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Climate Change Blog 30 - Facts on the Ground; Extreme Heat Forecast; Melting Antarctic; Forest Health; 50th Earth Day Program; Federal Clean Energy Loans; Covid and Climate Change; Washington

By Carl Howard posted 06-08-2020 05:00 AM

  

Climate Change Blog 30

Facts on the Ground:

On Monday, May 18, Cyclone Amphan became the most intense cyclone over the Bay of Bengal in the 21st Century. It had a maximum wind speed of 165 mph and caused at least 80 deaths in India and Bangladesh and obliterated numerous villages. It reached the highest classification of ‘super cyclonic storm.’

Scientists have long predicted that such tropical storms would develop as the planet, and oceans, warm. The Indian Ocean was exceedingly warm, 88F, thus providing the energy that fueled Amphan. Researchers in the US with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the likelihood of these kinds of cyclonic storms developing into the equivalent of Category 3 storms had increased by about 8% per decade since the late 1970s.

A similar recent monster storm, Cyclone Harold, formed over the South Pacific basin in April 2020. Both cyclones reached an estimated 1-minute Maximum Sustained Wind of 165 mph (Category 5), with Harold killing more than 30 people and causing widespread destruction in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, and Tonga.

Around three million people in India and Bangladesh heeded the warnings of the storm’s approach and moved to safety. But many refused to move given the fact that emergency shelters were already packed with people fleeing the Coronavirus. Many who escaped to the shelters are now feared to have been exposed. India has surpassed 100,000 infections and likely many more as testing is limited.

The storm may have also taken a toll on wildlife. Belinda Wright, the executive director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, reported serious damage to the ecosystem of the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest and a wildlife refuge, home to endangered species including Bengal tigers. Habitat loss, hunting and the illegal trade of animal parts have devastated the global population of tigers — now estimated at fewer than 4,000, compared with about 100,000 a century ago. The refuge was close to where the cyclone made landfall and stretches across the border of India and Bangladesh along the Bay of Bengal. Villagers said that there wasn’t a tree left standing.

Perhaps the most at-risk people during the storm were the one million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh living in horrid refugee camps. They have been sheltering there since 2017 after fleeing violence and persecution in neighboring Myanmar. Their makeshift tin and tarpaulin shelters were obliterated. And the first cases of Covid-19 have been confirmed in the camp.

More locally, and also in May, the northeast US experienced some oddly cold weather. After an unusually mild winter, an Arctic blast, called a polar vortex, descended. Climatologists have noted that climate change has likely affected air (the jet stream) and water currents which rarely allowed such Arctic winds to descend the way they have of late. But in the first week of May, record cold temperatures reached from New England to Alabama and Mississippi, and snow fell in western Massachusetts. Temperatures in NYC went from 80F to 40F.

This odd jet stream pattern has persisted for much of April and has contributed to unseasonably warm temperatures in much of western US. If the climate continues to vary widely from past patterns, the implications for agriculture, wildlife migration and mating and pollination, and ecosystems equilibrium, are troubling.

Scientists think Arctic warming and the decline in sea ice is causing the jet stream to wobble in ways that lead to more extreme weather year round, by creating zones of high-pressure air that can cause weather systems — the ones that bring extreme heat, or cold — to stall.

Arctic warming may also be affecting climate over the longer term. As Greenland’s ice sheet melts, the fresh water it releases lowers the saltiness of the nearby ocean. These salinity changes may affect large ocean currents that help determine long-term climate trends globally.

While the pandemic has temporarily reduced global GHG emissions, it won’t be meaningful. Emission levels are expected to ramp back up as global economic activity resumes. And since construction on renewable energy projects have mostly been shuttered, energy usage will continue to be largely carbon-dependent. What may be more lasting is the economic harm that has halted resiliency infrastructure projects (see below) as spending was diverted to emergency response.

Perhaps the world’s forests can absorb the excess carbon, but a closer look at the health of trees in a warming world is not encouraging. And perhaps the melting polar ice can be stopped, but improved measuring capability is providing data that is similarly disconcerting.

