Exporting the U.S. Shale Boom Has Changed Oil Markets Forever

Sheela Tobben and Dave Merrill, Bloomberg News

The Theo T oil tanker docked at a NuStar facility in 

Corpus Christi, Texas, on Dec. 31, 2015. 

Sheela Tobben and Dave Merrill

(Bloomberg) -- Five years ago on New Year’s Eve, the Theo T left the Texas Gulf Coast with the first U.S. shale crude shipment overseas. The oil, gathered from nearby ConocoPhillips wells and sold to trading giant Vitol Group, set sail for Italy just two weeks after lawmakers lifted a long-standing ban on exports.It was the start of a trade that would reshape global oil markets, shift geopolitical power and upend entire economies. The shale boom itself has turned the U.S. into the world's largest oil producer and has moved it ever closer to a long-cherished dream of ending dependence on Middle East oil. But the export boom created an entirely new market, sending crude pulled from the shale fields of Texas, New Mexico and North Dakota to more than 50 countries, with shipments often surpassing those of any OPEC nation aside from Saudi Arabia.

These past five years could very well go down as the best years that U.S. shale oil exporters will ever see. Covid-19 has obliterated global fuel demand and bankrupted more than 40 drillers across America. Exactly how much oil leaves U.S. shores in the coming years will largely depend on how quickly the world can recover from the pandemic and how aggressively politicians work to shift the world away from fossil fuels. But the global reach of U.S. shale has changed oil markets for good and remains a potent, diplomatic weapon for the U.S.“Opening the shale revolution to the world through the export ban lifting helped shift the global oil market psychology from supply scarcity to abundance,” said Karim Fawaz, IHS Markit's director of energy research analysis. “It unshackled the U.S. industry to keep growing past its domestic refining limitations.”

Perhaps no two groups have gained from the export of America's shale boom more than producers of U.S. oil and the giant commodities merchants who trade it. Wildcatters including billionaire Harold Hamm of Continental Resources Inc. and Scott Sheffield of Pioneer Natural Resources Co. saw their revenues more than double as exports took off. “Today the U.S. has its own petrodollars,” Hamm said in August 2018 as U.S. oil shipments overseas boomed. 

Trading giants including Trafigura Group, Vitol, Gunvor Group and Mercuria Energy Group profited from buying cheaper shale oil, shuttling it to the U.S. coast and shipping it to eager buyers in Europe and Asia. Betting that shipments would surge, they expanded their trading desks in the U.S., invested in ports, pipelines and export facilities. By the last week of 2019, exports of American oil had reached nearly 4.5 million barrels a day.

U.S. shale's gain was OPEC's loss. As shale oil flooded the market, OPEC was forced to cede market share. The U.S., which had been one of OPEC's biggest customers, has cut its monthly imports by about 50% since mid-2006. Last week, Saudi Arabian cargoes to the U.S. fell to zero for the first time since at least 2010.Exports have turned U.S. shale into a permanent thorn in OPEC's side. The oil cartel has had to join forces with Russia, Mexico and other major producers to ratchet back production several times in the past five years while U.S. shale expanded its reach into key markets.

Shale now shares the fortunes — and the misfortunes — of being a major exporter. The strongest evidence of this yet came in March when U.S. President Donald Trump joined leaders of the world's largest oil-producing nations to hammer out an unprecedented accord to save oil markets from total collapse as the pandemic slashed demand.

The U.S.’s shrinking dependence on foreign imports has also allowed the Trump administration to impose increasingly debilitating sanctions on two OPEC founding members — Venezuela and Iran — without fear of higher fuel prices back home. And with American shale now readily available in global markets, oil price spikes tied to conflicts in the Middle East are shorter and more subdued.

“The flow of U.S. oil since the ban's end has kept global oil supply in balance even at times when politics have caused the loss of supply from Iran, Venezuela and Libya,” said Sandy Fielden, director of oil research at Morningstar Inc. 

How long the U.S. can maintain this clout on global oil markets remains to be seen.

One bullish sign for U.S. oil exports: China’s appetite for crude has come back with a vengeance since the country emerged from lockdowns. That has helped draw down American oil inventories as U.S. cargoes start hitting the water once again, reaching 3.6 million barrels a day in the week of Christmas.

There is no other country that will dictate the fate of U.S. oil exports more than China. About two years after U.S. lawmakers lifted the export ban, shipments to China reached 2 million barrels a day, making it by far the largest buyer of American oil. The Asian nation's appetite for crude has rebounded since it emerged from lockdowns, but Saudi Arabia and Russia remain major suppliers to the country and competition may heat up later this year as OPEC+ restores output.“The Asian market will become more competitive as OPEC+ restores some of its production,”  said Shirin Lakhani, a senior oil analyst at Rapidan Energy Group. “For OPEC+ producers, sales into Asia have the best profit margins due to proximity and logistics.”

Demand for U.S. barrels will also depend on how well the global economy fares in the coming years after its deepest recession since World War II. The World Bank forecasts a 4% economic rebound this year, following a 4.3% contraction in 2020, but cautioned there’s an “exceptional level of uncertainty” as the pandemic may reduce potential global growth for a decade.  It will take until the end of 2021 for the oil glut left behind by the pandemic to clear as demand will be “lower for longer than expected” when the virus emerged in the spring, the International Energy Agency said in December. 

