable Energy Policy is Built on Burning American Trees, Vox, Mar. 4, 2019 – this article was endorsed by the Pulitzer Center)

Dr. Moomaw led a group of 800 scientists that petitioned the EU parliament (Jan. 2018) to “end its support for biomass.”

In June 2018, the EU Commission voted to keep biomass listed as a renewable energy, joined in their position by the support of the U.S. and Britain.

Under the influence of U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, the 2018 fiscal spending bill, as directed by Congress, instructed federal agencies to pass policies that “reflect the carbon-neutrality of biomass.” Among the many benefits mentioned by Congress, three seem almost Orwellian. Oops, scratch that. They are Orwellian, to wit: “To promote environmental stewardship by improving soil and water quality, reducing wildfire risk, and helping ensure our forests continue to remove carbon from the atmosphere.”

Congress’s emphasis on biomass that fells trees “ensuring that our forests continue to remove carbon from the atmosphere.” Really?

What about reams upon reams of scientific analyses that conclude it is a huge mistake to fell forests for biomass?

In the final analysis, the sorrowful impact of woody biomass can be summed up by two short sentences: (1) Wood-pellet power plants emit more CO2 into the atmosphere than coal-powered plants. (2) If forests are left alone an additional 10% to 20% of human-generated CO2 emissions are absorbed by the forests every year. Ipso facto, nature does the dirty work all by itself. . .for free!

(Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and is a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.) Photo: Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
Title: The Biomass Fiasco
Author: Hunziker, Robert
Publication(s): City Watch
Date: 4 May 2020
Link: https://citywatchla.com/index.php/cw/los-angeles/19708-the-biomass-fiasco

Societies can take numerous steps to prevent the destruction. Eating less meat, which physicians say will improve our health anyway, will lessen demand for crops and pastures. Eating fewer processed foods will reduce the demand for palm oil—also a major feedstock for biofuels—much of which is grown on land clear-cut from tropical rain forests. The need for land also will ease if nations slow population growth—something that can happen in developing nations only if women are given better education, equal social status with men and easy access to affordable contraceptives.

Producing more food per hectare can boost supply without the need to clear more land. Developing crops that better resist drought will help, especially as climate change brings longer, deeper droughts. In dry regions of Africa and elsewhere, agroforestry techniques such as planting trees among farm fields can increase crop yields. Reducing food waste could also vastly lessen the pressure to grow more; 30 to 40 percent of all food produced is wasted.

As we implement these solutions, we can also find new outbreaks earlier. Epidemiologists want to tiptoe into wild habitats and test mammals known to carry coronaviruses — bats, rodents, badgers, civets, pangolins and monkeys — to map how the germs are moving. Public health officials could then test nearby humans. To be effective, though, this surveillance must be widespread and well funded. In September 2019, just months before the COVID-19 pandemic began, the U.S. Agency for International Development announced it would end funding for PREDICT, a 10-year effort to hunt for threatening microbes that found more than 1,100 unique viruses. USAID says it will launch a new surveillance program; we urge it to supply enough money this time to cast a wider and stronger net.

In the meantime, governments should prohibit the sale of live wild animals in so-called wet markets, where pathogens have repeatedly crossed over into humans. The markets may be culturally important, but the risk is too great. Governments must also crack down on illegal wildlife trade, which can spread infectious agents far and wide. In addition, we have to examine factory farms that pack thousands of animals together — the source of the 2009 swine flu outbreak that killed more than 10,000 people in the U.S. and multitudes worldwide.

Ending deforestation and thwarting pandemics would address six of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals: the guarantee of healthy lives, zero hunger, gender equality, responsible consumption and production, sustainably managed land, and climate action (intact tropical forests absorb carbon dioxide, whereas burning them sends more CO2 into the atmosphere).

The COVID-19 pandemic is a catastrophe, but it can rivet our attention on the enormous payoffs that humanity can achieve by not overexploiting the natural world. Pandemic solutions are sustainability solutions.”

Preservation Green Lab, the Trust’s sustainability think tank, has published a new study today examining this that puts big numbers behind the finding that the greenest buildings aren’t in fact state-of-the-art ones; they’re the ones we already have.
Retrofit an existing building to make it 30 percent more efficient, the study found, and it will essentially always remain a better bet for the environment than a new building built tomorrow with the same efficiencies. Take that new, more efficient building, though, and compare its life cycle to an average existing structure with no retrofitting, and it could still take up to 80 years for the new one to make up for the environmental impact of its initial construction.

The Arctic Ocean, where climate change has bitten deepest, may be changing faster than any other water body on Earth, said lead scientist Andrea Niemi of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

“As the Arctic changes, the rest of the ecosystem is going to track with those changes,” she said. “There isn’t going to be a delay.”

Changes are coming so fast scientists haven’t even had a chance to understand what’s there.

Sixty per cent of the species in the Canada Basin — like the worms found living in undersea mud volcanoes and living off expelled methane — are yet to be discovered, the report suggests.

“Who knows what else is down there?” Niemi asked. “So much in the Arctic, we’re still at step one.”

The first assessment of fish species in the Beaufort Sea wasn’t done until 2014, she said.

Changes hard to miss

Still, changes are hard to miss, right down to the makeup of the water.

It’s 33 per cent less salty than in 2003 and about 30 per cent more acidic — enough to dissolve the shells of some small molluscs.

The Beaufort Gyre, a vast circular current that has alternated direction every decade, hasn’t switched in 19 years.

Nutrient-rich water from the Pacific Ocean isn’t getting mixed in as it used to, which affects the plankton blooms that anchor the Arctic food web. Sea ice is shrinking and thinning to the point where Inuit communities can’t get to formerly dependable hunting grounds.

Shorelines are on the move. Erosion has more than doubled in the last few decades. The mix of species is changing.

Killer whales are becoming so frequent they’re altering the behaviour of other species such as narwhal and beluga that Inuit depend on. Pacific salmon, capelin and harp seals are moving up from the south.

“In some cases, the communities are putting out their nets and they’re just catching salmon,” Niemi said.

The effect of the salmon on other species is unknown.

Coastal fish species are being found much further offshore.

Ringed seals can’t finish moulting before the ice breaks up and accompanying high ocean temperatures seem to be making them sluggish and more prone to polar bear predation.

Humans are making their presence felt, too. Increased Arctic shipping is making the ocean noisier and masking the sounds animals from seals to whales use to communicate.

Lack of long-term data on the North

The report’s conclusions are hamstrung by a lack of long-term data all over the North.

Niemi said it’s hard to measure changes when you don’t know what was there in the first place. Even when the changes can be measured, it’s difficult to know what’s causing them.

Inuit communities want to know what’s going on in their home, she said. “They’re interested in a holistic view of what’s going on. But we’re just handcuffed sometimes to provide the mechanisms behind the changes.”

One thing is certain: The old idea of the frozen North, with its eternal snows and unchanging rhythms, is gone forever.

“People see it as a faraway frozen land,” Niemi said. “But there is much happening.””

Title: First Federal Assessment of Arctic Ocean Finds Drastic Change
Author: The Canadian Press
Publication(s): CBC North
Date: 27 April 2020
Link: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/arctic-ocean-assessment-change-1.5545655

The amount of carbon absorbed by cherry trees may pale in comparison to other types of trees, with Black walnut, horse-chestnut, Douglas fir and pine trees among some that are thought to be especially adept.

The average mature tree can absorb 48 tons per year according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Trees absorb emissions with a system of respiration that also releases oxygen. The carbon that is absorbed by trees is then sequestered in trunks, roots, branches and leaves. Trees that have reached at least 20 years of age are believed to absorb carbon better than young or very old trees.

A significant amount of carbon is eventually released back into the atmosphere, typically within a couple hundred years as the trees die and decay. Small amounts are also released during respiration and the overall amount of carbon that trees can capture is also finite.

Environmentalists have long proposed planting massive amounts of trees in an effort to counter climate change and many government programs around the world have already been planting trees to help increase forested areas.

Research from 2019 indicated that up to two thirds of emissions currently in the atmosphere could be absorbed, leading some scientists to promote tree-planting as a powerful tool to combat climate change.

“[Forest] restoration isn’t just one of our climate change solutions, it is overwhelmingly the top one,” researcher Professor Tom Crowther of the Swiss university ETH Zürich told The Guardian. “What blows my mind is the scale. I thought restoration would be in the top 10, but it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.”

However, other scientists have been less enthusiastic and insist that reducing overall emissions remains the most effective strategy to mitigate climate change. In order for tree-planting have a significant effect on the climate, a trillion trees may need to be planted.

Although opinions are divided, some have warned against relying on mass tree-planting schemes due to risks of upsetting the biodiversity of areas where the trees are planted.

“There is an idea that you can just buy land and plant trees but that’s too simplistic—there is a risk of doing more harm than good,” Nathalie Seddon, professor of biodiversity at the University of Oxford, told the BBC.”

Single Cherry Tree Can Offset 20 Pounds Of Carbon Emissions Each Year, New Study Says, by Slisco, Aila. Newsweek 7 April 2020
https://www.newsweek.com/single-cherry-tree-can-offset-20-pounds-carbon-emissions-each-year-new-study-says-1496698

Title: Scientists Create Mutant Enzyme That Recycles Plastic Bottles In Hours
Author: Carrington, Damian
Publication(s): The Guardian
Date: 8 April 2020
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/08/scientists-create-mutant-enzyme-that-recycles-plastic-bottles-in-hours

Article Excerpt(s):

“A mutant bacterial enzyme that breaks down plastic bottles for recycling in hours has been created by scientists.

The enzyme, originally discovered in a compost heap of leaves, reduced the bottles to chemical building blocks that were then used to make high-quality new bottles. Existing recycling technologies usually produce plastic only good enough for clothing and carpets.

The company behind the breakthrough, Carbios, said it was aiming for industrial-scale recycling within five years. It has partnered with major companies including Pepsi and L’Oréal to accelerate development. Independent experts called the new enzyme a major advance.

Billions of tonnes of plastic waste have polluted the planet, from the Arctic to the deepest ocean trench, and pose a particular risk to sea life. Campaigners say reducing the use of plastic is key, but the company said the strong, lightweight material was very useful and that true recycling was part of the solution.

