Environment Forum

Airlines tout “going green” but their lobbyists are on different flight

The way some of the big U.S. airlines tell it, they’re responsible stewards of the environment working hard to shrink their footprints.

American Airlines, in an article in its in-flight magazine American Way, says the company is “committed to identifying and implementing programs to reduce our environmental impact.” Just this week, American announced the purchase of 460 new fuel-efficient aircraft. The newly merged United and Continental recently launched an “Eco-Skies” campaign that, according to a company web site, reflects “a common focus on protecting the environment” and “allow[s] us to integrate our programs and focus on the environmental commitment of our combined company.”

So why are these environmental stewards hiring lobbyists and going to court to fight common-sense rules that will help protect the environment? And why are some members of Congress introducing legislation that would make it illegal for air carriers to obey new European clean air standards?

On January 1, 2012, all civil aviation flights using airports in Europe will become accountable for their global warming pollution. A new European law, designed to reduce global warming emissions from aviation as part of the larger effort to avert climate catastrophe, will apply to all airlines without regard to nation of origin. (The law exempts airlines that operate a small number of flights to/from the EU).

In its first year, the law requires the airlines to make a modest three percent reduction from their 2004-2006 emissions levels, and to cut pollution five percent through 2020. The law gives airlines broad flexibility to determine how to reduce pollution.  Innovative carriers that cut emissions below required levels can sell their surplus allowances. This mild law won’t hurt the carriers’ business; in fact, a 2007 study by the industry’s International Air Transport Association found that the regulation’s “net impact is slightly positive for [both] the profitability of airlines operating extra-EU flights and the overall profitability of flights arriving and departing the EU.”

Instead of complying with the EU law, the American carriers United/Continental and American Airlines are doing what companies often do when they don’t like a law or regulation: they’re going to court and hiring lobbyists.  On July 5, a Grand Chamber of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) held a day-long hearing on the airlines’ challenge to the EU-ETS Aviation Directive. This week, House Transportation and Infrastructure chairman John  Mica (R-FL) introduced the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme Prohibition Act of 2011, a bill that would actually make it against the law for US airlines to participate in the European system – even just to report their emissions.

The arguments the airlines and their supporters in the House make in opposing the law range from the implausible to the absurd. They claim, for example, that the EU law is a violation of U.S. sovereignty and illegal under international law and the Chicago Convention, the treaty that regulates international air travel.

As if 2007 never happened?

If four years is a lifetime in politics, it’s an eternity in climate change politics. Events in Washington this week might make climate policy watchers wonder if 2007 really happened.

At issue is the decision by American Electric Power to put its plans for carbon capture and storage on hold, due to the weak economy and the lack of a U.S. plan to limit emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide. Read the Reuters story about it here.

Carbon capture and storage, or CCS for short, has been promoted as a way to make electricity from domestic coal without unduly raising the level of carbon in the atmosphere. Instead of sending the carbon dioxide that results from burning coal up a smokestack and into the air, the plan was to bury it underground. But that costs money and requires regulatory guarantees, and neither are imminent in the United States. Legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions bogged down on Capitol Hill a year ago and has not been re-introduced.

Sarah Forbes of World Resources Institute called AEP’s decision “a surprise, but not a shock.”

“Given that U.S. climate legislation stalled last summer, companies have less incentive to move forward with CCS, which has proven difficult to advance at scale,” Forbes said in a statement.

Compare that to what happened in 2007. Senators Barbara Boxer, John Warner and Joe Lieberman joined forces that year to focus attention on climate change and were able to shepherd a carbon-limiting bill to the Senate floor the next year, the farthest any such measure has gotten in the United States. Al Gore, the former vice president and perennial climate campaigner, shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nations’ Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change for bringing climate change to public attention.

On Groundhog Day of that year (why did they pick February 2?) the IPCC released its Fourth Assessment report on what was likely to happen in a warming world. The report forecast more severe weather, worse heat waves, dramatic droughts, wildfires and floods, rising seas and melting glaciers. It also famously said, with 90 percent certainty, that climate change was under way and that human activities contribute to it.

A flying HIPPO, with ICE-T on the side

A HIPPO took off from a windswept airfield in Colorado today, as  ICE-T waited in a nearby hangar, getting ready for a summer trip to the Caribbean.

