Tag Archives: carbon dioxide

Sky’s the limit: Israeli startup develops balloons to capture carbon

PETAH TIKVA, Israel (Reuters) – An Israeli startup has joined the fight against global warming by seeking inspiration in the upper atmosphere, where it hopes to send fleets of balloons that will trap carbon dioxide for recycling.

Carbon dioxide emissions, from the burning of fossil fuels and from industrial agriculture, are the main cause of climate change. But removing CO2 from the atmosphere at standard temperatures requires too much energy for governments and companies to consider it cost-effective.

High Hopes Labs developed a system that captures the carbon where it has almost solidified, far above the Earth.

“The beautiful thing is that capturing gas is very easy when it’s close to freezing…,” CEO Nadav Mansdorf told Reuters.

“Carbon is freezing in minus 80 degrees (Celsius) and the only place that we can find carbon in a temperature close to that, is 50 kilometers (30 miles) above our heads.”

The company has tested its system on a small scale, Mansdorf says, releasing gas-filled balloons with a box that serves as a carbon-capture device attached underneath.

The frozen carbon then falls back to Earth where it can be recycled for industrial use.

The company aims to build larger balloons within two years that could each be deployed to remove a tonne of carbon a day at a cost below $100, much less than comparable on-ground facilities currently in use, Mansdorf said.

(Reporting by Eli Berlzon; editing by John Stonestreet)

Energy from bogs: Estonian scientists use peat to make batteries

By Janis Laizans and Andrius Sytas

TARTU, Estonia (Reuters) – Peat, plentiful in bogs in northern Europe, could be used to make sodium-ion batteries cheaply for use in electric vehicles, scientists at an Estonian university say.

Sodium-ion batteries, which do not contain relatively costly lithium, cobalt or nickel, are one of the new technologies that battery makers are looking at as they seek alternatives to the dominant lithium-ion model.

Scientists at Estonia’s Tartu University say they have found a way to use peat in sodium-ion batteries, which reduces the overall cost, although the technology is still in its infancy.

“Peat is a very cheap raw material – it doesn’t cost anything, really,” says Enn Lust, head of the Institute of Chemistry at the university.

The process includes heating decomposed peat to a high temperature in a furnace for 2-3 hours. The university expects the government to fund a small-scale factory in Estonia to try out the technology.

Distillers in Scotland dry malt over peat fires to flavor whisky, and some northern European countries use peat to fuel factories and households, or as fertilizer.

As bogs are drained to mine peat, they release trapped carbon dioxide, raising environmental concerns. But the Estonian scientists say they are using decomposed peat, a waste product of traditional extraction methods that is usually discarded.

Sodium-ion batteries using peat will need to prove they are commercially viable and can be scaled up, Lukasz Bednarski, a market analyst and the author of a book on batteries, told Reuters.

China’s CATL in July became the first major automotive battery maker to unveil a sodium-ion battery.

“I think that companies will increasingly try to commercialize the sodium-ion battery, especially after the CATL announcement,” said Bednarski.

Less powerful sodium-ion batteries are likely to be used together with lithium-ion technology to bring down the overall cost of a battery pack, he said.

(Reporting by Janis Laizans in Tartu, Andrius Sytas in Vilnius and Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm; Writing by Andrius Sytas; Editing by Giles Elgood)

Methane menace: Aerial survey spots ‘super-emitter’ landfills

By Nichola Groom

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The U.S. waste-management industry has become a darling of environmentally minded investors for its work in recycling trash and harvesting gases from landfills as an alternative fuel.

Leading firms Waste Management Inc and Republic Services Inc are included in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index, a benchmark for socially conscious investing. The firms’ major investors include funds controlled by billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and wealth-management icon Larry Fink, founder of BlackRock Inc, who are both leading advocates for corporate climate action.