The new enzyme was revealed in research published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. The work began with the screening of 100,000 micro-organisms for promising candidates, including the leaf compost bug, which was first discovered in 2012.

“It had been completely forgotten, but it turned out to be the best,” said Prof Alain Marty at the Université de Toulouse, France, the chief science officer at Carbios.

The scientists analysed the enzyme and introduced mutations to improve its ability to break down the PET plastic from which drinks bottles are made. They also made it stable at 72C, close to the perfect temperature for fast degradation.

The team used the optimised enzyme to break down a tonne of waste plastic bottles, which were 90% degraded within 10 hours. The scientists then used the material to create new food-grade plastic bottles.

Carbios has a deal with the biotechnology company Novozymes to produce the new enzyme at scale using fungi. It said the cost of the enzyme was just 4% of the cost of virgin plastic made from oil.

Waste bottles also have to be ground up and heated before the enzyme is added, so the recycled PET will be more expensive than virgin plastic. But Martin Stephan, the deputy chief executive at Carbios, said existing lower-quality recycled plastic sells at a premium due to a shortage of supply.

“We are the first company to bring this technology on the market,” said Stephan. “Our goal is to be up and running by 2024, 2025, at large industrial scale.”

He said a reduction in plastic use was one part of solving the waste problem. “But we all know that plastic brings a lot of value to society, in food, medical care, transportation. The problem is plastic waste.” Increasing the collection of plastic waste was key, Stephan said, with about half of all plastic ending up in the environment or in landfill.

Another team of scientists revealed in 2018 that they had accidentally created an enzyme that breaks down plastic drinks bottles. One of the team behind this advance, Prof John McGeehan, the director of the Centre for Enzyme Innovation at the University of Portsmouth, said Carbios was the leading company engineering enzymes to break down PET at large scale and that the new work was a major advance.

“It makes the possibility of true industrial-scale biological recycling of PET a possibility. This is a very large advance in terms of speed, efficiency and heat tolerance,” McGeehan said. “It represents a significant step forward for true circular recycling of PET and has the potential to reduce our reliance on oil, cut carbon emissions and energy use, and incentivise the collection and recycling of waste plastic.”

Scientists are also making progress in finding biological ways to break down other major types of plastic. In March, German researchers revealed a bug that feasts on toxic polyurethane, while earlier work has shown that wax moth larvae – usually bred as fish bait – can eat up polythene bags.”

We traveled to protected areas deep inside these countries to learn the superpowers of three tree species that play an unusually important part in staving off environmental disaster, not just locally, but globally. These trees play many ecological roles, but most impressive is how they produce rainfall, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and support hundreds of other species.

If these ecosystems collapse, the climate effects are likely to be irreversible. And so what happens to these forests truly affects all life on Earth.

This is the story of three trees at the center of our climate crisis that provide big benefits to you, me, and the world. Meet the trees, get to know their superpowers, and learn how scientists are trying to protect them.”

Eagle Island is only about 25 miles from Argentina’s Esperanza research base, which recorded the potentially record-high temperature on February 6. According to NASA climate models, the island experienced peak melt — about 1 inch — on that same day, leading to a loss of 4 inches total in a one-week period.

Eagle Island lost around 20% of seasonal snow accumulation in that single event, NASA said.

“I haven’t seen melt ponds develop this quickly in Antarctica,” Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist at Nichols College in Massachusetts, said in a NASA press release Friday. “You see these kinds of melt events in Alaska and Greenland, but not usually in Antarctica.”

According to Pelto, this kind of rapid melting is caused by sustained temperatures significantly above freezing, an almost-unheard-of phenomenon in Antarctica until the 21st century that’s become more common in recent years.

“If you think about this one event in February, it isn’t that significant,” said Pelto. “It’s more significant that these events are coming more frequently.”

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is still working to verify the record temperature, but the agency called the Antarctic Peninsula one of the faster warming regions on Earth.

The heatwave was the culmination of several atypical weather patterns off the coast of South America. Warm temperatures built up due to a ridge of high pressure over Cape Horn, Chile. While warm air is typically kept out of the peninsula by strong winds, the westerlies were in a weakened state, allowing warm air to reach the ice sheet.

Scientists also recently found warm water for the first time beneath a vital point of Antarctica’s “doomsday glacier,” a nickname for one of Antarctica’s fastest melting glaciers. The collapse of the 74,000-square-mile Thwaites could release a mass of water roughly the size of Florida or Great Britain, raising sea levels by more than three feet.

On Elephant Island, just slightly north of the peninsula, chinstrap penguins have suffered a 60% decline because of the increasing temperatures, researchers found. WMO researchers have also discovered that the average temperature in Antarctica has increased by more than five degrees Fahrenheit over the last 50 years — a rate five times the global average.

First published on February 22, 2020 / 2:58 PM
© 2020 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Sophie Lewis is a social media producer and trending writer for CBS News, focusing on space and climate change.

The ecological damage produced by a traditional house is not only the consequence of the energy used during its lifetime, but also through the building materials required to construct it

Earthships are the brainchild of American architect Michael Reynolds, who first put the concept into practice in the seventies, during the first oil crisis. Sharp falling energy prices in the 80’s and 90’s restricted the idea for a long time to mostly anarchistic communities and individuals. Recently however, this revolutionary architecture is slowly gaining credibility in other sections of society. Oil prices continue to climb and uneasiness surrounding global warming grows. Moreover, thanks to 30 years of evolution, many of the initial glitches Earthships faced have been ironed out.

The autonomous nature of an Earthship is not as revolutionary as it was 30 years ago. The technology required to generate energy, filter water and recycle waste water apart from the existing infrastructure has significantly advanced. What makes an Earthship special and interesting these days is that it is mainly built out of waste materials and partly buried into the earth.

Thick Walls:

The house has very thick walls, with a diameter of around one metre. The walls are not made from concrete or bricks, but from piled up car tyres covered with clay. Every tyre is filled with earth and then tamped down with a sledge-hammer. Depending on the climate, two to three walls are surrounded by a heaped up wall, or built into a slope. Combined with a sun lounge on the south side of the building (the north side on the southern hemisphere) the construction provides a natural heating and cooling system.

The solar heat that enters the house through the large windows is absorbed by the thick walls. The walls have a large thermal mass thanks to the car tyres and the earth – insulation is extremely effective. During the night and on cloudy days, the heat is then slowly released. The same system cools the house in summer, as the surrounding earth and the car tyres are colder than the open air. Thanks to this natural air-conditioning, the inside temperature varies from 17 to 24 degrees all year round.

“No matter how sensible the idea is, building houses with car tyres and aluminium beer cans sounds ludicrous to most politicians”

Scrapped car tyres are the foundations of an Earthship. They are the key to the natural air-conditioning system and they take care of the solidity of the bearing walls. For non-bearing walls, aluminium cans or glass bottles are used. The roof and the veranda are made of wood. While the wood can be re-used, in many instances new wood is preferred. Because the tyres are completely packed in earth, the walls are also fireproof – it is impossible for oxygen to reach the rubber. During a forest fire in New Mexico, the interior of an Earthship was completely destroyed, but the walls were left intact.

Building houses out of car tyres and cans might sound unconventional, but the ecological benefit is so large that the concept deserves to be given some serious consideration. The fact that an Earthship does not use fossil fuels for heating or electricity (and therefore emits no CO2) is not even its most important advantage. By using waste material, the result is even better.

40 million car tyres = 40,000 Earthships

Firstly, great amounts of waste materials can be utilized. In the United Kingdom alone, 40 million car tyres are dumped annually. The project in Brighton uses a thousand tyres for one house, which theoretically means that with the yearly UK supply of dumped tyres, 40,000 Earthships could be built.

Furthermore, one is re-using, not recycling; a much greener option than grinding down tyres to produce speed bumps for example, since the waste is not undergoing an additional industrial, energy consuming process.

Secondly, and even more importantly, by using waste materials, thousands upon thousands of tonnes of building materials could be saved; concrete, mortar and bricks. The ecological damage produced by a traditional house is not only the consequence of the energy used during its lifetime, but also through the building materials required to construct it.

More traditional shapes may help with the general acceptance of this type of building method by the general public

Concrete production is one of the most energy-intensive industrial processes that exist. The sector is responsible for ten percent of global CO2-emissions, which makes it the third highest producer of greenhouse gases (following transport and energy production). Thus, building houses using waste materials (whether the buildings are self-sufficient or not) is an environmental advantage in more ways than one.

Old buildings are often demolished with the argument that replacement buildings have better insulation and therefore consume less energy. What is being overlooked is that both the pulling down of the old house as well as the building of the new house implicates a huge amount of building materials and energy (embodied energy), which completely negate the advantages of better insulation.

And the cost?

Using waste materials does not necessarily mean than an Earthship is cheaper than a traditional house – the homes on offer in Brighton will even be slightly more expensive due to the labour intensive nature of the Earthship (labour is taxed much more heavily than use of energy or materials). Although, once the house is built, the extra investment is quickly recovered as there are no gas, water or electricity bills.

Building an Earthship yourself with some friends could be very cheap, but is time consuming. The largest Earthships in the United States took almost ten years to build. If you build one on your own, the biggest cost would be the purchasing of solar panels and batteries, followed by the large windows, pumps and filters. Waste materials could be delivered for free, as people have to pay to get rid of them.

Unconventional and revolutionary ideas need to be adopted if we want to help prevent a worldwide fight for energy.

At the moment, there are only a handful of Earthships in Europe, with half of them built illegally, but the concept following is strong, with various national organisations promoting the idea. The most pressing problem is obtaining a building permit. No matter how sensible the idea is, building houses with car tyres and aluminium beer cans sounds ludicrous to most politicians.

Most Earthships in the US take on an unconventional form. They have fairy-tale like features that remind one of the works of architects like Gaudí and Hundertwasser. But others, like the 16 Earthships being built in Brighton (picture above), hardly look any different from conventional houses. These more traditional forms may help with the general acceptance of this type of building method by the general public.

Built up environments

Until now, most Earthships were built in isolated places, where most people live in built-up urban environments. The problem with the feasibility of an Earthship is the size of the plot on which it is built. This plot is significantly larger than the size of a conventional house.