OK, OK, enough fun with acronyms. HIPPO and ICE-T are flying climate laboratories, one in a Gulfstream V jet, the other in a refurbished C-130 military cargo plane.

Unlike its animal namesake, HIPPO is actually a rather sleek aircraft, fitted with equipment and a crew of 10, that makes flights of  eight hours or more at a go, sampling the atmosphere around the Pacific Basin, from near the North Pole to just off the coast of Antarctica. HIPPO is actually a combination of two acronyms: HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observations. HIAPER itself stands for High-performance Instrumented Airborne Platform for Environmental Research. Quite a mouthful.

Unlike most Gulfstream V’s — usually used as corporate jets — this one has no in-flight bar. (Roger Wakimoto, the director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which manages the program along with the National Science Foundation, said the bar was one of the first things to go after the plane was delivered.)

HIPPO takes off steeply and then flies in a sawtooth pattern, rising to 28,000 feet and then dipping to just 1,000 feet above the water or land. The point of this roller-coaster flight is to figure out how climate-warming carbon dioxide and other trace gases is distributed, not just at Earth’s surface but up to the edge of the troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere, where most weather occurs. Learn more about this project here.

By contrast, ICE-T is being equipped for summer in St. Croix, where it will be based for a series of flights out over the open Atlantic Ocean. Its mission is to examine the ice that forms in clouds, because more than half of all precipitation begins in the ice phase.

How ice forms and multiplies in clouds is poorly understood and ICE-T — Ice in Clouds Experiment – Tropics — is meant to help scientists learn more about it. That could in turn help with accurately modeling precipitation and predicting climate changes. Take a look here for more information.

Cows, climate change and the high court

If you took all the cows in the United States and figured out how much greenhouse gas they emit, would you be able to sue all the farmers who own them?

That interesting legal question came from Justice Antonin Scalia during Supreme Court oral arguments about whether an environmental case against five big U.S. power companies can go forward.

At issue is whether six states can sue the country’s biggest coal-fired electric utilities to make them cut down on the climate-warming carbon dioxide they emit. One lower court said they couldn’t, an appeals court said they could and now the high court will consider where the case will go next. A ruling should come by the end of June.

For now, though, the question was cows.

Attorney Barbara Underwood argued that the five power companies were the largest emitters of carbon dioxide in the United States, making up 10 percent of U.S. emissions. No other company comes close, she said.

Scalia then leaped into the fray.

“You’re lumping them all together,” he said of the five big power companies. “Suppose you lump together all the cows in the country. Would that allow you to sue all those farmers? I mean, don’t you have to do it defendant by defendant? … Cow by cow or at least farm by farm?”

Hu’s visit is over, but China’s ecological footprint lingers

The Chinese flags have disappeared from Washington’s wide avenues after China’s President Hu Jintao’s visit this week, but one statistic is still in the air: the rapidly expanding size of the Chinese ecological footprint, compared to the huge but slowing impact U.S. consumers have on global supplies of food, water, fuel — everything, really.

China and the United States are generally considered to hold the top two spots in the world for emissions of climate-warming greenhouse gases. But how do they compare when consumption of all goods is taken into account?

A report by Global Footprint Network indicates both countries are living beyond their means, ecologically speaking.

The Ecological Footprint measures the land and sea area needed to produce the resources a population consumes and absorb its carbon dioxide emissions. By this measure, it would take just under 3 billion global hectares (about 7.4 billion global acres) to produce what China’s people consume. If everybody on the planet lived as the Chinese do, it would take the resources of 1.2 Earths.

(The numbers are a bit different when focusing just on Hong Kong, where it would take 2.2 Earths to supply the world’s demand if everybody lived as people do in Hong Kong. A new report with this focus is here.)

The total U.S. ecological footprint is 2.5 billion global hectares (about 6.1 billion acres) — substantially less than China, but far higher for each individual U.S. consumer. If the whole world used as much stuff as people in the United States do, it would take five Earths to provide it.

However, the Global Footprint Network notes another difference between these two economic powers: China’s ecological footprint is growing faster than that of the United States. Between 1992 and 2007 (the most recent year for which data is available), China’s total ecological footprint grew 74 percent, more than triple the U.S. growth of 23 percent over the same time span.

