A gas processing plant in Seminole, Texas. Emissions from burning coal, oil and gas are the main drivers of global warming. , Brandon Bell/Getty Images
It’s no secret that fossil fuels are still going strong, as we discussed last month. But a new United Nations-backed report paints an alarming picture of how dramatically coal, oil, and gas production is expected to grow in the coming years.
If current projections hold, the United States will drill for more oil and gas in 2030 than at any point in its history, our colleague Hiroko Tabuchi reports. So will Russia and Saudi Arabia.
In fact, almost all of the top 20 fossil fuel-producing countries plan to produce more oil, gas, and coal in 2030 than they do today. If those projections hold, the world would overshoot the amount of fossil fuels consistent with limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius — the level scientists say would result in vastly more life-threatening heat waves, drought, and coastal flooding.
“Governments are literally doubling down on fossil fuel production; that spells double trouble for people and planet,” António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, said in a statement accompanying the report. “We cannot address climate catastrophe without tackling its root cause: fossil fuel dependence.”
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Regulators have slashed the value of shared-solar systems, starting in 2025. School districts, community advocates, and politicians have expressed outrage over the decision.
Solar panels on the roof of Thurgood Marshall Academic High School in San Francisco, Calif. (Lea Suzuki/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images)
By Jeff St. John, Canary Media
California regulators have ordered changes to the state’s shared-solar programs that critics say will ruin the economics of rooftop solar on apartment buildings, schools, and farms across much of the state.
And while the new regulations approved by the California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday have been modified from the rules proposed earlier this year to reduce the impact of the changes on renters, critics say the current version will still make rooftop solar uneconomic for most rental property owners, putting the benefits of solar further out of reach for the four in 10 Californians who rent their homes.
CPUC President Alice Reynolds said at Thursday’s meeting that the changes will help California “achieve a constellation of goals including grid reliability, greenhouse gas reductions, affordability equity, consumer protections and cost containment of utility bills.” The changes won’t affect existing customers, but they will apply starting in mid-2025 to new projects for customers of Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison , and San Diego Gas & Electric, the state’s three biggest utilities.
But Reynolds’ comments fly in the face of strident opposition from clean energy groups, renters’ rights advocates, affordable-housing proponents, farming groups, school districts, and more than 135 local elected officials. These groups have warned that the new regulations could derail investments in clean power needed to help the state reach its decarbonization goals while preventing schools, farms, and rental-housing properties from mitigating the burden of utility bills that are already among the highest in the country and are set to rise further in the coming years.
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The House Committee on Education and the Workforce announced on Thursday, Nov. 16 that it is launching an investigation into University research fellow and former Iranian official Seyed Hossein Mousavian, amid allegations that Mousavian is using his position to advance the interests of Iran.
Mousavian was criticized in the pages of the ‘Prince’ in February 2022 by two former State Department officials because Mousavian smiled while discussing death threats against a US diplomat in an Iranian documentary. Mousavian was defended at the time by Professor Frank von Hippel who described criticism as “a hatchet job against a political opponent.”
The investigation cites two kidnappings of Princeton graduate students: graduate student Elizabeth Tsurkov’s kidnapping in March by a militia linked to the IRGC while conducting research in Baghdad, Iraq, and the recently settled case of former graduate student Xiyue Wang, who filed a lawsuit against the University for their alleged negligence during his 40 months as a hostage in Iran. A letter to President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 asks if Mousavian used his contacts to secure their release.
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From theNew York State Department of Environmental Conservation
Each year, DEC biologists monitor both the juvenile and spawning adult populations of Atlantic sturgeon, one of the Hudson River’s most iconic fish species. These long-term monitoring programs were developed to track the Hudson River Atlantic sturgeon population following the commercial fishery closure in 1996 due to a declining population.
Since the mid-2000s, DEC’s Hudson and Delaware Marine Fisheries Unit has been monitoring the abundance of juvenile Atlantic sturgeon at their overwintering area in Haverstraw Bay. From late February to the end of April, young Atlantic sturgeon are collected using nets at their overwintering area in Haverstraw Bay. The sturgeon are weighed, measured for length, and examined for previous tags. Untagged fish are tagged under the dorsal fin with a Passive Integrated Transponder or PIT tag. This tag is like a microchip put in pets and is about the size of a grain of rice.
