ReportWire

Tag: Climate

  • Hurricane Norma makes landfall near resorts of Los Cabos on Mexico’s Baja California peninsula

    Hurricane Norma makes landfall near resorts of Los Cabos on Mexico’s Baja California peninsula

    [ad_1]

    Hurricane Norma has made landfall near the resorts of Los Cabos at the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula.

    The U.S. National Hurricane Center says Norma, once a Category 4 hurricane, made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane with winds of 80 mph (130 kph) just south of Todos Santos.

    Norma is expected to continue weakening over the weekend as it crosses into the Sea of Cortez, also known as the Gulf of California.

    Norma is expected to bring heavy rains and potential flash floods to Baja and may hit the mainland coastal state of Sinaloa as a tropical storm. Hotels in Los Cabos remained about three-quarters full of tourists, but shelters were set up at schools in the resorts.

    Residents of Los Cabos resorts rushed to prepare as Norma approached, while in the Atlantic, Hurricane Tammy threatened to batter the islands of the Lesser Antilles.

    Businesses in Cabo San Lucas nailed up sheets of plywood over their windows, and government personnel hung up banners warning people not to try to cross gullies and stream beds after Norma regained strength and once again became a major storm Friday.

    By early Saturday, Norma had weakened and was downgraded to Category 1 on the hurricane wind scale.

    The hurricane was expected to continue on that path through the evening before turning to the northeast and slowing down through Monday. The forecast track would take a weakened Norma toward the mainland of Mexico’s western Pacific coast as a tropical storm.

    Its languid pace raised the possibility of severe flooding. Norma was expected to dump six to 12 inches of rain with a maximum of 18 inches in places across southern Baja California and much of Sinaloa state.

    According to the state civil protection agency, shelters in Baja California Sur housed some 1,500 people by Saturday morning.

    The Los Cabos Civil Defense agency urged residents to stay indoors all day as winds and rain increased. Emergency workers rushed around the area evacuating people from low-lying areas and moving them to shelters.

    Police in San Jose del Cabo rescued two people from their truck when a surging stream swept it away early Saturday. Some informal settlements, away from the hotels that serve tourists, were already isolated by rising water. Some neighborhoods lost electricity and internet service.

    By late morning, the area’s streets were littered with palm fronds and other debris, and essentially deserted except for occasional military patrols. Strong winds whipped traffic signs, trees and power lines.

    Visitors at hotels in Los Cabos, which are largely frequented by foreign tourists, made no major moves to leave en masse, Baja California Sur state tourism secretary Maribel Collins said.

    There was no way out anyway: Airports were closed Saturday, according to the local civil defense office.

    The local hotel association estimated there were about 40,000 tourists still in Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo on Friday.

    At the marina in Cabo San Lucas, José Ceseña was hauling out of the water the boat he usually uses to ferry tourists around on tours. With the port closed to navigation and a hurricane coming, he said it wasn’t worth risking his craft.

    Homero Blanco, the state commander of the National Guard, said beaches at the resort had been ordered closed and Guard troops were sent to clear people from the seashore.

    The federal government posted 500 marines to the resort to help with storm preparations, and municipal officials said as many as 39 emergency shelters could be opened, if needed.

    In the Atlantic, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said Hurricane Tammy had winds of 85 mph (140 kph), and hurricane warnings were issued for the islands of Guadeloupe, Antigua, Barbuda, Montserrat, and St. Kitts and Nevis. Tammy was moving northwest at 8 mph (13 kmh).

    In the Atlantic, Hurricane Tammy was about 25 miles (40 kilometers) north-northeast of Guadeloupe and 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of the Caribbean island of Antigua.

    Tammy was expected to remain at hurricane strength and even strengthen slightly as it moved toward the Lesser Antilles through Saturday passing by Guadeloupe, Antigua and Barbuda. Both Martinique and Guadeloupe are French overseas departments.

    The hurricane center said in a report that “heavy rainfall and flooding (are) likely over much of the Lesser Antilles.”

    Two weeks after Tropical Storm Phillippe rolled through Antigua and Barbuda dumping six to eight inches of rain and plunging both islands into darkness, residents of the islands braced for Tammy’s arrival. The slow-moving system was forecast to bring up to 12 inches over a twin-island nation where the devastation of Hurricane Irma in 2017 and recent wind damage and flooding from Philippe are still fresh memories.

    “This means therefore, that the earth is still somewhat saturated and with additional rainfall, the potential for flooding is elevated,” Prime Minister Gaston Browne said in a nationwide broadcast on Friday afternoon. He urged residents to take all necessary steps to secure life and property.

    Government offices, banks, and most non-retail businesses closed early on Friday to allow staff to prepare. Residents’ rush to stock up on necessities caused gridlock throughout St John’s and near popular shopping centers and supermarkets.

    Local disaster management officials announced plans to open an estimated 40 shelters in communities throughout the country.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • UN committee deadlocked on climate disaster recovery fund

    UN committee deadlocked on climate disaster recovery fund

    [ad_1]

    Sultan Al Jaber, chief executive of the UAE’s Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) and president of this year’s COP28 climate summit gestures during an interview as part of the 7th Ministerial on Climate Action (MoCA) in Brussels on July 13, 2023.

    Francois Walschaerts | Afp | Getty Images

    United Nations representatives failed to secure a deal during late-night talks on how to implement a reparations fund for climate disaster recovery in developing nations.

    The “loss and damage fund” would call on rich countries to finance the recovery of climate disasters that have wrecked developing nations and set them behind on their sustainability goals.

    The commitment to establish the fund was one of the highlight announcements of last year’s UN Climate Conference, or COP27, after a series of down-to-the-wire negotiations. Part of the agreement at COP27 was the creation of a Loss and Damage Transitional Committee, which would be in charge of negotiating the details on how to set up and operate the fund.

    The group was made up of representatives from developing nations like Pakistan, Egypt and Venezuela, as well as rich countries like the United States and the United Kingdom.

    The 24-member committee met four times over the past week to settle on official recommendations for how to implement the fund. Those recommendations have been in dispute over the past year and are due to be completed in time to be adopted at this year’s COP28, which is set to take place at the end of November in Abu Dhabi.

    At the beginning of the fourth meeting, Sultan Al-Jaber, the director of COP28 and a United Arab Emirates minister, pressed the representatives to pick up the pace of their negotiations: “I don’t want this to be an empty bank account. This committee has to deliver its recommendations.”

    However, the talks slowed with representatives unable to reconcile their differences on how to operate the fund and who would pay for it.

    The fourth meeting bled into the late hours of Friday night and early Saturday morning, as committee members grew increasingly frustrated by the lagging progress.

    “I spent all day with a cold working on this, feeling like crap and I want to see it affected somewhere,” Diann Black-Layne, an environmental director for Antigua and Barbuda, said at the meeting.

    The meeting ended with no solid resolution and a plan to set up a fifth meeting on the issue, as the COP28 deadline inches nearer.

    “What message do I take back home?” said Ali Waqas Malik, representing Pakistan. “You came empty-handed. There is nothing on the table. No recommendations.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Check out the giant ship critical to building the world’s biggest offshore wind farm

    Check out the giant ship critical to building the world’s biggest offshore wind farm

    [ad_1]

    The Jan De Nul Group’s Voltaire in waters off China in Dec. 2022. As wind turbines get bigger, the vessels that install them are having to change, too.

    VCG | Visual China Group | Getty Images

    A project to build a facility described as “the world’s largest offshore wind farm” took a big step forward this month by producing its first power.

    Located in the North Sea, over 130 kilometers off England’s northeast coast, the Dogger Bank Wind Farm still has some way to go before it’s fully operational, but the installation and powering up of its first turbine is a major feat in itself.

    That’s because GE Vernova’s Haliade-X turbines stand 260 meters tall — that’s higher than San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge — and have blades measuring 107 meters.

    Turbine installation at Dogger Bank has required a huge amount of planning and preparation, with the Voltaire — a specialist vessel designed and built by the family-owned Jan De Nul Group — playing a key role.

    With a lifting capacity of 3,200 metric tons, the Voltaire — named after the 18th-century French philosopher — will have installed a total of 277 Haliade-X turbines when its work is complete.

    This image, from Dec. 2022, shows Jan De Nul Group’s Voltaire in China. A specialist installation vessel, the Voltaire has a lifting capacity of over 3,000 metric tons.

    VCG | Visual China Group | Getty Images

    Described by Dogger Bank as the “largest offshore jack-up installation vessel ever built,” in many ways, it’s the pinnacle of an extensive supply chain involving numerous businesses and stakeholders.

    The logistics are complex and multi-layered, with water depth a particular issue.

    The sea in the Dogger Bank Offshore Development Zone is up to 63 meters deep, meaning the Voltaire’s ability to work in deeper waters is crucial. 

    This is where its four legs come into play.

    According to Jan De Nul, the legs of the Voltaire — which was built at the COSCO Shipping Shipyard in China — enable it to lift itself above the water’s surface.

    With each leg measuring roughly 130 meters in length, they highlight the scale of equipment required to install huge offshore wind turbines like GE’s Haliade-X.

    In an online Q&A before installations at Dogger Bank began, Jan De Nul’s Rutger Standaert spoke of their importance. “Thanks to those legs, the Voltaire can effectively operate at a water depth of 80 meters,” Standaert, who is manager of vessel construction at the business, said.

    He noted that the Voltaire’s capabilities would enable installations further out to sea, allowing it to play a key role in the emerging floating offshore wind sector.

    “Off the Scottish coast, for example, expensive floating windfarms are often the only way to tap into offshore wind,” he said. “The water is too deep for fixed windfarms, but the Voltaire can offer new opportunities.”

    Thinking big

    Once completed, the Dogger Bank Wind Farm will have a total capacity of 3.6 gigawatts (GW) and be able to power as many as six million homes per year, according to its developers.

    Work on the project is taking place over three phases: Dogger Bank A, B, and C. A fourth phase of the wind farm known as Dogger Bank D has also been proposed, and would increase its capacity even further.

    Read more about electric vehicles, batteries and chips from CNBC Pro

    Søren Lassen is head of offshore wind research at Wood Mackenzie, a research and consultancy group. He described Dogger Bank as “a huge project, especially if you combine the three phases.”

    “It is a project that requires a lot of preparation,” he told CNBC. “There’s the logistics in terms of having the vessels to do the installation … and then of course, you also have the logistics in terms of getting the components to the marshaling port.”

    Both of these aspects were being made “a lot more complicated” by the use of next-generation turbines and a next-generation installation vessel, Lassen said.

    “You have … a lot of innovation that goes into this. And not only do you need a new vessel or new components, you also need new factories to build those components.”

