Friday, December 07, 2012 4:55:53 AM
Frozen landslide threatens to devour Dalton Highway
The debris flow is visible from the Dalton Highway. The lobe (middle of the frame) is moving toward the highway, picking up debris and toppling trees.
Photo by Guido Grosse 2012
This image is taken from the top of the debris flow that is closest to the Highway, about 75 yards. It is moving downslope at about 3 yards per year, and is accelerating. The bending trees are being overrun by the advancing debris.
Photo by Guido Grosse 2012
By KYLE HOPKINS — khopkins@adn.com
Published: December 1, 2012
A mysterious blob of frozen soil, rocks and trees is creeping toward the Dalton Highway, threatening to block the haul road that serves as a lifeline for Alaska's oil and gas industry. It could happen as soon as end of the decade.
University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers who have been studying the slow-moving landslide just south of the Brooks Range since 2008 say it is crawling closer to the highway every day. The scientists suspect climate change may have caused the 300-foot-wide finger of debris -- once thought to be motionless -- to gain speed as it slides toward the road.
"It's this giant moving mass and it's going to destroy anything in its way," said Rob Harper, a spokesman for the Alaska University Transportation Center.
The wave of frozen mud, snow and plants slowly spilled from the mountains within the past 5,000 years, researchers said. It is now within about 150 feet of the highway. Moving at a average rate of more than a centimeter a day, it could swamp the Dalton within five to 10 years, said Institute of Northern Engineering hydrologist Ronald Daanen.
"The sooner we come up with a viable solution, the better it is. There isn't a lot of time left," said Daanen, who will present information about the hazard at a worldwide meeting on geophysical sciences next week in San Francisco.
Transportation planners across the country are grappling with extreme weather such as floods, storms and unusual snowfall due to changing weather patterns. In the Alaska Arctic, the frozen debris encroaching on the Dalton Highway presents a new kind of puzzle.
As permafrost shrinks and summers grow longer in the southcentral Brooks Range, researchers wonder: How do you stop an accelerating, landslide-like ocean of mud and splintered trees from destroying one of the state economy's most important roadways?
The blob in question is at Mile 219 of the Dalton Highway, about 40 miles north of Coldfoot as the highway enters the Brooks Range. It is massive. More than 60 feet tall and as long as 10 football fields.
When it reaches the road, it will dump 22,000 tons of soil and rocks on the highway every year, the researchers wrote in a study proposal made earlier this year to the Department of Transportation.
That's akin to piling about 440 dump trucks full of frozen, earthy slop on the only road that connects North Slope oil and gas fields to the rest of Alaska. Another 700 feet beyond the roadway, also in the path of the debris field, is the buried trans-Alaska oil pipeline.
MYSTERY CLUMP
A now-retired U.S. Geological Survey geologist, Thomas Hamilton, mapped the debris fields in the late 1970s or early '80s, according to the university researchers. Hamilton called the mounds "flow slides" at the time, but did not study them in depth.
In 2006, Daanen was working at the university's Geophysical Institute Permafrost Lab when he made a trip with his wife up the Dalton Highway. He noticed what geologists call "drunken trees" in the southern Brooks Range.
The spruce trees, jutting at odd angles, were a clue that the ground might be moving as permafrost thawed below. Daanen drove slower. He saw the lopsided trees were collected together in clumps.
"It struck me that these are all on some sort of a land form that I hadn't seen before," he said.
Visiting scientists have assumed the formations were rock glaciers, collections of rock debris frozen in ice that can form as glaciers recede or under other conditions.
Daanen and geological engineer Margaret Darrow, who is leading the university research, writes that they appear to be something else entirely.
With the help of Hamilton, the researchers gave the blobs a name: "Frozen debris lobes." They described the little-understood phenomenon in an article published earlier this year in the journal of Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences.
"Our results indicate that frozen debris-lobes have responded to climate change by becoming increasingly active during the last decades, resulting in rapid downslope movements," the researchers wrote.
The debris lobe menacing the Dalton absorbs trees and vegetation as it marches forward, Darrow said. Standing along the highway, a five- or six-hour drive from Fairbanks, the heap assumes a monster-movie quality. All that's missing is the ominous music.
"You stand there, you look up at this huge hill and it's looming over you. And you know it's coming," she said.
What makes the formation unique from traditional landslides is that parts of it are frozen and parts of it are thawed as it moves downhill, Darrow said.
Based on historical aerial photos, the formation appears to have seeped from a hollow in the mountain slopes toward the highway. Set in motion by gravity, it's been moving for at least 10 years but wasn't close enough to the road to draw any great concern from the Transportation Department, said Billy Connor, a former DOT research manager and head of the university's Alaska University Transportation Center.
"It's like a big mud flow that's slowly moving down the hill toward the roadway. And it appears at this point in time it's the result of permafrost thawing up on the hillside," Connor said.
EXPENSIVE SOLUTIONS
Over the summer, the Transportation Department drilled holes in the "frozen debris lobe" closest to the highway to perform preliminary research. Daanen, Darrow and other university researchers plan to report their latest findings to the state by the end of the year.
After that, the department will begin considering options for saving the highway from the creeping debris, said Jeff Currey, a materials engineer for the Department's northern region.
Whatever the answer, it won't be cheap.
"Any solutions will probably cost millions of dollars and certainly some of them would cost tens of millions," Currey said.
Building a bridge over the lobe might work, though it would have to be almost 100 feet high and is among the most expensive options. It also wouldn't stop the debris from creeping onward toward the trans-Alaska oil pipeline buried west of the highway.
Currey estimates that the debris could take another 20 years or more to reach the pipeline after it arrives at the road, making the highway the more immediate concern.
Engineers could try freezing the debris back in place by super cooling the ground or building a barrier to hold it back. Simply hauling the mud, rocks and trees away might not work.
Digging away the face of the lobe might cause it to move even more quickly toward the highway -- a problem common to efforts to combat landslides, Darrow said.
"If you take out the toe, you remove the part that's holding it back and it just makes it go even faster," she said.
The scientists said they are just beginning to learn how the debris lobe was formed and why it's moving, questions they must answer before planners decide how to stop the blob from overtaking the highway.
"We are just scratching the surface. ... We're looking at data. But in terms of really understanding what is going on? No. We are not there yet," Daanen said.
At stake is a roadway that transportation planners sometimes jokingly call "the road to the bank."
The Dalton was built in 1974 as construction began on the oil pipeline. It remains partially unpaved today, a 414-mile lifeline that begins north of Fairbanks at the Elliott Highway, climbs through the Brooks Range and ends at Deadhorse near Prudhoe Bay.
Most Alaskans will never drive the highway. Daily traffic on the road averaged just 200 vehicles in 2011, and two-thirds of those were heavy trucks, according to the Transportation Department. But the road is a vital supply link to industry, funneling truckloads of pipe for drilling wells, fuel and even small buildings to the North Slope oil fields that fund state government.
The debris field at Mile 219 of the highway is the closest to the road, but Daanen has identified more than 150 such formations across the southern Brooks Range. A few of those also may threaten the highway in the future, researchers said.
"In the short run, the first thing we want to do is understand what the mechanism of movement is and try to come up with some idea for dealing with it," said Currey, the DOT materials engineer.
"We realized we better figure out what's going on here and get with it," he said.
Read The Village, the ADN's blog about rural Alaska, at adn.com/thevillage [ http://adn.com/thevillage ].
