Fish, shellfish, sea birds, and marine mammals are at risk

Scientists … plotted the yearly spring bloom of phytoplankton””tiny plants at the base of the ocean food chain””in the Arctic Ocean and found the peak timing of the event has been progressing earlier each year for more than a decade. The researchers analyzed satellite data depicting ocean color and phytoplankton production to determine that the spring bloom has come up to 50 days earlier in some areas in that time span.

The earlier Arctic blooms have roughly occurred in areas where ice concentrations have dwindled and created gaps that make early blooms possible, say the researchers, who publish their findings in the March 9 edition of the journal Global Change Biology.

That’s from the news release at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (where I did my Ph.D. thesis research).  The study itself is here:  “Are phytoplankton blooms occurring earlier in the Arctic?” (subs. req’d).

The figure on the right shows, “Significant trends toward earlier phytoplankton blooms (blue) were detected in about 11% of the area of the Arctic Ocean closest to the North Pole, delayed blooms (red) were evident to the south.”

Human activity is greatly disrupting the entire ocean ecosystem, as the scientific literature makes increasingly clear (see “Geological Society: Acidifying oceans spell marine biological meltdown “by end of century”).  The risks are enormous (see Nature: “Global warming blamed for 40% decline in the ocean’s phytoplankton”:  “Microscopic life crucial to the marine food chain is dying out. The consequences could be catastrophic”).

The Washington Post has a good article on this study, which quotes a number of leading experts raising concerns about the disruption these early blooms may cause:

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Speaking at the Center for American Progress Action Fund today, House energy committee ranking member Henry Waxman (D-CA) railed against the toxic influence of Koch Industries on efforts to fight global warming. Waxman, who fought polluters to pass the Clean Air Act of 1990, is dismayed by the level of outright science denial among the Republican Party today, exemplified by their votes to slash and burn environmental protection, and the Upton-Inhofe bill to reverse the scientific finding that carbon pollution threatens public health:

It apparently no longer matters in Congress what health experts and scientists think. All that seems to matter is what Koch Industries think.

Watch a compilation of Waxman’s remarks:

“Science denial, partisanship, and the rising power of special interests are deeply intertwined,” Waxman said, “and they feed off each other.” He explained the vicious circle fueled by Koch Industries, the private petrochemical conglomerate, and the Republican Party. “Koch Industries benefits immensely from the rollback of EPA regulations, so it backs Republican candidates who advocate this position. And it funds groups that attack science and it organizes anti-regulation demonstrations. Republican strategists see a partisan advantage in attacking efforts to address climate change, so that leads to a growing acceptance of science denial.”

In the question-and-answer period, Waxman was asked why industry is split on climate change, with some companies supporting action, and others opposed. After discussing how he has worked with coal and oil interests to bring them on board to action, he returned to David and Charles Koch:

The Koch brothers, I think, are unique, because they’re not just interested in their financial well-being, they’re interested in ideology. They are uniquely involved in the right wing of this country. They are financing the Tea Party movement, and the Republican Party, and they’re making the politics pay off for them both ideologically and economically.

“So there are industries that we’re never going to completely satisfy,” Waxman concluded. “We’ll do our best to hear their concerns and try to be responsive to them. But if their position is nothing, no way, no how, it’s hard to compromise with that kind of position.”

So I got an email invitation to this American Enterprise Institute event tomorrow:

Energy Policy: Above All, Do No Harm

An Address by John Rowe, Chairman and CEO, Exelon Corporation

Rowe is quite a reasonable guy (see Rowe: Low gas prices and no carbon price push back nuclear renaissance a “decade, maybe two”).  AEI, not so much (see “AEI: Still crazy with denial and delay after all these years“).

The title of the talk is absurd.  The primary goal of energy policy right now should not be “Do No Harm.”  It should be to “Stop doing harm — immediately!” (see Life-cycle study: Accounting for total harm from coal would add “close to 17.8¢/kWh of electricity generated” and The Lancet‘s landmark Health Commission: “Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century”).

The latest climate science makes clear that simply continuing our current energy policy risks multiple, simultaneous catastrophes, any one of which would be reason to dramatically change our energy policy, but combined they represent an existential threat to modern human civilization that creates a moral imperative for abrupt policy change (see “A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice“).

The talk title plays off what many people think is a quote from the famous Hippocratic oath many doctors take.  But it struck me that “Above all, do no harm,” doesn’t actually reflect modern medical practice — which is constantly doing harm to people, through the side-effects of drugs, surgery, and the like, in an effort to save people from far greater harm.

So I looked it up, and, indeed, that isn’t what the Hippocratic oath says.

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By Christy Goldfuss, the Public Lands Project Director at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In a hearing on Thursday, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) claimed that the overwhelming majority of westerners oppose the administration’s recent work to protect wild lands, a responsibility illegally ignored by the Bush administration. As he was questioning Interior Secretary Ken Salazar at a budget hearing before the House Natural Resources Committee, Bishop held up a pile of letters and claimed that the people directly impacted by Secretarial Order 3310 are the ones complaining “time and time again”:

Why are the people directly impacted by these decisions are the ones who are complaining time and time again about these decisions?