Washington math: oil spill + climate bill = new environmental polls

With BP’s spilled oil shimmering off the U.S. Gulf Coast, and a re-tooled bill to curb climate change expected to be unveiled this week in the U.S. Senate, what could be more appropriate than a bouquet of new environmental polls? Conducted on behalf of groups that want less fossil fuel use, the polls show hefty majorities favoring legislation to limit emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide.

In the kind of harmonic convergence that sometimes happens inside the Capital Beltway, a new poll released on Monday by the Clean Energy Works campaign showed “overwhelming public support for comprehensive clean energy legislation,” with 61 percent of 2010 voters saying they want to limit pollution, invest in clean energy and make energy companies pay for emitting the carbon that contributes to climate change. A healthy majority — 54 percent — of respondents said they’d be more likely to re-elect a senator who votes for the bill.

Last Friday, the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has been pushing for climate change legislation for years, released its own poll numbers. NRDC’s pollsters found seven in 10 Americans want to see fast-tracked clean energy legislation in the wake of the BP oil spill, and two-thirds say they want to postpone new offshore drilling until the Gulf oil spill is investigated and new safeguards are put in place.

Going back one more day, Rasmussen Reports found that even after the Gulf oil spill began dominating the Web, TV newscasts and newspaper front pages, 58 percent of respondents still favor offshore drilling. That’s a big majority but a 14-point drop from the 72 percent who favored offshore drilling after President Barack Obama announced at the end of March that he was opening new areas to exploratory offshore drilling for the first time in more than two decades.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi directed reporters to a poll by Republicans for Environmental Preservation — a quote on their website reads “Nothing is more conservative than conservation” — that showed 52 percent of Republicans and a similar number people who consider themselves conservatives support a U.S. energy policy to boost domestic energy production and cap carbon emissions.Even among Tea Party respondents, who are generally hostile to what they call big government, the poll found more favored the policy — 47 percent — than the 42 percent who opposed it.

Remember: the oil hasn’t really reached the Gulf Coast yet. And the bill, long delayed, isn’t set for launch until Wednesday. Let’s start counting now to see how many polls on these contentious issues arrive before a) the spill is cleaned up and b) the bill either becomes law or fails to gain congressional approval.

Photo credits: REUTERS/Navy (Oil on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico in an aerial view of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill off the coast of Mobile, Alabama, in this photograph taken from a U.S. Coast Guard HC-144 Ocean Sentry aircraft on May 6, 2010 and obtained on May 9, 2010)

from Global News Journal:

Driving carmakers to distraction over emissions

Europe's nominee to be climate chief surprised car manufacturers last week by saying she thought EU policymakers might have been too soft on them when carbon-capping rules were set in 2008.

Connie Hedegaard's forceful intervention during hearings for the European Commission raised the possibility of a renewed push by Europe to legislate car emissions if the Dane is approved by the European Parliament for the post next month.

The exisiting rules were hard-fought-over in 2008, with big European auto nations such as France, Italy and Germany arguing that a slow transition to tougher targets was necessary to protect jobs in a sector that is not only one of the EU's biggest employers but already feeling the heat from the economic crisis.

If new emissions caps were brought in, Big Auto and its army of lobbyists would swing back into action, pitting themselves against environmentalists and industries with an interest in tighter curbs, such as car parts suppliers and aluminium producers, who promise to cut the weight of future cars.

Most experts and policymakers think it is unlikely Hedegaard will reopen such an emotive debate to change the 2015 targets for cars, which are now written into law.

But she may instead use the option of a review in 2013 to fight for tougher targets for car makers to meet by 2020.

The current rules set a target of reaching 95 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre by 2020, about 40 percent below today's average -- but it is merely an "aspirational target", not a legally-binding one.

from Tales from the Trail:

“Heroism fatigue”: another hurdle for U.S. climate change action?

Could "heroism fatigue" be yet another bump in the road for any U.S. law to curb climate change? And what is "heroism fatigue" anyway?

To Paul Bledsoe of the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy, heroism fatigue is what happens when the Congress has spent most of the year doing something heroic, like trying to hammer out an agreement on healthcare reform, when what lawmakers might rather be doing is naming a new post office. Following one big, gnarly piece of legislation with another -- like a bill to limit climate-warming carbon dioxide -- can seem daunting.

