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©Ashley Cooper
March 15, 2022 Circular Economy / Climate Change / CO2 Emissions / Energy / Environment / Integrated Waste Management Systems / Landfill / Methane / News & Updates / Policies / Resource Management / Waste-to-Energy
Florida poised to solidify its status as the nation’s waste-to-energy capital with supportive new legislation

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This potential sign of state support could also renew discussions around broader waste planning efforts in Florida. While all forms of solid waste disposal generate emissions, landfill methane is an especially potent contributor to climate change and combustion facilities have a lower greenhouse gas emission profile.

“The support to level the playing field is indeed a step in the right direction,” said Philipp Schmidt-Pathmann, CEO of the Institute for Energy and Resource Management. “The better step would be to phase out landfilling altogether of untreated waste [and] focus on an integrated waste management system.” Schmidt-Pathmann and his colleagues also want to see more focus on the greenhouse gas implications of resource management.
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March 4, 2022 Climate Change / Environment / Failed Policies / Future Costs / International / News & Updates / Policies / Public Health / Science & Society
‘Delay is Death,’ said UN Chief António Guterres of the New IPCC Report Showing Climate Impacts Are Outpacing Adaptation Efforts

Ecologist Camille Parmesan, one of the lead authors of the report, said it shows that climate impacts will arrive faster and be “much more widespread than we thought.” The science assessed for it by the IPCC opened “a whole new realm on infectious diseases emerging in new areas,” and documents species extinctions and mass mortalities of mammals caused directly by climate change. Local losses of key species are already affecting the stability and integrity of ecosystems, she added.

Even to the authors, the intensity of some impacts from the current level of warming were surprising and disturbing, she said. Insect-ravaged forests, dried-up peatlands and “even intact, undisturbed Amazon rainforest” are losing their ability to remove carbon dioxide from the air, she said. “Maybe not every year,” she continued, but at a pace that could further accelerate warming.

Meanwhile, global emissions are still going up, and the panel’s report warned how risky it would be to shoot past the Paris agreement goal and rely on unproven carbon dioxide removal technologies to reduce the temperature quickly.

“We are concluding that going above our targets would increase risk of irreversible impacts,” Parmesan said, while other impacts would be “difficult to reverse after overshoot.”

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March 3, 2022 Climate Change / CO2 Emissions / Environment / International / News & Updates / Policies / Science & Society
Billions to suffer impacts of climate crisis as window for action rapidly closes, warns major IPCC report

The final, virtual approval sessions for the IPCC report, released with approval from 195 member governments, ran late into the night.

“Climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and planetary health. Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all,” the authors warned.

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March 3, 2022 Circular Economy / Climate Change / Environment / International / Plastics / Policies
‘Most important climate deal since Paris’: UN agrees treaty to end scourge of plastic pollution

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World leaders, ministers and other representatives from nearly 200 countries at the United Nations environment assembly in Nairobi, Kenya, agreed on Wednesday to develop a treaty designed to bring an end to the scourge of plastic pollution.

The resolution, which addresses the full lifecycle of plastic, including production, design and disposal, will be developed over the next two years.

It is hoped an agreement to address the growing problem of plastic waste in the world’s oceans, rivers and landscapes can be reached by the end of 2024.

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March 3, 2022 Air Pollution / Climate Change / Energy / Environment / News & Updates / Policies
This US Supreme Court decision could derail Biden’s climate plan

What is the history of the lawsuit?
In 2015, during the Obama administration, the EPA finalized a flagship climate rule, dubbed the Clean Power Plan, which sought to curtail emissions from the electricity sector to at least 30% below 2005 levels by 2030. The plan would have set reductions targets for US states; to meet them, coal- and gas-burning power plants could have upgraded their technology to boost efficiency and decrease emissions, but the bulk of the reductions would have needed to come from electric utilities shifting towards more renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar. The Obama EPA said that this ‘generation shifting’ approach was consistent with the Clean Air Act, a law that requires the agency to consider the best-available technologies when crafting regulations to curb air pollution.

The more industry-friendly Trump administration repealed the Clean Power Plan in 2018 and replaced it with a weaker version dubbed the Affordable Clean Energy plan, which more narrowly interpreted the Clean Air Act. It also limited pollution controls to technologies that could be installed at individual power plants. Critics said it would do little, if anything, to encourage a broader shift towards clean energy.

The situation came to a head on Trump’s final day in office in early 2021, when a federal appeals court in Washington DC dismissed the Trump plan and rejected its repeal of the original Clean Power Plan. The new Supreme Court case, West Virginia vs Environmental Protection Agency, hinges on the fact that the appeals court expressly rejected the Trump administration’s arguments that the Clean Air Act does not authorize the EPA to require generation shifting across the electricity industry.

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