Recall the pyramid of life (Blog 1) with Homo sapiens precariously balanced atop the four supporting blocks: Land-based resources, Ocean-based resources, Climatic stability and Political stabilty. Facts on the Ground has, for 30 Blogs, made the point that Climatic stability is very much in question. As further explained below, cracks in this block extend to the Land block (heat, draught, floods and wildfires harm Land-based resources), and the Ocean block as oceanic currents, sea level rise, acidification, altered salinity and coral reef die-offs compromise Ocean-based resources. And such diminished land and ocean-based resources lead to failed states, environmental refugees and Political instability as we are witnessing in parts of Africa and the Middle East.

Within Decades Extreme Heat Could Affect Billions of People

Up to one-third of the world’s population likely will attempt to survive in the next half century in areas that are considered unsuitably hot for humans, according to a recent report published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Sahara region in Africa has mean annual temperatures around 84F and fewer than 25 million people currently live there. But by 2070 extreme heat could make parts of India, the Middle East, South America, Southeast Asia and Australia unlivable.

The global population is also rising and may reach 10 billion by 2070. If so, about 3.5 billion people could be affected by extreme heat and many of them could be compelled to migrate to cooler areas. The likely resulting economic, social and political disruption could be profound.

The above-noted areas that could become unbearably hot “are precisely the areas that are growing the fastest,” said Timothy A. Kohler, an archaeologist at Washington State University and an author of the study.

A 2018 World Bank study had estimated that climate change would force about 140 million people in Africa, South Asia and Central and South America to migrate within their own borders by 2050. The new figure of 3.5 billion figure is a shocking number but it is a worst case estimate. If emissions decline and if warming slows, the number of people affected could drop to about a billion.

The researchers found that while warming could cause colder parts of the world to become more suitable for living, large parts would warm beyond a tolerable temperature range. Another of the study’s authors, Marten Scheffer, a professor of complex systems sciences at Wageningen University in the Netherlands said, “it turns out that if climate change remains on the current track, then a lot more will change in the coming 50 years than have changed in the past 6,000.”

“It’s a kind of no-go area to talk about climate migration,” Dr. Scheffer said. But the possibility that hundreds of millions of people may be forced to move to cooler areas means that society “needs to think about how we can accommodate as much as we can.”

Antarctica’s Melting Continues

Scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA, are receiving data from The Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2, or ICESat-2, which was launched in 2018, as part of NASA’s Earth Observing System. This new, vastly improved data from space is providing the most precise picture yet of Antarctica’s ice, which is accumulating in some places and disappearing in others, and how the changes could contribute to rising sea levels.

The data will help researchers better understand the largest driver of ice loss in Antarctica, the thinning of floating ice shelves that allows more ice to flow from the interior to the ocean. It is clear that the continent is losing mass over all as the climate warms, but the change is uneven. Ice is accumulating in parts of East Antarctica, and rapidly decreasing in West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula.

The researchers have determined how Antarctica’s mass balance, the difference between accumulation and loss, changed from 2003 to 2019 for each of its 27 drainage basins. Over-all, the continent had lost enough ice to raise sea levels by six millimeters, or about one-quarter of an inch, during that time.

Thinning ice shelves in West Antarctica are unable to prevent ice on land from flowing toward the ocean. Floating ice shelves accounted for 30% of the ice loss in West Antarctica, the researchers found. Floating ice is lost by calving of icebergs and through melting from underneath by a deep current of warmer water that circulates around the continent.

Floating ice is already in the water, so when it calves or melts it does not add to SLR. But when ice shelves cease to act as buttresses against the grounded ice behind them, when they thin and allow that ice to flow into the ocean, it adds to the sea level. Scientists are increasingly concerned about this loss of floating ice and the increased flow of grounded ice in the West Antarctic ice sheet, and fear that a portion of the sheet could collapse over centuries, greatly increasing sea levels.

The study looked at the Greenland ice sheet as well. The ice there is primarily lost via surface melting and runoff. The researchers found that Greenland is losing about 200 billion tons of mass each year on average. That’s enough to raise sea levels by about eight millimeters, or a third of an inch, over the study period.