The incoming Biden administration and its plan to completely reshape U.S. energy policy will undoubtedly affect U.S. oil exports. Among the president-elect’s promises on the campaign trail were stronger regulation of the hydraulic fracturing that unleashed the U.S. shale boom, a ban on fracking federal lands and a broader transition away from fossil fuels.  Depending on how it's executed, the ban alone may not significantly affect U.S. oil shipments. It would theoretically only apply to new drilling licenses and affect a fairly limited amount of new oil output, namely in New Mexico.

But that may only prove to be a temporary boon for oil exporters. Joe Biden is among a growing chorus of world leaders pledging to wean their nations off fossil fuels for good. More than 120 countries, including China, the U.K. and Canada, have committed to achieving net-zero emissions over the course of the next three decades. The president-elect himself has pledged to achieve net-zero emissions in the U.S. no later than 2050. Electric transportation lies at the center of virtually every country's plan to go carbon-neutral. 

Annual sales of electric cars around the world — including trucks and buses — reached almost 27 million in 2019 and are set to accelerate in the coming years to a rate of 133 million vehicles a year in the next two decades, according to BloombergNEF estimates. By 2040, around 500 million passenger electric vehicles will be on the road, or roughly one third of the world’s total.But as long as the world moves mostly on fossil fuels, shale will continue to fight for its share of the global market. “The lifting of the export ban and the incredible growth and resilience in domestic shale will keep the U.S. a crucial exporter of American crude oil for the foreseeable future,’’ Lakhani said.

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

The Climate Crisis Will Be Steroids for Fascism



Brian Kahn
MANAGING EDITOR, EARTHER
Filed to:COUPS



A gallows erected by Trump-supporting violent extremists in front of the Capitol.Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP (Getty Images)

The Capitol has a police force with a $500 million budget, and yet it failed at its one job on Wednesday. Members of Congress, among the most protected people on the planet, were forced to hide in undisclosed locations as violent extremists overran the Capitol.

The anti-democratic message Wednesday’s insurrection sent is chilling. Far-right mobs incited by the president over baseless conspiracy theories and a commitment to white nationalism breached one of the most secure places in the U.S. and disrupted a basic democratic process of certifying election results. But what it portends for both the future of the Republican Party and its response to the climate crisis is even more chilling.

The ingredients for the toxic soup that stirred extremists to take on one of the branches of government (as well as numerous coordinated attacks at the state level) will only grow more plentiful and powerful as the climate crisis worsens. If elected officials aren’t ready to take a clear-eyed look at the damage done on Wednesday and what awaits us in the coming hotter decades, we’ll face even more extreme assaults on democracy and the most vulnerable among us.

The violent assault on the Capitol followed a pattern increasingly familiar in the Trump era, though it’s been an undercurrent in American society for much longer. Blatant lies about the election being rigged were spread over social media and used as cover to convene in Washington, DC, and storm the Capitol. Extremists clashed with police, met minimal resistance outside, and were allowed to mill about the building for hours, trashing offices and posing in the Senate for Parler-worthy photos.

Then they were allowed to politely file out of the building and only a few dozen were arrested. That number may rise, but the initial response pales in comparison to how Black Lives Matter protesters were treated this summer. Not to mention climate-related protesters like Fire Drill Fridays where police created a huge perimeter to cordon off press and onlookers and brought in buses to process protesters who were arrested.

Newly Sworn‑In West Virginia Lawmaker Streamed Video Of Himself Storming the Capitol


Wednesday’s insurrection and law enforcement’s frail response are eerily similar to what happened this summer when right-wing militias spread conspiracies about wildfires in Oregon. In that case, extremists sowed confusion to assert control over regions engulfed in smoke, setting up armed checkpoints and threatening journalists. Law enforcement turned a blind eye, and in the case of one sheriff, even briefed extremists. At the time, experts told me it was in part an attempt by far-right figures to see what they could get away with.

The lesson in both cases is that the pushed boundaries didn’t snap back. The permissive nature of law enforcement and people in power—more than 120 Republican representatives and senators voted to decertify state election results based on lies after the mob invaded the Capitol Building—opens the door to further violent probing.

Now, I’m a firm believer that an assault on democracy or unlawful behavior during a climate-fueled disaster alone should be reason to hold people to account. But looking at the two events in tandem and seeing the climate future that awaits us is what really raises my alarm bells—and should raise those of the people in power. Pretending this will pass or offering broad platitudes that “we are better than this” will ensure more terror.

Climate change is chaos by nature. It means more powerful storms, more intense wildfires, more extreme floods and droughts. It is an assault on the weakest among us, and decades of the right-wing mindset of small government have left the country with fewer resources to deal with the fallout. As the summer’s wildfires show, the far-right will be there to try to fill the power void. Those fires occurred in a predominantly white region.

