This is Not Cool

New York Times reports this morning that “The war with Iran has been very lucrative for American oil companies, which have earned more than $130 billion in profit as people pay much higher prices for gasoline, diesel and other fuel.”

Citing a Brown University Climate Lab study, the Times reported “As of this week, Americans had spent an extra $147 billion on gasoline and diesel since the United States and Israel began striking Iran on Feb. 28.”

Drill, Baby Drill does not get you what they want you to think it does.

Meanwhile a new study from a Finnish think tank adds that Americans have paid more in additional costs than any other country.

Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (Finland):

This is because of America’s exceptional oil consumption due to high reliance on inefficient, oil-burning private vehicles and a slow transition away from petrol and diesel – leaving households, truckers and farmers particularly exposed to global fuel market shocks.

Continue reading “Americans Paying Biggest Price for Hormuz Oil Shock”

The UK Defense Secretary Wes Streeting has warned that citizens should be ready for emergencies related to climate extremes, or cyber attacks on energy infrastructure. According to the BBC, Streeter reminded the country of wildfires that burned this summer, and flooding expected this winter.

In response, many citizens are adopting some form of “prepper” lifestyle.

Just sayin’ – a lot of the needed preparations for any type of emergency involve accelerating the transition to clean, distributed energy.

BBC:

Some retailers have seen a dramatic increase in sales of essential goods after the government called for people to stock up in case of a crisis, according to figures obtained by Newsnight.

The Iceland supermarket chain said it was “clear” consumers had listened to warnings after it saw a 40% increase in sales of tinned products over the weekend.

The rise in sales came after Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said that people should stockpile goods to prepare for an emergency such as a cyber attack or an extreme weather event.

BBC:

Streeting said the public need to be prepared for “increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks” on businesses, or supply chain disruption caused by “hostile state actors or terrorists”.

Continue reading “UK Tells Citizens “Be Ready” for Climate, Energy Disruptions”

Above, ABC report mentions King Tide Flooding in South Florida, but has more details on continued El Niño driven flooding on the California coast.

No mention of the impact of climate change in raising the baseline sea level.

Below, Glaciologist Jason Box posted this account from on the scene in Florida.

One dead and five missing as giant oil rig collapsed in the Atlantic off Gabon.

Yahoo News reported that “…a pollution response team had been deployed to protect the coastline and nearby Mayumba National Park.”

Because this rig was not in an active phase of extraction, and was in much shallower water than the infamous Gulf Oil Spill at Deepwater Horizon in 2010, the potential for that scale of catastrophe is remote.

But, oh yes, tell me again about the threat of offshore wind turbines.

Peter Sinclair in the Midland Daily News:

Dr. Andrea Dutton is an Oceanographer at the University of Wisconsin, and a winner of the MacArthur “Genius award. As I spoke to her about climate driven sea level rise, she illustrated her points with sweeping waves of her arms.
She traced a graceful upward swoop of an imaginary graph, to illustrate the steady rise of oceans in response to global heating – and made a hard point.
“When you look at those graphs, it shows this smooth line going up, which gives you the impression it won’t get to say, 2 feet higher than today, until 2060, for example.”
“But I think that’s a little bit misleading, because in fact, during extreme storms or extreme high tides, you’ll reach 2 feet, but you’ll reach it with increasing frequency, as you approach 2060, till you’re there on average.”

“And so when you look at the projection, it gives you almost this false sense of complacency, that, “we have time, we’re not going to get to 2 feet until 2060”, for example, but in fact, we will get there, much before then, with increasing frequency.

And so using that graph on its own is a little bit dangerous, without understanding what it means.”

At the moment, her words are coming vividly to life in news reports from California, as just such an extreme event is evolving in the Pacific Ocean.

El Niño is a regular cycle occurring every 3 to 7 years, in which the world’s warmest ocean water, that normally pools in the southwest Pacific, around the Philippines and Indonesia, sloshes eastward and piles up for a time against the coasts of the Americas.
This cycle, scientists tell us, is still developing, but may be the most intense El Niño ever in the modern record.

That water, slowly surging against the west coasts of the Americas, being warm, expands, and it’s level rises well above normal, even more so as it presses up against the coasts. The expanding thousand mile lens of water is called a “Kelvin Wave”.
It’s not a wave like we see in pictures of crashing surf, but rather a massive swell, thousands of miles across.
As it presses up against shorelines, it may cause sea level to rise temporarily by as much as a foot or two.

Continue reading “Column: El Niño Giving a Glimpse of the Future”

Yellow Dot Studio, which has a history of producing high quality, laugh-because-it-hurts videos with climate themes, has a new one, voiced by Woody Harrelson.

The clean technology that Republicans love, and to be fair, the one that I still think could be a dark horse going forward, is geothermal.

Video above discusses in detail some of the red flags that are causing a wave of short selling of Fervo, the leading Geothermal contender.

Thermal decline, excessive water loss, and some history of earthquakes are all inherent to the technology, and definitely need to be discussed. What it tells us again is that, to meet the burgeoning demand for electricity, there is no readily available techno fix. Gas is limited by constraints on turbines and pipelines. Nuclear is not going to make a solid impact before the mid 2030s, assuming massive government support.

Solar, wind and batteries are cheap, well understood, and go up fast. We need to accelerate those technologies, not because they are good for the climate, but because they are literally the only thing in the cupboard for the near term.

Heatmap also has a good discussion of Fervo’s stumbles here.

Michigan State University is doing a good job thru its Ag Extension Service providing accurate information to local officials who are the critical front line to get clean energy and infrastructure sited in a timely manner.

A few weeks ago I attended an event for local officials near Saginaw, Michigan, to assess the messaging. For the stuff I knew first hand, it was spot on – and there was more that I learned that was new, as well.

Above, I asked Harmony Gmazel to restate what best evidence on rising electric rates has been. Neither Data Centers nor clean energy are implicated in rising electric rates – a bigger culprit is keeping aging transmission and distribution infrastructure updated in an era of changing climate and weather extremes.

I backed her up with a clip from Jigar Shah’s “Energy Empire” podcast, with the CEO of massive midwest utility ComEd backing her up.

Below, solar expert Charles Gould on the positive effects of solar fields on aquifers.

Continue reading “Educating Local Officials on Clean Energy Facts”