36 thoughts on “Richard Alley on the Polar Vortex and What He Worries About Most”
I wish Alley had included that the “next degree” is unavoidably “in the pipeline” because we’re not in equilibrium, like an iron skillet that takes time to let the heat it’s getting distribute itself through and through. I wish he’d mentioned the connection between lower temp gradient between pole and mid-latitude (the reality of which is clear) predicts in models the wider meanders in the storm-guiding jet stream, which we seem to be seeing. I wish he’d said that the next degree is MUCH more expensive than the first degree, and the 3rd degree is MUCH more expensive than the 2nd degree. Worried that we’ll be “worse off” ( how much? A bit?) isn’t getting it across. It’s just not getting across how dangerous our path is.
Wow indy222, that’s one of the best comments I’ve read yet anywhere. And believe me, I’ve read a lot of comments.
Everything you said is right, and is not that hard to explain to people if you put it as succinctly and easy to understand as you have here. In addition to the meandering of the Jet Stream, which can bring those frigid temps down to the U.S., the weakening of the Jet Stream due to a warmer Arctic can also mean stalling in one place. Very often it is this prolonged system that makes the weather so severe. As in Superstorm Sandy, which should have turned NE and into the Atlantic rather than being blocked by a high pressure air mass hanging out in that very area.
I also agree that reality is a shocker and people have to hear it.
I believe Richard Alley is very careful with his words so he doesn’t come across as an “alarmist” and scare a lot of the audience away. He perfectly know from the paleoclimate record what earth was before in a 400ppm CO2 world so he knows its already bad. But Alley is extremely focused on what we can do to solve this instead of just telling everybody that we are doomed. I believe he has a very positive attitude that can rub off on people with hope that we can change our energy course. But it requires a big majority of people to be completely attuned to the scientific facts and that what Richard is telling us is scientific fact (brilliantly demonstrated with the pen and effect of gravity). Once you are enlightened with the facts the motivation should be staring us in the face, even though he as well as everybody else know its going to be hard to change. Any addiction is.
I think Richard is a brilliant teacher and messenger to inform the public about global warming and climate change. We owe our planet and our children the time to listen and learn.
Excellent interview and no one can call Professor R.B Alley an alarmist living a lavish lifestyle, (he bikes around and climbs glaciers for a living for God’s sake), and a good respite to Donald Trump who thinks he knows better the the USAF. I am currently doing a 12 week MOOC Coursera on-line course on Energy, the Environment and Our Future led by Prof Alley (and imagine he gave his time free of charge). Also another (Turn Down The Heat: Why a 4 degree C warmer world must be avoided) given the World Bank (featuring Stefan Ramstorf and others).
These people are giving their time to educate people like me and like the IPCC AR1-5 authors do all the work in their own time without charge. They deserve better than having bellicose ignorant deniers calling them scam artists etc. After all climate scientists didn’t create the problem, brilliant engineers and inventors (like James Watt) and man’s thirst for reward did that.
You’re so right. The very idea that stellar scientific minds are giving their time and talents and getting the kind of inane and insulting rhetoric thrown at them, ticks me off. So does the Bizarro World idea that academics are lying about climate data to bring in the research bucks.
I will say this, though. The United States appears to the world as a backwoods yahoo denialists. We have to change that.
I would have agreed with you until we here in Australia (not me) voted in Tony Abbott and his band of climate change denying, anti-science, backward, uberconservative morons.
Recklessness is hardly “conservative”. What both Australia and the USA have is a bunch of coal interests putting their money behind certain groups whose positions are accepted as “conservative” because they are alleged to be “the conservative party/parties”.
The irony is that Australia could have already decarbonized its electricity supply by following the example of France. It even has its own massive supplies of uranium. Instead, Australia has a ban on nuclear energy in place.
Arguably, it doesn’t matter what tiny Australia does so long as Chindia keep building 50-odd gigawatts of coal-fired generation every year. I don’t take that as an excuse for setting a poor example.
I should have said socially uber conservative. You are correct about our uranium reserves. Lets bury the waste in your house.
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And we’ll put the coal ash on your lawn.
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Lets put the coal ash on your lawn cuz its nukes or nothin.
