Climate Change, Pollution, Clean Energy, and the Environment

[andydp]

You can't make stuff like this up.  Karma is a real b**ch !!




Here's the background on this:

[LFC]

Interesting piece at TPM on how both Putin's instability and small island nations at high risk from climate change are helping to drive energy modernization forward.

The year 2022 was a tough one for the growing number of people living in food insecurity and energy poverty around the world, and the beginning of 2023 is looking bleak.

Russia’s war on Ukraine, one of the world’s largest grain and fertilizer feedstock suppliers, tightened global food and energy supplies, which in turn helped spur inflation.

Drought, exacerbated in some places by warring groups blocking food aid, pushed parts of the Horn of Africa toward famine. Extreme weather disasters have left trails of destruction with mounting costs on nearly every continent. More countries found themselves in debt distress.

But below the surface of almost weekly bad news, significant changes are underway that have the potential to create a more sustainable world — one in which humanity can tackle climate change, species extinction and food and energy insecurity.

I’ve been involved in international sustainable development for most of my career and now teach climate diplomacy. Here’s how two key systems that drive the world’s economy — energy and finance — are starting to shift toward sustainability and what to watch for in 2023.

[LFC]

I've only seen the Great Salt Lake from the air. Sounds like that I won't get around to getting there before it's gone.

The Great Salt Lake in Utah is facing “unprecedented danger,” experts say, as it has fallen to an alarmingly low level amid a climate change-fueled megadrought that’s tightening its grip in the West.

Less than two weeks away from Utah’s 2023 legislative session, nearly three dozen scientists and conservationists released a dire report that calls on the state’s lawmakers to take “emergency measures” to save the Great Salt Lake before drains to nil.

Without a “dramatic increase” in inflow by 2024, experts warn the lake is set to disappear in the next five years.

“Its disappearance could cause immense damage to Utah’s public health, environment, and economy,” the authors wrote in the report. “The choices we make over the next few months will affect our state and ecosystems throughout the West for decades to come.”

The Great Salt Lake, plagued by excessive water use and a worsening climate crisis, has dropped to record-low levels two years in a row. The lake is now 19 feet below its natural average level and has entered “uncharted territory” after losing 73% of its water and exposing 60% of its lakebed, the report notes.

“The lake’s ecosystem is not only on the edge of collapse. It is collapsing,” Benjamin Abbott, a professor of ecology at Brigham Young University and lead author of the report, told CNN. “It’s honestly jaw-dropping and totally disarming to see how much of the lake is gone. The lake is mostly lakebed right now.”

Despite the massive rain and snow events that are currently occurring in the West, I heard that it would take well over a decade of these kinds of events to bring the Western water levels back to where they had been historically.

[LFC]

The West may be getting its ass kicked because of record ocean temperatures.

California is in its third week of back-to-back-to-back extreme weather events. The Pacific coast has been drenched by consecutive atmospheric rivers spanning from the end of last year into the present, with precipitation totals 400%-600% above average in some regions. At least 17 people have died as a result of the storms, and nearly 100,000 people faced evacuation orders, as reported by The New York Times. Hundreds of thousands of people lost power, and tens of thousands in the state remain without electricity, according to PowerOutage.us.

A new scientific study could help explain why. 2022 was the hottest year ever recorded for Earth’s oceans, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. All that heat has major implications for global climate, extreme weather, and marine health.

As ocean temperatures reach new heights, storms have more energy and moisture to fuel them. “I think we are seeing some of the repercussions of that in the storms that are hitting California,” said Kevin Trenberth, a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and one of the new study’s authors, in an article from the Washington Post. “The heavy rainfalls are a direct consequence of this [ocean heat] anomaly,” he added.

And it’s not just California. Intense rainfall, hurricanes, and flooding hit lots of regions around the world this past year. Climate change, and the specific consequences of increasing ocean heat, is likely a contributing factor in nearly all of those instances.

Extreme weather linked to climate change cost the U.S. at least $165 billion in 2022, according to NOAA data released on Monday. All told, the past year’s cumulative climate disasters made it the third most expensive since NOAA began keeping tabs, surpassed only by 2017 and 2005.

[LFC]

A bit of then and now. First the then.

ExxonMobil knew even more about how damaging climate change is than we thought, a study out this week shows.

In 2015, journalists obtained a trove of internal documents related to ExxonMobil’s work on climate change and published a series of investigations into how the company’s external PR didn’t match its internal research. “Exxon Knew,” which refers to the idea that Exxon knew about climate change and its dangers while continuing to mislead the public and perpetuating climate denial, has become a catchphrase of the climate movement. Much of the subsequent reporting and research into the uncovered Exxon documents has focused on how Exxon funded and encouraged climate denial while sitting on concrete knowledge of how its product causes climate change.

