by Arne Jungjohann

Recently, the editorial board of the Washington Post asked if the world can fight global warming without nuclear power, looking to Germany and Japan for the answer.

Both countries are known for a nuclear shutdown path. In Japan, only one of the 54 nuclear reactors currently remains in operation. Germany has closed eights reactors following the nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima in March 2011 and the remaining nine are scheduled to be closed by 2022.

That obviously must lead to rising emissions, the Post claims. Germany’s “electricity sector emits more carbon than it must after eight reactors shut down last year.”

If you look at the most recent emissions data, however, the opposite is happening. Germany reduced its carbon emissions in 2011 by 2.1 percent despite the nuclear phase out. How can that be?

The cut in greenhouse gases was mainly reached due to an accelerated transition to renewable energies and a warm winter. In addition, the EU emissions trading system capped all emissions from the power sector. While eight nuclear power plants were shut down, solar power output increased by 60 percent. In 2011 alone, 7.5 gigawatts of solar were installed. By the end of last year, renewable energies provided more than 20 percent of overall electricity.

The Washington Post refers to critics of this transition who “reasonably predict that the country will instead rely on electricity imports from neighbors running old, reliable coal, gas and, yes, nuclear plants for years to come.”

So this means Germany would import electricity from neighboring countries, such as France, Poland, and the Czech Republic? It’s true, depending on time of day and year, that Germany imports electricity. However, even after shutting its eight oldest nuclear power plants, Germany is still a net exporter of electricity.

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We knew that “deep ocean heat is rapidly melting Antarctic ice.” And we knew that these warm ocean currents melting Antarctica were so intense that, seawater appears to “boil on the surface like a kettle on the stove.”

We also knew that the the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) is inherently far less stable than the Greenland ice sheet because most of it is grounded far below sea level (see below). And JPL has told us that polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up and is on pace for 1 foot sea level rise by 2050.

Now a new study using NASA satellite data finds the WAIS in particular is “being eaten away from below by warm water” as the AP put it, which “suggests that future sea levels could rise faster than many scientists have been predicting.”

The Nature study itself, “Antarctic ice-sheet loss driven by basal melting of ice shelves,” concludes:

We find that ocean-driven ice-shelf thinning is in all cases coupled with dynamic thinning of grounded tributary glaciers that together account for about 40% of Antarctic discharge and the majority of Antarctic ice-sheet mass loss. In agreement with recent model predictions, we conclude that it is reduced buttressing from the thinning ice shelves that is driving glacier acceleration and dynamic thinning. This implies that the most profound contemporary changes to the ice sheets and their contribution to sea level rise can be attributed to ocean thermal forcing that is sustained over decades and may already have triggered a period of unstable glacier retreat.

This ought to be doubly worrisome since scientists told us in October that the Greenland Ice Sheet “could undergo a self-amplifying cycle of melting and warming … difficult to halt.”

The new study is behind a firewall, so I’m excerpting the NASA news release below along with a NASA video.

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Richmond, California protest Chevron on Earth Day.

Chevron posted a modest 4.2 percent increase in first-quarter profits compared to 2011, increasing net gains from $6.2 billion to $6.5 billion. That still translates to more than $71 million per day in the first three months of 2012.

Despite a drop in production, a 12 percent increase in average oil prices boosted Chevron’s profits this quarter.

Meanwhile, Chevron has faced recent protests in California, home to Chevron CEO John Watson, for environmental damage and tax dodging.

Here’s the context for Chevron’s $6.5 billion profits:

Chevron paid a 19 percent effective federal tax rate in 2011, after making $26.9 billion profit.

Spent 19.2 percent of its Q1 profits buying back stocks ($1.25 billion), which enriches the largest shareholders.

Production dropped by nearly 5 percent, from 2.76 million barrels per day in Q1 FY 2011 to 2.63 million barrels in 2012.

Chevron CEO John Watson received $25 million compensation last year, a raise of 52 percent. Chevron’s Vice President received a 75 percent increase to $7.8 million.

Chevron is sitting on even more cash reserves, $18.9 billion, up from $15.9 billion in January.

Has spent more than $500,000 on federal political contributions in the 2012 election cycle. 87 percent of these contributions went to Republicans.

Has spent $3.24 million on lobbying in the first few months of 2012, after spending $9.51 million lobbying in 2011. Some of the Chevron PAC’s major recipients for 2012 include House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) ($5,000), House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) ($5,000), Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) ($5,000), Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) ($7,500), Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) ($5,000).

Chevron is in a legal battle over a $18 billion judgment for environmental damage to Ecuador’s rainforest communities. According to Amazon Defense Coalition, the company has tried to block the decision four different times.

In January, Chevron had a natural gas explosion off the coast of Nigeria, which killed two contractors and “caused a fire to burn for weeks,” according to Reuters.

With just BP left to report its profits on Tuesday, four of the five Big Oil companies have already made over $26 billion in the first 91 days of 2012.

A new resource assessment of U.S. hydro potential finds that the industry could feasibly develop 12,000 megawatts of projects on existing non-powered dams around the country.

However, the inability of Congress to pass a production tax credit or help streamline permitting among regulatory agencies is threatening the hydro industry’s ability to get new projects constructed.

