MY DIAGNOSIS AND PROGNOSIS

My prognosis is very likely to be very good, despite the ominous sounding diagnosis — a small well-defined pancreatic neuro-endocrine tumor (PNET). Today, Thursday, I had surgery at Johns Hopkins to remove it. It wasn’t causing symptoms (that I’m aware of).

A PNET may or may not be cancer depending on your definition of cancer. In any case, it’s not what people normally think of when they hear the word cancer, particularly pancreatic cancer. You can read a “layman’s guide” to PNETs by Matthew Dallek at Slate.

I don’t generally blog about my health, in part since it takes a lot to stop me from blogging, but this is blogworthy, I think for a few reasons:

1. There are many analogies between dealing with early stage climate change and dealing with early stage diseases, analogies I’ve often made myself. As you can imagine, I’ve thought of a few more in the last several weeks.
2. Steve Jobs had a PNET, too, so there is a lot written about them for a general audience — and a lot written about Jobs’ 9-month delay in seeking conventional treatment (i.e. surgery).
3. It is Rare Disease Day. No seriously, click here. If you can’t write about a rare disease today, when can you? [And yes, my surgery was scheduled today purely coincidentally.]

Analogy-wise or coincidentally (take your pick), Hopkins uses a consensus-based approach for cases like mine. So every Tuesday night, one of the doctors presents the case to the entire multi-disciplinary pancreatic cyst team — a big group of gastroenterologists, surgeons, pathologists, researchers, radiologists, and others — and they come up with a recommended course of treatment. [A key reason this team exists is that CAT scans and the like are so good now they pick up a lot of cysts and tumors at an early stage incidentally -- as in my case and Dallek's -- and folks need to figure out what to do with them.]

The doctors say my prognosis is very probably very good — won’t know for sure until they remove and examine it. But then the prognosis was apparently quite good if I didn’t do anything — but there was chance it would metastasize, so the recommendation is to take it out. Can’t argue with the consensus, can you?

So one big difference between this PNET and global warming is that global warming is highly likely to be fatal to a livable climate and modern civilization if left untreated. Still, I think it safe to say  that most people would take it out, but then most people act considerably more risk averse toward worst-case scenarios in their own life than society is acting towards the business-as-usual scenario of  unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gas.

The other reason most folks would take this out is that Steve Jobs delayed removing his. Jobs had a PNET, too, though his may have been symptomatic and functioning (i.e. releasing hormones) and mine does not appear to be (it was discovered incidentally). His was at the head of the pancreas, which required far more extensive surgery. Also, he put off surgery for 9 months doing alternative medicine, which may or may not  have contributed to his death — there is huge controversy over that.

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After a difficult first year in 2011, during which Chevrolet sold a mere 7,671 Volts, sales of the vehicle shot up to a respectable 23,461 car sales for 2012 — driven largely by consumer demand reacting to high gas prices. According to the Washington Post (hat tip to Treehugger) that surge looks likely to continue: General Motors will be upping 2013′s production to 36,000 units.

Able to run on electrical or gasoline power, the Volt — along with other hybrids, electric vehicles, and fuel-efficient cars — has helped boost job growth in the automotive sector in the face of a sluggish economy. This happened despite a storm of right-wing contempt for fuel-efficient automobile technology over the last few years, which focused largely on the Volt as a symbol of President Obama’s (largely successful) attempts to give the American automotive industry a chance to retool itself and get back on its feet.

Since then, overall hybrid sales increased 50 percent in 2012 from the previous model year, sales of plug-in electric vehicles tripled, and GM itself captured 7 percent of the hybrid market — up 2 percent from the year before. And now the company is looking to bulk up its Volt production by 20 percent:

General Motors Co. is planning to build as many as 36,000 Chevrolet Volts and other plug-in hybrids for worldwide delivery this year, 20 percent more than in 2012, two people familiar with the effort said.

GM is planning to build 1,500 to 3,000 of the fuel- efficient vehicles a month, said the people, who didn’t want to be identified because the target isn’t public. GM sold about 30,000 Volt and similar Opel Ampera cars globally in 2012, said Jim Cain, a company spokesman, who declined to give a target for this year.

Chief Executive Officer Dan Akerson has struggled to compete against more successful alternative-power vehicles such as Toyota Motor Corp.’s Prius. The CEO originally touted the Volt’s gasoline-and-electric system as the technology of the future and forecast global Volt sales of 60,000 in 2012, before settling for half that amount.

The 36,000 target is “probably a doable number,” Jim Hall, principal of consultancy 2953 Analytics, said. “It will have a full calendar year in Europe” and GM will probably sell more this year now that the Volt is eligible for the car-pool lane in California, he said.

Admittedly, these numbers remain behind GM’s previous hoped-for targets. It still lags Toyota, which boosted its hybrid sales 70 percent in 2012 over the previous model year, dominating the market with 892,519 sales of its various Prius hybrid models worldwide. The Prius starts at $24,200 — and a subcompact Prius model sells for $19,080 — which undercuts GM’s $39,145 four-seat Volt.

So good news for electric and hybrid cars as a whole, and thus for fuel efficiency and the environment. But less so for the Volt itself.

Still, the Chevy Volt has several factors going in its favor. It was selected as 2011′s North American Car of the Year — with 92 percent of those surveyed telling Consumer Reports they would buy open again. Meanwhile, fuel standards are set to require 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, technological moves on the horizon promise to make the car’s lithium ion battery technology lighter and more efficient, and there’s every reason to think high gas prices are here to stay.

By Auden Schendler and Jeffrey York via Denver Post

What might you expect to find in communities where “family values” are the strongest? More churches? More parents helping out in classrooms? Maybe more bake sales? Yes, perhaps. But there’s one thing you would definitely find: solar panels.

Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder shows that one modern marker of communities with greater “family interdependence” — a social science term that indicates the value a person places on time spent with their family — is that more new solar energy businesses take root. Further, where state solar incentives are in place, high levels of family interdependence seem to supercharge the effectiveness of those incentives.

These aren’t just weird facts. The information is mind-blowing. It suggests that if government cares about solving climate change, or clean energy jobs, or entrepreneurship, then social norms — the unwritten rules of community conduct — might matter as much as rebates and incentives.

In short, for President Obama to meet his goal of responding to the threat of climate change and sow the seeds of clean energy development, he may not only need to build consensuses in Congress and implement the right economic policies. He might also need to rebuild Mayberry; to increase societal cohesion, neighborliness, family relationships, and community-mindedness. In fact, bolstering civic participation and fostering communities that value family might be just as important as economic policy in fixing climate change.

