ROME: Part of a massive glacier on the Italian side of the Mont Blanc mountain range is close to collapse after accelerated melting in the late summer heat, officials at a nearby town warned Wednesday.
This is the latest of a series of warnings about melting glaciers — in the Alps and elsewhere — as concern grows about the effects of climate change.
The mayor of the town of Courmayeur has ordered a local access road closed at night and limited access to the region below the glacier, which is popular with tourists, a town spokesman told AFP.
Town spokesman Moreno Vignolini dismissed “apocalyptic” reports in the media that it was threatening to smash down on the town itself. Below the glacier, he said, “there are no homes, only a few unoccupied chalets”.
Part of the Planpincieux glacier in the Aosta Valley is in danger of crashing into a valley running parallel to the Courmayeur valley, said Vignolini. “With the strong heat this summer, there has been between August and the first half of September, an acceleration of the melting of the glacier, at an average rate of 35 centimetres (14 inches) a day, up to highs of 50-60 centimetres on some days,”

The chunk of the glacier concerned, which makes up between a fifth and a sixth of the total and weighs around 250,000 tonnes, was threatening to break away and crash down into the valley, he added.
“There is a problem with a part of the Planpincieux glacier located at Val Ferret, which is thought to be falling due to a large fracture between the, say, stable part of the glacier and this part,” the mayor of Courmayeur, Stefano Miserocchi, told AFP.
Late on Tuesday Miserocchi ordered the night-time closure of the access road to Val Ferret, on the Italian side of Mont Blanc.
He has banned walkers from the area below the glacier, which is popular with visitors and has three mountain refuges. Experts at the Fondazione Montagna Sicura (Safe Mountain Foundation), who have been monitoring the glacier for the Val d’Aosta region since 2013, alerted local officials to the latest developments.
“This glacier is atypical because it’s temperate, and so is influenced by the temperature of the water flowing below, which particularly exposes it to the global warming in progress,” said the foundation’s secretary-general Jean Pierre Fosson.
But he cautioned against alarmism, stressing that the preventive measures taken so far were for an “unprecedented situation” for a glacier in the region.
While it might break off in a single block, it could just crumble away or not break away at all, he added.
The Foundation monitors 180 glaciers in the Val d’Aosta region and this kind of thing is unavoidable, said Fosson. “Every year we see two square kilometres (0.8 square miles) of ice disappear” he said. “And it is getting worse with the increasingly hot summers and autumns.”

According to a landmark assessment approved by the 195-nation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), accelerating melt-off from glaciers and Earth’s ice sheets atop Greenland and Antarctica are driving sea level rise. Since 2005, the ocean has risen 2.5 times faster than during the 20th century, threatening island nations and coastal cities. The rate at which the waterline rises will quadruple again by 2100 if carbon emissions continue unabated, the report found. On Sunday, dozens of people dressed in black attended a symbolic funeral march on a Swiss mountainside to mark the disappearance of an Alpine glacier on Pizol mountain. A study by Swiss researchers released earlier this month suggested that the Aletsch glacier — the largest in the Alps — could disappear completely by the end of the century if nothing was done to rein in climate change.