But Exxon wasn’t just listening to external scientists—the company had its own scientists working on creating models and projections. And until this week, no one had actually taken the models out for a test drive to see how they performed. As a paper published Thursday in the journal Science shows, it turns out they performed scarily well.

“We knew Exxon knew, but this is like Exxon knew 2.0,” said Geoffrey Supran, the study’s lead author and an associate professor at the University of Miami. “It produces an airtight and statistically rigorous insight into what [Exxon] knew in a way that is academically intriguing but also practically useful.”

And now the now. Lying liars and the lies they make for money. Some things never change.

The climate deniers are at it again.

In late December, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, released what it’s calling a “Climate Fact Check” report. The report, which was covered breathlessly by Fox News, purports to expose claims made by “climate alarmists and their media allies” in 2022 that “clashed with reality and science.” (Spoiler alert: all the “claims” covered are, in fact, in line with the scientific consensus. Go figure.)

CEI has a long history of perpetuating climate denial—its Director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy, Myron Ebell, is one of the most high-profile deniers in the U.S.—and this report is no exception. The report contains a lot of tried-and-true climate denier tactics to try to discredit coverage of climate-related disasters in 2022 from outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the BBC. Many of the rhetorical techniques are such old hat that there are entire academic papers and books written them. I won’t break down every false claim, scientific misdirect, and pointless non-sequitur in the report, but here are a few highlights:

If there's a hell I hope these f***ers burn in it for all the death, destruction, and misery they're enabling with their lies.

[goldenvalley]

Jan 12, 2023 21:10:17 GMT LFC said:

The West may be getting its ass kicked because of record ocean temperatures.

California is in its third week of back-to-back-to-back extreme weather events. The Pacific coast has been drenched by consecutive atmospheric rivers spanning from the end of last year into the present, with precipitation totals 400%-600% above average in some regions. At least 17 people have died as a result of the storms, and nearly 100,000 people faced evacuation orders, as reported by The New York Times. Hundreds of thousands of people lost power, and tens of thousands in the state remain without electricity, according to PowerOutage.us.

A new scientific study could help explain why. 2022 was the hottest year ever recorded for Earth’s oceans, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. All that heat has major implications for global climate, extreme weather, and marine health.

As ocean temperatures reach new heights, storms have more energy and moisture to fuel them. “I think we are seeing some of the repercussions of that in the storms that are hitting California,” said Kevin Trenberth, a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and one of the new study’s authors, in an article from the Washington Post. “The heavy rainfalls are a direct consequence of this [ocean heat] anomaly,” he added.

And it’s not just California. Intense rainfall, hurricanes, and flooding hit lots of regions around the world this past year. Climate change, and the specific consequences of increasing ocean heat, is likely a contributing factor in nearly all of those instances.

Extreme weather linked to climate change cost the U.S. at least $165 billion in 2022, according to NOAA data released on Monday. All told, the past year’s cumulative climate disasters made it the third most expensive since NOAA began keeping tabs, surpassed only by 2017 and 2005.

Yeah that's been the talk in CA.  We've had numerous atmospheric rivers before but rarely so close together.  Last big stuff like this in Sacramento was in 1997.

[LFC]

Jan 12, 2023 23:18:53 GMT goldenvalley said:

Yeah that's been the talk in CA.  We've had numerous atmospheric rivers before but rarely so close together.  Last big stuff like this in Sacramento was in 1997.

I saw a national forecast that said they believe the cycle will break but not until Jan 20.

[goldenvalley]

Jan 12, 2023 23:21:18 GMT LFC said:

Jan 12, 2023 23:18:53 GMT goldenvalley said:

Yeah that's been the talk in CA.  We've had numerous atmospheric rivers before but rarely so close together.  Last big stuff like this in Sacramento was in 1997.

I saw a national forecast that said they believe the cycle will break but not until Jan 20.

Yeah followed by a dry spell. Considering that it rarely rains after April (rarely in April) we can't have too long a spell.  Reservoirs across the state are at 82% of what is normal (an average) for this time of year.  But normal has always included rain and snow in Feb, March, and sometimes April.  They can't afford to be full this early because later rains can create overflowing and floods on their own.  Need room for future rain.

Last year we had above average rain and snow in December and then nothing until about April.  A freak set of storms then came thru in October which was great because nasty fires start in October and November.

[goldenvalley]

Here's a quick look at CA before the rain restarted on Friday night.

From Sacramento's standpoint the rain amount isn't too bad. I've seen worse in the 30+ years I've been here.  The wind though is a whole 'nother issue.

