Month: May 2016

You’re welcome. More on this below.

I posted not long ago on an item in Bloomberg News about the possibility of an Electric Vehicle Paradigm shift:

Even amid low gasoline prices last year, electric car sales jumped 60 percent worldwide. If that level of growth continues, the crash-triggering benchmark of 2 million barrels of reduced demand could come as early as 2023. That’s a crisis. The timing of new technologies is difficult to predict, but it may not be long before it becomes impossible to ignore.

Now there’s more.

Bloomberg:

Tesla just took the most ambitious automotive production timeline since the Ford Model T and moved it up two years.

The company now plans to produce 500,000 electric cars every year starting in 2018. That’s 10 times the number of vehicles it produced in 2015, and enough to ensure that all 400,000 customers who put down a $1,000 deposit on the forthcoming Model 3 will qualify for a significant U.S. subsidy.

Talk about doubling down—even the original 2020 goal was considered a long shot by Wall Street. This new target would pledge the carmaker to a faster production growth rate than Ford Motor Co. managed in the early 1900s. That’s when Henry Ford pioneered the production line with the Model T, the first mass market combustion-driven car.

A century later, Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk wants the Model 3 to be its electric grandchild. He’s now aiming for close to a million sales by 2020.

“My desk is at the end of the production line,” Musk said in an earnings conference call on Wednesday. “The whole team is super-focused.”

Musk’s enthusiasm aside, skeptics say his planned ramp-up is unattainable in the modern era. If Tesla can succeed—and even Musk admits that it’s a tough goal—it would be a tectonic shift for the global electric-vehicle market, just like the Model T was for the combustion engine.

Continue reading “Tesla: Best Bet for Surviving Zombie Apocalypse”

Quickie tour of Hell.

Irony never sleeps. Oil traders cautiously watching fire impact on tar sands production.

BBC News report below:

Continue reading “TimeLapse: Evacuating in Alberta”

Description:

Jimmy reviews some of the ridiculous comments he received on social media following our airing of a bit about climate change.

See original video – which has gone ridiculously viral – here.

Edmonton Journal:

Fort McMurray fire officials are prepared for another challenging day Wednesday as firefighters try to save the oilsands city from a massive wildfire that has destroyed homes and businesses, and forced the largest wildfire evacuation in Alberta’s history.

Tens of thousands of people have fled north and south.

Fueled by soaring temperatures that hit 32 C and tinder-dry forest, the fire broached the city limits and by 6:20 p.m. a mandatory evacuation order was issued for the entire city.

“Today has been a devastating day. We have had explosive fire conditions on the landscape brought on by extremely high temperatures” and low relative humidity, Bernie Schmitte, wildfire manager at Alberta Agriculture and Forestry, said Tuesday night during a news conference.

“The fire is still out of control,” Schmitte said. “We have been challenged on many fronts as the fire came through the community. It has entered the community and it has gone through the community.”

Officials have accounted for about 53,000 people, including 17,000 people north of the city, 8,000 in Anzac, 9,000 in Lac La Biche, and 18,000 in Edmonton. Fort McMurray has population of 83,000. “This is not an exact science,” one official said when asked about the discrepancy.

No fatalities or serious injuries have been reported at this time.

Military help has been requested through the province. That assistance will come from the Army and Royal Canadian Air Force. It will take about two days for the military to respond.

https://twitter.com/BrettAWX/status/727691077843603461

More coming.

In recent weeks, one of the important satellite monitors of arctic sea ice, a critical control on global weather and climate, (see elsewhere on this page) failed.

My recent video, above, raised the alarm about congressional climate deniers who are squeezing funding for our satellite eyes on the home planet.  This is a long term hobby horse for the anti science crowd.

New York Times, 2006:

From 2002 until this year, NASA’s mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: “To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers … as only NASA can.”

In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” deleted. In this year’s budget and planning documents, the agency’s mission is “to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.”

Understanding and protecting the only place in the universe that sustains human life is understood by climate deniers to be a dangerous, radical, and subversive activity.

Marshall Shepherd is a climate scientist and former President of the American Meteorological Society:

Imagine hurricane season without weather satellites. Since the satellite era we are not surprised about a storm the way the people of Galveston were over a century ago. Many climatologists are sounding the alarm that our fleet of satellites that monitor Arctic sea ice is on life support (and that may be generous). This matters to you and is frankly not just about polar bears.

Walt Meier is a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory. He wrote to me,

Satellites carrying passive microwave sensors are essential for monitoring sea ice because only these sensors have the capability to see through clouds and dark of night to capture a continuous and complete record of sea ice every day. This sea ice time series is now nearing 40 years in length, making it one of the longest continuous satellite-derived climate datasets. The loss of these satellites would effectively end the consistent record of Arctic sea ice decline.