But the idea is flexible enough to adapt to different situations. When an Earthship is built, earth mounds are formed, which in turn may provide support for another Earthship, and so on. The result would be revolutionary and unconventional. However, in response to the recent warnings from the International Energy Agency, unconventional and revolutionary ideas need to be adopted if we want to help prevent a worldwide fight for energy.
Low Tech Magazine, 29 December 2007

[…]
“The vast majority of Russia’s greenhouse gases are emitted by the energy industry (78.9%). Nearly half of these emissions come from the production of electricity and heat for the general population, while the rest largely come from the production of solid fuels, petroleum refining and fuels used in transportation.

Russia’s industrial production accounts for a further 10.8% of total greenhouse gas emissions — with metals production accounting for most. Agriculture makes up another 5.9% of total emissions and waste 4.4%.”

[…]
“Meanwhile, the plan lists possible economic benefits for Russia from climate change that must be exploited — like increased access along the Northern Sea Route due to melting ice and more space for agriculture and livestock.”

The modern glass greenhouse, often located in temperate climates where winters can be cold, requires massive inputs of energy, mainly for heating but also for artificial lighting and humidity control.

According to the FAO, crops grown in heated greenhouses have energy intensity demands around 10 to 20 times those of the same crops grown in open fields. A heated greenhouse requires around 40 megajoule of energy to grow one kilogram of fresh produce, such as tomatoes and peppers Source — page 15. This makes greenhouse-grown crops as energy-intensive as pork meat (40-45 MJ/kg in the USA).”

Low Tech Magazine, 24 Dec. 2015.

In 1987, 197 countries agreed to phase out their use of ozone-depleting substances by ratifying the Montréal Protocol. The success of this historic international agreement has reduced the emissions of CFCs to nearly zero; however, the recovery of the ozone hole has been slower as CFCs remain in the atmosphere for decades.

Due to the effect of ozone-depleting substances on the ozone layer, climate scientists who study these chemicals and their climate impacts have been focused on the consequences of ozone depletion. The climate impact of ozone-depleting substances themselves has been typically considered small given the very tiny concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere, and has been largely unexplored.

Experimenting with climate models

My colleagues and I were interested in understanding how ozone-depleting substances might have influenced late-20th century warming from 1995 to 2005. We specifically chose this time period in order to capture the rapid rise in ozone-depleting substances in the atmosphere over this time. Since the early 2000s, atmospheric concentrations have been declining.

One way that climate scientists approach problems like this one is to use computer models of the Earth to understand what the effects of different phenomena, such as volcanic eruptions and greenhouse gases such as methane, might have on air temperatures, ocean circulation patterns, rainfall and so on.
To explore the contribution of ozone-depleting substances to late-20th century warming, we ran a climate model over the period from 1955 to 2005. One of the simulations incorporated all of the various historical climate drivers – those that warm the climate, like carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone-depleting substances, and those that cool the climate, like volcanic particulate matter. The second simulation had all the historical climate drivers, except the ozone-depleting substances.

This is one of the first times the role of ozone-depleting substances had been isolated. Typically, climate model experiments that examine the roles of different climate drivers will lump all greenhouses gases together.

Comparing the two model simulations revealed that global warming was reduced by a third and Arctic warming by half when the ozone-depleting substances were not included in our simulation.

Arctic amplification

Why do ozone-depleting substances have such a large impact despite their very small atmospheric concentrations? First, these chemicals are very potent greenhouse gases, a fact that we have known for a long time. Second, in the late-20th century, warming from carbon dioxide was partially cancelled out by the cooling that comes from particulate matter in the atmosphere, allowing CFCs and other ozone-depleting substances to contribute substantially to warming.

Finally, when it comes to Arctic amplification, we know that this phenomenon arises from feedbacks within the climate system that act to enhance warming, and this is exactly what we find in our model simulations. In the simulation without ozone-depleting substances, the climate feedbacks were weaker than in the simulation with them, resulting in less Arctic amplification.

Understanding why the feedbacks differ is the aim of our future research but, in the meantime, our work clearly demonstrates the significant impact of ozone-depleting substances on Arctic climate.

Thirty years ago, those who signed the Montréal Protocol were not thinking about climate change. Yet, research such as ours underscores the important role this agreement will play in mitigating future warming as the concentrations of ozone-depleting substances decline over time.

That said, without massive reductions in carbon dioxide emissions in the coming decades, the gains we will achieve through the Montréal Protocol will be quickly overwhelmed. Further action is needed to protect the Arctic – and our planet.
The Conversation

“According to our framework, iron fertilization cannot have a significant overall effect on the amount of carbon in the ocean because the total amount of iron that microbes need is already just right,” says lead author Jonathan Lauderdale, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

The paper’s co-authors are Rogier Braakman, Gael Forget, Stephanie Dutkiewicz, and Mick Follows at MIT.

Ligand soup

The iron that phytoplankton depend on to grow comes largely from dust that sweeps over the continents and eventually settles in ocean waters. While huge quantities of iron can be deposited in this way, the majority of this iron quickly sinks, unused, to the seafloor.

“The fundamental problem is, marine microbes require iron to grow, but iron doesn’t hang around. Its concentration in the ocean is so miniscule that it’s a treasured resource,” Lauderdale says.

Hence, scientists have put forth iron fertilization as a way to introduce more iron into the system. But iron availability to phytoplankton is much higher if it is bound up with certain organic compounds that keep iron in the surface ocean and are themselves produced by phytoplankton. These compounds, known as ligands, constitute what Lauderdale describes as a “soup of ingredients” that typically come from organic waste products, dead cells, or siderophores—molecules that the microbes have evolved to bind specifically with iron.

Not much is known about these iron-trapping ligands at the ecosystem scale, and the team wondered what role the molecules play in regulating the ocean’s capacity to promote the growth of phytoplankton and ultimately absorb carbon dioxide.
Read more

“People have understood how ligands bind iron, but not what are the emergent properties of such a system at the global scale, and what that means for the biosphere as a whole,” Braakman says. “That’s what we’ve tried to model here.”

Iron sweet spot

The researchers set out to characterize the interactions between iron, ligands, and macronutrients such as nitrogen and phosphate, and how these interactions affect the global population of phytoplankton and, concurrently, the ocean’s capacity to store carbon dioxide.

The team developed a simple three-box model, with each box representing a general ocean environment with a particular balance of iron versus macronutrients. The first box represents remote waters such as the Southern Ocean, which typically have a decent concentration of macronutrients that are upwelled from the deep ocean. They also have a low iron content given their great distance from any continental dust source.

The second box represents the North Atlantic and other waters that have an opposite balance: high in iron because of proximity to dusty continents, and low in macronutrients. The third box is a stand-in for the deep ocean, which is a rich source of macronutrients, such as phosphates and nitrates.

The researchers simulated a general circulation pattern between the three boxes to represent the global currents that connect all the world’s oceans: The circulation starts in the North Atlantic and dives down into the deep ocean, then upwells into the Southern Ocean and returns back to the North Atlantic.

The team set relative concentrations of iron and macronutrients in each box, then ran the model to see how phytoplankton growth evolved in each box over 10,000 years. They ran 10,000 simulations, each with different ligand properties.

Out of their simulations, the researchers identified a crucial positive feedback loop between ligands and iron. Oceans with higher concentrations of ligands had also higher concentrations of iron available for phytoplankton to grow and produce more ligands. When microbes have more than enough iron to feast on, they consume as much of the other nutrients they need, such as nitrogen and phosphate, until those nutrients have been completely depleted.

The opposite is true for oceans with low ligand concentrations: These have less iron available for phytoplankton growth, and therefore have very little biological activity in general, leading to less macronutrient consumption.

The researchers also observed in their simulations a narrow range of ligand concentrations that resulted in a sweet spot, where there was just the right amount of ligand to make just enough iron available for phytoplankton growth, while also leaving just the right amount of macronutrients left over to sustain a whole new cycle of growth across all three ocean boxes.

When they compared their simulations to measurements of nutrient, iron, and ligand concentrations taken in the real world, they found their simulated sweet spot range turned out to be the closest match. That is, the world’s oceans appear to have just the right amount of ligands, and therefore iron, available to maximize the growth of phytoplankton and optimally consume macronutrients, in a self-reinforcing and self-sustainable balance of resources.

If scientists were to widely fertilize the Southern Ocean or any other iron-depleted waters with iron, the effort would temporarily stimulate phytoplankton to grow and take up all the macronutrients available in that region. But eventually there would be no macronutrients left to circulate to other regions like the North Atlantic, which depends on these macronutrients, along with iron from dust deposits, for phytoplankton growth. The net result would be an eventual decrease in phytoplankton in the North Atlantic and no significant increase in carbon dioxide draw-down globally.

Lauderdale points out there may also be other unintended effects to fertilizing the Southern Ocean with iron.

“We have to consider the whole ocean as this interconnected system,” says Lauderdale, who adds that if phytoplankton in the North Atlantic were to plummet, so too would all the marine life on up the food chain that depends on the microscopic organisms.

“Something like 75 percent of production north of the Southern Ocean is fueled by nutrients from the Southern Ocean, and the northern oceans are where most fisheries are and where many ecosystem benefits for people occur,” Lauderdale says. “Before we dump loads of iron and draw down nutrients in the Southern Ocean, we should consider unintended consequences downstream that potentially make the environmental situation a lot worse.”

Mindful of the old adage “garbage in, garbage out,” composting plants that want to produce and sell higher grades of compost need to be careful about what raw materials they take.

In the case of the B.C. facility, Antler offered to remove the stickers from the avocados, but the composting plant manager declined. “He just sent the truck away, so that material went to landfill.” She’s pretty sure it happens all the time. “The scale of waste is massive.”

It’s not just a waste — it could also speed up climate change.

At a compost plant, organic matter typically decomposes in the presence of oxygen, generating CO2 and compost that can nourish plants. At a landfill, it decomposes without oxygen into methane, a greenhouse gas that has about 30 times the global warming impact of CO2 over a century. (Some organics plants use anaerobic digestion, which also generates methane, but it is captured and burned so it doesn’t go into the atmosphere.)

