Climate Change, Pollution, Clean Energy, and the Environment

[AnBr]

Let's make them all fear law suits for falsehoods again. www.newsandguts.com/giuliani-oan-sued-by-georgia-election-workers-who-faced-extreme-harassment/

[andydp]

Dec 24, 2021 22:46:47 GMT AnBr said:

Let's make them all fear law suits for falsehoods again. www.newsandguts.com/giuliani-oan-sued-by-georgia-election-workers-who-faced-extreme-harassment/

These bozos only understand what will affect their bottom line. Sue them. Even if you don’t win it will cost money

[AnBr]

Dec 25, 2021 1:03:57 GMT andydp said:

Dec 24, 2021 22:46:47 GMT AnBr said:

Let's make them all fear law suits for falsehoods again. www.newsandguts.com/giuliani-oan-sued-by-georgia-election-workers-who-faced-extreme-harassment/

These bozos only understand what will affect their bottom line. Sue them. Even if you don’t win it will cost money

A good project for the Lincoln Project.

[goldenvalley]

High temp in Kodiak Alaska was 65 on Dec. 26.  

Nearby, Kodiak airport recorded 65 degrees and beat its previous daily record by 20 degrees, surpassing the 45-degree record reading last set on Dec. 26, 1984, by leaps and bounds.

Even more remarkable is that the same 65-degree reading would have set a record for November, January, February and March, too; those months haven’t seen readings above 59, 54, 56 and 57 degrees, respectively. The previous December record was 56 degrees, set on Dec. 22, 1984.

It's just extreme weather, right?

[LFC]

Dec 28, 2021 18:32:14 GMT goldenvalley said:

It's just extreme weather, right?

I believe the accepted denialist term is "natural fluctuations."

[LFC]

I suspect Russia playing games with energy supplies will accelerate European nations' desire for more renewables.

Electricity has started flowing from the Hornsea 2 wind farm, which will become the world's largest offshore wind farm when it is complete. Located off the UK's east coast, it's unlikely to hold the title long, however. The expansion of onshore wind has flattened out, but offshore is very much in the exponential growth phase, and some immense projects are under development and consideration. China's largest offshore wind farm reached full operation a day later.

When complete, Hornsea 2 will consist of 165 Siemens Gamesa wind turbines, each with a peak capacity of 8 MW. Many of those turbines are still to be installed, but the offshore substation and associated equipment for smoothing fluctuations were completed in October, and shortly before Christmas developer Ørsted announced power had started to flow from the first turbines.

The timing is fortuitous. The possibility that limitations in gas supply could, in combination with a cold winter, cause serious disruptions to electricity networks in the UK and northern Europe has caused anxiety for months. Even a fraction of Hornsea's eventual production will help buffer against that danger. On its first morning, it contributed to wind power providing almost 50 percent of Britain's electricity.

At 1,320 MW (equal to 1.3 million typical UK homes) Hornsea 2 will take the title of world's largest from the neighboring Hornsea 1, which has smaller but more numerous turbines, for a total capacity of 1,218 MW.

The development coincides with China's largest offshore wind farm, Jiangsu Qidong, being connected to the grid at full capacity on Christmas Day. At a total of 802 MW, Jiangsu Qidong is behind either Hornsea stage, but it is twice the size of the next largest existing offshore wind farm outside northern Europe. Where European and North American wind farms usually standardize by using a single size and make of turbine to save costs, Jiangsu Qidong has gone in the opposite direction, using seven models from four manufacturers.

Neither Hornsea nor Jiangsu Qidong remotely compares to the giant wind farms being developed by Denmark and South Korea, and the more speculative giant off Iceland. Even before those come to fruition, Hornsea's third stage – with 2,400 MW soon to start construction – will leave them well behind.

[pg]

Oh, dear. In ATX and all over TX, we've been experiencing record highs. New Year's Eve is predicted to be short sleeve weather into the night.