[goldenvalley]

At the risk of boring you with California woes and stats here are some astounding ones.

9: Number of atmospheric river storms to hit California in the past three weeks.

20: Number of confirmed fatalities, as of Monday, from California storms since Christmas.
12: Number of confirmed fatalities in California wildfires in 2021 and 2022.

41: Number of California’s 58 counties under federal emergency declaration.
3: Number under major disaster declaration (Santa Cruz, Merced, Sacramento).

24.5 trillion: Estimated gallons of water that fell on California from Dec. 26 to Jan. 11.
16: Number of times that amount of water could fill California’s largest reservoir, Shasta Lake.

17: Inches of rain measured in downtown San Francisco since Dec. 26.
3: Historical average in inches of rain that falls in downtown San Francisco over same time.

3: Number of times San Lorenzo River [Santa Cruz County] hit major flood stage since Dec. 27, prompting evacuations and flooding neighborhoods.

40: Size of hole, in feet, torn in the historic Capitola Wharf [Santa Cruz County] during the storms.

62: Miles of Highway 1 in Big Sur that remained closed Tuesday due to landslides.

1.19 million: Gallons of water flowing every second through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta on Friday.
54,712: Gallons flowing every second through the Delta on Dec. 1.

27: Feet of snow that has fallen at the UC snow lab at Donner Summit since Nov. 1.
12: Feet of snow that fell on average from 1991-2020 at the lab over the same time.

247: Percent of historic average for statewide Sierra Nevada snowpack, on Monday.
106: Percent of historic average for statewide Sierra Nevada snowpack on Dec. 1.


500+: Number of landslides statewide caused by storms, since New Year’s Eve, according to the California Geological Survey.

34 million: Number of Californians — 90% of state population — under flood watch Monday Jan. 9.

And yes there is still severe drought in a large part of California

46: Percent on Thursday of California in “severe drought,” according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
85: Percent on Dec. 1 of California in “severe drought.”

This is on the south edge of the Central Coast.

[LFC]

Meanwhile, back in Wyoming where the sky is big and the brains are small, a group of state senators want to ban EV sales to prop up their gas and oil industry. Global warming? It's a hoax.

A group of GOP Wyoming state lawmakers want to end electric vehicle sales there by 2035, saying the move will help safeguard the oil and gas industries.

The measure, introduced to the state legislature on Friday, was sponsored by six state legislators, who said in it that electric vehicles will hinder Wyoming’s ability to trade with other states. The bill states that citizens and industries would be encouraged not to purchase electric vehicles before the ban goes into effect.

“The proliferation of electric vehicles at the expense of gas-powered vehicles will have deleterious impacts on Wyoming’s communities and will be detrimental to Wyoming’s economy and the ability for the country to efficiently engage in commerce,” the bill reads.

I saw a comment that the state senator behind this didn't really mean it, and yet he and others went through the process of creating and submitting an actual bill. Huh.

And as a side note, remember that Republicans were against "picking winners and losers" ... until they weren't.

[goldenvalley]

Shifting from farming to solar farming in the Imperial Valley of California.  Interesting reactions from farmers.

Clean energy advocates see Imperial as an ideal place for solar farms and battery projects that can help solve the American West’s energy and water crises. The land is flat; the sunlight, abundant. The Colorado River desperately needs relief. And Imperial is one of California’s poorest counties, its agriculture-heavy economy practically crying out for diversification and higher-paying jobs.

But resistance to change runs deep, particularly among the few hundred families who own all the farmland.

Agriculture is the only way of life many of them have known, and they’re raring to defend it. Their ancestors settled here a century ago, staking an early claim to the Colorado and carving canals to carry its riches through the desert. Again and again, they’ve faced pressure to sell water to coastal cities. They’re ready to pounce on anything that smells like a water grab.

And to some of them, solar power smells like a water grab.

[goldenvalley]

Jan 17, 2023 14:55:59 GMT LFC said:

Meanwhile, back in Wyoming where the sky is big and the brains are small, a group of state senators want to ban EV sales to prop up their gas and oil industry. Global warming? It's a hoax.

A group of GOP Wyoming state lawmakers want to end electric vehicle sales there by 2035, saying the move will help safeguard the oil and gas industries.

The measure, introduced to the state legislature on Friday, was sponsored by six state legislators, who said in it that electric vehicles will hinder Wyoming’s ability to trade with other states. The bill states that citizens and industries would be encouraged not to purchase electric vehicles before the ban goes into effect.

“The proliferation of electric vehicles at the expense of gas-powered vehicles will have deleterious impacts on Wyoming’s communities and will be detrimental to Wyoming’s economy and the ability for the country to efficiently engage in commerce,” the bill reads.