But this borders on crazy talk. The “family values” people are the very ones who oppose climate solutions; they hate the idea of “social engineering.” Could they, nonetheless, have been on to something? Is there something to our collective nostalgia for Mayberry?

We think so. Perhaps the new businesses we’ll need to help solve climate change can best be encouraged by old values that we’ve lost in a world where “social” means isolating yourself indoors on Facebook. Taking it one step further, maybe one of the reasons we can’t seem to solve climate change is that unaffiliation and non-participation (dodging your neighbor in the driveway so he or she doesn’t get you off schedule) have replaced the cohesiveness of past communities where you knew the paper boy and you didn’t lock the door.

How might we change this?

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Cross-posted from the Center for American Progress.

In his State of the Union address last month, President Barack Obama touted the growth of the American renewable energy sector that has occurred during his time in office—particularly the doubling of “the amount renewable energy we generate from sources like wind and solar.” He pointed out that “Last year, wind energy added nearly half of all new power capacity in America.” These metrics are proof that the renewable energy sector is capable of boosting economic growth while moving us away from the dirty energy sources of the past.

Yet despite the booming expansion of onshore renewable energy facilities, the United States still lags behind many other industrialized countries when it comes to development of a resource that we have in abundance in close proximity to some of our areas of greatest demand for electricity: offshore wind. As we have stood on the sidelines over the past two decades, other countries such as Denmark, the United Kingdom, Germany, and even China have leapt ahead of us, recognizing the inherent value of this strong, commercially viable, renewable resource. As of June 2012, the rest of the world boasted 4,619 megawatts of installed offshore wind energy capacity, while the United States has yet to begin construction on its first offshore wind turbine.

Under President Obama, the Department of Energy announced its intention to close that gap by developing 54 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030 — more than 10 times the amount currently installed worldwide — and has begun taking proactive steps to achieve this target. In just the past five months, the administration has made major strides toward encouraging renewable energy development on the outer continental shelf. In October the Department of the Interior signed its first lease under the “Smart from the Start” program with NRG Bluewater Wind for a wind farm off the coast of Delaware. In November the department announced the first-ever competitive lease sales, giving multiple companies the opportunity to bid for leases on previously identified “wind energy areas” in federal waters off the coasts of Virginia, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. And In December the Department of Energy announced that it will fund seven offshore wind technology demonstration projects, including Fishermen’s Atlantic City Windfarm in New Jersey; pilot projects in California, the Great Lakes, Connecticut, and Maine; and two turbines off the coast of Virginia.

Despite these advances and pledges of support, critics of the offshore wind industry insist that the technology is too expensive to fully compete with traditional sources of energy — fossil fuels—without massive subsidies. To put that theory to the test, the Center for American Progress, the Clean Energy States Alliance, the Sierra Club, and the U.S. Offshore Wind Collaborative commissioned a study from the Brattle Group — a consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts — to investigate the costs and benefits of developing a commercial-scale offshore wind industry in the United States.

To date, most studies of offshore wind energy development tended to analyze individual projects, focusing on the specific costs and benefits of building a particular offshore wind farm. Since the next offshore wind farm built in the United States will actually be the first, and first-in-class products or projects of any kind are inherently more expensive, the results of these analyses don’t accurately account for the broader economic impact of developing an entire offshore wind industry the way that the Obama administration and the Department of Energy have suggested. Therefore, we asked the Brattle Group to develop estimates of the overall investment that would be required to develop such an industry in the United States and how that investment would affect the price of electricity. Read more

John Farrell via ILSR

Suddenly everyone knows about Germany’s solar power dominance because Fox News made asses of themselves, suggesting that the country is a sunny, tropical paradise. Most media folks have figured out that there are some monster differences in policy (e.g. a feed-in tariff), but then latch on to the “Germans pay a lot extra” meme. Germans do, and are perfectly happy with it, but that’s still not the story.

The real reason Germany dominates in solar (and wind) is their commitment to democratizing energy.

Half of their renewable power is owned by ordinary Germans, because that wonky sounding feed-in tariff (often known as a CLEAN Contract Program in America) makes it ridiculously simple and safe for someone to park their money in generating solar electricity on their roof instead of making pennies in interest at the bank.

It also makes their “energy change” movement politically bulletproof. Germans aren’t tree-hugging wackos giving up double mochas for wind turbines. They are investing by the tens of thousand in a clean energy future that is putting money back in their pockets and creating well over 300,000 new jobs (at last count). Their policy makes solar cost half as much to install as it does in America, where the free market’s red tape can’t compete with their “socialist” efficiency.

Fox News’ gaffe about sunshine helps others paper over the real tragedy of American energy policy. In a country founded on the concept of self-reliance (goodbye, tea imports!), we finance clean energy with tax credits that make wind and solar reliant on Wall Street instead of Main Street. We largely preclude participation by the ordinary citizen unless they give up ownership of their renewable energy system to a leasing company. We make clean energy a complicated alternative to business as usual, while the cloudy, windless Germans make the energy system of the future by making it stupid easy and financially rewarding.

I’m all for pounding the faithless fools of Fox, but let’s learn the real secret to German energy engineering and start making democratic energy in America.

– John Farrell directs the Energy Self-Reliant States and Communities program at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. This was reprinted with permission.

In yet another sign of climate change’s decimating effects on Arctic sea ice, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) just kicked off a program to update some of its nautical charts.

As Climate Central reports, routes through the Arctic Ocean have great economic value. They can serve as a shortcut between Europe and Asia, which can save shipping companies many thousands of miles of travel and thus considerable costs. But these passages have generally been blocked by ice, making extensive mapping of the sea floor to guide ships unnecessary.

Now that situation is changing. In 2012, the “minimum extent” for Arctic sea ice — the low point in the cyclical shifts the ice coverage goes through annually — reached a measure lower than any that’s been recorded since scientists began collecting satellite data in the late 1970s. At 3.41 million square kilometers, 2012′s minimum beat out the previous record, set in 2007, of 4.17 million square kilometers. For reference, that drop of roughly 800,000 square kilometers — an 18 percent collapse — constitutes an area larger than the state of Texas.

And with all that melting, the arctic routes are opening up, requiring NOAA to lay down 14 new charts in order to keep commercial traffic along the new paths as safe as possible:

The revisions affect Alaska’s coast, which has America’s only Arctic seafront. As a result of global warming, ice that has historically blocked Arctic waters, even in summer, has been plummeting in recent years, with 2012 ice melting back to the smallest extent since satellite records began. And as sea ice recedes, said NOAA Coast Survey director Rear Admiral Gerd Glang in a press release, “vessel traffic is on the rise.” [...]

