Latin America/Caribbean -- Hurricanes, Deforestation, and Drought?

Up in smoke? Latin America and the Caribbean -- a new report on that region and global warming.

From an article about the report, Latin America told to bat[ten] down hatches for climate change:

[I]t also warns that the impact of these changes will be felt across the world, as a permanent shift to seasonal "El Niño" conditions could lead to "a long-term drying out and die-off of the Amazon rainforest". This could become a "feedback mechanism", leading to catastrophic and irreversible climate change.

California leading the pack?

California Poised to Act On Its Own on Global Warming

California has had an immense impact on environmental issues, and is poised to have more.

[One] bill would bar California utilities from buying electricity from out-of-state power plants that generate large quantities of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas. That would force more than two dozen coal-fired plants under development in the West to adopt non-polluting technologies or lose a piece of the California market.

This ties directly into some of the research I've been doing this summer. The electricity networks of the United States are divided into East and West. (The line runs down the country, with Montana on one side and the Dakotas on the other at its top, and squiggles around to finally cut through the eastern portion of New Mexico. It is neither straight, nor does it follow state boundaries exactly.) California is the dominant electricity market in the "Western Interconnection", so every energy exporter (and every state that wants to be an energy exporter) as well as B.C. and other Canadian provinces in the Interconnection, want to sell to it. And that's just electricity, not petroleum products that are actually delivered as petroleum.

Purely from an economic standpoint, when California shifts, its suppliers must listen. Other members of the Western Interconnection seem to be doing so. Most of the resource-rich states (coal and wind) in the upper Midwest have taken strides in the past three years or so to establish state-level bodies to help grow their electricity transmission capacity (these tend to be sparse states, and a sparsely populated state doesn't grow a lot of transmission lines), and to promote the development of "zero-emission" clean-coal plants. Caveat: I'm a little down on the plants, myself, but that may be a) b/c I know full well that wishing for a technological advancement ("zero-emission") *now* isn't enough to trigger one actually happening, and b) all this research I've done this summer on this subject has been for an organization promoting wind energy.

FERC issues pipeline rule

News Release - FERC to Require Pipeline Companies to Report Infrastructure Damage Resulting from Hurricanes, Other Disasters under RM06-18. (PDF format here)

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission today revised its rules to better monitor and assess the physical state of the interstate natural gas pipeline grid and gas storage infrastructure when service is disrupted due to damage caused by a hurricane, other natural disasters or acts of terrorism.

The final rule, issued today, will require jurisdictional natural gas companies to report to the Commission damage to their facilities and report service disruptions that occur when a natural disaster or other cause results in a reduction in pipeline throughput or storage deliverability.

Chairman Joseph T. Kelliher said, “The rule fills a regulatory gap identified by the Commission last year after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The Commission lacked vital information on the physical condition of facilities that affected the operation of the pipeline grid. This rule will enhance our ability to mitigate critical gas service issues more quickly.”

Current Commission regulations only require regulated entities to report serious service disruptions, but not damage to the affected gas infrastructure. During last year’s hurricane disasters, companies kept the Commission informed about service disruptions, but FERC staff had to scramble to gather information through phone calls and other means to help the Commission assess the damage.

There's no enforcement mechanism, is there? Aside from the one that operates with or without this rule -- media reportage. It's self-initiated by whomever owns or operates the pipeline.

BP Shutdown of Prudhoe Bay Prompts Energy Policy Criticism

After Alaska Disruption, Governors Criticize National Energy Policy

Some criticized poor federal oversight, others, environmentalists who fight pipeline construction and drilling.

Last night I watched a news report featuring interviews with Lois Epstein from Cook Inlet Keeper and Steve Marshall of BP.

Ms. Epstein pointed out the state's reluctance to regulate pipeline construction and maintenance, due to its heavy dependence on oil revenue, and that in this case, because the BP lines met certain criteria (these have got to be 'internal' lines, carrying crude oil to the trans-Alaska pipeline or something like that) including not being near commercially navigable waters, that created a regulatory gap such that neither state nor federal rules were covering this pipeline adequately.

Of course that doesn't mean BP consciously built bad pipelines because of this gap, or anything like that. It's not in their commercial interest to build stuff designed to carry oil and have them fail to carry oil. But we are talking about lines that were built in the 1970's, and a) things age; and b) understandings of the impact of a pipeline and how best to construct and maintain them is going to advance with time.

The particularly troubling remark Ms. Epstein made is that the cause of corrosion in this case was unknown, which means (these are my words) this is and was an accident waiting to happen. Mr. Marshall suggested microbial corrosion, and noted that this is a highly corrosive environment, which doesn't seem to fit with his earlier description of the "dry crude" this particular pipe was carrying as being "low-risk", (and hence having no need for some of the more strenuous checks available).

Altered Oceans

The Los Angeles Times has a 5-part multimediate presentation up right now called Altered Oceans, their own ocean-oriented Inconvenient Truth. It looks pretty impressive.