
After hearing Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar at the City Club of Cleveland on Feb. 14 speak about President Obama's vision for the new energy frontier, which is largely a full-steam ahead agenda for fossil fuel extraction, and then reading that more than 800,000 people signed a petition to their U.S. Senators to stop the Keystone XL pipeline and nearly 2,000 people in Frankfort, Kentucky called for an end to mountaintop removal coal mining that same day, it was clear that Obama's energy plan does not align with the sustainable energy future many Americans want.
Charged with the duty of protecting America's great outdoors and powering the future of this country, the U.S. Department of the Interior manages the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees about 245 million surface acres, one-fifth of the nation's landmass, and 700 million sub-surface acres of public lands.
Salazar said Obama's energy blueprint focuses on tapping into all of the energy resources of the U.S. and that the Department of the Interior will play a key role in mapping out a future that will bring about energy security for America. He mentioned how President Richard Nixon coined the phrase "energy independence" in 1974 after the Arab oil embargo and that President Jimmy Carter called the response to the energy crisis the "moral equivalent of war" in 1977 to highlight the long-standing desire for the U.S. to eliminate its addiction to foreign oil, and to stop supporting nations that are hostile and don't share U.S. interests.
His talk quickly moved to renewable energy, as he discussed the 41 solar energy manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and how this country is projected to be the number one solar energy market in the world by 2014. He also said that major strides have been made in wind energy, with more than 400 U.S. companies manufacturing components for the wind energy industry and one-third of all new electrical capacity in the U.S. coming from wind farms.
Without pause, Salazar moved right to oil and gas production. He mentioned that we are currently producing more oil domestically, both onshore and offshore, since Ronald Reagan was president in the 1980s. On the natural gas front, he cited U.S. Geological Survey studies revealing ample reserves and pointed to how the great technological breakthroughs in the private sector have combined with public investment to help provide enough energy to supply the needs of the U.S. for the next 100 years.
As Salazar put it, the U.S. is making significant progress with Obama's energy strategy. In 2011, for the first time in as long as Salazar could remember, oil imports entering the U.S. have dropped below 50 percent because the U.S. has moved to capture new domestic sources of energy.
In 2009, there were no solar energy projects permitted on public lands. Today there are 29 commercial-scale solar projects on public lands that are some of the largest in the world, primarily in the southwestern U.S., which Salazar oversees on behalf of the American people. There are more than 5,600 megawatts of permitted renewable energy projects on public lands which, he said, is the equivalent to about 18- to 20 coal-fired power plants. (I get about eight coal-fired power plants from 5,600 megawatts). Salazar said these projects are creating thousands of jobs and even making skeptics believe that we can actually capture the power of the sun to power our cities. Obama's plan is to have 10,000 megawatts of renewable energy produced on public lands by the end of 2012, a goal Salazar said will be easy to achieve.
The rest of Salazar's speech focused on Obama's strong support for the oil and gas industry. He said that for the last three years the U.S. has been the leading producer of natural gas in the world and that natural gas development is an important part of Obama's energy blueprint, as it has the ability to create hundreds of thousands of jobs over the next decade.
Salazar said he realizes that the demand for natural gas has to increase to keep the market strong and he mentioned the work being done to encourage companies to transition their vehicle fleets to natural gas. Finally, Salazar recognized the elephant in the room and mentioned the "huge debate" that is happening in Ohio and other parts of the country over concerns that hydraulic fracturing is not safe. He assured the crowd of about 70 people that "hydraulic fracking can be done safely and in fact is being done safely in most cases" and that Obama supports this view.
However, Salazar said he recognizes that there are problems with the hydraulic fracturing process, which is why in the next several weeks the Department of the Interior will make an announcement on three rules that will help guide fracking on public lands. The rules will require full disclosure of the chemicals being injected into the Earth, set requirements to ensure the integrity of well bores and require companies to manage flowback water so it does not contaminate streams.
He identified the many states—Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and his home state of Colorado—that have a growing resistance to natural gas development. Salazar's feeling is that "the failure of giving the American people confidence that hydraulic fracturing will in fact work will end up being the Achilles heel of the energy promise of America."