Already by 2010, both the Northwest Passage across the Arctic coast of Canada and the Northern Sea Route, across Russia, had been ice-free simultaneously for an unprecedented third year in a row, encouraging a flurry of interest by commercial ship companies. Last summer a Chinese ship navigated the even more reliably frozen route right across the North Pole. [...]

“We don’t have decades to get it done,” said Capt. Doug Baird, chief of the Coast Survey’s marine chart division, in the press release describing the agency’s new Arctic Nautical Charting Plan. “Ice diminishment is here now.”

In fact, the collapse in the coverage area of Arctic sea is a radical shift unprecedented in at least 2000 years, as far as scientists are able to determine. It’s been matched by an equally dramatic drop in the volume of ice — a plunge to one fifth its level in 1980 — that was recently confirmed by the work of Britain’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) using the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 satellite. At this point, most experts think a completely ice-free Arctic could be a reality as soon as 2030.

Due to feedback loops, global warming actually affects the Arctic faster than other areas. Sea water absorbs much more of the sun’s heat than the relatively reflective ice cover — so as the ice recedes and exposes more of the ocean to sunlight, the ocean temperature rises. That in turn warms the local air, which makes the formation of new, thicker, lasting ice even more unlikely, and the process circles around again.

All this can in turn effect the wider planet: Warmer and and moister air in the Arctic atmosphere can alter the climate patterns that keep frigid air circling northward, along it to plunge south — a possible factor in the extreme winters the Northern Hemisphere has been seeing recently. It can also speed up the melting of glaciers and ice caps in Greenland or the Canadian Archipelago, and even speed up the melting of northern permafrost. That latter result threatens to damage homes, roads and other infrastructure that rests on soil which typically remains frozen. And melting permafrost also promises to release many gigatons of methan, an even more potent — though shorter-lived –greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Few, if any, observers or lawmakers think a carbon tax is likely to emerge from the gridlocked Congress anytime soon, and the Obama Administration has specifically said it isn’t planning to propose one, yet debate over the idea is becoming louder and more pointed. [Politico]

The National Association of Manufacturers and left-leaning think tank The Brookings Institution locked horns on Tuesday, with each issuing new analyses on carbon taxes that came to very different conclusions.

NAM says a carbon tax would cripple American businesses and not accomplish its goals. Brookings says the tax would be an efficient way to boost federal revenues, drive down greenhouse gas emissions and enable Washington to cut high corporate tax rates.

And Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), ranking member of the Senate environment committee, wants to make sure the White House isn’t interested. In a letter Tuesday, Vitter asked to President Barack Obama to reaffirm his opposition to a carbon tax — and to come out against newly proposed legislation from Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) that would put a fee on carbon.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has launched a program to update some of its nautical charts, thanks largely to climate change. The revisions affect Alaska’s coast, as ice that has historically blocked Arctic waters has plummeted in recent years. [Climate Central]

An expert witness said Wednesday that BP’s negligence caused the 2010 explosion aboard a Gulf of Mexico drilling rig, killing 11 workers and spilling millions of barrels of oil. [NYTimes]

As U.S. oil and natural gas production booms, the Obama administration’s energy policy has been “fluid” by necessity, according to top White House advisers, and “might not look perfectly pretty from the outside” as it evolves to shifting supply-and-demand scenarios. [Reuters]

U.S. natural-gas production will accelerate over the next three decades, new research indicates, providing the strongest evidence yet that the energy boom remaking America will last for a generation. [WSJ]

Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) says solar power, a business it abandoned four years ago, may expand into the world’s biggest source of energy in the next half century. [Bloomberg]

Ministers are unnecessarily driving up energy bills for consumers by failing to fully commit to low-carbon energy production, the British government’s official advisers have warned the energy secretary, Ed Davey. [The Guardian]

South Africa delayed introducing a carbon tax until 2015, after objections from metals companies such as ArcelorMittal (MT) South Africa Ltd. and Gold Fields Ltd. (GFI). [Bloomberg]

The UK Guardian has put me in a gallery of “climate change abolitionists, those engaging in an uphill battle to challenge the broken systems that threaten our survival.” They also want your suggestions for who else to add (click here).

Climate change abolitionists: who is fighting for a more sustainable world? It took Abraham Lincoln and others many years of campaigning to abolish slavery — but who are the contemporary figures fighting to abolish dangerous climate change?

Well, I don’t really think I should be mentioned in the same breath as Lincoln — unless you are talking about our mutual love of the figures of speech and my book Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga.

The Guardian has a good piece by Andrew Winston accompanying the gallery,”The campaign to abolish slavery has many parallels with the work of today’s climate change activists: it takes bravery and determination to try and make the world a better place.”

I agree that there are many parallels, many of which are spelled out in that article — and in an even longer piece in the Boston Phoenix, by Wen Stephenson, “The New Abolitionists: Global warming is the great moral crisis of our time,” which argues ”the climate-justice movement must embrace its radicalism to fight it.”

And readers of my books know I think metaphors are important — and that our inaction on climate change is a great moral crisis, the greatest moral crisis of our time. But it is also useful to spell out the differences.

Obviously slavery was not merely a great moral wrong, but cruel and inhumane to millions from the very start and for as long as it was occurring.

Unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions became immoral only when we learned that they would destroy a livable climate — and while we certainly need to go to zero this century, ideally by mid-century, we don’t have to go to zero tomorrow whereas, of course, slavery needed to be ended completely and instantly.

Winston writes:

So what are we “abolishing”? Climate abolitionists are not fighting to eliminate growth. Eradicating slavery did not rid the world of cotton or tobacco, and moving away from carbon will not mean abandoning human and economic development – in fact, it will help ensure it. What we want to abolish is our outmoded, broken economic and energy systems that threaten our survival, in part because they put no value on human and ecosystem inputs and impacts. We’re seeking a new way of powering our world that will save vast sums of money (variable costs of near zero), avoid the significant health impacts of burning dirty fossil fuels, and conserve our planet’s ability to support not only our entire $70tn economy, but our very existence.

I do think that is where we need to start. Development will continue, but it will have to continue as CO2 is pulled out of the economy ASAP. I’ll have more to say about “growth” soon.