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I’ll be happy to take the (steam, not metallurgical) coal ash from an all-nuclear USA!
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Methinks it’s less the common morons and denialists. It’s the fossil fools, i.e. the greedy and backwards rich from the Koch Brothers to Rupert Murdoch that corrupt politics and discourse in U.S.A, Canada, Australia. These “nations” are no longer beacons of democracy and progress, but corrupted oligarchies in the hands of a few industrial vampires. What they ultimately deal out is the catastrophic collapse of “capitalism”, dwarfing the collapse of “Marxism”, by clinging to their glorious past and refusing to look at the present, let alone the future. I sincerely hope Europe doesn’t go down the same drain.
Ha! Of course not. But I hope some of Europe (except e.g. Britain) can at least avoid fracking and mining and logging and agro-devastating the last heck out of the crumbling remains of our life support system in the end phase of the economic crash. Then there is some hope for decent localized and self-sufficient survival.
I second Sandy—well said, indy. And Sandy, JCL, and fortran have said it well also. Perhaps the best five lead-off comments to a thread in a while. I will throw in that I lean towards ALL climate scientists being less “careful” and more forceful in speaking truth—-we are running out of time, and the deniers are not careful at all in telling their lies.
It’s January, typically the coldest month here in Arizona, and the temp at the house here in Phoenix at 5am was 60 deg F. Not one single day below freezing. I can hardly wait for summer. I certainly agree with the above comments about not being reticent to shout the facts from the rooftops. Humanity is in grave danger and this is no time to be shy. It’s sad to see Obama so entrapped by the oil & gas money that he still pushes “all of the above.” He’s going to have to explain that to his daughters some day.
Wes, I lived in Tucson for three years and loved it. But Phoenix is quite different than Tucson both in politics and climate, as you know so well. I would have to advise you to get the heck out of Phoenix sometime soon before it gets unlivable and the water is gone.
Wes – politics is politics. Change comes from grassroots forcing politics to follow. It’s quite amazing isn’t it? A SOTU speech warning AGW, and clean coal? All of the above? Who dreamed up that line? It sounds like answer d.) in a multiple choice exam. I think it’s the 40 year old energy crisis stuff recycled. The pollsters probably said it was more popular to tout increased domestic energy sources( which he did in SOTU), than AGW. First term plan was increased domestic energy and freedom from foreign sources. This term its energy independence and AGW. No vision of any conflict there. It’s as if they incorporated drill, baby, drill in the platform. We did. Shale oil and gas. No word of sustainable future.
Well said Wes. I particularly like your part about energy independence probably polling a lot better than AGW, so Obama went with that. His advisers are terrible – have been since day one. He should have started in Jan. of 2009 to push 100% on green jobs, infrastructure, green transportation, renewables, retrofitting, etc. He could have put America back to work building the future and a better world. Of course I think that our system badly needed health reform, but I believe that if he had waited on that until the push for green jobs had brought the economy back reasonably well, that it would have been easier to get all the Stimulus money and put it to good use, not lose horrifically in such an important year as Census 2010, AND get the ACA passed, perhaps even single payer. He threw away more political capital from the 2008 election than, leaving himself and all Progressives vulnerable. All that led to the anti-science, anti-government extremists of the Tea Party, funded, of course, by Big Money.
His advisers terrible, but that doesn’t begin to take him off the hook. It’s clear to me that he most certainly does NOT get it. There’s no time for ‘all of the above.’ Shale gas is NOT a bridge fuel. Clean Coal is a total sham.
President Obama, why did you choose to read off the industry’s brochures for your energy policies?
I can’t understand why Alley doesn’t attribute the current weird weather on AGW. The Jet Stream is wandering because the Arctic is a lot warmer than it used to be. And the Arctic is warmer than it used to be ONLY because of AGW.
I’d go farther. All the weather patterns everywhere on the globe are being altered by AGW to some degree – that’s what climate change means – it means the weather is no longer the same, taken as a whole, and over an appropriate time period.
Look, if we tried to answer the inverse question, could we do it honestly and in good conscience? Could you truthfully say AGW has no effect on all weather events? Of course not.