But the waste industry may be doing far more harm to the planet than investors think, according to a years-long aerial survey commissioned by California air-quality regulators. The survey found “super-emitter” landfills accounted for 43% the measured emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane – outpacing the fossil-fuel and agricultural sectors.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and leak-detection firm Scientific Aviation have been conducting the flyovers since 2016. They found that some trash dumps operated by top U.S. landfill companies including Republic Services and Waste Management have been leaking methane at rates as much as six times the facility-level estimates from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The ten biggest methane-emitting landfills pumped out the gas at rates averaging 2.27 times the federal estimates, which are produced by waste firms using EPA methodology.

The California research may have wide-ranging global implications by showing the waste-management industry is playing a bigger role in accelerating climate change than regulators had believed. The surveys could also reveal flaws with United Nations guidelines for estimating methane emissions that are followed by the major governments including the United States, according to scientists involved in the surveys and regulators interviewed by Reuters.

The research could also bring scrutiny on the waste management industry from both policy-makers and green investors – who until now have been focused mainly on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels, said Eliot Caroom, a researcher at TruValue Labs, which provides investors with environmental and social-governance data and analysis.

“One of the largest emitting industries, waste management, deserves more attention,” he said.

Gates – who earlier this year published a book titled, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster – owns more than a third of Republic Services. He owns about 8% of Waste Management through stakes held by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust and his personal investment vehicle Cascade Investment LLC, according to fund disclosures. BlackRock owns a 4.6% share of Republic Services and 5% of Waste Management, mainly through funds that track third-party indexes.

Officials representing Gates and BlackRock did not comment for this story.

Inclusion in the Dow Jones sustainability indices is based on S&P Global scores for a number of environmental, social and governance criteria. Waste Management has the highest environmental score in the broader commercial services sector and a near-perfect score for climate change strategy. Republic Services also earned high marks for climate strategy.

Officials for Republic Services and Waste Management said they were cooperating with the California flyover surveys.

Waste Management said it was expanding efforts to reduce methane leaks, including better monitoring, adding more soil to cover landfills and capturing the gas for reuse.

Republic Services said in a statement that the aerial survey data represents snapshot data that may not accurately capture routine emissions at its facility. It called itself a leader in responsible landfill management.

FLAWED ASSUMPTIONS

Methane traps much more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, although for a shorter period of time. All told, one tonne of methane does about 25 times more damage to the climate over a 100-year period than one tonne of carbon dioxide, according to the EPA.

Methane concentrations in the atmosphere have been rising rapidly in recent years, alarming world governments seeking to cap global warming under the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. Measuring those concentrations in the atmosphere is relatively easy, but tracking the sources of the emissions is hard. That difficulty has become a major stumbling block for global policy-makers hoping to curb the problem.

The United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued guidelines for governments in 2006 on how to estimate methane emissions from landfills without direct measurements such as aerial surveys. Instead, the U.N. has said, methane at landfills can be estimated using factors such as the amount and content of waste stored on site and assumed rates of waste decay. Such methods “really don’t do the job anymore,” said Jean Bogner, a University of Illinois researcher who has studied methane emissions in landfills since the 1970s.

The IPCC said it would revisit its guidelines if U.N. member nations asked it to do so.

The U.N. estimates that landfills and wastewater produce about a fifth of the world’s human-caused methane emissions, behind only agriculture and the oil-and-gas industry.

Landfills produce methane when organic materials like food and vegetation are buried within them, rotting in low-oxygen conditions. The gas can leak out if the soil covering the dump is too thin, for instance, or if pipes intended to capture methane are broken.

About one-fifth of trash in the United States is food, according to the EPA, a major driver of the problem. Methane emissions from landfills are less of a problem in many developing nations, which tend to waste less food and use open-air dumps rather than covering trash with soil, according to the IPCC.

UNDER THE RADAR

On February 26, an airplane flown by Scientific Aviation buzzed about 1,500 feet above the Republic Services’ Forward landfill in Manteca in the Central Valley and snapped a series of pictures using an infrared spectrometer.

Scientists said the image showed the trash dump was emitting more than a quarter tonne of methane into the atmosphere each hour, the climate equivalent of nearly 12,000 cars idling on the nearby freeways. That rate is about six-times higher than the EPA had estimated for the facility.

Previous fly-overs of the facility since 2017 had shown similar readings.

