WELLINGTON, Jan 30 (Reuters) – Flood-ravaged Auckland is forecast to receive further heavy rain in the coming days, authorities in New Zealand’s largest city said on Monday, as insurers counted the costs of what looks likely to be the country’s most expensive weather event ever.
Four people lost their lives in flash floods and landslides that hit Auckland over the last three days amid record downpours. A state of emergency remains in place in Auckland. A state of emergency in the Waitomo region south of Auckland was lifted.
Flights in and out of Auckland Airport are still experiencing delays and cancellations, beaches around the city of 1.6 million are closed and all Auckland schools will remain closed until Feb. 7.
“There has been very significant damage across Auckland,” New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins told state-owned television station TVNZ on Monday. “Obviously there were a number of homes damaged by flooding but also extensive earth movements.”
Currently, around 350 people were in need of emergency accommodation, he added.
LOOMING CLOUDS
Metservice is forecasting further heavy rains to hit the already sodden city late on Tuesday.
“We have more adverse weather coming and we need to prepare for that,” Auckland Emergency Management duty controller Rachel Kelleher told a media conference.
Fire and Emergency services received 30 callouts overnight Monday, including responding to a landslide when a carport slid down a hill.
The council has designated 69 houses as uninhabitable and has prevented people from entering them. A further 300 properties were deemed at risk, with access restricted to certain areas for short periods.
The north of New Zealand’s North Island is receiving more rain than normal due to the La Nina weather event.
The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) said Auckland has already recorded more than eight times its average January rainfall and 40% of its annual average rainfall.
INSURERS FACE HEFTY BILL
The cost of the clean up is expected to top the NZ$97 million ($63 million) bill for flooding on the West Coast in 2021 but will not be anywhere near as expensive as the estimated NZ$31 billion insured costs of two major earthquakes in Christchurch in 2010-2011, said Insurance Council of New Zealand spokesperson Christian Judge.
Insurance Australia Group’s (IAG.AX) New Zealand divisions have received over 5,000 claims so far and Suncorp Group (SUN.AX) said it received around 3,000 claims across the Vero and AA Insurance Brands. New Zealand’s Tower (TWR.NZ) said it had received around 1,900 claims.
“The number of claims is expected to rise further over the coming days, with the event still unfolding and as customers identify damage to their property,” IAG said in a statement.
Economists say the recovery and rebuild could add to inflationary pressures in New Zealand as vehicles and household goods need to be replaced and there is an increase in construction work needed to repair or rebuild houses and infrastructure damaged by the flooding.
($1 = 1.5385 New Zealand dollars)
Reporting by Lucy Craymer; Editing by Aurora Ellis and Lincoln Feast
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DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan 19 (Reuters) – Greta Thunberg called on the global energy industry and its financiers to end all fossil fuel investments on Thursday at a high-profile meeting in Davos with the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA).
During a round-table discussion with Fatih Birol on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting, activists said they had presented a “cease and desist” letter to CEOs calling for a stop to new oil, gas and coal extraction.
“As long as they can get away with it they will continue to invest in fossil fuels, they will continue to throw people under the bus,” Thunberg warned.
The oil and gas industry, which has been accused by activists of hijacking the climate change debate in the Swiss ski resort, has said that it needs to be part of the energy transition as fossil fuels will continue to play a major role in the energy mix as the world shift to a low-carbon economy.
Thunberg, who was detained by police in Germany earlier this week during a demonstration at a coal mine, joined with fellow activists Helena Gualinga from Ecuador, Vanessa Nakate from Uganda and Luisa Neubauer from Germany to discuss the tackle the big issues with Birol.
Birol, whose agency makes policy recommendations on energy, thanked the activists for meeting him, but insisted that the transition had to include a mix of stakeholders, especially in the face of the global energy security crisis.
The IEA chief, who earlier on Thursday met with some of the biggest names in the oil and gas industry in Davos, said there was no reason to justify investments in new oil fields because of the energy crunch, saying by the time these became operational the climate crisis would be worse.
He also said he was less pessimistic than the climate activists about the shift to clean energy.
“We can have slight legitimate optimism,” he said, adding: “Last year the amount of renewables coming to the market was record high.”
But he admitted that the transition was not happening fast enough and warned that emerging and developing countries risked being left behind if advanced economies did not support the transition.