When we graph the range of air temperatures, or weather events, or ocean temperatures, etc we get a bell curve. The bell curves for all these things have shifted to the right over the past hundred years. THAT is AGW, and the fact that a graph of temp or events from 1850-1890 still has some overlap with a graph from 1970-2010 does not mean AGW has not affected all of our weather, because it has.
It simply means that a lot of our weather resembles weather from the past. Imagine a time in the future when these bell curve graphs do not overlap. If we were looking at air temps, that would mean that the absolute coldest day of the year is now hotter than the warmest day of yesteryear. Besides the fact that civilization would be gone at that point, would it only then be appropriate to say that AGW has affected all our weather?
Or would it be appropriate to say the same thing when the two bell curves have moved apart by a standard deviation? No? When then?
Look, I live in Vermont. Let’s say June 15th, 2014 will be a gorgeous day. 72F, low humidity.
Would it be fair to say that the weather on that day is affected by AGW? We had days in 1963 that had identical characteristics. But the fact is that we had MORE of them back in 1963, and the reason we have less of them now is because of AGW. The weather that day in June 2014 is not really the same as in 1963, because we no longer have the same expectation of seeing such a day. A fine June day is now more of an anomaly, which makes it different from such a day in 1963.
Amazingly there are still no climate trolls (searching the internet for key words to put their inane/politicized/sometimes-paid-for comments anywhere they find them. An intelligent conversation so far – fantastic!
The U.S. has a long history of Big Fossil Fuel interests manipulating the system. But now, with Citizens United (Scalia and Thomas were being feted at a big event funded by Koch and other money at the same time they were ‘deciding’ on perhaps the biggest give-away of what was left of our democracy) it’s money. It’s a corporatocracy now, with the widest gap between rich and poor and growing even more so.
I find it as zero ‘coincidence’ that Canada’s ruling party gained power as the tar sands rich were getting richer from their filth. I find the same for Australia that just happened to find a huge coal deposit.
As much as I totally believe that there are flaws so deep in capitalism as we see it in the U.S. today, it is equally possible to have governments of different systems turn to the same goals – communism like China, dictatorships, aristocracies, and the various forms of governance that use a different name but serve the same interests.
I have a couple of things I’d like to mention, but which don’t relate to the saintly Richard Alley, bless his soul.
First, Royal Dutch Shell has just announced that it is not going to proceed with its Arctic drilling program in 2014. I regard this is as pretty good news from an environmental point of view.
***
My second interest today is the crazy action in the propane market just now. There have been massive price spikes in propane within the past week. As Reuters notes, while there is a dire shortage of propane in the Upper Midwest and price gouging appears to be the case, Mr. Market still deigns to sell record levels of propane overseas.
Here’s some more OFF TOPIC (but it’s all really ON topic, isn’t it?)
The State Department announced today that the environmental impact statement for the Keystone XL is just fine and dandy with them. All we need is for Kerry to approve it and Obama to stand aside and construction can begin (and the Kochs will be on their way to being the richest men on earth).
As for Shell?—-good news for now, but once things in the arctic warm up enough, they WILL be back–it may take a few decades, but the exploiters will get there sooner or later—there’s just too much oil and gas (and minerals) up there for them to resist.
Re: the propane? Yes, just like with the fairly large amounts of gasoline we export, the goods follow the money. Her in the mid-atlantic, they want to retrofit the Cove Point MD LNG facility so that it can EXPORT LNG, since that will allow them to charge more everywhere—-when you’ve got a bit of an oversupply, go looking for some demand and use it up.
Thank God for predictability. A year ago when President Obama mentioned the Keystone XL pipeline in the 2013 SOTU speech, i predicted that the pipeline was a done deal, and we’d get the announcement some Friday on a slow news day late in the afternoon after reporters were off to their Happy Hour gatherings. What I hadn’t counted on was Obama’s chutzpah and perfect willingness to betray his enviro-leftie supporters quite so willingly with the quick approval of the southern portion of the Keystone XL pipeline which went into full throughput mode last week.
Things are moving right along. The price of gasoline should go up in the Midwest by anywhere from two bits to a buck per gallon within two years. Thank you, Mr. President! 🙂
Very good to see you here again. Actually, the southern leg passes within near spitting distance of where I live (less than 10 miles). I can see it being built.