But there are solutions, including other ways to affix the PLU to bulk fruits and veggies, such as:

1) Paper stickers or certified compostable plastic stickers, which have been successfully tested in the U.S.
2) Ink stamps like the ones used to label eggs.
3) “Branding” with lasers.

Proctor said produce sellers often don’t see the extra investment as worthwhile when many customers don’t have access to municipal composting. She added that the recent introduction of scannable barcodes on PLU stickers — which Canadian stores are expected to adopt soon — requires the labels to show fine detail and maintain durability, which only plastic enables.

In the meantime, you can help by making sure you take the little stickers off your fruit and veggie peels and rinds before tossing them in your green bin at home.”

Rapid melting of the Arctic sea ice and the Arctic glaciers is predicted to have negative global effects. Melting of glaciers will result in rising sea levels globally, threatening the existence of many island states. Many large cities will also need to invest in expensive climate change mitigation enterprises, such as increasing the height and extent of dykes and barriers. Two obvious examples are New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and New York/New Jersey during hurricane Sandy. Rising sea levels and a likely increase in frequency and violence of hurricanes is a toxic mix for low-lying cities and countries.

Massive melting of ice in the Arctic might also, according to some scientists, force the Gulf Stream to take a more southerly course, which will result in a much colder northern Europe. So even in a global warming scenario, there might be regions that will experience colder weather and climate.

HFO is a dirty and polluting fossil fuel that powers ships around the world. Around 75% of marine fuel currently carried in the Arctic is HFO, over half by vessels flagged to non-Arctic states — countries that have little if any connection to the Arctic. Combined with an increase in Arctic state-flagged vessels targeting previously non-accessible resources, this will greatly increase the risk of an HFO spill.

If HFO is spilled in the colder waters of the Arctic, it breaks down even more slowly than in warmer waters, with long-term devastating effects on both livelihoods and ecosystems.

HFO is a larger source of high emissions of harmful air pollutants — such as sulphur oxide, nitrogen oxide and particulate matter, including black carbon — than alternative fuels such as distillate and liquid natural gas. When emitted and deposited on Arctic snow or ice, the climate warming effect of black carbon is five times more than when emitted at lower latitudes, such as in the tropics.

Mitigating risks

Canada along with Finland, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway and the US have now proposed, in time for next week’s 71st meeting of the IMO’s Marine Environment Protection Committee, that work begins on mitigating the risks of use and carriage of HFO as fuel by ships in the Arctic. The European Parliament has broadly supported this move by adopting its resolution calling for a ban on the use of HFO in Arctic waters.

Meanwhile, Danish Shipping (the association of Danish shipowners) and Arctic expedition cruise operator Hurtigruten, among others, have called for regulation banning the use of HFO in the Arctic.

The submission from Canada et al is a request for a new output from the IMO, hence there are no concrete text amendments proposed. However, it is already embedded in Marpol Annex I that carriage of Heavy Grade Oil in the Antarctic, ie south of latitude 60 S, is prohibited. Heavy Grade Oil is defined as oil with a density greater than 900 kg/m3 or a viscosity (at 50°C) of 180 centistokes (cSt) or above. Thus, drafting of the relevant text to introduce a similar ban in the Arctic would be the least of the challenges.

It is noteworthy that the proposal will cover only the carriage of HFO as fuel, not as cargo. There are huge known oil reserves in the region, not least in the Russian Arctic, and a possible ban of transporting this at sea would presently not be feasible. Oil transported as cargo will most certainly be carried on board double-hulled tankers, whereas the requirement to double side skin protection of fuel tanks has taken effect only for ships built after January 1 this year.

It is also interesting that Canada et al in the submission do not use the damaging effects of Black Carbon as part of the rationale for a ban.

In October 2016, the IMO at MEPC 70 decided that from January 1, 2020, all ships operating outside Emission Control Areas must not burn fuel oil with a sulphur content above 0.5% (by mass). When that rule was adopted in 2008, it was believed that such future fuel oil would be distillate, either marine gas oil or marine diesel oil.

One could then suggest that the problem of carriage of HFO in the Arctic would resolve itself by 2020.

Well, if only the world were so simple.

In connection with the 0.1% sulphur limit in ECAs in 2015, the world saw a number of new fuels that did not fall under the traditional definition of distillate fuel. It is expected that the 2020 global cap of 0.5% sulphur limit will see the introduction of many new fuels. Some of these are expected to be based on de-sulphurised HFO derived from sweet crude, others might be blends of HFO with low-sulphur products. It could even be new oil products that the world has not yet seen.

It should thus be evident that a carriage ban only on HFO as fuel might not solve the potential problem. Whether the definitions of Heavy Grade Oil, as used for the Antarctic, will suffice is not for this author to judge. It would be recommended to involve refinery and bunker experts to ensure a robust definition of a fuel ban in the Arctic.

At this July’s MEPC meeting, IMO member states must not only support the action proposed by Canada and others to mitigate the risks of HFO use in the Arctic, they must commit to any measures taken by the IMO to reduce these risks — including a ban.”

Much later, around 1998, I got involved in the International Maritime Organization’s work on drafting the Polar Code. The first draft was brought to the IMO by Canada, but it needed quite some work in order to appear as an IMO document. The first version was adopted in 2002 as a set of voluntary guidelines, whereas the present version, which entered into force on January 1 this year, is a mandatory IMO Code under both the Solas and the Marpol Conventions.

Looking again at this year’s ice chart, it appears that the areas I visited back in 1979 will be open to ship traffic much earlier and the navigable window will be much longer.

Is that good? Well, from a purely navigational view, an ice-free Arctic for half of the year would be convenient. Many tonne-miles would be saved and thereby less fuel burned on a global basis, which arguably could have a mitigating effect of shipping on climate change and even delay the 2°C temperature increase scenario by several weeks. But overall, is this significantly beneficial compared with the negative side-effects of global warming, and the potential impacts of burning heavy fuel oil in the Arctic?

Rapid melting of the Arctic sea ice and the Arctic glaciers is predicted to have negative global effects. Melting of glaciers will result in rising sea levels globally, threatening the existence of many island states. Many large cities will also need to invest in expensive climate change mitigation enterprises, such as increasing the height and extent of dykes and barriers. Two obvious examples are New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and New York/New Jersey during hurricane Sandy. Rising sea levels and a likely increase in frequency and violence of hurricanes is a toxic mix for low-lying cities and countries.

Massive melting of ice in the Arctic might also, according to some scientists, force the Gulf Stream to take a more southerly course, which will result in a much colder northern Europe. So even in a global warming scenario, there might be regions that will experience colder weather and climate.

HFO is a dirty and polluting fossil fuel that powers ships around the world. Around 75% of marine fuel currently carried in the Arctic is HFO, over half by vessels flagged to non-Arctic states — countries that have little if any connection to the Arctic. Combined with an increase in Arctic state-flagged vessels targeting previously non-accessible resources, this will greatly increase the risk of an HFO spill.

If HFO is spilled in the colder waters of the Arctic, it breaks down even more slowly than in warmer waters, with long-term devastating effects on both livelihoods and ecosystems.

HFO is a larger source of high emissions of harmful air pollutants — such as sulphur oxide, nitrogen oxide and particulate matter, including black carbon — than alternative fuels such as distillate and liquid natural gas. When emitted and deposited on Arctic snow or ice, the climate warming effect of black carbon is five times more than when emitted at lower latitudes, such as in the tropics.

Mitigating risks

Canada along with Finland, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway and the US have now proposed, in time for next week’s 71st meeting of the IMO’s Marine Environment Protection Committee, that work begins on mitigating the risks of use and carriage of HFO as fuel by ships in the Arctic. The European Parliament has broadly supported this move by adopting its resolution calling for a ban on the use of HFO in Arctic waters.

Meanwhile, Danish Shipping (the association of Danish shipowners) and Arctic expedition cruise operator Hurtigruten, among others, have called for regulation banning the use of HFO in the Arctic.

The submission from Canada et al is a request for a new output from the IMO, hence there are no concrete text amendments proposed. However, it is already embedded in Marpol Annex I that carriage of Heavy Grade Oil in the Antarctic, ie south of latitude 60 S, is prohibited. Heavy Grade Oil is defined as oil with a density greater than 900 kg/m3 or a viscosity (at 50°C) of 180 centistokes (cSt) or above. Thus, drafting of the relevant text to introduce a similar ban in the Arctic would be the least of the challenges.

It is noteworthy that the proposal will cover only the carriage of HFO as fuel, not as cargo. There are huge known oil reserves in the region, not least in the Russian Arctic, and a possible ban of transporting this at sea would presently not be feasible. Oil transported as cargo will most certainly be carried on board double-hulled tankers, whereas the requirement to double side skin protection of fuel tanks has taken effect only for ships built after January 1 this year.

It is also interesting that Canada et al in the submission do not use the damaging effects of Black Carbon as part of the rationale for a ban.
In October 2016, the IMO at MEPC 70 decided that from January 1, 2020, all ships operating outside Emission Control Areas must not burn fuel oil with a sulphur content above 0.5% (by mass). When that rule was adopted in 2008, it was believed that such future fuel oil would be distillate, either marine gas oil or marine diesel oil.

One could then suggest that the problem of carriage of HFO in the Arctic would resolve itself by 2020.

Well, if only the world were so simple.

In connection with the 0.1% sulphur limit in ECAs in 2015, the world saw a number of new fuels that did not fall under the traditional definition of distillate fuel. It is expected that the 2020 global cap of 0.5% sulphur limit will see the introduction of many new fuels. Some of these are expected to be based on de-sulphurised HFO derived from sweet crude, others might be blends of HFO with low-sulphur products. It could even be new oil products that the world has not yet seen.

It should thus be evident that a carriage ban only on HFO as fuel might not solve the potential problem. Whether the definitions of Heavy Grade Oil, as used for the Antarctic, will suffice is not for this author to judge. It would be recommended to involve refinery and bunker experts to ensure a robust definition of a fuel ban in the Arctic.

At this July’s MEPC meeting, IMO member states must not only support the action proposed by Canada and others to mitigate the risks of HFO use in the Arctic, they must commit to any measures taken by the IMO to reduce these risks — including a ban.”