Likewise, each June fisheries biologists use much larger nets (even bigger than the mesh of soccer nets) to monitor the size and sex composition of the adult spawning stock near Hyde Park. Adult sturgeon are processed in a similar fashion as the juveniles. However, the sex of the fish can be determined through the expression of milt or eggs, as individuals are mature and are in spawning condition. The adults also are scanned for a PIT tag. These PIT tags help managers and researchers learn more about sturgeon movement and behavior while in the Hudson. The tags also can be scanned and detected by other scientists in other rivers along the East Coast. Atlantic sturgeon migrate as far south as Georgia and as far north as Canada’s Bay of Fundy, so the tags give scientists clues about where sturgeon migrate from place to place. Lastly, the tags can help learn about reproduction, survival, and population recovery.
Young Atlantic sturgeon spend up to five to seven years in the freshwater Hudson before moving into the ocean to migrate along the east coast. They are also a late maturing species and females may not spawn for the first time until the age of 15. Therefore, protected sturgeon spawned after the 1996 moratorium would only begin to return and spawn in the Hudson River in the early 2010s.
Through DEC’s long-term monitoring of both juvenile and adult sturgeon, DEC biologists are now seeing sturgeon originally PIT tagged as small toddlers returning to spawn as massive adults. Thus far, seven adult sturgeon have been recaptured on the spawning grounds after being at large for as long as 14 years. In 2023, three adults (two originally tagged in 2009 and one in 2011) were recaptured having grown between approximately a meter to 1.5 meters in length! Biologists hope to see an increasing trend in the number of adults that were originally tagged as juveniles returning to spawn in the Hudson River. This would signify the 1996 moratorium and other protection measures are benefiting the species and adult sturgeon are returning to produce more offspring that will overwinter in Haverstraw Bay and ultimately return again as adults.
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Concentrations of HFC-23, one of the world’s most potent greenhouse gases, remained elevated in East Asia after China, a known past polluter, agreed to curb emissions.
BY PHIL MCKENNA AND PETER ALDHOUS, Inside Climate News
Preliminary atmospheric monitoring data from a remote South Korean island off China’s east coast shows elevated concentrations of hydrofluorocarbon-23 (HFC-23), a greenhouse gas 14,700 times more potent than carbon dioxide on a pound-for-pound basis, according to the World Meteorological Association.
In June 2021, China ratified the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, a binding international agreement that seeks to curb emissions of climate-warming HFCs, synthetic gases primarily used for air conditioning and refrigerating. The agreement entered into force in China on September 15, 2021, requiring the country to reduce HFC-23 emissions “to the extent practicable” by the end of 2021.
The primary source of HFC-23 emissions in China was as a byproduct in the manufacturing of HCFC-22, which is used to produce other fluorinated chemicals including polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), or Teflon. More than half of all HCFC-22 has been produced in China since 2009, according to a United Nations Environment Programme report.
To comply with the Montreal Protocol, HCFC-22 manufacturers must install mitigation technologies, at a relatively low cost, to destroy the by-product HFC-23.
However, air samples collected at Gosan contained elevated concentrations of HFC-23, with some measurements roughly twice that of global background levels measured at other remote locations. The elevated concentrations continued through June 2022, the most recent month for which data is available.
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The U.S. EPA’s decision to include landfill methane emissions in its quadrennial document outlining enforcement priorities this year has left industry observers concerned and confused by the enhanced scrutiny.
The agency’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance said it has documented “widespread noncompliance” in methane emissions from landfills in its FY 2024-2027 National Enforcement and Compliance Initiatives document.
As a result, EPA plans to use preexisting requirements set out by the New Source Performance Standards that govern landfills to crack down on methane emissions.
“I am not aware that we have ever been the target of the NECIs in the past,” Anne Germain, chief operating officer and senior vice president of technical and regulatory affairs for the National Waste & Recycling Association, said. “This is relatively new ground.”
The move is part of a broader shift toward climate and environmental justice priorities by the Biden administration and EPA in recent years. Another enforcement priority included in the document was PFAS contamination, which the waste industry hopes will lead to more solutions upstream that reduce contamination for landfills and other downstream waste facilities. Landfills are also wrapped up in the “Mitigating Climate Change” goal that will bring stepped-up enforcement of emissions from oil and gas facilities and the use of hydrofluorocarbons as well.
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