On President Obama, it’s how he words these things. The SA article points out a key aspect in his language – will the pipeline ‘significantly’ increase climate change? Well, that’s just intentionally vague to the point of basically saying he is going to approve it, eventually. Will any one thing ‘significantly’ contribute to climate change? One coal plant running at full steam 24/7 wouldn’t significantly affect climate change if it was the only emitter in operation on the planet.
Which would easily fit with Obama’s ‘significant’ caveat to support approval. But anything that facilitates tar sands extraction, especially a major subsidy like a pipeline, definitely does contribute, significantly, to climate change.
I’m curious to see if John Kerry is corrupt enough to approve it, too.
Notice the keystone announcement was done around Super Bowl time. Good place to slip it into the full news cycles less likely to be noticed than on slow news day.
That’s the way the game is played. Whenever they have bad news to put out, they always pray for something that will get the infotainment folks in a lather—-a natural disaster, a Lohan or a Bieber getting arrested—-anything to cover their tracks.
Mr. President,
I believed in you, but you may be just about to betray the people who supported you, our planet and even your beautiful daughters. You must not say ‘YES’ to the Keystone XL Pipeline. The idea that it would not significantly contribute to climate change is completely wrong. Even CEO’s of fossil fuel companies know this, if a project becomes too onerous and expensive it won’t be continued. You must stop the oil companies from extracting perhaps the dirtiest form of fossil fuel – bitumen – which takes massive treatment even to extract it, dilute it with benzene and send it by pipeline. It would then go to the Gulf to be refined and EXPORTED. No, please, NO KXL PIPELINE.
I wish Alley had included that the “next degree” is unavoidably “in the pipeline” because we’re not in equilibrium, like an iron skillet that takes time to let the heat it’s getting distribute itself through and through. I wish he’d mentioned the connection between lower temp gradient between pole and mid-latitude (the reality of which is clear) predicts in models the wider meanders in the storm-guiding jet stream, which we seem to be seeing. I wish he’d said that the next degree is MUCH more expensive than the first degree, and the 3rd degree is MUCH more expensive than the 2nd degree. Worried that we’ll be “worse off” ( how much? A bit?) isn’t getting it across. It’s just not getting across how dangerous our path is.
Wow indy222, that’s one of the best comments I’ve read yet anywhere. And believe me, I’ve read a lot of comments.
Everything you said is right, and is not that hard to explain to people if you put it as succinctly and easy to understand as you have here. In addition to the meandering of the Jet Stream, which can bring those frigid temps down to the U.S., the weakening of the Jet Stream due to a warmer Arctic can also mean stalling in one place. Very often it is this prolonged system that makes the weather so severe. As in Superstorm Sandy, which should have turned NE and into the Atlantic rather than being blocked by a high pressure air mass hanging out in that very area.
I also agree that reality is a shocker and people have to hear it.
I believe Richard Alley is very careful with his words so he doesn’t come across as an “alarmist” and scare a lot of the audience away. He perfectly know from the paleoclimate record what earth was before in a 400ppm CO2 world so he knows its already bad. But Alley is extremely focused on what we can do to solve this instead of just telling everybody that we are doomed. I believe he has a very positive attitude that can rub off on people with hope that we can change our energy course. But it requires a big majority of people to be completely attuned to the scientific facts and that what Richard is telling us is scientific fact (brilliantly demonstrated with the pen and effect of gravity). Once you are enlightened with the facts the motivation should be staring us in the face, even though he as well as everybody else know its going to be hard to change. Any addiction is.
I think Richard is a brilliant teacher and messenger to inform the public about global warming and climate change. We owe our planet and our children the time to listen and learn.
Excellent interview and no one can call Professor R.B Alley an alarmist living a lavish lifestyle, (he bikes around and climbs glaciers for a living for God’s sake), and a good respite to Donald Trump who thinks he knows better the the USAF. I am currently doing a 12 week MOOC Coursera on-line course on Energy, the Environment and Our Future led by Prof Alley (and imagine he gave his time free of charge). Also another (Turn Down The Heat: Why a 4 degree C warmer world must be avoided) given the World Bank (featuring Stefan Ramstorf and others).