In a report released this month, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory found enormous potential for projects greater than 1 MW on existing dams around the country. There are more than 80,000 non-powered dams scattered throughout the U.S., with roughly 54,000 potentially suitable for energy projects.

Of those 54,000 non-powered dams — ranging from four feet to 770 feet in height — the researchers found about 12 GW of potential electrical generation capacity.

This follows a 2006 report from the Idaho National Laboratory that found roughly 30 GW of potential capacity in rivers around the country. That report assessed small and low-power hydro projects between 10 kW and 30 MW.

Topping it all off, the Department of Interior recently issued an analysis showing that 268 MW of hydro capacity could be developed at waste water treatment facilities around the country. Last month, Interior updated the study by examining the resource potential of waste water conduits and found another 103 MW of potential.

In other words, there’s still a lot of low-impact hydro available.

The U.S. currently has about 96 GW of conventional and pumped storage capacity, providing about 6 percent of total electrical output in 2011. As both of these resource studies point out, the industry has plenty of room to expand — and in a way that can have a much lower environmental footprint:

Importantly, many of the monetary costs and environmental impacts of dam construction have already been incurred at NPDs [non-powered dams], so adding power to the existing dam structure can often be achieved at lower cost, with less risk, and in a shorter timeframe than development requiring new dam construction. The abundance, cost, and environmental favorability of NPDs, combined with the reliability and predictability of hydropower, make these dams a highly attractive source for expanding the nation’s renewable energy supply.

Sounds too good to be true, right? Nothing is ever that simple.

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by Francesco Femia & Caitlin Werrell, via The Center for Climate and Security

The world is suddenly paying attention to the oft-ignored North African country of Mali, as it is racked by its most recent in a long string of crises: a coup d’etat. This political and constitutional crisis sits atop an already extremely vulnerable situation – a volatile mix of climate change, drought, food shortages, migration and immobility, armed insurrection and heavy weapons proliferation that threaten to plunge the country into a state of instability not unlike Somalia. As the international community, including the UN Security Council, moves to act on this crisis, it will be important to consider all the identifiable sources of Mali’s insecurity in order to get the solutions right.

From model to mayhem?

Mali has been described by some as a benchmark country in Africa, where democracy had put down healthy roots over the past two decades. Yet on March 21, a military junta seized control of the government in Timbuktu, ousting the democratically-elected President Amadou Toumani Toure from power. The rationale, according to military spokespersons, was that the government had failed to put a lid on the separatist Tuareg rebellion in the north (a situation we covered in a previous blog.) Soon after, on April 4, the UNSC issued a strongly-worded Presidential statement condemning the coup, and urging military leaders to restore power to civilian control. Since then, the coup leaders have committed to a framework agreement “for the restoration of constitutional order in Mali,” but a positive outcome remains uncertain.

Insecurities under the surface

Despite some previous descriptions of Mali as a success story, significant tensions were seething under the surface all along. The coup came amidst a backdrop of a series of old, perennial insecurities in Mali, and recent ones created by rapid political changes in North Africa.

The first is the aforementioned armed rebellion led by nomadic Tuareg tribesmen, which has been calling for separation from the south for over two decades. In October of last year, these militants formed the the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), and proceeded to violently wrest control of a significant swathe of northeastern Mali, with no signs of slowing down. A few weeks following the coup, the Tuareg managed to seize the “major garrison towns city of Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu,” prompting a chastened Malian military leadership to promise a handover to civilian control once elections could be held. As of today, the Tuareg control most of the country’s northern territory.

The second is the recent arrival of the Algerian Salafist offshoot, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), onto the Mali political scene. On April 4, the UN Security Council expressed serious concern about this entity, warning that Islamist extremists from AQIM and the Tuareg could take advantage of the instability caused by the coup to sow further chaos and advance sharia law.

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Arizona Tea Partier Judy Burges wants to kill clean energy programs.

A round-up of the top climate and energy news. Please post other links below.

An Arizona Tea Party-backed bill that would gut government-run green programs in the state may have the support it needs to go before Gov. Jan Brewer (R). [Huffington Post]

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson says the Obama administration plans to take further action to combat climate change. [Boston Globe]

The Sierra Club said Thursday it will try to block an energy company’s plan to export liquefied natural gas to find new markets for the drilling boom that has flooded the Mid-Atlantic with natural gas. [Associated Press]

A “perfect storm” of economic and regulatory factors is driving major United States utilities to rapidly switch from coal to natural gas as an electric power source, the top executive of one of the nation’s largest utilities said on Thursday. [New York Times]

Energy ministers from around the world met in London this week and got a scolding. The International Energy Agency warned the ministers that they are falling way behind in their efforts to wean the world from dirty sources of energy. Nations are nowhere near being on track to avert significant climate change in the coming decades. [National Public Radio]

Shell will not be joining David Cameron’s crusade to attract private sector investment into creating a North Sea wind revolution despite its commitment to turbines in the US. [Guardian]

Peru became the latest developing country to enact a domestic climate change initiative in the absence of a binding global pact, adopting a resolution on Thursday to lower carbon emissions in its fast-growing economy. [Chicago Tribune]