Stephenson’s piece focuses on Tim DeChristopher. Here are two excerpts:

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By Kiley Kroh

After a year full of mishaps and failures in its quest to drill for oil off the coast of Alaska, Royal Dutch Shell announced today that it would not pursue exploratory drilling activity in the Arctic Ocean this year.  The decision comes as the Obama administration nears the end of its high-level, 60-day review of Shell’s troubled Arctic drilling program, which was announced on January 8.

Last year was fraught with problems for Shell as the company attempted the first Arctic offshore exploratory drilling activity in decades. Technical failures, permit violations, struggles with the harsh and unpredictable Arctic conditions, and warnings from a wide range of voices all combined to discredit the company’s claims that such operations could be carried out safely and responsibly.

Shell made clear it sees this announcement as a hiatus, not a cancellation of its plans to tap the Arctic reserves. Marvin Odum, Shell’s Director of Upstream Americas said, “Our decision to pause in 2013 will give us time to ensure the readiness of all our equipment and people following the drilling season in 2012.”

Following mishaps this year, both of the company’s Arctic drilling rigs, the Kulluk and Noble Discoverer, require substantial repairs and will be towed to Asia.  The Kulluk was damaged when it was grounded near Kodiak, Alaska on New Year’s Eve and the Noble Discoverer was recently cited for multiple safety and environmental violations – now the subject of an investigation that was handed over to the Department of Justice this week.

As articulated in the recent op-ed co-authored by John Podesta and Carol Browner, the Center for American Progress was open to the possibility of offshore drilling in this remote region provided the Administration took significant steps to strengthen safeguards and improve response capacity, and the industry could demonstrate it was prepared for the extreme risk. Instead, Shell proved precisely the opposite – the oil and gas industry is not prepared for the enormous challenge of drilling in the Arctic Ocean.

As we’ve detailed numerous times, there is a tremendous and incalculable risk associated with any offshore operations in the Arctic. First, the region lacks even the basic infrastructure that would be necessary to mount a large-scale response to an oil spill or other major incident – roads, major airports, ports, a permanent Coast Guard facility, adequate facilities to house and feed responders. These obstacles, coupled with the extreme and volatile conditions in which companies would be operating, led the insurance giant Lloyd’s of London to warn companies that responding to an oil spill in a region “highly sensitive to damage” would present “multiple obstacles, which together constitute a unique and hard-to-manage risk.” And Total SA, the fifth largest oil and gas company in the world, announced it wouldn’t seek to drill in the Arctic because an accident there would be a “disaster.”

Rushing into Arctic offshore drilling is not an imperative and thus should not be attempted unless and until independent auditors determine the industry and the government are capable of acting responsibly and responding to a true worst-case scenario. No operation is foolproof, but when even the most carefully watched drilling operations repeatedly fail to attain safety certification, then are hit with routine air pollution violations, and marred by twice letting major pieces of equipment be cast adrift, the American people have no reason to continue taking oil companies at their word when they tell us they can operate safely and responsibly in this remote and dangerous region.

Related Resources:

• TIMELINE: Documenting Shell’s 2012 Arctic Drilling Debacle
• Putting a Freeze on Arctic Ocean Drilling
• VIDEO: The Risks of Drilling in Alaska’s Arctic Ocean

– Kiley Kroh is the Associate Director for Ocean Communications at the Center for American Progress

Rachel Nuwer via Take Part

In 1922 the conservationist Aldo Leopold canoed through a lush, verdant delta full of green lagoons, darting fish and squawking waterfowl. But Leopold’s “milk and honey wilderness,” where the Colorado River empties into Mexico’s Gulf of California, ceased to exist decades ago. In its stead, a cracked, barren mudflat stretches for miles.

“If we choose, we can have healthy rivers alongside healthy economies,” Postel said. “We don’t have to be running our rivers dry.”

“This amazing place does not exist anymore,” said Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project and freshwater fellow of the National Geographic Society. “A lot was lost.”

Ten major dams — from the Hoover Dam, erected in 1936, to the Glen Canyon Dam, completed in 1966 — block the flow of the Colorado River. Countless towns and industries siphon water from the river and its many tributaries as it meanders to the sea. Today the Colorado River joins the likes of the Indus, the Rio Grande, the Nile and other major world rivers that are so over-tapped they no longer reach the sea for long stretches of time. “This is one of America’s iconic rivers,” Postel said. “I don’t think this country would be the one we know today without the Colorado.”

It does not have to be this way, however. A restoration and outreach effort called Change the Course seeks to return the river to the sea. To pursue this goal, the National Geographic Society, the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, and Participant Media teamed up and pooled their expertise — science, social media, storytelling and policy — to change the fate of the once-mighty Colorado River.

A key to the campaign’s potential success rests on reversing more than 100 years of water use along the river. Since the mid-1800s, the Colorado River’s water was legally divided amongst farmers, landowners and ranchers along its course. Then, in the 1920s, seven states in the Colorado basin were allowed to divert additional water for cities, agriculture and industry. The result: more people have rights to divert water than the river has water to supply.

The clincher, however, is this: water rights holders have to “use it or lose it.” If a stakeholder does not divert his allocated amount of water from the river each year, he may lose those rights.

Bonneville Environmental Foundation, a nonprofit based in Portland, seized upon this idea.

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In October, a NOAA-led study found that “Warming-Driven Arctic Ice Loss Is Boosting Chance of Extreme U.S. Weather.” A new study offers another mechanism for warming to drive extreme weather — JR

Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research news release

The world has suffered from severe regional weather extremes in recent years, such as the heat wave in the United States in 2011 or the one in Russia 2010 coinciding with the unprecedented Pakistan flood. Behind these devastating individual events there is a common physical cause, propose scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). The study will be published this week in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and suggests that man-made climate change repeatedly disturbs the patterns of atmospheric flow around the globe’s Northern hemisphere through a subtle resonance mechanism.

“An important part of the global air motion in the mid-latitudes of the Earth normally takes the form of waves wandering around the planet, oscillating between the tropical and the Arctic regions. So when they swing up, these waves suck warm air from the tropics to Europe, Russia, or the US, and when they swing down, they do the same thing with cold air from the Arctic,” explains lead author Vladimir Petoukhov.

“What we found is that during several recent extreme weather events these planetary waves almost freeze in their tracks for weeks. So instead of bringing in cool air after having brought warm air in before, the heat just stays. In fact, we observe a strong amplification of the usually weak, slowly moving component of these waves,” says Petoukhov. Time is critical here: two or three days of 30 degrees Celsius are no problem, but twenty or more days lead to extreme heat stress. Since many ecosystems and cities are not adapted to this, prolonged hot periods can result in a high death toll, forest fires, and dramatic harvest losses.