    As such, a slew of upgrades and adjustments were needed to “reverberate throughout the entire value chain” for operations to run smoothly, he added.

    Bigger turbines, bigger challenges?

    This image, from June 2023, shows tower sections of GE’s Haliade-X wind turbine at a site in the U.S.

    David L. Ryan | The Boston Globe | Getty Images

    Thanks to their sheer size, larger turbine designs have created a specific set of needs for the offshore wind sector and sites like the Dogger Bank Wind Farm.

    “From cranes to vessels, we use a number of specially designed pieces of equipment to transport the Haliade-X turbines that will be used in this project,” a spokesperson for GE Offshore Wind said in a statement sent to CNBC.

    Wood Mackenzie’s Lassen stressed the importance of having dedicated transportation vessels, noting that the towers of turbines need to be broken into three or four sections in order to fit on board.  

    Massive blades represent the biggest challenge, he said, as they have to be laid flat. “And that just means that you need a very, very long transportation vessel, [and] that you need to stack them up accordingly.”

    Blades of the Haliade-X turbine stacked on top of each other at a site in the U.S. The past few years have seen companies develop increasingly large wind turbines.

    David L. Ryan | The Boston Globe | Getty Images

    Meanwhile, delays or bottlenecks can have far-reaching — and expensive — consequences.

    Lassen cited the example of blades not being delivered on time, which leads to vessels having to “go away and then come back half a year later to do the installation. This is very costly, of course.”

    And delays also lead to lost revenue.

    “These projects are going out [and] generating a lot of power from the day that they’re being installed, pretty much,” Lassen added.

    “So any delays [and] you’re also losing a lot of revenue, especially right now when the power prices are really, really high.”

    The bigger picture

    Offshore wind farms are set to play a significant role in reducing emissions and hitting net zero goals in the years ahead — but a supply chain that’s well-run and reliable will be key to the industry’s success.

    This is set to cost serious money. According to Wood Mackenzie, a base case of 30 GW of installations per year by 2030 — excluding China — will require investment of around $27 billion by 2026 to build out supply chains.

    “The supply chain needs to invest,” Lassen said, adding that it also needed capital, certainty and concrete, firm orders. However, cost pressures mean there is currently uncertainty over projects planned for 2025, 2026 and 2027.

    “Any delays to these projects takes away volume from the supply chain, and the supply chain needs that volume to convert it into revenue to build new factories,” Lassen explained.

    It is crucial that projects planned for the next few years go ahead, he added. “That helps the underlying supply chain ramp up so they can build the capacity [for] ’27, ’28, ’29 and well into the 2030s as well.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Southeast Asia haze returns as peatland fires fan global warming fears

    Southeast Asia haze returns as peatland fires fan global warming fears

    [ad_1]

    In this photo taken on October 10, 2023, a man looks at a forest fire as it approaches houses in Ogan Ilir, South Sumatra.

    Al Zulkifli | Afp | Getty Images

    With El Nino in full force, officials are bracing for the worst transboundary haze in southern Southeast Asia since before the pandemic in 2019.

    At a time when climate change is presenting an existential threat to human beings, the fear is that these seasonal haze situations will worsen as intensifying global warming renders the peatlands and forests even more combustible in the dry season.

    Southeast Asia is home to about 40% of the world’s total peatlands, and these fires and resultant emissions and toxic haze are turning out to be a serious driver of climate change.

    This further complicates the perennial transboundary haze problem for Southeast Asia, which plagued the region in the dry seasons for half a century, leading to a litany of respiratory and other health issues, deaths and economic losses in the region.

    “It’s a circular thing actually,” Helena Varkkey, associate professor of environmental politics and governance at Universiti Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, told CNBC.

    “The issue is that currently, most governments haven’t really looked at the haze and climate change as a unified issue, yet. They see it as separate issues. Something seasonal, that comes and goes, while climate change is something constant and developing,” she added.

    Despite a series of Southeast Asian agreements — including a reaffirmation of a commitment to haze-free skies by 2030 — the haze returned this year, raising questions about the effectiveness of ASEAN as an organization since many of its agreements lack enforcement mechanisms.

    Bickering in Southeast Asia

    The perennial bickering and denials among affected Southeast Asian nations is one of the unintended results.

    Even as air quality dipped to dangerous levels in parts of Peninsular Malaysia in the last few weeks, Indonesia flatly denied Malaysia’s claims that winds carried some of the hazardous haze from hotspots in Sumatra and Kalimantan over to its neighbor.

    “We continue to follow developments and there is no transboundary haze to Malaysia,” Indonesia’s Environment Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar said in a statement dated Oct 2.

    Her denial echoed past Indonesian leaders. In 2015, then Indonesian Vice-President Jusuf Kalla scolded neighboring countries for complaining about the haze.

    “For 11 months, they enjoyed nice air from Indonesia and they never thanked us,” the Jakarta Globe reported him as saying.

    Peatlands are one of the greatest allies and potentially one of the quickest wins in the fight against climate change.

    United Nations Environment Program

    Malaysian officials are undoubtedly haunted by the memory of the 2015 and 2019 transboundary haze episodes. In 2015, the last time El Nino worsened the impact of the dry season, 2.7 million hectares of forest were burned in Indonesia.

    The haze that year blanketed not just Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, but also southern Thailand and southern Philippines in September and October. School closures were effected in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore — affecting nearly four million students in Malaysia alone.

    Even though a comparatively smaller forest area combusted in Indonesia in 2019 at 1.6 million hectares, the World Bank estimated peat fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan likely cost Southeast Asia’s largest economy damages worth at least $5.2 billion, or 0.5% of its gross domestic product that year.

    People look at the airport scenery during the haze at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport on October 8, 2023.

    Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

    Data from Indonesia’s environment ministry suggest more than 267,000 hectares of forests were burned until August this year, reportedly outstripping the nearly 205,000 hectares for all of 2022. Still, this year’s fires have devastated a much smaller area compared to 2015 and 2019.  

    But with the return of El Nino this year, officials are bracing for worsening fires this dry season as the number of hotspots will likely peak in September and October. The ASEAN Specialized Meteorological Centre in Singapore raised its transboundary haze alert level to its second highest for Kalimantan in July and for Sumatra in September.

    Vicious cycle in the peatlands

    The haze in southern Southeast Asia is emitted mostly from massive peatland fires in Sumatra and Borneo. Dried out peatlands — drained and cleared for mainly palm oil and pulp plantations — make them very prone to fires.

    “The waterlogged conditions of the peatlands keep the organic material from decomposing, making it a powerful carbon sink,” Varkkay and Sharon Seah, senior fellow at the Climate Change in Southeast Asia Program at ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, said in an article dated Oct. 11.

    A view of burnt peatlands and fields on September 23, 2023 in Ogan Ilir, South Sumatra, Indonesia. At least six provinces in the country are battling ongoing forest fires as illegal blazes to clear land for agricultural plantation take control causing respiratory illnesses and biodiversity loss. The nation’s meteorology agency forecasted that Indonesia is likely to experience the most severe dry season since 2019 as the country enters the hottest day of this year’s El Nino-induced dry season.

    Ulet Ifansasti | Getty Images News | Getty Images

    “When drained in preparation for planting or other development activities, the organic material is exposed to the air, kick starting decomposition and the release of greenhouse gasses. When burnt, this process is accelerated, further speeding up global warming,” they added.

    According to the United Nations Environment Program, peatlands store nearly 550 billion tons of carbon — twice as much as all the world’s forests — even though peatlands cover only 3 per cent of the global land surface.

    “Peatlands are one of the greatest allies and potentially one of the quickest wins in the fight against climate change,” the UNEP said. “By conserving and restoring peatlands globally, we can reduce emissions and revive an essential ecosystem that provides many services, including their role as a natural carbon sink.”

    Sustainable palm oil

    Tying the transboundary haze problem to climate change would involve addressing the root issues of these peatland fires in Indonesia, but with Indonesia the world’s largest palm oil producer, that may not be easy.

    While Indonesia’s environment minister denied the haze has crossed beyond the borders of her country, she highlighted that 203 companies have been warned so far this year and 20 companies have been sealed off due to fire, including Malaysian subsidiaries.

    Clearly, the transboundary haze issue is a multifaceted issue involving several stakeholders. The onus does not only fall on Indonesia alone since companies from neighboring countries are also invested.

    To complement several Southeast Asian regional agreements on curtailing the transboundary haze, Singapore enacted its Transboundary Haze Pollution Act in 2014, making it an offence for companies to cause or contribute to any haze pollution in the wealthy city-state. 

    Malaysia is still making plans for similar legislation.

    A man rides his motorcycle past a wildfire on peatland at Palem Raya Regency with aerial interventions in Ogan Ilir, South Sumatra, Indonesia on September 01, 2023. Indonesia, the vast archipelago country, is often hit by forest fires which spread across the islands of Sumatra and Borneo. Forest and land fires in Indonesia are an annual problem that have strained relations with neighboring countries as the smoke from the fires could blanket parts of Singapore, Malaysia and southern Thailand in a thick noxious haze.

    Anadolu Agency | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

    Global campaigning network Greenpeace has gone a step further.

    It has called for the development of a regional legal framework that holds companies accountable for domestic forest fires due to peatland clearance and agricultural residue burning, reported Eco-Business, a sustainability-focused publication.

    “But I think what has been perhaps maybe more powerful than law is the market,” Varkkay said. “There’s a lot of awareness about sustainable palm oil and unsustainable practices. So the market’s been pushing the big companies, at least in the eyes of the public, to make sure that they are not engaging in unsustainable practices like fire.”

    To date, there are several large global consumer companies that have in the last decade committed to using only sustainable palm oil, certified by bodies such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. However, apparently not all have fulfilled public pledges.

    With the help of the United Nations Development Program, Indonesia has also developed its own Sustainable Palm Oil Platform, a forum for all stakeholders to come together to address challenges in the development of sustainable palm oil in Indonesia.

    Evidently, with the transboundary haze and the proliferation of hotspots still an issue after half a century, there is more work to be done and perhaps a greater urgency now than before.

    “I think the challenge, or the trajectory that we should be hoping for, is for governments to understand or to communicate and to make decisions based on the fact that climate change and the transboundary haze issues are connected,” Varkkey said.

    “So wins in either one will actually contribute back to the whole societal well being. That, I think, has not really happened yet, so hopefully it will happen soon,” she added.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Saudi oil giant Aramco announces pilot project to suck CO2 out of the air, but some scientists are skeptical

    Saudi oil giant Aramco announces pilot project to suck CO2 out of the air, but some scientists are skeptical

    [ad_1]

    Saudi Aramco said strong market conditions helped to push its second quarter net income to $48.4 billion, up from $25.5 billion a year earlier.