I saw a comment that the state senator behind this didn't really mean it, and yet he and others went through the process of creating and submitting an actual bill. Huh.

And as a side note, remember that Republicans were against "picking winners and losers" ... until they weren't.

That's an owning the libs move.  CA has moved to ban the sale of new gas powered vehicles as of 2035, so there!  The auto industry won't care what WY does...its share of the market is so tiny compared to that of CA.

[LFC]

Jan 17, 2023 20:07:24 GMT goldenvalley said:

That's an owning the libs move.  CA has moved to ban the sale of new gas powered vehicles as of 2035, so there!  The auto industry won't care what WY does...its share of the market is so tiny compared to that of CA.

As I commented elsewhere, WY said they were going to send this to CA. I suspect CA's response will be...

[LFC]

Big Oil sees the writing on the wall concerning gasoline so they're turning to a different way to destroy the planet for profit. The cons of oil production just keep stacking up and will continue to do so until we reach some other critical mass.

Pennsylvania’s fracking boom more than a decade ago initially attracted Shell to the area. The state sits atop the Marcellus and Utica Shale gas reserves. 

Shell officials and some in Pennsylvania’s government are optimistic that the plant in Beaver County could be the first of many, ushering a wave of petrochemical facilities to the region. The company’s leadership has described dreams of opening other polyethylene plants that would use the gas reserves to feed a booming Appalachian plastics manufacturing industry.  

The prospect represents something of a lifeline for the industry. Major oil companies like Shell and ExxonMobile are rapidly increasing their plastics output to make up for the anticipated shrinking demand for the companies’ fossil fuel products as nations lean on renewables and electrify their economies. Plastics are projected to be a key source of income for Big Oil over the coming decades — and these companies are using these projections to justify building new plants to crank out more. 

“What’s happening in the power plant sector? We’re slowly shifting to cleaner renewables, so less demand for fossil fuel for electricity,” said Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator under the Obama Administration and the founder of the group Beyond Plastics, a project based at Bennington College in Vermont. “What’s happening in transportation? People are buying electric cars, big truck fleets are electrifying, less demand for fossil fuels for transportation.”

While Pennsylvania hopes to be the titan of plastic, United Nations members agreed in March to create the world’s first international plastics treaty by 2024 to curb plastic production. By 2030, plastic will emit more greenhouse gases than coal-fired power plants, according to a 2021 study by Beyond Plastics.

[LFC]

Some California homeowners impacted by this latest round of wild weather will be in for a rude awakening.

alifornia has nearly seen the last of the relentless sequence of storms that inundated the state since late December, leading to tens of thousands of evacuations, at least 20 deaths, and an estimated $1 billion in damages.

From failed levees in the Central Valley counties of Merced and Sacramento to overflowing rivers along the coast, the rains touched almost every part of the state, with many areas receiving four to six times above average precipitation for the past several weeks. Mudslides closed major roads, thousands of homes were flooded, and trees knocked out power lines, with over 13,000 electric customers yet to regain service as of Tuesday afternoon.

Meteorologists expect that by Thursday, the last storm, this time a weaker one, will have cleared from the northern and central parts of California. But in the coming weeks, as flood waters recede and the rains’ full impact comes into view, many residents may find themselves facing a second crisis: A widespread lack of flood insurance that will leave thousands of homeowners grappling with the cost of repairing and rebuilding homes.

“California is a place where the preoccupation about water is about scarcity, not abundance,” said Rebecca Elliott, a professor at the London School of Economics who wrote a book about flood insurance in the United States. “Many, many thousands of Californians will assume that they have flood coverage and find out that they don’t.”

Standard homeowners insurance does not include flood coverage, even though, according to a recent survey, 47 percent of Americans assume that it does. Just 1.33 percent of California households have standalone policies through the National Flood Insurance Program, a federal-run system that makes up 95 percent of flood coverage in the United States. The share of private flood policies in California is even smaller. Yet as of earlier this month, 90 percent of the state’s population was under flood watch.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, requires homeowners with federally-underwritten mortgages to buy flood insurance if they are in what it designates as “special flood hazard areas.” That’s essentially the 100-year flood plain, or places that have a 1 percent annual chance of flooding. But the maps FEMA uses to delineate these areas are wildly out of date. First Street Foundation, a nonprofit that models flood risk, found there are 5.9 million property owners nationwide who face substantial flood risk outside FEMA’s official hazard areas.

“I show them the topography maps,” said Nick Ramirez, an insurance agent based in Los Angeles, of his clients who aren’t required by law to purchase flood insurance. “I say, ‘Do you want to protect yourself?’ Some say yes, and some just roll the dice.”

