NEWS UPDATE #84
January was the globe’s most unusually warm month ever recorded, and the past three months have been the most unusually warm three-month period on record as well, according to NASA. It is the combination of manmade global warming and a record strong El Niño that’s bumped up temperatures to never-before-seen levels since at least 1880.
Drought & development: why Maharashtra is fast running out of water
Ashwin Aghir, Catch News
Maharashtra is facing a severe water crisis. And the government is clearly struggling to cope. Worse still, it’s feared that the water sources that are left won’t last till the monsoon two months away. The state’s total water storage has gone down to 30% as against 50% this time last year. In at least three districts, water sources have dried up almost entirely. Most areas in Mumbai Metropolitan Region don’t get water for two days a week. The government is not in a position to meet the ever growing demands for water tankers from across Marathwada and western Maharashtra. (Also read: Warning notes from Marathwada: how water wars can consume India)
This Is How The Chhattisgarh Govt. Is ‘Punishing’ Tribals For Protesting Against Coal Mining
Youth Ki Awaaz
For the first time in 10 years of the Forest Rights Act (FRA), the Chhattisgarh government has cancelled forest rights allotted to tribals of Ghatbarra village in Surguja district. In an order issued on January 8, 2016, the state forest department stated that village residents were using their rights to oppose mining in coal blocks outside the forest compartments allotted to them. Ghatbarra village had claimed community rights over eight forest compartments. Of these, the tribals received title deeds for only three compartments. The remaining five compartments were under the Prasa East and Kete Besan coal blocks allocated to Rajasthan Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Limited (RVUNL) and operated by Adani Minerals Private Limited.
Burying the Law to Make Way for a Coal Mine
Kanchi Kohli & Alok Shukla, The Wire
When the Forest Survey of India’s 2011 report celebrated Hasdeo Arand as the largest unfragmented forest in central India outside the official protected area system, there was another process ongoing to undo this fact. The Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) was considering a coal mining proposal to open up 1898.328 hectares of Hasdeo that is significant for water, wildlife and ways of living for tribal and forest-dependent communities. That Hasdeo Arand was proposed as an elephant reserve and that the legal forest rights of communities had not been recognised did not stop the approval bodies from handing over the forests on the Parsa East Ketan Besan (PEKB) coal block in Chhattisgarh to Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Ltd (RRVUNL), which would carry out the mining operations through Parsa Kante Collieires Ltd, a joint venture with Adani Mining Ltd.
Farmers’ livelihoods or gas pipeline: The “national interest” debate
T.S. Subramanian, Frontline
With elections to the State Assembly less than three months away, a Supreme Court order has left the Tamil Nadu government wringing its hands in despair. On February 2, a bench comprising Chief Justice of India T.S. Thakur and Justices A.K. Sikri and R. Banumathi upheld a Madras High Court order of November 25, 2013, allowing the public sector undertaking Gas Authority of India Limited (GAIL) to go ahead with its plan to lay a gas pipeline through Coimbatore, Dharmapuri, Erode, Krishnagiri, Namakkal, Salem and Tirupur districts in western Tamil Nadu as part of its Kochi-Koottanad-Mangaluru-Bengaluru Pipeline (KKMBPL) project to transport natural gas.
70% of urban India’s sewage is landing up in its rivers and seas
Chaitanya Mallapur, IndiaSpend.com
There are four years left for the government target of ensuring all Indians use toilets, but in urban India alone, no more than 30% of sewage generated by 377 million people flows through treatment plants. The rest is randomly dumped in rivers, seas, lakes and wells, polluting three-fourths of the country’s water bodies, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of various data sources. An estimated 62,000 million litres per day sewage is generated in urban areas, while the treatment capacity across India is only 23,277 MLD, or 37% of sewage generated, according to data released by the government in December 2015.