In total, the melting of polar ice has raised sea levels over half an inch between 2003 and 2019. Polar melting began well before 2003 and is accelerating after 2019. [For further reading: Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come.]

Troubling News on Forest Health

A study on tree mortality, published April 17 in the journal Science, concluded that forests are endangered if global warming continues at the present pace. Most trees alive today won't be able to survive the warming, drying, climate expected in 40 years. These negative impacts are already outpacing the fertilization benefits of increased CO2.

Tim Brodribb is a plant physiologist at the University of Tasmania who led the recent study to identify when, where and how trees succumb to heat and dryness.  With a microphone, he says, you can hear them take their last labored breaths. During heat waves and droughts, air bubbles form in trees and crack open their delicate veins with an audible pop. The moment of their drying leaves splitting open in a lightning bolt pattern, disrupting photosynthesis, can be observed via a special camera.

"We really need to be able to hear these poor trees scream. These are living things that are suffering. We need to listen to them," he said.

Brodribb compared trees and forests with corals and reefs. Both are slow-growing and long-lived systems that can't easily move or adapt to the rapid warming they are experiencing. Both have relatively inflexible damage thresholds. For corals, a global tipping point was reached around 2014 to 2016, when, in record-warm oceans, reefs around the world bleached and died.

The new information and modeling reveals how heat-related stress kills trees and suggests that there is a drought threshold for tree mortality beyond which global forests could also perish, he said. That could be “catastrophic." "We're at a point where we can see the process, we can predict it. It's time to start making some noise about it. We can't afford to sit on our hands."

Scientists are confident that hotter droughts, with major impacts, are coming. Mass forest die-offs will proliferate and expand. The trend toward more extreme heat waves and droughts is lethal for forests. "It's our choice of how much worse we want it to get. Every little bit of reduction of warming can have a positive effect. We can reduce the tree die-off. Are we going to make the choices to try and minimize that?"

The Southwest US is experiencing such impacts. An emerging megadrought has already weakened and killed hundreds of millions of trees, including Rocky Mountain lodgepole and piñon pines, as well as aspens. Warming and draught have added to the death of Piñon pines in Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park where beetles and wildfires have proliferated. In many areas it's become too warm and dry for new trees to sprout from seed and grow.

Trees are dying around the globe, including African cedars and acacias.  South America's Amazon rainforest is experiencing alarming drying. Junipers are declining in the Middle East. In Spain and Greece, warming is damaging oak trees, and in moist, temperate northern Europe, unusual droughts are stressing great stands of beech forests.

If the current pace of warming continues, forests will disappear from large parts of the world within decades. Directly or indirectly, drought and high temperatures will drive some tree species to extinction. Within 40 years, none of the trees alive today will be able to survive the projected climate in many parts of the world, Brodribb said.

"That's one of the potential scenarios, and we need to know if that's right. We have to establish the consequences of rising temperatures unequivocally for policy makers," he said.

The ecological impact of the loss of so many trees is hard to fathom. Trees are the foundation for terrestrial biodiversity and they capture and store about one-third of human-caused CO2 emissions and produce oxygen. An immense surge in heat-trapping CO2 likely would follow the death of forests which would cause more warming and eliminate habitat for countless other animals, plants and fungi, with a rippling effect that reaches humans sitting ever more precariously atop the ecological pyramid.

Another recent study published in the journal Global Change Biology focused on the evergreen forests in the Stubai Valley in Tirol, Austria. It concluded that at 3.6F (2C) of global warming, which will be reached before the end of this century, the dense stands of spruce and fir will die and may be replaced by a mix of oaks and pines, the type of forest found on the drier southern part of the Alps in Italy.

"We found that at warming levels above 2 degrees Celsius a threshold was crossed, with the system tipping into an alternative state," the researchers wrote. Even warming that corresponds with the current policy goals of the Paris climate agreement could "result in critical transitions of forest ecosystems. Overshooting the climate targets could be dangerous, because "ecological impacts can be irreversible at millennial time scales once a tipping point has been crossed."

