Climate Change, Pollution, Clean Energy, and the Environment

[pnwguy]

Jan 12, 2022 16:17:18 GMT LFC said:

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

As long as the beneficiaries bankroll the GOP, thus it will forever be.  As long as corporations are only allowed to consider "shareholder value", the political bribery is a CEO's fiduciary obligation.

[LFC]

2021 was the 6th warmest year on record.

NASA, NOAA, and the Berkeley Earth group each released their end-of-year data for 2021 today, while the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA) and European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) numbers were already out. They all came up with similar rankings this year. All but ECMWF placed it as the sixth warmest year on record, while ECMWF ranked it in fifth place. It was very close to 2015 and 2018, so fifth through seventh are roughly tied. What is true for all of the datasets is that the last seven years are the warmest seven years on record.

The beloved climate change denier starting point of 1997 isn't working so well anymore, just as all the real science predicted.

[LFC]

I've only read part of this but it's an accessible Rand paper on the threats posed by nations deciding on their own to start experimenting with geoengineering. China is kind of diving in on this and that scares the crap out of me. Here are the first two sentences of the paper:

In February 2009, a provincial weather bureau in northeastern China fired 313 sticks of silver iodide into the clouds over Beijing. Intended to alleviate the longest drought in almost 40 years, the effort led to massive snowfall and the closure of 12 highways.

And, as noted, there will be winners and losers. Who gets to pick?

The primary concern is that some countries may decide to pursue geoengineering even as others condemn those efforts. As scholars have argued, this divergence results because “even optimal climate engineering would result in ‘winners and losers’: some states would gain relative to a world without climate engineering, some states would lose, and no state would be unaffected.”

[goldenvalley]

Scotland is auctioning off parcels for development of wind energy facilities.  Guess who is bidding.

Oil giants like BP and Shell as well as Iberdrola, the Spanish utility, look like the big winners in Scotland’s first offshore wind auction, whose results were announced on Monday.

This is a big deal.  

Companies were bidding on the chance to develop offshore parcels covering 2,700 square miles. The auction will bring in nearly 700 million pounds, or about $955 million, in option fees to the Scottish government. But the work will take time: Energy executives said the Scottish projects were unlikely to start generating power before the late 2020s.

“We secured the blocks that we wanted,” said Louise Kingham, head of country for Britain at BP, which gained the option to develop a large wind farm near Aberdeen with capacity comparable to a nuclear power station, in partnership with EnBW, a German utility.

Ms. Kingham said BP would invest £10 billion in the wind farm, including the acquisition of four service vessels and initiatives to modernize Leith, Edinburgh’s port. It is expected to become a manufacturing center for offshore equipment. BP also plans for Aberdeen, now a center for undersea technology for the oil industry, to become an operations and maintenance hub for the company’s wind business.

Companies want to make money and they're willing to spend money to facilitate that.  

[goldenvalley]

Meanwhile in North Dakota:

David Saggau, the chief executive of an energy cooperative, tried to explain the losing economics of running a coal-fired power plant to a North Dakota industry group more than a year ago.

Coal Creek Station had lost $170 million in 2019 as abundant natural gas and proliferating wind projects had cut revenue far below what it cost to run the plant. After four decades sending electricity over the border to Minnesota, Coal Creek would be closing in 2022, Saggau said, and nobody was clamoring to buy it.

“We made folks aware that the plant was for sale for a dollar,” Saggau, of Great River Energy, told the Lignite Energy Council during an October 2020 virtual meeting. “We’re basically giving it away.”

A renewable future was at hand. Winds come howling over the Missouri River in the heart of North Dakota — at the site where Lewis and Clark spent their first frigid winter — and Great River Energy planned to supply wind power over Coal Creek’s valuable transmission line. NextEra Energy, EDF Renewables and other powerhouse firms were racing to lock landowners into leases to harvest some of the most powerful and sustained winds in the country.

But that new clean-energy future never materialized in this part of coal country, with a landscape that has been mined for more than a century and has the scars and sinkholes to prove it. And the sale of Coal Creek Station, which received its last major permit approval earlier this month, illuminates the United States’ halting transition to renewables. Even in places such as North Dakota, where supply and demand align with clean energy, culture and politics pose major obstacles.

In these rural North Dakota counties, local officials passed ordinances that blocked wind and solar projects. State officials rallied to save Coal Creek, and a politically connected North Dakota energy firm stepped in to prolong its life, promising someday to capture its carbon emissions and store them underground.

