Month: July 2015

Denial can’t stop it. Obstruction can only slow it a bit. Lies can’t keep the truth from bubbling out.

Renewables aren’t knocking, they’re kicking in the doors.

Cleantechnica:

NV Energy, a Berkshire Hathaway-owned utility company, has signed a PPA to purchase electricity from the 100 MW Playa Solar 2 power plant at a stunningly low price of $0.0387/kWh!

CleanTechnica just reported on “the world’s cheapest solar” landing in Austin, Texas, with bids under 4 cents/kWh (and the assumed unsubsidized price of solar thus being below 5.71 cents/kWh), and that was incredible news, but it looks like that staggering news wasn’t even the highlight of the month!

Note that 3.87 cents/kWh is approximately 68% cheaper than the national average electricity price. I’s also well below the low levelized cost of electricity of coal, natural gas, or nuclear, according to Lazard. The only electricity generation option that can compete with that is wind energy. Furthermore, it’s much lower than the low of 6 cents/kWh that Lazard was predicting for solar in 2017, even if you add in the expected federal subsidy boost (which brings the price up to 5.53 cents/kWh).

Guardian:

So much power was produced by Denmark’s windfarms on Thursday that the country was able to meet its domestic electricity demand and export power to Norway, Germany and Sweden.

On an unusually windy day, Denmark found itself producing 116% of its national electricity needs from wind turbines yesterday evening. By 3am on Friday, when electricity demand dropped, that figure had risen to 140%.

Interconnectors allowed 80% of the power surplus to be shared equally between Germany and Norway, which can store it in hydropower systems for use later. Sweden took the remaining fifth of excess power.

Continue reading “The Revolution is Now”

Below, bonus – from the same series,  Candy Man Blues – don’t miss it.

Continue reading “Music Break: Global Jam of Grateful Dead’s Ripple”

With the sorta-news that Exxon has known about the threat of climate change since 1981, (is that the year they first hired a physicist?), maybe it’s time to ask if climate denial meets the definition of organized crime – as Senator Whitehouse does above, starting about 2 minutes in….

Yet the fossil fuel industry continues its crafty, cynical campaign of denial and delay.  Big coal, oil, and natural gas, and related industries like the Koch Brothers’ companies, profit by offloading the costs of their carbon pollution onto the rest of us.  They traffic in products that put health and safety at risk, and they don’t tell the truth about their product.

Sound familiar?  It should, because the fossil fuel industry is using a familiar playbook, one perfected by the tobacco industry.  Big tobacco fought for more than four decades to bury the truth about the health effects of its product. 

But the government has a playbook too.  It’s called RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.  The elements of a civil racketeering case are simple.  The government must allege four things: defendants (1) conducted (2) an enterprise (3) through a pattern (4) of racketeering activity.  ”Conducting” means everything from directing to aiding and abetting the activity.  An “enterprise” can be any form of association or a common scheme.  “Pattern” means continuity of the scheme, and for civil RICO particularly the prospect of ongoing conduct.  “Racketeering activity” simply means the violation of designated federal laws, including the federal mail fraud and wire fraud statutes.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse website:

Washington, DC – Today, in his 98^th weekly “Time to Wake Up” speech on climate change, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) highlighted the similarities between the tobacco industry’s efforts to mislead the American public about the dangers of its product and the ongoing effort by fossil-fuel interests to cast doubt on climate science.

“Big coal, oil, and natural gas, and related industries like the Koch Brothers’ companies, profit by offloading the costs of their carbon pollution onto the rest of us.  They traffic in products that put health and safety at risk, and they don’t tell the truth about their product,” Whitehouse said.  “Sound familiar?  It should, because the fossil fuel industry is using a familiar playbook, one perfected by the tobacco industry.”

Whitehouse noted that ultimately a U.S. District Court Judge found the tobacco companies’ fraudulent campaign amounted to a racketeering enterprise.

Continue reading “Are Climate Deniers Racketeers? or just Good Fellas?”

Across the country, a lot of people don’t realize how beautiful, and in a climate-altered world,  precious – the waters of the Northern Great Lakes are, or the threat that hangs over them.

ThinkProgress:

The Heartland Institute got out ahead of the curve, publishing a piece titled Is The Global Left Counting on Pope to Split the Catholic Church Over Global Warming? back in May. Take a moment to ponder this:

Has the Left finally come out with a method that will destroy the power of the Church to cause further damage to an already weakened Church, having been busy for years preparing for this moment? Not to be forgotten is the unholy alliance of international communism with the jihadi Islamists.

