13 November 2015, DeSmog, Obama Administration Approves Pipeline Expansion Set to Feed First Ever Fracked Gas LNG Export Terminal. The Obama Administration has quietly approved expansion of a major pipeline carrying fracked gas destined for the global export market. The Gulf Trace pipeline, owned by The Williams Companies, is set to feed into Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass LNG export terminal in Louisiana. As first reported by Reuters, LNG tankers loaded with super-chilled liquefied natural gas obtained viahydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) will set sail for the first time from Sabine Pass in January 2016. In a statement, Williams said it had received approval for Gulf Trace from the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and had set a date of the first quarter of 2017 for the project to be in service. The statement said Gulf Trace was part of $5.1 billion worth of transmission projects targeting the eastern U.S. Gulf Trace will feed gas obtained from fracking in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale basin to Sabine Pass. Pipeline company giant Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) recently purchased Williams Companies for $32.6 billion. ETP — whose assets include both hotly-contested proposed Dakota Access LLC pipeline and the Trans-Pecos Pipeline — is run byCEO Kelcy Warren, who served as an advisory committee member and donor to former Republican Party presidential candidate Rick Perry. Perry sits on ETP‘s Board of Directors. Sabine Pass LNG Terminal owner Cheniere Energy, the first company in the fracking era to receive an export permit from the Obama Administration back in 2012, also has a politically connected Board of Directors. Among its members is Obama’s former climate czar, Heather Zichal. FERC has come under fire of late for rubber-stamping nearly every project proposal landing on its desk. Read more here
13 November 2015, Climate News Network, Global warming drains the water of life. Melting snowpack in Turkey’s Lesser Caucasus mountains. New research warns that rising temperatures are reducing the mountain snow on which billions of people in lowland areas depend for their water supply. Up to two billion people who depend on winter snow to deliver their summer water could see shortages by 2060 as upland and mountain snowpacks continue to dwindle. An estimated 300 million people could find, 45 years on, that they simply won’t have enough water for all their needs, according to new research. Climate change driven by rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide – in turn, fed by human combustion of fossil fuels – may already be affecting global precipitation. Researchers have consistently found that much of the world’s drylands will increase as global average temperatures rise. But warmer temperatures increasingly also mean the water that once fell as snow, to be preserved until the summer, now falls as winter rain, and runs off directly. The snow that does fall is settling at ever higher altitudes and melting ever earlier. Reliable flow This is bad news for agricultural communities that depend on a reliable flow of meltwater every summer. California is already in the grip of a sustained drought, made worse by lower falls of snow. Great tracts of Asia depend on summer meltwater from the Himalayan massif and the Tibetan plateau. Justin Mankin, an environmental scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in the US, and colleagues report in Environmental Research Letters journal that they studied 421 drainage basins across the northern hemisphere. Read More here