Followed by freezing temps the very next day. Truly- god help us all if we get another event like last year. Some people are STILL trying to clean up from February 2021 and all its damage.

Stocking whatever might power the body, in case power to my home and/or water isn't possible.

[goldenvalley]

Dec 28, 2021 23:50:28 GMT pg said:

Oh, dear. In ATX and all over TX, we've been experiencing record highs. New Year's Eve is predicted to be short sleeve weather into the night.

Followed by freezing temps the very next day. Truly- god help us all if we get another event like last year. Some people are STILL trying to clean up from February 2021 and all its damage.

Stocking whatever might power the body, in case power to my home and/or water isn't possible.

A friend in New Orleans has invested in a solar powered generator plus batteries. In the aftermath of the recent hurricane, she was able to run extension cords out to her front porch for neighbors to charge their phones and a small fridge so people could keep something cold...meds...whatever could fit.  Seems like you might think about this...of course it only works after the clouds dissipate.

[LFC]

We got a Generac auto-start generator years ago because our neck of the woods isn't exactly first on the list when there's a big power outage. We have big enough propane tanks to last nearly a week. We've been happy to have it at some point every year we've owned it with the longest outage extending about 3 days.

[Bact PhD]

Dec 28, 2021 23:50:28 GMT pg said:

Oh, dear. In ATX and all over TX, we've been experiencing record highs. New Year's Eve is predicted to be short sleeve weather into the night.

Followed by freezing temps the very next day. Truly- god help us all if we get another event like last year. Some people are STILL trying to clean up from February 2021 and all its damage.

Stocking whatever might power the body, in case power to my home and/or water isn't possible.

We’ve got a similar, but warmer, outlook for the next several days. We just went to see a local outdoor holiday light display, walking around in short sleeves and flip-flops. It’s pushing 80* during the day and is predicted to continue into the weekend. We’ll get a blast of upper 30s at night for a couple days, then right back to upper 70s during the day by the time Dear Son returns to school the middle of next week.

Good Luck, pg.

*That’s about 8-10 degrees warmer than our typical late December afternoons.

[pg]

I do have a portable power generator. Whatever it is ( my son gave it to me during the Super Freeze), it's enough to power things like computers, cell phones, mini fridge etc. It's very small. Doesn't help the house, though. God bless TX- gas never stops... So at least I can cook.. I'm busy being a prepper, with food. After last year's disaster, I got my city-center fairly new home bullet-proof as possible and have just wrapped all outdoor pipes.

Last year was 4 days without power and we survived. The biggest factor in all of this is the stupid TX power grid. Lots of mouthing of what is supposedly in place, but we'll see.

[LFC]

Dec 29, 2021 1:55:59 GMT pg said:

God bless TX- gas never stops... So at least I can cook.. I'm busy being a prepper, with food.

I thought the loss of natural gas pressure was a massive problem (not necessarily for you) last winter. Was that mostly to power stations or did it include residential as well?

[LFC]

A new plant to sequester carbon emissions has opened up in Iceland.

The Quest to Trap Carbon in Stone—and Beat Climate Change

On a barren lava plateau in Iceland, a new facility is sucking in air and stashing the carbon dioxide in rock. The next step: Build 10,000 more.

These are some mighty bold claims for a small industrial plant in a tiny, peripheral country. Climeworks’ facility is capable of pulling down only about 4,000 tons of carbon per year—an eye-dropper’s worth of the 40 billion tons the world emits annually. The plant uses a technique known as direct air capture, in which enormous fans suck in vast amounts of air from our despoiled atmosphere and run it over chemical-laden filters. It’s similar in principle to the tech that factories and refineries use to scrub CO2 from their exhaust streams. But what’s potentially much better about direct air capture is that it can be deployed anywhere, and it removes carbon already in the atmosphere, whether it was belched out 10 years ago by a cement factory in Alabama or last week by a pickup truck in Zanzibar.