A group of 13 major oil companies charted out a plan yesterday to promote investments in carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS), ahead of a gathering in New York.
Oil chiefs grappling with growing demand for action to fight climate change have looked to invest in carbon-capture and sequestration techniques that some executives, including Occidental Petroleum Corp CEO Vicki Hollub, say could make drilling carbon neutral.
With fossil fuel development growing worldwide, the oil and gas industry faces growing criticism from activists concerned about accelerating climate impacts from melting ice caps to sea-level rise and extreme weather.
Scientists say the world needs to halve greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade to avoid catastrophic warming.
Carbon sequestration technology traps carbon in caverns or porous spaces underground.
A number of oil and gas CEOs say the technology will be crucial to meeting goals set in the 2016 Paris agreement on climate change to reduce global emissions.
“A lot of people don’t even know what CCUS is. I think the world is going to hear more and more and more about it,” BP plc CEO Bob Dudley said. “I don’t think we can meet the Paris goals without CCUS.”
The group, known as the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), said it aims to double the amount of carbon dioxide stored globally by 2030.
The group is also taking steps to reduce methane emissions.
The group formed in 2014 to support efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Its gathering will be held on the sidelines of a climate summit, where United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says he is banking on new pledges from governments and businesses to abandon fossil fuels.
Last Friday, millions of young people flooded the streets of cities around the world to demand urgent steps to stop climate change.
Many, including 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, have criticised governments and industries for not doing enough.
The OGCI group said in a statement that carbon-capture technologies could be expanded to more efficiently trap large amounts of carbon released by facilities such as power plants, which could then be used in oil recovery and, ultimately stored — thus, removing it from the atmosphere.
The group plans to work with others to put carbon-capture techniques into operation in the US, UK, Norway, the Netherlands, and China.
Later yesterday, , it was set to sign a declaration of collaboration with certain energy ministers and other stakeholders, to commit to efforts to expand carbon storage.
The companies, which include Exxon Mobil Corp, Chevron Corp and BP, account for 32% of global oil and gas production.
They have agreed to cooperate to accelerate reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Separately, almost 90 big companies in sectors from food to cement to telecommunications are pledging to slash greenhouse gas emissions, organisers said.

Asia’s prolonged binge on coal is making the grids that transmit power to a third of the world’s people brittle and prone to failure.
That’s the conclusion of new research in the peer-reviewed journal Energy & Environmental Science.
More than 400 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity in Asia are at risk as climate change dries out water sources necessary to cool those plants, according to the study.
“Coal power development can expect reduced reliability in many locations across Asia,” Edward Byers, one of the report’s authors, said by e-mail. “This is further evidence of coal power’s increasingly recognised incompatibility with current international and national climate and sustainable development policy.”
Summer heatwaves and reduced rainfall have been closing water-cooled power plants across the world as the impact of climate change exacerbates the nexus between water and energy supply. Asian utilities building coal plans could find themselves increasingly competing with industry and consumers for scarce water resources.
“This planned capacity adds 30% more to the existing coal-fired generation capacity, and will engender substantial water requirements and amounts of pollutants that can exacerbate global climate change and regional air pollution,” the researchers wrote.
Thermal power generation could fall as much as 16% globally in the next three decades because of water shortages, they concluded. Researchers used hydrological and climate models as well as data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker to reach their conclusions. Different warming scenarios ranging to as high as 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) were considered. The world is currently on a warming trajectory that may hit 5 degree Celsius by the end of the century.

The discussion around changing weather is changing. Anodyne references to “climate change” and “global warming” are being scorned by those who think it’s time for more drastic talk, and action, on the environment. They prefer more urgent terminology in hopes that it translates to more urgent action.

1. What new terms are part of the discussion?
Young demonstrators around the world are demanding that their governments declare climate “emergencies,” going so far as to skip school on Fridays to hold so-called climate strikes. The UK’s Guardian newspaper, which champions environmental issues, said in May that it was changing its house style to prefer “climate emergency,” “climate crisis” or “climate breakdown” over “climate change” (as well as “global heating” over “global warming”). Editor-in-chief Katharine Viner said “climate change” sounds “rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”

2. Is it showing results?
Maybe. In a poll by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation, 38% of US adults termed climate change “a crisis,” while an equal number called it “a major problem but not a crisis.” The Democratic leadership of the US House of Representatives this year established a Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, which aims, by March 2020, to publish a blueprint for keeping the gain in the Earth’s temperature to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). When Democrats last held a majority in the House, in 2007, they created a similar committee but called it the Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming. It was abolished when Republicans regained control of the House in 2011.

