tagged w/ American Petroleum Institute
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NAGOYA, Japan -- Delegates to the world summit on biodiversity here are calling for a moratorium on climate engineering research, like the idea of putting huge mirrors in outer space to reflect some of the sun's heating rays away from the planet.
Geo-engineering fixes for climate change include placing mirrors in space that reflect sunlight from the Earth. Photograph: Blue Line PicturesClimate engineering or geoengineering refers to any large-scale, human- made effort to manipulate the planet to adapt to climate change.
Representatives from Africa and Asia expressed concern about the negative impacts of geoengineering during the opening week of the 10th Conference of Parties (COP 10) to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Oct. 18-29. They were joined by civil society organizations in calling for a moratorium on geoengineering experiments.
The geoengineering proposals include installing giant vertical pipes in the ocean to bring cold water to the surface, pumping vast amounts of sulphates into the stratosphere to block sunlight, or blowing ocean salt spray into clouds to increase their reflectivity.
Broadly speaking, there are two main geoengineering approaches: solar radiation management and carbon sequestration, in other words, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to reduce the concentration of this greenhouse-effect gas.
To manage the sun's rays, there are ideas like releasing sulphates into the atmosphere or placing giant mirrors in outer space. For absorbing carbon, the possible approaches include ocean fertilization, in which iron or nitrogen is added to seawater to stimulate the growth of phytoplankton to sequester the carbon deep in the ocean.
"Some of the proponents of these technologies think it's easier to 'manage the sun' than get people to take a bus" to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, said Pat Mooney, executive director of the ETC Group, an international environmental organization headquartered in Canada.
"Politicians in rich countries see geoengineering as 'Plan B' so they don't have to make the hard choices of reducing emissions causing climate change," Mooney told Tierramérica.
"It's a political strategy aimed at letting industrialized countries off the hook for their climate debt," he said.
No longer the realm of crackpots, geoengineering is fast becoming the subject of serious scientific discussion and commercial interest.
In 2007, Tierramérica broke a story that a U.S. company, Planktos Inc., was going to dump 100 tonnes of iron dust into the ocean near Ecuador's Galápagos Islands -- a sanctuary for studying unique species and their evolution -- without the consent of the Ecuadorian government.
If it was able to prove that the technique absorbed carbon dioxide, Planktos hoped to sell carbon credits for the carbon it sequestered. The project was stopped and the company soon ended its research in this area.
The following year the CBD agreed to a moratorium on further ocean fertilization attempts.
Earlier this year, the CBD's scientific body proposed a ban on all climate- related geoengineering activities.
However, given the ongoing failure to reach an international agreement to curb emissions of the gases causing climate change, there has been renewed scientific and political interest in these experiments.
Britain's Royal Society, a highly respected global network that includes the world's most eminent scientists, now defends geoengineering research.
"We oppose a moratorium because we don't want to restrict scientific research into geoengineering," said John Shepherd, a climate scientist at the National Oceanography Center of the University of Southampton, and Royal Society fellow.
"Climate change could get to the point of 'desperate times requiring desperate measures' and therefore we should be ready with some good research on what might help," said Shepherd, author of the 2009 Royal Society report on geoengineering.
That report concluded that such technologies may well be necessary to cool the planet if efforts to reduce carbon emissions fail.
Research is needed to determine the hazards and effectiveness of any geoengineering idea, he told Tierramérica in an interview.
"Deployment of any geoengineering now would be incredibly premature," he said, and noted that this is the current opinion of the Royal Society as well.
In November, the Royal Society will hold a symposium in London entitled "Geoengineering: Taking Control of Our Planet's Climate."
Injecting sulphates into the atmosphere is attractive to policy-makers because its costs are much lower than reducing carbon emissions, writes Clive Hamilton, of the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Australian National University.
While acknowledging that no country advocates geoengineering, these schemes "avoid the need to raise petrol taxes, permit yet more unrestrained growth, and pose no threat to consumer lifestyles," stated Hamilton, the author of a new book on climate change titled "Requiem for a Species."
The ETC Group documents progress on various ideas to control the climate in its report, "Geopiracy: The Case Against Geoengineering," presented Oct. 19 in Nagoya. The report asks, "Who has the right to set the global thermostat?"
"Developing countries understand that they can't trust the rich countries that have failed to reduce their emissions to control the global thermostat," said Mooney.
The potential impacts on the global weather system of such attempts to cool the planet are impossible to assess, he added.
In his opinion, what is needed is a moratorium on open-air experiments in geoengineering to allow time for an international discussion about the potential biodiversity, social, and economic impacts.
