Above, Rachel Maddow reports on the Right wing war on Solar, expanding what I covered below.
ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is currently busy trying to figure out ways to block solar installations, is also responsible for a number of other far-right-friendly laws around the country, including the “Stand Your Ground” laws that allowed George Zimmerman kill young Treyvon Martin and walk.
The blowback from that high profile case has caused an exodus of ALECs corporate supporters, especially, no doubt, in light of Mr. Zimmerman’s high profile and increasingly obviously psychotic behavior.
Supporting and enabling racist gun nuts is certainly all in a day’s work for the Koch-funded ALEC climate denialist crowd, but looks bad in a corporate year-end report.
In related news, my spies tell me that ALEC’s latest initiative will build on past successes. Under this proposal, in the future, if you install a solar panel on your house, George Zimmerman will come and kill you.
Short review.
Richard Muller is a Berkeley Physics prof and would-be media star. Dr Muller got some attention a few years ago for some viral lectures slandering climate science and scientists,and whored himself on the Glenn Beck/Fox News circuit. Then he wangled a bunch of money from the Koch brothers to study the temp record. Then he found out that global temps were in fact, rising.
Richard Muller is now a media star as the “former climate skeptic scientist who now believes in climate change”.
So, following the recent rash of tornado activity, Muller writes in the NYTimes claiming that, paradoxically, there will be fewer tornadoes in a warming world, and was promptly blown out of the water by actual meteorologists and scientists who really know something about the problem.
Presumably he will now become more famous and sought-after as the “scientist who formerly thought there would be fewer tornadoes in a warming world, but has now been blown out of the water by actual meteorologists and scientists who really know something about the problem”
We can safely predict that even more “serious” journalists will now continue to seek him out, flatter him, and help him sell books.
Muller, who lacks any training or expertise in atmospheric science, is more than happy to promote with great confidence the unsupportable claim that global warming will actually decrease tornado activity. His evidence for this? The false claim that the historical data demonstrate a decreasing trend in past decades.
So one is essentially left with the physical reasoning I outlined above. You would think that a physicist would know how to do some physical reasoning. And sadly, in Muller’s case, you would apparently be wrong.
To allow Muller to so thoroughly mislead their readers, not once, but twice in the space of as many months, is deeply irresponsible of theTimes. So why might it be that the New York Times is so enamored with Muller, a retired physicist with no training in atmospheric or climate science, when it comes to the matter of climate change?
Now, a group of actual tornado and convective storm experts have weighed in. Muller not coming off so well.
Twisters returned to the national spotlight after a Nov. 17 outbreak viciously tore through 12 states, leaving eight people dead.
Research data show that climate change caused by human behavior is fueling more frequent and intense weather, such as extreme precipitation and heat waves — so it’s only natural to wonder if this applies to tornadoes, too. Scientists need more data and time to fully address that connection.
For instance, University of California, Berkeley, professor Richard Muller argued in a recent New York Times opinion piece that “the scientific evidence shows that strong to violent tornadoes have actually been decreasing for the past 58 years, and it is possible that the explanation lies with global warming.”
The honest “truth” is that no one knows what effect global warming is having on tornado intensity. Tornado records are not accurate enough to tell whether tornado intensity has changed over time. Continue reading “Tracking the Truth About Tornadoes”
USAToday has published a series of articles on Diseases that are on the move due to climate change. Regular readers here will already know about the Brain Eating Amoeba.
Bridget Bahneman lost her daughter to an illness that wasn’t supposed to exist as far north as Minnesota. Seven-year-old Annie’s brain was destroyed by an amoeba called Naegleria fowlerithat she was exposed to while swimming in a lake near their house.
Brain tissue was attacked by Naegleria fowleri, also called “the brain-eating amoeba.” When the amoeba infects the brain or spinal cord, it can cause meningitis.(Photo: George R. Healy, CDC)
We know that, even as some grassroots conservatives wake up to the benefits of renewable energy, the powers that pull the strings of the conservative establishment are doing everything they can to throw roadblocks in front of the energy revolution.
An alliance of corporations and conservative activists is mobilizing to penalise homeowners who install their own solar panels – casting them as “freeriders” – in a sweeping new offensive against renewable energy, the Guardian has learned.
Over the coming year, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) will promote legislation with goals ranging from penalising individual homeowners and weakening state clean energy regulations, to blocking the Environmental Protection Agency, which is Barack Obama’s main channel for climate action.
Details of Alec’s strategy to block clean energy development at every stage – from the individual rooftop to the White House – are revealed as the group gathers for its policy summit in Washington this week.
About 800 state legislators and business leaders are due to attend the three-day event, which begins on Wednesday with appearances by the Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson and the Republican budget guru and fellow Wisconsinite Paul Ryan.
Other Alec speakers will be a leading figure behind the recent government shutdown, US senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and the governors of Indiana and Wyoming, Mike Pence and Matt Mead.