Greg Laden’s Blog:

Now, there is a brand new paper by Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer, Scott Brophy, Elisabeth A. Lloyd, and Michael Marriott, called
Recurrent Fury: Conspiratorial Discourse in the Blogosphere Triggered by Research on the Role of Conspiracist Ideation in Climate Denial, in the current or upcoming issue of the Journal of Social and Political Psychology. The abstract reads:

A growing body of evidence has implicated conspiracist ideation in the rejection of scientific propositions. Internet blogs in particular have become the staging ground for conspiracy theories that challenge the link between HIV and AIDS, the benefits of vaccinations, or the reality of climate change. A recent study involving visitors to climate blogs found that conspiracist ideation was associated with the rejection of climate science and other scientific propositions such as the link between lung cancer and smoking, and between HIV and AIDS. That article stimulated considerable discursive activity in the climate blogosphere—i.e., the numerous blogs dedicated to climate “skepticism”—that was critical of the study. The blogosphere discourse was ideally suited for analysis because its focus was clearly circumscribed, it had a well-defined onset, and it largely discontinued after several months. We identify and classify the hypotheses that questioned the validity of the paper’s conclusions using well-established criteria for conspiracist ideation. In two behavioral studies involving naive participants we show that those criteria and classifications were reconstructed in a blind test. Our findings extend a growing body of literature that has examined the important, but not always constructive, role of the blogosphere in public and scientific discourse.

The authors note that there are generally two reasons someone would reject established consensus climate science. One is their politics (climate change is truly, an inconvenient truth for them). The other is conspiracist ideation, or “…person’s propensity to explain a significant political or social event as a secret plot by powerful individuals or organizations.” They point out that there is a sensible link between rejecting an area of science and believing in a conspiracy. In essence, a significant conspiracy is required in order for thousands of research scientists working in hundreds of institutions across dozens of countries to all be saying essentially the same thing about a major area of science. Conspiracy is not enough. Massive conspiracy is required. “In the case of climate change, several qualitative analyses have shown that denial is suffused with conspiratorial themes, for example when dissenters are celebrated as “Galileos” who oppose a corrupt scientific “establishment”.” Consider this:

Smith and Leiserowitz (2012) found that among people who reject the findings from climate science, up to 40% of affective imagery invoked conspiracy theories. That is, when asked to provide the first word, thought, or image that came to mind in the climate context, statements such as “the biggest scam in the world to date” would be classified as conspiracist.

Below, my video “Flogging the Scientists”, which captures some of the paranoid dynamics of the climate denial crowd.

Continue reading “Study: Climate Deniers Tend to be Conspiracy Theorists”

Speaking of Conspiracies….

Raw Story:

The email from Exxon’s in-house climate expert provides evidence the company was aware of the connection between fossil fuels and climate change, and the potential for carbon-cutting regulations that could hurt its bottom line, over a generation ago – factoring that knowledge into its decision about an enormous gas field in south-east Asia. The field, off the coast of Indonesia, would have been the single largest source of global warming pollution at the time.

“Exxon first got interested in climate change in 1981 because it was seeking to develop the Natuna gas field off Indonesia,” Lenny Bernstein, a 30-year industry veteran and Exxon’s former in-house climate expert, wrote in the email. “This is an immense reserve of natural gas, but it is 70% CO2”, or carbon dioxide, the main driver of climate change.

However, Exxon’s public position was marked by continued refusal to acknowledge the dangers of climate change, even in response to appeals from the Rockefellers , its founding family, and its continued financial support for climate denial. Over the years, Exxon spent more than $30m on thinktanks and researchers that promoted climate denial, according to Greenpeace.

Exxon said Wednesday that it now acknowledges the risk of climate change and does not fund climate change denial groups.

Below, current Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson explains, Yeah, it’s real. So what? Get over it.

Huffington Post:

Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse created a stir recently when he speculated that fossil fuel companies may be violating federal racketeering law by colluding to defraud the public about the threat posed by carbon pollution.

Whitehouse likened their actions to those of the tobacco companies that conspired to manufacture doubt about the link between smoking and disease when they were all too aware of it. In 2006, a federal district court ruled that the tobacco industry’s deceptive campaign to maximize its profits by hoodwinking the public amounted to a racketeering enterprise.

Whitehouse may be among the first to suggest that the fossil fuel industry is flouting the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), but he’s not the first to point out the parallels between the tobacco industry’s fraudulent campaign and the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to quash government action on climate change.
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Continue reading “Documents Show Exxon Aware of Climate Change Since 1981”

After one of the coldest springs in memory, Greenland jumps to a warm state.  Having shivered through the last few weeks of the cold snap, I’m a bit disappointed to miss the roaring melt that’s going on now.

Climate Central via Discovery:

It appears that Greenland’s melt season is making up for lost time.