Copyright 2012 Anchorage Daily News
http://www.adn.com/2012/12/01/2710503/frozen-landslide-threatens-to.html [with comments]
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Arctic Report Card: Dark Times Ahead
Decreasing snow amounts may be pushing Arctic fox populations in Europe toward extinction
NOAA
Posted by Richard Monastersky
06 Dec 2012 | 01:39 GMT
Conditions in the Arctic are slipping rapidly from bad to worse as the pace of climate change accelerates in that region. That’s the message from an annual environmental assessment of the far North [ http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/ ], released on Wednesday.
“Conditions in the Arctic are changing in both expected and sometimes surprising ways,” said Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The changes are having an impact far beyond the far North, she added. “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t always stay in the Arctic. We’re seeing Arctic changes that affect weather patterns in the US,” Lubchenco said at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, where the Arctic Report Card was previewed. The online report was written by 114 scientists from 15 countries.
According to the report, the Arctic broke a string of environmental records this past year. The summertime sea ice pack was the smallest ever seen [ http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/08/arctic-sea-ice-declines-to-record-low.html ]. The amount of Northern Hemisphere snow in June hit the lowest mark on record. Virtually the entire Greenland Ice Cap showed some evidence of surface melting for the first time in observations going back to 1979. And permafrost temperatures on the North Slope of Alaska topped previous highs, said Martin O. Jeffries, a co-editor of the Arctic report and the Arctic science advisor at the Office of Naval Research. “If we’re not there already, we’re surely on the verge of seeing a new Arctic,” he said.
The widespread reduction in snow and ice cover in summertime has darkened the ocean surface and land in the Arctic, allowing it to absorb more sunlight, which leads to enhanced warming. “The Arctic is one of Earth’s mirrors and that mirror is breaking,” said Donald Perovich, an Arctic researcher at Dartmouth College, who participated in the report.
The darkening of the surface creates a positive feedback that explains why the Arctic is warming twice as quickly as lower latitudes [ http://www.nature.com/news/specials/arcticfrontier/index.html ], said Jeffries. “This is what we call the Arctic amplification of global warming, a phenomenon that was predicted 30 years ago, which we’re now seeing happening in a significant way.”
The changes are putting stress on some creatures, including Arctic foxes in Scandinavia and nearby regions. The European population has crashed in recent years; and with only 200 individuals left, it is in danger of extinction, according to the report, which blames disruptions in the population of rodents. Lemming numbers have dropped in some regions, and scientists have suggested that reduced snow cover may be implicated, said Jeffries.
The Arctic assessment comes out a week after a report that documented accelerated melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica [ http://www.nature.com/news/grim-picture-of-polar-ice-sheet-loss-1.11921 ] .
© 2012 Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/12/arctic-report-card-dark-times-ahead.html [no comments yet]
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NOAA: Climate Change Driving Arctic Into A ‘New State’ With Rapid Ice Loss And Record Permafrost Warming
Arctic sea ice is melting much, much faster than even the best climate models had projected. The reason is most likely unmodeled amplifying feedbacks.
Image via Arctic Sea Ice Blog [ http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2012/09/models-are-improving-but-can-they-catch-up.html ].
By Joe Romm on Dec 6, 2012 at 12:26 pm
“Scary New Report on Arctic Ice” is the Weather Channel’s headline [ http://www.weather.com/weather/videos/news-41/top-stories-169/scary-new-report-on-arctic-ice-32589 ] for NOAA’s sobering 2012 Arctic Report Card [ http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/ ].
Everyone should indeed be scared by what we are doing to the Arctic because it will accelerate global warming, speed up sea level rise, and make deadly superstorms like Sandy more frequent and more destructive (see “NOAA Bombshell: Warming-Driven Arctic Ice Loss Is Boosting Chance of Extreme U.S. Weather [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/11/989231/noaa-bombshell-warming-driven-arctic-ice-loss-is-boosting-chance-of-extreme-us-weather/ ]“).
This is what’s new up north in 2012:
New records set for snow extent, sea ice extent and ice sheet surface melting [ http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/exec_summary.html ], despite air temperatures — a key cause of melting — being unremarkable relative to the last decade.
Multiple observations provide strong evidence of widespread, sustained change driving Arctic environmental system into new state.
Here’s a video summary from NOAA [ http://www.youtube.com/watchv=O5h02Yc6lfA (next below, as embedded)]:
• Below the tundra, record high permafrost temperatures [ http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/permafrost.html ] occurred in northernmost Alaska.
• Duration of melting was the longest [ http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/greenland_ice_sheet.html ] observed yet on the Greenland ice sheet, and a rare, nearly ice sheet-wide melt event [ http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/greenland_ice_sheet.html ] occurred in July.
The record Greenland melt is scary because if the Greenland ice sheet disintegrates, sea levels would rise 20 feet — and the process appears to be accelerating to a critical “tipping point” [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/07/01/508782/greenland-ice-sheet-melt-nearing-critical-tipping-point/ ] (see also “Science Stunner: Greenland Ice Melt Up Nearly Five-Fold Since Mid-1990s [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/11/30/1260591/science-stunner-greenland-ice-melt-up-nearly-five-fold-since-mid-1990s-antarticas-ice-loss-up-50-in-past-decade/ ]”). Indeed, polar researcher Jason Box, lead author of the Greenland section of the report, told the annual meeting [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/dec/05/arctic-sea-ice-scientists-report ] of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco:
“In 2012 Greenland crossed a threshold where for the first time we saw complete surface melting at the highest elevations in what we used to call the dry snow zone,” he told reporters at the AGU. “As Greenland crosses the threshold and starts really melting in the upper elevations it really won’t recover from that unless the climate cools significantly for an extended period of time which doesn’t seem very likely.”
The tundra warming is scary because it is a frozen locker of carbon whose defrosting will further accelerate warming (see “Carbon Feedback From Thawing Permafrost Will Likely Add 0.4°F – 1.5°F To Total Global Warming By 2100 [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/06/970721/carbon-feedback-from-thawing-permafrost-will-add-04f-15f-to-total-global-warming-by-2100/ ]”).
Here is more detail [ http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/permafrost.html ] on what’s happening in the tundra:
• In 2012, new record high temperatures at 20 [meters, 65 feet] depth were measured at most permafrost observatories on the North Slope of Alaska and in the Brooks Range, where measurements began in the late 1970s. Only two coastal sites show exactly the same temperatures as in 2011.
• A common feature at Alaskan, Canadian and Russian sites is greater warming in relatively cold permafrost than in warm permafrost in the same geographical area.
• During the last fifteen years, active-layer thickness [ALT] has increased in the Russian European North, the region north of East Siberia, Chukotka, Svalbard and Greenland.
The “ALT is the top layer of soil and/or rock that thaws during the summer and freez[es] again during the fall, i.e., it is not permafrost.”
The report makes painfully clear [ http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/exec_summary.html ] why all of these Arctic trends are going to continue — global warming and amplifying feedbacks:
Large changes in multiple indicators are affecting climate and ecosystems, and, combined, these changes provide strong evidence of the momentum that has developed in the Arctic environmental system due to the impacts of a persistent warming trend that began over 30 years ago. A major source of this momentum is the fact that changes in the sea ice cover, snow cover, glaciers and Greenland ice sheet all conspire to reduce the overall surface reflectivity of the region in the summer, when the sun is ever-present. In other words, bright, white surfaces that reflect summer sunlight are being replaced by darker surfaces, e.g., ocean and land, which absorb sunlight. These conditions increase the capacity to store heat within the Arctic system, which enables more melting – a positive feedback. Thus, we arrive at the conclusion that it is very likely that major changes will continue to occur in the Arctic in years to come, particularly in the face of projections that indicate continued global warming.