For 2014, Alec plans to promote a suite of model bills and resolutions aimed at blocking Barack Obama from cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and state governments from promoting the expansion of wind and solar power through regulations known as Renewable Portfolio Standards. Continue reading “Right Wing Group Mobilizes to Stop Solar Energy”
One of the most important things to grasp about the new industrial revolution around renewable energy, is that, this is not just a nice thing to do, the right thing to do – it is essential for the survival of civilization.
Leslie Glustrom has been sounding the alarm about the bogus “200 year supply” of coal for some time now. Here’s an update.
The report says that the U.S. may have already passed “peak coal,” the point at which production declines rather than increases. It says production may be approaching its peak in terms of volume extracted, and peak coal has probably already passed in terms of total energy content, since modern mining focuses more on low-energy coal than in decades past.
Illinois, the fifth largest coal-producing state, actually passed its coal peak almost a century ago — in 1918, according to the report. Production in 2012 was 46 percent lower than that year.
Top coal producer Wyoming had its peak in 2008, while the rest of the top six coal states are also long past their peaks:– West Virginia (1947), Kentucky (1990), Pennsylvania (1918) and Texas (1990).
Indiana and Ohio, the number eight and 10 states, peaked in 1984 and 1970, respectively.
The Illinois basin is one of the country’s major coal-producing regions, covering 50,000 square miles over much of Illinois and parts of Indiana and western Kentucky.
Illinois is considered to have the nation’s third largest reserve of recoverable coal, behind Montana and Wyoming, according to the Energy Information Administration.
But based on USGS statistics, the report notes that only 36 percent of Illinois basin coal is technically recoverable, and only 9 percent is likely to be economical to extract. This is a lower percent than four other major reserves: two in Appalachia, the Somerset basin in Pennsylvania, and the Northern Wasatch plateau in Colorado and Utah.
The report notes that even with rising coal prices, the amount of coal in western fields considered economically recoverable has been significantly downgraded. Much of the coal is too deep to mine economically. Strip-mining, the standard method for the West, would involve moving too much dirt; and underground mining or gasification is possible but more expensive than strip mining.
Leslie Glustrom
Glustrom predicts the country’s five largest coal mines, all in Wyoming, have only 9 to 13 years of life left before they become no longer profitable. Since some of the same companies mining in the West also run major Illinois basin mines, the economic decline of western mining will have direct ripple effects on Illinois basin mining. Among other things the mining companies face higher interest rates the higher their debt rises, meaning it is harder for them to finance new or expanded mines.
Glustrom’s report notes that Peabody, the country’s largest mining company, “reported just over $1 billion in losses in the fourth quarter of 2012 and $58 million in losses for the year, driving their AdjustedEarnings Per Share down from $3.77 in2011 to $0.84 per share in 2012.”
Peabody produces 30 million tons of coal from Illinois and Indiana annually, making it the Midwest’s largest producer.
The other two largest companies, Arch Coal and Alpha Natural Resources, also have major Illinois basin operations and have taken serious economic hits in the past few years. Alpha Natural Resources reported a loss of $458 million in the third quarter of 2013, a loss almost 10 times greater than in the third quarter of 2012.
The major energy story of the 21st century has been the natural gas revolution and cheap gas prices undercutting coal-fired power. But the report notes that even independent of competition from gas, the production costs of coal are rising enough to make coal-fired power increasingly uneconomical. Production costs are rising because the coal that’s left is increasingly hard to extract, because of rising transportation costs and other world market factors. Continue reading “Coal’s Peak has Passed”
In Appalachia, greens are banding together with the Tennessee Conservative Union to oppose mountaintop mining. In Georgia, the Sierra Club and Atlanta’s tea party have formed a Green Tea Coalition that is demanding a bigger role for solar power in the state’s energy market. Elsewhere, veterans of the George W. Bush administration are working with the Environmental Defense Fund on market-based ideas for protecting endangered species.
It’s not yet a broad national trend, and may not be enough to begin dampening Washington’s bitter left-right split over President Barack Obama’s environmental policies. But some activists — particularly outside the Beltway — see potential for the kinds of coalitions that used to get big things done, back in the days when Theodore Roosevelt was creating national parks and George H.W. Bush’s administration was taking on acid rain.
“I do think there’s a big schism there, but there are some things we can all agree on,” said Lloyd Daugherty, chairman of the Tennessee Conservative Union.
Daugherty’s group — and its roughly 15,000 members — joined an effort with environmentalists last spring against mountaintop mining. While Daugherty and his organization had long privately objected to the mining because of its effect on property rights, hunting and fishing, he decided to fight publicly after a Chinese company bought mineral rights in Tennessee.
“We’re proud that Tennessee is a red state. But just how red are we willing to go?” asked a 30-second ad that Daugherty’s group ran, which shows Tennessee’s state flag morphing into the Chinese flag.