[LFC]

More propaganda from the fossil fuel industry.

If you’re watching HGTV or Netflix, there’s a chance that you might run into a show hosted by an influencer who shills for the natural gas industry. An industry group is using federally sanctioned funds that are supposed to go to consumer education to pay for influencers and celebrities to promote natural gas and smear home electrification, the New York Times reported last week.

Documents obtained by the New York Times and the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group, show that the Propane Education and Research Council (PERC) is paying for influencers, including HGTV star Matt Blashaw and Netflix science communicator ​​Emily Calandrelli, to spread their pro-natural gas, anti-electrification messaging.

“PERC is running the largest national anti-electrification campaign I’ve encountered anywhere in the United States,” Charlie Spatz, a researcher at the Energy and Policy Institute, told the Times. “Propane customers, whether they’re buying fuel for their home heating or for their grill, they’re unwittingly funding PERC’s anti-climate agenda.”’

PERC occupies a strange niche in the oil and gas industry. Since it’s a trade association that’s federally recognized—Congress passed a law in 1996 that authorized the group—it’s allowed to levy fees on the sales of propane; some $40 million of the nonprofit’s revenue comes from those sales each year. The money is supposed to be used, per the law, to “inform and educate the public about safety and other issues associated with the use of propane.”

But in recent years, the group has joined in with much of the rest of the natural gas industry on aggressive pro-fossil fuel, anti-electrification pushes. According to the Times, PERC documents detailing the organization’s budget show marketing and communications as its largest spending category. And they’ve been spending some of that money on recruiting people like Blashaw and Calandrelli to be messengers for their pro-fossil fuel agenda.

[LFC]

If we clean up the atmosphere of the excess dust we've kicked up we might find that the planet starts warming more quickly. That's just ... awesome.

It’s no secret that humans have made big changes to Earth and its atmosphere. But as greenhouse gases have built up in the air and our planet’s average surface temperature has risen, a lesser-known phenomenon has been happening.

Earth’s atmosphere has gotten dustier since the pre-industrial age. And all those additional particles have likely been subtly counteracting some of the effects of climate change—cooling the planet a little bit, according to a review study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.

The effects of atmospheric dust are absent from nearly all climate studies and projections, according to the new analysis. Meaning that these models could be underestimating the warming associated with human-caused climate change. And, if the atmosphere becomes less dusty, we could be in for even more rapid temperature spikes.

“We want climate projections to be as accurate as possible, and this dust increase could have masked up to 8% of the greenhouse warming,” Jasper Kok, lead study researcher and an atmospheric physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a press statement. By adding the impacts of dust into future climate models, scientists could improve them, he continued. “This is of tremendous importance because better predictions can inform better decisions of how to mitigate or adapt to climate change.”

Kok and his co-researchers reached that 8% number via a complex combination of models, based on a wealth of previously published studies.

[LFC]

Who the HELL are these f***ing f***-faced f***wits? The hubris is stunning, as would be the denial of responsibility if they caused any damage with this stunt.

Mexico is cracking down on experiments in solar geoengineering. The controversial proposed climate solution, in which aerosol particles are released into the upper atmosphere to reflect the Sun’s heat, will no longer be allowed to take place in the country, the Mexican Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat) announced last week.

Both large-scale and in-development projects involving solar engineering are to be halted, via coordination between the Mexican environment ministry and the country’s National Council of Science and Technology, the news statement noted. The goal of the new policy is to “protect communities and environments.”

The nationwide ban comes on the heels of climate tech startup Make Sunsets’ claims that it released weather balloons filled with sulfur dioxide particles from an unspecified location in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur—without any sort of permission, dialogue, or approval from any Mexican regulatory agency or authority. The startup’s co-founder, Luke Iseman (formerly of Y Combinator and numerous other startups that seem to have floundered or been abandoned), said in a December interview with MIT Technology Review that he’d conducted two test balloon launches there in April 2022.

But Iseman has contradicted his own claims since then. In a follow-up report from The Wall Street Journal, published Thursday, Iseman changed his story to “a single weather balloon.” And in a Wednesday blogpost from Make Sunsets, the company floated the possibility that it never actually released any sulfur balloons at all. “Make Sunsets will share all information about its activities in Mexico to date (if any) with... responsible agencies,” the startup wrote. “Make sunsets will cease its operations in Mexico (if there were any),” the post continues.

Gizmodo reached out to Make Sunsets for more information but did not receive a response.

Regardless of whether or not Iseman and Make Sunsets actually did what they claimed, the alleged stunt drew widespread criticism and concern from scientists and policy experts alike. Though solar geoengineering is a simple enough concept, safe implementation of the theoretical climate change remedy is a complex issue.