The California Air Resources Board (CARB), which commissioned the survey, hopes the effort to find leaks will eventually help to curb emissions. A month after the February flyover, state inspectors accompanied officials from the San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District on a trip to examine the Forward landfill. The group discovered methane leaks that exceeded allowed limits in various locations, issuing two notices of violation to the landfill’s operator, according to an inspection report seen by Reuters.

In the most recent series of overflights which began last fall, regulators asked landfill operators to use information relayed to them in real-time from the aerial surveyors to find and fix leaks on the ground. The state is planning to issue a report on the effort later this year.

Many of the leaks are easily fixed by adding more soil or fixing broken pipes meant to capture methane for use as a fuel, said Jorn Herner, head of CARB’s research planning, administration and emissions mitigation.

The Biden administration last month announced it would require more U.S. landfills to install gas-capture systems to help limit methane emissions. A White House official did not comment for this story.

The state hopes to eventually replace the planes with space satellites. California in April announced a $100 million project, backed by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, to launch satellites in 2023 that will pinpoint large emissions of greenhouse gases from landfills and other sources, such as refineries, pipelines and farms.

(Reporting by Nichola Groom; editing by Richard Valdmanis and Brian Thevenot)

Thousands flee Goma after Congo warns of possible new eruption

By Djaffar Al Katanty

GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) -Thousands of people scrambled to flee the Congolese city of Goma on Thursday, some picking their way across landscapes scarred with lava, after officials said a second volcanic eruption could happen any time.

Magma, the molten rock that normally stays beneath the earth’s crust, had been detected beneath the city and the adjoining Lake Kivu, Constant Ndima Kongba, the military governor of North Kivu province, said, citing seismic and ground deformation data.

“Given these scientific observations, an eruption on land or under the lake cannot be ruled out at present, and it could occur with very little or no warning,” he said.

Thirty-one people were killed on Saturday evening when Mount Nyiragongo, one of the world’s most active volcanoes, sent a wall of orange lava downhill towards the city, destroying 17 villages on the way.

The lava stopped just 300 meters short of Goma airport, the main hub for aid operations in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Much of the city was spared but hundreds of earthquakes since have destroyed buildings and opened cracks in the earth.

Ten neighborhoods in the east of the city, which lay in the path of lava from the previous eruption in 2002, needed to move to Sake, around 13 miles (21 km) to the northwest, Ndima said.

“Evacuation is compulsory. Those who do not adhere swiftly carry unnecessary risks.”

Thousands of people heeded his message, filing out of town on foot, with huge bundles on their heads. Others fled by car, creating traffic jams across the city, or on large boats that took them across Lake Kivu.

On the road north of Goma, a stream of people picked their way across a landscape charred by lava still hot from Saturday’s eruption, drone video footage showed.

“The first day I didn’t move because there were no orders, but today it’s different,” said Alfred Bulangalire, 42, who was fleeing Goma on foot with his wife and four children.

“I know that my shop will be looted, but I have to protect myself and my family,” he said.

LAKE RISKS

A spokesman for the national government said at one point that boat traffic had been banned because Lake Kivu was considered dangerous, but a local governor later said the lake would remain open.

Volcanologists in Goma warned earlier on Thursday that, in a worst-case scenario, a volcanic eruption under the lake, accompanied by a large earthquake, could trigger a sudden release of carbon dioxide from the bottom of the lake.

Such an explosion could asphyxiate thousands of people, they said.

“Faced with this spectrum of dangers … the only option has been to protect human lives and keep the population out of the path of the lava flows,” government spokesman Patrick Muyaya told journalists.

Goma’s Heal Africa hospital, which was re-built on hardened lava from the 2002 eruption, has sent its patients to other facilities in town, its director, Serge Kahatwa, told Reuters.

“Other hospitals are full so it’s a big problem right now. They are overwhelmed,” he said.

Diego Zorrilla, the U.N.’s deputy humanitarian coordinator in Congo, said U.N. agencies were accelerating plans announced on Wednesday to temporarily relocate around 250 non-essential staff, around half of their aid workers.