Shipping emissions are an invisible killer that cause lung cancer and heart disease, a new study has found, but researchers say the 60,000 deaths they cause each year could be significantly cut by exhaust filtration devices.

The University of Rostock and the German environmental research centre Helmholzzentrum Munich have established a firm link between shipping exhaust emissions and serious diseases, that cost European health services €58 billion annually.

Conventional ship engines that burn heavy fuel oil or diesel fuel emit high concentrations of harmful substances including heavy metals, hydrocarbons and sulphur, as well as carcinogenic particulate matter (PM).

People in coastal areas are particularly at risk, researchers said. Up to half of PM-related air pollution in coastal areas, rivers and ports comes from ship emissions, according to the study.

Lief Miller, the CEO of conservation NGO NABU, said, “The results are frightening and confirm our worst fears. Emissions from ships cause serious lung and heart diseases.”

Fine particle emissions have been linked to increased health risks for decades. Although substantial efforts have been made to reduce the sulphur and diesel soot emissions from cars and lorries, no comparable efforts have been made for the shipping sector.

The NGO Transport & Environment said, “Marine fuel is 2,700 times dirtier than road diesel and €35 billion of fuel tax is paid yearly in Europe for road transport, while shipping uses tax-free fuel.”

Given that shipping accounts for over one fifth of global fuel consumption, the fact that its emissions are not more strictly regulated is cause for concern.

Improving air quality through exhaust filtration

For the researchers, legislation enforcing particle filtration and PM limits in shipping is the “next logical target for improving air quality worldwide, particularly in coastal regions and harbour cities”.

Dietmar Oeliger, NABU’s transport expert, said, “We really underline the recommendation of the scientists to urgently switch to low sulphur fuels together with effective emission abatement techniques.”

The most effective method of cleaning up emissions from shipping is to combine PM filters with low-sulphur fuels, a measure that has long been in place on the roads.

Other options include converting ships’ engines to run on gas or retrofitting them with exhaust gas cleaning systems known as “scrubbers”.

Controlling sulphur emissions

The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) has capped the sulphur content of shipping fuel at 3.5%. By 2020, the IMO will limit sulphur content in ship’s fuel to 0.5% worldwide.

In many of Europe’s coastal waters the limit is 1%, and as of January 2015, the limit in the Sulphur Emission Control Areas (SECAs) of the North and the Baltic Seas is just 0.1%.

According to Transport & Environment, the health benefits from the implementation of the new stricter SECAs are projected to be worth up to €23 billion.

But these limits are not strictly enforced, and the options available for reducing sulphur and PM emissions remain too expensive for the majority of ship operators.

As well as severe health risks to humans, sulphur causes acid rain and leads to a host of environmental problems including soil and water quality degradation and damage to biodiversity.

“We need meaningful measures to incentivise the uptake of cleaner marine fuels as a stepping stone towards cleaning up the sector,” said Sotiris Raptis, clean shipping officer at Transport & Environment.
EURACTIV, June 10, 2016

Lief Miller, the CEO of conservation NGO NABU, said, “The results are frightening and confirm our worst fears. Emissions from ships cause serious lung and heart diseases.”

Fine particle emissions have been linked to increased health risks for decades. Although substantial efforts have been made to reduce the sulphur and diesel soot emissions from cars and lorries, no comparable efforts have been made for the shipping sector.

The NGO Transport & Environment said, “Marine fuel is 2,700 times dirtier than road diesel and €35 billion of fuel tax is paid yearly in Europe for road transport, while shipping uses tax-free fuel.”

Given that shipping accounts for over one fifth of global fuel consumption, the fact that its emissions are not more strictly regulated is cause for concern.

Improving air quality through exhaust filtration

For the researchers, legislation enforcing particle filtration and PM limits in shipping is the “next logical target for improving air quality worldwide, particularly in coastal regions and harbour cities”.

Dietmar Oeliger, NABU’s transport expert, said, “We really underline the recommendation of the scientists to urgently switch to low sulphur fuels together with effective emission abatement techniques.”

The most effective method of cleaning up emissions from shipping is to combine PM filters with low-sulphur fuels, a measure that has long been in place on the roads.

Other options include converting ships’ engines to run on gas or retrofitting them with exhaust gas cleaning systems known as “scrubbers”.

Controlling sulphur emissions

The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) has capped the sulphur content of shipping fuel at 3.5%. By 2020, the IMO will limit sulphur content in ship’s fuel to 0.5% worldwide.

In many of Europe’s coastal waters the limit is 1%, and as of January 2015, the limit in the Sulphur Emission Control Areas (SECAs) of the North and the Baltic Seas is just 0.1%.

According to Transport & Environment, the health benefits from the implementation of the new stricter SECAs are projected to be worth up to €23 billion.

But these limits are not strictly enforced, and the options available for reducing sulphur and PM emissions remain too expensive for the majority of ship operators.

As well as severe health risks to humans, sulphur causes acid rain and leads to a host of environmental problems including soil and water quality degradation and damage to biodiversity.

“We need meaningful measures to incentivise the uptake of cleaner marine fuels as a stepping stone towards cleaning up the sector,” said Sotiris Raptis, clean shipping officer at Transport & Environment.

At its meeting in April this year, MPEC also agreed on the need for marine transport to take account of the Paris Agreement. The IMO plans to adopt binding measures to reduce the sector’s carbon footprint, and could lay out its timetable this week.

Cutting Sulphur Emissions:

The 171 members of the IMO will also have to agree on a date for the entry into force of the new rules on the reduced sulphur content of fuels. Adopted in 1997, the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) placed a limit of 0.5% on the sulphur content of shipping fuel, which will come into force in 2020.

60,000 premature deaths per year

Existing rules limit the sulphur content of shipping fuel to 3.5%, making marine transport the biggest emitter of sulphur oxides in the world. Exceptions can be found in the Sulphur Emission Control Areas (SECAs) of North America and Northern Europen where the mlimit is 0.1%.

In 1999, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University estimated that between 5% and 30% of the concentration of airborne sulphates in coastal regions was down to commercial shipping. These particles are harmful to marine and land environments, as well as to human health.

Later research by the University of Delaware attributed more than 60,000 premature deaths per year in Europe and Asia to this pollution, and predicted that that figure would rise by 40% by 2012.

Opposition from refiners

But refiners of shipping fuel have spoken out against the mandatory sulphur reduction. At least, if it comes into force so soon.

Cutting sulphur content would require big changes to machinery and investments in the billions of dollars. According to the consultancy CE Delft, the success of the reduced sulphur convention will depend on the ability of the refiners to provide low-sulphur fuel from 2020. If not, the oil companies and some shipping companies plan to push the entry into force of Annex VI of the MARPOL convention back to 2025.

One interesting detail: the Cook Islands pushed hard to strengthen the Paris Agreement, but are one of the fiercest opponents of binding emissions limits on maritime transport.

But the IMO’s Marine Environment Protection Committee (MPEC) has begun to take local and global impact of shipping pollution seriously; it was on the agenda for the committee’s 70th meeting in London this week.

The UN organisation is considering enforcing stricter regulations on large ships. Under the proposals, the owners of the tens of thousands of ships with a displacement greater than 5,000 tonnes would be obliged to measure their fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, and to declare the results to the IMO and the ships’ countries of registration. This is a first step.

At its meeting in April this year, MPEC also agreed on the need for marine transport to take account of the Paris Agreement. The IMO plans to adopt binding measures to reduce the sector’s carbon footprint, and could lay out its timetable this week.

Cutting Sulphur Emissions:

The 171 members of the IMO will also have to agree on a date for the entry into force of the new rules on the reduced sulphur content of fuels. Adopted in 1997, the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) placed a limit of 0.5% on the sulphur content of shipping fuel, which will come into force in 2020.

60,000 premature deaths per year

Existing rules limit the sulphur content of shipping fuel to 3.5%, making marine transport the biggest emitter of sulphur oxides in the world. Exceptions can be found in the Sulphur Emission Control Areas (SECAs) of North America and Northern Europen where the mlimit is 0.1%.

In 1999, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University estimated that between 5% and 30% of the concentration of airborne sulphates in coastal regions was down to commercial shipping. These particles are harmful to marine and land environments, as well as to human health.

Later research by the University of Delaware attributed more than 60,000 premature deaths per year in Europe and Asia to this pollution, and predicted that that figure would rise by 40% by 2012.

Opposition from refiners

But refiners of shipping fuel have spoken out against the mandatory sulphur reduction. At least, if it comes into force so soon.

Cutting sulphur content would require big changes to machinery and investments in the billions of dollars. According to the consultancy CE Delft, the success of the reduced sulphur convention will depend on the ability of the refiners to provide low-sulphur fuel from 2020. If not, the oil companies and some shipping companies plan to push the entry into force of Annex VI of the MARPOL convention back to 2025.

One interesting detail: the Cook Islands pushed hard to strengthen the Paris Agreement, but are one of the fiercest opponents of binding emissions limits on maritime transport.
Euractiv, Oct 26, 2016

So we now have publicly-funded concessions that Federal and Provincial Governments – past and present – have placed in the industry’s begging bowl, including:
–no Provincial Sales Tax on gas purchased;
subsidized (6 cents/ kilowatt-hour) electricity rates (residential customers pay 12 cents/KWh). The 6-cent industrial rate was originally conceived for labour-intensive industries, which LNG definitely is not;
–zero percent LNG royalty tax; 9 percent corporate tax rate on future profits declared in BC. Royalty taxes are payments to the resource owners – in this case the BC public. Much of the LNG industry is financially structured to offshore any profits to lower-tax jurisdictions, as Australia has already learned to its chagrin;
–$35/tonne carbon tax cap and $0/tonne on “fugitive” (vented and leaked) gases. The public will pay much higher carbon taxes, as this is ramped up in future years to limit global climate disruption. Fugitive emissions, when fully and accurately accounted for, make LNG a worse climate-warmer than coal;
–$120 Million a year for infrastructure costs (roads and pipelines to fracking holes). When this is factored into the skimpy returns to the public purse, the fracked gas industry remits less to BC’s coffers than do parking fees and fines in the City of Vancouver;
–reduced property assessments and property taxes. BC has legislated discounted property tax rates for all port facilities;
–relaxed Temporary Foreign Worker restrictions for imported workers. Unlike Australia, Canada has not negotiated local employment guarantees for the construction and operation of LNG facilities and pipelines;
–exemption from 25% import duty on machinery and equipment. The industry is also appealing a ruling by Canadian International Trade Tribunal imposing a hefty anti-dumping tariff on LNG modules constructed in Korea and floated here for final assembly. Constructing these units abroad denies jobs to Canadian steelworkers and revenue to Canada;
–accelerated capital cost write-downs. The Harper Government hiked the speed at which the LNG industry could write off its huge capital costs (to 30 percent per annum, previously 8 percent), effectively delaying income taxes and reducing borrowing costs for the industry.