There’s a strong strain of white nationalism and neo-Nazism that ran through Wednesday’s insurrection, and it’s easy to imagine what will happen when flames or storms hit places that are predominantly Black, brown, or Indigenous. In fact, we don’t need to imagine it at all. We’ve seen it in the gunman who showed up at a Walmart to kill immigrants whom he falsely blamed for putting strain on the environment. And we saw it in the white vigilante violence in the vacuum after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. We’ve seen it so frequently, it even has a name: ecofascism.

After Wednesday, the boundaries of permissible violence have now expanded to a distorting degree, at a time of increasing climate instability. White supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other extremists literally took over the halls of power and got away with it. When climate change upends communities with far fewer defenses—communities that hate groups already scapegoat—the results will be catastrophic.

It’s never been clearer that a large chunk of the nation’s top Republican leaders will embrace and even fuel this extremism and hate. The Venn diagram of people who push election denial and climate denial has near-perfect overlap, but even if these figures deny the climate crisis, they’ll still look to exploit it. At the end of the day, their goal is to use easy-to-disprove lies to build and consolidate power.

Fixing a mess like this absolutely has to be part of the process of addressing climate change. Accountability for those who incited extremists is a good place to start. Emily Atkin of Heated noted on Twitter in the wake of the Georgia special election that gave Democrats the Senate that democracy reform is climate policy, and I have to agree. Washington, DC, statehood, getting corrosive money out of politics, and expelling seditionists are all good places to start. A strong federal response to climate change that both draws down emissions and protects people from the impacts already in the pipeline is also crucial. Decades of weakening the federal government and proselytizing about the power of the individual has left millions exposed to calamity. Rebuilding the federal response to climate change, and ensuring it also engages everyone in moving the country forward through good-paying jobs and a just transition for frontline and fossil fuel communities, are essential to beating hate groups into the background.

None of this will make the fascism on full display disappear overnight. But doing nothing or insisting we turn the page opens the door to something much worse.

Researchers propose a framework for evaluating the impacts of climate change on California's water and energy systems

by Harrison Tasoff, University of California - Santa Barbara

Hydroelectric stations like Shasta Dam, along the Sacramento River, are integral to California’s water and energy needs. Credit: U.S. Bureau Of Reclamation

As the planet continues to warm, the twin challenges of diminishing water supply and growing energy demand will intensify. But water and energy are inextricably linked. For instance, nearly a fifth of California's energy goes toward water-related activities, while more than a tenth of the state's electricity comes from hydropower. As society tries to adapt to one challenge, it needs to ensure it doesn't worsen the other.

To this end, researchers from UC Santa Barbara, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley have developed a framework to evaluate how different climate adaptations may impact this water-energy nexus. Their research appears in the open access journal Environmental Research Letters.

"Electricity and water systems are linked in many different ways," said coauthor Ranjit Deshmukh, an assistant professor in the environmental studies department. "Climate change is expected to stress these links so we presented a framework that maps these interdependencies and will enable us to understand and quantify its impacts on the energy-water nexus."

Although it's not the first study to look at these topics, it takes a more nuanced approach than the papers that have come before. "There have been many analyses on how climate change could affect the water and energy sectors separately, but those studies were not typically looking at interactions and feedbacks between the two," said lead author Julia Szinai of Berkeley Lab's Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division. "Our paper develops a generalized framework that identifies how climate change affects these coupled water and electricity systems and potential adaptations to future gaps in supply and demand. By doing so we illustrate often overlooked tradeoffs and synergies in adapting to climate change."

The framework uses systems analysis to identify the biggest potential climate stressors on the water and energy sectors. It quantifies actions that will be needed to adapt to climate change, and examines the feedbacks that would result from these actions.

"For example, our framework shows how increased temperatures due to climate change will likely increase electricity demand for air conditioning and water demand for irrigation," Deshmukh explained. "Whereas snowpack loss in the Sierras and variable precipitation will affect the water supply, not just for urban and agricultural use, but also for hydropower generation and thermal power plant cooling."

California relies on snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas to slowly mete out water over the course of the year.

The team applied the framework they developed to California, which relies on the snowpack for a good deal of its water and expends significant amounts of energy to transport water from the north to the southern part of the state. They examined multiple adaptation strategies in the water sector and found that some are energy intensive while others can actually save both water and energy.

The researchers integrated data across a number of fragmented studies to estimate the overall range of possible water and energy futures for the state under various climate scenarios at the end of the century. Their analysis found that two factors will likely dominate climate change's direct impacts on California's electricity sector: higher air conditioning loads and decreased hydropower availability.
The climate crisis has severely impacted California’s water-energy nexus. Here we see the contrast between a full reservoir behind Folsom Dam in July 2011 compared to the water level under the extreme drought in January 2014. Credit: United States Bureau Of Reclamation

"One of the most important points of the paper is that adapting our water system to climate change can either significantly exacerbate electricity grid stress, or on the flip side, it could help to alleviate it," said co-author and Berkeley Lab climate scientist Andrew Jones. "If we focus on adapting the water system by using big transfers of water across basins, or by using energy-intensive desalination, that's just going to make the electricity problem much more difficult. If, on the other hand, we adapt the water system by conserving water, it's actually a win-win situation because you're also reducing the energy required for water."

Currently, a staggering 19% of California's electricity consumption goes toward water-related applications, such as treating, transporting, pumping and heating. Additionally, about 15% of in-state electricity generation comes from hydropower.

