I am still learning how to do CCNR, so I apoligize in advance for rehashing old news or omit the new. For now, I will simply present things that caught my attention this week. But please do include your favorite climate news links in the comments...
President Kabila suspends mining in North Kivu, South Kivu, and Maniema provinces, effective immediately, to crackdown on corruption.
Kabila made the decision because the mineral mining there was supporting the "mafia groups" responsible for the chronic instability in the region, said a statement from mining minister Martin Kabwelu.
And the illegal mining was going on with the complicity of local and national officials on both the civilian and military side, said the statement.
The presidential decree covers the provinces of Nord Kivu, Sud Kivu and Maniema.
But the ministry statement did not spell out how the president's decision would be enforced.
The two provinces of Kivu together mark DR Congo's eastern border with Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, where much of the bloodiest fighting between the various rebel groups, local militia and government troops takes place.
This story is still unfolding, but it is clear that the mining in the Great Lakes region that includes these three provinces is central to the economic instability of the entire country, and poses a real threat to the Congo Rainforest.
The instability in the Democratic Republic of Congo is a serious and underreported threat to our climate. The DRC is host to an international land-grab of vast mineral wealth, but its government is underfunded and the country is unstable. Corrupt groups mine for minerals, and then ship them out of the country without paying the government -- and the mineral rights are often set by those with the biggest guns.
The instability plus international land-grab is a dire threat to the environment. The DRC is host to a substantial portion of the Congo basin. This region hosts 18% of the world's rainforest, 70% of Africa's ground cover, and the is home to Congo River, which is the second largest river by volume on the planet. This region is the heart of ecology for the African continent, and it is being ravaged for oil, minerals, and hardwoods.
The Congo Rainforest is one of the world's most threatened ecosystems. The instability in the DRC makes it difficult to protect the national parks and enforce any regulation, and the international interest in mineral and fossil fuel wealth creates high risk circumstances for this important region. (map source)
More from Climate Change News Roundup.
The Executive
Carter-Era Solar Panel Will Not Return to White House Roof.
They explained that there were various reasons that the White House roof was not available for a gesture with very little energy-saving potential and that the Obama administration was doing more to promote renewable energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions than any previous government. The word "stunt" may have come up.
After the meeting, Mr. McKibben, speaking by cellphone from the sidewalk outside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, said: "They refused to take the Carter-era panel that we brought with us and said they would continue their deliberative process to figure out what is appropriate for the White House someday. I told them it would be nice to deliberate as fast as possible, since that is the rate at which the planet’s climate is deteriorating."
Although Obama's stimulus is "the most ambitious energy legislation in history" the American Enterprise Institute claims that "green energy is not good stimulus."
In the end, all of this planning may result in the best use of the government's money, but it is not likely to stimulate the economy, at least not anytime soon. "Spending money researching and developing green energy might be a good investment, but it is not good stimulus," says Reinhart of the American Enterprise Institute.
Has green energy had a chance to stimulate? Perhaps the AEI is confusing cause and effect? Reinhart's opinion hinges strongly on his notion that the infrastructure projects in the stimulus bill haven't been successful after one year. He does not take into account that starting businesses and creating jobs are lagging events -- that have been held up by green businesses lack of access to capital. -rb
The fence is a tough seat as Chu tells West Virginia that coal is vital to our economy.
Burning coal is hurting the environment by releasing carbon dioxide and the latest evidence shows that process is linked to climate change, Chu said. "The increase in carbon that we see has human fingerprints all over it."
That's not a popular belief in a state where some openly dispute that greenhouse gases are changing the climate. But Chu and Democratic U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the state's senior senator, said that's going to hurt coal in the long term.
"The issue is, how do you use coal in a clean way?" Chu said. "How do we use it in a way that diminishes the risks of climate change?"
Chu remains committed to researching clean coal technology, and predicts that it can be proven sufficiently to attract private enterprise within eight to ten years.
In a move to regulate carbon emmissions through the Clean Air Act, the White House argues against the courts taking action on greehouse gases.
Administration officials said the Environmental Protection Agency's regulatory moves to restrain carbon dioxide emissions made the lawsuit unnecessary, and the acting solicitor general asked the Supreme Court to return the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.
But environmentalists said that the administration had talked about - but not imposed - limits on emissions from existing power plants.
Moreover, environmental groups said, the government's brief went beyond that, employing arguments that threatened to undercut a basis for legal action that have been used for a century, since Georgia sued over damage a Tennessee copper smelter was inflicting on Georgia's forests.
"We're very angry and very disappointed that they would take this tack," said David Doniger, policy director of the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
In the wake of congress' failure to pass climate legislation this year, the Obama administration seeks to roll out rules to cut emissions.
The agency "has a huge role to play in continuing the work to move from where we are now to lower carbon emissions", said the official, who did not want to be identified as the EPA policies are still being formed.
President Barack Obama, looking to take the lead in global talks on greenhouse gas emissions, has long warned that the EPA would take steps to regulate emissions if Congress failed to pass a climate bill.
The Senate has all but ruled out moving on greenhouse gases this year, even though the House of Representatives passed a bill last year. In late July, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid stripped climate provisions out of an energy bill, saying he could not get one Republican vote for them.
Although Lisa Jackson has the sympathy of people in both parties, she has a difficult road ahead.
...Now that Congress has pulled the plug on legislation, that task has fallen to Lisa Jackson, Obama's Environmental Protection Agency chief. Caught between business groups and some Senate Democrats who want to stop her, and environmental organizations that say she's not going far enough, Jackson may have the toughest job in town.
