Mini Metropolis: Cacao farmers in Ivory Coast

ThreeNL
Published on Apr 15, 2014

Many cacao farmers work for a very low wage, and most of them can’t afford a bar of chocolate. Metropolis brings the chocolate to the cacao farmers to give them a taste of their own work.

Cocoa Farmers of Soubre, Côte d’Ivoire (Full Version)

Mars Sustainability
Published on Oct 17, 2012

Meet some of the farmers in Côte d’Ivoire who grow cocoa, the primary ingredient in chocolate, to support their families and learn about the communities in which they live and some of the challenges they face.

Will Fossil Fuels Run Out? | Earth Lab

BBC Earth Lab

Published on May 11, 2017

Greg Foot looks into the dirty world of fossil fuels. Will we run out of fossil fuels and what cost will we likely pay for their use? Footnotes 1 – http://www.fe.doe.gov/education/energ… and https://www.theguardian.com/science/2… 2 – http://www.fe.doe.gov/education/energ… 3- https://www.theguardian.com/environme… 4- https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/pdf… 5- http://fortune.com/2016/07/05/oil-res… 6- https://www.theguardian.com/environme… 7- http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidblac… 8- https://www.eia.gov/energy_in_brief/a… 9- https://www.theguardian.com/environme… 10- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10… 11- http://www.npr.org/sections/money/201… 12- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl… 13 – http://climate.nasa.gov/ and http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astron… 14 https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/over… 15 http://www.carbontracker.org/resources/ and https://www.theguardian.com/environme… 16 – https://www.scientificamerican.com/ar…

Construction of Cote d’Ivoire’s Soubre hydroelectric dam completed – YouTube

CGTN Africa
Published on Jul 1, 2017

A Chinese-built dam in Cote d’Ivoire has officially started power generation. The Soubre hydropower station is located in the west of the country and was constructed by China’s SINO Hydro company. It is currently the largest hydro-power project in Cote d’Ivoire. Upon completion the station is expected to boost the country’s entire capacity by about 10 percent . Cote d’Ivoire already has six hydropower stations and four more are due to be constructed as part of a national policy to attain a capacity of 4,000 MW by the year 2020.

What Is Donald Trump’s Response to the U.N.’s Dire Climate Report? | Th e New Yorker

 

The U.N.’s scientific advisory board sounds a piercing alarm on climate change, but the President doesn’t seem to hear it.

By Elizabeth Kolbert

Three years ago, when world leaders met in Paris to negotiate a treaty on climate change, one of the sticking points was where to set what might be called the Doomsday Thermometer. For reasons that had to do mostly with politics, rather than with geophysics, industrialized nations wanted to define “dangerous” warming as an average global-temperature increase of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). But island states, such as the Maldives and Mauritius, along with developing countries like Ethiopia and Cambodia, were resistant. Well before the world warmed by two degrees, their countries would be devastated—some of them underwater. Why should they endorse what amounted to a death sentence?

“We will not sign off on any agreement that represents a certain extinction of our people,” a delegate to the talks from Barbados told Politico. Together with a group of nearly fifty “climate vulnerable” countries, the island nations pressed for a limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The compromise reached—more Monty Hall than Solomon—was to endorse both figures. The Paris agreement calls for “holding” warming below two degrees, while “pursuing efforts” to limit it to 1.5 degrees.

Last week, the United Nations’ scientific advisory board delivered its assessment of those numbers. The findings of the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were almost universally—and justifiably—described as “dire.” Even 1.5 degrees’ worth of warming, the I.P.C.C. warned, is likely to be disastrous, with consequences that include, but are not limited to, the loss of most of the world’s coral reefs, the displacement of millions of people by sea-level rise, and a decline in global crop yields. Meanwhile, at the current rate of emissions, the world will have run through the so-called carbon budget for 1.5 degrees within the next decade or so. “It’s like a deafening, piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen,” Erik Solheim, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, told the Washington Post.

But, if a smoke alarm rings in the kitchen and everyone’s watching “Fox & Friends” in the den, does it make a sound? Asked about the report last week, Donald Trump said, “I want to look at who drew it—you know, which group drew it.” The answer seemed to indicate that the President had never heard of the I.P.C.C., a level of cluelessness that, while hardly a surprise, was nevertheless dismaying. The next day, as a devastating hurricane hit Florida—one made that much more destructive by the warming that’s already occurred—the President flew to Pennsylvania to campaign for Lou Barletta, a climate-change-denying Republican congressman running for the Senate.