The state has already seen some impacts of climate change on its water-energy systems. Extended droughts exacerbated by climate change have led to spikes in electricity consumption for groundwater pumping, and corresponding hydropower deficits have required replacement by dirtier fossil fuels.

The team is certain that the climate crisis will have a huge impact on the state's future water supplies. That said, the effect is wildly uncertain. In the worst case, available water supplies could decrease 25%; however, they could increase 46%.

"There are significant uncertainties in the climate model projections for precipitation," said Deshmukh. "But irrespective of those uncertainties, the adaptation measures offer significant co-benefits." Conserving water would save energy as well as money for consumers, and allow for greater flow in the state's natural streams and rivers.

When the team applied their framework to the worst-case scenario, they found that choosing the most energy-intensive adaptation strategies in the water sector could result in an energy imbalance as large as that caused directly by climate change.

"I think this is the first study to show that water sector adaptation can have as large of an impact on the electricity sector as the direct effect of climate change itself," said Jones.

"This study has highlighted the benefit of coordinated adaptation planning between the two sectors," added lead author Szinai, "so we're now linking a more detailed water resources management model and an electricity planning model that can demonstrate resilient pathways for building out electricity infrastructure in the Western U.S. when climate change impacts are included from the water sector."

Deshmukh is currently leading a team to explore the connections between energy, water and the climate by quantifying the impacts of climate change on hydropower dams and thermal power plants in 12 countries across southern Africa. He hopes to identify optimal investments in electricity infrastructure.

"California has a choice in how it wants to adapt its water sector to the impacts of climate change," Deshmukh stated. "The state can either pursue energy intensive climate adaptation measures such as desalination or develop a portfolio of measures that maximize water conservation potential. Planners and policymakers in the water and energy sectors need to coordinate their actions and plans for adapting to climate change."

Explore further 

Cooperation across boundaries and sectors could boost sustainable development

More information: Julia K Szinai et al. Evaluating cross-sectoral impacts of climate change and adaptations on the energy-water nexus: a framework and California case study, Environmental Research Letters (2020). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/abc378

Journal information: Environmental Research Letters

Provided by University of California - Santa Barbara

GREEN CAPITALI$M
Big businesses talk a big climate game — just not on Capitol Hill


Grist / stu99 / Getty Images

THE DOG THAT DIDN'T BARK

By Nathanael Johnson on Jan 6, 2021


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For nearly a decade, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat of Rhode Island, has been beating the bushes to find Republican partners on climate legislation. When asked to explain why his GOP colleagues have been so resistant to join him in taking action on climate change, Whitehouse doesn’t point to the usual suspects: President Donald Trump, donors like the Koch Brothers with a rooting interest in fossil fuels, or the influential Heartland Institute.

Instead, he points to corporations, and not just the fossil fuel firms that you’d expect, but woke tech companies like Google, which is working to power every search with carbon-free energy, along with other giants like Coca-Cola, which aims to quash a quarter of emissions from its entire supply chain.

The same companies touting their efforts to go “net zero” are silent on the issue when lobbying Congress, according to Whitehouse. The result is that there’s no counterweight to oil and gas lobbyists able to influence Republicans, no big businesses clamoring for members of Congress to take on climate change. Whitehouse has had some success in reaching across the aisle to pass small bipartisan bills, but he keeps bumping into the same barrier: Corporate lobbying was all on the side of inaction.


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“When you got one team not even showing up on the field, and the other team is out there with their massive dark-money cudgels threatening to take the head off any Republican who crosses them, that is a very important background to where we are,” he said. “That’s the reason we have to do so many small bills rather than biting the bullet and tackling this problem while it is still possible.”

It’s a situation that green-friendly big businesses have the power to change, Whitehouse said.

What do these companies have to say for themselves? Very little. Grist reached out to Google, The Coca-Cola Company, Pepsico, Apple, and a handful of other businesses and trade associations that Whitehouse called out. Only three responded. A representative from Apple didn’t address the lobbying question directly but pointed to the company’s most recent environmental progress report. “We have spoken clearly and unambiguously: across different forums, in public statements and closed-door discussions, and through our actions,” the report says. “Whether making known our support for the United States upholding its obligations under the 2015 Paris Agreement or backing a price on carbon, we’re pursuing strong policies that promote decarbonizing our economy.”

Walmart’s vice president for federal government affairs, Bruce Harris, responded in an email that the retail giant was one of the first big companies to adopt climate targets back in 2016, and that it had signed on with We Are Still In, a large coalition of businesses and local governments supporting the Paris climate agreement, and America’s Pledge on Climate Change. Harris also pointed out that Walmart’s CEO, Doug McMillon, is the chair of the Business Roundtable, an advocacy group for corporate leaders, which recently called for “a national climate policy solution to reduce U.S.-based emissions in accordance with the Paris Agreement and by at least 80 percent by 2050, through a market-based mechanism that includes a price on carbon.”

A representative from Coca-Cola sent a statement saying that the world needs to dramatically reduce emissions and that it’s “supportive of effective and well-designed policies and mechanisms that would help make this happen.” Coke is also part of We Are Still In, which recently published an open letter to the incoming Biden administration urging action on climate change.

