TAKE ACTION! Oil shale deposits across 17,000 square miles of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming hold an estimated 800 billion barrels of oil, more than three times Saudi Arabia's stated reserves. Both mining and processing of oil shale involve a variety of environmental impacts. The process produces four times the amount of greenhouse gas emissions compared to normal oil production. Vast amounts of water are required in the mining process, up to 4 barrels of water for every barrel of oil.

It would be a reckless and short-sighted to allow full-scale commercial production of synthetic crude oils from oil shale and other non-conventional sources. Wide scale use of such oil will result in decades of further carbon emissions from dependence upon fossil fuels, making it impossible to stop climate change. Please send a message today to the U.S. Department of Energy noting that a sustainable energy future does not include oil shale. TAKE ACTION!  

Posted by Dr. Glen Barry | Permalink | Comments (17) | More on oil shale climate

Despite 80% growth in carbon trading [ark] in the past year, including windfall profits [ark] for some, carbon markets have yet to lead to actual emission reductions. Indeed, carbon and other emissions continue to soar [ark | search].
As I have written previously, while profiting from efforts to reduce emissions may be useful to some degree, the cap and trade approach is by no means sufficient [ark]. At some point emissions need to be reduced at a cost to society because it is necessary and the right thing to do.

A much more suitable and less complex market based approach to reducing emissions quickly is a global carbon tax [search]. Such an approach need not be onerous, as Climate Ark's Lincoln Plan demonstrates. If is far preferable in terms of rapidly and clearly setting a price on carbon [search] to tax energy sources according to their carbon content than to expect carbon markets to do so. While carbon markets may have a role, we simply do not have time for them to develop to bring about necessary major emission reductions. We know a carbon tax will reduce emissions.

Posted by Dr. Glen Barry | Permalink | Comments (6) | More on carbon trading versus tax

New research indicates annual loss from the Antarctic ice sheet has surged [ark | more\ark] by 75 percent in a decade as a result of global warming. The study by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory [ark] appears in the Journal "Nature Geoscience" and is described as the most comprehensive to date on the status of Antarctic ice sheets. Using extensive measurements by radar they found in 2006 some 192 billion tonnes of Antarctic ice was lost [search] into the sea from narrow glacier outlets.

While there has been little scientific doubt that Greenland's ice is melting [search], there has been more uncertainty over the fate of the larger stores of ice on Antarctica. Until now there has been no consensus whether ice cover is growing, shrinking, or stable -- and various studies have had conflicting results. Some have suggested increased precipitation was leading to the accumulation of ice, a finding contradicted by this new study.

The shrinkage in the ice sheet was attributed to an upwelling of warm waters along the Antarctic coast, which is causing some glaciers to flow more rapidly into the ocean. The southern continent contains enough ice to raise ocean levels by 60 meters which would put every major coastal city in the world under water and make hundreds of millions of climate change refugees. The majority, 132 tonnes, was lost from the West Antarctic sheet, while the Antarctic Peninsula lost about 60 million tonnes. Yet there was a "near-zero" loss from the world's biggest ice sheet found in East Antarctica.

Posted by Dr. Glen Barry | Permalink | Comments (2) | More on Antarctic ice melt