Koodankulam kaput
Sam Rajappa, The Statesman
The brand new Russian plant was erected jointly by the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited and Atomstroyexport of Russia. It was connected to the grid on 22 October 2013 and commercial operation began on 31 December 2014. During the 800 and odd days of grid connection the reactor worked for 372 days, tripped 20 times and was off the grid for about 470 days. The actual power produced is 3,222 million units, just 18 per cent of its rated capacity. The reactor was commissioned for one year’s warranty period operation on 30 December 2014 but was shut down on 24 June 2015, much before the expiry of the warranty period.
India’s 2022 renewable energy goal will require investment four times the defence budget
Fact Check India
India’s installed capacity of renewable energy is likely to reach 147 GW by 2020, according to a report by the International Energy Agency. It would need Rs 8.01 lakh crore ($120 billion) in capital investment and Rs 2.67 lakh crore ($40 billion) in equity to achieve the ambitious target, according to information released by the ministry of new and renewable energy. The Rs 10.68 lakh crore ($160 billion) needed over the next seven years (until 2022) – at an average of Rs 1.53 lakh crore ($23 billion) a year– to meet the stated goal is equivalent to over four times the country’s annual defence spending, and over ten times the country’s annual spending on health and education.
Global warming in overdrive: We just had the hottest January ever recorded
Mashable
Global warming went into overdrive in January, leading to astounding temperature records. January was the globe’s most unusually warm month ever recorded, and the past three months have been the most unusually warm three-month period on record as well, according to new findings from NASA. The data, which is subject to adjustment as scientists refine their analysis, shows that the combination of accelerated manmade global warming from the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, is combining with a record strong El Niño to bump up temperatures to never-before-seen levels since at least 1880. (Also read: Bengaluru sizzles at 10-year high of 35.5 degrees Celsius)
Study Ties U.S. to Spike in Global Methane Emissions
Climate Central
There was a huge global spike in one of the most potent greenhouse gases driving climate change over the last decade, and the U.S. may be the biggest culprit, according a new Harvard University study. The United States alone could be responsible for between 30 percent and 60 percent of the global growth in human-caused atmospheric methane emissions since 2002 because of a 30 percent spike in methane emissions across the country, the study says.
How the great phosphorus shortage could leave us short of food
Charly Faradji and Marissa de Boer, The Conversation
You know that greenhouse gases are changing the climate. You probably know drinking water is becoming increasingly scarce, and that we’re living through a mass extinction. But when did you last worry about phosphorus? It’s not as well-known as the other issues, but phosphorus depletion is no less significant. After all, we could live without cars or unusual species, but if phosphorus ran out we’d have to live without food.
Global nitrogen footprint mapped for first time
Science Daily
The first-ever global nitrogen footprint, encompassing 188 countries, has found the United States, China, India and Brazil are responsible for 46 percent of the world’s nitrogen emissions. The economic modelling, which grouped the nitrogen footprint into top-ranking bilateral trade relationships, noted a trend for increased nitrogen production and found developed nations largely responsible for emissions abroad for their own consumption.
Sea levels rising at fastest rate in 2,800 years due to global warming, studies show
The Guardian
Sea levels are rising several times faster than they have in the past 2,800 years, with the process accelerating because of manmade global warming, according to new studies. An international team of scientists examined two dozen locations across the globe to chart rising and falling seas over centuries and millennia. Until the 1880s and the world’s industrialisation, the fastest seas rose was about 3cm to 4cm a century. During that time global sea levels did not get much higher or lower than 7.6cm above or below the 2,000-year average. But in the 20th century the world’s seas rose 14cm.
Record warm years almost certainly due to human-made climate change
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Recent record warm years are with extremely high likelihood caused by human-made climate change. Without greenhouse-gas emissions from burning coal and oil, the odds are vanishingly small that 13 out of the 15 warmest years ever measured would all have happened in the current, still young century. These odds are between 1 in 5000 and 1 in 170.000, a new study by an international team of scientists now shows. Including the data for 2015, which came in after the study was completed, makes the odds even slimmer.
