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Coal can no longer compete in the free market, so the Trump administration wants to prop it up with taxpayer subsidies
The conservative philosophy of allowing an unregulated free market to operate unfettered often seems to fall by the wayside when the Republican Party’s industry allies are failing to compete in the marketplace. Trump’s Energy Secretary Rick Perry recently provided a stark example of this philosophical flexibility when he proposed to effectively pull the failing coal industry out of the marketplace and instead prop it up with taxpayer-funded subsidies.
Most of the common metrics for grid reliability suggest that the grid is in good shape despite the retirement of many baseload power plants … The power system is more reliable today due to better planning, market discipline, and better operating rules and standards
However, [Perry’s proposal] conveniently fails to mention that nearly 14 gigawatts (GW) of coal capacity was forced offline during the Polar Vortex, roughly 25 percent of all coal capacity in [the region]. 1.4 GW of nuclear was forced offline as well. Most of these generator outages were due to temperatures below the operating limit of power plant equipment ... Additional coal capacity was unavailable due to frozen coal piles.
At the price of US$50 per barrel, we find that a bit more than half (53%) of subsidy value (in net present value terms) goes to projects that would have proceeded anyway. That fraction rises to nearly all (98%) of subsidy value at US$100 per barrel. As others have found, regardless of the oil price, the majority of taxpayer resources provided to the industry end up as company profits.
by Congress’ own Joint Committee on Taxation analysis (post-Trump), the tax subsidies to oil and gas outweigh the tax subsidies for all charitable giving to health and education.
Continue reading...A short film shot by Heath Patterson captures photographer Vaughan Brookfield and Tom Lynch's journey to a New Zealand glacier equipped with hundreds of kilograms of gear and a light projector. Their plan was to project images on to the rapidly receding Tasman Glacier. Brookfield says: 'We want to remind people of the effects humans are having on the environment'
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Supporters’ contributions to our podcast on population and climate change show exactly why we need to talk about this issue
Listen to the podcast hereLast month, on these pages, I asked if you might get in touch with your questions and thoughts on population and climate change. You did – in some numbers. These generous contributions form the heart of the latest edition of We Need to Talk About …, our podcast featuring supporters’ voices, in which your concerns are addressed by a panel of Guardian journalists and experts.
As a starting point, we used a Guardian article with an arresting headline: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children. In the podcast, we hear from one of the academics who produced the research which this article refers to, but equally interesting were your responses to this issue, and the discussions they prompted in our studio.
Related: 2017: the year we lost control of world population surge?
Continue reading...Chasing economic growth gains us nothing but global warming. We should follow the lead of tiny Costa Rica, where life expectancy is soaring
Earlier this summer, a paper published in the journal Nature captured headlines with a rather bleak forecast. Our chances of keeping global warming below the 2C danger threshold are very, very small: only about 5%. The reason, according to the paper’s authors, is that the cuts we’re making to greenhouse gas emissions are being cancelled out by economic growth.
In the coming decades, we’ll be able to reduce the carbon intensity of the global economy by about 1.9% per year, if we make heavy investments in clean energy and efficient technology. That’s a lot. But as long as the economy keeps growing by more than that, total emissions are still going to rise. Right now we’re ratcheting up global GDP by 3% per year, which means we’re headed for trouble.
Related: How banana skins turned on the lights in Lagos ... and then turned them off again
Continue reading...In this monthly podcast, Guardian supporters ask the questions and a Guardian panel try to provide the answers. This episode focuses on whether people should be having fewer children for the sake of the planet – and if so, how that societal change might happen
If we want to fight climate change should we have fewer children – or should we be focusing more on reducing consumption? Is the answer different depending on where you live in the world? And in any case, how might we make people and politicians engage with this issue?
Those are just some of the questions Guardian supporters asked deputy membership editor Vicky Frost to put to our panel in this edition of We Need to Talk About. She is joined by Damian Carrington, the Guardian’s environment editor; Lucy Lamble, the Guardian’s executive editor for global development; John Vidal, the multi-award winning former Guardian environment editor; and Afua Hirsch, a writer and broadcaster for the Guardian and Sky News among others, who has also worked in international development and the law.
