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Frequent Floods Force Farmers to Rethink Age-Old Practices
In 2008, Katy Lince watched the vegetables she had nurtured at Hawthorne Valley Farm in upstate New York float down a rushing river that days before had been a peaceful creek nowhere near her crops.
"We thought, that was a weird flood," said Lince, the farm's field vegetables manager. "That's not going to happen again."
It did. The next year.
The floods forced Lince and Steffen Schneider, the farm's director of operations, to reconsider an agricultural practice that farmers have followed for thousands of years: planting in flood plains, where the soil is particularly fertile.
Feds Punt on Leadership Over Fracking Rules, Experts Say
Nearly two years after Wyoming became the first state to regulate high-volume hydraulic fracturing, the federal government is finally taking similar steps to supervise oil and gas drilling on public lands.
Released earlier this month, the proposed rule is now open for public comment. While the regulations it contains are a significant step forward, they've disappointed environmentalists and watchdogs who hoped that the Obama administration would lead by example.
Compared to existing state regulations, the federal rule is in the "middle of the pack," said Bruce Baizel, senior staff attorney at Earthworks, a nonprofit that advocates for responsible oil and gas drilling. "It's not a model leader but it's also not stepping back either."
The proposed rule will require operators to test for leaks, create a plan for managing wastewater and reveal some of the chemicals they use in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
Regulating these activities will "ensure the health and safety of the land and the public ... and raise public confidence in hydraulic fracturing," Bureau of Land Management spokeswoman Megan Crandall told InsideClimate News.
FIT to Be CLEAN: EU's 'Feed-In Tariff' Rebranded for Americans
Officials in Long Island, N.Y., are rebranding a promising yet largely overlooked policy instrument to ramp up the region's solar power capacity.
Last month, the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA), the local utility, launched one of the nation's first CLEAN, or Clean Local Energy Accessible Now, programs.
The initiative uses the same feed-in tariff model that many credit for solar power booms in Germany, France and Spain—only with a different name.
Under the program LIPA pays solar operators a fixed rate of 22 cents for every kilowatt-hour of electricity they feed back to the grid for 20 years. The goal is to add 50 megawatts of commercial-scale solar energy, enough to power 6,500 homes.
Proponents say feed-in tariffs are key to stoking the clean energy economy, because they help solar and wind compete with conventional fossil fuels, provide private investors with a stable investment environment and create local jobs.
But advocates have struggled to sell the program in the United States—a problem they blame in part on its loaded name.
Bill to Ban Sustainability and Climate Change Action Fails in Arizona
A high-profile bill in Arizona to abolish sustainability efforts died last week, yet its defeat isn't deterring lawmakers in three other states from still trying to pass related policies into law.
The legislation seeks to outlaw states and their cities from endorsing or implementing the United Nations Agenda 21 principles of sustainable development. The list of 27 nonbinding principles, adopted by countries at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, is meant to guide policies to eradicate poverty and combat climate change, among other environmental threats.
In late March, the Arizona state Senate approved anti-Agenda 21 bill SB 1507, but the measure died on May 3, after House lawmakers failed to bring the legislation to a vote before the legislative session concluded that night.
In total, five states have tried and failed to pass such rules this year, with Arizona's battle being the most well known. Efforts in Alabama, Kansas and Louisiana are still alive.
Koch Brothers' Activism Protects Their 50-Year Stake in Canadian Heavy Oils
Over the last decade, Charles and David Koch have emerged into public view as billionaire philanthropists pushing a libertarian brand of political activism that presses a large footprint on energy and climate issues. They have created and supported non-profit organizations, think tanks and political groups that work to undermine climate science, environmental regulation and clean energy. They are also top donors to politicians, most of them Republicans, who support the oil industry and deny any human role in global warming.
What is less well documented are the many Koch businesses that benefit from the brothers' efforts to push the center of American political discourse rightward, closer to their own convictions. At the top of the list are the Koch family's long and deep investments in Canada's heavy oil industry, which have been central to the company's initial growth and subsequent diversification since 1959.