This is a long article and the issues are complicated...job losses as coal mining is reduced, a company that wants to build some sort of carbon capture/sequestration system that hasn't really been done before.  It's worth a read.

[LFC]

In these rural North Dakota counties, local officials passed ordinances that blocked wind and solar projects. State officials rallied to save Coal Creek, and a politically connected North Dakota energy firm stepped in to prolong its life, promising someday to capture its carbon emissions and store them underground.

So much for letting the market decide. It's "almost" like they don't actually believe that when they say it.

[goldenvalley]

Jan 18, 2022 18:06:07 GMT LFC said:

In these rural North Dakota counties, local officials passed ordinances that blocked wind and solar projects. State officials rallied to save Coal Creek, and a politically connected North Dakota energy firm stepped in to prolong its life, promising someday to capture its carbon emissions and store them underground.

So much for letting the market decide. It's "almost" like they don't actually believe that when they say it.

They're afraid of job loss which they instinctively recognize is what happens when the market decides.  To that extent I feel a bit sorry for them.  People don't want to lose jobs and it's particularly difficult when the jobs don't require much in the way of credentials to hold them.  

[jackd]

The job loss issue really is the heart of the problem; not just in North Dakota but wherever coal is mined.

[LFC]

Jan 18, 2022 18:10:53 GMT goldenvalley said:

Jan 18, 2022 18:06:07 GMT LFC said:

So much for letting the market decide. It's "almost" like they don't actually believe that when they say it.

They're afraid of job loss which they instinctively recognize is what happens when the market decides.  To that extent I feel a bit sorry for them.  People don't want to lose jobs and it's particularly difficult when the jobs don't require much in the way of credentials to hold them.  

I should have clarified that the "they" I referred to were Republicans in the political class, not the regular people.

That said the inertia of existing jobs is certainly more powerful than the draw of new ones. Many of these people are just trying to keep their own job until they retire which I also sympathize with. I just hate the hypocrisy of the GOP when they claim to worship at the altar of the free market. If you're a protectionist then just f***ing own it.

[pnwguy]

Jan 18, 2022 17:10:54 GMT goldenvalley said:

Scotland is auctioning off parcels for development of wind energy facilities.  Guess who is bidding.

Oil giants like BP and Shell as well as Iberdrola, the Spanish utility, look like the big winners in Scotland’s first offshore wind auction, whose results were announced on Monday.

This is a big deal.  

None of this should be a surprise, and I don't mean that to sound nefarious.  Off-shore construction requires a lot of very specialized skills that petroleum exploration companies uniquely possess.  Even the logistics of providing for manpower out in the ocean are thing few industries have experience with.

My ex's youngest brother worked as a cook on drilling rigs in the Gulf off of Louisiana.  And she used to work for engineering companies that build the platforms and habitats.  

[goldenvalley]

Jan 19, 2022 16:26:22 GMT pnwguy said:

Jan 18, 2022 17:10:54 GMT goldenvalley said:

Scotland is auctioning off parcels for development of wind energy facilities.  Guess who is bidding.

This is a big deal.  

None of this should be a surprise, and I don't mean that to sound nefarious.  Off-shore construction requires a lot of very specialized skills that petroleum exploration companies uniquely possess.  Even the logistics of providing for manpower out in the ocean are thing few industries have experience with.

My ex's youngest brother worked as a cook on drilling rigs in the Gulf off of Louisiana.  And she used to work for engineering companies that build the platforms and habitats.  

If those companies operated like the politicians in North Dakota do, they would never ever engage in wind power production.  

[AnBr]

Jan 19, 2022 16:26:22 GMT pnwguy said:

None of this should be a surprise, and I don't mean that to sound nefarious.  Off-shore construction requires a lot of very specialized skills that petroleum exploration companies uniquely possess.  Even the logistics of providing for manpower out in the ocean are thing few industries have experience with.

This is what the older energy companies should be doing. Adapting their businesses to the future energies or perish. Building offshore platforms for oil can't be that different from offshore wind platforms.

[LFC]

A group of scientists are asking for a ban on blocking sunlight as a "solution" to global warming. As I mentioned before, it's incredible how much hubris some of these people can have about monkeying with the entire planet's climate.

A group of scientists and governance scholars have signed a letter urging an agreement not to allow or undertake projects that seek to "block out" the Sun.

Every now and then, some scientists (or Monty Burns) suggest blocking out the sun. The idea, called solar geoengineering, is basically to cool the planet by reducing the sunlight that makes it down to Earth.