Persistent high pressure has been camping over Greenland since mid-June. More recently, the weather pattern driving the European heat wave, dubbed an atmospheric shruggie  —  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ — by Mashable’s Andrew Freedman (and an omega block by stodgy, old weather watchers), is also responsible for continuing to help keep Greenland warmer than normal.

The video below, taken during my approach to Ilulissat on May 29, shows how icy things still were in late may, early june, as do the stills from Ummannaq on this page.

The high temperatures in Europe have been more eye-popping, clearing 100°F from Spain to the Netherlands and setting an all-time July temperature record at London’s Heathrow Airport. But temperatures in the upper 30s and low 40s are still doing a number on Greenland’s ice sheet. Estimates from the National Snow and Ice Data Center indicate that roughly half the ice sheet’s surface is melting, well above the average of around 25 percent for this time of year.

Continue reading “After a Cold Spring, Greenland Melt Jumps”

Worth a read.  Jason Box is still dealing with aftershocks from his offhand tweet of a year ago.

In musing about the possible affects of a sudden large release of arctic methane, Dr. Box tweeted that humanity would be “f’d” – if a significant fraction were released. A lot of journos picked up on the “f’d”, but forgot the “if”….(I’ve posted on the lack of data to support overly gloomy projections about arctic methane..)
We have some challenges ahead, and a lot of scientists are somber about humanity’s prospects – but not to the point of giving up. (see post below)

Esquire:

The incident was small, but Jason Box doesn’t want to talk about it. He’s been skittish about the media since it happened. This was last summer, as he was reading the cheery blog posts transmitted by the chief scientist on the Swedish icebreaker Oden, which was exploring the Arctic for an international expedition led by Stockholm University. “Our first observations of elevated methane levels, about ten times higher than in background seawater, were documented . . . we discovered over 100 new methane seep sites…. The weather Gods are still on our side as we steam through a now ice-free Laptev Sea….”

As a leading climatologist who spent many years studying the Arctic at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State, Box knew that this breezy scientific detachment described one of the nightmare long-shot climate scenarios: a feedback loop where warming seas release methane that causes warming that releases more methane that causes more warming, on and on until the planet is incompatible with human life. And he knew there were similar methane releases occurring in the area. On impulse, he sent out a tweet.

“If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we’re f’d.”

The tweet immediately went viral, inspiring a series of headlines:

CLIMATOLOGIST SAYS ARCTIC CARBON RELEASE COULD MEAN “WE’RE FUCKED.”

CLIMATE SCIENTIST DROPS THE F-BOMB AFTER STARTLING ARCTIC DISCOVERY.

CLIMATOLOGIST: METHANE PLUMES FROM THE ARCTIC MEAN WE’RE SCREWED.

Box has been outspoken for years. He’s done science projects with Greenpeace, and he participated in the 2011 mass protest at the White House organized by 350.org. In 2013, he made headlines when a magazine reported his conclusion that a seventy-foot rise in sea levels over the next few centuries was probably already “baked into the system.” Now, with one word, Box had ventured into two particularly dangerous areas. First, the dirty secret of climate science and government climate policies is that they’re all based on probabilities, which means that the effects of standard CO2 targets like an 80 percent reduction by 2050 are based on the middle of the probability curve. Box had ventured to the darker possibilities on the curve’s tail, where few scientists and zero politicians are willing to go.

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Continue reading “Esquire: The Dark Night of the Scientists”

OK, now -if you still haven’t listened to the key segment in Dave Barber’s TED talk, above, do so. (starts at 9:14)

One of the takeaways from the Economist’s Arctic Conference in March, was that this Arctic stuff, ice, or no ice, is a harder slog than the rah-rah enthusiasm of 5 years ago would have lead you to believe.

UPDATE: Rachel Maddow’s very impressive reporting on the situation:

Don’t believe that drilling in the Arctic is some kind of slam dunk, even for the world’s largest corporations. And don’t believe that a fossil fuel future is inevitable – we are at an inflection point right now.  The low prices for oil globally are causing even the largest players to rethink, and many smart observers to wonder if we are in some kind of oil end game.  The remaining “exotic” oil in places like the Arctic, ocean deep water, and Alberta Tar Sands, depends on a continued high price for oil – but markets are not cooperating.
And importantly, don’t believe that because the Administration ok’d this particular venture, that they don’t know this.

Fuelfix:

WASHINGTON — Shell’s drive to resume Arctic drilling this summer has hit another speed bump, with the discovery of a hole in the hull of an ice management vessel meant to safeguard the company’s operations in the Chukchi Sea.

The MSV Fennica was on its way from Dutch Harbor, Alaska to the Chukchi Sea on Friday when a ballast tank leak was discovered by crew members and a certified Alaska marine harbor pilot on board the vessel. It was traced back to a gash about 39 inches long and 2 inches wide.