Because Koch Industries is a privately held company, the public has little access to information about the depth and diversity of its Canadian oil sands holdings. Over the past several months, however, InsideClimate News has pieced together a rough picture of the company's involvement in the industry, using published reports from the National Energy Board of Canada; documents and data extracted from the website of Canada's Energy Resource Conservation Board; securities disclosures and filings of Koch businesses in Canada; court documents from an inheritance battle that pitted Charles and David Koch against their two other brothers; Canadian and U.S. media reports; company newsletters and press releases; and two books, one written by Charles Koch and the other the autobiography of a long-time Koch company director.
These sources reveal that Koch Industries has touched virtually every aspect of the tar sands industry since the company established a toehold in Canada more than 50 years ago. It has been involved in mining bitumen, the hydrocarbon resin found in the oil sands; in pipeline systems to collect and transport Canadian crude; in exporting the heavy oils to the U.S.; in refining the sulfurous, low-grade feedstock; and in the subsequent distribution and sale of a variety of finished products, from jet fuel to asphalt. The company has also created or collaborated with other companies that have become leading players in the development of Alberta's oil resources, and it remains deeply invested in western Canada’s oil patch.
Koch Industries declined to answer any questions for this story.
Weather Insider: Why the Discredited Cloud Theory of Global Warming Won't Die
In climate science, some ideas seem to live forever like vampires, despite repeated attempts to slay them.
A New York Times story last week focused on one of those ideas and the man behind it: Richard S. Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The story caught the eye of climatologists everywhere.
Lindzen believes clouds will be our savior, because he says they'll help prevent catastrophic impacts from global warming. His pitch has made him the darling of naysayers and a pariah among the vast majority of climate scientists who find his research badly flawed and his conclusions unsupported.
Joel Norris, a professor of atmospheric and climate science at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, is among those who have followed Lindzen's cloud theory over the years. In an interview with InsideClimate News, Norris said it's unusual for discredited scientific ideas to keep resurfacing, as Lindzen's have for more than a decade.
Why Don't TV Meteorologists Believe in Climate Change?
In recent years, the world's scientists have begun to show that climate change is altering the magnitude and frequency of severe weather, and polls say a majority of Americans now link droughts, floods and other extremes to global warming.
And yet, this country's TV weather forecasters have increasingly taken to denying evidence that warming is affecting weather—or is even happening at all. Only 19 percent accept the established science that human activity is driving climate change, says a 2011 report by the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, making TV meteorologists far more skeptical than the public at large.
This Week in Clean Economy: NYC Takes the Red Tape Out of Building Green
The New York City Council this week adopted the country's most sweeping green building plan, approving citywide zoning regulations that encourage energy efficiency retrofits and widespread adoption of rooftop solar and wind.
The initiative, called Zone Green, will help the city slash annual energy costs of $15 billion and achieve its goal of trimming global warming emissions by 30 percent by 2030. The city's roughly one million buildings are responsible for almost 80 percent of carbon dioxide emissions, compared to 40 percent for the national average.
Weather Insider: What Tomorrow's Shift in the La Nina-El Nino Cycle Means
Changes are brewing in the equatorial Pacific, and they could profoundly affect weather across the U.S. and much of the globe next winter and spring.
La Niña, which has held sway since last fall, will be officially declared a goner Thursday, an official at the Climate Prediction Center in Maryland told InsideClimate News. And while nobody is quite certain what will happen next, some long-range forecast models are pointing to the possible emergence of the opposite phenomenon: El Niño.
Climate scientists are still trying to determine what role climate change plays in the La Niña/El Niño cycle. One study by scientists with NASA and the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle suggests global warming may already be affecting the intensity and impacts of El Niño.
Will Ohio Continue To Be a Regional Dumping Ground for Fracking Wastewater?
A series of earthquakes that rumbled from an oil and gas wastewater well in Ohio last year has highlighted the state's new role in the regional drilling landscape. Over the last couple of years, Ohio has become a dumping ground for wastewater.
Last year, drillers pumped more than 500 million gallons of toxic fluid—nearly 40 percent more than in 2010—into the state's injections wells, where energy companies pump waste into porous rock formations deep underground for permanent storage. With more than 170 injection wells in operation, Ohio is by far the region's leader in this area, with New York and Pennsylvania each having only a handful of injection wells. Ohio's regulators approved 29 new injection wells last year. Applications for 19 more are pending.
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