But there’s a big difference between making a public declaration and pushing members of Congress to pass legislation. The Environmental Defense Fund has been tracking these corporate declarations with its Climate Authenticity Meter and considers many of them helpful in building momentum toward legislation. The problem is, they’re still just words. The Business Roundtable’s call to action, for instance, is “just a statement — a promise to lead. Time will tell if the [Business Roundtable] and its members follow through with the advocacy required to move climate policy forward.”

When it comes to actual lobbying, the heavy hitters aren’t individual corporations, but the trade associations representing them, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Beverage Association. It’s one thing if a single company asks a politician to vote for a bill, and quite another when the request comes from an entire industry. “With the Chamber of Commerce, for instance, there’s always the implicit threat that if you don’t go along with us, we’ll go against you in the next election,” said Tom Lyon, a professor who studies corporate environmental strategy at the University of Minnesota.

Perhaps the trade group representing the highest concentration of companies making big carbon-cutting commitments is TechNet, which did not respond to requests for comment. TechNet lobbies for pretty much all tech giants, from Alphabet, Apple, and Amazon, all the way to Zoom. Early last year, it put out a 13-page, bullet-point studded document, explaining the policy objectives these companies hoped Congress could achieve. Some of these priorities extend well beyond immediate self-interest: The corporations asked the government to overhaul immigration policy and address systemic inequality. But when it came to climate change, there was nothing.

“The silence is deafening,” Whitehouse said.

So why aren’t these companies doing more? A pair of University of Glasgow academics, political science professor Kelly Kollman and business school lecturer Alvise Favotto, tried to figure out if corporations were connecting the dots between the do-gooder policies they were adopting within their company and the policies they were lobbying for in government. They wanted to know if the people working to make the companies more environmentally friendly, for instance, were coordinating their efforts with their lobbyists. Their findings, published in 2019, suggest that they were not — in the 150 corporations they surveyed in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany.

“Looking at these organizations from the outside, you’d think that if they are going to be making these commitments about diversity and climate change, they would go to their lobbyists and say, ‘Are we OK on these things? Are these things aligned?’” Kollman said.

For many business people, lobbying was an afterthought — something they tried to stay out of. People who are passionate about business are more likely to believe that business, not government, are the best tools for changing the world. Kollman remembers one sustainability officer explaining his approach to government action as hands-off: “This person said, ‘We see our role as trying to change markets, and trying to change business models, we don’t see our role as trying to change policy,’” Kollman said. “It’s just not in the mindset of how they make the world a better place. And I think that was a genuine answer.”

Their survey showed, however, that these views have been shifting. “Our data showed that close to no one saw lobbying as something that should be part of their corporate social responsibility reports until around 2006,” Favotto said. By 2013, 46 percent of the U.S. companies they were studying had begun at least acknowledging their lobbying in their corporate social responsibility reports.

More academics are beginning to study the relationship between corporate statements and corporate lobbying. Lyon directs the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Minnesota, which is setting up a task force to investigate the transparency of business lobbying efforts. Several organizations — Influence Map, Preventable Surprises, and The Center for Political Accountability — have begun tracking the issue, and there’s talk that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission could mandate better corporate sustainability disclosure, he said.

“There are all these nascent efforts,” Lyon said. “People are realizing that this is a big issue.”

With a new Congress and a new president, it appears the ground is shifting. TechNet is now calling for federal climate action to “limit warming to at least 1.5 degrees Celsius by the year 2050,” though it’s not clear if the group will make this issue a lobbying priority.

More and more corporate leaders are taking an interest in the lobbying their companies are paying for, said Victoria Mills, head of EDF’s corporate climate policy program. “I do think we are starting to see much more active engagement by companies on climate policy,” she said.

Still, Mills said she agreed with Whitehouse about the general state of affairs.

“He’s not wrong. You have some leaders out there, but by and large, the vast majority of companies are silent.”

 

DON'T NEED A WEATHERMAN

Climate change could take weather patterns back to the Pliocene

By Nathanael Johnson on Jan 7, 2021 

Grist / Natalia Varlamova / Universal Hve / Getty Imageistory Archis

The West Coast drinks from the wind. When westerly gales carry humid air from the Pacific Ocean into the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade mountain ranges, the West turns green, orchards blossom, and reservoirs swell. When those westerlies deflect to the north, hills turn brown, cities ban sprinklers, and forest fires flare.

There are consistent bands of westerly winds at about 40 degrees latitude in both hemispheres — near San Francisco in the northern hemisphere, and near Concepción, Chile, in the south. Over the past few decades scientists have seen these westerlies creeping toward the poles. If this shift is a result of climate change and continues, it could have profound implications: Over the next century, Seattle might become as dry as Los Angeles, and California could settle into an era of unending drought.

So are the westerlies going to keep drifting away from the equator? Well, if you want to know how the climate-changed future will unfold, look at the past: In the Pliocene, 2.6 to 5 million years ago, carbon dioxide levels were about what they are today but with warmer temperatures. And a new paper, just published in the journal Nature, provides evidence that back then the westerlies were closer to the poles.