These people are giving their time to educate people like me and like the IPCC AR1-5 authors do all the work in their own time without charge. They deserve better than having bellicose ignorant deniers calling them scam artists etc. After all climate scientists didn’t create the problem, brilliant engineers and inventors (like James Watt) and man’s thirst for reward did that.
You’re so right. The very idea that stellar scientific minds are giving their time and talents and getting the kind of inane and insulting rhetoric thrown at them, ticks me off. So does the Bizarro World idea that academics are lying about climate data to bring in the research bucks.
I will say this, though. The United States appears to the world as a backwoods yahoo denialists. We have to change that.
I would have agreed with you until we here in Australia (not me) voted in Tony Abbott and his band of climate change denying, anti-science, backward, uberconservative morons.
Recklessness is hardly “conservative”. What both Australia and the USA have is a bunch of coal interests putting their money behind certain groups whose positions are accepted as “conservative” because they are alleged to be “the conservative party/parties”.
The irony is that Australia could have already decarbonized its electricity supply by following the example of France. It even has its own massive supplies of uranium. Instead, Australia has a ban on nuclear energy in place.
Arguably, it doesn’t matter what tiny Australia does so long as Chindia keep building 50-odd gigawatts of coal-fired generation every year. I don’t take that as an excuse for setting a poor example.
I should have said socially uber conservative. You are correct about our uranium reserves. Lets bury the waste in your house.
And we’ll put the coal ash on your lawn.
Lets put the coal ash on your lawn cuz its nukes or nothin.
I’ll be happy to take the (steam, not metallurgical) coal ash from an all-nuclear USA!
Methinks it’s less the common morons and denialists. It’s the fossil fools, i.e. the greedy and backwards rich from the Koch Brothers to Rupert Murdoch that corrupt politics and discourse in U.S.A, Canada, Australia. These “nations” are no longer beacons of democracy and progress, but corrupted oligarchies in the hands of a few industrial vampires. What they ultimately deal out is the catastrophic collapse of “capitalism”, dwarfing the collapse of “Marxism”, by clinging to their glorious past and refusing to look at the present, let alone the future. I sincerely hope Europe doesn’t go down the same drain.
Do you think Europe can avoid it if those three go down?
Ha! Of course not. But I hope some of Europe (except e.g. Britain) can at least avoid fracking and mining and logging and agro-devastating the last heck out of the crumbling remains of our life support system in the end phase of the economic crash. Then there is some hope for decent localized and self-sufficient survival.
(Britain is perhaps next in row: Primitive and easy manipulatable voting system, lots of crazy rich folks corrupting politicians and media. E.g. “IPCC hearing brings UK closer to US polarisation on climate change” )
I second Sandy—well said, indy. And Sandy, JCL, and fortran have said it well also. Perhaps the best five lead-off comments to a thread in a while. I will throw in that I lean towards ALL climate scientists being less “careful” and more forceful in speaking truth—-we are running out of time, and the deniers are not careful at all in telling their lies.
It’s January, typically the coldest month here in Arizona, and the temp at the house here in Phoenix at 5am was 60 deg F. Not one single day below freezing. I can hardly wait for summer. I certainly agree with the above comments about not being reticent to shout the facts from the rooftops. Humanity is in grave danger and this is no time to be shy. It’s sad to see Obama so entrapped by the oil & gas money that he still pushes “all of the above.” He’s going to have to explain that to his daughters some day.
Wes, I lived in Tucson for three years and loved it. But Phoenix is quite different than Tucson both in politics and climate, as you know so well. I would have to advise you to get the heck out of Phoenix sometime soon before it gets unlivable and the water is gone.
Wes – politics is politics. Change comes from grassroots forcing politics to follow. It’s quite amazing isn’t it? A SOTU speech warning AGW, and clean coal? All of the above? Who dreamed up that line? It sounds like answer d.) in a multiple choice exam. I think it’s the 40 year old energy crisis stuff recycled. The pollsters probably said it was more popular to tout increased domestic energy sources( which he did in SOTU), than AGW. First term plan was increased domestic energy and freedom from foreign sources. This term its energy independence and AGW. No vision of any conflict there. It’s as if they incorporated drill, baby, drill in the platform. We did. Shale oil and gas. No word of sustainable future.