Anyone who thinks we can delay aggressive deployment of carbon-free technology simply has shut their eyes and ears to the growing scientific evidence.
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Related Post:
Death Spiral Watch: Experts Warn “Near Ice-Free Arctic In Summer” In A Decade If Volume Trends Continue
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/09/05/799761/death-spiral-watch-experts-warn-near-ice-free-arctic-in-summer-in-a-decade-volume-trends-continue/
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© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/12/06/1293011/noaa-climate-change-driving-arctic-into-a-new-state-with-rapid-ice-loss-and-record-permafrost-warming/ [with comments]
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Fossil-Fuel Subsidies of Rich Nations Five Times Climate Aid
The HollyFrontier Corp. refinery stands in Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S., on Monday, Nov. 7, 2011. HollyFrontier Corp. reported a profit $523.1 million in its third-quarter earnings statement today, compared with a profit of $51.2 a year earlier.
Paul Taggart/Bloomberg
By Alex Morales - Dec 3, 2012 10:36 AM CT
Rich countries spend five times more on fossil-fuel subsidies than on aid to help developing nations cut their emissions and protect against the effects of climate change, the Oil Change International campaign group said.
In 2011, 22 industrialized nations paid $58.7 billion in subsidies to the oil, coal and gas industries and to consumers of the fuels, compared with climate-aid flows of $11.2 billion, according to calculations by the Washington-based group.
The data underline the steps developed nations may be able to take to cut their emissions as ministers from 190 nations meet in Doha to discuss measures to curb global warming. Eliminating the subsidies would reduce incentives to pollute and help rich nations meet their pledge to provide $100 billion a year in climate aid by 2020, said Stephen Kretzmann, the founder of Oil Change International.
“Measures that encourage inefficient use of energy, such as fossil fuel subsidies, must be eliminated,” Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said in a statement released by her office in Paris today. “Carbon emissions must be dramatically reduced, and the energy sector must play a key role in this.
The subsidies enable consumers to fuel cars and heat their homes more cheaply. The International Energy Agency estimates they totaled $523 billion last year, mainly from support paid out in developing countries. Production subsidies make it cheaper for oil and gas companies to extract the fuels. Leaders of the Group of 20 nations agreed at a meeting in Pittsburgh in 2009 to phase out fossil-fuel subsidies in the ‘‘medium term.’’
U.S. Reaction
U.S. and European Union envoys in Doha agreed that fossil fuel subsidies should be phased out. The U.S. is pushing the issue meetings of the Group of 20 nations.
‘‘It’s an important issue,’’ said Todd Stern, the lead U.S. State Department official at the talks in Doha. ‘‘There are a lot of entrenched interests. There are different kinds of interests.’’
European Union Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard told reporters in Doha she didn’t mind what forum subsidies were discussed ‘‘as long as we start phasing out’’ their use.
Aid is a keystone of climate agreements, and developing nations from Barbados to China have complained in Doha about the lack of transparency surrounding $30 billion of so-called fast- start finance that industrialized nations pledged to pay for the three-year period ending in 2012. They’re also calling for a ‘‘roadmap’’ setting out how the $100 billion goal will be met.
Funding the Problem
‘‘You can’t say you’re serious about fighting climate change until you stop funding the problem,” Kretzmann said in an interview in Doha, where envoys at United Nations climate talks are entering a second week of talks. “It should be possible to phase out producer subsidies and use part of that money for climate finance to help cushion the blow of removing consumption subsidies in developing countries.”
Of the 22 nations examined, Slovenia and Finland paid out more than 50 times in subsidies what they gave in climate aid, the data show. U.S. subsides were the highest at about $13.1 billion, or five times its $2.5 billion of climate aid in 2011.
A U.S. official said by e-mail today that while the current administration has been seeking to eliminate about $4 billion in annual fossil fuel subsidies, Congress has yet to act.
U.S. Financing
While Congress has approved almost $7.5 billion in fast- start finance over the three years, at an average of about $2.5 billion, its actual contribution in 2011 was $3.2 billion, according to a document from the U.S. delegation in Doha.
Oil Change International, set up in 2005, used fast-start finance data from the World Resources Institute, taking annual averages to produce 2011 figures. It analyzed figures on fossil fuel subsidies from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s website.
Items included in the OECD data for the U.S. include tax exemptions and reductions for producers and for consumers, including farmers and low-income households. It includes federal measures, as well as some state-level programs.
OECD’s Caution
“Caution is required in interpreting the support amounts and in aggregating them,” the OECD says on its website. That’s because, among other reasons, different countries use different tax rates for fossil fuels, so the subsidy resulting from a tax exemption could appear relatively higher in a high-tax nation, Jehan Sauvage, an OECD analyst, said in an e-mail response.
Australia paid $8.4 billion in subsidies, while Germany and the U.K. paid $6.6 billion each. A U.K. government spokesman said in an e-mail that, in the absence of a common G20 definition for what constitutes a fossil-fuel subsidy, Britain doesn’t have any inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption.
Japan had the best record, with aid of $5 billion exceeding fossil fuel subsidies of $439 million, according to the campaign group.
Kretzmann said progress since nations made the pledge at the G20 meeting in 2009 has been “minor.” While reporting of subsidies has improved, “everyone in the G20 gets to pick their own definition of a fossil-fuel subsidy,” he said.
“As far as we can tell, there has been no single subsidy in the G20 that’s been phased out as a result,” Kretzmann said. “Overall, we think there’s roughly $1 trillion spent on fossil fuel subsidies globally, and that’s before you get into health costs, climate-change adaptation costs and military costs for protecting oil supplies.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net
©2012 BLOOMBERG L.P.
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To Stop Climate Change, Students Aim at College Portfolios
Students in Minneapolis, seeking steps to cut atmospheric carbon levels to 350 parts per million, known as the safe level.
Stephen Maturen for The New York Times
Bill McKibben, a writer turned advocate for carbon reduction, is on a national tour to build support for the divestment campaign.
Stephen Maturen for The New York Times
Demonstrators in 1978, protesting Harvard's refusal to divest itself of stocks owned in companies operating in South Africa.
Associated Press
By JUSTIN GILLIS
Published: December 4, 2012
SWARTHMORE, Pa. — A group of Swarthmore College [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/swarthmore_college/index.html ] students is asking the school administration to take a seemingly simple step to combat pollution and climate change [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html ]: sell off the endowment’s holdings in large fossil fuel companies. For months, they have been getting a simple answer: no.
As they consider how to ratchet up their campaign, the students suddenly find themselves at the vanguard of a national movement.
In recent weeks, college students on dozens of campuses have demanded that university endowment funds rid themselves of coal [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/coal/index.html ], oil [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/energy-environment/oil-petroleum-and-gasoline/index.html ] and gas stocks. The students see it as a tactic that could force climate change, barely discussed in the presidential campaign, back onto the national political agenda.
