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Power plant emissions hit a 27-year low — and Obama’s plan hasn’t even kicked in yet

Power plant emissions hit a 27-year low — and Obama’s plan hasn’t even kicked in yet

By on 6 Aug 2015commentsShare

Politico’s Michael Grunwald, among others, has been arguing that Obama’s Clean Power Plan is not actually as ambitious as some analysts make it out to be. The plan, which aims to cut emissions from the electric sector, is “pretty weak,” he argues, largely because emissions are already falling markedly. Today there’s a new data point to support that argument: Greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. power plants hit a 27-year low in April 2015, the most recent month for which data were available.

The Energy Information Administration, which tracks energy sector data as part of the Federal Statistical System, reported on Wednesday that the electric sector released 128.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that month — the lowest since April 1988.

The EIA breaks down the numbers:

In any year, April is typically the month with the lowest carbon dioxide emissions from the electric power sector, mainly because of mild weather, as low heating and cooling demand are reflected in low overall electricity demand. Two fuels, coal and natural gas, account for almost all the carbon dioxide emissions from the electric power sector. In April 2015, electricity generation from both coal and natural gas fell from their March values, but because coal fell more than natural gas (18% versus 6%, respectively), generation from natural gas surpassed generation from coal in April. …

A longer historical perspective shows more significant changes in the electric power sector fuel mix. Comparing April 1988 to April 2015 (27 years), natural gas consumption in the sector more than tripled, renewable energy consumption more than doubled, nuclear energy consumption increased 47%, and coal consumption decreased 17%. Electricity generation has become less energy and carbon intensive over time. Compared to April 1998, April 2015 generation in the electric power sector was 44% higher, but the associated primary energy use and carbon dioxide emissions increased by only 33% and 4%, respectively.

See the visualization below to get a better sense of the emissions trend. (You can mouse over for monthly values.)

The EPA estimates the state-centric plan will cut emissions from the power sector by 32 percent of 2005 levels by 2030. As Grunwald and other analysts point out, power plant emissions have already fallen by about 15 percent since 2005, getting us halfway to the administration’s goal before the plan even kicks into gear.

Another notable low point from April 1988: Celine Dion pulled off a win at the Eurovision Song Contest for “Ne partez pas sans moi.”

Source:
Monthly power sector carbon dioxide emissions reach 27-year low in April

, Energy Information Administration.

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Power plant emissions hit a 27-year low — and Obama’s plan hasn’t even kicked in yet

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Now we can watch the oceans acidify in real time

Now we can watch the oceans acidify in real time

By on 18 Feb 2015commentsShare

We have a new way to measure ocean acidification … from space! Just as it did for the rotary phone and the which-way-is-my-weathervane-pointing meteorology, satellite technology will give a big boost to the tech available to monitor ocean chemistry, according to new research. Scientists previously relied on a patchy network of buoys, ships, and lab tests to monitor acidification. By combining satellite measurements of salinity and other ocean variables, scientists can now paint a near-instantaneous picture of the ocean’s acid baseline at any one time.

And, bonus points: It turns out that five years of changing ocean chemistry is pretty mesmerizing:

Here’s more from Climate Central:

The new monitoring techniques can help monitor hot spots such as the Bay of Bengal, the Arctic Ocean, and the Caribbean, three places where ocean acidification could have major economic impacts but where little research has been done.

New monitoring efforts may come in particularly useful in the coming months, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says there is a risk of major coral bleaching in the tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans through May, an event that may rival severe bleaching that occurred in 1998 and 2010. Some island nations in the tropical Pacific including Kiribati, Nauru and the Solomon Islands are already seeing ocean conditions that can cause bleaching.

Source:
Ocean Acidification, Now Watchable in Real Time

, Climate Central.

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Now we can watch the oceans acidify in real time

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Here’s all the plastic in the ocean, measured in whales

Here’s all the plastic in the ocean, measured in whales

By on 10 Dec 2014commentsShare

Let’s see how closely you know your marine doom-and-gloom: Just how much plastic can be found in the oceans?

A) A lot.

B) A whole helluva lot.

C) Both A and B.

D) All of the above.