True believers have been trying to turn the idea into reality for at least 20 years. For most of that time they were ignored by investors, dismissed by scientists, and regarded with suspicion by environmentalists, who worry the technology will give businesses license to keep on polluting. Now the ground is shifting rapidly. The Climeworks facility is just the first of a handful of large direct air capture plants slated to go up in the next several years, propelled by nine-figure investments and the support of powerful allies, including in the US government.

An inflection point came in 2018, when the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared that the world will need to both cut new carbon emissions and somehow start reducing the amount of CO2 already up in the air—and that direct air capture was a promising approach. The following year, Climeworks’ top competitor, Canada-based Carbon Engineering, raised over $80 million in private investment. In 2020, Climeworks pulled in more than $100 million. Several newer startups have also leapt into the arena, and for what it’s worth, in December Elon Musk tweeted that SpaceX is starting its own atmosphere-scrubbing program.

But direct air capture faces huge obstacles. Despite carbon’s enormous impact down at ground level, it is barely a trace element in the air—only about 415 out of every 1 million atmospheric particles are CO2. Imagine putting a single drop of ink into an Olympic-size swimming pool; the challenge of direct air capture is akin to taking that drop back out. The cost is staggering: To pull in any meaningful amount of carbon requires armies of giant machines and titanic amounts of energy to run them. Then there is the question of how to get all that energy. If you burn carbon-spewing fossil fuels to run your carbon-capturing machines, you’re kind of defeating the point. Finally, there is the carbon itself; once you’ve gathered up a few million tons of CO2, what do you do with it?

Oh, and one more thing to consider: Among the technology’s first beneficiaries might be oil and gas companies.

To make this work somebody has to pay it. This is where we need to start taxing fossil fuel producers and consumers and make them start paying for their long externalized costs.

Wurzbacher and Gebald aren’t expecting to cover those costs by selling carbon to greenhouses. Nor by using it for synthetic fuels, which is still one of their sidelines. The big money, they figure, lies in selling carbon sequestration to the hundreds of corporations, cities, and other entities that have pledged to reduce their emissions. Insurance giant Swiss Re, Microsoft, Stripe, the Economist Group, and Audi (not to mention Coldplay) have already signed up to pay Climeworks millions of dollars to bury carbon for them.

Here is how oil and gas firms can benefit. Of course it means increasing production of fossil fuels. [sigh]

Carbon Engineering’s tech works on the same basic principles as Climeworks’, but the two companies have very different business models. That million-ton plant in Texas is a partnership with a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, a major oil and gas company based in Houston. Oxy, as it’s commonly known, plans to inject the captured carbon into the ground to push more oil into its wells, a process known as enhanced oil recovery. The CO2will stay underground—but putting it there will drive more fossil fuels into the maw of the American economy, which will belch them back out as greenhouse gases. In other words, the plant will capture carbon and use it to help put more carbon into the air.

[pg]

Dec 29, 2021 14:51:18 GMT LFC said:

Dec 29, 2021 1:55:59 GMT pg said:

God bless TX- gas never stops... So at least I can cook.. I'm busy being a prepper, with food.

I thought the loss of natural gas pressure was a massive problem (not necessarily for you) last winter. Was that mostly to power stations or did it include residential as well?

? A real question. Around 61% of All TX homes rely on electricity. Too many homes to count are under-insulated. And, well...it is TX. We all knew that turning down the thermostat to a chilly but deal-able 65 degrees would have gone a long way toward conserving the supply that was available. Almost nobody did it. So a lot of factors.

As far as the loss of natural gas pressure- some of that had to do with production, not delivery to structures in need. The almighty gas and oil biz had freeze outs of epic proportions. Now, we did have loss of supply to some areas due to outdated equipment AND equipment that was poorly equipped for cold temps. Not protected, etc. That caused some real issues in commercial power stations. Much of it, at least in my area, has been shored up. But the truth is that the controlling board of the TX power grid randomly chose the "rolling blackouts", to bad results. If they knew of weak lines that feed the power plants, they sure didn't act like it. 