    Maxim Shemetov | Reuters

    Saudi oil giant Aramco on Monday announced a partnership with Siemens Energy AG to develop a small-scale direct air-capture “test unit” in an attempt to manage emissions.

    The test unit will be built in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia and finished in 2024, according to a statement from Aramco on Monday.

    Direct air-capture, or DAC, works by extracting carbon dioxide that has already been emitted into the atmosphere. The extracted CO2 can then be condensed into solid stone-like formations or liquefied to be stored underground.

    DAC is the most expensive method of carbon capture, according to the International Energy Agency. It’s generally cheaper to remove CO2 at the source, before it’s emitted into the air.

    The big price tag attached to DAC along with questions of its efficacy have made some climate scientists skeptical of its viability as a long-term emissions reduction strategy.

    “From a physics point of view, we just made the problem thousands of times harder,” said Jonathan Foley who leads the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown. “Imagine trying to remove 400 things out of a million and do it in the air. Then, efficiently liquefy this stuff and put it below ground. That’s a huge engineering marvel…to do it at the scale of billions of tons is science fiction right now.”

    Foley added that DAC machines themselves take a lot of energy to get running, which eats away at whatever carbon reduction they do achieve.

    But despite obstacles to scaling DAC, many companies, especially tech giants, are pouring investments into developing the technology. For example, Amazon announced last month that it would provide funding for the world’s largest deployment of DAC, and a coalition of tech companies led by Stripe has launched a public benefit company called Frontier to invest in carbon-capture startups and projects.

    Extracting carbon from the atmosphere is attractive to companies with large carbon footprints, because it would allow them to keep emitting with a reversal mechanism after the fact.

    “Fossil fuel companies would love to be able to keep emitting from fossil operations while offsetting those emissions via cost-effective direct air capture projects — that’s kind of a perfect world for them, if they can get there,” said Cara Horowitz, the executive director of UCLA’s Emmet Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

    “And even if they can’t get there, investing in the development of DAC allows them to tout efforts to achieve net-zero goals in ways that don’t involve reducing use of fossil fuels.”

    So far, experts say, the technology is unproven at scale.

    “I would love a machine like this to actually work. Wouldn’t that be great? You just turn on a machine that sucks everything out of the sky,” said Foley. “But sorry, it’s a lot easier not to emit it than it is to take it back out again. That’s just thermodynamics.”

    The DAC collaboration between Aramco and Siemens Energy is still in early phases.

    A Siemens Energy spokesperson told CNBC that once the test unit is complete next year, the companies will consider taking the technology into an official pilot phase. Only after that would they pursue scaling it commercially.

    Given DAC’s adolescence, both oil companies are invested in other clean energy technology projects.

    The spokesperson for Siemens Energy said that the company has invested in hydrogen, wind, nuclear fusion and others. Meanwhile, Aramco also has projects in hydrogen and geothermal energy.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • How Apple made its first ‘carbon neutral’ product

    How Apple made its first ‘carbon neutral’ product

    [ad_1]

    Apple’s first “carbon neutral” products are versions of its smartwatch.

    Photo courtesy Apple

    In September, Apple announced its next-generation smartwatch models would all have a “carbon neutral” option, at the same price as the non-carbon neutral options, starting at $249.

    For Apple, making a product “carbon neutral” means that it changed its operations — including manufacturing, packaging and shipping — to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with making and selling its watches. It was able to drive emissions associated with a single watch down from 36.7 kg to 8.1 kg with these actions.

    In order to call its watches “carbon neutral” without being able to eliminate all of the emissions associated with making the watches, Apple bought carbon credits to compensate for the remaining 8.1 kg of emissions, or about 22% of the total footprint of making a watch.

    Apple is transparent about all of this carbon accounting in its environmental report for the watch.

    Carbon credits are certificates that individuals, businesses and corporations can purchase that represent a certain amount of greenhouse gases reduced, avoided, or removed from the atmosphere. They are a way for consumers to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions while also providing a financing mechanism to support sustainable development projects, according to a description from the United Nations.

    Depending on who you talk to, dubbing a product “carbon neutral” when the accounting requires buying carbon credits is either Apple acting responsibly and doing the best it can to contribute to climate mitigation strategies that are available right now, or an irresponsible misrepresentation of what “carbon neutral” should mean.

    The distance between those two analyses is substantial and virtually irreconcilable. It’s also a poignant indication of the distance between where climate mitigation ambitions and climate mitigation realities are right now.

    The relative effectiveness of nature-based carbon credits is contentious because some forestry carbon credits have been shown to be nullified when, for example, the forests set aside for carbon credits burn in wildfire season. But Apple and other stakeholders in the debate argue that not all carbon credits are created, monitored and stewarded with the same diligence. Apple says the quality of the carbon credits it is investing in are reputable, and that buying carbon credits for the emissions it cannot reduce is better than doing nothing.

    “If you want to be highest ambition, taking that 22% and buying high-quality, high-integrity carbon credits is the highest ambition,” Elizabeth Sturcken, managing director of the nonprofit climate advocacy organization Environmental Defense Fund, or EDF, told CNBC in a phone conversation at the end of September.

    Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project at the Goldman School of Public Policy at University of California at Berkeley, said Apple deserves to be celebrated for the significant emissions reductions it achieved in changing its operations, but Haya also said she wishes Apple had avoided the term “carbon neutral” in its communications about its work.

    She argues consumers would be better served by Apple publicly bragging about its 78% emissions reductions instead of trying to tell consumers that their product is actually “carbon neutral.” Even if the carbon credits Apple buys are of the highest quality, carbon credits are, by their very nature, an accounting strategy. There are 22% of emissions that Apple could not abate, and Haya commends Apple on that transparency.

    “If you buy an Apple Watch, your emissions are not zero,” Haya told CNBC, a fact that Apple acknowledges. The way to have no environmental impact is to not generate those emissions in the first place.

    “Fossil fuels are permanently in the ground if you don’t draw them out and burn them,” Haya told CNBC.

    The Apple Watch Ultra 2 with the new Alpine Loop watch band is one of the company’s first “carbon neutral” products.

    Photo courtesy Apple

    The most important work: Reducing emissions

    The most important work Apple did in launching its “carbon neutral” watch is to drive down the emissions that are associated with making its watch, according to everyone CNBC talked to for this story.

    Here are some specific examples of how Apple has worked to reduce actual emissions associated with making its “carbon neutral” watch:

    • 30% of the materials used in making the carbon neutral watch are recycled or renewable (not including packaging or in-box accessories)
    • 100% of the suppliers that Apple buys parts and components from for the “carbon neutral” watch have agreed to Apple’s Supplier Clean Energy Program, which means suppliers have to power the production of their Apple parts with renewable energy and invest in new renewable energy projects in the areas in which they operate. To be part of the program, qualified suppliers are not permitted to take credit for the renewable energy that already exists on the electric grid in which they operate, but must instead purchase new renewable energy on the grid in which they operate for the production of Apple-related products — a requirement called “additionality.” Apple is transparent and specific about the sources of clean electricity its suppliers use in its environmental progress report: In 2022, 2% of suppliers were using onsite renewable electricity, 24% were buying renewable energy certificates, 66% were making renewable power purchases, and 9% were making direct investments in renewable energy projects.
    • 100% of the electricity used in manufacturing of the watch is matched with 100% clean electricity, which means that Apple and its manufacturers have invested in enough renewable energy to cover the electricity footprint of what is used to make the Apple “carbon neutral” watch. In some cases, if the manufacturer has not yet reached 100% renewable energy, Apple will fill the gap by making enough investment in renewable energy projects to cover the total electricity footprint of what is used to make the “carbon neutral” watch. This kind of corporate clean electricity procurement math is its own complicated accounting framework, but is standard and has significantly improved the pace of renewable energy getting on the grid.
    • More than half of the shipping of products by weight is scheduled to be done with methods other than by airplane. Traveling by plane is currently one of the most carbon intensive methods of transportation.
    • The packaging for the watch is made with 100% recycled or “responsibly sourced” wood fibers.
    • Apple is also matching the expected electricity that customers use to charge their carbon neutral watches with investments in clean energy projects. Also, Apple advises users of when the energy on the grid they are using is the most clean so they can opt to charge their device when the electric grid is being charged with the most renewable energy.

    Apple ought to be respected for these accomplishments, Sturcken at EDF told CNBC.

    Sturcken has been at EDF for almost 27 years, leading partnerships with companies such as Airbnb, FedEx, Lyft, UPS and Walmart to reduce the emissions of their supply chains. EDF does not take money from the companies it works with, and Sturcken has not worked with Apple on its “carbon neutral” watch. Broadly speaking, though, Sturcken said, Apple is doing good work in its sustainability efforts. “They’re a leader,” Sturcken said. “They have a whole team. They get it. They’re focusing on the right things, in general.”

    Any aluminum Apple Watch Series 9 with the new Sport Loop watch band is considered “carbon neutral.”

    Photo courtesy Apple

    The offset debate

    To compensate for the 22% of unabated residual emissions, Apple invests in what it deems to be high-quality carbon credits that restore grasslands, wetlands and forests.

    Apple does this via its Restore Fund, an initiative that Apple launched with Conservation International and Goldman Sachs in 2021 that invests in protecting and restoring working native forests, grasslands and wetlands. Current projects are in Brazil and Paraguay and will restore 150,000 acres of forests and protect another 100,000 acres of forests, grasslands and wetlands.

    The criticism of these kinds of forestry projects is that their climate mitigation impact is less permanent than the climate impact of releasing greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere to begin with.

    “Apple relies on credits from carbon dioxide removal projects that restore forest, wetlands, and grasslands. Due to natural or human-induced disturbances such as forest fires, land degradation or land-use change, carbon storage in forestry and land-use projects is likely to only be temporary, and therefore in no way comparable with not having emitted greenhouse gases in the first place,” Reena Skribbe, a sustainable development expert at the nonprofit organization NewClimate Institute, told CNBC.

    “The environmental integrity of carbon credits from carbon dioxide removals cannot be assured, thus carbon credits cannot be seen as a substitute to emission reductions,” Skribbe told CNBC.

    Apple says the carbon credits it is investing in are carefully monitored, measured and tracked.

    “We’re here to do the right work, not that easy work,” Sarah Chandler, Apple’s vice president of environment and supply chain innovation, told CNBC. “There are certainly wonderful nature-based carbon removal projects, and there are ones that are not as wonderful. And it is important to draw distinctions between the two and be very clear about the projects.”