Continue reading...Big as the blow was to Theresa May at the general election in June, worse has followed. Not only was the election an unnecessary fight for Mrs May to have picked, she has emerged a diminished figure. Her cabinet is united – but mainly in their desire to succeed her. On the day of Mrs May’s big speech at the Conservative party conference this week, everything that could go wrong, did. Then Grant Shapps, a former party chairman who once led a double life as a “multimillionaire” web guru, was unmasked as a parliamentary general aiming to topple Mrs May for her shortcomings. Despite boasting the backing of 30 MPs, none of Mr Shapps’ troops were prepared to follow their commanding officer over the top. Mrs May is hurt and the consensus is that she will stagger on. But the crisis in the Conservative party is here to stay: a toxic brew of personal ambition, ideological visions and electoral panic.
This at a time when Britain’s productive forces are stagnating and the biggest foreign policy issue of our times – leaving the European Union – is met with the political posturing of a clown wearing the mask of a roaring lion. The Conservative party was once steeped in pragmatism, dominated by the wish to win elections and to be in power. There always were differences of opinion. These differences in dispositions have now curdled into doctrinal differences.
Continue reading...George Monbiot’s fear of the few remaining British farmers (Goodbye – and good riddance – to livestock farming, 4 October) reached new levels when he wrote that the “rich mosaic of rainforest and other habitats that once covered our hills has been erased” and blamed us for the tectonic drift that moved Britain from the equator towards the Arctic, perhaps 300m years ago. In the rest of his article he mixed unrelated science from all over the globe with the peculiar claims of noted eccentrics, and suggested that we should plough unsuitable land to grow soya, which will not grow in this climate, to produce artificial meat in urban factories.
He didn’t mention inconvenient features of the British ruminant livestock industry, such as the fact that most feed that animals get other than grass is made up of byproducts of the human food industry such as brewers’ grains, sugar beet and fruit-juice pulp, most of which would have to go to landfill if cows and sheep did not recycle it. Without the income from this form of recycling, the price of food in the shop would increase. We do need to moderate excessive meat consumption, and we do need to act on climate change, but this article sows confusion that will delay necessary change.Huw JonesSt Clears, Carmarthenshire
Continue reading...Increasingly unfamiliar and unpredictable weather events mean that business as usual is not an option for these islands to survive
As a Caribbean climate scientist, I am often asked to speak about how climate change affects small islands. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, one of two category five storms to batter the eastern Caribbean in just a week, three words resonate in my mind.
The first word is “unfamiliar”. Scientific analysis shows that the climate of the Caribbean region is already changing in ways that seem to signal the emergence of a new climate regime. Irma and Maria fit this pattern all too well. At no point in the historical records dating back to the late 1800s have two category five storms made landfall in the small Caribbean island chain of the eastern Antilles in a single year.
Continue reading...World leaders must do more to defend custodians of natural world whose lives are at risk from big business, says UN rapporteur Victoria Tauli-Corpuz
Global leaders must do more to protect indigenous people fighting to protect their land and way of life if the world is to limit climate change, according to the UN special rapporteur Victoria Tauli-Corpuz.
Speaking ahead of key climate talks in Bonn next month she urged politicians to recognise that indigenous communities around the world were the most effective custodians of millions of hectares of forest “which act as the world’s lungs”.
Related: ‘Indigenous peoples are the best guardians of world's biodiversity’
Related: The defenders: recording the deaths of environmental defenders around the world
Related: 'We'd rather die than lose': villagers in Indonesia fight for a land rights revolution
Continue reading...Accelerating rates of land clearing in Queensland are undermining Australia’s Direct Action greenhouse gas cuts
Accelerating rates of tree clearing in Queensland are wiping out any cuts to greenhouse gas emissions the federal government has made through its $2.55bn Direct Action fund, according to the latest data released by the Queensland government.
The results also point again to apparent holes in the federal government’s greenhouse gas accounting, as its official figures maintain that land clearing in Queensland is reducing, and that changes in land use across the whole country are cutting emissions rather than adding to them.
Related: For the love of Queensland, this land clearing has got to stop | Lyndon Schneiders
Related: Ending land clearing would compete with renewables for carbon abatement, analysis finds
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