The scientists didn’t intend to chart the paths of ancient winds. They started off by studying the dust blown off the steppes of Asia that has swirled down for millenia to form the muddy bottom of the Pacific Ocean. While examining the layers of sediment on the ocean floor, they realized they were able to spot a change in the prehistoric winds.

“As we are looking at these dust records, we saw that the dust goes up a lot 2.7 million years ago,” as the Pliocene climate was cooling, said Jordan Abell, the paper’s lead author and a doctoral candidate in earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Back then, the climate took a cold turn. As temperatures cooled and ice-caps grew over the north pole, the winds began dumping a lot more dust into a previously windless site closer to the equator.

This makes some intuitive sense. Weather tends to happen in the spots where warm air meets cold. “The weather is more intense where the temperature gradient is steep,” Abell said. “When you have ice over your poles it’s going to cool the air and move that gradient toward the equator.”

Now we may be witnessing the phenomenon in reverse: As ice caps dwindle, prevailing winds could slide away from the equator. That doesn’t guarantee it’s going to happen in the near future. This paper isn’t about how the weather patterns will shift in the next generation, it’s about how things are likely to change over the next century. In the long term, the trajectory is not back to the future, but forward toward the Pliocene.

Why crocodiles have changed so little since the age of the dinosaurs

Summary: New research explains how a 'stop-start' pattern of evolution, governed by environmental change, could explain why crocodiles have changed so little since the age of the dinosaurs.

Date: January 7, 2021

Source: University of Bristol

Science News from research organizations

New research by scientists at the University of Bristol explains how a 'stop-start' pattern of evolution, governed by environmental change, could explain why crocodiles have changed so little since the age of the dinosaurs.

Crocodiles today look very similar to ones from the Jurassic period some 200 million years ago. There are also very few species alive today -- just 25. Other animals such as lizards and birds have achieved a diversity of many thousands of species in the same amount of time or less.

Prehistory also saw types of crocodile we don't see today, including giants as big as dinosaurs, plant-eaters, fast runners and serpentine forms that lived in the sea.

In the new research, published today in the journal Nature Communications Biology, the scientists explain how crocodiles follow a pattern of evolution known as 'punctuated equilibrium'.

The rate of their evolution is generally slow, but occasionally they evolve more quickly because the environment has changed. In particular, this new research suggests that their evolution speeds up when the climate is warmer, and that their body size increases.




Lead author Dr Max Stockdale from the University of Bristol's School of Geographical Sciences, said: "Our analysis used a machine learning algorithm to estimate rates of evolution. Evolutionary rate is the amount of change that has taken place over a given amount of time, which we can work out by comparing measurements from fossils and taking into account how old they are.

"For our study we measured body size, which is important because it interacts with how fast animals grow, how much food they need, how big their populations are and how likely they are to become extinct."

The findings show that the limited diversity of crocodiles and their apparent lack of evolution is a result of a slow evolutionary rate. It seems the crocodiles arrived at a body plan that was very efficient and versatile enough that they didn't need to change it in order to survive.

This versatility could be one explanation why crocodiles survived the meteor impact at the end of the Cretaceous period, in which the dinosaurs perished. Crocodiles generally thrive better in warm conditions because they cannot control their body temperature and require warmth from the environment.

The climate during the age of dinosaurs was warmer than it is today, and that may explain why there were many more varieties of crocodile than we see now. Being able to draw energy from the sun means they do not need to eat as much as a warm-blooded animal like a bird or a mammal.

Dr Stockdale added: "It is fascinating to see how intricate a relationship exists between the earth and the living things we share it with. The crocodiles landed upon a lifestyle that was versatile enough to adapt to the enormous environmental changes that have taken place since the dinosaurs were around."

The next step for the team's research is to find out why some types of prehistoric crocodile died out, while others didn't.

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Bristol. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:
Maximilian T. Stockdale, Michael J. Benton. Environmental drivers of body size evolution in crocodile-line archosaurs. Communications Biology, 2021; 4 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s42003-020-01561-5

University of Bristol. "Why crocodiles have changed so little since the age of the dinosaurs." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 7 January 2021. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210107083751.htm>.

Native biodiversity collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean

Most native species are going locally extinct, while introduced tropical species thrive

An international team quantified a dramatic biodiversity collapse of up to 95 per cent of native species in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Date:January 7, 2021

Source: University of Vienna

The coastline of Israel is one of the warmest areas in the Mediterranean Sea. Here, most marine species have been at the limits of their tolerance to high temperatures for a long time -- and now they are already beyond those limits. Global warming has led to an increase in sea temperatures beyond those temperatures that Mediterranean species can sustain. Consequently, many of them are going locally extinct.

Paolo Albano's team quantified this local extinction for marine molluscs, an invertebrate group encompassing snails, clams and mussels. They thoroughly surveyed the Israeli coastline and reconstructed the historical species diversity using the accumulations of empty shells on the sea bottom.

Biodiversity loss in the last few decades

The shallow habitats at scuba diving depths are affected most. Here, the researchers were not able to find living individuals of up to 95 per cent of the species whose shells were found in the sediments. The study suggests that most of this loss has occurred recently, presumably in just the last few decades.

