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Making oil is more profitable than saving the planet. These numbers tell the story
NPR News
Oil companies have long been under pressure to invest more money into renewable energy to help fight climate change. Here's one simple reason why that's not happening: Right now, oil makes a lot more money. […]
But right now, oil companies are spending just 2.5% of their capital, collectively, on green power. The speed of the transition to renewables — as well as who should pay for it — has been a hot topic at the ongoing COP28 climate talks in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Companies point out that their expertise is in pumping oil, but there's another reason that is obvious to every energy investor. Just consider these numbers.
102 million barrels per day — that’s how much oil the world uses every single day. And it's going up.
The United States is producing more oil than any country in history
CNN
As the world grapples with the existential crisis of climate change, environmental activists want President Joe Biden to phase out the oil industry, and Republicans argue he’s already doing that. Meanwhile, the surprising reality is the United States is pumping oil at a blistering pace and is on track to produce more oil than any country has in history.
The United States is set to produce a global record of 13.3 million barrels per day of crude and condensate during the fourth quarter of this year, according to a report published Tuesday by S&P Global Commodity Insights.
Last month, weekly US oil production hit 13.2 million barrels per day, according to the US Energy Information Administration. That’s just above the Donald Trump-era record of 13.1 million set in early 2020 just before the Covid-19 crisis sent output and prices crashing.
That’s been helping to keep a lid on crude and gasoline prices.
Amid a year of record-breaking climate disaster, the U.S. broke its record on oil production
Salon
As the year 2023 comes to a close, scientists repeatedly draw attention to the numerous climate change records that were broken over the previous 12 months. There were new records set in global surface temperature, ocean heat content and ice melt — and humans everywhere felt the consequences. Our species just survived the hottest summer on record, complete with deadly heatwaves, intensified wildfires and worsened floods and flood-related events. Yet amidst the ecological havoc, the United States was busy smashing a different record: Oil production.
Last month, the United States' weekly oil production surpassed a record set shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic injected chaos into the world economy — and with it, at least temporarily, the demand for petroleum. In fact, the U.S. is now producing more oil than any other nation in history. According to the US Energy Information Administration, weekly US oil production in November 2023 averaged to 13.2 million barrels per day. This record-breaking was anticipated by Forbes' senior contributor Robert Rapier, who wrote earlier this month that the United States had set a new annual oil production record on December 15. (The chart currently only goes to December 8.) He also speculated that — as a conservative estimate — the United States might end 2023 having produced as many as "4.70 billion barrels. That would be nearly 5% above the previous record, or 210 million barrels above that 2019 level."
There are stark potential ecological consequences to all of this oil production. According to Dr. Michael Mann, a professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania, all of the extreme weather is a "new abnormal" that humans must aim to stave off. "The impacts of climate change are upon us in the form of unprecedented, dangerous extreme weather events. It will only get worse and worse as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels and generate carbon pollution," Mann told Salon in July.
Cop28 president says his firm will keep investing in oil
The Guardian
The president of the Cop28 climate summit will continue with his oil company’s record investment in oil and gas production, despite coordinating a global deal to “transition away” from fossil fuels.
Sultan Al Jaber, who is also the chief executive of the United Arab Emirates’ national oil and gas company, Adnoc, told the Guardian the company had to satisfy demand for fossil fuels.
“My approach is very simple: it is that we will continue to act as a responsible, reliable supplier of low-carbon energy, and the world will need the lowest-carbon barrels at the lowest cost,” he said, arguing that Adnoc’s hydrocarbons are lower carbon because they are extracted efficiently and with less leakage than other sources.
How the American South is paying the price for Europe's 'green' energy
CNN
[…] In 2009, the European Union (EU) pledged to curb greenhouse gas emissions, urging its member states to shift from fossil fuels to renewables. In its Renewable Energy Directive (RED), the EU classified biomass as a renewable energy source — on par with wind and solar power. As a result, the directive prompted state governments to incentivize energy providers to burn biomass instead of coal — and drove up demand for wood.
So much so that the American South emerged as Europe’s primary source of biomass imports.
Earlier this year, the EU was celebrated in headlines across the world when renewable energy surpassed the use of fossil fuels on the continent for the first time in history.
A sliver of wood from a 200-year-old tree has a dire warning for Earth
The Washington Post
Deep in the Sonoran Desert, high on a mountain’s wind-swept peak, there lives a tree known as Bigelow 224.
With its stout orange trunk and long, graceful needles, the tree looks like any other ponderosa pine growing on Mount Bigelow. But a sliver of its wood, taken amid Earth’s warmest year on record, shows that this tree has a story to tell — and a warning to offer. […]
For decades, scientists have used rings from long-lived trees like ponderosa pines to uncover clues about ancient climates. Their analyses helped prove that human-made greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet and demonstrated that modern climate extremes are unprecedented in the last 1,000 years.