Well said Wes. I particularly like your part about energy independence probably polling a lot better than AGW, so Obama went with that. His advisers are terrible – have been since day one. He should have started in Jan. of 2009 to push 100% on green jobs, infrastructure, green transportation, renewables, retrofitting, etc. He could have put America back to work building the future and a better world. Of course I think that our system badly needed health reform, but I believe that if he had waited on that until the push for green jobs had brought the economy back reasonably well, that it would have been easier to get all the Stimulus money and put it to good use, not lose horrifically in such an important year as Census 2010, AND get the ACA passed, perhaps even single payer. He threw away more political capital from the 2008 election than, leaving himself and all Progressives vulnerable. All that led to the anti-science, anti-government extremists of the Tea Party, funded, of course, by Big Money.
His advisers terrible, but that doesn’t begin to take him off the hook. It’s clear to me that he most certainly does NOT get it. There’s no time for ‘all of the above.’ Shale gas is NOT a bridge fuel. Clean Coal is a total sham.
President Obama, why did you choose to read off the industry’s brochures for your energy policies?
I can’t understand why Alley doesn’t attribute the current weird weather on AGW. The Jet Stream is wandering because the Arctic is a lot warmer than it used to be. And the Arctic is warmer than it used to be ONLY because of AGW.
I’d go farther. All the weather patterns everywhere on the globe are being altered by AGW to some degree – that’s what climate change means – it means the weather is no longer the same, taken as a whole, and over an appropriate time period.
Look, if we tried to answer the inverse question, could we do it honestly and in good conscience? Could you truthfully say AGW has no effect on all weather events? Of course not.
When we graph the range of air temperatures, or weather events, or ocean temperatures, etc we get a bell curve. The bell curves for all these things have shifted to the right over the past hundred years. THAT is AGW, and the fact that a graph of temp or events from 1850-1890 still has some overlap with a graph from 1970-2010 does not mean AGW has not affected all of our weather, because it has.
It simply means that a lot of our weather resembles weather from the past. Imagine a time in the future when these bell curve graphs do not overlap. If we were looking at air temps, that would mean that the absolute coldest day of the year is now hotter than the warmest day of yesteryear. Besides the fact that civilization would be gone at that point, would it only then be appropriate to say that AGW has affected all our weather?
Or would it be appropriate to say the same thing when the two bell curves have moved apart by a standard deviation? No? When then?
Look, I live in Vermont. Let’s say June 15th, 2014 will be a gorgeous day. 72F, low humidity.
Would it be fair to say that the weather on that day is affected by AGW? We had days in 1963 that had identical characteristics. But the fact is that we had MORE of them back in 1963, and the reason we have less of them now is because of AGW. The weather that day in June 2014 is not really the same as in 1963, because we no longer have the same expectation of seeing such a day. A fine June day is now more of an anomaly, which makes it different from such a day in 1963.
AGW is affecting all our weather, all the time.
Amazingly there are still no climate trolls (searching the internet for key words to put their inane/politicized/sometimes-paid-for comments anywhere they find them. An intelligent conversation so far – fantastic!
The U.S. has a long history of Big Fossil Fuel interests manipulating the system. But now, with Citizens United (Scalia and Thomas were being feted at a big event funded by Koch and other money at the same time they were ‘deciding’ on perhaps the biggest give-away of what was left of our democracy) it’s money. It’s a corporatocracy now, with the widest gap between rich and poor and growing even more so.
I find it as zero ‘coincidence’ that Canada’s ruling party gained power as the tar sands rich were getting richer from their filth. I find the same for Australia that just happened to find a huge coal deposit.
As much as I totally believe that there are flaws so deep in capitalism as we see it in the U.S. today, it is equally possible to have governments of different systems turn to the same goals – communism like China, dictatorships, aristocracies, and the various forms of governance that use a different name but serve the same interests.
OFF TOPIC
Gentle readers,
I have a couple of things I’d like to mention, but which don’t relate to the saintly Richard Alley, bless his soul.