The ad was put together by Shelby White, a senior campaigner at Catapult, an environmental strategy firm that looks to build unusual coalitions on issues like climate change and logging.
“We’re looking to find more of those issues that can bring conservatives, businesses and other unusual bedfellows together,” said Glenn Hurowitz, a senior member of Catapult and a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. Catapult has also recruited rock stars like Mick Jagger to combat guitars made from illegally logged wood and elite frequent fliers to lobby United Airlines to reduce pollution.
The green lines are storm wind and flood events. The red line is geophysical events.
Climate deniers hate those pesky intrusions of reality. For Insurance giants like Munich Re, Swiss Re, and Lloyds of London, climate change is a reality that is showing up where it hurts most, on the ledgers. The long piece excerpted below is quite an extraordinary investigation for a mainstream publication, and deserves a look.
In the aftermath of the German and Canadian floods, the victims, the insurers, the media, the politicians and the scientists were all asking the same questions: What caused them? Was it the relentless buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide? Could “extreme” weather events become the new normal or were they once-a-millennium acts of god?
In Munich Re’s offices, there wasn’t much debate as the claims cheques flew out the door: The higher frequency of extreme weather events is influenced by climate change; and recent climate change is largely due to burning hydrocarbons. “I’m quite convinced that most climate change is caused by human activity,” says Peter Höppe, head of geo-risks research at Munich Re.
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His statement is not remarkable, even though the big American insurers don’t like to put the words “climate change” and “anthropogenic” in the same sentence. What is remarkable is that Munich Re first warned about global warming way back in 1973, when it noticed that flood damage was increasing. It was the first big company to do so—two decades before the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit triggered a planetary anxiety attack by publicizing the concepts of “global warming” and “climate change.”
From a powerpoint by Munich Re’s Peter Hoeppe. Munich Re publication from 1973 warning of impacts of extreme events due to climate change.
Munich Re, Swiss Re and the other reinsurers, along with the Lloyd’s of London insurance market (unrelated to the bank of the same name), stand out from the rest of the business world by being on the same page as scientists on climate change. What’s more, while most of the planet has its head in the sand about the reality and requirements of global warming, the reinsurance industry has already moved on to mastering the math on other catastrophes.
Höppe is compact, intense and enthusiastic. A bit rumpled, like a scientist from Central Casting, he loves to back up his statements with official sources, jumping up every few minutes during an interview to retrieve documents. The 1973 document he prints out for me is a source of pride within the company, which bills itself as “the first alerter to global warming.” The warning notes “the rising temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere [as a result of which glaciers and the polar caps recede, surfaces of lakes are reduced and ocean temperatures rise].” It points to the “rise of the CO2 content of the air, causing a change in the absorption of solar energy.”
The warning ends with a pledge: “We wish to enlarge on this complex of problems in greater detail, especially as—as far as we know—its conceivable impact on the long-range risk trend has hardly been examined to date.”
The pledge was fulfilled. Munich Re has been examining climate change since then, compiling the world’s most extensive database on natural disasters, covering some 33,000 events and drawing on research by its own staff and more than 200 other sources. “There hasn’t been any industry or company that has addressed climate change this early,” Höppe says.
How did Munich Re and the other reinsurers get it right so early? The answer, in a word, is fear—fear of losses that could destroy their business. No industry has more incentive to know the effects of climate change than the reinsurance and insurance industries.
LONDON, 30 November – The insurance industry doesn’t like climate change. Global warming is introducing a whole new element into the business of quantifying risk – the basic function of the insurance business. One of the main challenges facing insurers is the increased occurrence of floods in many countries.
The UK is one of the world’s leading insurance centres: a recent seminar at the University of Oxford in the UK examined flood patterns in Britain over recent years.
Whenever scoundrels want to justify something, once they’ve wrapped themselves in the flag, the bibles come out. Whether it’s slavery, war, child/spousal abuse, or environmental crime, you’ll hear the perps tell you it’s all ok, cuz it’s “in the BAH-bull.”
All across the country—most recently, in the state of Texas—local battles over the teaching of evolution are taking on a new complexion. More and more, it isn’t just evolution under attack, it’s also the teaching of climate science. The National Center for Science Education, the leading group defending the teaching of evolution across the country, has even broadened its portfolio: Now, it protects climate education too.
How did these issues get wrapped up together? On its face, there isn’t a clear reason—other than a marriage of convenience—why attacks on evolution and attacks on climate change ought to travel side by side. After all, we know why people deny evolution: Religion, especially the fundamentalist kind. And we know why people deny global warming: Free market ideology and libertarianism. These are not, last I checked, the same thing. (If anything, libertarians may be the most religiously skeptical group on the political right.)
And yet clearly there’s a relationship between the two issue stances. If you’re in doubt, watch this Climate Desk video of a number of members of Congress citing religion in the context of questioning global warming. (above)