In practice, scientists suggest less dramatic methods than Mr Burns – think sending sunlight-reflecting small molecules into the upper atmosphere rather than erecting a big metal sun blocker – but the projects are often met with more than a few concerns about the risks. Joining these critics of the idea, 46 scientists and governance experts wrote an open letter explaining why they believe the risks outweigh the rewards.

"The risks of solar geoengineering are poorly understood and can never be fully known," the signatories wrote in their letter. "Impacts will vary across regions, and there are uncertainties about the effects on weather patterns, agriculture, and the provision of basic needs of food and water."

They write that with no international agreements on how solar geoengineering projects would be implemented, it is likely that a few powerful countries could begin implementing it against the wishes of the international community – including poorer countries that could be impacted more (e.g. by concerns over growing food).

They also believe that any commitments to the project could disincentivize governments, businesses, and societies from doing everything they can to reduce carbon emissions, believing that a technological "fix" could become available in the future.

"The speculative possibility of future solar geoengineering risks becoming a powerful argument for industry lobbyists, climate denialists, and some governments to delay decarbonisation policies," they added.

Many of the asshole pushing for geoengineering were the same people who told us not to trust climate models because the Earth's climate was too complex to model accurately. I wish I could say un...f***ing...believable and mean it but I totally believe it. In fact I accepted that it was likely to be pushed at us by these charlatans a long time ago.

[LFC]

A meeting of the mindless.

Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan Talking About Climate Change Will Make Your Brain Dissolve

This paragraph gives tiny snippets of the stupidity provided by Jordan Peterson.

For the next several minutes, as they continue this frankly bonkers conversation with all the seriousness of libertarian college students at debate club, Peterson also claimed that climate models are untrustworthy because of errors he said “compound over time,” which means, apparently, the models are “all errors.” Trying to predict what’s going to happen with the climate, he said, is analogous to trying to “predict how your life goes.” He also said that poor people are the real reason for climate change (??); that solar power is more deadly than nuclear because people fall off roofs during installation (); and that fracking hasn’t polluted any water supplies (?).

This comment left by a reader literally made me LOL.

JicagoChusticeExcession
Molly Taft
1/26/22 1:33pm

If I wanted to watch two assholes trade shit back and forth, I’d fire up pornhub.

[goldenvalley]

Jan 26, 2022 21:02:00 GMT LFC said:

A meeting of the mindless.

Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan Talking About Climate Change Will Make Your Brain Dissolve

This paragraph gives tiny snippets of the stupidity provided by Jordan Peterson.

For the next several minutes, as they continue this frankly bonkers conversation with all the seriousness of libertarian college students at debate club, Peterson also claimed that climate models are untrustworthy because of errors he said “compound over time,” which means, apparently, the models are “all errors.” Trying to predict what’s going to happen with the climate, he said, is analogous to trying to “predict how your life goes.” He also said that poor people are the real reason for climate change (??); that solar power is more deadly than nuclear because people fall off roofs during installation (); and that fracking hasn’t polluted any water supplies (?).

This comment left by a reader literally made me LOL.

JicagoChusticeExcession
Molly Taft
1/26/22 1:33pm

If I wanted to watch two assholes trade shit back and forth, I’d fire up pornhub.

I thought Peterson was dead.  

[Bact PhD]

Jan 26, 2022 22:02:26 GMT goldenvalley said:

Jan 26, 2022 21:02:00 GMT LFC said:

A meeting of the mindless.

Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan Talking About Climate Change Will Make Your Brain Dissolve

This paragraph gives tiny snippets of the stupidity provided by Jordan Peterson.

This comment left by a reader literally made me LOL.

I thought Peterson was dead.  

Hardly. He disappeared from public view for a couple of years, but of late he's been plying his crankery on Youtube and the podcast circuit.

[LFC]

Jan 26, 2022 22:02:26 GMT goldenvalley said:

I thought Peterson was dead.  

If by that you mean brain dead then you are correct.

[pnwguy]

Jan 27, 2022 14:39:06 GMT LFC said:

Jan 26, 2022 22:02:26 GMT goldenvalley said:

I thought Peterson was dead.  

If by that you mean brain dead then you are correct.

Sadly that would describe at least 20 percent of the US at the moment. The RW media ecosystem seems to destroy brain function as much as the new synthetic versions of meth.

[LFC]

The Minnesota moose population is taking a massive hit due to climate change.