Additionally, most of the species still found alive cannot grow enough to reproduce, "a clear sign that the biodiversity collapse will further continue," says Albano. In contrast, the tropical species that enter from the Suez Canal thrive. The warm waters in the Eastern Mediterranean are very suitable habitats for them. Indeed, they occur in large populations and their individuals are fully fit to reproduce.

"For anyone accustomed to snorkel or dive in the Mediterranean," explains the researcher, "the underwater scenario in Israel is unrecognisable: The most common species are missing, while in contrast tropical species are everywhere."

The future perspectives for the Mediterranean are not good. The sea will continue to warm even if we would stop carbon dioxide emissions today. This is due to the inertia of the system, the long braking distance, so to speak.

It is thus likely that the biodiversity collapse will continue to spread. It may already be occurring in other eastern Mediterranean areas not surveyed yet, and it will expand to the West and intensify. Only intertidal organisms, which are to some extent pre-adapted to temperature extremes, and habitats in deeper water, where the temperature is markedly lower, will continue to persist -- at least for some time.

"But the future is dim unless we immediately act to reduce our carbon emissions and to protect marine habitats from other pressures which contribute to biodiversity loss," says Paolo Albano, "The changes that already occurred in the warmest areas of the Mediterranean may not be reversible, but we would be able to save large parts of the rest of the basin."

Methodologically, the study was also interesting due to its interdisciplinary character: "These results came from the cooperation of scientists with very different backgrounds," says Martin Zuschin, Head of the Department of Palaeontology and co-author of the study -- "In particular, the cooperation between ecologists and palaeontologists is providing unique new views on how humankind is impacting biodiversity."

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Vienna. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:
Paolo G. Albano, Jan Steger, Marija Bošnjak, Beata Dunne, Zara Guifarro, Elina Turapova, Quan Hua, Darrell S. Kaufman, Gil Rilov, Martin Zuschin. Native biodiversity collapse in the eastern Mediterranean. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2021; 288 (1942): 20202469 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2020.2469

Disasters caused $210 billion in damage in 2020, showing growing cost of climate change

PUBLISHED THU, JAN 7 2021
Emma Newburger@EMMA_NEWBURGER

A record number of hurricanes, wildfires and floods exacerbated by climate change cost the world $210 billion in damage last year, a top insurer said.

The six costliest disasters of 2020 occurred in the U.S., topped by Hurricane Laura’s devastation, which caused $13 billion in damage after hitting Louisiana in August.

One major problem the report revealed is the lack of insurance coverage for disasters in developing countries.

Overall disaster losses in Asia totaled $67 billion, of which only $3 billion was insured.


A woman stands outside her home damaged due to heavy rain caused by Hurricane Eta, in Pimienta, Honduras November 6, 2020.
Jorge Cabrera | Reuters

A record number of hurricanes, wildfires and floods exacerbated by climate change cost the world $210 billion in damage last year, according to a report by reinsurance company Munich Re.

Damages totaled $95 billion in the U.S., nearly double the losses in 2019. The country experienced a record number of Atlantic hurricanes and the largest wildfires on record in California in 2020, the second-hottest year on record.

Climate change is causing more frequent and intense disasters like storms, heat waves and wildfires, and economic losses are also growing as more people build in disaster-prone areas.

“Natural catastrophe losses in 2020 were significantly higher than in the previous year,” Munich Re board member Torsten Jeworrek said in the report. “Climate change will play an increasing role in all of these hazards. It is time to act.”

More from CNBC Environment:
A historic Atlantic hurricane season is ending. A look at the records it shattered
‘I lost everything’: In hurricane-ravaged Louisiana, people struggle to rebuild
Heat waves are becoming more deadly as nights warm faster than days

The six costliest disasters of 2020 occurred in the U.S, the worst of which was Hurricane Laura. The storm caused $13 billion in damage after it devastated parts of Louisiana in August. The Atlantic hurricane season saw a record 30 named storms and accounted for $43 billion in losses, almost half of the total disaster loss in the U.S. last year, the report said.

A line of severe thunderstorms in the Midwest in August caused $6.8 billion in losses and destroyed millions of acres of farmland in Iowa. Drought in the West also fueled dozens of massive wildfires that resulted in $16 billion in losses.

One major problem the report revealed is the lack of insurance coverage for disasters in developing countries. Overall disaster losses in Asia totaled $67 billion, of which only $3 billion was insured.

The single worst disaster last year was flooding across China from summer monsoons, which amounted to $17 billion in damage, of which only 2% was insured. Cyclone Amphan hit India and Bangladesh in May, causing $14 billion in damage, very little of which was insured, the report said.

After Court OKs Trump Arctic Refuge Auction, Biden Urged to Immediately Ban Drilling on Public Lands

"Trump's last-ditch effort to extract fossil fuels in this sacred region is a direct assault on Indigenous sovereignty, our climate, and communities."

by

Jessica Corbett, staff writer

Published on

Wednesday, January 06, 2021

by

Common Dreams

Caribou graze on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. (Photo: USFWS/Flickr/cc)

President-elect Joe Biden is facing renewed pressure to deliver on his promise of a bold climate agenda after a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration could move forward with a Wednesday auction of fossil fuel drilling leases for federally protected lands in Alaska.