    What makes this debate more nuanced is that carbon credits can combat deforestation, and stopping deforestation is mission critical to meeting global climate goals, Sturcken told CNBC.

    “Stopping deforestation is blaringly urgent right now,” Sturcken said. Planting new trees is helpful, “but more urgent than anything is stopping deforestation, because it takes so long for new trees to grow. And if we don’t do that, in the near term, we have a much harder road to get to a climate-stable future. So anything we can do to incentivize in a robust and high integrity way, that kind of investment by companies we should be doing.”

    So, too, says Michael Ackerman, CEO of EcoForests Asset Management, a company that coordinated forestry investment in Latin America. He said carbon markets are right now “the wild, wild west,” as other disruptive industries such as bitcoin and social media have been. And from his perspective, combating deforestation should be an ultimate priority.

    “Protecting one tree in one place does not stop another tree from being chopped down elsewhere,” Ackerman told CNBC. “However, protecting and managing swaths of forests prevents those sections of forests from being degraded and improves global carbon sequestration, enhances biodiversity, and mitigates the risk of wildfires.”

    Any one of the aluminum Apple Watch Series 9 or SE with the new Sport Loop is considered “carbon neutral” by Apple.

    Photo courtesy Apple

    Forestry protection programs in low-income countries are particularly meaningful.

    “Forest projects in areas such as South America, Southeast Asia, and Africa have greater impact on communities than projects in North America would. Communities in these countries tend to be impoverished and have high levels of unemployment,” Ackerman told CNBC. “Successful managed forest projects will provide economic stimulus to neighboring communities, by way of job creation and social assistance.”

    But the forest-preservation registries are not effectively ensuring the quality of the carbon offsets, Haya told CNBC.

    “My perspective is coming from a deep study of carbon offset quality over the last 20 years,” Haya told CNBC. “If the offset market was reliable, I might be saying something very different to you right now. But the background is that there’s excessive over-crediting throughout the offset market over so many project types over the last 20 years.”

    Haya said she wishes Apple’s marketing team had stuck with advertising the very respectable 78% emissions reductions they have achieved and left out the “carbon neutral” verbiage altogether.

    In fact, it may eventually become a legal vulnerability to call a product “carbon neutral.”

    “The evidence against the impact of carbon credits is now so overwhelmingly clear that companies and crediting intermediaries — whose business models depend on these carbon credit markets — are reluctantly starting to move away from carbon neutrality labels,” Thomas Day, who analyzes carbon market mechanisms at the NewClimate Institute, told CNBC.

    “An exodus from carbon neutrality claims has started, and companies that stay behind are increasingly exposed to legal peril and heightened consumer awareness that this is a dishonest approach,” Day told CNBC.

    For now, Apple is holding fast.

    “We do believe that there are ways to make good investments in nature-based carbon removal. And we believe that it is important to start doing that work today,” Chandler told CNBC.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Extraordinary September heat means 2023 is now on track to be the warmest year on record

    Extraordinary September heat means 2023 is now on track to be the warmest year on record

    [ad_1]

    A boat is grounded on cracked earth in the Bahia (Bay) Cohana area of Lake Titicaca, shared by Bolivia and Peru, in the Bolivian Altiplano on September 22, 2023.

    Aizar Raldes | Afp | Getty Images

    2023 is on course to be the hottest year on record, scientists warned on Thursday, following extraordinarily high temperatures in September and the hottest summer in human history.

    The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said global average temperatures for January through to September were 1.4 degrees Celsius higher than the preindustrial period of 1850 to 1900.

    This was just over 0.5 degrees Celsius higher than average and 0.05 degrees Celsius higher the equivalent period in 2016 — the current hottest year on record.

    Scientists at C3S said September logged the largest temperature anomalies of any year stretching back to 1940, with the month as a whole found to be a staggering 1.75 degrees Celsius warmer when compared to the preindustrial reference period.

    September’s temperature anomalies prompted one researcher to describe the findings as nothing less than “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.”

    Extreme heat is fueled by the climate crisis, the chief driver of which is the burning of fossil fuels.

    “The unprecedented temperatures for the time of year observed in September — following a record summer — have broken records by an extraordinary amount,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement.

    “This extreme month has pushed 2023 into the dubious honour of first place — on track to be the warmest year and around 1.4°C above preindustrial average temperatures.”

    Burgess said that two months out from the COP28 climate conference, “the sense of urgency for ambitious climate action has never been more critical.”

    World leaders will convene in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates from Nov. 30 through to Dec. 12 for talks on how to address the worsening climate crisis.

    ‘Humanity has opened the gates to hell’

    As had been widely expected, a major U.N. report published last month confirmed that the world is currently not on track to meet the long-term goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement, a landmark accord that aims to pursue efforts to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

    The world has already warmed by around 1.1 degrees Celsius after over a century of burning fossil fuels as well as unequal and unsustainable energy and land use. Indeed, it is this temperature increase that is fueling a series of extreme weather events around the world.

    For Europe, scientists at C3S said September 2023 was the warmest September on record at more than 2.5 degrees Celsius higher than the 1991 to 2020 average and 1.1 degrees Celsius than September 2020, the previous warmest.

    Supporters of the Fridays for Future (FFF) climate activism group protest during a worldwide Fridays for Future climate strike on September 15, 2023 in Berlin, Germany.

    Maja Hitij | Getty Images News | Getty Images

    C3S also said El Niño conditions continued to develop over the equatorial eastern Pacific.

    El Niño is a naturally occurring climate pattern that contributes to higher temperatures across the globe. The U.N. weather agency declared the onset of El Niño on July 4, warning its return paves the way for a likely spike in global temperatures and extreme weather conditions.

    Pope Francis warned on Wednesday that “the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.”

    His comments followed a dire warning from U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres last month. Speaking at the U.N. headquarters in New York City in mid-September, Guterres said “humanity has opened the gates to hell.”

    “Horrendous heat is having horrendous effects,” he added. “Distraught farmers watching crops carried away by floods; Sweltering temperatures spawning disease; And thousands fleeing in fear as historic fires rage.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Bill Gates: ‘Republicans for climate change action are gold’

    Bill Gates: ‘Republicans for climate change action are gold’

    [ad_1]

    “Republicans for climate change action are gold,” said Bill Gates, the billionaire climate philanthropist and investor, on Thursday at the Climate Forward event in New York City.

    The number of Republicans convinced that responding to climate change is a priority has “got to be a number that we manage to increase over time,” Gates said.

    That’s because climate change mitigation and adaptation will require sustained investment and support from the public and private sector, Gates said.

    The Inflation Reduction Act, which was packed full of tax credits to drive the development of the clean energy economy, was passed entirely along party lines in both the House and Senate. No Republicans voted for it.

    The political divide on Capitol Hill mirrors that of the general public.

    More than half, 54%, of Americans consider climate change a “major threat” to the well-being of the United States, but that is starkly divided by party lines, according to survey data from the Pew Research Center. Almost eight in ten Democrats, 78%, consider climate change a major threat, up from 58% ten years ago. Only 23% of Republicans consider climate change a major threat, almost equivalent to the 22% of Republicans who considered climate change a major threat a decade ago. The most recent survey for this data was conducted in March 2022.

    The IRA included tax credits designed to kickstart the development of clean hydrogen, long-duration energy storage, and technologies to capture and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, to name a few.

    “The IRA is a very dramatic set of money to bootstrap key technologies, including into areas that most climate people don’t talk about,” Gates said, like, for example, industrial processes. “Industrial emissions, if you don’t solve that, the whole thing doesn’t get solved,” Gates said.

    “It’s a fantastic climate bill,” Gates said.

    But the longevity of the IRA and those tax credits depends on whichever party rules Washington D.C.

    “We don’t have that much time to keep this thing intact,” Gates said. “It’s not guaranteed that tax credits necessarily last out the full 10 years, because they can be repealed if you get a change in political control.”

    That’s a problem because building and scaling hard technology involving heavy equipment, manufacturing, and infrastructure-scale solutions takes time — much longer than a single administration’s tour through Washington D.C.

    “These are 30-year investments in steel factories, fertilizer factories, and new ways of making meat,” Gates said. “It requires a constant, full-speed-ahead in order for the U.S. to be an exemplar.”

    While Gates emphasized the importance of getting Republicans to take climate policy seriously, he also said he doesn’t like to demonize them.

    Instead, Gates asks the question: “Why have we failed to bring more people along? And this is a super important thing,” he said.

    When Gates interacts with philanthropists who are investing in climate, he encourages those who have relationships with Republicans to work with them to try to increase their commitment to climate. “I think that’s extremely valuable,” he said.

    The United States’ ability to sustain its investment in climate technology will have global implications.

    While the majority of global emissions come from middle-income countries, the United States and other wealthy nations have to lead the way in developing and bringing down the cost of new technologies, Gates said.

    Clean technologies have to be better and cheaper because that’s the only realistic way to see them scale in less wealthy countries, according to Gates. It’s also unrealistic to expect rich countries to pay for the distribution of clean technologies in less wealthy countries unless they’re better and cheaper than the dirty, legacy way of operating. The political will isn’t there.

    “Sadly if you try to subsidize it, you are at many multiples of what the foreign aid budget is,” Gates said. “The voters aren’t going to come up with that. So innovation is the only way you can achieve these goals.”

    At this point, the question is not whether the globe will overshoot the goal target established by the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, but by how much.

    “We are not on a path to get to a 1.5 degree limitation,” Gates said. And indeed, António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, earlier in the week said the planet is right now,heading towards a 2.8 degree temperature rise, or more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Post-tropical cyclone Lee makes landfall in Nova Scotia, Canada with winds of 70 miles per hour

    Post-tropical cyclone Lee makes landfall in Nova Scotia, Canada with winds of 70 miles per hour

    [ad_1]

    A member of the media films the storm hitting Market Wharf during post-tropical cyclone Lee in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada, on Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023. The Canadian Maritimes will take the hardest hit from Hurricane Lee, now officially a post-tropical cyclone with maximum winds of 80 miles per hour.

    Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

    The center of post-tropical cyclone Lee made landfall Saturday in Nova Scotia, Canada, with sustained winds of 70 mph (110 kph), U.S. weather officials said Saturday.

    The storm’s center came ashore about 135 miles (215 kilometers) west of Halifax, Nova Scotia, the U.S. National Hurricane Center. That’s about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of Eastport, Maine.

    Once a hurricane and still almost as strong as one, Lee brought high winds, rough surf and torrential rains Saturday to a large swath of New England and Maritime Canada, toppling trees, swamping coastlines and cutting power to tens of thousands.

