Jean Chemnick, E&E reporter
Published: Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Chanting and wearing protest buttons, 43 activists were arrested today after zip-tying themselves to White House gates to oppose approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. The group that gathered in Lafayette Park this morning to press President Obama to reject TransCanada’s permit for the proposed pipeline included leaders of the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and 350.org, and well-known activists including NASA scientist James Hansen, Robert Kennedy Jr. and actress Daryl Hannah.

Shortly before noon, they moved to the sidewalk in front of the White House to sit on the pavement or chain themselves to the fence, chanting slogans such as “Barack Obama, yes you can/stop the dirty pipeline plan.”

After three warnings, U.S. Park Police began to make arrests.

The mostly middle-aged protesters and their supporters wore buttons printed with “NO KXL” — the O’s featuring the Obama campaign logo of a rising sun.

The protesters said Obama wanted them there, pushing him to make the “right” decision this year to reject the Alberta-to-Texas pipeline, which they said would make the lofty climate-mitigation goals he expressed during last night’s State of the Union address all but impossible to achieve.

“The president’s just starting his second term,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, which today broke a 120-year tradition of not engaging in illegal protests to take part in the action. “We want to make sure his ambition meets the scale of this challenge.”

Brune said that the president made “a good speech,” but that he needed to take action. “You can’t necessarily solve climate change with a single speech,” he said. “The president has an enormous amount of executive authority that he has not yet utilized.” He urged the president to move quickly on environmentalists’ top two objectives for the second term: an aggressive greenhouse gas rule for existing power plants and rejection of the pipeline permit.

The State Department will make a recommendation on a supplemental environmental impact statement for the pipeline’s new route in the coming months, though Obama will have the final say on whether the project goes forward.

Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, said he was engaging in civil disobedience for the first time.

“I think that with the appointment of Secretary [John] Kerry now at the State Department, things may look good for the cancellation of Keystone XL,” he said. The former senator and ardent climate action proponent took over the top diplomatic post earlier this month. “But having said that, we still have to apply the pressure,” he said. He noted that Canada and the oil industry are both pressing the administration to grant the Keystone permit. The American Petroleum Institute is touting its own research today that it says shows a groundswell of support for the project (see related story).

Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, an activist group, said that disobedience is an appropriate tool to use.

“Sometimes it’s important to do civil disobedience because it’s the way we underline the moral certainty of the questions that we face,” he said.

Julian Bond, civil rights leader and chairman emeritus of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said he participated in the action on his own behalf. “All these movements tend to learn from each other,” he said. “They borrow from each other, they learn from each other’s tactics.”

He said he was particularly concerned about the effect climate change might have on the health of residents in poor neighborhoods.

Hannah, dressed in a military-style jacket with an anti-Keystone XL patch embroidered on the shoulder, said the pipeline would allow the high-carbon Canadian oil sands development to expand.

“They can’t put it for sale on the global market unless it gets to a coast somewhere,” she said.

Today was the actress’s fifth arrest for civil disobedience. “It gets people to think deeper about these issues, to look deeper, to do their homework,” she said. “It’s the last stand.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

Jin Liangkuai/Xinhua, via Associated Press

A deep-water drilling rig in the South China Sea operated by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, or Cnooc.

By KATE GALBRAITH
Published: February 6, 2013

AUSTIN, Tex. – The oceans deep are a repository of many secrets. Shipwrecks have existed undisturbed for centuries, as have corals and fish of almost unimaginable diversity.

Now, increasingly, the secrets of the seabed are being looked at by companies drilling for oil and minerals. International geopolitics and the environment are getting more muddled as a result.

“Deep-sea drilling is expensive and hard, and the technology wasn’t there until very recently,” said Sheila Smith, a senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States. Now, major powers are vying for drilling rights in places like the East China Sea, where the tussle is between the two largest energy consumers in Asia: China and Japan. Tensions there flared this week when Japan said China had recently aimed military targeting radar at one of its ships near disputed islands.

The drilling industry continues to move toward deeper waters and new deposits. In the Gulf of Mexico, drilling is now occurring beneath as much as 8,000 to 9,000 feet, or about 2,400 to 2,700 meters, of water, according to Mike Lyons, general counsel of the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association. The Deepwater Horizon rig, by contrast, was drilling in about 5,000 feet of water in the gulf when it exploded after a blowout nearly three years ago.

