Trump prepares orders aiming at global funding and treaties & Electric cars will not stem global demand for oil, says BP

26.01.17

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Trump Prepares Orders Aiming at Global Funding and Treaties

The Trump administration is preparing executive orders that “would clear the way to drastically reduce the United States’ role in the United Nations and other international organizations, as well as begin a process to review and potentially abrogate certain forms of multilateral treaties”, reports the New York Times, which has obtained two draft orders. It adds: “The first of the two draft orders, titled ‘Auditing and Reducing U.S. Funding of International Organizations’ calls for terminating funding for any UN agency or other international body that meets any one of several criteria.” The paper says it is unclear whether the Paris Agreement would fall inside the scope of the orders. The NYT’s scoop is picked up by, among others, Climate Home, the Hill, Reuters and the Independent. Meanwhile, Reuters reports that any scientifc findings by the US Environmental Protection Agency staff will likely face a case-by-case review by the Trump administration before being released. Despite earlier fears that it would, the Hill says that Trump administration is “not currently planning” to remove climate change-related content from the EPA website. In other Trump-related developments, the Independent reports that the chief executive of E.on says Trump is causing serious setbacks to climate change efforts and Bloombergreports that Exxon has praised the “monumental” Paris Agreement in a “signal to Trump”. Matt McGrath, BBC News’ environment correspondent, has penned an overview of how deep Trump’s “control-alt-delete” on climate policy is likely to go. Finally, Climate Home has launched a tracker to keep tabs on all the latest developments in the “US climate action crackdown”.

Electric cars will not stem global demand for oil, says BP

The Guardian

Global demand for oil will still be growing in 2035 even with an enormous growth in electric cars in the next two decades, with numbers on the road rising from 1m to 100m, BP has predicted. The Guardian reports that the oil and gas giant predicted that despite electric cars spreading rapidly and renewable energy recording exceptional growth, oil demand would still rise because of rising prosperity in the developing world. BP said electric cars would not be a “gamechanger” for the oil industry. The Times reports the views of Spencer Dale, BP’s chief economist, who says that despite an “abundance of oil” globally, it was “increasingly likely” that some resources would be left in the ground and therefore keep prices below $100 a barrel. The Financial Times notes that BP says there was twice as much technically recoverable oil available as the world than is expected to be needed between now and 2050, making it likely that some oil reserves will never be extracted. The Telegraph says that “BP is bracing for a revolution in electric car use that could halve the demand for oil from vehicles”.

Scientists Are Planning the Next Big Washington March

Climate Central

Following the huge turnout and impact of last weekend’s Women’s March, a new effort is underway to get scientists marching against Trump, reports Climate Central. “A group of researchers have proposed a March for Science. What started as a discussion on Reddit has quickly blossomed into a movement. Organizers started a private Facebook group and Twitter account on Monday. By Wednesday afternoon, the former boasted more than 300,000 members and the latter had nearly 55,000 followers. A public Facebook page had more than 11,000 likes just five hours after going online. The explosion of support caught organisers off guard, but they’re meeting this weekend to discuss details about the date and full mission statement.” InsideClimateNews and the Telegraph also carry the story. In Rolling Stone, the veteran climate campaigner Bill McKibben says “mark April 29th on your calendar, because the climate movement will convene in DC to show that the election didn’t cancel physics”.

Theresa May refuses to say whether she will tell Donald Trump climate change is not a ‘Chinese hoax’

The Independent

Theresa May has refused to say whether she will urge Donald Trump not to pull out of the Paris climate change accords. The prime minister is to meet the new US president at the end of the week and faced questioning over her planned discussion from former Labour leader Ed Miliband during prime minister’s questions. He asked her to “reassure” the House of Commons that she would tell Trump that climate change is “not a hoax invented by the Chinese” – as the president has previously suggested. May did not comment directly on Trump’s stance, or whether she would raise the issue in the meeting, saying only that “all parties” should abide by the agreement. Meanwhile, Climate Home reports that MPs are sending a letter to May urging her to tackle the president’s climate denial. It is being coordinated by Labour MP Mary Creagh, who chairs the influential Environmental Audit Committee.

Extreme weather has cost Europe more than £330bn and the lives of 85,000 people since the 1980s

The Independent

Extreme weather has cost Europe more than £300bn and ended the lives of 85,000 people over the last three decades – and the problems are getting worse as the world warms, according to a new report by the European Environment Agency (EEA). The document revealed the cost to the economy had soared by about 80% over the past 30 years. The paper added: “During the 1980s, the damages averaged about €7.6bn (about £6.5bn) a year, but by the 2000s the figure had risen to €13.7bn, the report said. Overall between 1980 and 2013, the cost was nearly €393bn. Some 75,000 deaths were attributed to heatwaves, with about 4,400 from floods, about 3,300 from storms and a similar number from droughts, forest fires and cold weather.”