“We’ve reached this point of intense urgency that we need to act on climate change now, but the situation is bleaker than it’s ever been from a political perspective,” said William Lawrence, a Swarthmore senior from East Lansing, Mich.
Students who have signed on see it as a conscious imitation of the successful effort in the 1980s to pressure colleges and other institutions to divest themselves of the stocks of companies doing business in South Africa under apartheid.
A small institution in Maine, Unity College, has already voted [ http://sustainabilitymonitor.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/unity-college-board-of-trustees-votes-to-divest-from-fossil-fuels/ ] to get out of fossil fuels. Another, Hampshire College in Massachusetts, has adopted a broad investment policy [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-lash/college-investment-endowment-_b_2006569.html ] that is ridding its portfolio of fossil fuel stocks.
“In the near future, the political tide will turn and the public will demand action on climate change,” Stephen Mulkey [ http://www.unity.edu/board-trustees/stephen-mulkey ], the Unity College president, wrote in a letter [ http://sustainabilitymonitor.wordpress.com/2012/11/13/an-open-letter-to-college-and-university-presidents-about-divestment-from-fossil-fuels/ ] to other college administrators. “Our students are already demanding action, and we must not ignore them.”
But at colleges with large endowments, many administrators are viewing the demand skeptically, saying it would undermine their goal of maximum returns in support of education. Fossil fuel companies represent a significant portion of the stock market, comprising nearly 10 percent of the value of the Russell 3000, a broad index of 3,000 American companies.
No school with an endowment exceeding $1 billion has agreed to divest itself of fossil fuel stocks. At Harvard, which holds the largest endowment in the country at $31 billion, the student body recently voted [ http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/green/greenblog/2012/11/harvard_students_vote_to_suppo.html ] to ask the school to do so. With roughly half the undergraduates voting, 72 percent of them supported the demand.
“We always appreciate hearing from students about their viewpoints, but Harvard is not considering divesting from companies related to fossil fuels,” Kevin Galvin, a university spokesman, said by e-mail.
Several organizations have been working on some version of a divestment campaign, initially focusing on coal, for more than a year. But the recent escalation has largely been the handiwork of a grass-roots organization, 350.org [ http://350.org/ ], that focuses on climate change, and its leader, Bill McKibben [ http://350.org/en/node/5600#bio ], a writer turned advocate. The group’s name is a reference to what some scientists see as a maximum safe level [ http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0804/0804.1126.pdf ] of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 350 parts per million. The level is now about 390, an increase of 41 percent since before the Industrial Revolution.
Mr. McKibben is touring the country [ http://math.350.org/ ] by bus, speaking at sold-out halls and urging students to begin local divestment initiatives focusing on 200 energy companies [ http://gofossilfree.org/companies/ ]. Many of the students attending said they were inspired to do so by an article he wrote over the summer in Rolling Stone magazine, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719 (about 40% of the way down at {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77869081 )].”
Speaking recently to an audience at the University of Vermont [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_vermont/index.html ], Mr. McKibben painted the fossil fuel industry as an enemy that must be defeated, arguing that it had used money and political influence to block climate action in Washington. “This is no different than the tobacco industry — for years, they lied about the dangers of their industry,” Mr. McKibben said.
Eric Wohlschlegel, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute [ http://www.api.org/ ], said that continued use of fossil fuels was essential for the country’s economy, but that energy companies were investing heavily in ways to emit less carbon dioxide.
In an interview, Mr. McKibben said he recognized that a rapid transition away from fossil fuels would be exceedingly difficult. But he said strong government policies to limit emissions were long overdue, and were being blocked in part by the political power of the incumbent industry.
Mr. McKibben’s goal is to make owning the stocks of these companies disreputable, in the way that owning tobacco stocks has become disreputable in many quarters. Many colleges will not buy them, for instance.
Mr. McKibben has laid out a series of demands that would get the fuel companies off 350.org’s blacklist. He wants them to stop exploring for new fossil fuels, given that they have already booked reserves about five times as large as scientists say society can afford to burn. He wants them to stop lobbying against emission policies in Washington. And he wants them to help devise a transition plan that will leave most of their reserves in the ground while encouraging lower-carbon energy sources.
“They need more incentive to make the transition that they must know they need to make, from fossil fuel companies to energy companies,” Mr. McKibben said.
Most college administrations, at the urging of their students, have been taking global warming seriously for years, spending money on steps like cutting energy consumption and installing solar panels.
The divestment demand is so new that most administrators are just beginning to grapple with it. Several of them, in interviews, said that even though they tended to agree with students on the seriousness of the problem, they feared divisive boardroom debates on divestment.
That was certainly the case in the 1980s, when the South African divestment campaign caused bitter arguments across the nation.
The issue then was whether divestment, potentially costly, would have much real effect on companies doing business in South Africa. Even today, historians differ on whether it did. But the campaign required prominent people to grapple with the morality of apartheid, altering the politics of the issue. Economic pressure from many countries ultimately helped to force the whites-only South African government to the bargaining table.
Mr. Lawrence, the Swarthmore senior, said that many of today’s students found that campaign inspirational because it “transformed what was seemingly an intractable problem.”
Swarthmore, a liberal arts college southwest of Philadelphia, is a small school with a substantial endowment, about $1.5 billion. The trustees acceded to divestment demands during that campaign, in 1986, but only after a series of confrontational tactics by students, including brief occupations of the president’s office.
The board later adopted a policy stating that it would be unlikely to take such a step again.
“The college’s policy is that the endowment is not to be invested for social purposes” beyond the obvious one of educating students, said Suzanne P. Welsh, vice president for finance at the school. “To use the endowment in support of other missions is not appropriate. It’s not what our donors have given money for.”
About a dozen Swarthmore students came up with the divestment tactic two years ago after working against [ http://swatmountainjustice.wordpress.com/ ] the strip mining of coal atop mountains in Appalachia, asking the school to divest itself of investments in a short list of energy companies nicknamed the Sordid 16 [ http://swatmountainjustice.wordpress.com/the-sordid-sixteen-of-fossil-fuels/ ].
So far, the students have avoided confrontation. The campaign has featured a petition signed by nearly half the student body, small demonstrations and quirky art installations [ http://swatmountainjustice.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/fossil-fuel-divestment-campaign-update-and-art-installation/ ]. The college president, a theologian named Rebecca Chopp [ http://www.swarthmore.edu/presidents-office.xml ], has expressed support for their goals but not their means.
Matters could escalate in coming months, with Swarthmore scheduled to host a February meeting — the students call it a “convergence” — of 150 students from other colleges who are working on divestment.
Students said they were well aware that the South Africa campaign succeeded only after on-campus actions like hunger strikes, sit-ins and the seizure of buildings. Some of them are already having talks with their parents about how far to go.
“When it comes down to it, the members of the board are not the ones who are inheriting the climate problem,” said Sachie Hopkins-Hayakawa, a Swarthmore senior from Portland, Ore. “We are.”
Brent Summers contributed reporting from Burlington, Vt.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/business/energy-environment/to-fight-climate-change-college-students-take-aim-at-the-endowment-portfolio.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/business/energy-environment/to-fight-climate-change-college-students-take-aim-at-the-endowment-portfolio.html?pagewanted=all ]
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You Need to See This Movie [Promised Land]
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
12/06/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/fracking-movie-promised-land_b_2251339.html [with comments]
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The debris flow is visible from the Dalton Highway. The lobe (middle of the frame) is moving toward the highway, picking up debris and toppling trees.