Youth climate activist Greta Thunberg takes part in a discussion on “Treating the climate crisis like a crisis” with International Energy Agency head Fatih Birol (not pictured) on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland January 19, 2023. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann
‘REAL MONEY’
The United Nation’s climate conference, held in Egypt last year, established a loss and damage fund to compensate countries most impacted by climate change events.
Nakate, who held a solitary protest outside the Ugandan parliament for several months in 2019, said the fund “is still an empty bucket with no money at all.”
“There is a need for real money for loss and damage”.
In 2019, the then 16-year-old Thunberg took part in the main WEF meeting, famously telling leaders that “our house is on fire”. She returned to Davos the following year.
But she refused to participate as an official delegate this year as the event returned to its usual January slot.
Asked why she did not want to advocate for change from the inside, Thunberg said there were already activists doing that.
“I think it should be people on the frontlines and not privileged people like me,” she said. “I don’t think the changes we need are very likely to come from the inside. They are more likely to come from the bottom up.”
The activists later walked together through the snowy streets of Davos, where many of the shops have temporarily been turned into “pavilions” sponsored by companies or countries.
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Writing by Leela de Kretser; Editing by Alexander Smith
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Jan 16 (Reuters) – Scientists in Chile’s Patagonia region are unearthing the southernmost dinosaur fossils recorded outside Antarctica, including remains of megaraptors that would have dominated the area’s food chain before their mass extinction.
Fossils of megaraptors, a carnivorous dinosaur that inhabited parts of South America during the Cretaceous period some 70 million years ago, were found in sizes up to 10 meters long, according to the Journal of South American Earth Sciences.
“We were missing a piece,” Marcelo Leppe, director of the Chilean Antarctic Institute (INACH), told Reuters. “We knew where there were large mammals, there would also be large carnivores, but we hadn’t found them yet.”
The remains, recovered from Chile’s far south Rio de las Chinas Valley in the Magallanes Basin between 2016 and 2020, also include some unusual remains of unenlagia, velociraptor-like dinosaurs which likely lived covered in feathers.
The specimens, according to University of Chile researcher Jared Amudeo, had some characteristics not present in Argentine or Brazilian counterparts.
[1/5] A man works at the area where scientists discovered megaraptor fossils at ‘Guido’ hill in the Chilean Patagonia area, close to Torres del Paine park, in Magallanes and Antarctic region, Chile in this undated handout photo provided by the Instituto Chileno Antartico on January 16, 2023. Instituto Chileno Antartico/Handout via REUTERS
“It could be a new species, which is very likely, or belong to another family of dinosaurs that are closely related,” he said, adding more conclusive evidence is needed.
The studies also shed more light on the conditions of the meteorite impact on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula that may have triggered the dinosaurs’ extinction some 65 million years ago.
INACH’s Leppe pointed to a sharp drop in temperatures over present-day Patagonia and waves of intense cold lasting up to several thousand years, in contrast to the extremely warm climate that prevailed for much of the Cretaceous period.
“The enormous variation we are seeing, the biological diversity, was also responding to very powerful environmental stimuli,” Leppe said.
“This world was already in crisis before (the meteorite) and this is evidenced in the rocks of the Rio de las Chinas Valley,” he said.
Reporting by Marion Giraldo; Writing by Sarah Morland, Editing by Alistair Bell
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DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan 16 (Reuters) – Big oil firms came under pressure at the start of the World Economic Forum (WEF) from activists who accused them of hijacking the climate debate, while a Greta Thunberg-sponsored “cease and desist” campaign gained support on social media.
Major energy firms including BP (BP.L), Chevron (CVX.N) and Saudi Aramco (2222.SE) are among the 1,500 business leaders gathering for the annual meeting in the Swiss resort of Davos, where global threats including climate change are on the agenda.
“We are demanding concrete and real climate action,” said Nicolas Siegrist, the 26-year-old organiser of the protest who also heads the Young Socialists party in Switzerland.
The annual meeting of global business and political leaders opens in Davos on Monday.
“They will be in the same room with state leaders and they will push for their interests,” Siegrist said of the involvement of energy companies during a demonstration attended by several hundred people on Sunday.
The oil and gas industry has said that it needs to be part of the energy transition as fossil fuels will continue to play a major role in the world’s energy mix as countries shift to low carbon economies.
[1/5] Climate activists display a banner during a protest ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2023 in the Alpine resort of Davos, Switzerland, January 15, 2023. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann
On Monday, a social media campaign added to the pressure on oil and gas companies, by promoting a “cease and desist” notice sponsored by climate activists Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate and Luisa Neubauer, through the non-profit website Avaaz.