The new study supports the view that global warming has greatly endangered the continued existence of the world's forests, according to University of Utah forest researcher Bill Anderegg. In the West US, forests are struggling to recover from insect and wildfire devastation. Older trees conserve their energy to survive drought and fend off beetles but then are unable to produce seeds. As result, there were few piñon pine nuts to be harvested last fall on the Navajo Nation lands where the nutritious nuts have been a staple for centuries.

Many national carbon-reduction targets pursuant to the Paris climate agreement are dependent on tree planting to reduce emissions. But rapid forest change and catastrophic die-offs will undermine those plans. For nations to meet their carbon reduction goals, forests must be protected, and that means global warming must be stopped and reversed. For that to happen, carbon emissions must end.

The 50th Earth Day – A Moment to Reflect on the State of the Planet

NYSBA EELS, along with the NYC Bar, and the New York City Climate Action Alliance hosted a day-long webinar on April 22. We hope to make it available to all for free. Stay tuned. We covered many of the threats covered in my Blogs and discussed seizing the opportunity of the shutdown due to the Coronavirus to think of ways of restarting smarter in terms of mitigating the causes of climate change, adapting to its impacts and designing more sustainable paths forward.

Also on Earth Day, the World Meteorological Organization forecast that due to the pandemic global GHG emissions would decline 6% this year, the biggest yearly decline in CO2 since the Second World War. But that would be nowhere near the reductions needed to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change.

“Whilst Covid-19 has caused a severe international health and economic crisis, failure to tackle climate change may threaten human well-being, ecosystems and economies for centuries,” said Petteri Taalas, a former research scientist from Finland and now the meteorological organization’s general secretary.

The last five years have already been the hottest on record and a new global heat record is expected to be set in the next five years. But the pace of warming depends on what happens as lawmakers here and abroad debate economic stimulus packages and distribute trillions of dollars in start-up money.

The head of the United Nations, António Guterres, called on countries to transition away from fossil fuels as they repair their economies, including by suspending taxpayer funds to prop up polluting industries and instead using them to create “green jobs and sustainable growth.” He said, “we need to turn the recovery into a real opportunity to do things right for the future.”

Trump Tweeted that he promised help for the fossil fuel sector, that he had instructed administration officials to ensure that federal funds be made available to the oil and gas sector “so that these very important companies and jobs will be secured long into the future.”

His administration has rolled back numerous environmental protections which had been enacted to reduce US carbon emissions including the Clean Power Plan, oversight of methane emissions, and car tailpipe emissions standards, the biggest climate initiative ever adopted by the US. He has announced his intention to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, the international attempt to avert the worst effects of climate change.

The global economy is on hold. The coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed over 350,000 lives globally, corresponds with international focus on climate change. A new generation, including 17 year old Greta Thunberg, as well as Khristen Hamilton and Jamie Margolin, with a youth activist group called Zero Hour, has launched worldwide protests demanding climate action. Business and finance leaders have pledged to reduce their carbon footprints, and BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, with $7 trillion in global investments, announced that it would divest from ventures with high levels of climate risk. For the first time, climate change policies are a focus in the US presidential election campaign.

However, powerful industries do not seek change. According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, the oil and gas industry spent over $125 million in lobbying at the federal level in 2019. The coal mining industry spent about $7 million on lobbying. And thus far in 2020, fossil fuel companies have invested at least $50 million in political contributions, the vast majority to Republicans.

While the fossil fuel industry is enjoying regulatory relief, the fact remains that if the planet is to preserve its forests and its polar ice caps and the weather patterns upon which humanity depends, one major change that must be made is a rapid and comprehensive shift to electrification via renewable energy sources.

The low-hanging fruit remains in the form of generating energy via solar, wind and other non-carbon processes. About one-quarter of humanity’s emissions come from power plants that generate the electricity used for lighting, air-conditioning and running factories. Most power plants still burn fossil fuels (coal, natural gas or oil) which produce CO2. California intends to achieve zero carbon emissions in producing electricity by 2045 primarily via solar panels and wind turbines. Work remains to be done on carbon capture and sequestration, and improvements in battery storage capability.