Congo imposed martial law on the region earlier this month to try to stem the bloodshed and widespread insecurity many people still face every day, long after the official end of a civil war in 2003.

Around 3,000 houses were destroyed in Saturday’s volcanic eruption and more than 20,000 people left homeless. At least 40 people are still missing.

(Reporting by Djaffar Al Katanty; additional reporting by Stanis Bujakera, Fiston Mahamba and Hereward Holland; writing by Hereward Holland and Edward McAllister; editing by Cooper Inveen, John Stonestreet, Philippa Fletcher)

Clean crude? Oil firms use offsets to claim green barrels

By Timothy Gardner, Nerijus Adomaitis and Rod Nickel

(Reuters) -In January, Occidental Petroleum announced it had accomplished something no oil company had done before: It sold a shipload of crude that it said was 100% carbon-neutral.

While the two-million-barrel cargo to India was destined to produce more than a million tons of planet-warming carbon over its lifecycle, from well to tailpipe, the Texas-based driller said it had completely offset that impact by purchasing carbon credits.

Such credits are financial instruments generated by projects that reduce or avert greenhouse-gas emissions such as mass tree plantings or solar power farms. The projects’ owners can sell the credits to polluting companies, who then use them to make claims of offsetting their carbon emissions.

Details of the Occidental transaction have not been previously reported. Two sources involved in the deal told Reuters that the driller paid about $1.3 million for the credits – or about 65 cents per barrel. Oil currently sells for more than $60 a barrel.

Occidental says such credits make the two-million-barrel cargo carbon-neutral because they represent an equivalent amount of greenhouse gas removed from the atmosphere by the projects generating the credits.

The arrangement reflects a growing trend. Oil-and-gas companies worldwide are increasingly trying to market their products as cleaner using a range of controversial methods, including buying credits, powering drilling operations with renewable power and investing in expensive and commercially unproven technology to capture and store emissions.

The moves are designed to secure a future for the fossil fuel industry in a world where investors, activists and regulators demand action to stop climate change. In some cases they are also designed for profit: Companies have begun seeking a premium price for what they call cleaner petroleum products.

Although carbon credits do nothing to reduce the pollution from a given barrel of oil, proponents of offset programs argue that credit purchases help finance clean-energy efforts that otherwise would not be profitable.

Critics blast such programs as smoke-and-mirrors public relations efforts that allow polluters to scrub their image while they continue to profit from climate damage.

Oil company claims of clean fuels through offsetting are like “a tobacco company saying they sell nicotine-free cigarettes because they paid someone else to sell some chewing gum,” said David Turnbull, a spokesman for Washington-based Oil Change International, an advocacy group opposing fossil fuels.

NO CLEAR STANDARDS

National and global carbon credit programs establish guidelines that projects must follow to in order to sell offsets. The programs rely on companies and nonprofit organizations such as Verra and SustainCERT to issue and verify credits under their standards. They certify that the projects generating credits are leading to the promised amount of reduced emissions and would not have been built without the credit income.

But there are no uniform standards for how to calculate the full climate impact of fossil fuels, or how to properly offset it with environmental projects, industry experts say. Companies buying credits are also not obliged to disclose their cost or origin – a problem because they can vary widely in price and quality.

In Occidental’s case, the credits were generated between 2016 and 2019 by solar, wind and other clean-energy projects in emerging economies such as India, Thailand and Turkey, and were verified by Verra.

“The credits they issued are valid and have environmental integrity,” said Verra spokeswoman Anne Thiel.

Verra and other verifiers, however, have since stopped approving renewable energy projects in those nations to generate offsets after concluding last year that they had become competitive enough to be built even without offset credit revenue.

Occidental defended the deal, saying it could kick off a new market for oil offset with credits that directs money to green-energy projects. “We can be a big part of the global solution,” said Richard Jackson, Occidental’s president of operations for onshore resources and carbon management.

TREES IN SPAIN

Occidental and the cargo’s buyer, India’s Reliance Industries, did not comment on whether Reliance paid a premium for the shipment.

But other oil-and-gas companies are eager to create a market where climate credentials allow them to command higher prices. That could allow them to recoup the full cost – or more – of credits or other measures that allow for the low-carbon labeling.