Anomalous surface temperatures are disturbing the air flows

Climate change caused by greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning does not mean uniform global warming – in the Arctic, the relative increase of temperatures, amplified by the loss of snow and ice, is higher than on average. This in turn reduces the temperature difference between the Arctic and, for example, Europe, yet temperature differences are a main driver of air flow. Additionally, continents generally warm and cool more readily than the oceans. “These two factors are crucial for the mechanism we detected,” says Petoukhov. “They result in an unnatural pattern of the mid-latitude air flow, so that for extended periods the slow synoptic waves get trapped.”

The authors of the study developed equations that describe the wave motions in the extra-tropical atmosphere and show under what conditions those waves can grind to a halt and get amplified. They tested their assumptions using standard daily weather data from the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). During recent periods in which several major weather extremes occurred, the trapping and strong amplification of particular waves – like “wave seven” (which has seven troughs and crests spanning the globe) – was indeed observed. The data show an increase in the occurrence of these specific atmospheric patterns, which is statistically significant at the 90 percent confidence level.

The probability of extremes increases – but other factors come in as well

“Our dynamical analysis helps to explain the increasing number of novel weather extremes. It complements previous research that already linked such phenomena to climate change, but did not yet identify a mechanism behind it,” says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of PIK and co-author of the study. “This is quite a breakthrough, even though things are not at all simple – the suggested physical process increases the probability of weather extremes, but additional factors certainly play a role as well, including natural variability.” Also, the 32-year period studied in the project provides a good indication of the mechanism involved, yet is too short for definite conclusions.

Nevertheless, the study significantly advances the understanding of the relation between weather extremes and man-made climate change. Scientists were surprised by how far outside past experience some of the recent extremes have been. The new data show that the emergence of extraordinary weather is not just a linear response to the mean warming trend, and the proposed mechanism could explain that.

– Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research news release

Related Posts:

 

President Obama should require existing power plants to reduce their emissions by at least one-quarter by 2020.

By Daniel F. Becker and James Gerstenzang, reprinted with permission of the authors

ELECTRIC power plants spew about 40 percent of the carbon dioxide pollution in the United States, but, amazingly, there are no federal limits on utility emissions of this potent greenhouse gas. The Obama administration plans to remedy this situation by drafting rules that would curtail these discharges from existing plants. The president should make sure they are tough. Nothing he can do will cut greenhouse gases more.

By accomplishing this under the executive authority Congress granted him in the Clean Air Act, the president will be stepping in where recent Congresses have refused to go. He did the same thing last August, when he toughened auto emissions standards that will result in a new car fleet that averages 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, and again last spring, when he proposed rules, restricting carbon dioxide emissions, that will effectively prevent the building of new coal-burning power plants.

Now President Obama should require existing power plants to reduce their emissions by at least one-quarter by 2020. These plants emitted 2.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2011, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, so a 25 percent cut would result in a reduction of more than 500 million tons. This would reduce lung-related illness and premature deaths, slow the accumulation of climate-changing gases in the atmosphere and demonstrate to the rest of the world that the United States was serious about taking on global warming.

To achieve these reductions, the rules should favor making homes, buildings and power plants more energy efficient over the more costly conversion of coal-fired plants to natural gas. (Gas-fired power plants emit half as much carbon dioxide as coal-fired plants. But expanding energy efficiency will reduce electricity demand and eliminate the need for the coal plants. Closing them is better than converting them to gas.) The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy says the technology exists now to cut electricity use by one-quarter by 2020 through efficiency alone. Based on the average electricity production of the nation’s large coal-fired power plants, this would allow for the closing of close to 60 such plants across the nation.

Certainly, the coal and utility industries won’t take this lying down. Some coal mines may be closed, and the electric industry will be reconfigured. A study by the Natural Resources Defense Council estimated recently that reducing emissions by at least one-quarter over the next seven years would cost $4 billion in compliance expenses in 2020. But the reduced hospitalizations and fewer days of work lost to illness, and other health and environmental benefits would save $25 billion to $60 billion, the study said. The approach would also stimulate investments of more than $90 billion in energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies, according to the analysis for the N.R.D.C. by the consulting firm ICF International.

The progression to using less coal will create new jobs to build the highly efficient appliances, wind turbines, solar farms and other technologies that capture renewable energy. In addition, jobs will be created as some states and utilities choose to comply by building natural gas power plants, which should be done only if they won’t cause environmental havoc.

The auto industry is beginning to show how strong emissions standards and the technological advances they stimulate can benefit employment.

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By Mari Hernandez

Our neighbor to the north has an energy source that our nation has yet to fully utilize — and it’s not tar sands.

Canadian hydropower has contributed to America’s clean energy economy, and has the potential to provide our nation with more clean energy. The question is: how can Canada and the United States strengthen this trade relationship?

An event Monday titled, Power Partnerships: How Canada-U.S. Hydroelectric Partnerships Reinforce America’s Clean Energy Economy, held at the Wilson Center in Washington D.C., brought together representatives from public utilities, think tanks, and government officials to answer that question.

Canadian hydropower has been supplying baseload power to the U.S. electric grid for over 40 years. In 2010, the U.S. imported 43.8 terawatt-hours of electricity from Canada, of which about 80 percent is from hydropower. Though Canadian electricity imports make up just one percent of total U.S. annual electricity generation, hydropower imports make up about 10 percent of all U.S. renewable electricity consumption.

The event speakers discussed the barriers that currently prevent Canadian hydropower imports from becoming an even bigger part of the U.S. energy mix– including transmission capacity, low natural gas prices, the threat to domestic jobs, competition from other renewables, environmental concerns, and regulatory barriers. Overcoming some of these challenges won’t be easy, but the case for moving forward is clear: greater energy security, affordable power prices, and reliable baseload power which can help to integrate intermittent renewable energy sources.

The event panelists included Canadian Ambassador to the United States Gary Doer, Premier of Manitoba Greg Selinger, Commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Tony Clark, Minnesota Power Executive Vice President David McMillan, Hydro-Quebec-US Vice President Stephen Molodetz, and Richard Caperton, Director for Clean Energy Investment at the Center for American Progress — all of whom discussed their take on the benefits of imported hydropower from Canada, and offered ways to facilitate greater cross-border clean energy trade.