Technology has accelerated the move toward deeper waters. “A lot of the drilling now in the Gulf of Mexico is done with drill ships, as opposed to conventional drilling platforms that people have used in the past,” Mr. Lyons said. The ships can inhabit deeper waters and be stabilized over a drill site with the aid of sophisticated computers, he said.

Amy Myers Jaffe, executive director for energy and sustainability at the University of California, Davis, said that the industry’s advances into deeper water had been steady but incremental.

With the increased capability comes increased scrutiny, especially after events like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident and a 2011 oil leak off of Brazil, as well as a natural gas leak last year at a North Sea drilling platform about 150 miles, or 240 kilometers, off Aberdeen, Scotland.

Ms. Jaffe said that drillers had perhaps viewed deep-water operations as too routine. “I think that we were a little blasé about how hard it is to do,” she said. “And maybe the industry is now grappling with the difference between 2 percent tolerance and 0 percent tolerance” for mistakes. Zero percent may be the new model, especially in places that have recently experienced public outcries over spills, including Australia, Brazil and the United States, she said.

Shell’s difficulty in drilling in Arctic waters off Alaska further illustrates the technological challenges of operating in new, often adverse settings.

The industry is eager to “get access to these fragile and complicated areas” like the Arctic, said Frederic Hauge, president of the Bellona Foundation, an environmental group based in Oslo. But the risks are immense, he said, adding that in Norway, he felt that companies lacked adequate emergency response plans for their far-afield rigs.

As technology helps propel the industry further offshore, geopolitical difficulties are intruding. Many countries have overlapping maritime boundaries. Lebanon and Israel have disputed claims in the natural-gas-rich eastern Mediterranean Sea. The United States and Mexico have also had differences over rights in the Gulf of Mexico, though they signed a cooperation agreement a year ago on drilling.

In the East China Sea and the South China Sea, disputes continue as China, with its rising energy appetite, clashes with its neighbors over drilling rights and sovereignty claims.
“If these were uncontested regions, I’m sure people would have gone forward already” with drilling, said Ms. Smith of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Should the drilling industry venture into even deeper waters, additional political complications await. The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, signed by more than 150 countries – though not by the United States – gives the International Seabed Authority, based in Jamaica, oversight of mineral exploration in waters that lie beyond a country’s so-called exclusive economic zone, which typically extends 200 nautical miles, or 370 kilometers, from shore.

Adam Cook, a marine biologist with the seabed agency, said that while the group had agreed to 17 exploration contracts with companies, most of those companies were looking for minerals like manganese nodules, which are rock formations. So far, none are after oil or natural gas, and the consensus is that there is “unlikely to be any drilling for oil and gas beyond national jurisdiction in the near future,” Mr. Cook said in an e-mail.

A version of this article appeared in print on February 7, 2013, in The International Herald Tribune.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-02-05/greenhouse-gas-emissions-fall-in-u-dot-s-dot-power-plants-on-coal-cuts

Well, another good reason to oppose fracking.…..DV

By Mark Drajem on February 06, 2013

Natural gas and oil production is the second-biggest source of U.S. greenhouse gases, the government said, emboldening environmentalists who say tighter measures are needed to curb the emissions from hydraulic fracturing.

In its second-annual accounting of emissions that cause global warming from stationary sources, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the first time included oil and natural- gas production. Emissions from drilling, including fracking, and leaks from transmission pipes totaled 225 million metric tons of carbon-dioxide equivalents during 2011, second only to power plants, which emitted about 10 times that amount.

Gas and oil production “is an area where we have technological answers to our problems,” Michael Levi, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said in an interview. “We know how to fix many of these problems; we just need to make the decision to do it.”

The EPA yesterday released on its website details of emissions from about 8,000 factories, power plants and refineries. Two coal-fired power facilities owned by Atlanta- based Southern Co (SO). topped the list, followed by one owned by Energy Future Holdings Corp (TXU). of Dallas.

