Greetings, Friends
We have made the turn to a New Year and a new decade for Carbon Rangers. You are reading Issue Number 1 of Volume 11. Thank you for your steady support. We have 600+ subscribers in about 25  countries now. I wish we had better news of course, but the plan is to tell the truth as best we can and hope everyone responds with good behavior and right action. To improve the world it is important to understand it. And we know the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are still diminishing and sending icebergs into the oceans of the world. (Iceberg photo: foldedstory) .
Changes in Policy. One especially disturbing feature during 2017 was the steady erosion of good environmental policy in the United States at the Federal level, specifically at the Environmental Protection Agency. We have also witnessed steady Administration pressure on the United Nations to meet the expectations of the US or face financial retaliation by reduction in funding.
United Nations Finances. The actual contribution of the USA to the United Nations is substantial and necessary but quite reasonable - amounting to about US $1.80 per US citizen per year. For comparison, the USA defense budget is approximately US $700 billion per year, or roughly $2 billion per day. The total UN operating budget equals approximately one day and nine hours of US military spending. The US share is roughly seven hours of Pentagon spending. This subject gets longer treatment in a recent post from Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University. The link is here.
Fossil Fuel Divestment. I thought to begin 2018 with some positive news of how fossil fuel divestment efforts are making progress. The lead item below is a piece by our friend Bill McKibben telling how NY State is responding to the federal government on the issue of fossil fuel divestment. Very interesting decisions by several traditional fossil fuel and mining giants have a distinctly more ecological look. There is also a note on how China is making plans for a renewed effort to work forcefully on improving the environment by means of strong government policies. Several major fossil fuel giants- BP and Shell show willingness to diversify by adding renewables to their holdings. The solar industry manages to keep growing despite a hostile regulatory situation in the USA.
I include as usual a slice of timeless wisdom from Thomas Berry.
Cordially,
Br. Kevin
You can link to the Edmund Rice International website for Care of Earth here.
The Thomas Berry Forum for Ecological Dialogue at Iona College has a web page here.
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The Movement to Divest from Fossil Fuels Gains Momentum
By Bill McKibben
December 21, 2017
The New Yorker
Tuesday, December 19, 2017, should have been a day of unmitigated joy for America’s oil and gas executives. The new G.O.P. tax bill treats their companies with great tenderness, reducing even further their federal tax burden. And the bill gave them something else they’ve sought for decades: permission to go a-drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But, around four in the afternoon, something utterly unexpected began to happen. A news release went out from Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office, saying that New York was going to divest its vast pension-fund investments in fossil fuels. The state, Cuomo said, would be “ceasing all new investments in entities with significant fossil-fuel-related activities,” and he would set up a committee with Thomas DiNapoli, the state comptroller, to figure out how to “decarbonize” the existing portfolio. Cuomo’s office even provided a handy little Twitter meme of the type that activists often create: it showed three smoke-belching stacks and the legend “New York Is Divesting from Fossil Fuels.” The pension fund under Albany’s control totals two hundred billion dollars, making it one of the twenty largest pools of money on Earth.
Read More.
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China Unveils an Ambitious Plan to Curb Climate Change Emissions
By Keith Bradsher and Lisa Friedman
Dec. 19, 2017
SHANGHAI — China is the world’s No. 1 polluter. It burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. It produces more than a quarter of the world’s human-caused global warming gases, nearly as much as North America and Europe put together.
On Tuesday, the country set out to claim another title reflecting its ambitions to change all that: keeper of the world’s largest financial market devoted to cleaning up the air.
China released plans on Tuesday to start a giant market to trade credits for the right to emit planet-warming greenhouse gases. The nationwide market would initially cover China’s vast, state-dominated power generation sector, which produced almost half of the country’s emissions from the burning of fossil fuels last year. If it works as intended, an emissions market will give Chinese power companies a financial incentive to operate more cleanly.
The long-awaited announcement could bolster global efforts to combat climate change after President Trump signaled this year that the United States would back away from Obama-era promises to curb emissions. It could also serve as a big — though ultimately government-controlled — laboratory for such carbon markets, after earlier efforts in Europe and at the local level in China stumbled. Read More
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New York Unveils Climate Plan to Counter 'political interference' from Washington
As part of a sweeping green mandate, New York's governor said he would reconvene a climate advisory panel in order to avoid "political interference" from the White House.
Governor Andrew Cuomo, pictured above (Photo: thenation), in the rollout this week of his annual "State of the State" initiative, said he would promote building a state economy based on efforts to increase clean energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. "As a result, the advisory committee will continue its critical work without political interference and provide the guidance needed to adapt to a changing climate," his office said in a statement.