On building new hydropower projects and transmission lines, Molodetz put forward an option for more positive and productive stakeholder involvement. He said there is a need for a “regional venue” to talk about the benefits of any new projects, since there tends to be so much focus on transmission siting and the negative aspects of that. He also cautioned against an “either/or” mentality, noting that hydro imports are part of a clean energy strategy and shouldn’t be seen as something that would necessarily crowd out other renewables.

Another important point that was mentioned several times was the fact that most states’ renewable energy portfolio standards (RPSs) do not include imported hydropower as an eligible resource. This is partly because some states would too easily meet their RPS target, rather than encouraging the development of other renewable energy sources. However, there are opportunities for states to encourage the growth of all renewables, including imported hydropower.

Caperton stated that if Canadian hydro imports were counted in states’ RPSs, the renewable targets must be increased in order to displace dirty energy sources rather than wind or solar. These increased targets would put our nation on a path to utilize more clean energy and further reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Although the Keystone XL decision has the potential to define President Obama’s climate legacy, there are cleaner energy sources that we can import from our northern neighbors that could lead us to a lower carbon future. If we can adequately address the current barriers to importing more hydro and ensure that it’s displacing coal, Canadian hydropower could become an even greater part of the United States clean energy economy and strengthen the relationship between the two nations.

Mari Hernandez is a Research Associate in Energy Policy for the Center for American Progress.

The budget cuts in the sequester, set to take effect on Friday, March 1, could seriously compromise the ability of the National Weather Service to provide timely, reliable weather forecasts, according to both government officials and leaders in the industry. [WaPo]

“Sequestration substantially increases the risk that the United States will not be a weather-ready nation,” said Kevin Kelly, a lobbyist at Van Scoyoc Associates, who advocates for the weather enterprise. “Communities that experience a heightened risk of severe weather – which affects large portions of the nation in the spring and summer – face the chance of greater danger because the Weather Service will not be operating at 100 percent.”

The cash-strapped National Weather Service is facing increasing scrutiny over its inferior computer modeling power compared to international peers and is anticipating a likely gap in weather satellite coverage. Last week, the Government Accountability Office ranked the pending satellite gap among the top 30 threats facing the Federal government.

The Department of Commerce warned that not only will the loss of satellite data and imagery diminish the quality of forecasts, but so will other important weather data surrendered by spending cuts.

A new report, released today by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), shows how more than 100 oil and gas companies are drilling in U.S. waters in the Gulf of Mexico without paying royalties to the American people. [Natural Resources Committee]

A new paper describes the ability of a substance called Graphene to convert a high percentage of the energy from sunlight into electricity, promising huge improvements in the efficiency of photovoltaic cells. [Science Blogs]

Solar forecasts could predict how much sunlight would reach the ground in a given location every 15 minutes for the next 36 hours, aiding the reliability of solar power. [Climate Central]

A BP executive testified today that a well blowout on the Deepwater Horizon rig was “an identified risk” and a “big” one, though he also emphasized safety was a “shared responsibility.” [NYTimes]

Emissions scenarios and climate models suggest carbon emissions are likely to result in more frequent and severe coral bleaching events, U.S. scientists report. [UPI.com]

Climate change, a fast growing population, ill-designed infrastructure, high levels of pollution and lack of law enforcement have made Egypt a country thirsty for water — both in terms of quantity and quality. [Egypt Independent]

European Union lawmakers on Tuesday backed a Commission plan to suspend for a year airline payments for carbon emissions. [Reuters]

Last fall, a major study found that the carbon feedback from thawing permafrost will likely add 0.4°F – 1.5°F to total global warming by 2100. That was based on climate modeling. A new study looks at the paleo-climate record and comes to an equally worrisome conclusion — JR.

Caves point to thawing of Siberia

Oxford University news release

Evidence from Siberian caves suggests that a global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius could see permanently frozen ground thaw over a large area of Siberia, threatening release of carbon from soils, and damage to natural and human environments.

A thaw in Siberia’s permafrost (ground frozen throughout the year) could release over 1000 giga-tonnes of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, potentially enhancing global warming.

The data comes from an international team led by Oxford University scientists studying stalactites and stalagmites from caves located along the ‘permafrost frontier’, where ground begins to be permanently frozen in a layer tens to hundreds of metres thick. Because stalactites and stalagmites only grow when liquid rainwater and snow melt drips into the caves, these formations record 500,000 years of changing permafrost conditions, including warmer periods similar to the climate of today.

Records from a particularly warm period (Marine Isotopic Stage 11) that occurred around 400,000 years ago suggest that global warming of 1.5°C compared to the present is enough to cause substantial thawing of permafrost far north from its present-day southern limit.

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Rising Tensions and Policy Options in South America

The Amazon; the tropical savannahs of Brazil—the Cerrado—and Bolivia; the Andean highlands of Peru and Bolivia; and the arid coastal plain of Peru, represent the major geographic and climatic regions of the continent, encompass the range of socioeconomic trends reshaping the region, and capture the new heartland of the continent’s illicit economies, including the global cocaine trade. Credit: AP.

By Max Hoffman and Ana I. Grigera via CAP. For citations, see report PDF.

This report examines the interactions of climate change, environmental degradation, migration, and conflict in the Amazon; the tropical savannahs of Brazil—the Cerrado—and Bolivia; the Andean highlands of Peru and Bolivia; and the arid coastal plain of Peru. These regions represent the major geographic and climatic regions of the continent, encompass the range of socioeconomic trends reshaping the region, and capture the new heartland of the continent’s illicit economies, including the global cocaine trade.

The natural wealth of the Amazon and the Andes is a crucial strategic resource. The Amazon is central to the regional and global climate and contains priceless biodiversity. The mineral wealth and energy resources of the Amazon and the Andes are also important contributors to the global supply chain and the macroeconomic growth of the region. Further, the Amazon and the Cerrado have adopted a crucial role in regional and global food security. Finally, the rivers and glaciers of the region are fundamental to the energy security, water security, and agricultural health of much of South America. For all these reasons, the areas defined in this report demand attention.

There are two caveats about this report. First, the study of climate change, migration, and conflict or insecurity in this region is more predictive in nature, compared to the earlier reports in this series. While many people in the region are experiencing profound dislocation or human insecurity because of the trends outlined in this report, the prospects for massive humanitarian disasters or country collapse are remote, unlike in Northwest Africa or the Bay of Bengal—topics of previous reports. Nonetheless, the trends are worrying and deserve the focused attention of policymakers in the Hemisphere.