Blocking out sunlight via sulfur particles could trigger rapid and significant global shifts in precipitation that could leave some parts of the planet flooded and others arid, according to past research. If not managed properly, solar geoengineering could lead to even more erratic and rapid changes in temperature than we’re currently experiencing under climate change. And the use of sulfur, specifically, would likely damage Earth’s crucial ozone layer.

Then, there’s the geopolitical implications of a country or rogue actor deciding to go ahead and change the stratosphere’s composition without international buy-in.

For all of these reasons and more, it’s probably not in Mexico’s favor to allow this sort of unregulated geoengineering experimentation on its soil. The ministry’s press statement cites a United Nations moratorium on geoengineering that Mexico and nearly 200 other countries (though not the U.S.) agreed to in 2010—as well as the risk of dangerous climactic consequences. “There are enough studies that show that there would be negative and unequal impacts associated with the release of these aerosols,” wrote the environment ministry.

It wasn't big enough to really change even local weather but if the sulfur-dioxide particles they released came down too quickly and combined with water then you get sulfuric acid. If a balloon came down too quickly it could poison a water supply. Gawd, I hate stupid people who just charge ahead without any thought to the risks unknowingly being assumed by others.

[LFC]

Here's the latest set of groups attacking climate change reality except they're doing it from the investment end of things. They are more than happen to destroy the futures of billions of people to keep their profits up today.

Bankrolled by mysterious donors, a little-known group named Consumers’ Research has emerged as a key player in the conservative crusade to prevent Wall Street from factoring climate change into its investment decisions.

On Dec. 1, the group joined 13 state attorneys general in calling for a federal regulatory agency to investigate Vanguard, one of the world’s three biggest financial asset managers. Consumers’ Research accused Vanguard of “meddling with [the] energy industry to achieve progressive political goals at the expense of market efficiency.”

Within days, Vanguard announced it was quitting a coalition called the Net Zero Asset Managers Alliance and shelved its own modest pledges to cut the amount of greenhouse gas emissions linked to companies in which it invests. Leaders of Consumers’ Research were surprised — and elated.

“I knew we had found something important,” said Will Hild, who became executive director of the organization in March 2020, just as the pandemic hit. “But I didn’t know Vanguard would just capitulate.”

Vanguard didn’t put it that way. In a statement, it affirmed its commitment to “helping our investors navigate the risks that climate change can pose to their long-term returns,” despite leaving the business coalition.

Even so, Hild’s group and other opponents of “woke capitalism” are feeling emboldened now that Republicans control the House of Representatives. They see themselves as part of a political alliance that can scrutinize and possibly derail the environmental, social and governance — or ESG — goals of corporations and the Biden administration.

Some big Wall Street firms — most notably BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard and Fidelity Investments — have publicly embraced sustainable investing, partly because of investor demands and pressure on businesses to speed up climate measures.

But Republicans have promised to reverse what Rep. Garland “Andy” Barr (R) called a “cancer on our capital markets.” In mid-December, Barr and Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) introduced legislation to nullify a Labor Department regulation that allows ESG strategies to be used in retirement plans. In addition, Barr and Rep. Bill Huizenga, (R-Mich.) hope to revive legislation they introduced in December that would block the Securities and Exchange Commission from requiring publicly traded companies to disclose their climate risk.

Consumers’ Research is one of several dark-money groups — nonprofits that seek to influence policy without disclosing their donors — that hope to derail the sustainable investments push. They often work in tandem with various GOP-led organizations, including the State Financial Officers Foundation, whose top donor is Consumers’ Research, according to Hild.

These activists hope that House leaders will haul corporate executives before Congress to defend their ESG practices. The hearings will examine how many financial asset managers have used their large shareholdings to pressure other companies to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, improve sustainability or bolster corporate governance.

The Center for Political Accountability’s president, Bruce Freed, whose nonprofit advocates for corporate transparency, said the goal of such groups is obvious — to pressure CEOs into submission. “There’s a climate of intimidation that companies are facing today,” he said.

[goldenvalley]

Jan 30, 2023 17:16:53 GMT LFC said:

Here's the latest set of groups attacking climate change reality except they're doing it from the investment end of things. They are more than happen to destroy the futures of billions of people to keep their profits up today.

Bankrolled by mysterious donors, a little-known group named Consumers’ Research has emerged as a key player in the conservative crusade to prevent Wall Street from factoring climate change into its investment decisions.

On Dec. 1, the group joined 13 state attorneys general in calling for a federal regulatory agency to investigate Vanguard, one of the world’s three biggest financial asset managers. Consumers’ Research accused Vanguard of “meddling with [the] energy industry to achieve progressive political goals at the expense of market efficiency.”