Delegates in Nagoya are hotly debating the wording of a moratorium. A representative from Brazil told Tierramérica that it has become a big issue for countries like Canada that are firmly opposed to any ban or moratorium on geoengineering experiments.
Stumping for the moratorium is the ETC Group's Silvia Ribeiro, who asserted in a Tierramérica interview: "Geoengineering is not a solution to the problem of climate change. It could only be considered in an emergency and therefore can never be for-profit or part of any carbon market."NAGOYA, Japan -- Delegates to the world summit on biodiversity here are calling for a... more
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Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here is his letter of resignation to Curtis G. Callan Jr, Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society.
Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:
1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.
3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.<
5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.
6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?
I do feel the need to add one note...
more at link...Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa... more
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CHICAGO — The American Petroleum Institute and four other business groups filed suit last week against Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director H. Dale Hall, joining Alaska Gov. SARAH PALIN'S administration in trying to reverse the listing of the polar bear as a threatened species.
On Aug. 4, Alaska sued to oppose the polar bear’s listing, arguing that the animal’s populations as a whole are stable and that melting sea ice does not pose an imminent threat to their survival.
The suit says polar bears have survived past warming periods. The federal government has 60 days from the filing date to respond.
One of the plaintiffs in Thursday’s lawsuit, the National Association of Manufacturers, lauded the choice of PALIN as the Republican vice presidential nominee for reasons including her ADVOCACY of Alaskan oil and gas exploration, which many fear could be affected by the bear’s protected status.
The manufacturers association and the petroleum institute were joined in the lawsuit by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Mining Association, and the American Iron and Steel Institute.
They object to what they call the "Alaska gap" in relation to the special rule the federal government issued in May in conjunction with the polar bear’s protected status.
The rule, meant to prevent the polar bear’s status from being used as a tool for imposing greenhouse gas limits, exempts projects in all states except Alaska from undergoing review in relation to emissions.
Manufacturers association Vice President Keith McCoy said the group sees the rule as unfairly subjecting Alaskan industry to greenhouse gas controls and opening a back door for regulation nationwide.
"This could significantly curtail oil and gas exploration," especially on Alaska’s North Slope, he said. "It’s discrimination against the state of Alaska. During a time when gas prices are high and we need to look at all options, to issue something that shuts off a viable resource" is ill-advised, he said.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the D.C. Circuit, notes that greenhouse gas emissions worldwide contribute to global warming and says that projects in Alaska should not be subject to special SCRUTINY because of the polar bear’s STATUS.
Kassie Siegel, climate program director for the Center for Biological Diversity, which originally petitioned to list the polar bear as an endangered species in 2005, decried the assertion in the Alaska suit that science does not prove that polar bear populations are declining. The center is also suing the federal government, seeking to change the polar bear’s status from "threatened" to "endangered."
At least four current federal lawsuits challenge aspects of the listing.
CHICAGO — The American Petroleum Institute and four other business groups filed... more
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WASHINGTON -- Pared-down energy legislation cleared the Senate on Thursday by a wide margin after the oil industry and utilities succeeded in stripping out provisions that would have cost them billions of dollars.
The tax measure and the renewable electricity mandate were included in an energy bill that easily passed the House last week. But industry lobbyists focused their attention on Republican members of the Senate and on the White House, which repeatedly threatened to veto the bill if the offending sections were not removed.
Separately, Congress reached a tentative agreement on a major energy package that it plans to enact outside the energy bill, according to a Senate Democratic staff member. The agreement, to be included in a broad government spending bill, would authorize the Energy Department to guarantee loans for various energy projects, making financing far easier.
The agreement would guarantee loans of up to $25 billion for new nuclear plants and $2 billion for a uranium enrichment plant, something those industries had been avidly seeking. It would also provide guarantees of up to $10 billion for renewable energy projects, $10 billion for plants to turn coal into liquid vehicle fuel and $2 billion to turn coal into natural gas.
!?!?!?!!?!?!?!!?!?!?!!?!?!!?!?!!?!?!?!!?!!?!?!!?!!?!?!!?!?!?!?!!?!!?!!?!?!!?!?!?!!?!!?!?!?
In other news, as hand basket sales sky rocket, scientists are feverishly working on a family sized hand basket that would allow as many as 20 people to make the journey to hell together. O.k., I made that up, but if you can't afford a bomb shelter and you don't know Tom Cruise, you may want to buy a hand basket before you spend all your money on Christmas presents.
WASHINGTON -- Pared-down energy legislation cleared the Senate on Thursday by a wide... more
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