Lundin Energy, an independent driller with operations in Norway, is one of the companies that sees a market opportunity in crude with a low-carbon designation.

The company plans to spend $35 million to plant 8 million trees in northern Spain and Ghana – something it says will allow it to generate its own credits to offset greenhouse gas emissions from its fossil fuels.

Lundin was the first oil company in the world last year to receive independent certification it was producing low-carbon oil based on its reduction of emissions in producing oil from its Edvard Grieg field in Norway. It also aims to certify low-carbon oil from the Sverdrup field, also in Norway – Western Europe’s biggest – which Lundin co-owns with a consortium of partners.

Cleaner drilling operations, however, have a limited environmental benefit. At least 80% of greenhouse gases from oil are emitted after extraction from the ground, according to consultancy IHS Markit.

Alex Budden, Lundin’s Vice-President, said if buyers paid a 1% premium for lower-carbon barrels, it would boost the company’s annual oil revenue by $10 million to $20 million. That would allow it to recover the costs of its offset and efficiency efforts and eventually profit from them.

So far there have been no takers. “But it’s going to happen,” Budden said.

GREEN OIL SANDS?

Across the Atlantic, Canadian producers in the oil sands have a bigger challenge. Producers there emit three to five times more carbon than the worldwide average because more energy is needed to extract the oil, according to Rystad Energy, a global consultancy. Its producers are hoping to change that.

Suncor Energy, for example, has pledged to cut the amount of carbon it emits per barrel produced 30% from 2014 levels by 2030 to contribute to Canada’s climate goals and address shareholder pressure to reduce its emissions.

It will do so by improving energy efficiency and investing in renewable energy technologies, such as wind farms, said Chief Sustainability Officer Martha Hall Findlay. She said Suncor will consider certifying those lower-carbon barrels.

“There’s no question carbon is our Achilles heel in the oil sands,” she said.

Liquefied natural gas producers are also increasingly marketing carbon-neutral LNG. Unlike in the oil market, some LNG buyers are already paying a premium for such cargoes.

In March, for example, Shell announced it had taken delivery of Europe’s first ever carbon-neutral cargo of LNG from Russian supplier Gazprom. Gazprom provided the gas and both companies chipped in for the offsets, said Mehdi Chennoufi, Shell’s head of LNG Origination and Business Development.

Shell said the credits came from projects that protect biodiversity or restore land, but it would not disclose the cost.

Buyers in Spain, Japan, Taiwan and China have also bought LNG certified as carbon-neutral, a trend that has led the International Group of LNG Importers, an association of big global LNG companies, to start working on standardized methodology.

“Today there is a lot of talk about carbon-neutral LNG, but there is no universal definition,” said Vincent Demoury, the group’s Deputy General Delegate.

Climate activist Andy Gheorghiu said the notion of carbon-neutral liquefied natural gas is like “vegan pork sausage.”

“It’s just nonsense,” he said.

Other companies are turning to carbon-capture technology – despite its history of high costs and operational difficulties – to offset their products’ climate impact.

Qatar, the world’s biggest LNG producer, announced in February that it is building a carbon-capture project at its North Field expansion project in the Persian Gulf.

Occidental is also developing the largest-ever direct-air-capture facility, to pull 500,000 tonnes per year of carbon dioxide out of the open air near some of its Texas oil fields, using fans and chemical reactions. That’s equal to the annual emissions from nearly 110,000 U.S. cars.

Environmentalists criticize such projects because they could extend the life of the fossil fuel industry.

If Occidental’s project works, for example, the company plans to pump the carbon back into the Texas oil fields, raising reservoir pressure to extract more crude.

Occidental says it hopes to market crude oil produced in this way as the feedstock for refining jet and marine fuel – providing a way for those industries to claim they have offset their emissions.

Marion Verles, Chief Executive Officer at SustainCERT, the credit verifier, said such offset schemes can help reduce overall greenhouse-gas emissions – but could also backfire.

Telling consumers they can consume carbon-neutral fossil fuels sends the message, she said, that “behavioral change is no longer needed.”

