On May 5th, NASA climatologist James Hansen and others say they will be blocking BNSF coal trains from passing through White Rock, British Columbia. They say that they will be blocking coal trains only, allowing other freight and passenger trains to pass.

Hansen has posted a letter (PDF) about this on his website, addressed to Warren Buffett, the owner of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad.

University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver is also participating.

This is encouraging: Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber is calling for a ‘sweeping review’ of coal exports from his state.

Reducing fossil fuel exports seems like a promising strategy for limiting the total quantity of fossil fuels burned by humanity.

As pointed out on Twitter by University of Alberta professor Andrew Leach, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) has some interesting maps and animations available online showing the development of unconventional gas in the United States.

For example, here is an animation of the development of gas wells in the Barnett Shale between 1981 and 2010.

This article demonstrates a common mistake in thinking about climate change: Recession rebound didn’t hurt environment – Report shows greenhouse gases stable in 2010.

Keeping emissions stable harms the environment very badly. The climate change problem is the accumulation of greenhouse gas pollution in the atmosphere. Humanity continues to add tens of billions of tonnes of that pollution to the air annually.

Our climate problems will be solved when that pollution is nearly cut to zero – just levelling off the amount of pollution per year is just the start of a very difficult journey.

In a survey on nuclear power written for The Economist, Oliver Morton does a good job of explaining one of the reasons why nuclear power is unlike any other form of electricity generation:

In liberalised energy markets, building nuclear power plants is no longer a commercially feasible option: they are simply too expensive. Existing reactors can be run very profitably; their capacity can be upgraded and their lives extended. But forecast reductions in the capital costs of new reactors in America and Europe have failed to materialise and construction periods have lengthened. Nobody will now build one without some form of subsidy to finance it or a promise of a favourable deal for selling the electricity. And at the same time as the cost of new nuclear plants has become prohibitive in much of the world, worries about the dark side of nuclear power are resurgent, thanks to what is happening in Iran.

None of this contradicts the argument that we need more nuclear plants to deal with climate change, but it does highlight some of the special risks associated with the technology.

One challenge with renewable forms of energy like wind and solar power is that the power output from such facilities is intermittent. One way to address the problem is to store power from times when it is being produced in excess for use at times when the quantity demanded is high.

This article describes a number of such energy storage options, including ‘Green Power Islands’ along with systems based on pumping water, compressing air, and storing heat in molten salt.

Related:

• Batteries for large-scale energy storage
• Baseload solar in Italy
• Proposed pumped hydroelectric storage in Australia
• Pumped and multi-lagoon tidal systems
• Pumped hydroelectric storage in Wales
• Grid technologies to support renewable power
• Peak power, storage, and renewables
• Compressed air for mobile energy storage
• Compressed air energy storage

Potentially big news: “Proposed new [EPA] emissions standards would limit carbon dioxide produced by new power plants, which would probably prohibit construction of any coal-fired facilities“

Greenpeace has released a new report on how Canada’s government has been trying to support oil sands exports to the United States and Europe: Dirty Diplomacy: The Canadian Government’s Global Push to Sell the Tar Sands.

Arguably, Canada’s government should not be out there advocating for such a destructive industry. If the European Union and the United States do not want to buy the fuel from the oil sands, that is probably a good thing for the world.

NASA scientist James Hansen has a TED talk in which he addresses climate change:

He talks about his motivation for speaking out, as well as for engaging in civil disobedience to try to encourage the emergence of stronger climate policies.

Clare Demerse of the Pembina Institute does a good job of explaining one major reason why the oil sands are of special concern, when it comes to the various sources of greenhouse gas pollution in Canada:

No one could make the case about why the oilsands matter better than Environment Canada just did. In late July, the department published a document called Canada’s Emissions Trends, which provides an up-to-date projection of greenhouse gas pollution under a “business as usual” scenario — in other words, our emissions future unless governments take stronger actions than they have to date.

This document provides really important data, so we were very glad to see it made public. But the picture it paints of where oilsands emissions are heading is — to put it mildly — not pretty.

Over the last two decades, greenhouse gas emissions from the oilsands have grown by over 150 per cent. From 2005 to 2020, Environment Canada’s number show, they’re going to keep right on growing, tripling from 30 million tonnes in 2005 to 92 million tonnes in 2020. That represents 12 per cent of Canada’s projected national emissions in 2020, more than the total for any province except Alberta and Ontario.

That makes the oilsands sector very unique. In other parts of Canada’s economy, emissions are expected to grow much more slowly, or even to drop as technologies improve or federal or provincial emission reduction policies take effect. Most notably, electricity emissions are expected to fall by 31 million tonnes in Canada by 2020 in the absence of new government policies — while oilsands expansion is forecast to increase emissions by twice that much over the same period. (It’s worth noting that the federal government has already outlined a regulatory approach to coal-fired electricity detailed enough that it’s been included in Environment Canada’s “business as usual” projections, while the projections don’t include an equivalent federal policy approach for the oilsands.)

While other sectors of the Canadian economy can learn how to operate in ways that damage the climate much less, output from the oil sands will always significantly raise global pollution levels.

The world as a whole needs to go on a carbon diet, and Canada along with it. Plans to have output from the oil sands keep growing without end are at odds with that necessary aim.