It demands energy company CEOs “immediately stop opening any new oil, gas, or coal extraction sites, and stop blocking the clean energy transition we all so urgently need”, and threatens legal action and more protests if they fail to comply.
The campaign, which had been signed by more than 660,000 people, had almost 200,000 shares on Monday morning.
Sumant Sinha, who heads one of India’s largest renewable energy firms, said it would be good to include big oil companies in the transition debate as they have a vital role to play.
“If oil people are part of these conversations to the extent that they are also committing to change then by all means. It is better to get them inside the tent than to have them outside the tent,” Sinha, chairman and CEO of ReNew Power, told Reuters, saying that inclusion should not lead to “sabotage”.
Rising interest rates have made it harder for renewable energy developments to attract financing, giving traditional players with deep pockets a competitive advantage.
As delegates began to arrive in Davos, Debt for Climate activists protested at a private airport in eastern Switzerland, which they said would be used by some WEF attendees, and issued a statement calling for foreign debts of poorer countries to be cancelled in order to accelerate the global energy transition.
Additional reporting by Kathryn Lurie; Editing by Alexander Smith and Alex Richardson
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Jan 15 (Reuters) – One year on from the massive eruption of an underwater volcano in the South Pacific, the island nation of Tonga is still dealing with the damage to its coastal waters.
When Hunga-Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai went off, it sent a shockwave around the world, produced a plume of water and ash that soared higher into the atmosphere than any other on record, and triggered tsunami waves that ricocheted across the region – slamming into the archipelago which lies southeast of Fiji.
Coral reefs were turned to rubble and many fish perished or migrated away.
The result has Tongans struggling, with more than 80% of Tongan families relying on subsistence reef fishing, according 2019 data from the World Bank. Following the eruption, the Tongan government said it would seek $240 million for recovery, including improving food security. In the immediate aftermath, the World Bank provided $8 million.
“In terms of recovery plan … we are awaiting for funds to cover expenditure associated with small-scale fisheries along coastal communities,” said Poasi Ngaluafe, head of the science division of Tonga’s Ministry of Fisheries.
SILENT REEFS
The vast majority of Tongan territory is ocean, with its exclusive economic zone extending across nearly 700,000 square kilometres (270,271 square miles) of water. While commercial fisheries contribute only 2.3% to the national economy, subsistence fishing is considered crucial in making up a staple of the Tongan diet.
The U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization estimated in a November report that the eruption cost the country’s fisheries and aquaculture sector some $7.4 million – a significant number for Tonga’s roughly $500 million economy. The losses were largely due to damaged fishing vessels, with nearly half of that damage in the small-scale fisheries sector, though some commercial vessels were also affected.
Because the Tongan government does not closely track subsistence fishing, it is difficult to estimate the eruption’s impact on fish harvests.
But scientists say that, apart from some fish stocks likely being depleted, there are other troubling signs that suggest it could take a long time for fisheries to recover.
Young corals are failing to mature in the coastal waters around the eruption site, and many areas once home to healthy and abundant reefs are now barren, according to the government’s August survey.
It is likely volcanic ash smothered many reefs, depriving fish of feeding areas and spawning beds. The survey found that no marine life had survived near the volcano.
Meanwhile, the tsunami that swelled in the waters around the archipelago knocked over large boulder corals, creating fields of coral rubble. And while some reefs survived, the crackling, snapping and popping noises of foraging shrimp and fish, a sign of a healthy environment, were gone.
“The reefs in Tonga were silent,” the survey report found.
FARMING REPRIEVE
Agriculture has proved a lifeline to Tongans facing empty waters and damaged boats. Despite concerns that the volcanic ash, which blanketed 99% of the country, would make soils too toxic to grow crops, “food production has resumed with little impacts,” said Siosiua Halavatu, a soil scientist speaking on behalf of the Tongan government.
Soil tests revealed that the fallen ash was not harmful for humans. And while yam and sweet potato plants perished during the eruption, and fruit trees were burned by falling ash, they began to recover once the ash was washed away.
“We have supported recovery works through land preparation, and planting backyard gardening and roots crops in the farms, as well as export crops like watermelon and squash,” Halavatu told Reuters.
But long-term monitoring will be critical, he said, and Tonga hopes to develop a national soil strategy and upgrade their soil testing laboratory to help farmers.