Photo by Guido Grosse 2012
This image is taken from the top of the debris flow that is closest to the Highway, about 75 yards. It is moving downslope at about 3 yards per year, and is accelerating. The bending trees are being overrun by the advancing debris.
Photo by Guido Grosse 2012
By KYLE HOPKINS — khopkins@adn.com
Published: December 1, 2012
A mysterious blob of frozen soil, rocks and trees is creeping toward the Dalton Highway, threatening to block the haul road that serves as a lifeline for Alaska's oil and gas industry. It could happen as soon as end of the decade.
University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers who have been studying the slow-moving landslide just south of the Brooks Range since 2008 say it is crawling closer to the highway every day. The scientists suspect climate change may have caused the 300-foot-wide finger of debris -- once thought to be motionless -- to gain speed as it slides toward the road.
"It's this giant moving mass and it's going to destroy anything in its way," said Rob Harper, a spokesman for the Alaska University Transportation Center.
The wave of frozen mud, snow and plants slowly spilled from the mountains within the past 5,000 years, researchers said. It is now within about 150 feet of the highway. Moving at a average rate of more than a centimeter a day, it could swamp the Dalton within five to 10 years, said Institute of Northern Engineering hydrologist Ronald Daanen.
"The sooner we come up with a viable solution, the better it is. There isn't a lot of time left," said Daanen, who will present information about the hazard at a worldwide meeting on geophysical sciences next week in San Francisco.
Transportation planners across the country are grappling with extreme weather such as floods, storms and unusual snowfall due to changing weather patterns. In the Alaska Arctic, the frozen debris encroaching on the Dalton Highway presents a new kind of puzzle.
As permafrost shrinks and summers grow longer in the southcentral Brooks Range, researchers wonder: How do you stop an accelerating, landslide-like ocean of mud and splintered trees from destroying one of the state economy's most important roadways?
The blob in question is at Mile 219 of the Dalton Highway, about 40 miles north of Coldfoot as the highway enters the Brooks Range. It is massive. More than 60 feet tall and as long as 10 football fields.
When it reaches the road, it will dump 22,000 tons of soil and rocks on the highway every year, the researchers wrote in a study proposal made earlier this year to the Department of Transportation.
That's akin to piling about 440 dump trucks full of frozen, earthy slop on the only road that connects North Slope oil and gas fields to the rest of Alaska. Another 700 feet beyond the roadway, also in the path of the debris field, is the buried trans-Alaska oil pipeline.
MYSTERY CLUMP
A now-retired U.S. Geological Survey geologist, Thomas Hamilton, mapped the debris fields in the late 1970s or early '80s, according to the university researchers. Hamilton called the mounds "flow slides" at the time, but did not study them in depth.
In 2006, Daanen was working at the university's Geophysical Institute Permafrost Lab when he made a trip with his wife up the Dalton Highway. He noticed what geologists call "drunken trees" in the southern Brooks Range.
The spruce trees, jutting at odd angles, were a clue that the ground might be moving as permafrost thawed below. Daanen drove slower. He saw the lopsided trees were collected together in clumps.
"It struck me that these are all on some sort of a land form that I hadn't seen before," he said.
Visiting scientists have assumed the formations were rock glaciers, collections of rock debris frozen in ice that can form as glaciers recede or under other conditions.
Daanen and geological engineer Margaret Darrow, who is leading the university research, writes that they appear to be something else entirely.
With the help of Hamilton, the researchers gave the blobs a name: "Frozen debris lobes." They described the little-understood phenomenon in an article published earlier this year in the journal of Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences.
"Our results indicate that frozen debris-lobes have responded to climate change by becoming increasingly active during the last decades, resulting in rapid downslope movements," the researchers wrote.
The debris lobe menacing the Dalton absorbs trees and vegetation as it marches forward, Darrow said. Standing along the highway, a five- or six-hour drive from Fairbanks, the heap assumes a monster-movie quality. All that's missing is the ominous music.
"You stand there, you look up at this huge hill and it's looming over you. And you know it's coming," she said.
What makes the formation unique from traditional landslides is that parts of it are frozen and parts of it are thawed as it moves downhill, Darrow said.
Based on historical aerial photos, the formation appears to have seeped from a hollow in the mountain slopes toward the highway. Set in motion by gravity, it's been moving for at least 10 years but wasn't close enough to the road to draw any great concern from the Transportation Department, said Billy Connor, a former DOT research manager and head of the university's Alaska University Transportation Center.
"It's like a big mud flow that's slowly moving down the hill toward the roadway. And it appears at this point in time it's the result of permafrost thawing up on the hillside," Connor said.
EXPENSIVE SOLUTIONS
Over the summer, the Transportation Department drilled holes in the "frozen debris lobe" closest to the highway to perform preliminary research. Daanen, Darrow and other university researchers plan to report their latest findings to the state by the end of the year.
After that, the department will begin considering options for saving the highway from the creeping debris, said Jeff Currey, a materials engineer for the Department's northern region.
Whatever the answer, it won't be cheap.
"Any solutions will probably cost millions of dollars and certainly some of them would cost tens of millions," Currey said.
Building a bridge over the lobe might work, though it would have to be almost 100 feet high and is among the most expensive options. It also wouldn't stop the debris from creeping onward toward the trans-Alaska oil pipeline buried west of the highway.
Currey estimates that the debris could take another 20 years or more to reach the pipeline after it arrives at the road, making the highway the more immediate concern.
Engineers could try freezing the debris back in place by super cooling the ground or building a barrier to hold it back. Simply hauling the mud, rocks and trees away might not work.
Digging away the face of the lobe might cause it to move even more quickly toward the highway -- a problem common to efforts to combat landslides, Darrow said.
"If you take out the toe, you remove the part that's holding it back and it just makes it go even faster," she said.
The scientists said they are just beginning to learn how the debris lobe was formed and why it's moving, questions they must answer before planners decide how to stop the blob from overtaking the highway.
"We are just scratching the surface. ... We're looking at data. But in terms of really understanding what is going on? No. We are not there yet," Daanen said.
At stake is a roadway that transportation planners sometimes jokingly call "the road to the bank."
The Dalton was built in 1974 as construction began on the oil pipeline. It remains partially unpaved today, a 414-mile lifeline that begins north of Fairbanks at the Elliott Highway, climbs through the Brooks Range and ends at Deadhorse near Prudhoe Bay.
Most Alaskans will never drive the highway. Daily traffic on the road averaged just 200 vehicles in 2011, and two-thirds of those were heavy trucks, according to the Transportation Department. But the road is a vital supply link to industry, funneling truckloads of pipe for drilling wells, fuel and even small buildings to the North Slope oil fields that fund state government.
The debris field at Mile 219 of the highway is the closest to the road, but Daanen has identified more than 150 such formations across the southern Brooks Range. A few of those also may threaten the highway in the future, researchers said.
"In the short run, the first thing we want to do is understand what the mechanism of movement is and try to come up with some idea for dealing with it," said Currey, the DOT materials engineer.
"We realized we better figure out what's going on here and get with it," he said.
Read The Village, the ADN's blog about rural Alaska, at adn.com/thevillage [ http://adn.com/thevillage ].