3. Isn’t this just semantics?
Literally, yes. And it could be argued that much more tangible steps are being taken: With a changing atmosphere already upon us, use of electric cars is growing, renewable energy is already cheaper than coal in many places (and is becoming cheaper), many investors are uprooting carbon from portfolios and more and more people are eating less meat. But activists argue that stronger words can focus attention on the planet in a new way, and that rallying cries can prompt corresponding action.

4. What sort of action?
By mid-2019, local and national governments representing 206mn people had declared “climate emergencies,” according to the Climate Emergency Declaration Petition, a campaign group. It says in most cases, that means the government commits to develop an action plan within six months. The student climate strikers who advocate use of “emergency” want governments to commit to switching to 100% renewable energy as soon as possible, preferably by 2030.

By Eric Roston New York When it comes to saving the world’s rainforests, governments can make a big diff erence, and fast. Take Indonesia, which in 2012 surpassed Brazil as the world’s leader in tropical rainforest destruction. In 2017, it engineered a 60% drop in tree loss from the previous year by strictly enforcing protections in vulnerable regions. On the other hand, governments can reverse course just as swiftly. Take Brazil, where a decade-long trend of improving forest protections has now gone into reverse. It’s a concern both in and beyond the tropics, with multinational companies coming under increasing pressure to stop doing business with suppliers that ravage the environment. Rainforests host half the species on Earth, help regulate global weather patterns and produce much of the planet’s oxygen. Their disappearance, through burning or felling, creates about 10% of the greenhouse gases the world produces in a given year that drive climate change.

By one estimate, more tropical tree cover was lost globally in 2016 and 2017 than in any other years this century. The Situation A handful of nations are the guardians of the world’s rainforests, with Brazil home to one third and roughly 15% shared by Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Critics blame Brazil’s relapse on the rollback of environmental protections and enforcement in the Amazon in recent years. One analysis pointed to an 84% year-on-year increase in forest fires to record levels in 2019, many caused by loggers incentivised by the government’s disdain for environmental oversight. Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro, who relishes criticism of his attitude toward the Amazon and jokingly refers to himself as “Captain Chainsaw,” is facing a backlash from trading partners including Germany, Norway and the European Union. In Congo, agriculture, logging and energy projects pushed deforestation to record levels in 2017. The global bright spot was Indonesia, where authorities imposed a moratorium on developing peatlands, carbon-rich areas where the tree canopy shields waterlogged soil. When cleared, peatlands are drained, leaving a vast area of tinder that can smolder under the ground for years. Combined with better educational campaigns and stricter law enforcement, the moratorium cut primary forest loss to the lowest level in 14 years, notwithstanding setbacks in Sumatra, an island that’s home to endangered tigers and orangutans. Tree loss declined yet further in 2018. The Background Although tropical deforestation rates have dropped by more than a third since the 1990s, rainforests remain on course to disappear in about a century. The 2015 Paris agreement to fight climate change recognised forests as part of the solution to curbing carbon emissions. Rainforests absorb prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide and store it in trees, other plants and soil. Forest fires in Indonesia in 2015 pumped out more greenhouse gases than the entire US economy. Tropical deforestation continues mostly because people, both near and far, demand timber as well as commodities — typically soy, palm oil, and beef — that flourish where forests get in the way. Indonesia, for example, delivers about half the world’s $50bn palm- oil crop each year. It’s cheaper than other vegetable oils, widely used in products from mayonnaise to makeup and a route out of poverty for farmers. Hundreds of international companies have pledged to clean up their supply chains, sourcing commodities only from producers certified as having sustainable practices. The Argument Climate scientists say that preserving rainforests, and restoring former forested land, represents a relatively straightforward and economical way to meet climate change targets. Such measures, they estimate, could help bring humanity about one- third of the way to the Paris goal of limiting warming to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Environmentalists argue over the best approach, but targets and protections have proven most eff ective only when strictly applied. On-the-ground strategies include removing roads into sensitive areas or paying rural and indigenous communities to maintain habitats. Activists urge rich nations to follow Norway’s lead and off er incentives to countries to curb forest loss (and to withdraw them if necessary).

