Above, Australian Broadcasting report summarizes impacts of the Iran war on China – “short term pain for long term gain.”
Below, Aljazeera report on penetration of EVs in Chinese markets, and how drivers there are insulated from the worst impacts of the Strait of Hormuz cutoff.
Climate Scientist Michael Mann on this month’s extraordinary heat wave, a harbinger of things to come.
“We obviously have to preserve our democracy..” to deal with climate change.
“Everyone wants a little bit of volatility to make some money.”
Natural gas is historically volatile in price, which has always been a natural advantage to wind and solar, which can readily sign 20 year contracts at predictable prices.
In keeping with the colossal record of incompetence and ignorance of the Trump administration, the utterly predictable damage to Persian Gulf infrastructure, as well as permanent uncertainty about reliabilty of supply from the region, add new uncertainty costs to renewable’s biggest competitor.
Fracking Grifter and Energy Secretary Chris Wright no doubt thought, when he bought his cabinet seat with huge donations to the Trump campaign, that his vision of locking the world into US LNG contracts and massive infrastructure investments was secure.
One wonders what he is thinking today.
“This will bring down the economies of the world,” warned Saad al-Kaabi, Qatar’s energy minister, on March 6th. It was not hyperbole. Days earlier QatarEnergy, which makes a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas (lng), shut down its production and export facilities after some were hit by Iranian strikes. Unable to extract, process and, because the Strait of Hormuz is blocked by the fighting, ship its lng, the firm has declared force majeure on its contracts. The price of lng has ballooned on world markets. Customers around the globe, who use it to generate electricity, heat homes and make things like fertiliser, are scrambling to respond.
Rystad, a consultancy, reckons that if Qatari infrastructure suffered little damage and exports resumed after 15 days, annual global lng output would fall by 4.3% this year. If this stretches to a month, the loss would be over 14%.
Last year the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, a think-tank, modelled a 12-month blockade and found that even accounting for extra production spurred in other places by high prices, annual output would fall by 15%. This at a time when lng demand was forecast to rise by nearly 8% in 2026.
Report into last year’s catastrophic outage says the problem did not lie with solar and wind power
ENTSO-E, a group of grid operators, said the “whole of Europe” needed to modernise parts of its power system to avoid a blackout similar to the one that struck Spain and Portugal.
The European grid operators called the blackout on April 28 last year “the first of its kind”. It left nearly 60mn people without electricity and triggered probes into the weaknesses of a power system that has changed radically as wind and solar generation have grown.
It also spurred a backlash against renewables and Spain’s decision to phase out nuclear power.
Voltage fluctuations overwhelmed the Spanish grid on the day of the blackout as they triggered the disconnection of power plants and managers lost control of the system.
These fluctuations were caused by unusual oscillations in the frequency at which the electrical current changes direction.
The findings confirm the conclusions of a preliminary report which the experts issued in October.
Last year’s paralysing power blackout in Spain and Portugal was caused by a “perfect storm of multiple factors,” according to a final report by an expert panel published on Friday.
Continue reading “Final Report: Renewables Not Cause of Spain’s Blackout”Gonna get hot this summer.
Heat dome setting records in US West.
An unusually strong and sprawling heat dome is the catalyst for the heat, but the magnitude is undoubtedly being worsened by planet-warming pollution. Heat waves are becoming more frequent, more severe and lasting longer as the world warms.
Continue reading “Extreme Heat Warnings Under Western Dome”Resurfaced comments made by Gregg Phillips, the head of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, have sparked concern about the new leader’s competency and mental state.
Phillips, a conservative activist who spread voter fraud conspiracies, was appointed to lead the federal government’s storm disaster response under the Department of Homeland Security in December. Previously, he oddly claimed that he involuntarily teleported to a Waffle House in Georgia that was 50 miles away.
“Teleporting is no fun,” Phillips said on one podcast last year. “It was real.”
Continue reading “FEMA Response Chief “Teleports to Waffle House”. You Heard Me.”In the last 72 hours the world has changed in a significant way, that still might not be apparent to many.
Glancing at the Wall Street Journal this morning I see the usual war-porn visuals of exploding boats, planes and installations, assurances from US military sources that Iranian assets are being degraded, followed by a significant paragraph.
Despite the strikes, Iran is still believed to have a vast stockpile of mines, cruise missiles on trucks and hundreds of undamaged boats in hidden facilities with deeply dug tunnels along the coast and on islands, said Farzin Nadimi, an expert on Iranian defenses at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“I think it will take weeks to reach a point where there can be safe operations in the strait,” he said. “Even then, a lot of the Iranian assets will survive.”
Iran has attacked dozens of vessels in the strait, often with small, unmanned boats carrying explosive charges or airborne drones. Other ships have been hit by projectiles, in the strait and in the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf.
This is a wonderful conversation, but to save some time I’ve set the link to start about halfway in just before the main event.
Edward Norton and Stephen Colbert agree on their mutual love of Walt Whitman, someone who, Colbert says, is not read nearly enough anymore.
As a long time worshipful follower of the Good Gray Poet, this was like an unexpected lightning stroke from heaven.
We’re at the equinox, so as good a time as any to repost an excerpt from one of Whitman’s greatest – “Song of the Rolling Earth”.
I did this last some years ago on an Autumn Equinox, and had kind of forgotten, but since it’s Spring Equinox tomorrow, seems appropriate.
I think we need it now as much as ever.
Song of the Rolling Earth:
I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall
be complete,
The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who
remains jagged and broken.
It’s said that if anything pushes to its furthest infinite expression, it transforms into its opposite.
Is it possible that Trump’s sheer stupidity, greed and narcissism is so extreme that it flips the world to an accelerated Green transition?
Iran has now proven that control of the strait “gives it a stranglehold over the world economy . . . Even if the Islamic republic decides, at some point, that it has an interest in reopening the Strait of Hormuz — it will always want to retain the option of closing it again as a visible threat to ward off aggressors.”
Heavy reliance on imported oil and gas, in short, means a chronic risk of severe and unpredictable economic shocks. The Iran crisis has focused the minds of governments around the world on this problem — and on how clean energy could help them address it.