A quarter of the world’s freshwater fish face extinction
Canada’s National Observer
Nearly a quarter of the world’s freshwater fish are at risk of extinction due to global heating, overfishing and pollution, according to an expert assessment.
From the large-toothed Lake Turkana robber in Kenya to the Mekong giant catfish in Southeast Asia, many of the world’s freshwater fish are at risk of disappearing, the first International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list assessment of the category has found.
Nearly a fifth of all threatened freshwater species are affected by climate change, from impacts such as falling water levels, shifting seasons and seawater moving up rivers. Of the assessed species, 3,086 out of 14,898 were at risk of vanishing.
Humans might have driven 1,500 bird species to extinction — twice previous estimates
Nature
Around one in nine bird species has gone extinct in the past 126,000 years, according to a study published today in Nature Communications, and humans probably drove most of those extinctions. The findings suggest the rate of bird extinctions is more than double the number estimated previously — and that more than half of the extinct bird species were never documented.
The global magnitude of these previously undetected extinctions is likely to “come as a shock to many”, says Jamie Wood, a terrestrial ecologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. “The sobering thing is that this estimate could actually be conservative,” he says.
Over centuries, humans have triggered waves of extinctions among birds and other animals through land clearing, hunting and introducing non-native species. Islands have been particularly badly affected: 90% of known bird extinctions have occurred in these isolated ecosystems. But because birds have lightweight, hollow bones, their remains tend not to be preserved well as fossils. As a result, most analyses of bird extinctions have relied instead on written observational evidence. These records began only around 500 years ago, which makes it difficult to build a picture of species losses over longer periods.
Biden’s Arctic oil rules may leave ‘big gaps’ on climate
E&E News
Proposed Interior Department rules for drilling in the Western Arctic are spurring two contradictory views: that President Joe Biden has thwarted an oil boom in northern Alaska or paved the way for one.
Which perspective turns out to be right has significant implications for climate change and the future of the oil industry in the Arctic, considering the size of the petroleum reserves in the region.
The Bureau of Land Management proposal, which could strengthen Interior’s ability to block future drilling on protected lands in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, follows Biden’s controversial decision earlier this year to approve the massive Willow oil project in the same reserve. Drillers say the NPR-A rules could infringe on their development rights, while green groups say it fails to shift the NPR-A away from its origins as a potential stockpile of crude oil. How Interior officials apply the new language could determine which side will eventually claim victory.
Earthjustice attorney Jeremy Lieb said the proposed NPR-A rules, while an improvement, don’t address the serious question of how ongoing oil development in the reserve will “align with climate commitments.”
“Those are big gaps,” he said.
Chum salmon are breeding in Arctic, and it is 'an ominous sign’ for humanity
WION
Chum salmon, a species of anadromous salmonid fish, have found a new location to spawn—the Arctic waters, and the scientists are alarmed.
Chum salmon are said to be anadromous, which means they hatch in freshwater streams and rivers and then migrate out to the saltwater environment of the ocean to feed and grow. They do not reside in fresh water for an extended period.
However, scientists have recently discovered that these migrating fish have been spawning in uncharted waters. They believe that due to unprecedented warming of the waters, an after-effect of climate change, the Arctic is becoming conducive for them to breed in large numbers.
In the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, new marine ecosystems are flourishing
Knowable Magazine
In the Pacific Ocean, between Hawaii and California, at least 79,000 metric tons of plastic has coalesced to create the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The patch, kept together by ocean currents and spanning an area of roughly 1.6 million square kilometers — about twice the size of Texas — is one of the most incriminating examples of human pollution on the planet. It’s also a huge hazard for marine life, killing up to 1 million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals each year via ingestion of plastic or entanglement in plastic pieces.
But while the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is harming some creatures, it’s actually helping others to survive. In a study published in April 2023 in Nature Ecology & Evolution, a team of interdisciplinary scientists fished 105 pieces of plastic from the patch and found barnacles and bryozoans stuck to items like toothbrushes, clothes hangers and shampoo bottles. In addition to open-ocean species, coastal organisms were frequently found on the items — the plastics were acting as little rafts, carrying creatures far from their shallow coastal homes.
Common coastal stowaways included amphipods, isopods, hydroids and bryozoans, most of which originated from the northwest Pacific. Many of the coastal species were likely carried out to sea as debris from the Japan earthquake and tsunami of 2011. Not only had these tenacious creatures survived the journey to the garbage patch, but crustacean eggs and anemone buds (new anemones growing from old ones) indicate that many of them “are clearly capable of living, surviving and reproducing in the open ocean with the aid of plastic pollution,” says study coauthor and invertebrate zoologist Henry Choong of the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, Canada. The plastics, he says, provide them with a “permanent, non-biodegradable ‘home.’”