In total, power plants emitted 2,221 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2011, down 4.5 percent from 2010, according to the agency. The EPA report showed the benefits of fracking, as it attributed the reduction to cuts in coal use and increased use of gas as fuel by electricity generators. There was also an increased use of power from renewable sources such as solar and wind, the agency said.

Top Emitters
“This report confirms that major carbon reductions from power plants wouldn’t be possible without a reliable and affordable supply of domestically produced natural gas,” Simon Lomax, research director at Energy in Depth, an industry group, said in an e-mail.

The EPA report on oil and gas looked at emissions from basins, or large production areas, not individual wells. Among the top emitters were ConocoPhillips (COP)’ operations in the San Juan basin in New Mexico, and Apache Corp (APA).’s operations in the Permian basin in Texas. Both companies are based in Houston.

“ConocoPhillips continues to seek out ways to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions,” Daren Beaudo, a spokesman for the company said in an e-mail. The company is working to cut methane venting with gas conservation and waste-heat recovery, he said.
Apache has been growing rapidly in the Permian basin, where it’s now the second-largest producer, Bill Mintz, a spokesman for the company, said in an interview. “We have done some infrastructure projects that improved our emissions performance in 2012.”

Proposed Regulations
The EPA has already proposed regulations to curb emissions from new power plants, setting a standard that would preclude the construction of new coal-fired facilities that don’t capture and sink underground the carbon coming from their smokestacks. Once those rules are finished in the coming weeks, the EPA must move to establish similar rules for existing power plants.

Environmental groups have asked the agency to establish standards to prevent methane leakages from the drilling, fracking and transport of oil and gas. The boom in that production in states such as Pennsylvania and North Dakota means that those rules are necessary, according to environmental groups. Methane’s lifetime in the atmosphere is much shorter than carbon dioxide, but it’s more efficient at trapping radiation, making its short-term impact 20-times greater than carbon dioxide, according to the EPA.

“Reducing fugitive methane emissions is a top priority because they are so powerful” a force for global warming, said Mark Brownstein, managing director of the Environmental Defense Fund in New York. “You want to make sure the goose is laying what approximates golden eggs.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Drajem in Washington at mdrajem@bloomberg.net

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2013/feb/08/fossil-fuel-subsidies-tax-breaks

New OECD data reveals a system of fossil fuel subsidies and taxes that is horribly overcomplicated and illogical

Duncan Clark
guardian.co.uk, Friday 8 February 2013 07.39 EST

Miners at Hungary’s last remaining deep-cast coal mine at Markushegy, 70 km west of Budapest, January 23, 2013. Photograph: LASZLO BALOGH/REUTERS

Last week the OECD published two new reports which shine a light on our complex and confused relationship with fossil fuels. The first looks at how we subsidise them, the second at how we tax them. The picture they paint can be summed up in two words: tangled mess.

Looking first at subsidies, the principle take-out is that government support for oil, coal and natural gas is still increasing across the developed world, despite promises to turn the situation around. Indeed, after dipping with the wider economy in 2009, the total value of subsidies or tax breaks received by those extracting or burning fossil fuels climbed relatively steeply and by 2011 was approaching the pre-crash peak of more than $80 billion.

Government support for fossil fuels

As the graph shows, coal subsidies are gradually waning, but increases in oil and gas support have more than made up for that.

In some cases, governments directly help the oil, coal and gas sector through policies such as wage subsidies, liability limitation or below-market-rate access to government goods and services. But much of the support included in the OECD’s analysis consists of fossil fuels being sold at a lower tax rate than is charged on other goods. Examples include ‘red diesel’ used in agriculture and VAT discounts for domestic electricity and heating fuel. The graph below shows that these consumer-focused forms of support make up the majority of the total. (The split is more even in countries with big fossil fuel sectors.)

Government support for fossil fuels by type of policy

If heating fuels and home electricity currently receive tax breaks in many countries, the situation is quite different for vehicle fuels. The OECD’s second report – Taxing Energy Use – shows that on average transport accounts for a remarkable 85% of energy-related tax revenue despite making up just 23% of total energy use and 27% of CO2 emissions.

Transport fuels in OECD nations

But these averages conceal a huge disparity in the actual rates applied in different countries. The graph below shows the average tax rate on transport fuels across the 34 OECD nations, expressed as an effective carbon tax – i.e. the tax rate paid by consumers relative to each unit of CO2 that the fuels will release.