SKY WATER
Scientists are also now taking stock of the eruption’s impact on the atmosphere. While volcanic eruptions on land eject mostly ash and sulfur dioxide, underwater volcanos jettison far more water.
Tonga’s eruption was no different, with the blast’s white-grayish plume reaching 57 kilometers (35.4 miles) and injecting 146 million tonnes of water into the atmosphere.
Water vapor can linger in the atmosphere for up to a decade, trapping heat on Earth’s surface and leading to more overall warming. More atmospheric water vapor can also help deplete ozone, which shields the planet from harmful UV radiation.
“That one volcano increased the total amount of global water in the stratosphere by 10 percent,” said Paul Newman, chief scientist for earth sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We’re only now beginning to see the impact of that.”
Reporting by Gloria Dickie in London; Additional reporting by Kirsty Needham; Editing by Katy Daigle and Tomasz Janowski
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LUETZERATH, Germany, Jan 11 (Reuters) – Hundreds of police began clearing climate protesters out of an abandoned village on Wednesday in a showdown over the expansion of an opencast lignite mine that has highlighted tensions around Germany’s climate policy during an energy crisis.
The protesters formed human chains, made a makeshift barricade out of old containers and chanted “we are here, we are loud, because you are stealing our future” as police in helmets moved in. Some threw rocks, bottles and pyrotechnics. Police also reported protesters were lobbing petrol bombs.
The demonstrators, wearing masks, balaclavas or biosuits, have been protesting against the Garzweiler mine, run by energy firm RWE (RWEG.DE) in the village of Luetzerath in the brown-coal district of the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Climate activist Greta Thunberg plans to join the demonstration on Saturday, a spokesperson for Luetzerathlebt environmentalist group told Reuters.
Economy Minister Robert Habeck of the Greens called for no further violence after police and protesters scuffled.
“Leave it at that – from both sides,” he told reporters.
Police say the standoff could take weeks to resolve.
As the officers moved in, some activists perched on the roofs or the windows of the abandoned buildings, chanting and shouting slogans.
Others hung suspended from wires and wooden frames, or were holed up in treehouses to make it harder for police to dislodge them after a court ruling allowed for the demolition of the village now otherwise empty of residents and owned by RWE.
Julia Riedel, who said she has been camping in the village for two-and-a-half years, said the demonstrators had taken up their positions “because the issue here is whether the climate will cross the tipping point or not.”
Police, who had water cannon trucks on standby, led away and carried some protesters from the site.
The project has underscored Germany’s dilemma over climate policy, which environmentalists say has taken a back seat during the energy crisis that has hit Europe after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, forcing a return to dirtier fuels.
It is particularly sensitive for the Greens party, now back in power as part of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government after 16 years in opposition. Many Greens oppose the mine’s expansion, but Habeck has been the face of the government’s decision.
[1/14] Police officers keep guard as activists stage a sit-in protest against the expansion of the Garzweiler open-cast lignite mine of Germany’s utility RWE, in Luetzerath, Germany, January 11, 2023 that has highlighted tensions over Germany’s climate policy during an energy crisis. REUTERS/Thilo Schmuelgen
“The empty settlement of Luetzerath, where no one lives any more, is the wrong symbol in my view,” Habeck said with reference to the demonstration.
HEAVY MACHINERY
Birte, a 51-year-old midwife who joined the protest on Sunday, was in tears as police led her away.
She said it was important for politically moderate citizens to attend the protest, to show “that these are not just young, crazy, violent people, but that there are people who care”.
Police have urged the protesters to leave the area and remain peaceful.
“It’s a big challenge for the police and we need a lot of special forces here to deal with the situation. We have aerial rescue specialists,” said police spokesperson Andreas Mueller.
“These are all factors that make it difficult to tell how long this will last. We expect it to continue for a least several weeks.”
A Reuters eyewitness saw police using heavy machinery to start dismantling high barricades.
RWE said earlier on Wednesday it would start to dismantle Luetzerath, and had begun building a fence around the area.
“RWE is appealing to the squatters to observe the rule of law and to end the illegal occupation of buildings, plants and sites belonging to RWE peacefully,” RWE said.
The fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted Scholz’s government to change course on previous policies.
Those include firing up mothballed coal power plants and extending the lifespan of nuclear power stations after Russia cut gas deliveries to Europe in an energy standoff that sent prices soaring.
The government has, however, brought forward the date when all brown coal power plants will be shut down in North Rhine-Westphalia, to 2030 from 2038, acceding to a campaign promise from the Greens.