Watch it:

The Wild Lands policy introduced by the administration last December fulfills the government’s responsibility under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) to “prepare and maintain” an inventory of public lands for all uses, including wilderness. Under the Bush administration, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had ignored that responsibility.

As Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) said during an oversight hearing last week, “the Bush administration did not want Congress to preserve wilderness so they volunteered to stop looking for it.” In a settlement with the State of Utah, then Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton abandoned BLM’s responsibility to designate new wilderness study areas beyond those identified by recommendations made to Congress in 1993. In the last five years, BLM found more than 18,000 new sites for oil and gas wells but not a single new site for potential wilderness.

When Bishop took the opportunity to support Big Oil, he snubbed the other western elected officials and business owners that support the Wild Lands policy, including those from his own district and state. A letter thanking Secretary Salazar for the Wild Lands policy was signed by 67 elected officials from around the West. People in Colorado were so supportive of the policy that 73 elected officials signed their own letter, and seven businesses from Congressman Bishop’s own district asked him to stop his attack of the Wild Lands policy. That’s 147 businesses and elected officials from around the West that aren’t complaining. They’re saying thanks.

Don’t miss the big House hearing Tuesday, March, 8,  10 am EST, “Climate Science and EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Regulations.”  You should be able to watch it here.  I’ll post the again link tomorrow morning.

The witness list is fascinating, so I’ll go through it in some detail:

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Last coal plant in Pacific Northwest to shut down starting in 2020

The last coal-fired power plant in the Pacific Northwest will shut down completely by 2025 under an agreement announced Saturday by Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire. The first boiler of TransAlta’s 1,460-megawatt plant in Centralia, Wash., is set to go offline in 2020 and the second in 2025.

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In his opening statement,  Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) warned the audience gathered at the Center for American Progress Action Fund that he would be speaking “as bluntly as possible” about the legislative battle being waged over American health and environmental security.  CAP’s Valeri Vasquez has the story.

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While collecting windfall profits, oil giant backs away from its commitments to restore the Gulf Coast

Nine months ago, in the aftermath of the explosion and collapse of the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig, the 24-hour news networks doubled as 24-hour oil spill cams, with a picture-in-picture window of the out-of-control undersea gusher serving as a constant reminder of the ongoing environmental calamity. At the time, promises to clean up the polluted waters and coastlines gushed with equivalent expedience from the mouths of BP executives testifying on Capitol Hill.

Yet today, as the world’s attention is focused on political upheaval in the Gulf of Sidra and the Gulf of Aden rather than environmental upheaval in the Gulf of Mexico, BP is quietly retreating from its responsibility to restore the environmental and economic health of the Gulf coast.

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Jake Caldwell, CAP’s Director of Policy for Agriculture, Trade & Energy, looks at strategies to address rising food prices, in this cross-post. For more, see the CP series on food insecurity

Global food prices increased for the eighth consecutive month in a row, according to a report released today by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, soaring to record levels last month””with devastating consequences for the world’s poor. Food prices are on the rise due to growing populations and rising incomes across much of the developing world alongside tight supplies, high oil prices, and stockpiling of imports as the main factors, although profound uncertainty regarding future harvests due to global warming is also a clear catalyst.

The FAO report is the latest troubling analysis to land at the feet of U.S. policymakers as they consider the possibility of deep and misguided cuts to U.S. food assistance by Congress in the coming weeks. The World Bank estimates that the spike in food prices since June has placed 44 million people into extreme poverty. And the U.S. Department of Agriculture is forecasting U.S. food prices will increase 4 percent this year, squeezing already tight family budgets.

Yet as food prices continue to climb, conservatives in the U.S. House of Representatives are responding by slashing the budgets of the very U.S. government assistance programs that hold the most promise to end the misery and despair that global hunger brings. The House-passed budget proposal, H.R. 1, sends our overseas food aid commitments backwards to 2001 levels, slashing $800 million from the food aid budget at the precise moment when it is needed most and when it will have the greatest impact.

These drastic and shortsighted cuts will inevitably lead to more people going hungry around the world, lost opportunities to sell U.S. products and services in healthy overseas markets, and increased levels of global poverty and instability that threaten our national security. The funding for agricultural investment and emergency food aid needs to be restored immediately.

In particular, Congress needs to embrace the Obama administration’s $1.64 billion budget request to bolster the U.S. investment in global food security through the Feed the Future initiative, which is included in his budget proposal for fiscal year 2012, which begins in October this year. U.S. overseas agriculture assistance today stands at only 3.5 percent of overall U.S. development aid, down from 18 percent in 1979.