[LFC]

The situation for coral reefs is likely worse than previously thought.

Coral reefs have long been regarded as one of the earliest and most significant ecological casualties of global warming. In new research published in the journal PLOS Climate, we found that the future of these tropical ecosystems – thought to harbour more species than any other – is probably worse than anticipated.

Climate change is causing more frequent marine heatwaves worldwide. Corals have adapted to live in a specific temperature range, so when ocean temperatures are too hot for a prolonged period, corals can bleach – losing the colourful algae that live within their tissue and nourish them via photosynthesis – and may eventually die.

Across the tropics, mass bleaching and die-offs have gone from being rare to a somewhat regular occurrence as the climate has warmed. More frequent heatwaves mean that the time corals have to recover is getting shorter.

Bleached corals are more vulnerable to disease and starvation.

In a 2018 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that 1.5°C of global warming would cause between 70 and 90% of the world’s coral reefs to disappear. Now, with models capable of examining temperature differences between coral reefs one kilometre apart, our team found that at 1.5°C of warming, which the world is predicted to reach in the early 2030s without drastic action to limit greenhouse gas emissions, 99% of the world’s reefs will experience heatwaves that are too frequent for them to recover.

That would spell catastrophe for the thousands of species that depend on coral reefs, as well as the roughly one billion people whose livelihoods and food supply benefits from coral reef biodiversity.

[LFC]

Gee, big companies are dragging their feet on addressing climate change. What a shock.

The world’s leading companies are seriously overstating their plans to act on climate change, according to a report released Monday. In findings that should surprise no one, 25 firms, including Google, Unilever, and Walmart, are only on track to reduce emissions by an average of 40%—a far cry from what’s suggested by popular terms like “net zero” and “carbon neutral.”

The analysis comes from the New Climate Institute, an organization based in Germany, which partnered with CarbonWatch to comb through the carbon-neutral or net-zero plans of some of the world’s leading organizations, giving each of them an “integrity” rating. None of the companies surveyed hit the highest integrity grade possible in the report, and only one, Danish shipping giant Maersk, got the second-highest “reasonable integrity” rating. Apple, Sony, and Vodaphone followed with “moderate integrity” ratings. Companies including Amazon, Google, IKEA, Volkswagen, and Walmart got “low integrity” scores, while 10 companies, including CVS Health, Nestlé, and Unilever, bottomed out with the lowest ranking.

“We set out to uncover as many replicable good practices as possible, but we were frankly surprised and disappointed at the overall integrity of the companies’ claims,” Thomas Day of NewClimate Institute, lead author of the report, said in a release. “As pressure on companies to act on climate change rises, their ambitious-sounding headline claims all too often lack real substance, which can mislead both consumers and the regulators that are core to guiding their strategic direction. Even companies that are doing relatively well exaggerate their actions.”

Nearly all of the companies surveyed—24 out of 25—are relying heavily on offsetting credits to reach their net-zero targets, a process that has problems of its own. Two-thirds of those 24 companies currently lean heavily on offsets based on reforestation, planting trees, and other land-based activities—which, as the report points out, can be impacted or reversed by something as simple as a forest fire—to reach their net-zero targets. And policies around offsets don’t necessarily hold steady through an entire company. Nestlé and Unilever, both enormous multinational brands, “explicitly distance themselves” from offsetting at the top level, the report found—but do encourage brands they own to pursue investing in offsets, in many cases in order to sell products that can be labeled “carbon neutral” while the company pursues relatively minor emissions cuts.

[goldenvalley]

Feb 7, 2022 22:55:48 GMT LFC said:

Gee, big companies are dragging their feet on addressing climate change. What a shock.

Companies including Amazon, Google, IKEA, Volkswagen, and Walmart got “low integrity” scores, while 10 companies, including CVS Health, Nestlé, and Unilever, bottomed out with the lowest ranking.

I note most of those companies are essentially retailers (not VW of course).  They want to sell stuff to we little consumers and they worry about prices that the consumer sees. 

[LFC]

Florida Republicans, under marching orders from Florida utility companies especially FP&L, are pushing bills to cut the value of excess home power generated and sold back to the power company.

Florida is inching closer to changing the state’s solar industry—and individual ownership of solar panels—for the worse.

A pair of bills, both heavily backed by utility interests, made big steps forward in the state legislature this week. What’s more, the utility has taken up blogging, of all things, to defend its honor. Stay kooky, Florida!