During the EELS Earth Day program, I shared a chart from the 2014 IPCC Report (Summary for Policymakers). Given emissions growth up to 2014, in order to have any chance of keeping global warming from exceeding 2C, emissions will have to decline between 38% of 2010 emissions levels and 24% above 2010 levels by 2050, and by 2100 emissions must decline between 134% and 50% of 2010 levels. To achieve 134% reduction, 100% of 2010 levels must be eliminated and 34% of 2010 emissions must be removed from the atmosphere. Removal at that scale depends on technology that does not exist. As I say, work remains to be done. And fast. And that work needs to be funded generously by the federal government. That is not happening (see below).

Experts disagree on which technologies are best, and technical hurdles (as noted) remain in cutting emissions to zero. But there’s broad agreement that we could greatly reduce power-plant emissions with existing technology.

The electrification of transportation is another low-hanging fruit. The technology exists to replace gas-powered cars with electric vehicles charged by solar power. Gas-burning furnaces could be replaced with electric heat pumps, and steel mills that burn coal could be replaced with electric furnaces that melt scrap. About 25% of global emissions could be reduced via electrification.

Parts of the modern economy can’t easily be electrified. Batteries are still too heavy for most airplanes or long-haul trucks. Many key industries, like cement and glass, require extreme heat and currently burn coal or gas. Efficiency improvements can be made now while we make advances elsewhere.

Another speaker at the Earth Day event, Peter Lehner, of Earth Justice, noted that about 25% of global emissions comes from agriculture and deforestation. Low-hanging fruit is found here too. He explained that improved farming techniques could turn farmland from a carbon-producer into a carbon sink. Changes to our diet, especially less meat consumption, could greatly reduce the number of methane-producing cattle and reduce pressure to clear the Amazon for pastures. The average North American eats more than six times the recommended amount of red meat. If cows were a country, they would be the third-largest GHG emitter in the world. And food waste accounts for nearly 10% of global GHG emissions.

Much of the above is doable with existing technology and know-how. It is a question of political will and public pressure to make these changes and invest in the necessary technology. Another necessary step can be taken and it too is a question of political will and public support: a tax on carbon emissions. Such a tax is essential to discourage carbon emissions and to raise dedicated funds.

Tomi Vest, General Counsel, NYC Mayor’s Office of Resiliency, addressed the City’s mitigation efforts including flood protection for much of NYC’s 520 miles of coast. Her office is working with FEMA and expects two products in 3-4 years to revise current risk assessments and establish new insurance rates, as well as to establish new flood maps that reflect expected impacts of SLR, to revise building codes and land use provisions. She said that by 2100 there could be 171,000 buildings and 1.2 million New Yorkers in the floodplain.

Mike Gerrard, Director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, gave an over-view of the issues including the goals of NY State’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act: renewable energy milestones of 6,000 megawatts and 9,000 MW by 2025 and 2035, respectively, 70% of the State’s electricity from renewables by 2030 (and 40% GHG reduction from 1990 levels), carbon-free/100% clean electricity by 2040, and 85% GHG reduction by 2050.

Greg Hale, Senior Adviser at NYSERDA, explained that the Roadmap for meeting these goals is under development and includes achieving carbon neutral statewide building stock. NYSERDA’s program to decarbonize buildings is doing just that.

Federal Government is Sitting on Billions of Dollars in Clean Energy Loans

As noted above, it is crucial that the federal government dedicate large sums to fund research into the best ways to transition to a carbon-free economy. The good news is that Congress (long ago) approved about $43 billion in low-interest loans for clean energy projects (such as renewable power, nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage technology) . The question is, why isn’t it being disbursed?

“We’re searching high and low all over Washington, D.C., for money to put people back to work and here we have more than $40 billion,” said Dan Reicher, executive director of the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University, who worked at the Energy Department under President Bill Clinton. “This is the moment to really put these programs back in gear.”

The loans had some bipartisan support even before the coronavirus pushed 40 million people into unemployment. Some supporters of the program said it was being held back by a president who has falsely claimed wind power causes cancer and favors deep cuts to renewable energy spending, including the loan program.

