Trump’s Interior Secretary Calls Obama-Backed Solar Project A ‘Sphere Of Death’ For Birds

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Ivanpah solar plant

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said he’s not against any one form of energy but still took the time during a recent speech to highlight how green energy from solar panels and wind turbines comes with an environmental cost.

“You know wind chops up around 650- or 750,000 birds a year,” Zinke said at an event hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Tuesday. “Wind comes at a cost. If you’re a fisherman, offshore wind isn’t particularly enamored with because it prevents you from fishing which is an important part of our economy.”

Zinke also said a massive government-funded solar thermal plant in the Southern California desert was a “sphere of death” for insects and birds and looked like something out of the movie “Mad Max.”

“Solar. If you’ve been outside of Las Vegas and looked at that solar field, it kind of looks like a scene from Mad Max,” Zinke said, referring to the Ivanpah solar plant, which was partly funded by the Obama administration.

The Ivanpah solar plant uses 170,000 mirrored heliostat panels to point solar rays to boilers atop three tall towers to generate electricity. Ivanpah got a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, and then a $539 million federal grant to pay off its federal loan.

“Is that the future of having these three or four eighty foot towers with reflector cells the size of garage doors where it makes this cone — this sphere of death — so as birds go through it, they get zapped,” Zinke said.

Auditors estimated the Ivanpah plant killed 6,185 birds in 2015, including about 1,145 birds that were incinerated by the intense heat coming off its many mirrored heliostat panels.

“And, they invent new language for it. It’s called a streamer. A streamer,” Zinke said of the incinerated birds. “And, then what happens is the bird gets zapped and of course bugs become a part of it and then it draws more birds. So, there are a few problems with that too.”

Zinke’s point was that replacing coal-fired power plants with wind and solar has an environmental cost. He said coal can be burned more cleanly over time, and it’s unlikely that we can immediately replace it with wind and solar energy.

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June 22, 2017 at 07:26AM

El Niño WATCH cancelled; ENSO neutral likely for 2017

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June 22, 2017 at 07:26AM

Legal Group Says Elements Inside State Dept Hiding Shady Information About Paris Deal

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A conservative legal group said Wednesday that elements within the Trump administration are hiding evidence showing government officials coordinated with outside lobbying groups while negotiating aspects of the Paris agreement on climate change.

Attorneys for the Department of State filed court documents Monday in response to an E&E Legal’s open records request for the agency’s correspondence with lobbying groups. Officials are withholding the information despite President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the nonbinding climate accord.

The agency “sunk to new lows” to withhold and “stonewall the release of crucial documents” regarding the Obama administration’s dogged pursuit of the Paris deal, Matthew Hardin, an attorney for E&E Legal, said in a press statement to The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The move to classify the communication was made more than a year after the documents first appeared, Hardin said, adding that the move was meant to hide from the group and public what he thinks are nefarious aspects of the negotiating process.

E&E Legal also criticized Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for allowing his agency to essentially do former President Barack Obama’s bidding. Obama signed the treaty last year, which obligated the U.S. to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent within a decade.

Why is Tillerson still “playing such improper games to avoid releasing records which expose the previous Administration’s pursuit of an extreme ‘climate’ treaty, one that the new Administration has expressly rejected,” Hardin added. Tillerson, a former CEO for Exxon, was a supporter of the international treaty and believed it was an effective diplomatic tool.

White House adviser Jared Kushner was also in favor of staying in the agreement nearly 200 nations forged in 2015 to prevent the Earth’s temperature from exceeding 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

Kushner and Tillerson eventually lost out to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Trump’s strategic adviser, Steve Bannon, both of whom lobbied the president to leave the 194-member deal. Pruitt believed nixing the accord allows Trump to make permanent executive orders rolling back Obama-era climate regulations.

Tillerson, for his part, indicated in March that he would support the deal if Trump could reduce some of the objectives hammered out during the agreement. He told a congressional hearing earlier this month that Trump’s decision to back out did not alter his previous support for the wide-ranging deal.

Chris Horner, a senior attorney with E&E Legal, told reporters in May that, “President Trump should view State’s input here with great suspicion, taking note of its record on this matter.”

Read more at Daily Caller

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June 22, 2017 at 06:56AM

Who needs Paris? U.S. is well on its way to lower emissions with economic, technological changes

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Even as President Trump was withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate deal, environmentalists — and former President Barack Obama — said it didn’t matter, and the U.S. was locked into a low-emissions future anyway.

With the dust of the decision settling, analysts have taken a closer look and say it’s still possible, though difficult, for the U.S. to meet the goal of the Paris deal even without being a signatory.

Federal data show the U.S. is already well over one-third of its way toward meeting that pledge, with net emissions in 2015 down more than 11 percent compared with 2005. Even without a comprehensive federal strategy to reduce emissions, other factors could continue the downward trend.

State and local governments are undertaking voluntary pollution-reduction measures to make up for the federal pullback. In some cases, they have specifically adopted policies designed to meet the Paris targets. Leading companies also have redoubled their efforts on energy efficiency and are taking other steps to cut pollution.

Perhaps most important, technological developments or massive economic shifts — such as major steps forward on electric cars and renewable energy storage, and the type of market shift over the past 10 years as utilities abandon coal in favor of cleaner natural gas — could propel the U.S. toward its goal.

“Things can change very rapidly. There is the potential for some technological breakthrough making it easier than we think at the moment,” said Kevin Kennedy, deputy director of the U.S. Climate Initiative at the World Resources Institute.

As part of the Paris accord, Mr. Obama committed the U.S. to a 2025 target reduction of 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels. That figure was seen as optimistic under even a best-case scenario that involved federal rules such as the Clean Power Plan, a set of government regulations limiting carbon emissions from power plants and one that Mr. Trump is rolling back.

What’s clear, analysts say, is that it’s virtually impossible to predict where emissions will go. Even the harshest government policies may not have carried the U.S. to its 26 percent goal.

It’s also entirely possible that the U.S. could hit its target with no help at all from the administration.

Although environmentalists were disheartened by the withdrawal from Paris accord, they say that assuming the emissions goal is now unattainable would be foolish.

“I think it would be unfair to say it’s completely dead,” said Maria Belenky, director of policy and research at Climate Advisers, a policy group that advocates for carbon emissions reductions. “We’re not starting from zero. To hit 26 [percent] is enormously hard, but we’re going from about 12 percent to 26 percent. It’s not easy, but we’re not starting from zero.”

Indeed, data from the Environmental Protection Agency show emissions in 2015 — the last year for which full numbers are available — were roughly 11.5 percent below 2005 levels, meaning the nation is already almost halfway to the 26 percent target. Emissions in 2015 dropped 2.3 percent from the previous year, data show.

A study from the Rhodium Group, a leading research firm, found that emissions from energy consumption — which accounts for about 80 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions — last year were about 13.7 percent below 2005 levels.

Perhaps more important, they were nearly 18 percent lower than what the federal government forecast in 2008, underscoring the difficulty in predicting trends. The 2008 forecasts didn’t factor in the massive change from coal to natural gas in electricity generation or all of the advances in auto and appliance efficiency, or the rapid growth of wind and solar power.

The Rhodium Group study predicts that even assuming Trump policies stay in place and the federal government does little in the way of carbon-targeting regulations, U.S. emissions could drop by as much as 19 percent by 2025 compared with 2005 levels.

Read more at Washington Times

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June 22, 2017 at 06:56AM