All in all, this is extremely generous treatment for a foreign-owned industry which would employ, at most, a tiny fraction of BC’s 2.5 million-strong workforce – far fewer than each of BC’s high-tech, film and tourism industries. A 2014 study by the Centre for Policy Alternatives showed that, at a $12 LNG price in Asia, it would be 14 years before the capital costs of these projects were written off and LNG royalties begin to trickle into BC’s public coffers. The fracked gas industry has built up tax credits of a whopping $3 billion, meaning that, should it ever actually record a profit locally, the first $3 billion will be tax-free. As the LNG price has fallen to under $10/mmBTU, that 14-year break-even timing is likely to be further delayed. This mirrors the Australian LNG experience, which has shown break-even periods of 15 years or more for its LNG projects, and a tripling of local gas prices in the face of export competition for local supplies. Australians are paying more for their own gas than are foreign buyers.

Natural gas is composed primarily of methane, as a greenhouse gas 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Fracking for natural gas causes severe damage to local environments, permanently pollutes local groundwater, and has been identified as the cause of a series of earthquakes in north-eastern BC. …”
https://commonground.ca/bcs-lng-industry-flogging-a-dead-horse/

However – attention has been drawn to the species in recent years due to its drought resistance and its potential to become an essential crop in areas presently facing and/or at risk of droughts. The cactis are a source of minerals and additionally store significant quantities of water in arid and desert environments.

Here is a report from the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nation around the benefits of Opuntia (prickly pears):

Title: Cactus pear deserves a place on the menu: Turning a useful food-of-last-resort into a managed and valuable crop
Author: Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations
Date: 30 November 2017
News Agency: Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations
Link: http://www.fao.org/fao-stories/article/en/c/1070166/

Article Excerpt:

“Climate change and the increasing risks of droughts are strong reasons to upgrade the humble cactus to the status of an essential crop in many areas,” said Hans Dreyer, director of FAO’s Plant Production and Protection Division.

[…]

Cactus pear cultivation is slowly catching on, boosted by growing need for resilience in the face of drought, degraded soils and higher temperatures. It has a long tradition in its native Mexico, where yearly per capita consumption of nopalitos – the tasty young pads, known as cladodes – is 6.4 kilograms. Opuntias are grown on small farms and harvested in the wild on more than 3 million hectares, and increasingly grown using drip irrigation techniques on smallholder farms as a primary or supplemental crop. Today, Brazil is home to more than 500,000 hectares of cactus plantations aimed to provide forage. The plant is also commonly grown on farms in North Africa and Ethiopia’s Tigray region has around 360,000 hectares of which half are managed.

The cactus pear’s ability to thrive in arid and dry climates makes it a key player in food security. Apart from providing food, cactus stores water in its pads, thus providing a botanical well that can provide up to 180 tonnes of water per hectare – enough to sustain five adult cows, a substantial increase over typical rangeland productivity. At times of drought, livestock survival rate has been far higher on farms with cactus plantations.

Projected pressure on water resources in the future make cactus “one of the most prominent crops for the 21st century,” says Ali Nefzaoui, a Tunis-based researcher for ICARDA, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas.

Here is a YouTube Video from the UNFAO on the benefits of Opuntia (prickly pears):

Title: Opuntia cactus: a useful asset for food security
Author: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Date: 24 November 2017
News Agency: UNFAO (YouTube)
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–0EdaCtR_4

For those of you interested in the Ontario context, here is an article and a website about the Opuntia (prickly pears) native to Ontario.

Title: Eastern prickly pear cactus
Author: Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks
Date: 2009 / 2014
News Agency: Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks
Link: https://www.ontario.ca/page/eastern-prickly-pear-cactus

Title: Prickly pear cactus at home anywhere
Author: Lee Reich
Date: 5 November 2008
News Agency: The Toronto Star
Link: https://www.thestar.com/life/homes/outdoor_living/2008/11/05/prickly_pear_cactus_at_home_anywhere.html

Projects in the east Arctic, closer to Canada’s Beaufort Sea, receive an even greater incentive — no extraction tax for the first 12 years of operation.

Russia may be borrowing a page from Canada’s book in drafting the policy. Doug Matthews, a Canadian energy writer and analyst, said the incentive package sounds “rather like our old national energy program in the … Beaufort [Sea] back in the ’70s and ’80s.”

What new projects are getting the go-ahead?

Russia’s minister of the Far East and Arctic, Alexander Kozlov, said in a press release that those incentives are resulting in three new massive offshore oil projects.

Currently, there is only one producing offshore oil platform in Russian waters — the Prirazlomnaya platform, located in the Pechora Sea.

Russia’s state oil companies are also expected to massively intensify their onshore Arctic operations.

Rosneft’s Vostok Oil project, billed as the “biggest in global oil,” will involve the construction of a seaport, two airports, 800 km of new pipelines, and 15 new towns in the Vankor region.

“The project is expected to become the stepping stone for large scale development of Arctic oil,” said Nikita Kapustin, an energy researcher with the state-funded Energy Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in an email.

Developments in the Laptev, East Siberian and Chukchi Seas — nearer to Alaska — are “more distant prospects,” Kapustin said.

But massive incentives for Arctic ports and pipelines could make exploiting those regions more feasible in the future.

What could the environmental impacts be?

Simon Boxall, an oceans scientist at the University of Southampton, said sending more goods via the Northern Sea Route could actually have a positive environmental impact.

“You’re knocking thousands of miles off of that route, and that of course saves energy, it saves fuel, it saves pollution,” he said.

The problem, Boxall says, comes with what those ships are carrying. Any spilled oil degrades slowly in cold Arctic waters, and is easily trapped beneath ice.

Boxall is optimistic that moderate spills from Russia’s offshore oil projects could be contained to “a fairly small locality,” and would be unlikely to affect Canadian shores.

But Tony Walker, an assistant professor at the School of Resource & Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University, disagrees.

“Any petroleum products released into surface water could easily get to the Northwest Territories in just a matter of days,” he said.

“Basically, it’s everybody’s problem.”

Walker says most Arctic nations have limited capacity to perform cleanups in the region. Russia’s fleet is mostly based in Murmansk, near its western border, he says, and is mostly decommissioned anyway.

“So it would really be virtually impossible,” he said.

How could this affect oil and gas prices?

Despite enabling access to more than 37 billion barrels of oil — equivalent to about a fifth of Canada’s total remaining reserves — analysts say the effect on prices should be negligible.

“The main intention of Arctic oil is to replace production of some of the more mature Russian fields,” said Kapustin.

“I don’t see much of an effect on price,” said Matthews.

The primary market for Russia’s Arctic oil and gas is China. Canada’s market share there is so small, Matthews says, it’s unlikely to make a difference.

Could Canadian businesses benefit?

Since U.S. and EU sanctions were put in place in 2014, international oil companies have been reluctant to co-invest in Arctic oil projects. Sanctions prohibit collaboration on offshore oil projects with Russia’s biggest companies.

Canadian businesses also might not have the expertise needed any longer, according to Matthews.

“We were really the leaders back in the ’70s and ’80s for technology for Arctic exploration,” Matthews explained. But “when the oil industry in the Beaufort [Sea] shut down in the mid-’80s … we really lost that technological edge.”

Canada’s recent investment in pipelines means some Canadian companies have built expertise in their construction, including in cold-weather environments.

But Matthews and other analysts say Russia is more likely to look to the East for expertise and investment — to Japan and China, and to India, which Kapustin said has already invested in the Vostok Oil project.”

Multiple agencies – including environmental groups – indicated concern of drilling activities in close proximity to a nuclear waste dump. In recent years, Russia additionally has developed floating nuclear reactors which can be moved along the Northern Sea Route to supply power to remote regions – with a particular focus on resource extraction activities. Here is a news item by the CBC.

“Last month, the Russian government pushed through new legislation creating $300 billion in new incentives for new ports, factories, and oil and gas developments on the shores and in the waters of the Arctic ocean.

The incentives are part of a broader plan to more than double maritime traffic in the Northern Sea Route, on Russia’s northern coast — and give a boost to state energy companies like Gazprom, Lukoil, and Rosneft.

But analysts say their immediate impact will be increased exploration and development for offshore oil and natural gas.

With Canadian and U.S. offshore oil developments still on ice, here’s what Russia’s big spending could mean for the Arctic — and Canadians.

How is the money being spent?

Russia’s government is offering tax incentives for offshore oil and gas developments, including a reduced five per cent production tax for the first 15 years for all oil and gas developments.

Projects in the east Arctic, closer to Canada’s Beaufort Sea, receive an even greater incentive — no extraction tax for the first 12 years of operation.

Russia may be borrowing a page from Canada’s book in drafting the policy. Doug Matthews, a Canadian energy writer and analyst, said the incentive package sounds “rather like our old national energy program in the … Beaufort [Sea] back in the ’70s and ’80s.”

What new projects are getting the go-ahead?

Russia’s minister of the Far East and Arctic, Alexander Kozlov, said in a press release that those incentives are resulting in three new massive offshore oil projects.

Currently, there is only one producing offshore oil platform in Russian waters — the Prirazlomnaya platform, located in the Pechora Sea.

Russia’s state oil companies are also expected to massively intensify their onshore Arctic operations.

Rosneft’s Vostok Oil project, billed as the “biggest in global oil,” will involve the construction of a seaport, two airports, 800 km of new pipelines, and 15 new towns in the Vankor region.