Conservation groups say Corps should step up, for instance by including environmental audits in their financial reporting. They are pressing for better systems to certify producers of sustainably grown commodities; these make it easier both for companies to avoid illegal operators and consumers to make eco-friendly choices. There’s some way to go: A 2018 survey by environmental group Greenpeace found that all 16 multinationals surveyed either failed to publicly identify their palm-oil suppliers or used producers that harmed rainforests.

Norway’s $1tn sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, is adding its clout to a growing number of asset managers across the globe scrutinising supply chains and businesses as wildfires rip through the Amazon. “We have had a focus on deforestation for several years and follow the ongoing serious situation,” Carine Smith Ihenacho, chief corporate governance off icer at Norges Bank Investment Management, said in an emailed com- ment. The wealth fund’s chief governance off icer said that she expects companies to have a strategy for reducing de- forestation from their own activities and supply chains. In 2017, the fund initiated dialogue with companies that buy and sell soy and cattle products in Brazil, Ihenacho said. The Norwegian investor, which holds more than 9,000 companies around the world, has ratcheted up its work on ethics and sustainability over several years. It has taken steps to exclude or put companies under observation on a set of criteria, and it also engages directly in dialogue with companies to express its views. By the end of 2018, the fund had invested $6.2bn in stocks in Brazil, and about $2.8bn in bonds, according to a hold- ings overview on its website. “We have in previous years divested from one soy produc- er in this region due to links to unsustainable production and deforestation,” Ihenacho said. Not only engaging directly with companies, the Norwe- gian fund has also taken initiative to talk to lenders to get a broader perspective on deforestation and financing, ac- cording to the governance off icer. The fund engaged with banks in Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia and Malaysia last year, Ihenacho said, to understand how they monitor deforesta- tion risk in their credit loan portfolios.

As the fires ravaging Brazil’s Amazon stoke global outrage, its neighbours are also scorching, ripping up and poisoning their forests – largely under the radar.
Bolivia and Peru have seen faster growth in the number of fires this year than Brazil, as illegal miners, ranchers and cocaine producers continue to wreak havoc.
The 2.5mn square-mile Amazon is being attacked on all sides, with fires claiming an area equivalent to dozens of soccer pitches every hour in Brazil alone. At the deforestation rates seen in recent years, the whole forest will lose an area about the size of Virginia over the next decade according to Michael T Coe, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center.
That’s endangering an eco-system that not only hosts a vast and largely unknown share of the world’s biodiversity but also helps regulate the continent’s climate.
Fires have multiplied in Brazil as loggers and farmers, emboldened by President Jair Bolsonaro’s disdain for environmental oversight, set ablaze land cleared earlier this year. Countries like Colombia, Peru and Bolivia aren’t encouraging deforestation, but lack resources and political will to enforce existing regulations, according to Carolina Gil, an attorney for environmental protection group Amazon Conservation.
“The current crisis in Brazil is just the tip of the iceberg,” Gil said.
Continued destruction threatens to turn dense forests into scrub-land covered in shrubs and weeds, she added, wrecking a region which provides a home to tens of thousands of animal and plant species, and roughly one-fifth of the world’s fresh water.
Colombia, which has the largest swath of the Amazon after Brazil and Peru, lost 530,400 acres (215,000 hectares) of the rainforest in 2017, according to satellite data monitored by Amazon Conservation. Brazil, which has about six times as much of the jungle, has been losing about 1.58mn acres a year.
Meanwhile, cultivation of coca plants, the raw material for cocaine, more than quadrupled in Colombia between 2012 and 2017. Farmers often slash down forest in national parks to plant illegal crops in remote parts of the country where the government’s presence is weak or non-existent.
Mercury used by informal gold miners also continually seeps into the rivers in Colombia’s Amazon, poisoning fish.
Colombia’s environment ministry didn’t reply to a written request for comment.
Brazil has experienced more than 83,000 fires so far this year, up 77% from the same period last year, according to the country’s National Institute for Space Research, known as Inpe. Meanwhile, Bolivia and Peru have seen their number of fires roughly double during the same period.
In Bolivia, where nearly 19,000 fires have destroyed more than 1mn acres of forest this year, left-wing President Evo Morales has mobilized firefighters and used a Boeing 747 Supertanker to fight the blazes.
Bolivia’s environment ministry and presidential press office did not return phone calls and emails seeking comment. Morales on Sunday said he was open to international help to put out fires and called for a summit between countries that make up the Amazon to “coordinate immediate actions and long-term plans,” according to a statement.
Peru’s environment ministry didn’t reply to an email seeking comment.
Brazil’s neighbours don’t share Bolsonaro’s belligerence, or hostility to environmental protection, but their record isn’t much better, said Rodrigo Botero, director for the Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development in Colombia.
“You can see across the region that the pressures in countries like Bolivia, which is suffering huge losses, or Paraguay are the same as in Brazil,” he said. “It’s not a question of left or right.”