Copyright 2012 Anchorage Daily News
http://www.adn.com/2012/12/01/2710503/frozen-landslide-threatens-to.html [with comments]
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Arctic Report Card: Dark Times Ahead
Decreasing snow amounts may be pushing Arctic fox populations in Europe toward extinction
NOAA
Posted by Richard Monastersky
06 Dec 2012 | 01:39 GMT
Conditions in the Arctic are slipping rapidly from bad to worse as the pace of climate change accelerates in that region. That’s the message from an annual environmental assessment of the far North [ http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/ ], released on Wednesday.
“Conditions in the Arctic are changing in both expected and sometimes surprising ways,” said Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The changes are having an impact far beyond the far North, she added. “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t always stay in the Arctic. We’re seeing Arctic changes that affect weather patterns in the US,” Lubchenco said at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, where the Arctic Report Card was previewed. The online report was written by 114 scientists from 15 countries.
According to the report, the Arctic broke a string of environmental records this past year. The summertime sea ice pack was the smallest ever seen [ http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/08/arctic-sea-ice-declines-to-record-low.html ]. The amount of Northern Hemisphere snow in June hit the lowest mark on record. Virtually the entire Greenland Ice Cap showed some evidence of surface melting for the first time in observations going back to 1979. And permafrost temperatures on the North Slope of Alaska topped previous highs, said Martin O. Jeffries, a co-editor of the Arctic report and the Arctic science advisor at the Office of Naval Research. “If we’re not there already, we’re surely on the verge of seeing a new Arctic,” he said.
The widespread reduction in snow and ice cover in summertime has darkened the ocean surface and land in the Arctic, allowing it to absorb more sunlight, which leads to enhanced warming. “The Arctic is one of Earth’s mirrors and that mirror is breaking,” said Donald Perovich, an Arctic researcher at Dartmouth College, who participated in the report.
The darkening of the surface creates a positive feedback that explains why the Arctic is warming twice as quickly as lower latitudes [ http://www.nature.com/news/specials/arcticfrontier/index.html ], said Jeffries. “This is what we call the Arctic amplification of global warming, a phenomenon that was predicted 30 years ago, which we’re now seeing happening in a significant way.”
The changes are putting stress on some creatures, including Arctic foxes in Scandinavia and nearby regions. The European population has crashed in recent years; and with only 200 individuals left, it is in danger of extinction, according to the report, which blames disruptions in the population of rodents. Lemming numbers have dropped in some regions, and scientists have suggested that reduced snow cover may be implicated, said Jeffries.
The Arctic assessment comes out a week after a report that documented accelerated melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica [ http://www.nature.com/news/grim-picture-of-polar-ice-sheet-loss-1.11921 ] .
© 2012 Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/12/arctic-report-card-dark-times-ahead.html [no comments yet]
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NOAA: Climate Change Driving Arctic Into A ‘New State’ With Rapid Ice Loss And Record Permafrost Warming
Arctic sea ice is melting much, much faster than even the best climate models had projected. The reason is most likely unmodeled amplifying feedbacks.
Image via Arctic Sea Ice Blog [ http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2012/09/models-are-improving-but-can-they-catch-up.html ].
By Joe Romm on Dec 6, 2012 at 12:26 pm
“Scary New Report on Arctic Ice” is the Weather Channel’s headline [ http://www.weather.com/weather/videos/news-41/top-stories-169/scary-new-report-on-arctic-ice-32589 ] for NOAA’s sobering 2012 Arctic Report Card [ http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/ ].
Everyone should indeed be scared by what we are doing to the Arctic because it will accelerate global warming, speed up sea level rise, and make deadly superstorms like Sandy more frequent and more destructive (see “NOAA Bombshell: Warming-Driven Arctic Ice Loss Is Boosting Chance of Extreme U.S. Weather [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/11/989231/noaa-bombshell-warming-driven-arctic-ice-loss-is-boosting-chance-of-extreme-us-weather/ ]“).
This is what’s new up north in 2012:
New records set for snow extent, sea ice extent and ice sheet surface melting [ http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/exec_summary.html ], despite air temperatures — a key cause of melting — being unremarkable relative to the last decade.
Multiple observations provide strong evidence of widespread, sustained change driving Arctic environmental system into new state.
Here’s a video summary from NOAA [ http://www.youtube.com/watchv=O5h02Yc6lfA (next below, as embedded)]:
Two of the most worrisome highlights are:
• Below the tundra, record high permafrost temperatures [ http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/permafrost.html ] occurred in northernmost Alaska.
• Duration of melting was the longest [ http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/greenland_ice_sheet.html ] observed yet on the Greenland ice sheet, and a rare, nearly ice sheet-wide melt event [ http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/greenland_ice_sheet.html ] occurred in July.
The record Greenland melt is scary because if the Greenland ice sheet disintegrates, sea levels would rise 20 feet — and the process appears to be accelerating to a critical “tipping point” [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/07/01/508782/greenland-ice-sheet-melt-nearing-critical-tipping-point/ ] (see also “Science Stunner: Greenland Ice Melt Up Nearly Five-Fold Since Mid-1990s [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/11/30/1260591/science-stunner-greenland-ice-melt-up-nearly-five-fold-since-mid-1990s-antarticas-ice-loss-up-50-in-past-decade/ ]”). Indeed, polar researcher Jason Box, lead author of the Greenland section of the report, told the annual meeting [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/dec/05/arctic-sea-ice-scientists-report ] of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco:
“In 2012 Greenland crossed a threshold where for the first time we saw complete surface melting at the highest elevations in what we used to call the dry snow zone,” he told reporters at the AGU. “As Greenland crosses the threshold and starts really melting in the upper elevations it really won’t recover from that unless the climate cools significantly for an extended period of time which doesn’t seem very likely.”
The tundra warming is scary because it is a frozen locker of carbon whose defrosting will further accelerate warming (see “Carbon Feedback From Thawing Permafrost Will Likely Add 0.4°F – 1.5°F To Total Global Warming By 2100 [ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/06/970721/carbon-feedback-from-thawing-permafrost-will-add-04f-15f-to-total-global-warming-by-2100/ ]”).
Here is more detail [ http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/permafrost.html ] on what’s happening in the tundra:
• In 2012, new record high temperatures at 20 [meters, 65 feet] depth were measured at most permafrost observatories on the North Slope of Alaska and in the Brooks Range, where measurements began in the late 1970s. Only two coastal sites show exactly the same temperatures as in 2011.
• A common feature at Alaskan, Canadian and Russian sites is greater warming in relatively cold permafrost than in warm permafrost in the same geographical area.
• During the last fifteen years, active-layer thickness [ALT] has increased in the Russian European North, the region north of East Siberia, Chukotka, Svalbard and Greenland.
The “ALT is the top layer of soil and/or rock that thaws during the summer and freez[es] again during the fall, i.e., it is not permafrost.”
The report makes painfully clear [ http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/exec_summary.html ] why all of these Arctic trends are going to continue — global warming and amplifying feedbacks:
Large changes in multiple indicators are affecting climate and ecosystems, and, combined, these changes provide strong evidence of the momentum that has developed in the Arctic environmental system due to the impacts of a persistent warming trend that began over 30 years ago. A major source of this momentum is the fact that changes in the sea ice cover, snow cover, glaciers and Greenland ice sheet all conspire to reduce the overall surface reflectivity of the region in the summer, when the sun is ever-present. In other words, bright, white surfaces that reflect summer sunlight are being replaced by darker surfaces, e.g., ocean and land, which absorb sunlight. These conditions increase the capacity to store heat within the Arctic system, which enables more melting – a positive feedback. Thus, we arrive at the conclusion that it is very likely that major changes will continue to occur in the Arctic in years to come, particularly in the face of projections that indicate continued global warming.