    Many denizens shrugged off Lee, now a post-tropical cyclone, as not much worse than the region’s famous and frequent nor’easters, a similarity some meteorologists acknowledged even while warning people not to underestimate it.

    The storm ‘s center made landfall in Canada at near hurricane strength on Saturday afternoon, then was expected to weaken as it moved into New Brunswick and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, forecasters said.

    In the United States, a tropical storm warning was in effect for a 230-mile stretch from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to the eastern end of Maine. That included Bar Harbor, the touristy gateway to Acadia National Park, where officials closed a parking lot at a pier as high tide moved in and waves crashed against seawalls.

    Activity at the Scituate Boat Ramp prior to Hurricane Lee.

    Stuart Cahill | Getty Images

    Lee flooded coastal roads and boats in Nova Scotia, knocked down power lines and trees, and took ferries out of service as it fanned anxiety in a region still reeling from wildfires and severe flooding this summer. Nova Scotia’s largest airport, Halifax Stanfield International, had no incoming or outgoing flights scheduled Saturday.

    “People are exhausted. … It’s so much in such a small time period,” said Pam Lovelace, a councilor in Halifax, the capital. “From a mental health perspective, we’re asking people to check in on their neighbors.”

    A tropical storm warning was in effect for much of New Brunswick and all of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, along with a hurricane watch for parts of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

    The storm’s center was just off southern Nova Scotia — dozens of miles southeast of Eastport, Maine — with maximum sustained winds near 70 mph (110 kph), the U.S. National Hurricane Center said in its 2 p.m. EDT advisory. Hurricane strength is 74 mph (119 kph).

    Hurricane-force winds extended as far as 140 miles (220 kilometers) from Lee’s center, with tropical-storm-force winds extending as far as 390 miles (630 kilometers) — enough to cover all of Maine and much of Maritime Canada.

    The storm was so big that it caused power outages several hundred miles from its center. At midday Saturday, 11% of electricity customers in Maine lacked power, along with nearly a third of Nova Scotia, 8% of New Brunswick and 3% of Prince Edward Island.

    Storm surge of 1 to 3 feet was predicted for the Maine coast, and the U.S. hurricane center warned it would be accompanied by large and destructive waves. The storm could drop as much as 4 inches of rain on parts of Maine, Massachusetts, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick through Saturday night, with the potential for local flooding, forecasters said.

    The storm skirted some of the most waterlogged areas of Massachusetts that experienced severe flash flooding days earlier, when fast water washed out roads, caused sinkholes, damaged homes and flooded vehicles.

    “At this point, the storm is resembling a nor’easter,” said Sarah Thunberg, a National Weather Service meteorologist, referring to the fall and winter storms that often plague the region and are so named because their winds blow from the northeast. They typically have a much wider wind field than tropical systems, whose winds stay closer to a storm’s center.

    Keith Oliver works a boat travel lift to take a boat out of the ocean at the Billings Diesel & Marine Service in preparation for the possible arrival of Hurricane Lee on September 15, 2023 in Stonington, Maine. 

    Joe Raedle | Getty Images

    But the entire region has experienced an especially wet summer — it ranked second in the number of rainy days in Portland, Maine — and Lee’s high winds toppled trees stressed by the rain-soaked ground in Maine, the nation’s most heavily wooded state.

    Cruise ships found refuge at berths in Portland, while lobstermen in Bar Harbor and elsewhere pulled traps from the water and hauled boats inland.

    Billy Bob Faulkingham, House Republican leader of the Maine Legislature, and another lobsterman survived after their boat overturned while hauling traps ahead of the storm Friday, officials said.

    The boat’s emergency locator beacon alerted authorities, and the two clung to the hull until help arrived, said Winter Harbor Police Chief Danny Mitchell. The 42-foot boat sank.

    “They’re very lucky to be alive,” he said.

    Lee lashed the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Bahamas and Bermuda before turning northward, and heavy swells were causing life-threatening surf and rip currents in the U.S. and Canada, according to the hurricane center.

    Forecasters urged residents to stay home: “Nothing good can come from checking out the big waves and how strong the wind truly is,” said Kyle Leavitt, director of the New Brunswick Emergency Management Organization.

    But many ventured out anyway. Among them was Ren Renton on Maine’s Bailey Island, a slender spit jutting into the Gulf of Maine.

    “The ocean is always dynamic no matter what storm you get,” she said. “It comes and goes and takes what it wants, but hopefully not too much.”

    Lee shares some characteristics with 2012’s Superstorm Sandy. Both were once strong hurricanes that became post-tropical cyclones — cyclonic storms that have lost most of their tropical characteristics — before landfall. But Lee was not expected to be nearly as destructive as Sandy, which caused billions of dollars in damage and was blamed for dozens of deaths in New York and New Jersey.

    Lee also isn’t anywhere near as severe as the remnants of Hurricane Fiona, which a year ago washed houses into the ocean, knocked out power to most of two provinces and swept a woman into the sea, said Canadian meteorologist Jill Maepea.

    Destructive hurricanes are relatively rare so far north. The Great New England Hurricane of 1938 brought gusts as high as 186 mph (300 kph) and sustained winds of 121 mph (195 kph) at Massachusetts’ Blue Hill Observatory. But there have been no storms that powerful in recent years.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • G20 nations soften Russia condemnation to reach Delhi summit compromise, draw Ukraine’s ire

    G20 nations soften Russia condemnation to reach Delhi summit compromise, draw Ukraine’s ire

    [ad_1]

    India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi (2L) addresses the opening session of the G20 Leaders’ Summit at the Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi on September 9, 2023.

    Ludovic Marin | Afp | Getty Images

    NEW DELHI — The Group of 20 nations on Saturday overcame differences in references to the war in Ukraine, reaching a consensus on a joint declaration that paves the way for frameworks on debt resolution, and country-specific climate financing solutions among other pledges aimed at enhancing development in the Global South.

    In an 83-paragraph joint communique aimed at deepening the integration of the needs of developing economies into the multilateral forum’s agenda, the Delhi declaration omitted words from the last year’s statement that overtly condemned Russian aggression against Ukraine — instead highlighting the human suffering and other negative impacts of the war in Ukraine that have complicated recovery efforts in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.

    The wording of “most members strongly condemned the war” was among the changes. Instead, G20 member states agreed to lean on the tenets of the United Nations charter on territorial integrity and against the use of force.

    “Considerable time was spent — especially in the last few days — in regard to geopolitical issues, which really centered around the war in Ukraine,” Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said Saturday at a press conference following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s initial announcement of the consensus on a joint declaration.

    “Everybody helped, because everybody came together for the consensus, but the emerging markets took a particular lead on this and many of us have a strong history of working together,” Jaishankar added.

    This accomplishment underscores India’s diplomatic clout at a time when global alliances are shifting. With the Russian and Chinese heads of state conspicuously absent from this year’s leaders’ summit, Modi has been keen to position India as a key global player advocating the interests of the Global South, while serving as an interlocutor with the developed nations.

    Yet, there were some fears Delhi negotiators and diplomats might not have been able to broker a consensus at this year’s meeting. Fierce objections by the Russians and Chinese to references to the ongoing war in Ukraine have hobbled India’s efforts at fostering consensus in the major discussion tracks in the course of its year-long presidency.

    Oleg Nikolenko, a spokesperson for the Ukraine’s foreign ministry, criticized the compromise in a Facebook post, saying the G20 joint communique was “nothing to be proud of.”

    ‘Cascading challenges’

    In the Delhi declaration, G20 leaders called for the “full, timely and effective implementation” of the Black Sea grain deal “to ensure the immediate and unimpeded deliveries of grain, foodstuffs, and fertilizers/inputs from the Russian Federation and Ukraine.”

    Russia unilaterally withdrew from the deal — brokered between Turkey, the United Nations, Ukraine and Russia in July 2022 — that helped ease the Kremlin’s naval blockade in the Black Sea and established a humanitarian corridor for agricultural exports.

    The agreement had facilitated the transport of 725,167 tons of wheat for the World Food Program to some of the world’s most food-insecure countries, including Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.

    The ensuing food insecurity from the festering Ukraine crisis added to the many challenges that have afflicted the world in the last few years, complicating policy efforts to recover from the adverse economic and social impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

    Challenge that the region is facing is 'immense,' says Asian Development Bank

    “Years of cascading challenges and crises have reversed gains in the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals,” G20 leaders said in the Delhi declaration, as they pledged to protect the most vulnerable in the world by promoting equitable growth and enhancing macroeconomic and financial stability.

    To further cement that goal, India also fostered the admission of the African Union as the second regional grouping to gain full G20 membership after the European Union.

    Other than the mitigation of the impact on geopolitics of food and energy security, the Delhi declaration also included the expediting of climate action, the provision of more loans to developing nations by multilateral institutions and restructuring the world’s debt architecture as well as an international framework for cryptocurrencies.

    Leveraging the G20

    Leaders of India, Brazil, South Africa and the U.S. met on the margins of the G20 summit, pledging “to build on the historic progress of India’s G20 presidency to address global challenges” in partnership with the World Bank in building “better, bigger, and more effective” multilateral development banks. 

    These pledges build on a G20 agreement to expand lending by multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Such steps could yield as much as $200 billion in extra funding in the next decade, Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said Saturday at the press conference explaining the Delhi declaration.

    World Bank President: Tangible plans on G20 financing will come

    These four countries represent the current and the next three G20 member states that are due to hold the rotating presidency of the multilateral forum founded in 1999 to tackle the issues that afflict the global economy.

    In the flurry of activities independent of the auspices of the main G20 summit, Modi and U.S President Joe Biden underscored not only the deepening partnership between their two countries, but also their urgency and resolve in persuading the world they represent a more viable strategic proposition in facilitating the developmental needs of the Global South.

    Biden and Modi’s second bilateral meeting in less than six months on the eve of the two-day G20 leaders’ summit kicked off a series of other deals and announcements — a stark contrast, in particular, to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s decision to stay away from this summit.

    Modi and Biden were joined by leaders from Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Mauritius, and the United Arab Emirates in launching the Global Biofuels Alliance, a partnership aimed at deploying greener fuels around the world that help meet decarbonization goals. 

    What is the G-20, and what has it accomplished?

    The two leaders also announced a plan to develop a network of railways and sea routes that will connect India, the European Union and Middle Eastern countries such as Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in “a transformative regional investment.”

    This seeks to not only counter China’s influence in the energy-rich Middle East, but also its Belt and Road global infrastructure initiative.

    Biden also announced a partnership with the European Union in a new greenfield rail line expansion to develop the Lobito Corridor connecting the southern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and northwestern Zambia to regional and global trade markets via the port of Lobito in Angola.