Lost history of Antarctica revealed in octopus DNA
Science
Some 100,000 years ago, scientists believe Antarctica’s massive western ice sheet collapsed, temporarily opening waterways between a trio of seas surrounding the continent. New evidence for that scenario comes from a surprising source: octopus DNA.
The ice sheet’s collapse allowed long-separated populations of Turquet’s octopus (Pareledone turqueti) to interbreed for thousands of years; when the sheet reformed, the animals were isolated once more, a story that has been recorded in the sea creatures’ genes, researchers report today in Science. The work also bolsters concerns that a large rise in sea level may be in our planet’s near future.
“It’s a really creative approach” to uncovering Antarctica’s lost history, says Andrea Dutton, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies ancient sea levels but was not involved in the study.
About 129,000 to 116,000 years ago, a warm spell called the last interglacial gave our planet a brief break in between several million years of ice ages. The average temperature of the planet was about 0.5°C warmer than it is today—and climate projections predict it will be again within decades. The global sea level was also 5 meters to 10 meters higher than current levels. Many scientists believe the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and consequent melting could have been a primary reason.
Direct air capture: An expensive, dangerous distraction from real climate solutions
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
This month elites from 198 nations gathered in the fossil-fuel-rich United Arab Emirates for the 28th annual Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Agreement on Climate Change. Near the top of the agenda is the deployment of technologies to remove carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas causing global warming, from the atmosphere. The week before the conference started, The Economist published an approximately 10,000-word special report on the topic, and the Financial Times reported that direct air capture of carbon dioxide is “grabbing investors attention.”
All year, the zeitgeist has been building toward technologies that separate carbon dioxide from air, referred to as direct air capture (DAC). In September, the United States Department of Energy awarded Occidental Petroleum a $600 million grant to build a DAC machine. As scientists and entrepreneurs who’ve dedicated our careers to help solve global warming, you might expect us to be happy.
We are not.
The reason is simple: Separating carbon dioxide from air, while technically straightforward, is outrageously expensive. In fighting climate change, the obvious question should always be: How can we avoid the most carbon dioxide per dollar invested?
Plan to stash planet-heating carbon dioxide under U.S. national forests alarms critics
Grist
A proposal that would allow industries to permanently stash climate-polluting carbon dioxide beneath U.S. Forest Service land puts those habitats and the people in or near them at risk, according to opponents of the measure.
Chief among opponents’ concerns is that carbon dioxide could leak from storage wells or pipelines and injure or kill people and animals, as well as harm the trees in the forests and their habitat, said Victoria Bogdan Tejeda, attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.
“There are enough broad-ranging concerns with this rule that this isn’t the time to move forward and experiment when the consequences are so high,” said Bogdan Tejeda.
Surge in extreme forest fires fuels global emissions
Nature
Global forest fires emitted 33.9 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) between 2001 and 2022, according to a report by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). This makes the CO2 emissions generated by forest fires each year higher than those from burning fossil fuels in Japan — the world’s sixth-largest CO2 emitter. Driving the emissions spike was the growing frequency of “extreme forest-fire events”.
Xu Wenru, a co-author and a landscape ecologist at the CAS Institute of Applied Ecology, based in Shenyang, China, says that the term ‘extreme forest fires’ generally refers to blazes that, compared with an average forest fire, burn through a larger area, last for a longer time and leave a bigger impact.
Xu and her colleagues found that the growth in emissions had been mostly fuelled by an uptick in infernos on the edge of rainforests between 5 and 20º S and in boreal forests above 45º N.
In particular, the emissions from boreal-forest blazes “showed a rapidly growing trend”, she says.
Biden administration moves to protect old-growth forests as climate change brings fires, pests
AP News
The Biden administration moved on Tuesday to conserve groves of old-growth trees on national forests across the U.S. and limit logging as climate change amplifies the threats they face from wildfires, insects and disease.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the agency was adopting an “ecologically-driven” approach to older forests — an arena where timber industry interests have historically predominated. That will include the first nationwide amendment to U.S. Forest Service management plans in the agency’s 118-year history, he said.
The proposal follows longstanding calls from environmentalists to preserve older forests that offer crucial wildlife habitat and other environmental benefits. Timber companies have fought against logging restrictions on government-owned lands.
Your Money Is Funding Fossil Fuels Without You Knowing It
Wired
When you drop money in the bank, it looks like it’s just sitting there, ready for you to withdraw. In reality, your institution makes money on your money by lending it elsewhere, including to the fossil fuel companies driving climate change, as well as emissions-heavy industries like manufacturing.