Scientists: air pollution led to more than 5.5 million premature deaths in 2013
The Guardian
Air pollution caused more than 5.5 million people to die prematurely in 2013, according to research presented on Friday, with more than half of those deaths in India and China and illnesses in those countries almost certain to rise. According to scientists from the US, Canada, China and India, who presented their findings at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC, conditions caused by air pollution killed 1.6 million people in China and 1.4 million people in India in 2013.
It’s Not Just What Exxon Did, It’s What It’s Doing
Bill McKibben, TomDispatch
We have the chief legal representatives of the eighth and 16th largest economies on Earth (California and New York) probing the biggest fossil fuel company on Earth (ExxonMobil), while both Democratic presidential candidates are demanding that the federal Department of Justice join the investigation of what may prove to be one of the biggest corporate scandals in American history. And that’s just the beginning. As bad as Exxon has been in the past, what it’s doing now — entirely legally — is helping push the planet over the edge and into the biggest crisis in the entire span of the human story.
Who Will Be Left Standing At The End Of The Oil War
Charles Kennedy, Oil Price
Everyone is hurting, some more than others. Venezuela is already on its knees. But even $30 oil isn’t enough to bring the other bigger players down or to end the cold oil war. Saudi Arabia has some $600 billion in financial reserves; Russia is worried enough only to start talking to OPEC; U.S. producers are holding strong and are fairly calm, closely measuring the pace of desperation most recently indicated in the word game over an output freeze.
It’s Time To Call The Shale Gas Revolution As Well As “The Mighty Marcellus” A Bust
Nicholas C. Arguimbau, Countercurrents.org
The entire US shale gas industry is being brought down by its largest play, the Marcellus, in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Here’s how things look on the ground. Restaurants that used to be packed are now virtually empty. Almost every drilling company has laid off workers and reduced its capital budget. Drilling rig counts, a surrogate for future new production, dropped by half, from 120 to 59, between 2013 and 2015, and dropped by half again, from 59 to 29, in the last nine months, leaving total production supported primarilly by pre-exiating, “legacy” wells which in shale gas plays typically lose about one third of their present production each year. (Also read: Shale Set To Decline Substantially This Year)
Masdar’s zero-carbon dream could become world’s first green ghost town
The Guardian
Developers have abandoned their original goal of building the world’s first zero-carbon city in the UAE desert. With completion originally scheduled for this year, just how much of the once-revolutionary vision has actually been realised?
With Climate Change, Organic Agriculture Could Outperform Conventional Agriculture, says Study
Think Progress
The analysis, conducted by researchers at Washington State University, looked at organic farming as it relates to four main pillars of sustainability: productivity, economics, environment, and community well-being. Researchers surveyed over 40 years’ worth of studies comparing organic farming to conventional farming, and looked at how each practice contributed to a particular tenant of sustainability. “Hundreds of scientific studies now show that organic ag should play a role in feeding the world,” John Reganold, WSU regents professor of soil science and agroecology and lead author of the study, told Phys.org.
Thomas Piketty on the rise of Bernie Sanders: the US enters a new political era
Thomas Piketty, The Guardian
How can we interpret the incredible success of the “socialist” candidate Bernie Sanders in the US primaries? The Vermont senator is now ahead of Hillary Clinton among Democratic-leaning voters below the age of 50, and it’s only thanks to the older generation that Clinton has managed to stay ahead in the polls. Because he is facing the Clinton machine, as well as the conservatism of mainstream media, Sanders might not win the race. But it has now been demonstrated that another Sanders – possibly younger and less white – could one day soon win the US presidential elections and change the face of the country. In many respects, we are witnessing the end of the politico-ideological cycle opened by the victory of Ronald Reagan at the 1980 elections. (Also read: Nothing Less Than Fate of Planet Hinges on Next U.S. Supreme Court Nominee)