    “This is a big deal, this is a real big deal,” Biden said Saturday. “The world stands at an inflection point in history, a point where decisions we make today affect the course of all our futures for decades to come.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • ‘Much more needed’ to achieve Paris climate goals: UN report

    ‘Much more needed’ to achieve Paris climate goals: UN report

    [ad_1]

    UN says world is not on track to meet the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement, including capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

    The world is dangerously off course in meeting the Paris climate deal’s goals for reducing carbon pollution and boosting finance for the developing world, according to the UN’s first Global Stocktake of progress on the treaty.

    The 2015 Paris Agreement has successfully driven climate action, but “much more is needed now on all fronts”, said the report published on Friday, which will underpin a crucial climate summit in Dubai at the end of the year.

    “Against forecasts made prior to its adoption, the Paris Agreement has led to contributions that significantly reduce forecasts of future warming,” the report noted.

    “Yet the world is not on track to meet the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement.”

    According to the report, there was a “rapidly narrowing window” to implement existing commitments to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (34.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, as highlighted in the 2015 treaty.

    Global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025 and drop sharply thereafter to keep the 1.5C target in view, the stocktake said, drawing from a scientific assessment by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

    Achieving net zero carbon emissions by mid-century, another Paris Agreement goal – will require “radical decarbonisation”, the report said, including phasing out the burning of all fossil fuels whose emissions cannot be captured.

    How quickly to purge the global economy of oil, gas and coal will be hotly contested at the 196-nation two-week COP28 talks, which take place in Dubai starting in late November.

    The stocktake also says that clean power must be dramatically ramped up, according to the first UN scorecard of the world’s progress in meeting Paris Agreement climate goals.

    “Scaling up renewable energy and phasing out all unabated fossil fuels are indispensable elements of just energy transitions to net zero emissions,” it said.

    “Unabated” refers to the absence of any technology that removes carbon emissions, either at the source or from the atmosphere.

    G20’s burden

    Separately on Friday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said leaders of the G20 nations have the power to reset a climate crisis that is “spinning out of control”.

    “The climate crisis is worsening dramatically – but the collective response is lacking in ambition, credibility, and urgency,” Guterres said in the Indian capital New Delhi, which is chairing the G20 summit this weekend.

    “The climate crisis is spiralling out of control. But G20 countries are in control.”

    “Together, G20 countries are responsible for 80 per cent of global emissions. Half-measures will not prevent full climate breakdown,” he said.

    China, the United States, the European Union and India alone contribute more than half of total emissions.

    The stocktake also highlighted the need to rapidly and radically scale up financial support to developing nations so they can adapt to climate-amplified weather disasters that are already eating away at their economies.

    Many African nations, already mired in debt, are struggling to transition away from fossil fuels even as their coffers are drained by worsening droughts, floods, heatwaves and storms.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Invasive species cost the global economy over $423 billion annually, according to a new report from the United Nations

    Invasive species cost the global economy over $423 billion annually, according to a new report from the United Nations

    [ad_1]

    A lanternfly is seen on the roof of an apartment in New York City, United States on August 8, 2022. NY State Department of Agriculture is encouraging residents to kill the invasive spotted lanternfly.

    Tayfun Coskun | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

    The carcasses of spotted lanternflies that now litter the streets of New York City are not just gross, they are expensive.

    The annual cost of invasive alien species now exceeds $423 billion annually, according to a new report by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, an organization that is a part of the United Nations.

    The report claims over 37,000 so-called alien species have been transported due to human activities around the world. Over 3,500 of those are invasive, meaning they are harmful in that they threaten nature and how people benefit from nature.

    Invasive alien species, as defined by the report, are species that are known to “have become established and spread, which cause negative impacts on nature and often also on people.”

    The costs of invasive species have quadrupled every decade since 1970, according to the report.

    Coordinating lead author for the report Martin Nuñez said the $423 billion estimate is a gross underestimate and the true cost is more likely in the trillions, with human health complications taking up a large part of that price. He cited mosquitos in developing world, which carry diseased like malaria, Zika and West Nile Fever. They are spread by alien mosquito species like Aedes albopictus and Aedes aegyptii.

    In the case of the spotted lanternflies plaguing New York, the state estimates the flies, which arrived from China, could cost at least $300 million annually, mainly to the grape and wine industry.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Photos: Heavy rainstorms trigger flooding in Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria

    Photos: Heavy rainstorms trigger flooding in Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria

    [ad_1]

    Fierce rainstorms have battered Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria, triggering flooding that caused at least eight deaths, including two holidaymakers swept away by a torrent that raged through a campsite in northwestern Turkey.

    In Istanbul, heavy rain flooded streets and homes in two neighbourhoods, killing at least two people, according to a statement from the governor’s office.

    About a dozen people were rescued after being stranded inside a library, while some subway stations were shut down.

    In Greece, police banned traffic in the central town of Volos, the nearby mountain region of Pilion and the resort island of Skiathos as record rainfall caused at least one death, channelled thigh-high torrents through streets and swept cars away.

    Five people were reported missing, possibly swept away by floodwaters.

    Authorities sent mobile phone alerts in several other areas of central Greece, the Sporades island chain and the island of Evia, warning people to limit their movements outdoors.

    Streams overflowed their banks and swept cars into the sea in the Pilion area, while rockfalls blocked roads; a small bridge was carried away and many areas suffered electricity cuts.

    Authorities evacuated a retirement home in the city of Volos as a precaution.

    Farther north in Bulgaria, Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov said, two people died and three others were missing after a storm caused floods on the country’s southern Black Sea coast.

    Overflowing rivers caused severe damage to roads and bridges. The area also suffered power blackouts, and authorities warned residents not to drink tap water due to contamination from floodwaters.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Oil giant led by COP28 boss to spend an ‘eyewatering’ $1 billion a month on fossil fuels this decade, research says

    Oil giant led by COP28 boss to spend an ‘eyewatering’ $1 billion a month on fossil fuels this decade, research says

    [ad_1]

    Sultan Al Jaber, chief executive of the UAE’s Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) and president of this year’s COP28 climate summit gestures during an interview as part of the 7th Ministerial on Climate Action (MoCA) in Brussels on July 13, 2023.

    Francois Walschaerts | Afp | Getty Images

    UAE oil giant ADNOC — run by the president of the COP28 climate conference — is expected to spend more than $1 billion every month this decade on fossil fuels, according to new analysis.

    This is nearly seven times higher than its commitment to decarbonization projects over the same timeframe, the research says.

    It comes ahead of the COP28 climate summit, with Dubai set to host the U.N.’s annual conference from Nov. 30 through to Dec. 12. Viewed as one of the most significant climate conferences since 2015’s landmark Paris Agreement, COP28 will see global leaders gather to discuss how to progress in the fight against the climate crisis.

    The person overseeing the talks, Sultan al-Jaber, is chief executive of ADNOC (the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company) — one of the world’s largest oil and gas firms. His position as both COP28 president and ADNOC CEO caused dismay among civil society groups and U.S. and EU lawmakers, although several government ministers have since defended his appointment.

    Analysis conducted by international NGO Global Witness, and provided exclusively to CNBC, found that ADNOC is planning to spend an average of $1.14 billion a month on oil and gas production alone between now and 2030 — the same year in which the U.N. says the world must cut emissions by 45% to avoid global catastrophe.

    It means that ADNOC is forecast to spend nearly seven times more on fossil fuels through to 2030 than it does on “low-carbon solution” projects.

    By 2050, the year in which the U.N. says the entire world economy must achieve net-zero emissions, ADNOC is projected to have invested $387 billion in oil and gas. The burning of fossil fuels is the chief driver of the climate emergency.

    ADNOC, which recently became the first among its peers to bring forward its net-zero ambition to 2045, disputes Global Witness’ analysis and says the assumptions made are inaccurate.

    “The analysis of, and assumptions made, regarding ADNOC’s capital expenditure program beyond the company’s current five-year business plan (2023 to 2027) are speculative and therefore incorrect,” a spokesperson at ADNOC told CNBC via email.

    The Abu Dhabi energy group announced in January this year that it would allocate $15 billion for investment in “low-carbon solutions” by 2030, including investments in clean power, carbon capture and storage and electrification projects.

    High-rise tower buildings along the central Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai on July 3, 2023.

    Karim Sahib | Afp | Getty Images

    Global Witness arrived at its projections by analyzing ADNOC’s forecasted oil and gas capital expenditure, exploratory capital expenditure and operational expenditure for the period from 2023 to 2050. The data was sourced from Rystad Energy’s UCube database.

    Rystad’s data is not available to the public, but is widely used and referenced by major oil and gas companies and international bodies.

    “Fossil fuels companies like to burnish their green credentials, yet they rarely say the quiet part out loud: that they continue to throw eyewatering amounts at the same old polluting oil and gas that is accelerating the climate crisis,” said Patrick Galey, senior investigator at Global Witness.

    “How [al-Jaber] can expect to lecture other nations on the need to decarbonise and be taken seriously is anyone’s guess, while he continues to provide vastly more funding to oil and gas than to renewable alternatives,” he added.

    “He is a fossil fuel boss, plain and simple, saying one thing while his company does the other,” Galey said.

    The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the analysis conducted by Global Witness. The Conference of the Parties (COP) is the supreme decision-making body of the UNFCCC.

    Main priority for COP28

    Al-Jaber was the founding CEO of Abu Dhabi state-owned renewable energy firm Masdar, which works in more than 40 countries worldwide and has invested in or committed to invest in renewable energy projects with a total value of over $30 billion.

    Speaking earlier this year, al-Jaber said the main priority for the COP28 summit will be to keep alive the fight to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

    The Paris Agreement aims to limit the increase in the global average temperature to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Beyond the critical temperature threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius, it becomes more likely that small changes can trigger dramatic shifts in Earth’s entire life support system.

    The International Energy Agency says no new oil, gas or coal development is compatible with the goal of curbing global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

    In response to a request for comment from CNBC, an ADNOC spokesperson said that energy demand is increasing as the world’s population is expanding. “All of the current energy transition scenarios, including by the IEA, show that some level of oil and gas will be needed into the future,” the spokesperson said.

    “As such, it is important that, in addition to accelerating investments in renewables and lower carbon energy solutions, we consider the least carbon intensive sources of oil and gas and further reduce their intensity to enable a fair, equitable, orderly, and responsible energy transition. This is the approach ADNOC is taking,” they added.

    The spokesperson said its 2022 upstream emissions data confirmed the energy group as one of the least carbon-intensive producers worldwide. The company will seek to further reduce its carbon intensity by 25% and target near zero methane emissions by 2030, they added.