Within days, Vanguard announced it was quitting a coalition called the Net Zero Asset Managers Alliance and shelved its own modest pledges to cut the amount of greenhouse gas emissions linked to companies in which it invests. Leaders of Consumers’ Research were surprised — and elated.

“I knew we had found something important,” said Will Hild, who became executive director of the organization in March 2020, just as the pandemic hit. “But I didn’t know Vanguard would just capitulate.”

Vanguard didn’t put it that way. In a statement, it affirmed its commitment to “helping our investors navigate the risks that climate change can pose to their long-term returns,” despite leaving the business coalition.

Even so, Hild’s group and other opponents of “woke capitalism” are feeling emboldened now that Republicans control the House of Representatives. They see themselves as part of a political alliance that can scrutinize and possibly derail the environmental, social and governance — or ESG — goals of corporations and the Biden administration.

Some big Wall Street firms — most notably BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard and Fidelity Investments — have publicly embraced sustainable investing, partly because of investor demands and pressure on businesses to speed up climate measures.

But Republicans have promised to reverse what Rep. Garland “Andy” Barr (R) called a “cancer on our capital markets.” In mid-December, Barr and Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) introduced legislation to nullify a Labor Department regulation that allows ESG strategies to be used in retirement plans. In addition, Barr and Rep. Bill Huizenga, (R-Mich.) hope to revive legislation they introduced in December that would block the Securities and Exchange Commission from requiring publicly traded companies to disclose their climate risk.

Consumers’ Research is one of several dark-money groups — nonprofits that seek to influence policy without disclosing their donors — that hope to derail the sustainable investments push. They often work in tandem with various GOP-led organizations, including the State Financial Officers Foundation, whose top donor is Consumers’ Research, according to Hild.

These activists hope that House leaders will haul corporate executives before Congress to defend their ESG practices. The hearings will examine how many financial asset managers have used their large shareholdings to pressure other companies to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, improve sustainability or bolster corporate governance.

The Center for Political Accountability’s president, Bruce Freed, whose nonprofit advocates for corporate transparency, said the goal of such groups is obvious — to pressure CEOs into submission. “There’s a climate of intimidation that companies are facing today,” he said.

If we had a functional Congress and state legislatures plus a judiciary that is willing to see when the 1st Amendment is being abused we might have a chance at regulating these dark money groups to make them reveal who they really are.  Not to stop the money being spent, just to know who is spending it.  We'd only have to revise the entire corporations code in the US and the various states because the dark money hides in the complicated corporate structures.  I can dream, can't I?

[LFC]

The cost of existing coal power has crossed over the threshold where it is now more expensive to run than the cost of replacing it with new solar or wind. And I seriously doubt those costs include the costs they create but, through political protection, have managed to keep externalized.

Nearly all of the coal plants operating in the U.S. are now more expensive to keep online than it would be to build entirely new renewable energy facilities in their stead, according to a new analysis by Energy Innovation, an energy and policy firm. The analysis found that 99% of U.S. coal plants supply energy that would be cheaper if those plants were shut down and replaced with wind farms or solar fields.

“Coal is unequivocally more expensive than wind and solar resources, it’s just no longer cost competitive with renewables,” Michelle Solomon, a policy analyst at Energy Innovation, told the Guardian. “This report certainly challenges the narrative that coal is here to stay.”

In 2020, the country reached a point that the report refers to as the “cost crossover,” when renewables overtook coal on the U.S. grid. Energy Innovation has been running analyses since that year, looking at the cost of these coal plants compared to new renewable energy. The 2020 analysis found that 62% of the coal fleet was pricier to run than it would be to replace it with renewables; in 2021, that number had risen to 71%.

There’s a big new factor at play in this year’s analysis: the Inflation Reduction Act, which both provides significant tax credits for building new renewables as well as loan guarantees to replace fossil fuel infrastructure. Thanks in part to these incentives, the Energy Innovation analysis found that, out of the 210 coal plants still operating in the country, only one—a plant in Wyoming—produces energy at a cost that is competitive compared to the price of either local wind, solar, or both. And a lot of these potential renewable plants would be a lot cheaper; new wind or solar facilities would be around 30% cheaper than some three-quarters of the existing coal plants.

[LFC]

Wait, I thought global warming was supposed to be good for plants. [/snark]

Extreme drought and hot weather killed millions of trees in California’s forests last year, according to a new report from the U.S. Forest Service.

Aerial surveys conducted from July 2022 to October 2022 surveyed 39.6 million acres (over 61,000 square miles) of tree canopy across California. The Forest Service found about 2.6 million acres (over 3,100 square miles) of dead trees, or the equivalent of about 36.3 million dead trees.

