Climate Cast

Technology to draw existing carbon out of the atmosphere to combat climate change may seem far off, but a project that would capture a million tons of carbon a year is scheduled to open in Texas in 2022.

Carbon Engineering and Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, announced the project earlier this year.

Brian Crabtree, vice president of carbon management at the Great Plains Institute, an energy-focused nonprofit, said several models for reaching the United Nations climate goals rely on direct carbon capture, as well as carbon capture technology for power, steel and other industrial plants.

“To the extent that we want steel and cement in the modern world, we have to be capturing the CO2 from those processes,” Crabtree told MPR chief meteorologist and Climate Cast host Paul Huttner. “In steel production, over half of the emissions are a result of the chemistry of the steel production process. The same is true with manufacturing Portland cement.”

The United States moved to officially withdraw from the Paris Agreement this week. The 2015 United Nations agreement commits nearly 200 countries to reducing greenhouse gas emissions at a rate that will keep the global temperature from rising 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. For the U.S., that requires reducing emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

Many states, including Minnesota, pledged to continue the work when President Donald Trump signaled earlier in his presidency that he would pull the U.S. out of the agreement. But are their efforts enough to counter the president’s move?

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“What I think is more significant are this suite of actions that the administration has taken in the last two to three years,” said Julie Cerqueira, the executive director of the U.S. Climate Alliance. “The withdrawal from Paris is significant in that it is sending a signal internationally that the U.S. federal government doesn't believe climate change is a priority. But what we're looking at domestically is an unraveling of all of our major national climate policies.

“That, to me, is much scarier,” she said.

The U.S. Climate Alliance is a coalition of 25 governors who have committed their states to meeting their share of the U.S. greenhouse gas reduction target. Minnesota joined the alliance in 2017 under former Gov. Mark Dayton.

Related: MN conservatives praise Clean Power Plan rollback

Cerqueira said the Trump administration’s rollback of Obama-era clean power rules and of federal car emissions standards, as well as its attack on California’s own, stricter emissions standards, is limiting states’ abilities to make good on their climate promise.

“What we've seen when we look at the states that are part of our coalit...

A United Nations report released this summer warns the world must drastically change the way it produces food in order to meet emissions reduction goals. Some Minnesota farmers have already heeded that warning by adopting regenerative farming practices.

Mike Bredeson is an agroecologist with the Ecdysis Foundation. The agricultural research foundation is working with those farmers and large food companies to study and lift up regenerative techniques.

Bredeson told MPR chief meteorologist and Climate Cast host Paul Huttner the approach is more of a mindset than a prescriptive set of rules.

“When you think of terms such as organic farming, it’s easy to point to a designated list of characteristics [and] say, ‘This farm is certified organic and it meets these criteria,’” he said. “Regenerative farming, instead of a certain bar to be reached, they’re on this pathway of always improving the land that they’re managing. They know that if they’re using two pesticide applications right now, their goal is to reduce that to one application and eventually eliminate that application totally.”

The approach also includes planting cover crops, which take the place of commodity crops such as corn and soybeans during the off-season. Plants capture carbon when they photosynthesize, so cover crops put the land to work fighting climate change when it typically wouldn’t. They also help keep the soil intact, which also stores carbon.

Bredeson said regenerative agriculture pays off for both the environment and the farmer. Land farmed with regenerative practices does a better job of capturing rain water and holding on to nutrients, meaning less cost for the farmer.

“They’re not only producing as much or more, they’re seeing that by producing and using cover crops, they’re opening up more markets,” Bredeson said.

Climate change often impacts disenfranchised communities more directly, and that includes indigenous communities. But these communities can also teach us a lot about how to move forward.

That was the topic of a talk by Chiefs of Ontario Environmental Director Kathleen Padulo at the University of Minnesota this week. Padulo also stopped by the MPR News studios to talk with meteorologist and Climate Cast host Paul Huttner.