While those answers are all FINE, now we can get a little more specific thanks to a study by the 5 Gyres institute. After spending six years sampling the seas, scientists can say that there are AT LEAST of 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic floating on out there. That adds up to about 269,000 TONS of the stuff. Most of that comes from discarded fishing gear — nets and other large debris — but a non insignificant chunk comes from less auspicious sources, including microbeads in cosmetic products (WHYYY, cosmetic products???).

This was actually less plastic than the researchers expected to find at the surface, but they suspect the missing plastic is likely being eaten by organisms, or otherwise mulched by the gyres, and sinking deeper into the oceans. That probably isn’t a good thing, anyway, since microplastics may introduce unknown pollutants into the ecosystems we rely on for food. But it’s still a LOT! If you can’t wrap your head around just how much plastic that really is, CityLab helpfully drew a comparison to this non-plastic thing you might find in the ocean: An adult blue whale.

Shutterstock

This big guy weighs between 100 and 150 tons. Which means THIS is how many whales’ worth of plastic are floating around out there:

Grist / Shutterstock

That’s 2,150 whales. You’re welcome. (And sorry, oceans.)

Source:
New Research Quantifies the Oceans’ Plastic Problem

, New York Times.

There Are At Least 5.25 Trillion Pieces of Plastic in the Ocean

, CityLab.

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Here’s all the plastic in the ocean, measured in whales

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You know it’s good when your biggest transportation problem is too many cyclists

You know it’s good when your biggest transportation problem is too many cyclists

20 Oct 2014 6:11 PM

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It must be nice to be Dutch: While the rest of us are dealing with ensuring reasonable access to reproductive healthcare and violent seasonal pumpkin festivals, in the Netherlands, people are taking to the streets to protest poor bike traffic planning.

While we’ve fretted about the possibility that there are TOO MANY bikers in the Low Country before, the truth is more complicated than that.

Citylab’s Sarah Goodyear points out that despite our utopian mental images of happy Dutchmen gleefully coasting along their superior bike infrastructure, even the most advanced of biking societies still have logistical speed bumps to work out when it comes to bike traffic. Case in point: In Utrecht, where an estimated third of trips are taken on two wheels, certain intersections have cyclists waiting so long for a green that some of them have just started running the light. And then the police started doing what they do best: writing tickets. The resulting backup last week was more than 100 bikers deep and rattled the city to its polite and measured core.

So last week, volunteers from the local chapter of Cyclists’ Union broke out the radical tools of social change — sweet rolls and pamphlets — to soothe their impatient compatriots and gently called attention to another of the poorly designed intersections last week. And it’s working! A day after the first incident, city planners conceded that the traffic signal’s timing was off, and readjusted it to cycle more cyclists through faster.

In the U.S., where cars vs. bikes sometimes feels like a physical battle of wheels more than a civil battle of wills, it’s nice to see what can happen when a large number of people ask nicely for a thing that will make their lives better. I don’t mean to go all Kumbaya on you here … so I’ll let Goodyear do it for me:

As the number of people riding bicycles on the streets and roads of the United States and other countries continues to rise, the need to create better infrastructure only becomes more apparent. That includes better bike-specific signal timing and bike-specific regulations such as the Idaho stop (which allows bikes to treat stop signs as yield signs).

Change is possible, even though it may take time. Someday, more places will be lucky enough to have Utrecht’s problems — and, one would hope, also its willingness to find solutions.

Source:
What We Can Learn from a Dutch Bike Traffic Jam

, CityLab.

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You know it’s good when your biggest transportation problem is too many cyclists

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California is No. 1 in prepping for climate change

CALIFORNIA LOVE

California is No. 1 in prepping for climate change

9 Oct 2014 5:09 PM

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California, I’m coming home. Because duh: The hippie-tacular Golden State leads the nation in prepping for climate change. A new 50-state tracking tool developed by the Georgetown Climate Center charts state-by-state progress in climate adaptation plans, and shows which ones have been plucky enough to hit their goals. California is at the head of the pack, of course, and is trailed closely by — you guessed it — Massachusetts and New York.