“The project is expected to become the stepping stone for large scale development of Arctic oil,” said Nikita Kapustin, an energy researcher with the state-funded Energy Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in an email.

Developments in the Laptev, East Siberian and Chukchi Seas — nearer to Alaska — are “more distant prospects,” Kapustin said.

But massive incentives for Arctic ports and pipelines could make exploiting those regions more feasible in the future.

What could the environmental impacts be?

Simon Boxall, an oceans scientist at the University of Southampton, said sending more goods via the Northern Sea Route could actually have a positive environmental impact.

“You’re knocking thousands of miles off of that route, and that of course saves energy, it saves fuel, it saves pollution,” he said.

The problem, Boxall says, comes with what those ships are carrying. Any spilled oil degrades slowly in cold Arctic waters, and is easily trapped beneath ice.

Boxall is optimistic that moderate spills from Russia’s offshore oil projects could be contained to “a fairly small locality,” and would be unlikely to affect Canadian shores.

But Tony Walker, an assistant professor at the School of Resource & Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University, disagrees.

“Any petroleum products released into surface water could easily get to the Northwest Territories in just a matter of days,” he said.

“Basically, it’s everybody’s problem.”

Walker says most Arctic nations have limited capacity to perform cleanups in the region. Russia’s fleet is mostly based in Murmansk, near its western border, he says, and is mostly decommissioned anyway.

“So it would really be virtually impossible,” he said.

How could this affect oil and gas prices?

Despite enabling access to more than 37 billion barrels of oil — equivalent to about a fifth of Canada’s total remaining reserves — analysts say the effect on prices should be negligible.

“The main intention of Arctic oil is to replace production of some of the more mature Russian fields,” said Kapustin.

“I don’t see much of an effect on price,” said Matthews.

The primary market for Russia’s Arctic oil and gas is China. Canada’s market share there is so small, Matthews says, it’s unlikely to make a difference.

Could Canadian businesses benefit?

Since U.S. and EU sanctions were put in place in 2014, international oil companies have been reluctant to co-invest in Arctic oil projects. Sanctions prohibit collaboration on offshore oil projects with Russia’s biggest companies.

Canadian businesses also might not have the expertise needed any longer, according to Matthews.

“We were really the leaders back in the ’70s and ’80s for technology for Arctic exploration,” Matthews explained. But “when the oil industry in the Beaufort [Sea] shut down in the mid-’80s … we really lost that technological edge.”

Canada’s recent investment in pipelines means some Canadian companies have built expertise in their construction, including in cold-weather environments.

But Matthews and other analysts say Russia is more likely to look to the East for expertise and investment — to Japan and China, and to India, which Kapustin said has already invested in the Vostok Oil project.”

Robert Scott, Emerald Ash Borer Services Coordinator with Parks and Open Spaces, Forestry and Horticulture at the City of Thunder Bay, hopes the designation will bring more attention to green infrastructure in Thunder Bay.

“It’s really exciting that we could be recognized as a Tree City of the world alongside Toronto and Edmonton and Halifax,” he said. “Those are places that you would think of as a little greener than Thunder Bay.”

Scott said that despite the size of Thunder Bay, the city has all the same tree and forest management strategies as larger cities, which allowed for the city to receive the designation.

“We have a very good management strategy for these trees and it should be recognized throughout the city as something we should continue and build upon, especially as we face climate change,” Scott said. “The city has declared a climate emergency, so I think this really ties into the sustainability of Thunder Bay as a whole.”

The city had to meet a number of standards to be considered for the designation. One of the items provided by the city was the inventory of Thunder Bay’s public tree assets as well as a tree canopy estimate.

Other necessary criteria of the designation covered areas such as allocation of resources and policy that outlines management of the trees.

“We congratulate the first cities to be recognized for 2019, our inaugural year,” said Hiroto Mitsugi, assistant director general, FAO in a press release. “Together, these Tree Cities form a new global network of urban forestry leaders that share the same values for city trees and forests.”

Author: CBC Thunder Bay
Date: 11 February 2020
News Agency: CBC Canada: Thunder Bay
Link: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/thunder-bay-recognized-for-forestry-management-1.5458612

[…]

“The mats will be about a metre wide and two metres long.

Title: Rothesay woman crochets plastic bags together to make sleeping mats for homeless
Author: Semerad, Elke
Date: 10 February 2020
News Agency: CBC New Brunswick
Link: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/plastic-mats-bags-homelessness-1.5457934

“What we’re talking about is restoring the right relations with the land,” said Catherine Tamarro, who is part of the land stewardship circle.

Tamarro is a Wyandot elder who belongs to the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation in Michigan. She’s a multimedia artist who lives in Toronto.

“Indigenous people have been in that space for thousands of years,” she said.

“I think that the idea is to have those rights of stewardship returned to us.”

What is a black oak savannah?
Prior to the arrival of European settlers, the majority of southern Ontario was covered in densely forested areas that were broken up by two kinds of tallgrass ecosystems, prairies and savannahs.

Black oak savannah is characterized by grasses, shrubs and widely spaced oaks, and is an ecosystem relatively rare in Canada. Savannas are dependent on fire, either natural or human-caused, to maintain the open space. The black oak is resistant to fire, and some of the largest ones in Toronto are located in High Park.

The savannah is a place for traditional medicines and berries to grow and would attract grazing animals for hunting.

“It is a remnant of Indigenous land stewardship that exists in the city,” said Tamarro. “It’s very precious.”

The black oak savannah in High Park is estimated to be approximately 4,000 years old. Since savannahs are characterized by open spaces, they were often the first areas to be cleared for settler developments and agriculture, and suppression of wildfires also reduced their expanses.

Challenges of park management
“It’s significant because it’s an approach to managing the landscape that is in pretty stark contrast to how Canadian municipal and federal authorities manage it,” said Doug Anderson who is a Métis earthworker in the land stewardship circle.

Some of the challenges around managing High Park include controlling invasive plant species and looking for a sustainable way to restore the park to its natural state while still allowing for recreational usage.

The land stewardship circle believes that the use of pesticides for dealing with invasive species is detrimental to the entire ecosystem that exists within the savannah.

For decades, the city has been also been doing controlled burns in the park to maintain the savannah. While no burns happened in 2019, the land stewardship circle hopes that in the future contracts offered by the city for restoration are offered to Indigenous stewards.

Restoring the savannahs is a first step in restoring Indigenous relationships with the land for future generations, according to Anderson.

“We need to teach our kids how to heal the land,” said Anderson.

“We have to have relationships with the land and we have to know how things grow and balance and how you can get a lot of food off it. We need to actually live with all of these things and in balance.”

City says it welcomes feedback

The City of Toronto’s Park’s, Forestry and Recreation department said in a statement “We are engaged in conversations with the Indigenous community about incorporating Indigenous knowledge and practices in High Park.

“These conversations are ongoing, and we welcome feedback and suggestions for collaboration.”

The statement said High Park is one of Toronto’s most popular and ecologically sensitive parks.

“Practices, including prescribed burn management, have been selected based on research and experience and are part of the city’s long-term management plan to protect and sustain Toronto’s rare black oak woodlands and savannahs.

“Parks, Forestry and Recreation staff are committed to building a relationship with Indigenous communities, as well as exploring new partnerships and land use practices.”

********

Title: ‘It’s very precious’: Indigenous collective wants input into managing High Park’s oak savannah
Author: Rhiannon Johnson
Date: 15 February 2020
Publication: CBC Indigenous / CBC News
Link: https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/high-park-indigenous-land-stewardship-1.5456265

There are comparisons to recent initiatives to revitalize the black oak savannah in the Niagara and St. Catharines regions of Ontario. More information about the Niagara and St. Catharines initiatives can be found here:

Title: Work begins to restore Niagara’s oak savannah
Author: Julie Jocsak
Date: 1 March 2019
Publication: The Standard (St. Catharines)
Link: https://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/news-story/9201748-work-begins-to-restore-niagara-s-oak-savannah/

The technology, developed in the late 1940s, does away with furnaces, air conditioners and hot water heaters, and is the most efficient way to heat and cool a building. While it’s widespread in some countries, like Sweden, it’s been slow to catch on here.

“The site has to be appropriate,” said architect Lisa Cunningham, who recently designed a gut renovation of a private Brookline home using geothermal energy. The best sites for geothermal systems have lots of space to install horizontal pipes in relatively shallow ground. But because the Brookline lot is so small, workers had to drill two holes 500 feet deep.

“One thing that’s so great about having a project like this right in the heart of a very dense town, we’re showing people it can be very cost-effective,” Cunningham said, adding that the cost for installing the system in the Brookline home “came in less than a comparable gas system.”

But that includes thousands of dollars in state rebates and federal tax incentives that are expiring. Cost is still a big hurdle, said Zeyneb Magavi, co-executive director of Home Energy Efficiency Team (HEET), a Cambridge-based environmental nonprofit.

“Geothermal ground source heating has been around a long time, and it has usually been installed one house by one house individually,” she said. “It works. However, it is a fairly high up-front cost, and you have to have the means and motivation to be able to do it.”

Magavi, a clean energy advocate, said she asked herself: Who already digs holes and puts pipes in the ground, has big money and is motivated to find a new business model? Her answer: natural gas distribution companies.

Magavi was familiar with the gas utilities through her work — along with HEET co-executive director Audrey Schulman and the Gas Leaks Allies — helping gas companies identify leaky pipes most in need of repair.

Together, they found it would cost $9 billion over 20 years to fix the aging infrastructure. Magavi suggested they use for money to transform the industry instead.

“The idea is that a gas utility takes out its leaky gas pipe and, instead of putting in new gas pipe, we put in a hot water loop,” Magavi said. “If we’re going to invest in infrastructure, let’s invest in infrastructure for the next century. Let’s not invest in infrastructure that was hot in 1850.”

HEET commissioned a study to investigate if there were a way to make geothermal energy appealing to both utilities and environmentalists.

“We wanted something that was renewable, resilient, reliable, kept gas workers in jobs, [was] equal or lower cost than gas, and safe and doable,” Magavi said. She found that “networking” — connecting geothermal systems to many homes and businesses — ticked all of the boxes.

