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Submission + - 300 Stanford professors call for full fossil fuel divestment (blueandgreentomorrow.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Some 300 professors from Stanford University, California, have called for the school to fully divest from the fossil fuels industry, arguing that the magnitude of climate change calls for a thorough commitment, not a partial solution.

In May last year, the board of trustees at the prestigious university decided not to make any more direct investments in coal mining companies, stating that the energy source is polluting and no longer necessary given the clean alternatives now available. The school also said it would divest from the holdings it currently owns in such firms.

However, professors at the university are now calling for the school to get rid of all fossil fuel investments.

A letter from the professors, which has been published in the Guardian, notes that companies currently own fossil fuel holdings sufficient to produce 2,795 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide – five times the amount recommended if global warming is to remain with the 2C limit, past which scientists have warned that the effects of climate change will become more extreme and unpredictable.

Submission + - Top 10 Clean Energy Developments of 2014 (rmi.org)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: 2014 was an exciting year for clean energy. And we’re not just talking about Rocky Mountain Institute and Carbon War Room merging in a strategic alliance. Sure, that was exciting news, but there were many other remarkable clean energy developments that are helping bring us closer to a clean, prosperous, and secure energy future. Based on an informal poll of the RMI staff we list our top 10:

1. The U.S. and China sign climate accord
2. The EPA limits carbon emissions from power plants
3. New York and California get serious on regulatory transformation
4. Solar breaks records
5. Solar gets cheap
6. Batteries go mainstream
7. Universities go green
8. Net-zero buildings come of age
9. EVs are everywhere
10. Energy efficiency becomes “cool”

Submission + - Comment period opens on Vermont Yankee report (sentinelsource.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: During the next two months the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission will accept public comments about a report outlining Vermont Yankee’s decommissioning plans.

The nuclear power plant shut down on Dec. 29 after 42 years in operation.

The report, called a Post-Shutdown Decommissioning Activities Report, includes the plans for decommissioning the facility, as well as cost estimates for the work.

According to a news release from the NRC, comments should be submitted by March 23.

The agency will also discuss the report and accept comments about it at a public meeting Thursday, Feb. 19, from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Quality Inn on Putney Road in Brattleboro.

Written comments can be mailed to Cindy Bladey, Office of Administration, Mail Stop: 3WFN-06-A44M, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C. 20555-0001. They can also be submitted online through www.regulations.gov using Docket No. 50-271.

Submission + - Where in the World Are the Fossil Fuels That Cannot Be Burned to Restrain Global (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Canada, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. cannot burn much of the coal, oil and gas located within their national territories if the world wants to restrain global warming. That’s the conclusion of a new analysis aimed at determining what it will take to keep average global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius this century—a goal adopted during ongoing negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

"If we want to reach the two degree limit in the most cost-effective manner, over 80 percent of current coal, half of gas and one third of oil need to be classified as unburnable," said Christophe McGlade, a research associate at University College London's Institute for Sustainable Resources (ISR) and lead author of the report published in Nature on January 8, during a press conference. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Those global restrictions apply even if technologies that can capture carbon dioxide and dispose of it become widespread over the next decade. "Rapid development of [carbon capture and storage] only allows you to produce very slightly more."

Submission + - Pope Francis Could Tip Balance Against Fossil Fuels (cleantechnica.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Six years ago, Pope Benedict XVI installed more than 1,000 solar panels on the Vatican’s audience hall, helping him earn him the sobriquet of the “Green Pope”.

Some time in the next few months, his successor Pope Francis may just go one step further. His actions could tip the balance against fossil fuels, as the world’s wealthiest institution takes on the world’s most powerful industry.

The signs have been building. In November, the Pope sent a letter to Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott urging him to address climate change and sustainability at the G20 summit – something Abbott had pointedly refused to do.

At Lima, the Pope sent another letter urging diplomats to agree on a strong deal to tackle climate change as UN negotiations drew to a close. In a message to Peru’s environment minister, Manuel Pulgar Vidal, who led the discussions in Lima, Francis warned that “the time to find global solutions is running out.”