Writing by Paul Carrel and Matthias Williams; Editing by Tom Hogue, Christopher Cushing, Conor Humphries and Alison Williams
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Jan 11 (Reuters) – U.S. clean energy companies are offering better wages and benefits, flying in trainers from overseas, and contemplating ideas like buying roofing and electric repair shops just to hire their workers as firms try to overcome a labor shortage that threatens to derail President Joe Biden’s climate change agenda.
The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law last year, provides for an estimated $370 billion in solar, wind and electric vehicle subsidies, according to the White House. Starting Jan. 1, American consumers can take advantage of those tax credits to upgrade home heating systems or put solar panels on their roofs. Those investments will create nearly 537,000 jobs a year for a decade, according to an analysis by BW Research commissioned by The Nature Conservancy.
Reuters Graphics Reuters Graphics
But with the U.S. unemployment rate at an historic low of 3.5%, companies say they fear they will struggle to fill those jobs, and that plans to transition away from fossil fuels could stall out. Despite layoff announcements and signs of a slowdown elsewhere in the economy, the labor market for clean energy jobs remains tight.
“It feels like a big risk for this expansion. Where are we going to find all the people?” said Abigail Ross Hopper, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association trade group.
The shortage is anticipated to hit especially hard in electric vehicle and battery production and solar panel and home efficiency installations, forcing some of the companies into bold new approaches to find workers.
Korea’s SK Innovation Co Ltd, which makes batteries for Ford Motor Co’s (F.N) F-150 Lightning all-electric pickup truck in Commerce, Georgia, has pumped up pay and benefits as it ramps up its U.S. workforce to 20,000 people by 2025 from 4,000 today.
The battery maker is advertising pay between $20 and $34 an hour, above Georgia’s median hourly wage of $18.43, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is also covering 100% life insurance costs and matching retirement plan contributions up to 6.5%, above the national average of 5.6%, according to the Plan Sponsor Council of America. And the company is providing free food on the job.
“Georgia’s talent pool is not really massive. But we are trying to improve some of our policies to better source and retain workers,” said an SK official who declined to be named, citing the sensitivity of the matter.
Georgia state officials said SK’s hiring has been a success considering how quickly production had to ramp up to meet the company’s obligations to automakers.
While national residential solar installer SunPower Corp (SPWR.O) is recruiting aggressively, Chief Executive Peter Faricy said the company is also looking at what he called “crazy ideas” to secure labor – including buying up companies just for their workers.
“I’m not suggesting we will do this, but I want to give you an order of magnitude of what we’re considering. Like, should we acquire a roofing company and make them all solar installers? Do we go buy an electrical company and acquire 100 electricians?” he said.
SunPower also held talks within the last year with panel manufacturer First Solar Inc (FSLR.O) about developing a solar panel that would be easier to install, enabling crews to outfit two homes a day instead of just one, Faricy said.
SunPower’s competitor, Sunrun Inc (RUN.O), is deploying drones to survey roofs ahead of installation, reducing the number of workers required to scale roofs. It is also rewarding top crews with office parties.
“As best you can game-ify the experience for the employee… it just makes the industry more fun, more attractive,” Chris McClellan, Sunrun’s senior vice president of operations, said in an interview.
Offshore wind developer Orsted (ORSTED.CO), a Danish company that is planning to build projects off the East Coast, hopes to fly in employees from projects in the United Kingdom and Asia to help train staff. State reports have indicated that New York and Massachusetts face large offshore wind workforce gaps.
“We’re creating sort of an ecosystem where we don’t just have an offshore wind academy, but really train the trainers of the future,” said Mads Nipper, Orsted’s CEO, told Reuters.
The Biden Administration has repeatedly promised that new green energy jobs would be well-paying union jobs.
But many of those jobs have lagged the fossil fuel industry in pay, according to a 2021 study by BW Research, as clean energy companies have sought to contain costs to compete with entrenched industries. The IRA seeks to address that by tying prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements to the subsidies.
Those provisions — and the hiring challenges — have put pressure on some employers to use unionized labor.
Learning from its earlier hiring challenges in Europe and Asia, Orsted signed an agreement with North America’s Building Trades Unions to secure workers.
Even Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O), a company that has been embroiled in disputes with workers trying to organize, has used union labor to build the electric charging infrastructure for its fleet of electric delivery vehicles in Maspeth, Queens, NY.
Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.