Georgetown Climate Center

California has one of the longest wish lists in the nation, anyway, with 345 separate climate goals. The sad truth is that achieving 48 of its 345 goals actually puts it way out front. Another sad truth is that just 14 states have finalized any kind of climate action plan at all (not surprisingly, most of those are coastal).

California’s successes so far have a lot to do with prioritizing the issues. The state, for example, has created a “Planning for Sea Level Rise Database,” installed tools to identify and reduce climate-related health vulnerabilities, and even has a bill that’ll require lighter-colored pavement to reduce the effects of urban heat islands. So maybe Cali is just going for the low-hanging fruit here, but hey, at least it’s picking the stuff. (And it’d better before the fruit dries out completely.)

Source:
California leads on climate change, says 50-state tool

, USA Today.

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California is No. 1 in prepping for climate change

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Chart: As Top Tax Rates Dropped, Top Incomes Soared

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

We’re still posting a new chart on the current state of income inequality every day over the next week. Yesterday’s looked at how the top 1 percent of Americans have captured half of all income.

Today, let’s talk taxes. In the past few years, we’ve heard a lot about overtaxed “job creators” and freeloading “takers.” But consider this: As the income rates for the wealthiest have plunged, their incomes have shot up.

Source: Tax rates: The Tax Foundation; top incomes: Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty (Excel)

Illustrations and infographic design by Mattias Macklerâ&#128;&#139;

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Chart: As Top Tax Rates Dropped, Top Incomes Soared

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You’ll fall in love with this heart-shaped solar power plant

THE POWER OF LOVE

You’ll fall in love with this heart-shaped solar power plant

25 Sep 2014 5:45 PM

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All solar farms are lovely, but this one will downright steal your heart. Once built, its 7,888 panels will form a four-acre valentine, visible only from above, on Grand Terre, the biggest island of the South Pacific archipelago New Caledonia.

This heart will pump two megawatts of sun-powered electricity through the arteries of the New Caledonian grid, which means they won’t need to burn as much gas, oil, and coal — the territory’s main fuel sources — to keep the lights on.

The design mirrors a nearby heart-shaped swath of wild mangrove  — the Coeur de Voh, or Heart of Voh — made famous by the photography of French activist Yann Arthus-Bertrand in his coffee-table staple Earth from Above. (In honor of Grist’s deep sea mission this month, and because it’s a brilliant film, consider dedicating 90 minutes to exploring the human-ocean bond through Arthus-Bertrand’s latest documentary, Planet Ocean.)

This project says, “Hey, Sun. We love you. Thanks for the juice.”

Wikimedia Commons / Bananaflo

The Coeur de Voh

Source:
Is this heart-shaped solar farm the world’s most beautiful power plant?

, BusinessGreen.

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Thousands of birds are igniting mid-air. What’s solar got to do with it?

Thousands of birds are igniting mid-air. What’s solar got to do with it?

18 Aug 2014 6:28 PM

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At the $2.2 billion Ivanpah solar installation in California’s Mojave Desert, telltale plumes of smoke curl above the plant’s hyper-concentrated rays. According to federal wildlife officials, these smoke bombs are too big to be caused by insects or bits of trash. Nope — they’re the result of unlucky birds that actually ignite in mid-air.

Federal wildlife investigators who checked out the solar thermal plant last year report seeing about one singed bird every two minutes. Now, they’re calling on California officials to halt progress on a similar project until there can be further study of Ivanpah’s avian impact. (And its track record with tortoises isn’t that great, either.) So far, the results don’t look pretty: Current bird death toll estimates run as high as 28,000 a year.

From the Associated Press:

More than 300,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door, reflect solar rays onto three boiler towers each looming up to 40 stories high. The water inside is heated to produce steam, which turns turbines that generate enough electricity for 140,000 homes. …

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials warned California this month that the power-tower style of solar technology holds “the highest lethality potential” of the many solar projects burgeoning in the deserts of California.

The commission’s staff estimates the proposed new tower would be almost four times as dangerous to birds as the Ivanpah plant. The agency is expected to decide this autumn on the proposal.

We’ve heard a lot about how wind farms impact birds — in some cases so dramatically that huge projects can get stopped in their tracksEt tu, solar array?

