Month: February 2014

Trouble in paradise.  Comment thread starts in….3…2…1….

National Geographic:

The German village of Atterwasch is tiny, its single street lined with sturdy brick and stone houses. The village has a single church whose bells peal out at noon each day, a small volunteer fire department, and a cemetery with a special section devoted to German soldiers who died nearby in the closing months of World War II.

Atterwasch may soon be gone.

Vattenfall, a Swedish energy company, hopes to relocate the village and its residents in order to strip-mine the ground underneath for lignite, or “brown coal.”

“They would tear everything down, dig up the cemetery, blow up the church and cut down all the trees,” said Christian Huschga, a screenwriter and father of two who has lived in Atterwasch for more than 30 years.

Billions of tons of brown coal lie buried underneath the Lausitz region, a gently rolling landscape of pine forests, farm fields, and rural villages about 100 miles (161 kilometers) south of Berlin, in what was once East Germany. In the past century, the landscape has been scarred and pitted by strip mines hundreds of feet deep that sprawl over dozens of square miles.

Continue reading “German Utilities Still in Love with Brown Coal”

Esquire:

This week, a Very Special Episode of How We’re Fked As A Species.

Centuries from now, when the several remaining humans are huddled around a dwindling fire and pondering how each of them will kill the others and eat their still-warm flesh, the most boring among the remnant will pose the question, “Who is to blame for all of this?” Someone will mention the Koch Brothers. Someone else will bring up BP, and maybe our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline will get a moan-out while the silent one in the corner sizes up the available rocks and studies the heads of his companions. If I’m not around, I hope at least one of them will summon up his last remaining breath and say, “The noodlebrained bag of useless flesh named David Gregory,” before collapsing in a heap in the corner, whence he will awaken an hour later to find one of his companions sizing up his quadriceps for a light snack.

Continue reading “Charles Pierce: Meditation on Bill Nye and David Gregory”

It should be added that recent droughts in the west have had Katrina-like costs.

I fully agree that reversing the slide into the New Dark Ages is a worthy preoccupation – but, it’s worth asking, – Bill Nye getting better at this?  I’m not so sure – getting sucked into “the debate” on a venue that has criminally ignored the issue for years, except to perpetuate the idea that there is a “debate” among people who actually know stuff –
he gives yet another opportunity for Marsha Blackburn (think Sara Palin without the charm) to spout science denialist talking points.

Huffington Post:

First, some context: TV news shows almost never cover climate change, which ought to be one of the most aggressively-reported issues around, given that, y’know, it’s a dire threat to the planet and everyone on it. A recent study from Media Matters found that the Sunday shows on NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox spent a combined 27 minutes on the topic in the whole of 2013. Meet the Press was singled out as “failing to offer a single substantial mention of climate change” for the entire year.

I cringed when he held up a picture of the arctic and said “antactic”.  I wish he’d bluntly said “climate change is manmade”, “humans are the cause, humans are the solution”, and “we can’t prove any single event was caused by global warming” with “we can’t prove any single home run was caused by steroids — but we *can* prove there wouldn’t have been as many”.
He does not yet know how to cut to the heart of an argument.  Some points for continuing to show up.
What made a difference in this presentation was David Gregory’s continued reminders to climate denier Marsha Blackburn that blatant denial was not an option, the consensus was clear. Points for him on that, but deducts for scheduling Nye and Blackburn in the first place. Should have been leading scientists with expertise, and policy maker who is serious about solutions.
Fact Checking below.

TheWire:

Here’s an example of how this will work. The segment, which you can watch here, begins inauspiciously, with a quote from NBC weatherguy Al Roker.

Al Roker:

Is it a natural cycle? Is it — is it due to human interference or human conditions that we have created? That remains open to debate. But there is no doubt the climate is changing.

Rating: False
Continue reading “Bill Nye vs the Barbarians: Is Bill Getting Better at This?”