The 22-year-old icebreaker has since returned to the port in Dutch Harbor and is being examined by marine experts, but it is uncertain how quickly the breach in its hull can be repaired and whether this will delay Shell’s hopes to begin drilling an oil well in the Chukchi Sea later this month.

The Fennica is just one of the 29 vessels in Shell’s Arctic fleet, which includes another icebreaker, the MSV Nordica, and at least two other anchor handlers tasked with helping to keep ice away from the company’s drilling site. But Shell’s contracted Fennica is unique in that it is carrying a critical piece of the company’s Arctic containment system: a capping stack designed to fit on top of a damaged well in case of a blowout or other emergency.

Shell spokesman Curtis Smith said the company does not believe the incident will delay the company’s planned Chukchi Sea operations. But, he noted, “any impact to our season will ultimately depend on the extent of the damage.”

Wall Street Journal:

The Arctic is a prize that Shell competitors like Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. aren’t pursuing for reasons ranging from collapsed oil prices to Western sanctions against Moscow. Even state-controlled giants like Russia’s OAO Rosneft have put Arctic plans on hold this year. And a consortium including Exxon and BP PLC suspended its Canadian Arctic exploration program on June 26, saying it wouldn’t be able to complete its work before its lease expires in 2020.

It could be a year or more before Shell knows whether it is sitting on a bonanza of crude or drilling one of the most expensive duds in history. Anything less than a blockbuster would be a significant setback for the company, Shell executives say, and a blow to oil development in the U.S. Arctic.

“Everybody’s watching to see if we’re going to fail or succeed out there,” said Ann Pickard, an executive vice president who runs Shell’s Arctic division. “If we fail for whatever reason…I think the U.S. is another 25 years” away from developing Arctic resources.

Ms. Pickard said that if the company fails to turn up oil in its best prospect, a drilling area called Burger-J, “I would probably recommend that we walk away.”

Anchorage Daily News:

Unalaska Mayor Shirley Marquardt said some marine pilots in Dutch Harbor suspect the ship may have been damaged by underwater debris, possibly left over from World War II — a common threat in the rugged region that might not show up on charts until ships are gouged or massive anchors haul up waste.

Continue reading “Shell Arctic Icebreaker Damaged – Drilling Possibly Affected”

The right wing just can’t do humor, and they just can’t seem to stop pushing tobacco, and climate denial.

A lot of humor depends on tweaking the powerful on behalf of the powerless – (afflicting the comfortable to comfort the afflicted, etc). Problem there for Fox is, if you are spending all your time defending the interests of the world’s greediest, most amoral and destructive corporate powers, you lose some of the empathic connection necessary for the best humor.

Something entirely lost on Fox News “comedian” Greg Gutfeld.

In the video above, Gutfeld takes the side of tobacco merchants against all those crazy left wing doctors who just want to tell us what to do.

FoxNews:

ATLANTA –  In just one year, e-cigarette use tripled among U.S. middle and high school students, according to a report today from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products (CTP). E-cigarettes have become the most commonly used tobacco product among this age group.

“Currently there is about 4.6 million students who report using any form of tobacco,” said Brian King, deputy director for research translation at the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health. “About 2.5 million of those are e-cigarette users.

Although e-cigarettes are “smokeless,” the devices use an aerosol mist to deliver nicotine, which is addictive.

“No form of tobacco — whether it’s combustible, incombustible or electronic — is safe for youth to use,” King said. “And that is primarily because we know nicotine can have adverse health effects on the developing adolescent brain. It can lead to addiction. And it could also lead to sustained forms of tobacco use.”

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Gutfeld, is, I guess, the right wing answer to Bill Maher.  Except, kind of dumb, poorly informed, wedded to the right wing agenda, and not funny.  Need more proof?

Heartland Institute:

If you missed The Five today, you missed an EPIC rant by the great Greg Gutfeld. His segment was about New York City banning the use of electronic cigarettes in public places this week — Nurse Bloomberg’s last hurrah before ceding the mayor’s office to an even more dedicated leftist.

Why ban e-cigs, which deliver nicotine to the user and results in the harmless exhale of water vapor? Because it looks like one isreally smoking cigarettes … and that would send a bad message to anyone who happens to observe it. Seriously. That’s the mayor’s and city council’s justificaiton. That fact sent Gutfeld off the edge, prompting what is undoubtedly a righteous and hilarious Top 5 Greatest Rant from a master of the genre.

Heartland Institute, of course, is the prime example of the Tobacco/Climate nexus.

Below, see a boggling climate denial rant (I had many to choose from – caution, Gutfeld fancies himself a science buff..)

Headvise warning. Continue reading “Climate Deniers Helplessly Addicted to Tobacco Promotion”