“The beautiful thing is that when you interconnect them, the more customers you put on the system, the more efficient it gets,” Magavi said.

Magavi showed the results to senior officials with Eversource, the largest energy delivery company in New England.

It was an unusual pitch, but she felt that “they also understood that we were approaching this always from a data- and fact-based conversation, and they took us very seriously,” Magavi said.

Eversource Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer Penni Conner said the company likes the idea.

“This looks a lot like the gas business that we’re in except it’s totally clean,” Conner said. “Eversource can bring the capital and the expertise to this. We know how to build infrastructure.”

Eversource conducted its own study of networked geothermal heat pump systems, leading it to propose three different pilot projects to Massachusetts regulators in order to prove that the networked systems are feasible.

Under a networked system, homes and businesses would own the geothermal heat pumps, while Eversource would own and manage the system of pipes, sensors and pressure regulators, Conner said. That would convert the gas utility into a networked, thermal management company.

“Maybe I have a laundromat that has a lot of heat load, maybe it’s working a lot in the evening,” Conner said. “So they are leveraging putting heat back into the system potentially in the evening when others need it for cooling. So you get that benefit.”

State regulators are now reviewing Eversources’s proposals for networked pilot projects, and could give the go-ahead within a year.

“I think we can move fast,” Magavi said. “My vision of the future is that we have wires delivering us renewable energy competing with pipes delivering us renewable energy. So thermal power and electric power grids, and the two benefit each other.”

Geothermal energy heating our homes, with pumps powered by solar- and wind-generated electricity. If this unusual collaboration between a natural gas utility and an environmental organization pays off, a clean energy future could be right under our feet.
https://www.wbur.org/earthwhile/2020/01/13/heat-eversource-geothermal-energy-climate-change

The technology, developed in the late 1940s, does away with furnaces, air conditioners and hot water heaters, and is the most efficient way to heat and cool a building. While it’s widespread in some countries, like Sweden, it’s been slow to catch on here.

“The site has to be appropriate,” said architect Lisa Cunningham, who recently designed a gut renovation of a private Brookline home using geothermal energy. The best sites for geothermal systems have lots of space to install horizontal pipes in relatively shallow ground. But because the Brookline lot is so small, workers had to drill two holes 500 feet deep.

“One thing that’s so great about having a project like this right in the heart of a very dense town, we’re showing people it can be very cost-effective,” Cunningham said, adding that the cost for installing the system in the Brookline home “came in less than a comparable gas system.”

But that includes thousands of dollars in state rebates and federal tax incentives that are expiring. Cost is still a big hurdle, said Zeyneb Magavi, co-executive director of Home Energy Efficiency Team (HEET), a Cambridge-based environmental nonprofit.

“Geothermal ground source heating has been around a long time, and it has usually been installed one house by one house individually,” she said. “It works. However, it is a fairly high up-front cost, and you have to have the means and motivation to be able to do it.”

Magavi, a clean energy advocate, said she asked herself: Who already digs holes and puts pipes in the ground, has big money and is motivated to find a new business model? Her answer: natural gas distribution companies.

Magavi was familiar with the gas utilities through her work — along with HEET co-executive director Audrey Schulman and the Gas Leaks Allies — helping gas companies identify leaky pipes most in need of repair.

Together, they found it would cost $9 billion over 20 years to fix the aging infrastructure. Magavi suggested they use for money to transform the industry instead.

“The idea is that a gas utility takes out its leaky gas pipe and, instead of putting in new gas pipe, we put in a hot water loop,” Magavi said. “If we’re going to invest in infrastructure, let’s invest in infrastructure for the next century. Let’s not invest in infrastructure that was hot in 1850.”

HEET commissioned a study to investigate if there were a way to make geothermal energy appealing to both utilities and environmentalists.

“We wanted something that was renewable, resilient, reliable, kept gas workers in jobs, [was] equal or lower cost than gas, and safe and doable,” Magavi said. She found that “networking” — connecting geothermal systems to many homes and businesses — ticked all of the boxes.

“The beautiful thing is that when you interconnect them, the more customers you put on the system, the more efficient it gets,” Magavi said.

Magavi showed the results to senior officials with Eversource, the largest energy delivery company in New England.

It was an unusual pitch, but she felt that “they also understood that we were approaching this always from a data- and fact-based conversation, and they took us very seriously,” Magavi said.

Eversource Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer Penni Conner said the company likes the idea.

“This looks a lot like the gas business that we’re in except it’s totally clean,” Conner said. “Eversource can bring the capital and the expertise to this. We know how to build infrastructure.”

Eversource conducted its own study of networked geothermal heat pump systems, leading it to propose three different pilot projects to Massachusetts regulators in order to prove that the networked systems are feasible.

Under a networked system, homes and businesses would own the geothermal heat pumps, while Eversource would own and manage the system of pipes, sensors and pressure regulators, Conner said. That would convert the gas utility into a networked, thermal management company.

“Maybe I have a laundromat that has a lot of heat load, maybe it’s working a lot in the evening,” Conner said. “So they are leveraging putting heat back into the system potentially in the evening when others need it for cooling. So you get that benefit.”

State regulators are now reviewing Eversources’s proposals for networked pilot projects, and could give the go-ahead within a year.

“I think we can move fast,” Magavi said. “My vision of the future is that we have wires delivering us renewable energy competing with pipes delivering us renewable energy. So thermal power and electric power grids, and the two benefit each other.”

Geothermal energy heating our homes, with pumps powered by solar- and wind-generated electricity. If this unusual collaboration between a natural gas utility and an environmental organization pays off, a clean energy future could be right under our feet.

The CBC explored this subject in a Calgary-focused article.

Title: Beet brine again used to keep Calgary streets clear of snow and ice
Author: Dave Dormer
News Agency: CBC News
Date: 17 November 2018
Link: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-beet-brine-snow-ice-control-1.4909615

Sven Hunhammar will chair the inquiry. Hunhammar holds a Master’s degree in engineering and a doctorate in natural resource management. He is Director of Sustainability and Environment at the Swedish Transport Administration, and has previously worked at the Stockholm Environment Institute, the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, Transport Analysis and the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation.

The inquiry is to:

Analyze the conditions for introducing a national ban on sales of new gasoline and diesel cars—and how to exempt vehicles that run on renewable fuels and electric hybrid vehicles from such a ban;

Analyze how to bring about an EU-wide ban on sales of new gasoline and diesel cars and the phasing out of fossil fuels in the EU;

Make the necessary legislative proposals, albeit not in the area of taxation, where the inquiry may only analyse measures and conduct impact analyses; and

Propose a year by which fossil fuels should be phased out in Sweden, and the measures needed for this to happen in the most cost-effective manner possible.

The inquiry’s terms of reference are based on point 31 of the January Agreement, the policy agreement between the Swedish Social Democratic Party, the Center Party, the Liberal Party and the Green Party.”

Link: https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/12/20191225-sweden.html

Link: https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/49119

and

“Cyptogamic covers are responsible for about half of the naturally occurring nitrogen fixation on land and they take up as much carbon dioxide as is released yearly from biomass burning.”

Link: https://phys.org/news/2012-06-algae-lichens-mosses-huge-amounts.html

Though — there is some debate — as some research points that temperatures above 20C cause these organisms to release large amounts of methane and nitrous oxide.

Link: https://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/15822/20150727/mosses-unexpectedly-release-greenhouse-gasses-more-powerful-c02.htm

“Some of these are organisms that you would typically find in ambient air, but they’re highly concentrated, so we see a lot more of them than we would find in ambient air conditions. Others are organisms that are not typically found in ambient air. So there are things that grow deep in the soil or grow in the insides of plants and not things that would generally be aerosolized just by wind.” […]

“There’s just as much possibility that the movement of these organisms through the smoke has a beneficial impact. Some microbes called “endophytes” can increase plant growth and yield and some even act as antibiotics against plant pathogens, thereby assisting their host species.

We’ve seen a lot of bacteria that act as nitrogen fixers. Of course, nitrogen is the building block of all protein and everything that exists on earth. We wouldn’t have anything if it weren’t for these bacteria, and we’ve seen these bacteria being transported.”

Popular Mechanics, Dec. 20, 2019

[…]

“No surprise, then, that [asbestos] is effectively banned in Canada. And a surprise, to observers, that Canada exports it to other countries, most notoriously India, where public-health regimes are less vigorous than in Canada.”

But that fact is no more mysterious than two forces that are as well known in India as they are in Canada. One is the power of supply and demand. The other is the vacuum of political indifference.”

Regarding the Indian context:

“Swami worked eight hours a day, six days a week. In return, the Shree Digvijay Cement Co. Ltd. each day dispensed 230 rupees ($5) and a 150-gram lump of dark, sticky cane sugar, called jaggery. His managers instructed him to suck on it through the day. “They told us if we ate it, all the dust that we breathed in would stick to it and move through our system and not hurt us,” he says.

That’s the sort of thing that passed for safety equipment at the factory, where Swami worked until recently. After 10 years of the sugar fix, the workers were given gloves, and cotton handkerchiefs to tie over their mouths. But for more than a decade, there has been nothing at all, Swami says.

India has a voracious market for asbestos, which is used to make a cement composite used in low-cost building products.”

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/canadas-chronic-asbestos-problem/article4184217/

How much more does Kenney actually believe Trudeau’s Liberal government can realistically do to more hastily complete the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project—that is, without the police state and/or armed forces getting brutally involved?
What more could he realistically do, considering the fact aboriginal title rights must be observed, along with general populace constitutional and charter rights?

Would the large number of project protesters—including those of many aboriginal nations—actually be expected to drop their undoubtedly strong moral and ethical convictions simply because some government tells them so?

Indeed, the federal government used the very same National Energy Board as did the Harper Conservatives to now twice approve (many call it rubber stamping) the pipeline project, while failing to consider the threats the greatly increased oil tanker traffic will pose to B.C.’s tourist-attracting waters and the life within it, including the endangered Southern Resident Orca whale.

Also, let’s not forget that the governing Liberals early this year gave the increasingly outdated dirty-energy fossil fuel sector 12 times the subsidization allocated to clean renewable energy innovative technologies.