Second, in line with the Climate, Migration, and Security Project, and driven by the evidence, this report is concerned with the periphery—the geographic and sociopolitical margins of the region. These peripheral regions or hinterlands are immense, far from the political and financial hubs of their countries and overwhelmingly rural with deeply entrenched poverty. Yet the pressures of population and global demand for commodities have driven the rapid growth of towns and cities on this periphery, cities that face the challenge of navigating a path of sustainable, stable development  in difficult environments.

This report looks at the most vulnerable residents of this periphery, particularly small-hold farmers and indigenous populations, and on the ungoverned or undergoverned marginal areas of the three countries studied. While the major urban centers and agricultural areas of Brazil’s Northeastern, Southeastern, and Southern regions make cameo appearances because of their role in the regional migratory picture and international drug trade, they are not the focus of this report. Instead we examine how, in the peripheral regions of the Amazon and the Andes, an effective government presence is absent, rural livelihoods have been undermined, illicit economies have flourished, drug trafficking organizations and nonstate actors have put down deep roots, and the unregulated exploitation of natural resources and vulnerable populations continues apace.

New strategies are needed to comprehensively address these sources of instability. We must account for the dislocation caused by climate change and human mobility and facilitate smart and sustainable security strategies. Combating organized crime and the international narcotics trade, providing sustainable development, and preparing for the effects of climate change are the central challenges for the region in the decades to come.

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By Shiva Polefka

South Carolina news outlet TheState.com reported on Sunday that an official, comprehensive assessment of dramatic climate change impacts looming large in South Carolina’s future was buried and barred from release, apparently due to political pressure.

According to TheState.com, the report, completed by a working group of 18 senior state scientists under the auspices of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, found that the Palmetto State faces an average temperature rise of as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 70 years. Along with the heat would come increases in wildlife disease, loss of habitat for wild game, degradation of the state’s valuable recreational and commercial fisheries, increases in “dead zones” off the state’s coast, and salt water intrusion into coastal rivers and freshwater aquifers.

The report also issued a dramatic warning: As South Carolina’s climate warms, it could face in-migration of harmful invasive species from Florida, including piranha and Asian swamp eels.

Even more alarming than piranhas and eels, however, is the possibility that South Carolina’s conservative state government may have suppressed the report — intended for public education and planning purposes — for political reasons.

Despite detailing major risks to vital state industries and natural resources, the document was never released after its completion in 2011. TheState.com reports that it recently “obtained” a copy but that it otherwise remains unavailable to the public. While the previous head of DNR, John Frampton, reportedly wanted to release the document for public review, he retired suddenly before the release occurred, after what he claimed was pressure to resign from an administrative appointee of Governor Nikki Haley.

According to TheState.com, DNR’s new director says the agency’s “priorities have changed,” to matters including expansion of the ports of Savannah and Charleston, and a new gold mine.

Unfortunately, the developments in South Carolina resemble the woeful political meddling in strategic planning for climate change of its northern neighbor. In 2010, a study from the State of North Carolina’s Panel on Coastal Hazards used sea level rise projections of approximately one meter by 2100 — in line with the National Academy of Science and other coastal states including Maine, Florida and California — to estimate that the state should prepare for inundation and increased flood risk for more than 2,000 square miles of coastal lands. In response, North Carolina’s legislature passed a bill in 2012 mandating that coastal counties ignore the best available science, and instead follow a formula using “historical data” that projects sea level rise of no more than 8-12 inches by 2100.

Unfortunately, there has been no mention of whether South Carolina’s DNR is integrating the two-foot sea level rise reportedly predicted in its 2011 climate change report into the state’s new port expansion plans.

Shiva Polefka is a research associate in the Ocean Program at the Center for American Progress. Tiffany Germain, ThinkProgress War Room Senior Climate/Energy Researcher, contributed research.

How Long Will Colleges Keep Investing in Companies Whose Stock Price Is Based on the Destruction of a Livable Climate?

CO2 emissions by fossil fuels [1 ppm CO2 ~ 2.12 GtC, where ppm is parts per million of CO2 in air and GtC is gigatons of carbon (via Hansen). Significantly exceeding 450 ppm risks several severe and irreversible warming impacts. We are headed toward 800 to 1,000+ ppm, which represents the near-certain destruction of modern civilization as we know it – as the recent scientific literature makes chillingly clear.

Climate hawk Bill McKibben has another terrific new piece in Rolling Stone, “The Case For Fossil-Fuel Divestment.” The founder of 350.org explains:

The logic of divestment couldn’t be simpler: if it’s wrong to wreck the climate, it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage. The fossil fuel industry, as I showed in Rolling Stone last summer, has five times as much carbon in its reserves as even the most conservative governments on earth say is safe to burn – but on the current course, it will be burned, tanking the planet. The hope is that divestment is one way to weaken those companies – financially, but even more politically. If institutions like colleges and churches turn them into pariahs, their two-decade old chokehold on politics in DC and other capitals will start to slip. Think about, for instance, the waning influence of the tobacco lobby – or the fact that the firm making Bushmaster rifles shut down within days of the Newtown massacre, after the California Teachers Pension Fund demanded the change. “Many of America’s leading institutions are dozing on the issue of climate,” says Robert Massie, head of the New Economics Institute. “The fossil fuel divestment campaign must become the early morning trumpet call that summons us all to our feet.”

This article builds on McKibben’s viral piece from the summer “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” which he summarizes:

By now, most activists know the three numbers I outlined in this magazine last summer, in a piece that immediately went viral: If we’re to hold planetary warming to the two degrees that the world’s governments have said is the absolute red line, we can only burn 565 more gigatons of carbon – but the fossil fuel companies, private and state-owned, have 2795 gigatons of carbon in their reserves. That is, they have five times the coal and oil and gas needed to roast the earth, and they fully intend to burn it – in fact, a company like Exxon boasts about spending a hundred million dollars a day looking for more hydrocarbons, all the fracking gas and Arctic oil and tar sands crude they can find. “The math is so irrefutable,” says Klein, the veteran anti-corporate activist who’s been helping lead the fight. “The fossil fuel companies haven’t even bothered to dispute it. And coming to the issue with numbers like that, putting them in an academic context, that’s radical. It makes it hard for the boards of trustees – who after all are supposed to be numbers people – to deal with. Suddenly it’s the students who are the number crunchers, and the idealistic fantasists are the bank presidents on the board who don’t want to deal with the reality staring them in the face.”