So just by leaving money in a bank account, you’re unwittingly contributing to worsening catastrophes around the world. According to a new analysis, for every $1,000 dollars the average American keeps in savings, each year they indirectly create emissions equivalent to flying from New York to Seattle. “We don’t really take a look at how the banks are using the money we keep in our checking account on a daily basis, where that money is really circulating,” says Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, which published the analysis. “But when we look under the hood, we see that there's a lot of fossil fuels.”
By switching to a climate-conscious bank, you could reduce those emissions by about 75 percent, the study found. In fact, if you moved $8,000 dollars—the median balance for US customers—the reduction in your indirect emissions would be twice that of the direct emissions you’d avoid if you switched to a vegetarian diet.
Land of the free, home of the inefficient: appliance standards as culture war target
NPR News
From ceiling fans to refrigerators, the Department of Energy is updating appliance efficiency standards that would affect millions of consumers.
The Biden administration's goal is to reduce climate-warming greenhouse gasses and save Americans billions of dollars a year in utility costs. But the administration is facing pushback from the natural gas industry, because some new standards would affect gas appliances. Conservative politicians and media have taken notice of the measures, too, and they've now made unsexy, technical appliance standards a flashpoint in the country's culture war.
The resistance to energy efficiency moves comes from the top of the Republican Party… Donald Trump has a history of rolling back efficiency standards and likely would again if elected next year. Trump has repeatedly claimed that newer dishwashers don't work as well as older, less efficient ones.
Changing climate casts a shadow over the future of the Panama Canal – and global trade
The Guardian
From his office perched on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, Steven Paton looks over the entrance to the Panama Canal; the high rises of the country’s capital resting upon the horizon behind him, and an increasingly long queue of tankers lining up in the bay.
For 33 years his job with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute monitoring the region’s climate has given him a front-row seat to how the weather’s familiar patterns have changed, upending axioms of old and calling into question the future viability of one of the most important trade routes in the world.
Over the last year, as the region has suffered through what Paton calls a “rainfall deficit”, passage through the Panama Canal has slowed and the queue of tankers waiting in the bay to pass through it has grown. Now, with warnings that the situation is set to get much worse, experts say that the effects of a restricted Panama Canal could be felt all over the world.
Oregon court strikes down state climate program, rules in favor of utilities, industry
The Oregonian
An Oregon court on Wednesday delivered a blow to Oregon’s signature Climate Protection Program, invalidating it over the state’s failure to follow rule-making requirements.
The program mandates ever-increasing cuts in emissions from the state’s natural gas utilities, suppliers of gasoline, diesel, kerosene and propane and large industrial plants.Oregon’s three gas utilities, an oil-industry group and a dozen other local trade organizations had challenged the program’s rules last year, aiming to block them.
The Oregon Court of Appeals found that the Environmental Quality Commission, the policy and rule-making board for the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, did not meet heightened disclosure requirements.
How a utility company fought to keep two Colorado towns hooked on fossil fuels
NPR News
Once a sleepy coal mining town, Crested Butte, Colo., has transformed itself into a year-round tourism magnet. […] Now, Mayor Ian Billick fears that's all under threat — from climate change. […]
"Based upon what I see as a field scientist, it made it clear that even if there was a lot of grief that came along with that decision, it was something that we absolutely needed to do," Billick said.
Most homes in Colorado are heated by natural gas, a fossil fuel made up primarily of the potent planet-warming gas methane. Billick's proposal required all-electric heating and cooking in new construction, to take advantage of low-carbon electricity generated from sources like wind and solar power. The same rationale has led places from New York State to Berkeley, Calif. to enact similar gas bans. Berkeley's ban has been blocked in court.
But the push put Billick on a collision course with Atmos Energy, the town's natural gas provider and the largest gas-only utility in the country.
The problem with every country’s promise to phase out fossil fuels
The Washington Post
Last week, world leaders celebrated a climate first: a call by nearly 200 countries to “transition away” from fossil fuels. Many heralded the agreement as a new phase in climate talks and the beginning of the end of fossil fuels.
But beneath the U.N. agreement lies a darker truth: No fossil fuel company or country has a real plan for phasing out fossil fuels. On the contrary, almost all expect to continue extracting coal, oil and gas far into the future — far beyond what is needed to cut emissions in line with climate goals of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), or even 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
And part of the reason is that almost every country and company sees itself in a unique position: as the future last producer of fossil fuels.
“Every country has their own reason why they should be the last,” said Michael Lazarus, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute and one of the authors of the Production Gap Report, which analyzed countries’ plans for fossil fuel expansion.