(Additional reporting by Shadia Nasralla, Nina Chestney, and Susanna Twidale in London; Kate Abnett in Brussels; Isla Binnie in Madrid; and Nidhi Verma in New Delhi; Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Brian Thevenot)

Last year was one of three warmest on record, researchers find

By Nina Chestney

LONDON (Reuters) – Last year was one of the three warmest on record, with glaciers melting, sea levels rising and a spate of wildfires, heatwaves and droughts, research published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) showed.

The BAMS annual State of the Climate Report, by 528 climate scientists from 61 countries, said only 2015 and 2016 were hotter than 2019, based on records dating to the mid- to late 1800’s.

Each decade since 1980 has been successively warmer than the preceding one, with the most recent (2010-2019) being around 0.2 degrees Celsius warmer globally than the previous (2000–09).

For the 32nd consecutive year, 2019 saw the loss of mass from mountain glaciers, while lake temperatures were above the long-term average and permafrost temperatures continued to rise.

In 2019, global mean sea level set a new record for the eighth year running, reaching 87.6 mm above the 1993 average when satellite measurements began, with an annual average increase of 6.1 mm from 2018, the report said.

Greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to climate change and pollution, increased. Carbon dioxide emissions rose by 2.5 parts per million (ppm), nitrous oxide by 1 part per billion (ppb) and methane by 9.2 parts per billion, the report said.

“A number of extreme events, such as wildfires, heatwaves and droughts, have at least part of their root linked to the rise in global temperature,” said Robert Dunn from the UK’s Met Office, which contributed to the report.

“The rise in global temperature is linked to another climate indicator: the ongoing rise in emissions of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane.”

Pressure is building for governments to do more to limit emissions to maximize the chances of capping a rise in average global temperatures at 1.5C, a goal enshrined in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

(Reporting by Nina Chestney; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Side effects: Fuel demand crash shuts U.S. ethanol plants, meatpackers lack refrigerant

By Stephanie Kelly and Tom Polansek

NEW YORK/CHICAGO (Reuters) – A slew of U.S. ethanol plants have shut down as fuel demand has collapsed during the coronavirus outbreak, and meatpackers have been hit by a worrying side-effect: less carbon dioxide is now available to chill beef, poultry and pork.

“We’re headed for a train wreck in terms of the CO2 market,” said Geoff Cooper, president of the Renewable Fuels Association industry group. The RFA said 29 of the 45 U.S. ethanol plants that sell carbon dioxide, or CO2, have idled or cut rates. The U.S. ethanol sector is the top supplier of commercial carbon dioxide to the food industry, accounting for around 40% of the market, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.

That has put the U.S. meat industry on high-alert. It uses carbon dioxide as a refrigerant and preservative for meat, and also uses the gas to stun animals before slaughter.

The CO2 crunch is the latest supply chain disruption threatening the food industry as it struggles to keep workers on the job during the coronavirus outbreak while meeting rising demand at grocery stores.

Cargill Inc [CARG.UL], the world’s biggest supplier of ground beef, and chicken processor Perdue Farms said they are seeking to make sure they have enough supplies.

“We are working with our partners to ensure they understand that we offer an essential service to the world – providing the ingredients, feed and food that nourish people and animals – and maintain our supply,” Cargill spokesman Daniel Sullivan said. He added that the company is aware of “potential shortages or limited allocations” in certain areas.

Perdue Farms has enough CO2 “for now” and back-up plans if supplies run low, spokeswoman Andrea Staub said.

But if shortages of carbon dioxide worsen, meat companies may not be able to produce food at regular rates, said Rich Gottwald, president of the Compressed Gas Association.

“If they don’t have CO2, then it will slow their production of those food products,” he said.

The North American Meat Institute, an industry group that represents processors like Tyson Foods Inc <TSN.N> and WH Group Ltd’s <0288.HK> Smithfield Foods Inc [SFII.UL], said it was helping connect carbon dioxide suppliers with meat companies that anticipated possible problems obtaining CO2.

