Fossil fuel emissions may reach an all-time high in 2017


Visitors walk past a sphere featuring national flags at India’s pavilion last week during the COP23 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany. PATRIK STOLLARZ/AFP/Getty Images
Chris Mooney reports for The Washington Post:

Global carbon dioxide emissions are projected to rise again in 2017, climate scientists reported Monday, a troubling development for the environment and a major disappointment for those who had hoped emissions of the climate change-causing gas had at last peaked.

The emissions from fossil fuel burning and industrial uses are projected to rise by up to 2 percent in 2017, as well as to rise again in 2018, the scientists told a group of international officials gathered for a United Nations climate conference in Bonn, Germany.
Despite global economic growth, total emissions held level from 2014 to 2016 at about 36 billion tons per year, stoking hope among many climate change advocates that emissions had reached an all-time high point and would subsequently begin to decline. But that was not to be, the new analysis suggests.
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Will proposed Pinelands rule increase wildfire threat?

 TIM TAI / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Homes adjacent to a section of the Pancoast Road firebreak, foreground, inside the Four Seasons at Mirage residential community in Barnegat, NJ, on Friday, Nov. 10, 2017.

Jacqueline L. Urgo reports for Philly.com:

The Pinelands Commission is contemplating proposed changes to its “comprehensive management plan” that Bill Brash, president of the New Jersey Fire Safety Council, a Freehold-based nonprofit, feels could pose a fire hazard by making it more difficult to construct and maintain firebreaks wider than six feet.


Proposed amendments to the commission’s Comprehensive Management Plan would add a requirement that construction and maintenance of any firebreak over six feet wide would need a permit before any work commences.

“There are literally thousands of miles of firebreaks in the Pinelands — most of them well over six feet wide — so this proposed amendment would require a permit for nearly all of them,” said Brash, who insists the measure could slow down the firebreak process in red tape.


A spokesman for the DEP, the agency that oversees the Forest Fire Service, said it is reviewing the proposal but currently has no further comment.
The Pinelands Commission, which manages 938,000 acres in the 1.1 million-acre federally protected lands, is reviewing its overall  management plan and will accept written comment from the public on the matter until Nov. 17, said its executive director, Nancy Wittenberg.

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Changing energy market disrupts pioneers GE and Siemens

From the Financial Times:

As the costs of solar and wind power have plunged, making them cheaper than fossil fuel generation in many parts of the world, the traditional model of the industry has changed. Capital spending on the new technologies has soared. Battery storage is also starting to be a cost-effective solution for supporting the grid, challenging the market for “peaker” gas turbines that are used when demand is at its highest. Yet both groups have taken positions in renewable energy but have stumbled along the way. 


 The result is that GE and Siemens are being forced to drive down costs dramatically in their core power businesses. Siemens is looking to cut thousands of jobs in its power and gas unit. On Monday, new GE chief executive John Flannery will outline his plans for turning round the American group, whose financial position has become so precarious that it has been evaluating a cut in its once rock-solid dividend.


Yet although both groups face a turbulent environment, the immediate outlook is considerably brighter at Siemens, which appears to be better positioned to adjust to the disruption sweeping through the energy industry.


GE’s 2017 has been a disaster. Questions swirled in June when the company announced the departure of Jeff Immelt, chief executive since 2001. Answers arrived in October, when GE reported a fall in earnings for the third quarter and sharply reduced its guidance for the full year. Mr Flannery, who took over in August, described those results as “unacceptable, to say the least”, and said the company needed to “to make some major changes with urgency”.


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Prieto concedes NJ Assembly Speaker post to Coughlin

The months-long political drama involving the Democratic leadership of the New Jersey Assembly is over.

Vincent Prieto of Secaucus announced Thursday that he will not seek the post again in January, effectively handing it to Craig Coughlin of Woodbridge. 


North Jersey loses. Central Jersey wins. 


Brenda Flanagan reports the story for NJTV News:

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Pruitt’s political foxes chowing down in the EPA hen house

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt talks with reporter in Hazard, KY

Career employees at the agency say political appointees are shutting them out of decision-making. They worry that the public will suffer.

