Glacier Area On Mount Kilimanjaro On The Kenya/Tanzania Border In East Africa Decreased 85% 1912-2007;

Per capita CO2 emissions in Europe

On the two year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it's worth putting the size of that spill into context. By the time it was capped on July 15, 2010, the well had released 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf, making it the largest accidental oil spill in history.

Ongoing drought conditions have the prompted the U.S. Agriculture Department to declare a federal disaster area in more than 1,000 counties covering 26 states. That's almost one-third of all the counties in the United States, making it the largest disaster declaration ever made by the USDA. The result is skyrocketing corn, wheat and soybean prices.

Fourteen US states generate at least 10% of their energy from wind power.

Stanford scholar Mark Z. Jacobson lays out how the US could get to 100% renewable energy by 2050. David Roberts describes his ambitious blueprint and the challenges it would face here.

While deforestation is a major source of global carbon emissions (see previous two posts), the expansion of agriculture into drained organic soils also releases carbon. Wetlands, and especially peatlands, have waterlogged soils. As a result, their soils are depleted of oxygen, preventing decomposition. This means that the carbon in plants and animals is stored in the soils. When these soils are drained, the oxygen returns and organic material decomposes. Decompostion releases the carbon stored in that material. Thus, draining wetland soils releases carbon dioxide and contributes to climate change.

FAO adds emissions from cropland expansion into drained organic soils to deforestation. The result: significant increases in carbon emissions from Indonesia, which has substantial peatlands.

The government owns a whole lot of land in the western United States. The resulting conflict between the government and environmentalists seeking to conserve this land for multiple use (parks, ranching, logging, mining, forestry, wildlife preservation, recreation etc.), and the Wise Use movement seeking to transfer the land from the government to the states or to private ownership, is a hallmark environmental fight in the west that many in the eastern United States are unaware. And it drives these standoffs that we saw in Nevada (Cliven Bundy) and now Oregon.

A recent report from the Energy Information Administration found that U.S. plant owners and operators are getting ready to retire 27 gigawatts’ worth of coal generation, or about 8.5 percent of the coal fleet, between now and 2016. Considering the substantial contribution of burning coal to climate change, coal plant retirements are one of the greatest ways to reduce carbon emissions.

From Vox:

“In recent years, China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, has been making major efforts to restrain its coal use and shift to cleaner sources of energy. When Donald Trump and other conservatives in the United States complain that China isn’t doing anything about climate change, they simply haven’t been paying attention...

Since 2013, China’s coal consumption has actually fallen — due in part to a major economic slowdown but also in part to sluggish output in heavy industries like steel and cement that have traditionally accounted for half the country’s coal use... On top of that, as China’s leaders start to take global warming seriously, the country has been making massive investments in clean energy. As part of the Paris climate deal, China has pledged to get 20 percent of its energy from low-carbon sources by 2030. The government is planning to install an addition 130 gigawatts of wind and solar by 2020 and making big bets on nuclear power.”