Corrine Case, an electrician represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said she was paid $43 an hour to install the charging system at Amazon.
A single mother, Case said she was excited about the job security offered by the rising demand for electricians to install charging stations.
“Our field is constantly changing because of new energy sources and to be a part of that is amazing,” she said.
FREE WORKER TRAINING
In their hunt for workers, solar, wind and electric vehicle companies have expanded programs offering free and subsidized training to military veterans, women and the formerly incarcerated.
SK told Reuters that it has been recruiting at military job fairs and American Legion chapters and collaborating with programs like the Georgia National Guard’s Work for Warriors and the Manufacturing Institute’s Heroes MAKE America.
Some solar companies have tried to recruit veterans, saying the skills learned in military life translate well to the industry.
Utility scale solar developer SOLV Energy, SunPower and Nextracker last year teamed up with nonprofit Solar Energy International to fund a women-only training program for solar installers. More than 30 women attended the week-long course in Colorado.
In October, the nonprofit Solar Hands-On Instructional Network of Excellence (SHINE) teamed up with the Virginia Department of Corrections on a pilot program to train 30 prison inmates and recently incarcerated people in solar panel installation. SHINE’s director David Peterson said the group is discussing expanding the program.
In California, the nonprofit Grid Alternatives has trained 150 inmates at the Madera County jail in solar installation since 2017 and is expanding its program this year to other facilities in the state. Potential employers are more open to hiring the formerly incarcerated once they see they have received some training, Tom Esqueda, the nonprofit’s outreach manager, said.
In Los Angeles, nonprofit Homeboy Industries, which works to rehabilitate former gang members, is using the potential job opportunities for solar panel installers to help recruits for its state-funded jobs program. Homeboy trains 50-60 people a year as solar panel installers.
More than 80% of the people who have gone through the training in the last year have found jobs in solar, according to Jackie Harper, who oversees the program.
“I’m going to be sticking with this,” said Marco Reyes, 28, who went through the program after his release from prison in February and earns $23 an hour as an installer in Valencia, California.
He now plans to train in the electrical end of solar installation, which would bump up his pay.
“Everyone has a chance to move up the ladder into a better position,” he said. “This job to me is a life changer.”
Read more:
Korea’s Hanwha Qcells to invest $2.5 bln in U.S. solar supply chain
U.S. solar installations to fall 23% this year due to China goods ban -report
Reporting by Nichola Groom and Valerie Volcovici; Edited by Richard Valdmanis and Suzanne Goldenberg
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Activists call for faster action on climate change
Pollen warning issued as plants bloom early
Governments get short-term gas-price respite
LONDON/BRUSSELS, Jan 4 (Reuters) – Record-high winter temperatures swept across parts of Europe over the new year, bringing calls from activists for faster action against climate change while offering short-term respite to governments struggling with high gas prices.
Hundreds of sites have seen temperature records smashed in the past days, from Switzerland to Poland to Hungary, which registered its warmest Christmas Eve in Budapest and saw temperatures climb to 18.9 degrees Celsius (66.02°F) on Jan. 1.
In France, where the night of Dec. 30-31 was the warmest since records began, temperatures climbed to nearly 25C in the southwest on New Year’s Day while normally bustling European ski resorts were deserted due to a lack of snow.
The Weather Service in Germany, where temperatures of over 20C were recorded, said such a mild turn of the year had not been observed in the country since records began in 1881.
Czech Television reported some trees were starting to flower in private gardens while Switzerland’s office of Meteorology and Climatology issued a pollen warning to allergy sufferers from early blooming hazel plants.
The temperature hit 25.1C at Bilbao airport in Spain’s Basque country. People basked in the sun as they sat outside Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum or walked along the River Nervion.
“It always rains a lot here, it’s very cold, and it’s January, (but now) it feels like summer,” said Bilbao resident Eusebio Folgeira, 81.
French tourist Joana Host said: “It’s like nice weather for biking but we know it’s like the planet is burning. So we’re enjoying it but at the same time we’re scared.”
Scientists have not yet analysed the specific ways in which climate change affected the recent high temperatures, but January’s warm weather spell fits into the longer-term trend of rising temperatures due to human-caused climate change.
“Winters are becoming warmer in Europe as a result of global temperatures increasing,” said Freja Vamborg, climate scientist at the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
It follows another year of extreme weather events that scientists concluded were directly linked to global warming, including deadly heatwaves in Europe and India, and flooding in Pakistan.