These funds are urgently needed. Agricultural productivity growth in developing countries is now less than 1 percent annually. The Feed the Future initiative puts us back on the right course by prioritizing investment in agricultural development in developing countries and establishing partnerships with key countries to leverage local and technical expertise in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions. As the global population surges to 9 billion by 2050, the Feed the Future program represents a forward-leaning investment in the world’s capacity to produce and make accessible more food for all.

The program deserves the nation’s full support, especially due to uncertainty about future harvests and overstretched capacity in the global food system in the face of climate change. In the past year, a series of extreme weather events have increased the level of uncertainty and unpredictability surrounding the success or failure of upcoming harvests. The status of future food stocks are affected by flooding in Australia, Pakistan, and Brazil, and unprecedented heat waves and drought in Russia, Ukraine, and now China. Heavy rains in Iowa and Illinois and dry conditions in key U.S. wheat growing regions such as Kansas and Colorado are also sending prices higher and playing havoc with harvest forecasts.

Leading global companies such as reinsurer Munich Re, whose business it is to know and understand natural disasters, recently noted “It would seem that the only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change.” And the American Association for the Advancement of Science reports that extreme weather events such as drought and heavy rains exacerbated by climate change are already having an effect on the safety of the world’s food supplies as crops are wiped out and health threats to humans from such toxic organisms as mycotoxins flourish in scarce food supply conditions.

Indeed, the consequences of climate change on agriculture could well be even more severe in the coming decades. Agriculture in the United States and the world is at risk from the negative effects of rising temperatures, prolonged drought, and increased evaporation and water consumption. And a rising sea level will lead to more intense flooding and the potential loss of limited arable land. As resources become more scarce, mass migrations of millions of people will intensify.

Given the magnitude of the coming crisis, it is in the national security interests of the United States to provide financing to allow the most vulnerable developing countries to prepare for and adapt to the effects of climate change in agriculture and development. Congress must act to restore funding for climate change adaptation, drought resistance, and tropical forest conservation, consistent with the commitments the United States has made to the world.

The Group of Twenty industrial and industrializing nations have pledged $20 billion for agricultural development in developing countries, and $6 billion for a World Bank fund for food security. To date, however, only $925 million has been delivered. At its June 2011 summit, the G-20 plan to make global food security a centerpiece of their annual summit. In order for the world to make progress on ensuring reliable and affordable access to food, all nations must fulfill their financial commitments.

Of course, rising oil prices also are driving food prices higher. Oil and fossil fuels are a significant agricultural input cost, from fertilizer and crop production, to fuel to drive machinery for farmers and producers. The price of oil also has an impact on the cost of storage and transportation of food around the world. As oil prices rise, inflationary pressures send food prices soaring in both developing countries and the United States.

This is why the United States also must reduce its dependence on foreign oil. The United States must maintain and increase efforts to improve fuel efficiency, invest in non-fossil fuel based research and transportation infrastructure, and bring advanced biofuels to commercial scale. And in light of current ethanol policy and the growing competition for grain, there is a need in the United States to transition beyond corn as a biofuels feedstock and strive to produce advanced biofuels that deliver measurable life cycle greenhouse gas reductions, utilize non-food based feedstocks grown in closed tanks or on semi-arable land that does not compete with food or feed.

Finally, the United States needs to take the lead in combatting shortsighted government and private-sector actions such as government food-export bans and the hoarding of tight supplies. Prohibiting the export of essential staples and the secretive stockpiling of grain supplies are government practices that must end. In addition, subsidies and tariffs in developed countries, and barriers to trade between developing countries must be eliminated.

Eight consecutive months of rising food prices are a threat to global health and poverty reduction. We have moved well beyond a wake-up call. The increases in food and fuel prices are hurting families all over the world, roiling markets, and threatening to stall the global economic recovery. The world needs to work cooperatively toward investing in agriculture, combating climate change, and promoting open and transparent government actions. Congress needs to fully fund the U.S. commitment to agricultural development and food security.

Ultimately, the global food system is resting on a knife’s edge with little margin for error. The condition of new crops due in a few months is now paramount. In order to prevent a full-fledged food crisis, the world will require good harvests in the major food producing nations in the coming months, and the strong political will to make the long-term investments in global food security immediately.

Jake Caldwell is Director of Policy for Agriculture, Trade and Energy at the Center for American Progress.

See also

Making Egypt More Food Secure by Jake Caldwell

The Coming Food Crisis (Foreign Policy) by John Podesta and Jake Caldwell

Last month, CP covered the first bombshell NY Times piece on natural gas fracking (see NYT:  “The dangers to the environment and health are greater than previously understood”). CAP’s Tom Kenworthy has the followup and the fallout.

In the past couple of years big energy has launched an aggressive defense of the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, which employs a mixture of water, sand and chemicals pumped at high pressure deep underground to stimulate production of natural gas and oil. The practice is now used in about 90% of the roughly half million gas wells in the U.S.

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