Two things jump out here. One is the remarkable difference between those at the top and the bottom of the table. The rate in the UK, for example, is around 15 to 20 times higher than the federal rate applied in North America. The gap would close a bit if American state taxes were included but from a quick glance at the figures, it looks like the difference would still be almost an order of magnitude between the US and UK.

Tax rates for vehicle fuels

The other thing that jumps out from this graph is that many countries are already charging an effective carbon tax of more than ¤200 per tonne on their vehicle fuels. In Britain it’s closer to ¤300 – way more than almost anyone is talking about in terms of climate policy. On one level, that’s a positive story, as it illustrates that when it’s introduced incrementally and combined with energy-efficiency improvements, a very high carbon tax doesn’t have to be scary.

On the other hand, it’s worrying to see that North Americans are used to paying almost no fuel tax. It’s a reminder how crucial it is to start upping carbon taxes now, because there’s such a long way to go and the increase will be much more politically plausible and economically manageable if introduced gradually. (As Nigeria showed at the beginning of last year, big overnight increases in fuel tax can lead to social breakdown and policy U-turns.)

While the difference in fuel tax between nations is striking, also interesting is the gap between specific fuels within nations. Across the OECD, for example the tax per unit of CO2 is a huge 37% lower for diesel than it is for petrol. Yes, diesel engines are more efficient and achieve more miles per unit of carbon emitted, but that’s not a good reason for taxing those emissions any less. (If anything, it’s a reason for taxing them higher, because for each unit of carbon emitted, a diesel car will create more local air pollution and road use.)

But even diesel looks heavily regulated next to aviation fuel, which is exempt for most international travel and subject to a low rate even for domestic flights in most countries. The OECD estimates a typical rate of just ¤23 per tonne of CO2 emissions – approximately a tenth of the figure for petrol. (The rate would be lower still if the global warming impacts of vapour trails and other non-CO2 impacts were factored into the equation.)

Looking at both reports, the picture that emerges is a horribly overcomplicated and illogical system, both within and between nations. Things would be a lot clearer, greener, less distorting and fairer if a single carbon tax was applied across all fuels, sectors and – ultimately – countries. There’s no reason someone on a low income in a rural area making an unavoidable trip by car should pay a higher tax rate than a wealthy person heating a mansion, a banker hopping between meetings in a plane or indeed a farmer growing out-of-season tomatoes in a heated greenhouse.

As James Hansen and others have argued, the simplest and most complete approach to taxing carbon would be for nations to apply a consistent tax at the point where the fuel comes out of the ground or gets imported from overseas. If that happened, it would need to be introduced in parallel with greater efforts to insulate homes and protect vulnerable householders from higher heating bills. But under Hansen’s plan – which involves sharing the revenues of the carbon tax equally between citizens – those who don’t use much fuel would end up better off anyway.

It took 700 pages for the OECD to map out the developed world’s fiscal relationship with fossil fuels. A better system could be expressed in a few sentences.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/feb/08/al-gore-fossil-fuel-divestment

A US campaign to encourage universities and cities to drop their investments in fossil fuel companies is gaining momentum

Carey L. Biron for IPS, part of the Guardian Environment Network
guardian.co.uk, Friday 8 February 2013 05.19 EST

Al Gore is backing a US campaign of divestment in fossil fuel companies. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP

A months-old national campaign to convince U.S. colleges, universities and city governments to withdraw investments from the world’s largest oil and gas companies has seen some notable initial successes.

On Tuesday, a city supervisor in San Francisco introduced resolutions calling on the city’s retirement fund to “divest” all money it has in fossil fuel companies and gun manufacturers. That followed a significant recent decision by the city of Seattle’s two-billion-dollar retirement fund to actively shed its stocks in companies that contribute to climate change.

And Wednesday, former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, a prominent climate activist and Harvard alum, sided with a strengthening campaign to get that school to back out of its oil and gas investments.

“If I were a student, I would support what you’re doing,” Gore told students, speaking on campus at Harvard. “But if I were a board member I would do what I did when we took up the Apartheid issue. This is an opportunity for learning and the raising of awareness, for the discussion of sustainable capitalism.”