First, Royal Dutch Shell has just announced that it is not going to proceed with its Arctic drilling program in 2014. I regard this is as pretty good news from an environmental point of view.
http://tinyurl.com/n639wkf
***
My second interest today is the crazy action in the propane market just now. There have been massive price spikes in propane within the past week. As Reuters notes, while there is a dire shortage of propane in the Upper Midwest and price gouging appears to be the case, Mr. Market still deigns to sell record levels of propane overseas.
http://tinyurl.com/k5z8vk6
Anyone else following this market development?
Here’s some more OFF TOPIC (but it’s all really ON topic, isn’t it?)
The State Department announced today that the environmental impact statement for the Keystone XL is just fine and dandy with them. All we need is for Kerry to approve it and Obama to stand aside and construction can begin (and the Kochs will be on their way to being the richest men on earth).
As for Shell?—-good news for now, but once things in the arctic warm up enough, they WILL be back–it may take a few decades, but the exploiters will get there sooner or later—there’s just too much oil and gas (and minerals) up there for them to resist.
Re: the propane? Yes, just like with the fairly large amounts of gasoline we export, the goods follow the money. Her in the mid-atlantic, they want to retrofit the Cove Point MD LNG facility so that it can EXPORT LNG, since that will allow them to charge more everywhere—-when you’ve got a bit of an oversupply, go looking for some demand and use it up.
Hi boldguy,
Thank God for predictability. A year ago when President Obama mentioned the Keystone XL pipeline in the 2013 SOTU speech, i predicted that the pipeline was a done deal, and we’d get the announcement some Friday on a slow news day late in the afternoon after reporters were off to their Happy Hour gatherings. What I hadn’t counted on was Obama’s chutzpah and perfect willingness to betray his enviro-leftie supporters quite so willingly with the quick approval of the southern portion of the Keystone XL pipeline which went into full throughput mode last week.
Things are moving right along. The price of gasoline should go up in the Midwest by anywhere from two bits to a buck per gallon within two years. Thank you, Mr. President! 🙂
Hi Ray,
Very good to see you here again. Actually, the southern leg passes within near spitting distance of where I live (less than 10 miles). I can see it being built.
On the northern leg, various groups are spinning the latest news to fit their perspectives. I received an email from the Sierra Club today saying that it actually shows the pipeline would contribute to climate change. Scientific American is pitching it that way, too:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2014/01/31/keystone-pipeline-will-impact-climate-change-state-department-reports/
On President Obama, it’s how he words these things. The SA article points out a key aspect in his language – will the pipeline ‘significantly’ increase climate change? Well, that’s just intentionally vague to the point of basically saying he is going to approve it, eventually. Will any one thing ‘significantly’ contribute to climate change? One coal plant running at full steam 24/7 wouldn’t significantly affect climate change if it was the only emitter in operation on the planet.
The corporate media, like the supposedly Communist News Network CNN, are pitching it as having little impact:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/31/politics/keystone-pipeline/
Which would easily fit with Obama’s ‘significant’ caveat to support approval. But anything that facilitates tar sands extraction, especially a major subsidy like a pipeline, definitely does contribute, significantly, to climate change.
I’m curious to see if John Kerry is corrupt enough to approve it, too.
Kerry:
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/01/keystone-pipeline-john-kerry-102955.html
Notice the keystone announcement was done around Super Bowl time. Good place to slip it into the full news cycles less likely to be noticed than on slow news day.
That’s the way the game is played. Whenever they have bad news to put out, they always pray for something that will get the infotainment folks in a lather—-a natural disaster, a Lohan or a Bieber getting arrested—-anything to cover their tracks.
Obviously that’s gouging – isn’t that illegal?
Here’s the White House contact info. Also what I wrote:
White House
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments
PHONE NUMBERS
Comments: 202-456-1111
Switchboard: 202-456-1414
Mr. President,
I believed in you, but you may be just about to betray the people who supported you, our planet and even your beautiful daughters. You must not say ‘YES’ to the Keystone XL Pipeline. The idea that it would not significantly contribute to climate change is completely wrong. Even CEO’s of fossil fuel companies know this, if a project becomes too onerous and expensive it won’t be continued. You must stop the oil companies from extracting perhaps the dirtiest form of fossil fuel – bitumen – which takes massive treatment even to extract it, dilute it with benzene and send it by pipeline. It would then go to the Gulf to be refined and EXPORTED. No, please, NO KXL PIPELINE.