Next he focused on oil production, saying the Obama administration has moved forward in developing onshore and offshore oil resources in a very robust way in the last three years. Plans are underway to further the leasing and production of offshore oil drilling in the Gulf and American oceans. The Department of the Interior has plans to move forward on exploration in the Alaskan and Arctic Seas and drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
During the traditional City Club question-and-answer session, one audience member, Mark Mangan from Medina County, Ohio, confronted Salazar about being "a victim of natural gas drilling gone wrong." He explained that his water well has been deemed explosive and his home a public health hazard. He mentioned two neighbors who have been diagnosed with cancer, one just 20 years old, believed to be caused by toxic drinking water. Mangan broke into tears, asking Salazar "can you help us?"
Salazar's response focused on the obviously improper construction of the well in Mangan's community and made reference to Ohio Gov. John Kasich's comment in his recent State of the State address mentioning that some natural gas companies just do the job wrong. Salazar assured Mangan that when fracking is done on public lands it will be done right and excused himself since his department doesn't manage private lands. Mangan replied, "These wells, Sir, they were actually drilled in Medina County park system. It's not private land."
When a question was posed to Salazar regarding the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, a $7 billion project to bring heavy, sour crude oil from tar sands production in Alberta, Canada, through the breadbasket of America, to Port Arthur, Texas, for refining, he answered, "The President and the administration have never reached a judgement as to whether or not it should be built" since the State Department, the permitting agency, determined that there wasn't enough time to evaluate the proposal that has yet to be filed on the alternative route of the pipeline. He said that "at the end of the day it may be built," citing the advantage of tar sands oil contributing to national security if, as he believes, the U.S. consumes the oil.
However, experts have shown that the Keystone XL pipeline is an export pipeline. "The Gulf Coast refiners at the end of the pipeline's route are focused on expanding exports, and the nature of the tar sands crude Keystone XL delivers enhances their capacity to do so," according to a report by Oil Change International. In addition, the report highlights the company Valero, the top beneficiary of the pipeline, and the export strategy the company recently presented to its investors. Because the company's refinery is within a Foreign Trade Zone, it will accomplish its export strategy tax-free. The report also said that with U.S. oil demand decreasing, due to higher fuel economy standards and slow economic growth, and with U.S. production of domestic oil increasing, U.S. refiners are turning to export.
There's no doubt there are discrepancies between the will of the people and the energy plan Obama has put forward. I found it interesting that Salazar never mentioned coal except to equivocate solar energy generation to coal-fired power plants. Maybe that's because he didn't want to bring attention to the boom-bust cycle that runs so rampant in fossil fuel extraction. When you base your entire economy on an energy-intensive system and then rely on nonrenewable fossil fuels to support it—and allow elected officials to be bought by the industry—no doubt communities will suffer and the rights of people will fall to the bottom of the priority list.
Just take a moment to look at the Appalachian region of the U.S. There you'll find the most impoverished communities in America where companies profited greatly by extracting natural resources at the expense of exploiting its people and destroying the environment, leaving generations in decades-long, structural poverty. The region is still fighting these battles as mountaintop removal coal mining continues to destroy communities and make people sick.
Is this what we want for our future or can we finally move forward with a sustainable energy strategy that puts energy efficiency first and foremost, and finally levels the playing field for renewable energy by removing all incentives and subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, and making them responsible for the costs they have been externalizing for more than a century?
I don't know about you, but I'm willing to keep fighting for what's right. Salazar and Gov. Kasich are correct. There are natural gas companies out there that just do the job wrong. I've been listening to stories for years from people all over our country who are asking for help because of companies that have contaminated their drinking water and made them and their families and neighbors sick.
You certainly don't have to look far to learn about this issue. Perhaps the best way to get started is by watching the Oscar-nominated film Gasland. Thanks to the film's director Josh Fox, viewers get an inside look at the largest domestic natural gas drilling boom in history that is sweeping across the U.S.
Frustrations are running high as our country continues to run our energy policy as business as usual. Sooner or later, push will come to shove. I just hope that when it does, our country will have taken the right steps forward to truly embrace the sustainable energy future we are capable of creating.
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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