Anyone who thinks we can delay aggressive deployment of carbon-free technology simply has shut their eyes and ears to the growing scientific evidence.
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Related Post:
Death Spiral Watch: Experts Warn “Near Ice-Free Arctic In Summer” In A Decade If Volume Trends Continue
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/09/05/799761/death-spiral-watch-experts-warn-near-ice-free-arctic-in-summer-in-a-decade-volume-trends-continue/
*
© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund (emphasis in original)
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/12/06/1293011/noaa-climate-change-driving-arctic-into-a-new-state-with-rapid-ice-loss-and-record-permafrost-warming/ [with comments]
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Fossil-Fuel Subsidies of Rich Nations Five Times Climate Aid
The HollyFrontier Corp. refinery stands in Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S., on Monday, Nov. 7, 2011. HollyFrontier Corp. reported a profit $523.1 million in its third-quarter earnings statement today, compared with a profit of $51.2 a year earlier.
Paul Taggart/Bloomberg
By Alex Morales - Dec 3, 2012 10:36 AM CT
Rich countries spend five times more on fossil-fuel subsidies than on aid to help developing nations cut their emissions and protect against the effects of climate change, the Oil Change International campaign group said.
In 2011, 22 industrialized nations paid $58.7 billion in subsidies to the oil, coal and gas industries and to consumers of the fuels, compared with climate-aid flows of $11.2 billion, according to calculations by the Washington-based group.
The data underline the steps developed nations may be able to take to cut their emissions as ministers from 190 nations meet in Doha to discuss measures to curb global warming. Eliminating the subsidies would reduce incentives to pollute and help rich nations meet their pledge to provide $100 billion a year in climate aid by 2020, said Stephen Kretzmann, the founder of Oil Change International.
“Measures that encourage inefficient use of energy, such as fossil fuel subsidies, must be eliminated,” Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said in a statement released by her office in Paris today. “Carbon emissions must be dramatically reduced, and the energy sector must play a key role in this.
The subsidies enable consumers to fuel cars and heat their homes more cheaply. The International Energy Agency estimates they totaled $523 billion last year, mainly from support paid out in developing countries. Production subsidies make it cheaper for oil and gas companies to extract the fuels. Leaders of the Group of 20 nations agreed at a meeting in Pittsburgh in 2009 to phase out fossil-fuel subsidies in the ‘‘medium term.’’
U.S. Reaction
U.S. and European Union envoys in Doha agreed that fossil fuel subsidies should be phased out. The U.S. is pushing the issue meetings of the Group of 20 nations.
‘‘It’s an important issue,’’ said Todd Stern, the lead U.S. State Department official at the talks in Doha. ‘‘There are a lot of entrenched interests. There are different kinds of interests.’’
European Union Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard told reporters in Doha she didn’t mind what forum subsidies were discussed ‘‘as long as we start phasing out’’ their use.
Aid is a keystone of climate agreements, and developing nations from Barbados to China have complained in Doha about the lack of transparency surrounding $30 billion of so-called fast- start finance that industrialized nations pledged to pay for the three-year period ending in 2012. They’re also calling for a ‘‘roadmap’’ setting out how the $100 billion goal will be met.
Funding the Problem
‘‘You can’t say you’re serious about fighting climate change until you stop funding the problem,” Kretzmann said in an interview in Doha, where envoys at United Nations climate talks are entering a second week of talks. “It should be possible to phase out producer subsidies and use part of that money for climate finance to help cushion the blow of removing consumption subsidies in developing countries.”
Of the 22 nations examined, Slovenia and Finland paid out more than 50 times in subsidies what they gave in climate aid, the data show. U.S. subsides were the highest at about $13.1 billion, or five times its $2.5 billion of climate aid in 2011.
A U.S. official said by e-mail today that while the current administration has been seeking to eliminate about $4 billion in annual fossil fuel subsidies, Congress has yet to act.
U.S. Financing
While Congress has approved almost $7.5 billion in fast- start finance over the three years, at an average of about $2.5 billion, its actual contribution in 2011 was $3.2 billion, according to a document from the U.S. delegation in Doha.
Oil Change International, set up in 2005, used fast-start finance data from the World Resources Institute, taking annual averages to produce 2011 figures. It analyzed figures on fossil fuel subsidies from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s website.
Items included in the OECD data for the U.S. include tax exemptions and reductions for producers and for consumers, including farmers and low-income households. It includes federal measures, as well as some state-level programs.
OECD’s Caution
“Caution is required in interpreting the support amounts and in aggregating them,” the OECD says on its website. That’s because, among other reasons, different countries use different tax rates for fossil fuels, so the subsidy resulting from a tax exemption could appear relatively higher in a high-tax nation, Jehan Sauvage, an OECD analyst, said in an e-mail response.
Australia paid $8.4 billion in subsidies, while Germany and the U.K. paid $6.6 billion each. A U.K. government spokesman said in an e-mail that, in the absence of a common G20 definition for what constitutes a fossil-fuel subsidy, Britain doesn’t have any inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption.
Japan had the best record, with aid of $5 billion exceeding fossil fuel subsidies of $439 million, according to the campaign group.
Kretzmann said progress since nations made the pledge at the G20 meeting in 2009 has been “minor.” While reporting of subsidies has improved, “everyone in the G20 gets to pick their own definition of a fossil-fuel subsidy,” he said.
“As far as we can tell, there has been no single subsidy in the G20 that’s been phased out as a result,” Kretzmann said. “Overall, we think there’s roughly $1 trillion spent on fossil fuel subsidies globally, and that’s before you get into health costs, climate-change adaptation costs and military costs for protecting oil supplies.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net
©2012 BLOOMBERG L.P.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-03/fossil-fuel-subsidies-of-rich-nations-are-five-times-climate-aid.html [with comments]
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To Stop Climate Change, Students Aim at College Portfolios
Students in Minneapolis, seeking steps to cut atmospheric carbon levels to 350 parts per million, known as the safe level.
Stephen Maturen for The New York Times
Bill McKibben, a writer turned advocate for carbon reduction, is on a national tour to build support for the divestment campaign.
Stephen Maturen for The New York Times
Demonstrators in 1978, protesting Harvard's refusal to divest itself of stocks owned in companies operating in South Africa.
Associated Press
By JUSTIN GILLIS
Published: December 4, 2012
SWARTHMORE, Pa. — A group of Swarthmore College [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/swarthmore_college/index.html ] students is asking the school administration to take a seemingly simple step to combat pollution and climate change [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html ]: sell off the endowment’s holdings in large fossil fuel companies. For months, they have been getting a simple answer: no.
As they consider how to ratchet up their campaign, the students suddenly find themselves at the vanguard of a national movement.
In recent weeks, college students on dozens of campuses have demanded that university endowment funds rid themselves of coal [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/coal/index.html ], oil [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/energy-environment/oil-petroleum-and-gasoline/index.html ] and gas stocks. The students see it as a tactic that could force climate change, barely discussed in the presidential campaign, back onto the national political agenda.
