US judge: Government must consider climate change in oil drilling leases

21.03.19

News

US judge: Government must consider climate change in oil drilling leases

Federal agencies must “take a hard look” at the impact of oil and gas exploration on climate change, a US federal judge has ruled, according to CNN and others. The ruling “could have significant implications for the Trump administration’s efforts to expand domestic energy production”, CNN says. The decision “amounts to a road map that could be used to challenge hundreds of [other] Trump administration leases as well”, says the New York Times, adding: “experts said that, while the decision could lead to legal delays for the drilling expansion envisioned by Trump by tangling them in litigation, it was unlikely to halt it entirely”. The judge temporarily blocked drilling on about 300,000 acres [1,300 square kilometres] of land in Wyoming, says the Washington Post, ruling that the cumulative climate impact of wells on the land should have been considered rather than judging individual sites “in a vacuum”. Previous court rulings had focused on likely emissions from individual lease sales or permits, says Timemagazine, whereas this new judgement argues authorities should account for emissions from past, present and foreseeable future oil and gas leases. The order is the latest in a string of similar rulings over the past decade, says the Associated Press, that have “faulted the US for inadequate consideration of greenhouse gas emissions when approving oil, gas and coal projects on federal land”. The Wyoming leases in question were granted in 2015 and 2016 under the Obama administration, notes the Financial Times, but they have been defended in court by Trump administration officials. The FT adds that the order, even if upheld by higher courts, will have a relatively small impact on US oil and gas production, as the lease area in Wyoming represents less than 4% of the federal land leased for drilling in the state. The FT continues: “But the decision is further evidence of how US environmental laws can bind the hands of the federal government…Of 36 court battles over attempted deregulation since January 2017, the Trump administration has prevailed in just two.” The Independent, Hill, Guardian, Axios, Reuters and Bloomberg all have the story.

EU leaders push for net-zero emissions without setting target date

Reuters

European Union leaders have charted a course towards net-zero emission, but without setting a target date for the goal in draft summit conclusions, Reuters reports. The European Parliament has overwhelmingly backed a mid-century deadline, Reuters adds. The draft conclusions have “dismay[ed] climate campaigners”, reports Climate Home News.

Labour promises to set transport emissions targets for rail, road, aviation and shipping

BusinessGreen

Labour’s shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald has set out details of his party’s strategy to put emissions reduction “at the core” of the Department for Transport, if it wins power, reports BusinessGreen. The plan would include a specific carbon budget for the department, along with targets for emissions from rail, road transport and aviation. In a comment in the Times, McDonald writes that climate change “is not taken seriously” under the current transport secretary Chris Grayling. He says: “We cannot continue to ignore the fact that transport is the UK’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions and the worst-performing sector when it comes to reducing carbon emissions. For too long climate change has been considered too difficult to address in the transport sector. This will change under Labour.”

Climate change: All-Wales plan to cut emissions unveiled

BBC News

The Welsh government has published a collection of 100 policies and proposals to tackle climate change, reports BBC News, including a new centre at Cardiff University to look at the psychology of cutting energy use. The “vast majority” of the policies already exist under different government departments, BBC News says, but the aim is to coordinate efforts towards a legally binding 80% cut in emissions below 1990 levels by 2050. “Previously unannounced pledges include a review of skill gaps for jobs supporting decarbonisation and the setting up of an expert group to advise on new technologies,” BBC News says.

Comment

Cyclone Idai: What’s the role of climate change?

Matt McGrath, BBC News

The specific role of climate change in the devastation caused by Cyclone Idai is “unlikely to be clearly determined” unless funding is found to model events, writes BBC environment correspondent Matt McGrath. He adds: “However, there are a number of conclusions about rising temperatures that researchers have gleaned from previous studies on tropical cyclones in the region.” For example, he quotes scientists saying that the overall number of storms in southern Africa has held relatively steady, whereas the frequency of high-intensity events has increased. Climate change is also changing background factors such as the intensity of rainfall, sea-surface temperatures and sea levels, McGrath explains. He concludes: “Whatever arguments about the impacts of climate change on tropical cyclones, the damage caused in Mozambique has much more to do with the vulnerability of people on the ground than rising temperatures.” The Independent also has a feature on recent events, under the headline: “Cyclone Idai reveals the fundamental injustice at the heart of climate change.” In a letter to the Guardian, Friends of the Earth UK’s Craig Bennett writes: “Climate scientists are clear: storms, cyclones and floods will worsen as the planet warms…Something can be done to make disasters of this scale less likely. The question is: will political leaders do it?” An opinion piece in the Guardian by Dr Adam Corner says: “People have a right to know what’s behind their flooding or heatwave. The UK is lagging behind other countries.” Corner argues in favour of weather forecasts being contextualised with information about the changing climate. He writes: “Don’t people have a right to know how their climate is changing? And aren’t weather forecasts the obvious place to alert us to these new risks that we face?”