"Especially Democrats want to get  back to some meat-and-potatoes job-creation stuff," Bledsoe says. "They're going to need a little time after healthcare."

Congressional down-time doesn't sound like part of the Obama administration's game plan on climate and energy. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu said last week that the president expects a comprehensive bill on this in 2010. President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech to Congress could be a good barometer of how much he wants this, as my colleague Richard Cowan wrote. The speech has yet to be scheduled, but is expected within the next few weeks.

Bledsoe, whose organization looks for consensus on such complex issues as climate change, said agreement on a climate bill is possible. "An energy bill with robust climate provisions that focuses on job creation seems a bill that could gain bipartisan support in this economic environment." By contrast, a bill styled as mainly combating climate change with energy issues added in "could have a hard time with unemployment at 10 percent," Bledsoe said.

To get a law to Obama's desk, there's going to have to be a "deliberate conscious attempt at reaching out to moderates of both parties," Bledsoe said.

It's early days on this, so let the handicapping begin! What's your best estimate of when or if Congress can craft a workable measure to combat climate change? This year? If so, when?

Must the natural gas industry clean up its act?

Natural gas is regarded as a relatively clean source of energy but there is mounting evidence that it has a dirty side.

My colleague Jon Hurdle has reported on Wyoming water woes that have been linked to the booming gas industry. You can see his stories here and here.

In August U.S. government scientists reported that they had for the first time found chemical contaminants in drinking water wells near natural gas drilling operations, fueling concern that a gas-extraction technique is endangering the health of people who live close to drilling rigs.

The Environmental Protection Agency found chemicals that researchers say may cause illnesses including cancer, kidney failure, anemia and fertility problems in water from 11 of 39 wells tested around the Wyoming town of Pavillion in March and May this year.

On Monday, I reported that high concentrations of harmful compounds have been found in the air in a north Texas town that is in the heart of the region’s gas industry, according to a report released by an environmental consultancy.

The study by Wolf Eagle Environmental Engineers and Consultants found high concentrations of carcinogenic and neurotoxin compounds in the atmosphere at seven locations around the rural town of DISH, which is about 50 miles northwest of Dallas.

Better Than A Rainforest? Air Capture Climate Technology Gets A Closer Look

It sounds almost too good to be true: new technology that would be better than carbon neutral — it would be carbon negative, taking more climate-warming carbon dioxide out of the air than factories and vehicles put in. It’s called air capture technology, and Reuters took a look at some promising versions of it on October 1.

This technology is expected to help some of the world’s poorest countries capitalize on any global carbon market, which would put a price on carbon emissions and let rich companies that spew lots of carbon buy carbon credits from poor companies and countries that emit less. The least developed countries emit very little carbon now. But the way the carbon market is set up under the Kyoto Protocol, this puts them at a disadvantage. If you don’t emit a lot it’s tough to get access to financing and clean technology under the current rules.

Most of these less-developed countries are going to be on the front lines of climate change, if they’re not there already. The predicted ravages of a changing climate, including droughts, floods and wildfires, would hurt them worst and first. The idea is that they need to develop, to give themselves a cushion against these disasters. To develop, they need energy. And usually, getting energy has meant spewing more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, adding to the climate change that caused the problem in the first place.

What air capture technology could do, some of its proponents say, is let the poorest, least industrialized countries build renewable power plants fueled by sun and wind and use the heat left over from this emissions-free power generation to fuel the air capture technology. A small rules change would let them sell these super-carbon-credits in the global carbon market, giving them access to financing and clean technology, while at the same time they’re cleaning the air. It’s a win-win, air capture’s supporters say.

Sort of, says Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a lead author of the forest mitigation chapter in the 2007 report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“Plants perfected taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere millions of years ago,” Frumhoff says. “It’s called photosynthesis and they do it incredibly efficiently and cost-effectively. There are plenty of things we can do today, particularly restoring the world’s forests as part of the climate solution.”

Frumhoff notes that many developing countries are already poised to get into the carbon market through the U.N. REDD program, which stands for “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing countries” and aims not just to keep forests standing but to plant new ones.