    “As we reduce our emissions, we are also ramping up investments in renewables and zero carbon energies like hydrogen for our customers,” the spokesperson said.

    A separate report published in April last year by Global Witness and Oil Change International found that 20 of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies were projected to spend $932 billion by the end of the decade to develop new oil and gas fields.

    At that time, Russian state company Gazprom was estimated to spend the most on fossil fuel development and exploration projects through to 2030 ($139 billion), followed by U.S. oil majors ExxonMobil ($84 billion) and Chevron ($67 billion).

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Google to begin selling maps data to companies building solar products, hopes to generate $100 million in first year

    Google to begin selling maps data to companies building solar products, hopes to generate $100 million in first year

    [ad_1]

    A screenshot of Project Sunroof shows the map data offered by the pilot project, which is meant to help consumers plan solar installations for their homes.

    Screenshot

    Google is planning to license new sets of mapping data to a range of companies to use as they build products around renewable energy, and is hoping generate up to $100 million in its first year, CNBC has learned.

    The company plans to sell access to new APIs (application programming interfaces) with solar and energy information and air quality, according to materials viewed by CNBC.

    Among the new offerings will be a Solar API, which could be used by solar installers like SunRun and Tesla Energy and solar design companies like Aurora Solar, according to a list of example customers viewed by CNBC. Google also sees customer opportunities with real estate companies like Zillow, Redfin, hospitality companies like Marriott Bonvoy, and utilities like PG&E.

    Some of the data from the Solar API will come from a consumer-focused pilot called Project Sunroof, a solar savings calculator that originally launched in 2015. The program allows users to enter their address and to receive estimated solar costs such as electric bill savings and the size of the solar installation they’ll need. It also offers 3D modeling of the roofs of buildings and nearby trees based on Google Maps data. 

    Google plans to sell API access to individual building data, as well as aggregated data for all buildings in a particular city or county, one document states. The company says it has data for over 350 million buildings, according to documents, up significantly from the 60 million buildings it cited for Project Sunroof in 2017.

    One internal document estimates the company’s solar APIs will generate revenue between $90 and $100 million in the first year after launch. There’s also a potential to connect with Google Cloud products down the line, documents state.

    As part of the planned launch, the company is also planning to announce an Air Quality API that will let customers request air quality data, such as pollutants and health-based recommendations for specific locations. It’ll also include digital heat maps of the data and hourly air quality information, as well as air quality history of up to 30 days.

    Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The latest revenue play comes as the company has been trying to monetize its maps products as it faces pressure to produce revenue amid a broader economic slowdown. While the company is focusing on becoming more efficient, it’s also been investing in newer technologies like generative AI and sustainability — a market it hopes to take advantage of with the Solar API.

    The company currently licenses its mapping API for navigation to companies like Uber, which said in 2019 it paid Google $58 million over there years. Maps API revenue goes toward the company’s cloud segment, which finally turned profitable in the first quarter but has had a rocky path toward trying to compete with market leaders Amazon and Microsoft.

    Google doesn’t break out how much its Maps business makes, but it has historically been one of Google’s most under-monetized products, Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak told CNBC in 2021. At the time, Morgan Stanley had estimated Google Maps would earn $11.1 billion by this year as new travel products and promoted pins began to increase ad revenue.

    The move also comes as the company attempts to streamline its mapping products. In June, CNBC found the company was laying off employees at traffic-reporting app Waze, which it acquired in 2013, and combining it with the Google Maps team.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Bare electrical wire, leaning poles were a possible cause of deadly Maui fires

    Bare electrical wire, leaning poles were a possible cause of deadly Maui fires

    [ad_1]

    In the first moments of the Maui fires, when high winds brought down power poles, slapping electrified wires to the dry grass below, there was a reason the flames erupted all at once in long, neat rows — those wires were bare, uninsulated metal that could spark on contact.

    Videos and images analyzed by The Associated Press confirmed those wires were among miles of line that Hawaiian Electric left naked to the weather and often-thick foliage, despite a recent push by utilities in other wildfire- and hurricane-prone areas to cover up their lines or bury them.

    Compounding the problem is that many of the utility’s 60,000, mostly wooden power poles, which its own documents described as built to “an obsolete 1960s standard,” were leaning and near the end of their projected lifespan. They were nowhere close to meeting a 2002 national standard that key components of Hawaii’s electrical grid be able to withstand 105-mile-per-hour winds. A 2019 filing said it had fallen behind in replacing the old wooden poles because of other priorities and warned of a “serious public hazard” if they “failed.”

    It’s “very unlikely” a fully insulated cable would have sparked and caused a fire in dry vegetation, said Michael Ahern, who retired this month as director of power systems at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.

    Experts who watched videos showing downed power lines agreed wire that was insulated would not have arced and sparked, igniting a line of flame.

    Hawaiian Electric said in a statement that it has “long recognized the unique threats” from climate change and has spent millions of dollars in response, but did not say whether specific power lines that collapsed in the early moments of the fire were bare.

    “We’ve been executing on a resilience strategy to meet these challenges, and since 2018, we have spent approximately $950 million to strengthen and harden our grid and approximately $110 million on vegetation management efforts,” the company said. “This work included replacing more than 12,500 poles and structures since 2018 and trimming and removing trees along approximately 2,500 line miles every year on average.”

    But a former member of the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission confirmed many of Maui’s wooden power poles were in poor condition. Jennifer Potter lives in Lahaina and until the end of last year was on the commission, which regulates Hawaiian Electric.

    “Even tourists that drive around the island are like, ‘What is that?’ They’re leaning quite significantly because the winds over time literally just pushed them over,” she said. “That obviously is not going to withstand 60, 70 mile per hour winds. So the infrastructure was just not strong enough for this kind of windstorm … The infrastructure itself is just compromised.”

    John Morgan, a personal injury and trial attorney in Florida who lives part-time on Maui noticed the same thing. “I could look at the power poles. They were skinny, bending, bowing. The power went out all the time.”

    Morgan’s firm is suing Hawaiian Electric on behalf of one person and talking to many more about their rights. The fire came 500 yards from his house.

    Sixty percent of the utility poles on West Maui were still down on Aug. 14, according to Hawaiian Electric CEO Shelee Kimura at a media conference — 450 of the 750 poles.

    Hawaiian Electric is facing a spate of new lawsuits that seek to hold it responsible for the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century. The number of confirmed dead stands at 115, and the county expects that to rise.

    Lawyers plan to inspect some electrical equipment from a neighborhood where the fire is thought to have originated as soon as next week, per a court order, but they will be doing that in a warehouse. The utility took down the burnt poles and removed fallen wires from the site.

    This was a “preventable tragedy of epic proportions,” said attorney Paul Starita, lead counsel on three of the lawsuits.

    “It all comes back to money,” said Starita, of the California firm Singleton Schreiber. “They might say, oh, well, it takes a long time to get the permitting process done or whatever. OK, start sooner. I mean, people’s lives are on the line. You’re responsible. Spend the money, do your job.”

    Hawaiian Electric also faces criticism for not shutting off the power amid high wind warnings and keeping it on even as dozens of poles began to topple. Maui County sued Hawaiian Electric on Thursday over this issue.

    Michael Jacobs, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that with power lines causing so many fires in the United States: “We definitely have a new pattern, we just don’t have a new safety regime to go with it.”

    Insulating an electrical wire prevents arcing and sparking, and dissipates heat.

    Other utilities have been addressing the issue of bare wire. Pacific Gas & Electric was found responsible for the 2018 Camp Fire in northern California that killed 85 people. The disaster was caused by downed power lines.

    Its program to eliminate uninsulated wire in fire zones has covered more than 1,200 miles of line so far.

    PG&E also announced in 2021 it would bury 10,000 miles of electrical line. It buried 180 miles in 2022 and is on pace to do 350 miles this year.

    Another major California utility, Southern California Edison, expects to have replaced more than 7,200 miles, or about 75% of its overhead distribution lines, with covered wire in high fire risk areas by the end of 2025. It, too, is burying line in areas at severe risk.

    Hawaiian Electric said in a filing last year that it had looked to the wildfire plans of utilities in California.

    Some don’t fault Hawaiian Electric for its comparative lack of action because it has not faced the threat of wildfires for as long. And the utility is not at all alone in continuing to use bare metal conductors high up on power poles.

    The same is true for public safety power shutoffs. It’s been only a few years that utilities have been willing to preemptively shut off people’s power to prevent fire and the disruptive practice is not yet widespread.

    But Mark Toney called wildfires caused by utilities absolutely preventable. He is executive director of the ratepayer group The Utility Reform Network in California. It is pushing PG&E to insulate its lines in high-risk areas.

    “We have to stop utility-caused wildfires. We have to stop them and the quickest, cheapest way to do it is to insulate the overhead lines,” he said.

    As for the poles, in a 2019 Hawaiian Electric regulatory document, the company said its 60,000 poles, nearly all wood, were vulnerable because they were already old and Hawaii is in a “severe wood decay hazard zone.” The company said it had fallen behind in replacing wood poles because of other priorities and warned of a “serious public hazard” if the poles “failed.”

    The document said many of the company’s poles were built to withstand 56 mph (90 kph), when a Category 1 Hurricane has winds of at least 74 mph.

    In 2002, the National Electric Safety Code was updated to require utility poles like those on Maui to withstand 105-mile-per-hour winds.

    The U.S. electrical grid was designed and built for last century’s climate, said Joshua Rhodes, an energy systems research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. Utilities would be smart to better prepare for protracted droughts and high winds, he added.

    “Everyone considers Hawaii to be a tropical paradise, but it got dry and it burned,” he said Thursday. “It may look expensive if you’re doing work to stave off starting wildfires or the impact of wildfires, but it’s much cheaper than actually starting one and burning down so many people’s homes and causing so many people’s deaths.”

    Tony Takitani, an attorney born and raised on Maui, is working with Morgan on the litigation.

    Takitani said in his 68 years there, it’s getting drier and drier. He said what happened on the island is so horrific it’s hard to talk about. But he does think it will force improvements to the grid.

    “When the poles go down, it’s kindling,” he said. “The combination of what’s going on with our Earth and people not being properly prepared for it, I think caused this. From living here, from the videos I’ve seen of poles going down and fires igniting, it seems kind of obvious.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Rome: As hot as always

    Rome: As hot as always

    [ad_1]

    A look at how ancient Romans coped with hot weather and how global warming has affected modern-day culture.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The world’s largest floating wind farm is now officially open — and helping to power North Sea oil operations

    The world’s largest floating wind farm is now officially open — and helping to power North Sea oil operations

    [ad_1]

    The Hywind Tampen project is located in waters off the Norwegian coast.