Climate change liability. It’s a term you’ll be hearing in the coming years, as damages attributed to climate change continue to grow. But how will lawyers and the courts assess liability in this new territory?

“In some ways, these are new lawsuits but they are sort of in a long line of other lawsuits that deal with these types of harm,” said Alexandra Klass, who teaches environmental and property law at the University of Minnesota Law School.

She said state and local jurisdictions who are suing fossil fuel companies for damages related to climate change — think hurricane and wildfire recovery, or updating storm water and transportation systems — are using the same sections of law Minnesota and Lake Elmo used in lawsuits against tobacco companies and 3M.

“Public nuisance is an old common law theory. It basically says that if someone has engaged in conduct that harms the public, it’s either a state or local government, for the most part, who then brings action on behalf of the public,” Klass said.

While the public has used an benefited from gas and oil, the lawsuits rest on the fact that fossil fuel companies knew the impacts their products would have on the climate and sought to hide it.

“[The defendants] will say that fossil fuels have been used by the public and by the same state and local governments to power the economy and drive our cars. They’ll also say they’re not responsible for damages,” Klass said. “They are also arguing that the way to deal with this is through legislation, not litigation, and that we should provide a carbon tax and sort of move forward.”

How these cases, particularly a Rhode Island case against Chevron, play out will help lay the groundwork for sorting out liability in the future, Klass said. But she expects most litigation will remain at the hand of governments.

“It’s very difficult for individuals to have the ability to bring lawsuits, whether it’s against the power companies or oil and gas companies, which I think it why state an...

Xcel Energy says it should have no problem reaching its goal to cut carbon by 80 percent by 2030. It’s that last 20 percent that will require some still-nascent technology, Xcel CEO Ben Fowke told MPR chief meteorologist Paul Huttner in this week’s Climate Cast.

“If we start to nurture these kinds of technology, I think they’ll be there when we need it by 2050,” he said.

One technology Fowke is keeping his eye on is modular nuclear reactors. He said they would bring the same carbon-free power existing nuclear power plants do, but without some of the problems.

“They’re smaller, so they’re not these massively big power plants that cost billions and billions of dollars,” Fowke said. “And the reason they’re called modular is because they’re developed in the factory and not designed on the fly, as the history of what our nuclear industry has been.

“So the promise is [they’ll be] much more predictable; they have passive safety systems, which means they automatically shut down without the need for cooling, in the event they need to be shut down; and they’re better at integrating renewable energy, so they move up and down with load better than the existing technology,” he said.

Fowke also said he’s excited about the potential of hydrogen power.

“I would have laughed 10 years ago if I thought we could move to a hydrogen economy,” he said.

Through a process called electrolysis, Fowke said, utilities can use renewable energy to extract hydrogen from water. That hydrogen is then able to be stored, which means developing batteries that can store renewable energy long term becomes less of an imperative.

Xcel’s plan has been celebrated, but also critiqued because it requires the utility to rely more heavily on legacy natural gas and nuclear power plants to offset the closure of Xcel’s coal plants. Much of the country’s natural gas now comes from fracking, which takes a heavy toll on the environment. Natural gas also emits methane, a more powerful greenhouse gas emission.

Fowk...

As part of our Climate Curious project, MPR News asked listeners what they want to know about climate change.

People wrote in with a wide breadth of questions, including what kind of trees to plant to fight climate change, how much the effects of a changing climate will cost and how to assess the accuracy of climate predictions.

MPR News Chief Meteorologist Paul Huttner sat down with a climate reporter — MPR’s own Elizabeth Dunbar — and a climate scientist — Kenny Blumenfeld, senior climatologist for the State Climatology Office at the Minnesota DNR — to answer some of the questions listeners submitted.

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Here’s a look at what they had to say.

How much will climate impacts and adapting to climate change cost? Who will pay these costs?— Kate Knuth, Hennepin County, Minn.

It’s not possible to calculate an exact dollar amount as we’re still figuring out the true impact of climate change on our lives. But there are a few main areas we can focus on.