In fact, the divestment movement here in the U.S., which has burgeoned following the November presidential election, took its inspiration from the anti-Apartheid experience.

“During the 1980s, 155 schools came out against the South African Apartheid, and so we’re modelling a lot of what we’re doing now on that,” Jamie Henn, communications director for 350.org, an advocacy group that has spearheaded the divestment push, told IPS.

“So, it made perfect sense for us to start with universities, as these institutions have a special responsibility to make their investments live up to their missions. Many have publicly committed to sustainability and solving the big issues of the day, yet many are still putting tens of millions of dollars into companies that are wreaking havoc on the planet.”

Hampshire College, a small school in Massachusetts, was the first to follow the campaign’s lead; in 1979, it was also the first school in the United States to divest from South African holdings. Two more colleges have now followed suit.

While these are each small and notably progressive schools, Henn reports that student groups have sprung up around the issue on the campuses of at least 230 schools, including at each of the elite Ivy League schools and several large state schools. At least 20 institutions have now started processes to look at divestment options.

“We’ve been blown away by how quickly the campaign has spread – right now it’s the fastest-moving student environmental campaign of the past decade, maybe ever,” Henn says.

“And an increasing number of students are also increasing pressure on politicians to take action. Look at these numbers – Harvard’s endowment is 32 billion dollars. That perks up the ears of a lot of people.”

The Harvard administration was initially cold on the idea of divestment, however, reportedly refusing for months to agree to a meeting between the school president and student representatives on the issue. But following a concerted campaign – and a campus-wide referendum in which nearly three-quarters of students voted in favour of divestment – recent weeks have seen a significant softening of tone.

“Finally, at the end of the semester, the administration felt enough pressure to agree to a meeting with a couple of members of the school’s board, and that took place last Friday,” Alli Welton, a co-coordinator of Divest Harvard, a student group, told IPS.

“In that meeting, the board members said they were very concerned about climate change, but questioned whether divestment would have a significant impact on the issue. However, they also noted that doing so wouldn’t have a large impact on the school’s endowment.”

Indeed, that latter contention is supported by a recent report by Aperio Group, an investment management firm, which found that divesting of climate change-related holdings would bring with it remarkably little risk for university endowments.

Welton notes that negotiations between students and the administration are going to continue (“That’s pretty good after a semester of not talking to us”), with a decision slated for February 15. While she says she’s “very encouraged” by the administration’s new willingness to talk, Welton refers to a far larger impact on the student body.

“I’ve never seen anything like this happen around climate change on campus – it seems like students know a lot more about this issue and are feeling its urgency,” she says. “It really feels as though divestment is a very clear way that we can effect change.”

Critically for such a large issue as climate change – and one on which many activists have repeatedly felt let down by failures at the national and international levels to agree on substantive long-term solutions – Welton notes that organising around investments makes a massive issue feel more immediate.

“These local-level initiatives make climate change more accessible for people, and make it more possible for them to get involved,” she says. “We can see very clearly that we’re part of something gigantic, and that definitely creates identity for a national and even international movement.”

According to 350.org’s Henn, the second phase of the organisation’s divestment strategy will focus on city governments and pension funds. In this, Seattle’s actions have already become a model of sorts.

Led by the city’s mayor, Mike McGinn, in turn responding to exhortations by 350.org, last month Seattle’s retirement and pension funds reported that they had some 17 million dollars invested in oil and gas companies. On Jan. 31, those funds moved to create a mechanism to look into how potential divestments could take place.

“This was a critical first step, as there was no such mechanism even in existence,” Aaron Pickus, a spokesperson for the mayor, told IPS.

While no decision has yet been made on how that money should now be used, Pickus says, “There has been a general request that it not be re-invested in companies that are polluting our climate.”

The public response has been positive, he notes, even while constituents understand that the city is at the beginning of a process that could span the next half-decade.

“There is a rapidly growing sense that something – in fact, many concrete things – need to start happening to change the trend on how we approach climate change,” Pickus says.

“That includes how we invest – not just in pensions but also, more generally, how we’re spending taxpayer money. For instance, are we going to invest in new, wider highways or in green transit options?”

Special thanks to Richard Charter