Source:
Emerging Solar Plants Scorch Birds in Mid-Air

, The Associated Press.

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Thousands of birds are igniting mid-air. What’s solar got to do with it?

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Not even Jesus is going to save California from this drought

El Niño flakes out

Not even Jesus is going to save California from this drought

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California is looking pretty thirsty these days, having gotten less than half the historical average rainfall over the past year. But a few months ago the state began think that a great wet hope might step in to save them: El Niño, the weather system named after Jesus himself. Now the forecasts have changed, however, and it looks like Californians are SOL.

Back in April, scientists said there was a close-to-80 percent chance that an El Niño would form this year. Some believed that all of the pieces were in place for a particularly strong one. And while this would’ve raised certain flavors of meteorological hell, at least the boy would have brought copious amounts of much-needed rainfall.

But over the past few months the probability of an El Niño forming has decreased. And if one does form, it’s becoming clearer that it won’t be a strong one — meaning that it probably won’t bring Californians the break they were hoping for.

From The Economist:

Even if an El Niño does emerge this autumn, it is no longer thought likely to pack the punch needed to bring relief to California. Certainly, no-one expects it to be anything like the “Godzilla of El Niños” that doubled the region’s rainfall in 1997. “The great wet hope is going to be the great wet disappointment”, Bill Patzert, a climatologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, told the San Gabriel Valley Tribune recently.

Shoot. Maybe that’s why Californians make so much wine, because they know Jesus isn’t gonna to be around to turn water into the stuff. Even if he were, the drought might make it hard for him to preform those kind of miracles, anyway.

Still confused about what El Niño is? Check out the video from my explainer last month:


Source
The Pacific’s wayward child, The Economist

Samantha Larson is a science nerd, adventure enthusiast, and fellow at Grist. Follow her on Twitter.

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Not even Jesus is going to save California from this drought

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Washington state just lopped up to $2,500 off the cost of solar panels. Here’s how.

Washington state just lopped up to $2,500 off the cost of solar panels. Here’s how.

Steve Jurvetson

All new technology, no matter how innovative, arrives in a world of pre-existing laws and regulations. But not all technology catches the same breaks. A company like Lyft or Uber can do its thing right out there in the open for a surprisingly long time, despite being — essentially — appified versions of such already-illegal innovations as dollar vans and jitneys.

By comparison, solar energy, despite having made leaps and bounds both technologically and finance-wise, can’t show up at the block party without bringing down a lawsuit, a law, or some kind of extra fee.

Yet those impediments, intentional and unintentional, are beginning to remove themselves. A decision this week by the Building Code Council in Washington state is a prime example.

Until now, the process of legally installing solar panels on a building in Washington has been what it is in most of the U.S.: while there are state and national building codes, each county enforces them differently. What this meant was that the process of putting in solar ranged from the very simple (a solar panel installation was seen as the equivalent of putting on an extra layer of shingles)  to the complicated and prolonged (any installation, no matter how much of a no-brainer, required a full set of plans, signed by a licensed structural engineer, which added between $800-$2,500 to the final bill.) Solar installers were spending a lot of time learning about how permits were handled from county to county, and avoiding some areas altogether because the  process was so daunting.

Then this April, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee issued an executive order to deal with carbon emissions — and that order paved the way for the standardization and simplification of solar permitting. It was a surprisingly agreeable process, says Mia Devine, a project manager at Northwest Solar Communities, a coalition that helped with the rule changes. “The mandate of the governor’s office really made people pay attention. It actually passed unanimously.”

This whole “actually making it easy to put in solar” thing is still fairly rare, but the idea of having simpler rules seems like a popular one. In the coming months, expect to see more of these attempts to make rules around solar easier to navigate. It won’t be the wild west of the Silicon Valley startup world, but it’s shaping up to be a lot more open than it is today.


Source
Rooftop solar panels just got easier to install, The Olympian

Heather Smith (on Twitter, @strangerworks) is interested in the various ways that humans try to save the environment: past, present, and future.

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Washington state just lopped up to $2,500 off the cost of solar panels. Here’s how.

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