The tens of millions of dead trees tell a story of how bad the dry and hot conditions were across the American West throughout much of 2022. The average mortality was a lot higher last year than in 2021, the report explained. The survey looked at a large variety of trees to assess which were the most affected. Douglas fir mortality especially increased in 2022 from 2021. In 2021, an estimated 170,000 Douglas firs died—that number jumped to around 3 million. This represents a 1,650% increase in mortality from one year to the next.

[LFC]

Remember when the climate denial community said that the Antarctic situation was proof that global warming was a hoax? Of course they lied but this makes it clear that yet another one of their arguments needs to be added to the massive trash heap of other failed arguments and predictions. Not that the denial community cares that they've literally never been right about anything.

Research scientists on ships along Antarctica’s west coast said their recent voyages have been marked by an eerily warm ocean and record-low sea ice coverage—extreme climate conditions, even compared to the big changes of recent decades, when the region warmed much faster than the global average.

Despite “that extraordinary change, what we’ve seen this year is dramatic,” said University of Delaware oceanographer Carlos Moffat last week from Punta Arenas, Chile, after completing a research cruise aboard the RV Laurence M. Gould to collect data on penguin feeding, as well as on ice and oceans as chief scientist for the Palmer Long Term Ecological Research program.

“Even as somebody who’s been looking at these changing systems for a few decades, I was taken aback by what I saw, by the degree of warming that I saw,” he said. “We don’t know how long this is going to last. We don’t fully understand the consequences of this kind of event, but this looks like an extraordinary marine heatwave.”

If such conditions recur in the coming years, it could start a rapid destabilization of Antarctica’s critical underpinnings of the global climate system, including ice shelves, glaciers, coastal ecosystems, and even ocean currents. Such radical changes have already been sweeping the Arctic, starting in the 1980s and accelerating in the 2000s.

Data collected during Moffat’s most recent research voyage includes the first readings from temperature and salinity sensors that were deployed a few years ago, which will give the scientists a starting point for comparisons. Moffat said it’s “too early, and difficult” to attribute this year’s conditions to long-term climate change until some peer-reviewed results are published.

“But it seems to me that this might be a really unprecedented event,” he said. “These episodes of relatively rapid ocean warming that can persist for months have been occurring all over the place. They haven’t been common in this region.”

He said ocean temperature readings going back to April 2022 speak to the persistence of the warm conditions off the Antarctic Peninsula. The cruise covered an area more than 600 miles long and crisscrossed waters above the 125-mile wide continental shelf, documenting widespread ocean heating.

“That’s a very significant region,” he said. “We don’t have data going back 30 years for the entire region. But for the parts of the shelf for which we do have that data, it really seems extraordinary. It’s very difficult to warm the ocean, and so when we see these conditions, that really speaks to a very intense forcing.”

[LFC]

Texass learned about the dangers of depending on privately owned fossil fuel and electrical generation the hard way. At least they've learned.

A new study from Climate Central shows that the U.S. saw impressive overall growth in wind and solar energy capacity in 2022. Red states, but especially Texas, led the country in clean energy production last year.

The researchers analyzed data from WeatherPower, the organization’s solar and wind forecasting tool, and data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration to learn about clean energy generation in 2022 for the 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia.

Red states dominated the list of top solar energy producers in 2022:

• California generated 58,664,084 megawatt-hours from solar energy last year.
• Texas came in second, generating 22,863,146 MWh.
• Florida generated 13,595,456 MWh.
• North Carolina generated 11,532,539 MWh.
• Arizona generated 10,408,801 MWh.

Red states also led in wind energy production in 2022:

• Texas came in first, creating 129,578,478 MWh from wind in 2022.
• Iowa came in second, generating 48,442,412 MWh from wind energy.
• Oklahoma generated 45,757,509 MWh.
• Kansas produced 34,239,591 MWh.
• Illinois generated 23,819,521 MWh.

The nationwide expansion is not very surprising—the Biden administration has made billions of dollars available to invest in renewable energy through last year’s major climate bill. The U.S. aims to reach net zero emissions by 2050, and the recent efforts to expand fossil fuel-free energy are a major step in that direction. “We are moving closer to the goals we need to reach in order to hit net zero,” Jennifer Brady, a senior data analyst at Climate Central, told the Guardian. “We have a free natural resource in the form of weather that can be captured to generate power.”

The country generated 238 gigawatts of solar and wind energy in 2022—a huge jump from 2021, when it only produced 13 GW. “The electricity generated from solar and wind in 2022 is enough to power the equivalent of 64 million average American households,” according to the report.