A group of Catholic Bishops went one step further, calling for an end to fossil fuel use, citing climate change’s threat to the global poor as the lodestar of their concern. The document, signed by bishops from all continents, insisted on limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C relative to pre-industrial levels — a considerably more ambitious goal than the 2C ceiling that’s generally agreed on as the threshold beyond which climate change becomes truly dangerous.

Submission + - 2014, the year... the divestment trend came of age (businessgreen.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: From the Rockefellers to Mark Carney, the carbon bubble hypothesis won some high-level supporters this year, cranking up ever more pressure on carbon-intensive business models.

Over the past year the carbon bubble hypothesis has moved from an intriguing theory that was gaining traction among environmentalists, to a mainstream business story that has commanded the attention of some of the world's largest investors and prompted growing numbers of businesses and individuals to divest from fossil fuel assets.

If oil industry cheerleaders have been relatively successful at dismissing the peak oil theory, arguing that a short-term strategic decision by the Saudi Arabian government to step up production somehow disproves the physical inevitability of oil production one day peaking, they have been much less effective at discrediting the carbon bubble analysis.

The reason the oil industry counter-attack against the carbon bubble argument has been so underwhelming is because the hypothesis is all but unanswerable. If the world is to avoid potentially catastrophic climate change fossil fuels reserves that are currently regarded as assets by energy firms need to stay in the ground. Even if carbon capture and storage proves successful and cost effective at scale in the next few decades many oil fields and coal seams will have to remain unexploited if the world is to meet its stated 2C temperature target.

Submission + - Climate Deal Would Commit Every Nation to Limiting Emissions (nytimes.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: Negotiators from around the globe reached a climate change agreement early Sunday that would, for the first time in history, commit every nation to reducing its rate of greenhouse gas emissions — yet would still fall far short of what is needed to stave off the dangerous and costly early impact of global warming.

The agreement reached by delegates from 196 countries establishes a framework for a climate change accord to be signed by world leaders in Paris next year. While United Nations officials had been scheduled to release the plan on Friday at noon, longstanding divisions between rich and poor countries kept them wrangling through Friday and Saturday nights to early Sunday.

The agreement requires every nation to put forward, over the next six months, a detailed domestic policy plan to limit its emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases from burning coal, gas and oil. Those plans, which would be published on a United Nations website, would form the basis of the accord to be signed next December and enacted by 2020.

Submission + - Global Warming to Make European Heat Waves 'Commonplace' by 2040s (nytimes.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: In June 2003, a high-pressure weather system took hold over Western Europe and hovered there for weeks, bringing warm tropical air to the region and making that summer the hottest since at least 1540, the year King Henry VIII discarded his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves.

Temperatures were about 2.3 degrees Celsius, or 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit, above average that summer, contributing to perhaps 70,000 additional deaths and hitting the elderly particularly hard. The heat was a factor in the outbreak of forest fires and in lower than usual crop yields. It caused Alpine glaciers to shrink at a rate double that seen in the previous record summer five years earlier.

Now, three scientists from the Met Office, the British weather agency, have concluded that human-caused global warming is going to make European summer heat waves “commonplace” by the 2040s.

Their findings, published on Monday in the online journal Nature Climate Change, suggest that once every five years, Europe is likely to experience “a very hot summer,” in which temperatures are about 1.6 degrees Celsius, or 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit, above the 1961-90 average. This is up from a probability, just a decade ago, that such events would occur only once every 52 years, a 10-fold increase.

Submission + - New Mexico levies $54M against US for violations at nuclear repository (theguardian.com)

Submitted by mdsolar
mdsolar writes: New Mexico on Saturday levied more than $54 million in penalties against the US Department of Energy for numerous violations that resulted in the indefinite closure of the nation’s only underground nuclear waste repository.

The state Environment Department delivered a pair of compliance orders to Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, marking the state’s largest penalty ever imposed on the agency. Together, the orders outline more than 30 state permit violations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico and at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The orders and the civil penalties that come with them are just the beginning of possible financial sanctions the Energy Department could face in New Mexico. The state says it’s continuing to investigate and more fines are possible.

The focus has been on a canister of waste from Los Alamos that ruptured in one of WIPP’s storage rooms in February. More than 20 workers were contaminated and the facility was forced to close, putting in jeopardy efforts around the country to clean up tons of Cold War-era waste.

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