“The record-breaking heat across Europe over the new year was made more likely to happen by human-caused climate change, just as climate change is now making every heatwave more likely and hotter,” said Dr Friederike Otto, climate scientist at Imperial College London.
Temperature spikes can also cause plants to start growing earlier in the year or coax animals out of hibernation early, making them vulnerable to being killed off by later cold snaps.
Robert Vautard, director of France’s Pierre-Simon Laplace Institute, said that while temperatures peaked from Dec. 30 to Jan. 2, the mild spell has lasted for two weeks and is still not over. “This is actually a relatively long-lived event,” he said.
EMPTY SLOPES
French national weather agency Meteo France attributed the anomalous temperatures to a mass of warm air moving to Europe from subtropical zones.
It struck during the busy skiing season, leading to cancelled trips and empty slopes. Resorts in the northern Spanish regions of Asturias, Leon and Cantabria have been closed since the Christmas holidays for lack of snow.
On Jahorina mountain above the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, which hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics, it should have been one of the busiest weeks of the season. Instead, the chair-lifts hung lifeless above the grassy slopes. In one guesthouse a couple ate dinner alone in the restaurant, the only guests.
A ski jumping event in Zakopane, southern Poland, planned for the weekend of Jan. 7-8 was cancelled.
Karsten Smid, a climate expert at Greenpeace Germany, said while some climate change impacts were already unavoidable, urgent action should be taken to prevent even more drastic global warming.
“What’s happening right now is exactly what climate scientists warned us about 10, 20 years ago, and that can no longer be prevented now,” Smid said.
WEATHER EASES GAS STRAIN
The unusually mild temperatures have offered some short-term relief to European governments who have struggled to secure scarce gas supplies and keep a lid on soaring prices after Russia slashed deliveries of the fuel to Europe.
European governments have said this energy crisis should hasten their shift from fossil fuels to clean energy – but in the short term, plummeting Russian fuel supplies have left them racing to secure extra gas from elsewhere.
Gas demand has fallen for heating in many countries due to the mild spell, helping to reduce prices.
The benchmark front-month gas price was trading at 70.25 euros per megawatt hour on Wednesday morning, its lowest level since February 2022 – just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The head of Italy’s energy authority predicted that regulated energy bills in the country would fall this month, if the milder temperatures help keep gas prices lower.
However, a note by Eurointelligence cautioned that this should not lull governments into complacency about Europe’s energy crisis.
“While it will give governments more fiscal breathing room in the first part of this year, resolving Europe’s energy problems will taken concerted action over the course of several years,” it said. “Nobody should believe this is over yet.”
Reporting by Kate Abnett, Richard Lough, Alan Charlish, Krisztina Than, Luiza Ilie, Susanna Twidale, Riham Alkousaa, Jason Hovet, Emma Pinedo, Kirsten Donovan, Federico Maccioni; writing by Matthias Williams; Editing by Janet Lawrence and Mark Heinrich
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Electric motorbike startups making inroads in Kenya
Say battery swapping saves drivers time, money
Planning to expand model to Tanzania, Uganda
NAIROBI, Dec 26 (Reuters) – Over recent months, sets of sturdy, brightly-branded battery swapping stations have cropped up around Kenya’s capital Nairobi, allowing electric motorcyclists to exchange their low battery for a fully-charged one.
It is a sign of an electric motorcyle revolution starting to unfold in Kenya where combustion-engine motorbikes are a cheaper and quicker way to get around than cars but environmental experts say are 10 times more polluting.
East Africa’s biggest economy is betting on electric-powered motorcycles, its renewables-heavy power supply and position as a technology and start-up hub to lead the region’s shift to zero-emission electric mobility.
The battery swapping system not only saves time – essential for Kenya’s more than one million motorcyclists, most of whom use the bikes commercially – but also saves buyers money as many sellers follow a model in which they retain ownership of the battery, the bike’s most expensive part.
“It doesn’t make a lot of economic and business sense for them to acquire a battery…which would almost double the cost of the bike,” said Steve Juma, the co-founder of electric bike company Ecobodaa.
Ecobodaa has 50 test electric motorcyles on the road now and plans to have 1,000 by the end of 2023 which it sells for about $1,500 each – roughly the same price as combustion-engine bikes thanks to the exclusion of the battery from the cost.
After the initial purchase, the electric motorcyle – designed to be sturdy enough to traverse rocky roads – is cheaper to run than petrol-guzzling ones.