Despite the widespread public opposition and national attention on the bills’ shady ties to Florida Power and Light (FPL), one of the state’s most powerful utilities, both the Senate and House anti-solar bills are cruising through the legislature. Last week, a subcommittee granted the bill, HB 741, its first approval in the House. On Tuesday, as hundreds of pro-rooftop-solar protesters rallied against the bill in Tallahassee, the Senate version of the bill, SB 1024, passed its final subcommittee in a 6-3 party-line vote, clearing the way for a full vote.

Both the Senate and House bills deal with what’s known as net metering, which is a practice that lets folks who put solar panels on their roof sell excess electricity that they generate to the utility and put it back on the grid. The legislation would allow utilities to lower the amount of credit they give solar customers for excess electricity and hit them with additional fees, thus eliminating a major incentive to install solar panels in the first place.

Net metering helps make rooftop solar more attractive to customers, keeps the solar installation industry running, and makes more renewable energy available on the grid during potential peak load times (like very hot days). It also encourages more local generation, which eliminates stresses on distribution systems. Net metering, however, is not attractive to utility interests that want to continue to be the sole source of power for customers.

Florida Power and Light (FPL), the state’s largest utility, isn’t a huge fan of net metering. Only 1% of customers in Florida actually use net metering, but rooftop solar installations have exploded since 2018, when new regulations allowed people to rent panels for cheap; small-scale solar in Florida shot up by 57% in 2020 alone. FPL says that this rapid growth of rooftop solar could cost Florida utilities up to $700 million by 2025. (The Senate version of the bill has since had a compromise amendment added that would grandfather in rates for current rooftop solar owners, but opponents say the bill would still kneecap the industry’s growth.)

They've apparently tried this before.

[goldenvalley]

Feb 11, 2022 20:45:38 GMT LFC said:

Florida Republicans, under marching orders from Florida utility companies especially FP&L, are pushing bills to cut the value of excess home power generated and sold back to the power company.

Florida is inching closer to changing the state’s solar industry—and individual ownership of solar panels—for the worse.

A pair of bills, both heavily backed by utility interests, made big steps forward in the state legislature this week. What’s more, the utility has taken up blogging, of all things, to defend its honor. Stay kooky, Florida!

Despite the widespread public opposition and national attention on the bills’ shady ties to Florida Power and Light (FPL), one of the state’s most powerful utilities, both the Senate and House anti-solar bills are cruising through the legislature. Last week, a subcommittee granted the bill, HB 741, its first approval in the House. On Tuesday, as hundreds of pro-rooftop-solar protesters rallied against the bill in Tallahassee, the Senate version of the bill, SB 1024, passed its final subcommittee in a 6-3 party-line vote, clearing the way for a full vote.

Both the Senate and House bills deal with what’s known as net metering, which is a practice that lets folks who put solar panels on their roof sell excess electricity that they generate to the utility and put it back on the grid. The legislation would allow utilities to lower the amount of credit they give solar customers for excess electricity and hit them with additional fees, thus eliminating a major incentive to install solar panels in the first place.

Net metering helps make rooftop solar more attractive to customers, keeps the solar installation industry running, and makes more renewable energy available on the grid during potential peak load times (like very hot days). It also encourages more local generation, which eliminates stresses on distribution systems. Net metering, however, is not attractive to utility interests that want to continue to be the sole source of power for customers.

Florida Power and Light (FPL), the state’s largest utility, isn’t a huge fan of net metering. Only 1% of customers in Florida actually use net metering, but rooftop solar installations have exploded since 2018, when new regulations allowed people to rent panels for cheap; small-scale solar in Florida shot up by 57% in 2020 alone. FPL says that this rapid growth of rooftop solar could cost Florida utilities up to $700 million by 2025. (The Senate version of the bill has since had a compromise amendment added that would grandfather in rates for current rooftop solar owners, but opponents say the bill would still kneecap the industry’s growth.)

They've apparently tried this before.

I don't know about Florida but a similar proposal was offered by the Public Utilities Commission recently.  They set the rates and have concluded that the amount credited to owners of roof top solar is in excess of what that power is worth on the open market.  And in CA the rooftop solar owners don't pay certain charges for access to the grid that non solar power owners have to pay. The bottom line was that the folks that can't afford to mount roof top installations or who rent are subsidizing those who can.  And the claim is that the need for such a subsidy is much reduced because the price of the equipment has gone down. There was an uproar so the PUC has withdrawn the proposal and is potentially rewriting it.

[jackd]

Socialism for corporations and capitalism for people.