"President-elect Biden can reverse these disastrous oil and gas industry plans by keeping his promise to ban fossil fuel extraction—including fracking—on our public lands and waters."
—Mitch Jones, Food & Water Watch

After decades of national debate over oil and gas development in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), Republicans in Congress opened up the region to drilling with a provision in the so-called "tax scam" that President Donald Trump signed in 2017.

Late Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason in Anchorage declined (pdf) to issue a preliminary injunction to block the auction. The request came from environmental groups and Indigenous people who are opposed to drilling in ANWR, which is home to over 280 species.

In a statement Wednesday, Mitch Jones, policy director at the advocacy group Food & Water Watch, urged Biden to prevent fossil fuel development in the refuge—and beyond—when he takes office in two weeks. The president-elect has previously said he "totally" opposes drilling in the ecologically sensitive region.

"Trump rushing through these lease sales as a final handout to his cronies in the oil and gas industry is outrageous, if not surprising," Jones declared. "Trump's consistent, willful ignorance of the realities of climate change has pushed our planet towards decades of increasing climate chaos."

"President-elect Biden can reverse these disastrous oil and gas industry plans by keeping his promise to ban fossil fuel extraction—including fracking—on our public lands and waters," he added. "This is a step he can, and must, take upon taking office."

Jones' call for Biden to intervene to protect ANWR's coastal plain came after environmental and Indigenous leaders expressed disappointment with Gleason's decision not to block the auction while also emphasizing that her ruling doesn't mark the end of their fight against drilling rights in the refuge.

Four lawsuits have been filed since August challenging the lease plans, according to Reuters. The National Audubon Society and other groups had argued that the auction shouldn't go forward until the broader challenge to the drilling is resolved.

The Anchorage Daily News reports that Erik Grafe, an Earthjustice attorney representing the Audubon Society, said the case "is by no means over."

"The court concluded only that for now there is no harm that justifies an injunction. It also recognized that such an action could come very soon with issuance of seismic permits," he said. "We will continue to press our case that the agency approved the program unlawfully and that its decision should be overturned."

Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich'in Steering Committee, which represents some of the area's Indigenous people, similarly said Tuesday that "today's ruling is disappointing but does nothing to change the strength of our lawsuit or our resolve."

Demientieff's people have relied on the region's Porcupine Caribou Herd for thousands of years. The Gwich'in call the coastal plain, which the caribou use as their calving grounds, "Iizhik Gwats'an Gwandaii Goodlit" or "The Sacred Place Where Life Begins."

As The Guardian reported ahead of the ruling Tuesday:

Oil from drilling west of the refuge, at Prudhoe Bay, has fueled the economic development the state has depended on to fill its coffers and write annual revenue checks to residents. That extraction also led to the most damaging oil spill in history, when the Exxon Valdez tanker spewed millions of barrels off Alaska's southern coast in 1989.

Prudhoe Bay "was the largest oil field ever discovered in North America. Since then we have had more than 1,500 square miles of oil and gas development in the Alaskan Arctic… but [ANWR] has been off limits," said Adam Kolton, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League.

"For us, it symbolizes just what's at stake here. If you can't draw a line at the tundra and keep this one area of the Arctic off limits, then the question is, where can you draw the line and what protected part or wildlife refuge in the United States will remain off limits?"

For the first-ever ANWR auction, the Bureau of Land Management "plans open bids from companies seeking 10-year leases," according to the Daily News. "Up for grabs to the highest bidder are 22 tracts on the refuge's coastal plain, most of them about 50,000 acres. Together, the tracts represent about 5% of the 19-million-acre refuge."

It remains unclear if any fossil fuel companies will even bid on the leases—especially given that major U.S. banks, under pressure from environmental and Indigenous groups, have adopted policies of refusing to finance drilling in the Arctic, including ANWR, which was designated by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960.

EPA: Fuel efficiency dropped in 2019

Ben Geman, author of Generate

Data: EPA; Chart: Axios Visuals

The average fuel efficiency of cars and light trucks sold in the U.S. dipped in model year 2019, newly released federal data shows.

Why it matters: Transportation is the nation's largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. The overall trends (see above) show that the sector is far from steep emissions cuts.

How it works: Per Reuters, "The shift to larger vehicles was the biggest factor hurting fuel economy. In 2019, 44% of the fleet were cars and 56% were light-duty trucks, a category that includes SUVs, the highest percentage of trucks on record."

What they're saying: EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the data justifies his agency's decision to weaken Obama-era rules on mileage and CO2 emissions to allow smaller increases through the mid-2020s.

• "This report shows in detail how few auto manufactures were able to meet the unrealistic emissions standards set by the Obama administration without resorting to purchasing emission credits," he said.

The other side: Dan Becker, an advocate for much tougher emissions standards, said the data show why the incoming administration must reverse Trump policy.

• "Without tough rules from the Biden administration, automakers will keep pushing gas-guzzling Trumpmobiles on consumers rather than deliver clean cars that cut pollution," said Becker, who's with the Center for Biological Diversity.