While supplies remain available, Veronica Nigh, a farm bureau economist, said some meat companies already were paying more for CO2.

“They’re certainly feeling the impact of limited supply and the price that ends up translating to,” she said on a conference call on Friday.

(Reporting by Stephanie Kelly in New York and Tom Polansek in Chicago. Additional reporting by PJ Huffstutter in Chicago; Editing by David Gregorio)

Brazil Amazon deforestation soars to 11-year high under Bolsonaro

By Marcelo Teixeira

SAO JOSE DOS CAMPOS, Brazil (Reuters) – Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest rose to its highest in over a decade this year, government data on Monday showed, confirming a sharp increase under the leadership of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro.

The data from Brazil’s INPE space research agency, which showed deforestation soaring 29.5% to 9,762 square kilometers for the 12 months through July 2019, sparked an uncharacteristic admission by the government that something needed to be done to stem the tide.

It was the worst level of deforestation since 2008, heaping further pressure on the environmental policy of Bolsonaro who favors developing the Amazon region economically.

The Amazon is the world’s largest tropical rainforest and is considered key to the fight against climate change because of the vast amounts of carbon dioxide it absorbs.

Risks to the forest drew global concern in August when fires raged through the Amazon, drawing sharp criticism from France’s President Emmanuel Macron.

At a briefing to discuss the numbers, Environment Minister Ricardo Salles said the rise in deforestation showed the need for a new strategy to combat the illegal logging, mining and land grabbing which he said were to blame.

Environmentalists and nongovernmental organizations placed the blame squarely on the government, saying that Bolsonaro’s strong pro-development rhetoric and policies to weaken environmental enforcement are behind the rise in illegal activity.

“The Bolsonaro government is responsible for every inch of forest destroyed. This government today is the worst enemy of the Amazon,” said Marcio Astrini, public policy coordinator for Greenpeace, in a statement.

Bolsonaro’s office directed Reuters to remarks made by Salles and another official and did not comment further on the issue.

In August, Reuters reported Bolsonaro’s government had systematically weakened environmental agency Ibama, grounding a team of elite enforcement commandos and forbidding agents from destroying machinery used to illegally deforest.

Brazil’s Climate Observatory, a network of nongovernmental organizations, said the 2019 increase in deforestation was the fastest in percentage terms since the 1990s and the third fastest of all-time.

In response to the numbers, Salles vowed to roll out a series of measures to counter the rising deforestation, including stepping up enforcement efforts assisted by high-resolution satellite imaging.

The minister said he would meet governors of Amazon states on Wednesday to discuss tactics to counter deforestation.

All options are on the table, according to Salles, including mobilizing the military for use in environmental enforcement operations.

GOVERNMENT REVERSAL

Salles’ recognition that deforestation is indeed on the rise comes after months of the government casting doubt on preliminary monthly data showing destruction was skyrocketing.

At multiple press briefings earlier this year, Salles alleged the monthly data was unreliable and contained inconsistencies. He had urged journalists not to report the monthly figures and wait for the annual data, announced Monday.

Bolsonaro had accused the INPE space research agency of lying about the monthly data. In a high-profile dispute, then-INPE chief Ricardo Galvao stood by the data and called Bolsonaro “a joke of a 14-year-old boy that is not suitable for a president of Brazil.” Galvao was later fired.

The annual figure accounts for seven months under Bolsonaro, but also measures five months under the previous government.

It also does not account for destruction after July. Preliminary data for August to October shows deforestation more than doubled compared to the same period a year-prior to 3,704 square kilometers.

NGOs say they fear that protections could be weakened further as the government considers allowing commercial agriculture on native reserves, expanding wildcat mining and allowing for illegally occupied land to be “regularized.”

Beef prices are also at record highs in Brazil, leading some environmentalists to fear it could fuel land grabbing for cattle ranching – one of the biggest drivers of deforestation.

“The coming years could be even worse,” said Carlos Rittl, executive-secretary for Climate Observatory.

 

(Reporting by Marcelo Teixeira; Writing by Jake Spring and Stephen Eisenhammer; Editing by Alex Richardson and Andrea Ricci)