    Ole Berg-rusten | AFP | Getty Images

    A facility described as “the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm” was officially opened by Crown Prince Haakon of Norway on Wednesday, marking the culmination of a major renewable energy project years in the making.

    Located around 140 kilometers (86.9 miles) off the coast of Norway in depths ranging from 260 to 300 meters, Hywind Tampen uses 11 turbines. The wind farm produced its first power in Nov. 2022 and became fully operational this month.

    While wind is a renewable energy source, Hywind Tampen helps power operations at oil and gas fields, the idea being that it will cut these sites’ carbon dioxide emissions in the process.

    “Hywind Tampen has a system capacity of 88 MW and is expected to cover about 35 per cent of the annual need for electricity on the five platforms Snorre A and B and Gullfaks A, B and C,” Norwegian energy firm Equinor said.

    Stock picks and investing trends from CNBC Pro:

    Floating offshore wind turbines are different from fixed-bottom offshore wind turbines, which are rooted to the seabed. One advantage of floating turbines is that they can be installed in far deeper waters than fixed-bottom ones.

    In recent years a range of companies and major economies like the U.S. have laid out goals to ramp up floating wind installations.

    Equinor, a major player in the fossil fuel industry, describes the turbines at Hywind Tampen as being “mounted on floating concrete structures with a common anchoring system.”

    Alongside Equinor, partners in the Hywind Tampen project include Vår Energi, INPEX Idemitsu, Petoro, Wintershall Dea and OMV.

    The project off Norway’s coast marks Equinor’s latest move in the floating wind sector. Back in 2017, it started operations at Hywind Scotland, a five-turbine, 30 MW facility it calls the planet’s first floating wind farm.

    “With Hywind Tampen, we have shown that we can plan, build and commission a large, floating offshore wind farm in the North Sea,” Equinor’s Siri Kindem, who heads up the firm’s renewables business in Norway, said in a statement.

    “We will use the experience and learning from this project to become even better,” she added. “We will build bigger, reduce costs and build a new industry on the shoulders of the oil and gas industry.”

    Powering the oil and gas industry

    The use of a floating wind farm to help power the fossil fuel industry is likely to spark significant debate at a time when discussions about climate change and the environment are at the front and center of many people’s minds.

    This is because fossil fuels’ effect on the environment is considerable. The United Nations says that, since the 19th century, “human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.”

    “Burning fossil fuels generates greenhouse gas emissions that act like a blanket wrapped around the Earth, trapping the sun’s heat and raising temperatures,” it adds.

    The stakes are high. Speaking at the COP27 climate change summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, last year, the U.N. Secretary General issued a stark warning to attendees.

    “We are in the fight of our lives, and we are losing,” Antonio Guterres said.

    “Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing, global temperatures keep rising, and our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • China is furious with Japan’s plan to release treated Fukushima water into the ocean

    China is furious with Japan’s plan to release treated Fukushima water into the ocean

    [ad_1]

    Fisherman Haruo Ono’s fishing boats are pictured at Tsurushihama Fishing Port, Shinchi-machi of Fukushima Prefecture, some 60 kms north of the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on August 21, 2023.

    Philip Fong | Afp | Getty Images

    Japan is expected to start releasing a huge amount of treated radioactive water from the tsunami-hit Fukushima nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean, a highly controversial move that has drawn sharp criticism from neighboring countries.

    The imminent water release comes more than a decade after Japan was rocked by the second-worst nuclear disaster in history. A massive earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 destroyed the Fukushima nuclear power plant, which is situated on Japan’s east coast, about 250 kilometers (155 miles) northeast of the capital Tokyo.

    Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said earlier this week that the country plans to discharge roughly 1.3 million metric tons of treated wastewater — enough to fill about 500 Olympic-sized swimming pools — from the wrecked Fukushima power plant into the sea from Thursday, depending on weather conditions.

    Japan’s government has repeatedly said the discharge of the treated water is safe and the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog has endorsed the move. The International Atomic Energy Agency said in early July that Tokyo’s plans were consistent with international standards and will have a “negligible” impact on people and the environment. The process will take decades to complete.

    Neighboring countries are far from happy, however.

    Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida (C) speaks during a meeting with representatives of the Inter-Ministerial Council for Contaminated Water, Treated Water and Decommissioning Issues and the Inter-Ministerial Council Concerning the Continuous Implementation of the Basic Policy on Handling of ALPS Treated Water, at Prime Minister’s Office, on August 22, 2023, in Tokyo, Japan. (Photo by Rodrigo Reyes Marin/Zuma Press/Pool/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

    Rodrigo Reyes Marin | Zuma Press | Pool | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

    Local fishing groups and U.N. human rights experts have voiced their concerns about the potential threat to the marine environment and public health, while campaigners say that not all possible impacts have been studied.

    Japan says the process of releasing the filtered and diluted water is a necessary step of decommissioning the plant and that a relatively swift solution is needed because the storage tanks holding the treated water will soon reach their capacity.

    Regionally, China has emerged as one of the fiercest opponents to Japan’s plans.

    ‘Extremely selfish and irresponsible’

    Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin on Tuesday accused Tokyo of being “extremely selfish and irresponsible” by pressing ahead with the disposal of the water, adding that the ocean should be treated as a common good for humanity “not a sewer for Japan’s nuclear-contaminated water.”

    “China strongly urges Japan to stop its wrongdoing, cancel the ocean discharge plan, communicate with neighboring countries with sincerity and good will, dispose of the nuclear-contaminated water in a responsible manner and accept rigorous international oversight,” Wang said at a news conference.

    A spokesperson for Japan’s Embassy in London did not respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

    Hong Kong’s Chief Executive John Lee, meanwhile, “strongly opposes” the discharge of wastewater from the Fukushima power plant. Responding to Japan’s announcement, Hong Kong announced import curbs on some Japanese food products.

    South Korean protesters participate in a rally against Japanese government’s decision to release treated radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean, on August 22, 2023 in Seoul, South Korea.

    Chung Sung-jun | Getty Images News | Getty Images

    South Korea, at times a lone voice of regional support to Japan, said it sees no scientific problem with the plan to release the treated water. It made clear in a statement issued on Tuesday, however, that the government “does not necessarily agree with or support the plan.”

    Hundreds of activists in South Korea had gathered in the capital of Seoul earlier this month to rally against Japan’s plan to dispose of the treated water into the ocean.

    Both China and South Korea have banned fish imports from around Fukushima.

    ‘A total non-issue’

    Nigel Marks, an associate professor at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, said the Fukushima water problem boils down to tritium — a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that occurs naturally in the environment and is released as part of the routine operation of nuclear power plants.

    “Tritium releases far higher than that planned at Fukushima have been happening for around sixty years with a perfect safety record,” Marks told CNBC via email.

    It “poses the question as to how the Fukushima water became such a PR nightmare, given that from a radiation safety perspective the tritium is essentially harmless,” he continued. “The underlying problem is that the release sounds bad. The typical person isn’t aware that their own body is radioactive, nor do they have a sense of scale of how much radiation is a lot, nor how much is little.”

    “At this point science needs to step in and have a say — after all, tritium is produced in the upper atmosphere every day; in fact, one year of Fukushima water has the same amount of tritium as four hours of rainfall across the Earth,” Marks said.

    “Fundamentally this is why the Fukushima water is a total non-issue — there is already a small amount of tritium around us (harmlessly doing nothing) and the tiny extra bit won’t matter one jot.”

    Fishing groups in Japan, South Korea and the Philippines have all criticized the release of treated wastewater from the nuclear plant, fearing that it could affect regional resources and the livelihood of coastal communities.

    Analysts at environmental campaign group Greenpeace said they were “deeply disappointed and outraged” by Japan’s decision to release treated radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean.

    “Instead of engaging in an honest debate about this reality, the Japanese government has opted for a false solution – decades of deliberate radioactive pollution of the marine environment – during a time when the world’s oceans are already facing immense stress and pressures,” said Shaun Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace East Asia.

    “This is an outrage that violates the human rights of the people and communities of Fukushima, and other neighboring prefectures and the wider Asia-Pacific region.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • This startup is helping the ocean absorb more harmful carbon emissions

    This startup is helping the ocean absorb more harmful carbon emissions

    [ad_1]

    Removing carbon from the atmosphere is a growing field of business in the fight against global warming, but it’s not just big air vacuums doing the work. New technology is targeting an even bigger potential resource: The ocean. 

    The ocean, often likened to the lungs of the planet, is the world’s largest natural carbon sink. It generates half of all the oxygen we need and absorbs a quarter of all carbon dioxide we don’t. A buffer against the impacts of climate change, it has also fallen victim to it, as excess heat and CO2 make it more acidic and less able to do its job.

     Now, companies like Equatic, Captura, Running Tide, and a startup called Ebb Carbon are using new technology to restore ocean chemistry and speed up its natural abilities.

     “We’re restoring the balance in the ocean chemistry and enabling the ocean to absorb CO2 and convert it to a safe stable form,” said Ben Tarbell, co-founder and CEO of Ebb Carbon. Tarbell said he anticipates the company will remove upwards of a million tons of CO2 per year in the coming five years, simply by improving the ocean’s own natural capabilities.

     Here’s how it works: Ebb sets up its modules near ocean water – this first one by Sequim Bay in Washington state. The seawater flows through the Ebb system, which uses an electrochemical process to remove acid. Free of acid, it is returned to the ocean much better able to absorb CO2 again and store it as bicarbonate naturally.

     “We can install our modules anywhere, and, as we scale, we’ll be installing systems at existing industrial facilities on the coast that process ocean water,” Tarbell added.

     That potentially lowers costs substantially. Ebb is selling its carbon removal service to companies like Stripe, which are looking for offsets to meet their net-zero goals. The potential for such sales makes it attractive to investors like Prelude Ventures.

    “Right now there are very large voluntary carbon markets, large corporations willing to pay to remove carbon from the atmosphere to offset emissions in other parts of their business. Those markets alone are a multibillion-dollar market opportunity,” said Gabriel Kra, managing director at Prelude Ventures.

     Right now Tarbell says his technology costs over $100 per ton of CO2 removed, but as it scales to more locations, he says he expects that cost to drop significantly.

    “Because we’re coupling our systems with existing infrastructure, like desalination plants and coastal power plants, we can leverage the cost of that existing infrastructure to enable benefits for them while also reducing our costs,” Tarbell said.

    In addition to Prelude, Ebb Carbon is backed by Evok Innovations, Congruent Ventures, and Propeller. The company says it’s raised $27.75 million to date.

    [ad_2]

    Source link