Toronto Globe and Mail:

Scientists call it Santa’s revenge. It’s the theory that persistent weather patterns at the mid-latitudes – like this winter’s tediously long-lasting polar vortex or California’s severe drought – are a direct consequence of climate change heating up the Arctic.

New evidence suggests the link is real, even as experts continue to argue over how much it is influencing the weather on a day to day basis. The effect has implications for severe weather predictions, food security and water use across the northern hemisphere. If the data are right, they suggest that climate change in the Arctic is coming home to roost in a big and expensive way.

“It’s starting to get harder to say that something isn’t happening,” said Jennifer Francis, a research professor at Rutgers University who presented her findings Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago.

Continue reading “Is This Santa’s Revenge?”

Chris Mooney in Mother Jones:

How do we know that Bill Nye won the creationism debate with Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis earlier this month? Simple: The Christian Right is now airing its grievances over the outcome publicly, with one of its top leaders saying the debate made Christians look completely out of touch.

AP – Secretary of State John Kerry toured a factory in Beijing Saturday and announced a new joint partnership with China to work on curbing emissions and output of greenhouse gases that trap solar heat in the atmosphere. (Feb. 15)

Kerry was on tour of Asia where emerging competitors must be looking with delight at the Anti Science movement in the US – a guarantee to erode our technological edge.

UPDATE:

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Climate change may be the world’s “most fearsome” weapon of mass destruction and urgent global action is needed to combat it, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday, comparing those who deny its existence or question its causes to people who insist the Earth is flat.

In a speech to Indonesian students, civic leaders and government officials in Jakarta, Kerry laid into climate change skeptics, accusing them of using shoddy science and scientists to delay measures needed to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases at the risk of imperiling the planet. He also went after those who dispute who is responsible for such emissions, arguing that everyone and every country must take responsibility and act immediately

“We simply don’t have time to let a few loud interest groups hijack the climate conversation,” he said, referring to what he called “big companies” that “don’t want to change and spend a lot of money” to act to reduce the risks. He later singled out big oil and coal concerns as the primary offenders.

“We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and science and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts,” Kerry told the audience gathered at a U.S. Embassy-run American Center in a Jakarta shopping mall. “Nor should we allow any room for those who think that the costs associated with doing the right thing outweigh the benefits.”

“The science is unequivocal, and those who refuse to believe it are simply burying their heads in the sand,” Kerry said. “We don’t have time for a meeting anywhere of the Flat Earth Society,”

Last Fall the Economist published a cover story detailing the tumbling fortunes of European electric utilities as Renewable energies continue to eat away at the 100 year old fossil fuel business model.
Amory Lovins weighed in with a response. The two pieces are a great primer in understanding how the current revolution in power production is moving along.
Have excepted liberally here, but for a good read, go to the links and check out the two back to back.

Economist:

ON JUNE 16th something very peculiar happened in Germany’s electricity market. The wholesale price of electricity fell to minus €100 per megawatt hour (MWh). That is, generating companies were having to pay the managers of the grid to take their electricity. It was a bright, breezy Sunday. Demand was low. Between 2pm and 3pm, solar and wind generators produced 28.9 gigawatts (GW) of power, more than half the total. The grid at that time could not cope with more than 45GW without becoming unstable. At the peak, total generation was over 51GW; so prices went negative to encourage cutbacks and protect the grid from overloading.

The trouble is that power plants using nuclear fuel or brown coal are designed to run full blast and cannot easily reduce production, whereas the extra energy from solar and wind power is free. So the burden of adjustment fell on gas-fired and hard-coal power plants, whose output plummeted to only about 10% of capacity.
–
The decline of Europe’s utilities has certainly been startling. At their peak in 2008, the top 20 energy utilities were worth roughly €1 trillion ($1.3 trillion). Now they are worth less than half that (see chart 1). Since September 2008, utilities have been the worst-performing sector in the Morgan Stanley index of global share prices. In 2008 the top ten European utilities all had credit ratings of A or better. Now only five do.

Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Utilities Ignore Renewables at Own Risk”