[1/5] Workers at ARC Ride assemble an electric motorcycle at the company’s warehouse in Industrial Area, Nairobi, Kenya November 2, 2022. REUTERS/Monicah Mwangi
“With the normal bike, I will use fuel worth approximately 700-800 Kenyan shillings ($5.70-$6.51) each day, but with this bike, when I swap a battery I get one battery at 300 shillings,” said Kevin Macharia, 28, who transports goods and passengers around Nairobi.
EXPANSION PLANS
Ecobodaa is just one of several Nairobi-based electric motorcycle startups working to prove themselves in Kenya before eventually expanding in East Africa.
Kenya’s consistent power supply which is about 95% renewable led by hydroelectricity and has a widespread network, was a major support for growth of the sector, said Jo Hurst-Croft, founder of ARC Ride, another Nairobi-based electric motorcycle startup.
The country’s power utility estimates it generates enough to charge two million electric motorcycles a day: electricity access in the country is over 75%, according to the World Bank, and even higher in Nairobi.
Uganda and Tanzania also have robust and renewables-heavy grids that could support electric mobility, said Hurst-Croft.
“We’re putting over 200 swapping stations in Nairobi and expanding to Dar es Salaam and Kampala,” said Hurst-Croft.
($1 = 122.9000 Kenyan shillings)
Reporting by Ayenat Mersie; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
WASHINGTON, Kan., Dec 18 (Reuters) – Farmer Bill Pannbacker got a call earlier this month from a representative from TC Energy Corp , telling him that its Keystone Pipeline, which runs through his farmland in rural Kansas, had suffered an oil leak.
But he was not prepared for what he saw on his land, which he owns with his wife, Chris. Oil had shot out of the pipeline and coated what he estimated was nearly an acre of pasture uphill of the pipe, which is set into a valley.
The grass was blackened with diluent bitumen, one of the thickest of crude oils, which was being transported from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
The rupture on Dec. 7 is the third in the last five years for the Keystone Pipeline, and the worst of the three – more than 14,000 barrels of crude has spilled and cleanup is expected to take weeks or months.
TC has not said when repairs could be completed and a 96-mile (155-km) segment of the pipeline will restart. Crews will remain busy on site through the holidays and completion of the cleanup depends on weather and other factors, the Canadian company said in a statement.
“We are committed to restoring the affected areas to their original condition or better.”
BEEHIVE OF WORKERS
Keystone’s two previous spills happened in unincorporated areas in North Dakota and South Dakota. And while the city of Washington, Kansas, is small with just over 1,000 residents, it is surrounded by farms where wheat, corn, soybeans are planted and cattle are raised. The spill in Washington County affected land owned by several people.
The once-quiet valley is currently a construction site buzzing with some 400 contractors, staff from pipeline operator TC Energy, and federal, state and local officials. They are working into the night, leaving a glow from the high-intensity lamps seen from miles away.
Cranes, storage containers, construction equipment and vehicles stretch for more than a half mile from the site of the rupture. The valley has become almost a small town, with several Quonset-style huts erected for workers.
Aerial photos showed a large, blackened swath of land that almost looks like an airborne object is throwing a shadow over the land. Pannbacker said that pasture was used for cattle grazing and calving, but with calving season over, there were no livestock there at the time.
The oil-blackened grass on the land, which is owned by Pannbacker and his sisters as part of a family trust, is now completely gone. It was scraped away and is now confined to a giant mound of dirt that is noticeably darker at the bottom. But oil droplets on plants further up the hill were still visible.
WIDER GROUP AFFECTED
Living in rural Kansas, the Pannbackers are used to preparing for harsh weather, but not an oil spill. Residents have been largely unconcerned despite the accident, even as the area will resemble a work site for the near-future.
“How many people have experienced an oil spill? Who knows what it’s like?” said Chris Pannbacker. “It’s not like a tornado or a natural disaster.”
Kansas State Representative Lisa Moser in a Facebook post said there are 14 landowners who are being compensated for either the spill or the use of their property during cleanup.
TC said it is discussing compensation with landowners but would keep details private. The company said it has stayed in regular contact with landowners. Pannbacker said TC has not yet discussed compensation with them yet.
Pannbacker says he does not expect the grass on the pastureland to return for at least two or three years; there is a well site on the pasture used for the cattle that they will not be using either.
Reporting by Erwin Seba in Washington, Kan.; additional reporting by Rod Nickel; writing by David Gaffen
Editing by Marguerita Choy
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.