“They haven’t put out any or almost any of these loans since he’s become president,” said Representative Frank Pallone Jr. (NJ), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “There’s an ideological or political aspect to this. The president is not someone who seeks to promote the clean energy sector.”

Mr. Pallone said over 3 million jobs had been created in low-carbon technology efforts before the pandemic, and that he intended to prioritize finding ways to issue the idle loans in the next stimulus.

Shaylyn Hynes, a spokeswoman for the Department of Energy, declined to explain why the loans were not being disbursed. She said the Trump administration supported renewable energy and had funded research and development projects for wind and solar power.  She said that Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette had directed the agency to “utilize all of its resources to be supportive of the energy industry during the Covid-19 pandemic, including the loan program office.”

Some of the money comes from a loan program for advanced vehicle technology ($17.7 billion) and some from a loan program for tribal energy projects ($2 billion). Most of it, about $24 billion, is in the Title XVII loan program which was authorized in 2005 to support large projects intended to address climate change. In 2009, in response to the last financial crisis, Congress temporarily expanded the program and the Obama administration granted a $535 million loan to Solyndra, a California solar company that went bankrupt. Many conservatives still point to that failure in arguing against additional loans.

The Title XVII loan guarantee program is divided into $10.9 billion for advanced nuclear energy, $8.5 billion for advanced fossil energy and $4.6 billion for renewables.

“Republicans have decided they don’t want this money to go out, even though a lot of it could be for things they say they like, like for the oil and gas industry or carbon capture and sequestration or the nuclear industry,” said Peter W. Davidson, who led the loan program under former President Obama and is now chief executive of Aligned Climate Capital, an asset management company.

The refusal to issue the loans is all the more puzzling as research shows that until the COVID-19 shutdown, the energy efficiency sector was the largest job creator in the energy industry, employing at least 2.4 million people as of 2019 (whereas the coal industry employed around 70,000 people.)

“Jobs in the low-carbon sector have been growing at a much faster pace than overall employment, and they are expected to have dramatic growth going into the future,” says Devashree Saha, a senior associate at the nonprofit World Resources Institute (WRI). “In a situation like today, with unemployment rising, significant investment in clean energy and other low-carbon sectors as part of the economic recovery is a very effective way to create jobs in the near term.”

WRI has a long list of areas with huge job-creation potential. Retrofitting homes and businesses to save energy, an important piece of combating climate change, could add millions of jobs and save small businesses 10%-30% in utility costs and help them survive. A $1 million investment in energy efficiency creates around eight full-time jobs, nearly three times as many as an investment in fossil fuels.

WRI research shows that as much as 200,000 jobs could be created annually by modernizing the electric grid, while improving its resiliency and efficiency. An annual investment of $12-16 billion in the grid could lead to $30-40 billion in annual economic activity. Investments in modernizing the country’s aging transportation infrastructure could create thousands of jobs in construction and manufacturing. Each $1 billion invested in public transportation can create 50,000 jobs. Investments in afforestation, essential in fighting climate change, could create at least 150,000 jobs annually.

The list goes on. Offshore wind projects could also create hundreds of thousands of jobs. A $2.8 billion wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts is nearing the start of construction. The electric vehicle industry is another area of potential growth and currently employs over 275,000 people in California alone.

“In many ways, I think COVID-19 has been a reality check for us,” Saha says. “It has given us a preview of the kind of disruptions that climate change can bring. At the same time, COVID-19 also offers a chance to rebuild the U.S. economy in a cleaner and more sustainable way—in a manner that can reduce pollution, that can create good jobs, and also advance a more reliable and resilient power. I think U.S. policymakers should not miss this chance to place climate change and investment in low-carbon infrastructure at the heart of the recovery process.”

Coronavirus May Increase Cities’ Risk for Climate Disasters

The federal government is not loaning money for energy projects and is unlikely to loan money to cities for adaptation projects related to climate change.

I noted in Blog 28 how cities globally are beginning to construct sea walls and other projects to fend off rising seas and other coming threats. But with the economic shutdown, virtually all projects have stopped.