A Brief Chat With Elon Musk About Climate Change, Rex Tillerson, and Donald Trump

Gizmodo

Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, yesterday entered into a Twitter exchange with a number of people over the subjects of climate change and Trump’s choice of the former Exxon chief Rex Tillerson as the US secretary of state. For example, he entered into a direct message conversions with Gizmodo in which he said that Tillerson “has publicly acknowledged for years that a carbon tax could make sense. There is no better person to push for that to become a reality than Tillerson. This is what matters far more than pipelines or opening oil reserves. The unpriced externality must be priced.” He added: “CO2 isn’t exactly pollution, but it does cause warming and slight acidification of water if very large quantities are dug from deep underground and added to the surface cycle. The problem is the age-old tragedy of the commons. The common good being consumed is atmospheric and oceanic carbon capacity, which currently has a price of zero. This results in an error in market signals and far more CO2 is generated than should be. We won’t ever go to zero CO2, but the rate over time should be dropped far below what it is today.” The Independent also carries the story.

Comment

Strangling Nation’s Huge Climate Policy Machine Won’t Be Easy for Trump

John H Cushman Jr &Lisa Song Zahra Hirji, InsideClimate News

InsideClimateNews has produced a graphic showing how “thousands of employees and others across dozens of agencies and departments” are engaged in federal climate science, policy and communications in the US. “If the Trump administration intends to strangle the flow of climate change information produced by the federal bureaucracy, it will be no small task.” In 2014, federal climate change funding stood at $11.6bn, up from $2.4bn in 1993.

Donald Trump’s battle against the environmentalists is only the beginning

Geoffrey Lean, London Evening Standard

The veteran environmental journalist writes that it is “far from clear how far [Trump] will succeed, and even less so that any US administration can, by itself, frustrate the world’s efforts to combat climate change”. He adds: “Trump’s biggest bugbears — such as Obama’s measures to boost fuel economy in road vehicles and to cut carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants — will be much tougher to kill, because they have been through a lengthy rule-making process and will require a similar one to be dismantled. And much of the EPA’s powers to regulate pollutants are enshrined in the Nixon-era Clean Air Act, making them hard to weaken…Even if Trump does decide to quit [the Paris Agreement], US emissions are still likely to fall because many states, from California to New York, will stick to bold reduction plans while even Republican states such as Texas and Iowa are expanding massive renewable-energy programmes.”

President Trump and the fog of pollution

James Murray, BusinessGreen

James says he’s “angry, scared, and bored” with Trump: “Opponents need to stop focusing on who or who doesn’t believe climate change is a hoax, and argue repeatedly that the only logical and rational thing to do is to respond aggressively and ambitiously to complex climate risks. And more important still, businesses, investors, and citizens need to invest whatever political capital they have in hammering home the point that clean technologies work, deliver multiple benefits, and can and will outperform the dirty technologies of the 20th century.”

Science

Rapid decadal convective precipitation increase over Eurasia during the last three decades of the 20th century

Science Advances

The amount of rainfall delivered by convective weather systems each year has been increasing “astonishingly fast” over northern Eurasia, a new study says. Using 35-year datasets of three-hourly and daily rainfall observations, the researchers show that annual convective rainfall has increased at a rate of 18.4% per degree of temperature rise. Of this increase, 16% is down to greater frequency of convective events and 2.4% is attributable to increased rainfall intensity. These increases “appear to be directly linearly associated with higher atmospheric water vapour accompanying a warming climate over northern Eurasia,” the researchers conclude.

Are fish outside their usual ranges early indicators of climate-driven range shifts?

Global Change Biology

New research finds that “first sightings” of marine species outside their normal ranges could provide an early warning of impending climate-driven range shifts. Their analysis finds that fish first sightings tend to be tropical and sub-tropical species moving towards high latitudes, as would be expected in climate warming. Detecting range shifts at an early stage would allow resource managers and researchers to better manage range-shifting species before they potentially colonise, the researchers note.

Skilful seasonal predictions for the European energy industry

Environmental Research Letters

A new study describes how the UK Met Office’s global seasonal forecasting system (GloSea5) can be used by the energy industry to forecast winter supply and demand. GloSea5 successfully reproduces the influence of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) on European climate, the researchers say, allowing forecasts of wind speed and wind energy supply. Accurate temperature forecasts mean that estimates of winter demand are also possible on timescales well in advance of each season, the paper says.

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