One is public health, Dunbar said. Increased air pollution will have an especially large impact on people who have asthma or issues breathing.

Related Minnesota's generally clean air still contributes to thousands of deaths

Damage to and improving infrastructure will comes with a large cost, too, Blumenfeld said.

More rain means the need for more effective draining, roads damaged in extreme weather conditions require time, labor and equipment to fix and rising sea levels will create the need to move whole communities.

It’s important to keep in mind that much of our infrastructure was not built with climate change in mind, Huttner said.

How extensive is crop failure in Minnesota and the Midwest due to flooding and extra wet conditions? I have seen a lot of standing water in corn...

Welcome to Climate Curious, where we answer your most pressing questions about climate change, from the complicated to the too-afraid-to-ask. Got a question you’re dying to ask? Share it here. And while you’re there, vote for the other questions you think we should tackle next.

How is climate change affecting meteorologists’ ability to accurately predict the weather?

— Mary Dow-Bunnell, Cottage Grove, Minn.

For this question, Climate Cast helped us out.

“There is evidence that climate change is affecting jet-stream patterns,” said Climate Cast host and MPR’s chief meteorologist Paul Huttner. “Jennifer Francis at Rutgers University is one of the premier authors of a theory called arctic amplification, and here’s how it works: Basically the poles are warming more rapidly than the equator, and it’s that difference in temperature that drives jet streams. So, that makes a slower, more erratic jet stream — a loopier jet stream. It can mean slower, wetter storms and quicker, more intense droughts, and that can be more difficult for meteorologists to forecast.”

“It also produces changing precipitation patterns,” he said. “More water vapor in the atmosphere can mean heavier rain and snow events, so sometimes we have to goose our predictions and take that into account a little bit.”

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Huttner also said forecast models are still catching up with new atmospheric assumptions driven by climate change, which can make predicting the weather tricky.

To hear the full conversation, hit play on the audio player above. Submit your own climate change question and vote for the ones you’d like answered here.

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Thousands of Minnesota youth are expected to walk out of school today in an effort to hasten the seemingly glacial pace of climate policy. The first and last major climate bill to pass a house of Congress was the 2009 American Clean Energy and Security Act. It failed in the Senate despite support in the House and from major U.S. corporations.

“Much of what we’re seeing play out today, both in terms of discussions about domestic climate policy and what’s happening internationally, one can argue is the aftermath of that failed attempt,” said Kyle Meng, an assistant professor of environmental economics at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Meng and University of Chicago economist Ashwin Rode recently published a post-mortem on the bill in the journal Nature Climate Change. Meng said understanding what went wrong can help chart a path forward for climate policy today.

He said the 2009 bill, which would have created a market in which companies would have to pay to pollute, banked on building political support by using revenue from that market to help companies offset their new costs.

“That prevailing view turned out to be false,” Meng told Climate Cast host Paul Huttner. “I think the thinking today is, how do we use this revenue in a way that’s more broad based than what was considered 10 years ago?

“This government revenue can be used to help address some of the economic inequality issues of our time, and I think linking these two (issues) could potentially build greater political support for climate change policy,” he said.

Farmers’ Almanac is predicting a frigid winter, with minus 40-degree days in January. But the The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is putting out a neutral forecast, said meteorologist Peter Boulay with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources Climate Working Group.

“The Farmers’ Almanac has my mom and her friends just terrorized, just petrified with fear,” Boulay said. “It generally doesn’t look like it will be.”

But he said anything can happen, calling the atmosphere “fickle” and pointing to both a blob of warm water in the Pacific Ocean and a warmer-than-average autumn in Alaska that could send Minnesota’s winter either direction on the Winter Misery Index, now the Snow and Cold Index.

“We had a debate. Is it the winter misery index or the winter fun index? So we kind of compromised,” Boulay said.

One thing that is certain, he said, the winters are bringing more precipitation.