The good news is that:

1. Divestment would likely have no significant penalty on portfolio return.
2. Divestment would hedge against the inevitable collapse of the market capitalization of fossil fuel companies when the world wakes up to climate reality.
3. The money would be far better invested in colleges’ own green improvements, which have a high return and very low risk.

As McKibben puts it:

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By Chris Mooney and Julia Whitty

The latest cover story of Mother Jones magazine — and, relatedly, the latest Climate Desk Live briefing, occurring this Wednesday in D.C. — are focused on one of the “good news” energy stories that we don’t hear often enough: How the U.S. military in general, and particularly the Navy, are taking the energy challenge head-on for good, strategic reasons.

The piece begins, memorably enough, with environmental correspondent Julia Whitty’s gut-tightening high speed landing on-board the USS Nimitz. A 1,092 foot aircraft carrier, the Nimitz was involved last summer in the “Great Green Fleet” demonstration, in which five ships and 71 aircraft were operated using biofuel blends or nuclear power. As Whitty reports, the Defense Department uses over 12 million gallons of oil daily in its operations. About a third of that use is attributable to the Navy. That makes thinking about the global energy future — and where affordable fuel is going to come from in the future — a national security necessity.

As Navy Secretary David Mabus, a biofuels champion, has put it, “Too many of our platforms and too many of our systems are gas hogs.” In particular, the lesson of past oil price spikes has been a telling one — Navy fuel costs can rise by dollar amounts in the billions because of market fluctuations. That’s a reality impossible for strategic planners to ignore. So while Washington fights endlessly over climate and energy, the Navy just starts solving problems.

Whitty’s piece goes into great depth about how the Navy has, historically, been an energy and navigational technology innovator. This is not the first time: the Great Green Fleet descends from Teddy Roosevelt’s “Great White Fleet,” which back in 1907 sailed around the world in newfangled ships made of steel and powered by coal. Before that, there were those who resisted (yes) switching from sails to steam engines. The Navy was on the right side of that fight, too.

The most important point of Whitty’s article is that when the Navy moves — and it is moving — the rest of the world follows. It is such a massive institution — the Great Green Fleet exercise required a government purchase of 900,000 gallons of 50-50 biofuel blend — that when it demands innovations, the civilian world and industry quickly come to heel, asking for their orders.

On Wednesday in D.C., the Climate Desk Live will focus on Whitty’s article and the significance of the Navy’s transformation, featuring the author herself and three additional speakers: Dr. David Titley, the retired naval officer who led the Navy’s Task Force on Climate Change, Capt. James Goudreau, director of the Navy’s Energy Coordination Office, and Dr. D. James Baker, who is the former administrator of NOAA, the current director of the Global Carbon Measurement Program of the William J. Clinton Foundation, and the co-author of a new report on the relationship between weather extremes and national security. You can learn more about the event at these links — and watch a live stream if you can’t attend in person.

Chris Mooney is a science and political journalist at Mother Jones. Julia Whitty is an award-winning author and a former documentary filmmaker.

 

By Shiva Polefka, Michael Conathan, and Kiley Kroh

In November 2012, BP settled the Justice Department’s criminal case against it in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, agreeing to pay $4.5 billion in fines and admit it was guilty of 11 counts of manslaughter. But that 10-figure deal was just the tip of the iceberg.

Yesterday, the civil trial to assess BP’s violations of the U.S. Clean Water Act began in New Orleans, a process that will end with additional fines that could exceed four times that amount.

The civil trial will determine responsibility for an unprecedented environmental disaster, in which BP’s high-pressure Macondo well ruptured and discharged nearly 5 billion gallons of crude oil in to the Gulf of Mexico — as well as the amount of fines the company must pay to the U.S. Federal government, Gulf Coast states, and municipalities for violations of federal environmental law.

If Federal District Judge Carl J. Barbier agrees with the Justice Department that BP was grossly negligent in its handling of the blowout and oil spill, the London-based oil giant could face more than $17 billion dollars in federal fines under the Clean Water Act. While this would be a record fine under the statute, it corresponds to the unprecedented scale of the environmental disaster the company caused, because responsible parties are charged per barrel of oil spilled. And it would still be significantly less than the $26 billion in profit BP amassed in 2011 alone.

In addition, Gulf Coast states are seeking more than $34 billion in damages under the U.S. Oil Pollution Act, which was passed in response to Exxon’s 1990 spill in Valdez, Alaska. The OPA explicitly authorizes U.S. states to impose their own fines and penalties on parties deemed responsible for oil spills that affect them.

Continuing its effort to shift blame for the accident, BP argues that it was not grossly negligent, and that its contractors Halliburton and TransOcean instead share significant responsibility for the spill. TransOcean, from whom BP leased the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, settled with the Justice Department in November of 2012, admitting criminal and civil violations and agreeing to pay $1.4 billion in fines.

BP’s latest trial follows its settlement last fall of the US government’s criminal case against the company. In that agreement, BP pled guilty to 14 criminal counts stemming from accident, including manslaughter in the deaths of 11 oil rig workers that were killed when safety equipment failed, and the oil rig exploded and sank. BP also admitted to obstruction of Congress, for purposefully providing lawmakers with estimates of oil-discharge rates 10-times lower than what they knew was occurring. As part of the criminal settlement, BP agreed to pay $4.5 billion over 6 years.

Thanks to the RESTORE Act, which Congress passed and President Obama signed into law as part of a larger transportation bill in 2012, 80 percent of the civil fines paid by BP and other responsible parties will go directly to the affected Gulf Coast states to fund economic and environmental recovery — rather than going to the U.S. Treasury — making the ultimate decision in the current case a critical one for ecosystem and economic restoration in the Gulf. Analysis by the Center for American Progress indicates that by allocating the penalties to ecosystem restoration in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, the RESTORE Act will create thousands of jobs supporting and restoring industries that were devastated by the Deepwater Horizon disaster — such as tourism and fishing, which are cumulatively worth more than $25 billion per year to these states.

The first phase of the trial is expected to take three months, and will result in assignment of percentages of blame among the responsible parties. Reportedly, Judge Barbier has insisted he won’t let the trial drag on for years as occurred following 1989’s Valdez spill.

With funding to restore damaged ecosystems along the Gulf Coast hanging in the balance, Judge Barbier’s sense of urgency is welcome and warranted. Gulf Coast residents and the American public deserve a prompt, decisive and just resolution.

Shiva Polefka is the Ocean Program Research Associate, Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy, and Kiley Kroh is the Associate Director of Ocean Communications at the Center for American Progress.