Though the Administration often seems incapable of systematic action, it has spent the past eighteen months systematically targeting rules aimed at curbing greenhouse-gas emissions. One of these rules, which required greater fuel efficiency for cars and trucks, would have reduced CO2 emissions by an estimated six billion tons over the lifetime of the affected vehicles. In a recent filing intended to justify the rollback, the Administration predicted that, by the end of this century, global temperatures will have risen by almost four degrees Celsius (nearly seven degrees Fahrenheit). In this context, the Administration argued, why would anyone care about a mere six billion tons? Come the apocalypse, it seems, we’ll all want to be driving S.U.V.s.

The Supreme Court, for its part, appears unlikely to challenge the Administration’s baleful reasoning. Last week, it declined to hear an appeal to a lower-court ruling on hydrofluorocarbons, chemicals that are among the most potent greenhouse gases known. The lower court had struck down an Obama-era rule phasing out HFCs, which are used mostly as refrigerants. The author of the lower-court decision was, by the dystopian logic of our times, Brett Kavanaugh.

Even as the I.P.C.C. warned that 1.5 degrees of warming would be calamitous, it also indicated that, for all intents and purposes, such warming has become unavoidable. “There is no documented historical precedent” for the changes needed to prevent it, the group wrote. In addition to transforming the way that electricity is generated and distributed around the world, fundamental changes would be needed in transportation, agriculture, housing, and infrastructure. And much of this would have to be accomplished by the time today’s toddlers hit high school. To have a reasonable chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, the I.P.C.C. said, global CO2 emissions, now running about forty billion tons a year, would need to be halved by 2030 and reduced more or less to zero by 2050. And this would still not be enough. All the scenarios that the I.P.C.C. could come up with to limit warming to 1.5 degrees rely on some kind of “carbon-dioxide removal”: essentially, technologies to suck CO2 out of the air. Such technologies exist, but so far only in the sense that flying cars exist—as expensive-to-produce prototypes. A leaked draft of the report noted that there was a “very high risk” of exceeding 1.5 degrees; although that phrase was removed from the final report, the message is clear.

…(read more).

EPA Science Panel Disbanded – Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

Date: October 11th, 2018
Agency: EPA, Federal
Explanation: Personnel Changes
Scientist: Other

On October 11, 2018, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) disbanded the particulate matter (PM) review panel. In the past, the panel has provided advice to EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), which is responsible for reviewing the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for criteria pollutants. Under the Clean Air Act, CASAC is required to periodically review the NAAQS, and recommend appropriate changes thereto to protect public health. When reviewing the NAAQS for PM, CASAC has historically relied on advice from the PM review panel, which is comprised of two dozen university researchers and others with special expertise on the health effects of PM. The panel will not, however, have a role in CASAC’s next review. On October 11, EPA sent an email to panel members, informing them that “the CASAC PM Review Panel will no longer be involved with the Agency’s PM NAAQS Review and your service on the panel has concluded.”

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The UN’s Devastating Climate Change Report Was Too Optimistic – Motherboard

The IPCC has been criticized for being “too alarmist. If anything, it is the opposite. With their latest report, they have been overly conservative.”

A decade ago, the “father of global warming”—the first scientist to sound the alarm on climate change in the 1980s to the US Congress—announced that we were too late: the planet had already hit the danger zone.

In a landmark paper, James Hansen, then head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, along with seven other leading climate scientists, described how a global average temperature above 1°Celsius (C)—involving a level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere of around 450 parts per million (ppm)—would lead to “practically irreversible ice sheet and species loss.” But, they added, new data showed that even 1°C was too hot.

…(read more).

David Attenborough on climate change: ‘The world will be transformed’

The Guardian

Published on Nov 29, 2016

An extract from Liberatum’s documentary In this Climate, in which a range of cultural and environmental figures including Noam Chomsky, David Attenborough and Mark Ruffalo respond to the threat of climate change and to the deniers.

Mary Robinson’s climate mission

James Hansen’s 1988 testimony after 30 years. How did he do?

YaleClimateConnections
Published on Jun 20, 2018

James Hansen is known as the “Father of Global Warming”, chiefly because of his 1988 testimony before the U.S. Senate, in which he announced that “… the greenhouse effect has been detected, and is changing our climate now.” 30 years later, Peter Sinclair asked senior climate scientists how those predictions have held up.