Even she agrees that regulation is inferior to legislation. It took a 2007 Supreme Court ruling to clarify that the 1970 law gave the agency the power to regulate carbon at all. One of Jackson's first moves as EPA administrator was to take up the court's invitation and declare carbon an environmental threat. Within weeks, she followed that with rules requiring automakers to boost fuel economy 5 percent a year and average 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016.
Those rules, effective Jan. 2, 2011, will mark the U.S.'s first-ever nationwide limits on greenhouse gas pollution...
The EPA is meeting with substantial resistance, however. Individual states are challenging the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases, and there is a propsal in the senate to stall any EPA action under the Clean Air Act with respect to carbon dioxide or methane for two years.
On the hill
Reid pronounces the climate bill dead, and suggests a piecemeal approach for next round.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Tuesday that attempts to tackle climate legislation in the next Congress should start with a "piecemeal" approach focused on electric power plants rather than a more sweeping proposal.
"I think we are looking to a time when we can get part of this done. We can’t get everything done at once," Reid said.
Reid acknowledged it’s a "cinch" that climate legislation won’t move this year. But he praised negotiations among some senators in recent months on plans to cap carbon from utilities.
"We have got to be able to suck it up and say I may not get all I want," Reid said, speaking at a "clean energy" conference he co-hosted at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. "We are not going to be able, as much as people want, to have a price on all carbon."
"But why don’t we step back. We had a really good thing going," Reid added. "The utilities are really interested in doing this because they want the certainty."
He has firm plans to introduce a lame duck energy bill that includes a renewable electricity standard. A RES is agreeable to several Republicans, including Sam Brownback of Kansas.
Reid also suggested passing energy legislation could be more likely during a lame-duck session. He noted the Senate would resume work after the recess but added, "Maybe, after the elections, we can get some more Republicans to work with us.
"We are going to continue working on this. You won’t hear the last of us until we adjourn sine die," he added, referring to the close of the current Congress.
The energy and oil spill response package that Reid unveiled in late July contained rebates for home-efficiency retrofits and measures to boost deployment of natural gas-powered trucks and electric cars.
But Reid is under heavy pressure from renewable energy groups, environmentalists and many members of his caucus to include an RES.
Sundry
Meeting energy demand will take 'truly extraordinary development and deployment of carbon-free sources of energy.
When it comes to greenhouse-gas emissions contributing to global warming, the big problem isn't the power plant on the outskirts of town. Rather, the big factor is the plants that will be built a decade or two from now.
"The sources of the most threatening emissions have yet to be built," according to a team of scientists trying to see what sort of warming will have been triggered by the end of the century by only today's greenhouse-gas emitters. The scientists' study appeared Thursday in the journal Science.
The researchers say their findings reinforce the notion that to meet skyrocketing demand for energy during this century, it will take "truly extraordinary development and deployment of carbon-free sources of energy" to keep global warming in check.
Main climate threat from CO2 sources yet to be built.
"The problem of climate change has tremendous inertia," says Davis. "Some of this inertia relates to the natural carbon cycle, but there is also inertia in the manmade infrastructure that emits CO2 and other greenhouse gases. We asked a hypothetical question: what if we never built another CO2-emitting device, but the ones already in existence lived out their normal lives?"
For a coal-fired power plant a "normal life" is about 40 years. For a late-model passenger vehicle in the United States it is about 17 years. After compiling data on lifetimes and emissions rates for the full range of fossil-fuel burning devices worldwide, the researchers found that that between the years 2010 to 2060 the total projected emissions would amount to about 500 billion tons of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere. To gauge the impact, they turned to the climate model. The researchers found that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 would stabilize at less than 430 parts per million (ppm) and the increase of global mean temperatures since preindustrial time would be less than 1.3°C (2.3°F).
"The answer surprised us," says Davis. "Going into this study, we thought that existing sources of CO2 emissions would be enough to push us beyond 450 ppm and 2°C warming." In light of common benchmarks of 450 ppm and 2°C, these results indicate that the devices whose emissions will cause the worst impacts have yet to be built.
Traditional Coal Plants Expanding: more than 30 built or under construction since 2008.
An Associated Press examination of U.S. Department of Energy records and information provided by utilities and trade groups shows that more than 30 traditional coal plants have been built since 2008 or are under construction.
The construction wave stretches from Arizona to Illinois and South Carolina to Washington, and comes despite growing public wariness over the high environmental and social costs of fossil fuels, demonstrated by tragic mine disasters in West Virginia, the Gulf oil spill and wars in the Middle East.
The expansion, the industry's largest in two decades, represents an acknowledgment that highly touted "clean coal" technology is still a long ways from becoming a reality and underscores a renewed confidence among utilities that proposals to regulate carbon emissions will fail. The Senate last month scrapped the leading bill to curb carbon emissions following opposition from Republicans and coal-state Democrats.
BP frozen out of Arctic drilling race.
BP has been forced to abandon hopes of drilling in the Arctic, currently the centre of a new oil rush, owing to its tarnished reputation after the Gulf of Mexico spill.
The company confirmed tonight that it was no longer trying to win an exploration licence in Greenland, despite earlier reports of its interest. "We are not participating in the bid round," said a spokesman at BP's London headquarters, who declined to discuss its reasons for the reverse.
New England forests transition as the globe warms.
Spring did not come for the oaks of Martha's Vineyard.
For three years, the residents here watched a stunning outbreak of caterpillars that stripped an oak tree bare in a week, then wafted on gossamer threads to another.
The islanders fought through clouds of drifting filaments with brooms, brushed off the showers of excrement after they walked under trees, and tiptoed through a maze of half-inch worms on the sidewalks. The local newspapers ran pictures of building sides covered with caterpillars, looking like horror-movie outtakes.