TUTTGART, Germany (Reuters) – Automakers around the world are pushing hard for new networks that can charge electric cars fast. In Europe, some power companies and grid operators are testing whether it might be smarter and cheaper to move into the slow lane.

A 15-month study of electric car charging behavior in Germany has concluded that consumers can be persuaded to accept slow, overnight recharging that could help avoid brownouts from surges in electricity demand or costly upgrades to power grids.

The prospect of millions of EVs hitting the roads as governments gradually ban new diesel and gasoline cars is seen as a major challenge for power companies, especially in Germany which is switching from nuclear and coal to less predictable sources of energy such as wind and solar.

The small study in the wealthy Stuttgart suburb of Ostfildern-Ruit though has helped alleviate the concerns of some grid operators that too many electric vehicles (EVs) charging at peak times could cause network crashes.

The engineers at Netze BW, the local grid operator behind the trial, found that all the households involved came around to leaving their electric cars plugged in overnight and only half ever charged simultaneously.

“Since the experience with the project we have become a lot more relaxed. We can imagine that, in future, half of the inhabitants of such a street own electric vehicles,” said Netze BW engineer Selma Lossau, project manager for the study.

Still, with limited EV battery ranges for now, slow, overnight charging doesn’t get around the problem of how to persuade drivers to ditch petrol cars altogether.

Without a network of fast-charging stations offering quick refueling, drivers may be wary of using EVs for long trips – which is why some automakers want lots of fast-charging stations to encourage the widespread adoption of electric cars.

‘CHANGED MY OUTLOOK’

Slower, or delayed, charging has already gained traction in Norway, Europe’s leading EV market, where nearly 50% of new car sales are zero-emission vehicles.

A study by energy regulator NVE showed that Norway faces a bill of 11 billion crowns ($1.2 billion) over the next 20 years for low- and high-voltage grids, substations and high-voltage transformers – unless it can persuade car owners to charge outside peak afternoon hours.

The investment cost to the country of 5.3 million people could drop to just over 4 billion crowns if cars are charged in the evening, and may fall close to zero if batteries are only plugged in at night, NVE said.

NVE is now working a tariff proposal which will penalize peak-hours charging. Tibber, a Norwegian power company, already offers cheaper electricity for EV charging if you let it decide when your car is charged while firms such as ZAPTEC offer ways to adjust charging to the available grid capacity.

Some of the 10 households participating in the Stuttgart trial said they initially wanted to keep topping up their cars for fear of running out of juice, but soon adapted to leaving the power company to handle it as it saw fit overnight.

“At the start, I did not want to take any risks and charged frequently in order to feel secure. Over time, I changed my outlook,” said Norbert Simianer, a retired head teacher who drove a Renault Zoe during the trial. “I grew used to the car and became more at ease in handling the loading process.”