And we can't forget- the idiots in control of the TX power grid didn't even reside in TX. How in the heck can you manage a situation when you live in the Caribbean? Or worse- one of those erstwhile controlling board members just may have actually been dead (: All I can do is protect my own pipes/property and hope for the best.

[goldenvalley]

Wild fires in Colorado in December nowhere near forests. More extreme weather events...and poor grassland management?

[andydp]

Dec 31, 2021 21:44:24 GMT goldenvalley said:

Wild fires in Colorado in December nowhere near forests. More extreme weather events...and poor grassland management?

I’m in the area right now. Go to Www.Denverpost.com
Excellent coverage with photos of the destruction. Whole developments are nothing but ash piles.
Last report I heard was 6 killed and for the extent of the destruction very few injuries.

[goldenvalley]

Dec 31, 2021 22:06:22 GMT andydp said:

Dec 31, 2021 21:44:24 GMT goldenvalley said:

Wild fires in Colorado in December nowhere near forests. More extreme weather events...and poor grassland management?

I’m in the area right now. Go to Www.Denverpost.com
Excellent coverage with photos of the destruction. Whole developments are nothing but ash piles.
Last report I heard was 6 killed and for the extent of the destruction very few injuries.

Now you have double reasons to wear good masks.  One of the guys on Lawyers, Guns and Money lives in Boulder but isn't there right at the moment.  He gives some background on the area burned and what the drought looks like.

[jackd]

A friend who lives in one of the towns says wires blew down in the high winds and ignited a store with cinders blowing all over the place.

[andydp]

Dec 31, 2021 22:33:41 GMT jackd said:

A friend who lives in one of the towns says wires blew down in the high winds and ignited a store with cinders blowing all over the place.

That seems to be the consensus with the authorities

[AnBr]

Dec 31, 2021 21:44:24 GMT goldenvalley said:

Wild fires in Colorado in December nowhere near forests. More extreme weather events...and poor grassland management?

Obviously they need rakes.

[goldenvalley]

Dec 31, 2021 22:33:41 GMT jackd said:

A friend who lives in one of the towns says wires blew down in the high winds and ignited a store with cinders blowing all over the place.

Yeah, that is what happens in the mega fires we've seen in CA over the last few years.  Wires can blow down or they arc in the high wind and ignite what's around the towers and lines. Embers blow a mile or miles ahead of the body of the flames into already super dry material, whether it is trees, grass, or the roofs of houses creates a leapfrogging of fire.  It isn't like a wave of water that has a much more defined front line.  

[LFC]

The economics of getting ahold of the problem now show less cost than if we miss and try to repair the damage. Of course that means nothing because if there's anything the right and business are experts at its externalizing costs and pushing everything they can onto future generations.

What will it cost if the climate exceeds the Paris Agreement temperature goals this century—even if we later remove carbon dioxide from the air and manage to bring temperatures back down to meet those targets by 2100? And how does that compare with the costs of staying below those targets?

Most plans that are consistent with the Paris Agreement goals assume that temperatures will rise above 1.5° or even 2° C before 2100. They then heavily rely on the success and wide adoption of what are called negative carbon emissions techniques, which involve the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to bring temperatures back down. That’s a gamble for a number of reasons.

“Betting on being able to bring temperatures down after a larger overshoot is very risky because of the uncertain technological feasibility and because of the possibility of setting off irreversible processes in the earth system with even a temporary temperature overshoot,” wrote second author Dr. Christoph Bertram, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, in an email to Ars Technica. “Furthermore, such an approach would be unfair to future generations, as it basically would shift more of the mitigation burden on them.”