Rachel Leven reports for the Center for Public Integrity:
Today’s EPA is wracked with internal conflict and industry influence, and is struggling to fulfill its mission, according to more than two dozen current and former agency employees. A few dozen political appointees brought in under the Trump administration are driving policy. At least 16 of the 45 appointees worked for industries such as oil, coal and chemicals. Four of these people — and another 21 — worked for, or donated to, politicians who have questioned established climate science, such as Pruitt and Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla.

Most of the 46 political appointees working at EPA previously worked for climate change doubters or industry 

Career staff members — lawyers, scientists, analysts — are largely being frozen out of decision-making, current and former agency employees say. These staffers rarely get face time with Pruitt and frequently receive top-down orders from political appointees with little room for debate. They must sometimes force their way into conversations about subjects in which they have expertise.
And that is a big mistake, said one of Pruitt’s predecessors.
Career employees are “very dedicated to protecting human health and the environment, and they will change their ways of how they do that if they’re convinced you really want to accomplish that aim,” said Christine Todd Whitman, EPA administrator under President George W. Bush.
One such employee agreed. “I think it’s the fact that we’re not following regular procedures, we’re not sure of what the legal justification is for some of the things they’re asking us to do. We’re just kind of being told ‘Do the opposite thing you did 18 months ago.’ That’s hard to swallow.”
Under Pruitt, who sued the EPA 14 times as Oklahoma’s attorney general, the agency already has declined to ban a pesticide linked to neurological damage in children; frozen requirements to reduce water pollution from coal-fired power plants and opened the door to loosening limits on toxic coal waste. The EPA most recently proposed eliminating the Clean Power Plan, an Obama administration rule aimed at reducing carbon emissions in the power sector.
“These rules [being rolled back] aren’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. There are ways to improve things,” said Gordon Binder, who served as chief of staff for then-EPA Administrator William Reilly under President George H.W. Bush. “But Pruitt’s come in with a flyswatter and is slapping them down instead of laying out the problems with a rule and saying, ‘How can we fix it?’”
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GOP tax plan could suck the juice out of NJ clean-energy


Just when New Jersey’s clean-energy advocates find
an ally in the governor’s office to back their agenda,
the federal government is moving to phase out tax incentives that have helped promote solar and wind energy, as well as electric vehicles.


Tom Johnson reports for NJ Spotlight:

New Jersey Gov.-elect Phil Murphy won a string of endorsements from environmentalists for his clean-energy platform, which included a goal of having 100 percent of the state’s electricity generated by renewable energy by 2050.
But achieving that target could prove difficult if Republicans in Washington, D.C., succeed in passing a tax plan that would eliminate and slash tax credits that encourage the use of solar and wind power, and give consumers more of an incentive to switch to electric vehicles.
The tax-reform plan now being debated by Congress would eliminate a $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles, reduce a tax credit for wind production by one-third, and eventually phase out an existing tax credit for solar after 2027.


Undermining NJ’s efforts


The actions could complicate the state’s plans to ramp up its reliance on renewable energy, as well undermine efforts to build the infrastructure for electric vehicles and convince motorists to switch to cleaner-running vehicles.
“This plan barely touches huge tax giveaways for fossil fuels,’’ said Ana Unruh Cohen, director of government affairs for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “But it would zero-out cost-effective electric-vehicle tax credits and weaken tax credits for wind and solar that are creating jobs, spurring innovation, meeting consumer demand, and cleaning up the air.’’
In New Jersey, as elsewhere in the Northeast, the biggest source of greenhouse-gas emissions contributing to global warming is the transportation sector. The state’s global-warming reduction law requires an 80 percent decrease in such emissions by 2050, a target that likely will be impossible to meet unless steep cuts from vehicles are achieved, according to clean-energy advocates.
Sen. Bob Smith, the chairman of the Senate Environment and Energy Committee, is planning to put a priority in the next legislative session in January on moving a package of bills that would promote the use of electric vehicles. Losing the $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles is a blow to that goal.
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