‘We were ecologists before the capitalists’: the gilets jaunes and climate justice

Natalie Sauer, Climate Home News

Climate Home News reporter Natalie Sauer has an in-depth feature about the “gilets jaunes” and their attitude to action on climate change, based on interviews with some of those taking part in the protests. “The division between those demanding social justice and climate justice fits neatly with a widely-held view of the gilets jaunes as opposed to climate action,” Sauer writes. “The initial protests were sparked by a rise in diesel tax, which would have cut pollution but landed the cost on drivers…The narrative that this amounts to a popular rejection of efforts to fight global warming, has been co-opted internationally, most prominently by US president Donald Trump.” Yet Sauer finds a complex and varied attitude to climate policy, explaining: “One manifesto has been widely circulated by the gilets jaunes, calling for among other things, increased building insulation and an aviation fuel tax. But the movement has yet to adopt a coherent programme or set of goals. Because of this any snapshot of the gilets jaunes is bound to fail to grasp the full picture.”

Donald Trump is using Stalinist techniques against climate science

Prof Michael Mann and Bob Ward, The Guardian

“Americans should not be fooled by the Stalinist tactics being used by the White House to try to discredit the findings of mainstream climate science,” write Prof Michael Mann and Bob Ward in a comment for the Guardian. A planned panel being set up “to promote an alternative official explanation for climate change…will consist of scientists who do not accept the overwhelming scientific evidence that rising levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are behind climate change and its impacts”, they write. They add: “The creation of the new panel of climate change deniers, and the recruitment of supporters to provide it with a veneer of legitimacy, echoes the campaign by Joseph Stalin’s regime to discredit the work of geneticists who disagreed with the disastrous pseudo-scientific theories of Trofim Lysenko.”

Science

Extracting weather information from a plantation document

Climate of the Past

A new study develops a method for extracting weather and climate data from a document preserved from Shirley Plantation in Virginia, US, covering the period 1816–42. The researchers show how this data can be used for climate studies – for example, by “developing an index for midsummer temperatures from the timing of the first malaria-like symptoms in the plantation population each year”. The results show that the “median day when these symptoms would begin occurring in the modern period [1943-2017] is a month and a half earlier than the median day they occurred in the historical period”, the study says. The authors conclude that “this type of local weather information from historical archives…can be useful toward a more complete understanding of climates of the past”.

Power, coalitions and institutional change in South African climate policy

Climate Policy

“Powerful coalitions of coal-related industries and their lobbies have constrained institutional change and managed to delay the implementation of carbon pricing measures” in South Africa, a new study says. The researchers examined the different groups and relationships that drive and hinder institutional change in South African climate policy. The findings show that the “South African government has managed to drive institutional change in climate policy significantly over the past seven years”, the authors say, but “unbalanced power relations between coalitions of support in government and civil society and opposition – mainly from the affected industry – result in very fragile institutional change”. (Carbon Brief published a climate and energy profile of South Africa late last year.)

How effective is the European Union energy label? Evidence from a real-stakes experiment

Environmental Research Letters

The energy labelling scheme used by the European Union (EU) “does not increase demand for energy-efficient products”, a new study suggests. In a “real-stakes randomised controlled trial”, researchers tested the effectiveness of the EU’s environmental certification scheme against a control case with no energy-related information and another option that displays the lifetime cost of energy of the product. The results show that “the EU energy label does not increase demand for energy-efficient products over a control condition. By contrast, lifetime-cost information increases the willingness-to-pay for energy efficiency considerably”.

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