But the alternative—staying below those targets in the first place—is also a significant challenge. Only a few models have looked at such scenarios, and they’ve received relatively little focus in past policy discussions. But a recent study from an international collaboration of nearly two dozen climate modeling groups has systematically compared the economic implications of these scenarios using nine commonly used models. The results were unanimous—the economy will be better off if we don’t count on repairing the damage later.

To quote the movie Tomorrowland:

In every moment, there is the possibility of a better future, but you people won't believe it. And because you won't believe it, you won't do what is necessary to make it a reality! So you dwell on this terrible future, you resign yourselves to it, for one reason: because that future doesn't ask anything of you today.

[LFC]

Air pollution has more impact than just lung issues. And yet the GOP fights against cleaning up America at every step. It's all about profits today, costs for somebody else tomorrow.

A growing body of evidence over the last few years has demonstrated that air pollution is a significant risk factor for developing dementia in old age. It shouldn’t be much of a shock. “When sensitive people breathe in polluted air from outdoors, very small particles can penetrate the lungs and get into the circulation system,” Jiu-Chiuan Chen, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, told The Daily Beast. “These ‘toxic’ responses can make the blood-brain barrier leaky and cause damage to the brain.” It’s not all that different from how other risk factors like smoking can negatively impact human health, leaving it more vulnerable to degenerative conditions like dementia.

The big question scientists have had in the last few years was whether the impact of air pollution on dementia risk was permanent—or whether this was something that could be reversed. New findings published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences bring good news: Improved air quality over several years is associated with a reduced risk of dementia in elderly women.

The findings bolster suspicions that external pollutants can contribute to accelerated aging in the brain (which is effectively what dementia is). But more critically, they also show that this aging can be slowed down if exposure to those pollutants decreases.

[LFC]

More on the need for a modern electrical grid that is better prepared to use renewable energy more effectively. The cost drop of renewables is incredible. We need to take better advantage of them.

In the summer of 1988, scientist James Hansen testified to Congress that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels was dangerously warming the planet. Scientific meetings were held, voluminous reports were written, and national pledges were made, but because fossil fuels were comparatively cheap, little concrete action was taken to reduce carbon emissions.

Then, beginning around 2009, first wind turbines and then solar photovoltaic panels decreased enough in cost to become competitive in electricity markets. More installations resulted in more “learning curve” cost reductions – the decrease in cost with every doubling of deployment. Since 2009, the prices of wind and solar power have decreased by an astonishing 72% and 90%, respectively, and they are now the cheapest electricity sources – although some challenges still exist.

Meanwhile use of renewables continues to rise while coal, until this past year, has been dropping for over a decade. Usage for coal is down well over 50% from it's peak in the mid-2000s. There's a good interactive graph for this in the article.

[LFC]

There Is No Adapting to This

The U.S. is hemorrhaging money and lives in the face of the climate crisis. No level of adaptation can keep up without cutting emissions.

On Monday, the U.S. government released data showing that 2021 was the third-costliest year for extreme weather on record. It was also the highest tally for the number of disasters that cost $1 billion or more, beating 2020, and the deadliest year in a decade.

Those stats are stark, but they don’t tell the full story. At the individual and community level, climate disasters are doing irreparable harm. Taken together, 2021's run of monster disasters made it clearer than ever that merely adapting to the climate crisis will never be enough.

Consider that last year, Greenville, California, and Mayfield, Kentucky—two formerly vibrant towns—were all but wiped completely off the map by a wildfire and tornado, respectively. These are life-altering events for those thrust onto the frontlines of the climate crisis.

The concept of bad weather “seasons” now seems increasingly quaint, a relic of the 20th century like CRT television sets and the Model T. Freakish heat waves are now an every-month occurrence. We saw it in the Pacific Northwest this summer, where all-time temperature records were obliterated amid a mass casualty event, just as we saw in Colorado this December, where unseasonably warm weather left the ground bereft of snow and allowed the state’s most destructive wildfire in history to overrun suburban neighborhoods.

Welcome to vast externalized costs being placed upon every level payer from the individual up to the federal government.