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Fracking protesters walk free after court quashes 'excessive' sentences

18.10.18

News

Fracking protesters walk free after court quashes ‘excessive’ sentences

The Guardian

Three protestors who were jailed last month for blocking access to a fracking site in Lancashire have been freed after the court of appeal quashed their sentences, the Guardian reports. The court ruled that their prison sentences of 15 and 16 months were inappropriate, describing them as “manifestly excessive”. Following their release, one of the protestors told a group of supporters: “If people break the law out of a moral obligation to prevent the expansion of fossil fuel industries they should not be sent to prison…The fracking industry threatens to industrialise our beautiful countryside. It will force famine, flooding and many other disasters on the world’s most vulnerable communities by exacerbating climate change.” The news was accompanied by a number of opinion pieces on fracking. At the Daily Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes that: “Shale gas fracking is not a global climate problem. It is part of the solution.” He continues: “In Britain it will displace imported coal and gas with a higher carbon footprint. Well-meaning grannies chained to the Cuadrilla fracking site in Lancashire might usefully ponder the geometry of this.” An editorial in the same paper leads with: “Fracking fuels self-reliance”. “We need to be careful before putting all our energy eggs into the renewables basket, certainly while the future of nuclear power remains uncertain”, the Daily Telegraph says. It concludes that: “a secure and reliable domestic source of gas, supplanting imports, is worth pursuing”. Elsewhere, George Monbiot argues in the Guardian: “As the fracking protesters show, a people’s rebellion is the only way to fight climate change”, and the Guardian also reports that Claire Perry, the “minister spearheading the UK’s renewed push for fracking” has “admitted she has never been to a shale gas well”.

U.S. greenhouse emissions fell in 2017 as coal plants shut

Reuters

Greenhouse gas emissions from the US’ largest industrial plants dropped by 2.7% in 2017, according to new figures from the US Environmental Protection Agency. The agency found that the decline was steeper than in 2016, when emissions fell 2%. The EPA’s acting administrator Andrew Wheeler said that the data proves that federal regulations are not necessary to drive carbon dioxide reductions, Reuters reports. Wheeler said in a press release: “Thanks to President Trump’s regulatory reform agenda, the economy is booming, energy production is surging, and we are reducing greenhouse gas emissions from major industrial sources.” The Hill also has the story.

Coal applications set to be rejected by Welsh Government

BBC News

The Welsh government intends to reject future coal mining applications as a matter of policy, BBC News reports. Under proposed new planning rules, which are due to be finalised by the end of 2018, Wales would only allow permission under exceptional circumstances. The draft planning policy says: “Proposals for opencast, deep-mine development or colliery spoil disposal should not be permitted…Should, in wholly exceptional circumstances, proposals be put forward they would clearly need to demonstrate why they are needed in the context of climate change emissions reductions targets and for reasons of national energy security.” There are two major opencast coal mines currently operating in Wales.

Bahrain applies to Green Climate Fund to help clean up waste from fossil fuels

The Guardian

Bahrain has requested $9.8m from the Green Climate Fund to clean up wastewater from the oil and gas industry, the Guardian reports. The UN’s Green Climate Fund directs taxpayer funds from rich countries to help developing countries invest in low-emissions technology. But Bahrain’s proposal raises questions “over whether taxpayer-funded assistance for poor countries is reaching its intended targets”, the Guardian writes. Lutz Weischer, team leader for international climate policy at Germanwatch, told the paper: “The GCF was given the mandate to promote a paradigm shift to low-carbon and climate resilient development pathways [which mean] transitioning away from coal, oil and gas. A project that would make a country’s water supply dependent on continued oil and gas production is clearly not in line with the mandate.”

Comment

Let’s quickly note how bad Trump’s current climate-change argument is

Philip Bump, Washington Post

A number of publications have responded to an interview given by US president Donald Trump to the Associated Press on Tuesday, where the Trump was asked about climate change. At the Washington Post, Philip Bump responds to Trump’s arguments that Michael was a bad storm but that there had been worse storms in the past, as well as his “faux-middle-ground position”, that the climate has changed back and forth over time for millennia. “The point is that warm water in the Gulf of Mexico helped Michael build strength rapidly, making it a worse storm than it might otherwise have been”, Bump explains. During the interview, Trump also remarked: “what I’m not willing to do is sacrifice the economic well-being of our country for something that nobody really knows”. Vox counters that “fighting climate change won’t destroy the economy”, noting that “when pressed on climate change, Trump and other elected Republicans routinely use the economy as a shield to avoid committing to any policies to slow or adapt to climate change.” In the Guardian, Dana Nuccitelli, says that “Trump’s answers were particularly ignorant and nonsensical”. While a comment piece in Intelligencer leads with: “Trump’s climate denial isn’t just a war on our coastlines. It’s a war on our brains.”

What’s at Stake in Brazil’s Election? The Future of the Amazon

Somini Sengupta, New York Times

Brazil’s upcoming presidential election is “also a referendum on the fate of the Amazon”, writes Somini Sengupta, international climate reporter for the New York Times. The campaign promises of frontrunner Jair Bolsonaro – who has also suggested pulling Brazil out of the Paris climate agreement – “could have dire consequences for the Amazon, and therefore for the rest of the planet”, she writes, since the Amazon “acts as a giant sink for the carbon dioxide emissions that the world as a whole produces”. She notes that Brazil is also the world’s “sixth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases”. In another comment piece on the election, the Huffington Post leads with: “Brazil’s election could deal a crushing blow to combating climate change”. Earlier this year, Carbon Brief published a profile of Brazil’s key climate policy developments, pledges and statistics.

Economic climate models are elegant, brilliant and, in the US, failing us

Brendan Greeley, FT Alphaville

The US uses integrated assessment models (IAMs) to “launder its own choices”, argues Brendan Greeley from FT Alphaville, and to “pretend that decisions on climate will have outcomes that are precisely measurable, certain, and purely economic.” But, Greeley writes, our options on climate change are “not measurable with any precision, uncertain, and profoundly moral”. “We game the models to avoid hard choices”, he says. For example, “integrated assessment models assume that paying now to avoid devastating and irreversible changes to global weather patterns is the same thing as making a financial investment with a long time horizon”. Yet if an investment doesn’t pay off, “it’s literally not the end of the world”. So “to treat them as the same thing is already inherently a moral decision”, he explains. Carbon Brief recently published an in-depth explainer on IAMs.

Science

Impacts of heat, cold, and temperature variability on mortality in Australia, 2000–2009

Science of the Total Environment

Extremes and variability of temperatures account for around 6% of deaths in Australia, a new study says, yet “adaptation appeared to have not occurred in most cities studied”. The researchers analysed daily data on deaths and weather variables for the five most populous Australian cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth) for 2000-09. The results show that heat, cold and temperature variability together resulted in more than 42,000 deaths during the study period. Most of attributable deaths were due to cold (61%), the researchers say, followed by temperature variability (28%) and then heat (11%).