New York state's 2018 climate agenda builds on steps already taken by the governor, including a mandate to get half of the state's electricity needs from renewable energy sources by 2030. Among the new efforts is a call to procure at least 800 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2019. The governor also launched an initiative to establish 1,500 megawatts of clean energy storage by 2025—the largest state-level commitment in the country.
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Billiton, Australian Mining Giant, Leaving World Coal Association
In a startling sign of the times, Australia-based multinational mining giant BHP Billiton announced on December 19, 2017, that it had made a "preliminary decision" to leave the World Coal Association (WCA)—and perhaps the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—because of "material... differences on climate and energy policy." In a report released at the same time, BHP said it believes "the Paris Agreement provides a solid long-term foundation for further progress in the global response to climate change." The report also says that, unlike the Trump administration, "BHP accepts the [U.N.] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's assessment of climate change science, which has found that warming of the climate is unequivocal, the human influence is clear and physical impacts are unavoidable... . As a result, responding to climate change is a priority… governance and strategic issue for BHP." The company said it would invite a response from the WCA and make "a final determination as to future membership" by the end of March.
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Shell, Seeking to Curb Its Carbon Footprint, Buys Electricity Provider
By Stanley Reed Dec. 21, 2017
LONDON — Royal Dutch Shell announced on Thursday that it had agreed to buy a Britain-based provider of electrical power and natural gas, one of the boldest in a series of recent investments in non-oil and gas-energy businesses by large European oil companies.
The acquisition of First Utility, which has about 825,000 residential customers, was an indication that Ben van Beurden, Shell’s chief executive, was wasting little time in acting on a commitment he made last month. Mr. van Beurden had said he aimed to ramp up investment in new-energy businesses toward $2 billion annually, in an effort to reduce the company’s carbon emissions.
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TESLA
2017 was the year of Tesla co-founder Elon Musk. From a battery factory in Nevada, to South Australia where his batteries are helping a wind farm provide reliable power, to a new energy grid in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, Tesla has taken the lead in producing batteries for energy storage and to power electric cars. And it has developed new all-electric semi trucks and solar shingles!
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BP, Once a Renewables Leader, Bets $200 Million on Solar
By Stanley Reed Dec. 15, 2017
LONDON — BP had been at the forefront when it came to major oil companies going green. It invested billions in renewables. It was quick to acknowledge the link between fossil fuels and global warming. It adopted the slogan “Beyond Petroleum.”
But that all fell by the wayside when the company was hit by the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. On Friday, in what may be a move to repolish tarnished green credentials, the energy giant said that it would spend $200 million to acquire a large stake in a Lightsource, a solar power developer based in Britain.
BP, like other major European oil companies, is responding to pressure from investors and governments, especially in the region, to shift away from the traditional fossil fuels blamed for climate change, like oil and gas, and into cleaner sources of energy. Statoil, the Norwegian giant, for example, is staking out a big position in offshore wind, and Total, the French company, last year bought a battery maker called Saft for 950 million euros, or $1.1 billion.
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Today’s Energy Jobs Are in Solar, Not Coal
By NADJA POPOVICH APRIL 25, 2017 NYT
President Trump has promised to revive the coal industry and double down on fossil fuels, creating “so many energy jobs,” but he has not focused on the increasingly important role of renewable power in America’s energy economy.
Last year, the solar industry employed many more Americans than coal, while wind power topped 100,000 jobs.
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SOLAR ENERGY SHINES in USA
 Production of clean energy climbed as prices continued to come down. In March, 10 percent of all electricity generated in the U.S. came from wind and solar, with help from Texas (America’s number 1 wind provider) and California (the largest solar producer). Bloomberg New Energy Finance concluded in the summer that solar energy can now be as cheap as power from new coal plants in the U.S.
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 1914-2009
Message from Thomas Berry
“Here we might observe that the basic mood of the future might well be one of confidence in the continuing revelation that takes place in and through the earth. If the dynamics of the universe from the beginning shaped the course of the heavens, lighted the sun, and formed the earth, if this same dynamism brought forth the continents and seas and atmosphere, if it awakened life in the primordial cell and then brought into being the unnumbered variety of living beings, and finally brought us into being and guided us safely through the turbulent centuries, there is reason to believe that this same guiding process is precisely what has awakened in us our present understanding of ourselves and our relation to this stupendous process. Sensitized to such guidance from the very structure and functioning of the universe, we can have confidence in the future that awaits the human venture.” (Thomas Berry, “The New Story,” in The Dream of the Earth, 137).
Photo by Lou Niznik 10–6–1999
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