Simianer and his neighbors were given electric cars and 22 kilowatt (kW) wall-boxes for their garages, alongside two charging points in the street, all free of charge.

In return, they gave up their normal cars and allowed Netze BW, which is a subsidiary of German utility EnBW (EBKG.DE), to monitor and carry out a deferred and down-scaled charging process during a seven-and-a-half-hour period overnight.

Netze BW tried various options, either slotting cars in at the maximum 22 kW charging flow one after another, or lengthening the charging time for individual cars by adjusting the power flow, or combining both methods, Lossau said.

The participants, who used apps to check the status of their car batteries, grew accustomed to the lack of instant charging capability because their vehicles could always handle their everyday commutes of up to 50 km (31 miles).

EnBW said nine of the 10 households in the trial on Ostfildern-Ruit’s Belchenstrasse had opted to keep the wall-boxes and most were exploring leasing electric car.

TWO-WAY STREET

Lossau said monitoring 10 households did not in itself provide the “empirical mass to draw conclusions for the load profile of all of Germany”.

She also said there would need to be better two-way communication between EVs, the grid and consumers for the system to function efficiently on a large scale.

“There will have to be more exchange of information between e-cars and the grid to update the loading status in real-time, because otherwise, there can be the wrong impression about the speed of loading,” she said.

Utility companies developing so-called vehicle-to-grid (V2G) services, however, are struggling to persuade some automakers to use technology that allows two-way flows of information, and power, between batteries and grids.

Carmakers such as Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE), Daimler (DAIGn.DE) and Ford (F.N), for example, are prioritizing one-directional fast-charging instead to overcome consumer resistance to EVs.

Japan’s Nissan (7201.T) has been leading the way among carmakers exploring V2G though Germany’s BMW (BMWG.DE) has now decided to develop it too, saying cooperation between cars and grids will be key to making e-mobility ready for mass markets.

“It is about making sure there is enough supply for the electric cars and that the lights do not go out elsewhere,” a BMW spokesman said. “The cars don’t just load when it’s best for the market, but they can also supply power back to the grid to help even out demand spikes.”

“There has to be more progress on the data exchanges, however. It is not yet the standard,” he said.

Nevertheless, the Ostfildern-Ruit trial has raised hopes that power grids might be able to cope with an influx of electric cars, especially if the consumers play ball.

Even if drivers resist overnight charging, suppliers of software and equipment to power grids, such as Germany’s Siemens (SIEGn.DE), are also looking at safer and more efficient ways to manage how and when power is used to charge cars.

MORE DATA PLEASE

The German city of Hamburg, for example, started a three-year pilot project this month with Siemens to pre-emptively identify overloads on transformers and along cables, and manage EV charging points accordingly.

“Loading processes offer so much flexibility that the overload on the networks can be reduced by deferring loading times or reducing the load that is supplied,” said Thomas Werner, expert at Siemens Digital Grid.

“This happens through the digitization of hardware and software and with communication technology,” he said.

Using software to help protect aging power networks from predictable surges could also avoid costly hardware upgrades to parts of the 1.7 million km of distribution grids in Germany.

With few than 100,000 electric-only cars in Germany at the moment, there is little threat of blackouts from over-demand. But the Transport Ministry in Berlin envisages up to 10 million electric cars on the roads by 2030.

The number of charging points across the country also only stands at 21,000. That’s up 50% over the last year but still barely a fraction of future needs.

Next up for Netze BW is a trickier test.

Managing the power for 10 households with electric cars in a suburban street of 22 homes is one thing, now the power company is launching a study of car charging behavior in an apartment block with 80 flats, where quarrels over access are likely.

It is also looking at a study in rural areas, where the longer cables required present challenges in maintaining stable voltages for charging.

But that’s still only part of the story. Lossau said power companies would have to work more closely with carmakers to fill knowledge gaps and exchange information.

“It can only work if we get more data from each other.”