Officials in San Francisco and Miami Beach have said they are likely to delay climate-related projects and Washington State has cut funding for resilience projects. The urgent need to address threats related to climate change remains, but the Coronavirus demands immediate attention.

 “I have not seen any projections of sea level rise slowing down as a result of the Covid crisis,” said Brian Strong, chief resilience officer for San Francisco, which was one of the first US cities to shut down while planning a $5 billion upgrade to its sea wall. But, “there’s only so much money to go around.” The city expects a budget shortfall of as much as $1.7 billion.

Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, which works with cities around the world, said “revenue projections are dropping like crazy… . Capital projects are going to be wiped off the books of local governments around the country.”

Miami Beach is in the same bind. In 2015, the city began elevating roads that frequently flood at high tide because of rising seas, and installing new pumps to control the water. It has done about 20% of the neighborhoods on its list, according to Roy Coley, the city’s public works director, and had planned to issue bonds in order to continue. That now appears unlikely. The shutdown is costing the city $3.6 million in lost tax revenue each week from lost tourism, the mainstay of their economy.

Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, who campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination promising to lead on climate change, was compelled to cut $50 million in climate resilience funding from the state’s budget.

New York City, which felt its vulnerability to the impacts of climate change in 2012 with Hurricane Sandy, is actively addressing its adaptation needs. Ms. Vest, of the Mayor’s Office, spoke about resiliency projects in 6 coastal communities in NYC, plus 7 different segments/projects hardening lower Manhattan, plus 2 City-wide projects. As of this writing, no funds have been diverted from these projects, but that could change.

Thus, hope depends on the federal government that could make dedicated infrastructure funds available. Again, large-scale resiliency projects are major job creators which is essential now that some 30 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits.

Shalini Vajjhala, a former Obama administration official who now advises cities on adaptation measures, said “if we wait until the money is available, it’s going to be oversubscribed.”

Laura Lightbody, head of the Flood-Prepared Communities project for the Pew Charitable Trusts, warned that if cities and states don’t continue their work on resilience, they will set themselves up for even worse consequences later. “Without resilience planning, systems and infrastructure already spread thin may not be able to respond effectively to the next big flood. … Natural disasters won’t wait until this pandemic has run its course.”

Washington

Judge Vacates Oil and Gas Leases in Montana for NEPA Failures

Judge Brian Morris (US District Court, MT) found that the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management had completely failed to take into account the environmental impacts of drilling on regional water supplies and the global impact that the increased drilling would have on climate change. The ruling voids 287 oil and gas leases across nearly 150,000 acres of Montana.

This is at least the third such ruling that criticized the Trump administration for failing to consider the cumulative impacts of expanding fossil fuel production on the warming of the planet. As noted in Blog 29, the Trump administration is seeking to eliminate the legal requirements that the government take such impacts into account as currently required by the National Environmental Policy Act.

Derrick Henry, a spokesman for the bureau, wrote in an email: “With all due respect, we disagree with the Court’s conclusion, and the B.L.M. stands by its analysis in following the letter of the law to issue oil and gas leases in Montana. Regardless of the ultimate outcome of this dispute and despite the attempts of radical, special interest groups, the Department and the B.L.M. will continue to work toward ensuring America’s energy independence while preserving a healthy environment.”

Judge Morris’ opinion was consistent with two earlier rulings, one in 2018 in New Mexico, and one in 2019 in Washington, DC. All three decisions have concluded that when considering whether to grant drilling leases, the BLM is required to consider the cumulative climate impacts of allowing more planet-warming GHG emissions into the atmosphere.

“The nature of climate change is that we’re dealing with death by a thousand cuts. These decisions are saying you have to add up the impact of all of those cuts,” said Kyle Tisdel, a lawyer with the Western Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit law firm that argued against the administration in the Montana lease case.

“The changes that Trump has proposed to NEPA are not in place yet,” said Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at the Vermont Law School, “but if they were, Judge Morris would not have been able to find that B.L.M. was in violation of the law.”

The views expressed above are my own.
Carl Howard, Co-chair, NYSBA EELS Global Climate Change Committee
Follow me on Twitter @Howard.Carl

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