“We’ve reached this point of intense urgency that we need to act on climate change now, but the situation is bleaker than it’s ever been from a political perspective,” said William Lawrence, a Swarthmore senior from East Lansing, Mich.
Students who have signed on see it as a conscious imitation of the successful effort in the 1980s to pressure colleges and other institutions to divest themselves of the stocks of companies doing business in South Africa under apartheid.
A small institution in Maine, Unity College, has already voted [ http://sustainabilitymonitor.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/unity-college-board-of-trustees-votes-to-divest-from-fossil-fuels/ ] to get out of fossil fuels. Another, Hampshire College in Massachusetts, has adopted a broad investment policy [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-lash/college-investment-endowment-_b_2006569.html ] that is ridding its portfolio of fossil fuel stocks.
“In the near future, the political tide will turn and the public will demand action on climate change,” Stephen Mulkey [ http://www.unity.edu/board-trustees/stephen-mulkey ], the Unity College president, wrote in a letter [ http://sustainabilitymonitor.wordpress.com/2012/11/13/an-open-letter-to-college-and-university-presidents-about-divestment-from-fossil-fuels/ ] to other college administrators. “Our students are already demanding action, and we must not ignore them.”
But at colleges with large endowments, many administrators are viewing the demand skeptically, saying it would undermine their goal of maximum returns in support of education. Fossil fuel companies represent a significant portion of the stock market, comprising nearly 10 percent of the value of the Russell 3000, a broad index of 3,000 American companies.
No school with an endowment exceeding $1 billion has agreed to divest itself of fossil fuel stocks. At Harvard, which holds the largest endowment in the country at $31 billion, the student body recently voted [ http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/green/greenblog/2012/11/harvard_students_vote_to_suppo.html ] to ask the school to do so. With roughly half the undergraduates voting, 72 percent of them supported the demand.
“We always appreciate hearing from students about their viewpoints, but Harvard is not considering divesting from companies related to fossil fuels,” Kevin Galvin, a university spokesman, said by e-mail.
Several organizations have been working on some version of a divestment campaign, initially focusing on coal, for more than a year. But the recent escalation has largely been the handiwork of a grass-roots organization, 350.org [ http://350.org/ ], that focuses on climate change, and its leader, Bill McKibben [ http://350.org/en/node/5600#bio ], a writer turned advocate. The group’s name is a reference to what some scientists see as a maximum safe level [ http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0804/0804.1126.pdf ] of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 350 parts per million. The level is now about 390, an increase of 41 percent since before the Industrial Revolution.
Mr. McKibben is touring the country [ http://math.350.org/ ] by bus, speaking at sold-out halls and urging students to begin local divestment initiatives focusing on 200 energy companies [ http://gofossilfree.org/companies/ ]. Many of the students attending said they were inspired to do so by an article he wrote over the summer in Rolling Stone magazine, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math [ http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719 (about 40% of the way down at {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77869081 )].”
Speaking recently to an audience at the University of Vermont [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_vermont/index.html ], Mr. McKibben painted the fossil fuel industry as an enemy that must be defeated, arguing that it had used money and political influence to block climate action in Washington. “This is no different than the tobacco industry — for years, they lied about the dangers of their industry,” Mr. McKibben said.
Eric Wohlschlegel, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute [ http://www.api.org/ ], said that continued use of fossil fuels was essential for the country’s economy, but that energy companies were investing heavily in ways to emit less carbon dioxide.
In an interview, Mr. McKibben said he recognized that a rapid transition away from fossil fuels would be exceedingly difficult. But he said strong government policies to limit emissions were long overdue, and were being blocked in part by the political power of the incumbent industry.
Mr. McKibben’s goal is to make owning the stocks of these companies disreputable, in the way that owning tobacco stocks has become disreputable in many quarters. Many colleges will not buy them, for instance.
Mr. McKibben has laid out a series of demands that would get the fuel companies off 350.org’s blacklist. He wants them to stop exploring for new fossil fuels, given that they have already booked reserves about five times as large as scientists say society can afford to burn. He wants them to stop lobbying against emission policies in Washington. And he wants them to help devise a transition plan that will leave most of their reserves in the ground while encouraging lower-carbon energy sources.
“They need more incentive to make the transition that they must know they need to make, from fossil fuel companies to energy companies,” Mr. McKibben said.
Most college administrations, at the urging of their students, have been taking global warming seriously for years, spending money on steps like cutting energy consumption and installing solar panels.
The divestment demand is so new that most administrators are just beginning to grapple with it. Several of them, in interviews, said that even though they tended to agree with students on the seriousness of the problem, they feared divisive boardroom debates on divestment.
That was certainly the case in the 1980s, when the South African divestment campaign caused bitter arguments across the nation.
The issue then was whether divestment, potentially costly, would have much real effect on companies doing business in South Africa. Even today, historians differ on whether it did. But the campaign required prominent people to grapple with the morality of apartheid, altering the politics of the issue. Economic pressure from many countries ultimately helped to force the whites-only South African government to the bargaining table.
Mr. Lawrence, the Swarthmore senior, said that many of today’s students found that campaign inspirational because it “transformed what was seemingly an intractable problem.”
Swarthmore, a liberal arts college southwest of Philadelphia, is a small school with a substantial endowment, about $1.5 billion. The trustees acceded to divestment demands during that campaign, in 1986, but only after a series of confrontational tactics by students, including brief occupations of the president’s office.
The board later adopted a policy stating that it would be unlikely to take such a step again.
“The college’s policy is that the endowment is not to be invested for social purposes” beyond the obvious one of educating students, said Suzanne P. Welsh, vice president for finance at the school. “To use the endowment in support of other missions is not appropriate. It’s not what our donors have given money for.”
About a dozen Swarthmore students came up with the divestment tactic two years ago after working against [ http://swatmountainjustice.wordpress.com/ ] the strip mining of coal atop mountains in Appalachia, asking the school to divest itself of investments in a short list of energy companies nicknamed the Sordid 16 [ http://swatmountainjustice.wordpress.com/the-sordid-sixteen-of-fossil-fuels/ ].
So far, the students have avoided confrontation. The campaign has featured a petition signed by nearly half the student body, small demonstrations and quirky art installations [ http://swatmountainjustice.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/fossil-fuel-divestment-campaign-update-and-art-installation/ ]. The college president, a theologian named Rebecca Chopp [ http://www.swarthmore.edu/presidents-office.xml ], has expressed support for their goals but not their means.
Matters could escalate in coming months, with Swarthmore scheduled to host a February meeting — the students call it a “convergence” — of 150 students from other colleges who are working on divestment.
Students said they were well aware that the South Africa campaign succeeded only after on-campus actions like hunger strikes, sit-ins and the seizure of buildings. Some of them are already having talks with their parents about how far to go.
“When it comes down to it, the members of the board are not the ones who are inheriting the climate problem,” said Sachie Hopkins-Hayakawa, a Swarthmore senior from Portland, Ore. “We are.”
Brent Summers contributed reporting from Burlington, Vt.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/business/energy-environment/to-fight-climate-change-college-students-take-aim-at-the-endowment-portfolio.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/business/energy-environment/to-fight-climate-change-college-students-take-aim-at-the-endowment-portfolio.html?pagewanted=all ]
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You Need to See This Movie [Promised Land]
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
12/06/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/fracking-movie-promised-land_b_2251339.html [with comments]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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