Continue reading “Defunding Our Eyes on the Planet”

Readers of this blog are familiar with the increasing number of studies linking the drop in Arctic sea ice to extreme weather events in the temperate latitudes, ie where a lot of people live, work, and grow food.

Above, one of my most popular vids explains, with Jennifer Francis and Jeff Masters.

Washington Post:

Investigating the factors affecting ice melt in Greenland — one of the most rapidly changing places on Earth — is a major priority for climate scientists. And new research is revealing that there are a more complex set of variables affecting the ice sheet than experts had imagined. A recent set of scientific papers have proposed a critical connection between sharp declines in Arctic sea ice and changes in the atmosphere, which they say are not only affecting ice melt in Greenland, but also weather patterns all over the North Atlantic.

The new studies center on an atmospheric phenomenon known as “blocking” — this is when high pressure systems remain stationary in one place for long periods of time (days or even weeks), causing weather conditions to stay relatively stable for as long as the block remains in place. They can occur when there’s a change or disturbance in the jet stream, causing the flow of air in the atmosphere to form a kind of eddy, said Jennifer Francis, a research professor and climate expert at Rutgers University.

Blocking events over Greenland are particularly interesting to climate scientists because of their potential to drive temperatures up and increase melting on the ice sheet.

Continue reading “New Studies on Arctic, Ice, and Jet Stream”

More please.

UPDATE: Per MediaMatters, the above segment featured more climate scientists than ABC’s evening and Sunday news shows did in an entire year.

Aradhna Tripati, who assures us, above, she is not fucking with us, is one of my favorite interviews ever..

Here she is from 2013:

Below, Tripati on undersea Methane: Continue reading “Jimmy Kimmel: Palin v the 97 Percent”

Off topic, but sorta not, given the gravity of this election for Climate policy.

Uber Denier Marc Morano told me months ago in an interview, that the outcome of this election was critical from his perspective, and that if the new President was not a Republican, his side will have won a lot of battles but lost the war.  As Mr. Trump tightens his grip on the nomination, I wonder how Climate deniers are taking this?

He’s one of theirs, but maybe his persona is a little bit too revealing of what he, and they, represent.

The ad above is not a bad template for anyone that wants to start drawing on the voluminous archives of incredibly tasteless, dumb, and demeaning Trumpist outtakes.

Below, my interview of a few months ago with Morano, 4 minutes, worth it for his take on Obama and what comes after. Continue reading “Toughest Anti-Trump Ad Yet”

I posted last week the news that Saudi Arabia seems to have recognized that the age of Oil is drawing to an  end.

Below, Amory Lovins Whale oil analogy might have seemed quixotic a few years ago. Now?

Tom Dispatch:

Sunday, April 17th was the designated moment.  The world’s leading oil producers were expected to bring fresh discipline to the chaotic petroleum market and spark a return to high prices. Meeting in Doha, the glittering capital of petroleum-rich Qatar, the oil ministers of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), along with such key non-OPEC producers as Russia and Mexico, were scheduled to ratify a draft agreement obliging them to freeze their oil output at current levels. In anticipation of such a deal, oil prices had begun to creep inexorably upward, from $30 per barrel in mid-January to $43 on the eve of the gathering. But far from restoring the old oil order, the meeting ended in discord, driving prices down again and revealing deep cracks in the ranks of global energy producers.

It is hard to overstate the significance of the Doha debacle. At the very least, it will perpetuate the low oil prices that have plagued the industry for the past two years, forcing smaller firms into bankruptcy and erasing hundreds of billions of dollars of investments in new production capacity. It may also have obliterated any future prospects for cooperation between OPEC and non-OPEC producers in regulating the market. Most of all, however, it demonstrated that the petroleum-fueled world we’ve known these last decades — with oil demand always thrusting ahead of supply, ensuring steady profits for all major producers — is no more.  Replacing it is an anemic, possibly even declining, demand for oil that is likely to force suppliers to fight one another for ever-diminishing market shares.

No doubt geopolitics played a significant role in the Saudi decision, but that’s hardly the whole story. Overshadowing discussions about a possible production freeze was a new fact of life for the oil industry: the past would be no predictor of the future when it came to global oil demand.  Whatever the Saudis think of the Iranians or vice versa, their industry is being fundamentally transformed, altering relationships among the major producers and eroding their inclination to cooperate.

Until very recently, it was assumed that the demand for oil would continue to expand indefinitely, creating space for multiple producers to enter the market, and for ones already in it to increase their output. Even when supply outran demand and drove prices down, as has periodically occurred, producers could always take solace in the knowledge that, as in the past, demand would eventually rebound, jacking prices up again. Under such circumstances and at such a moment, it was just good sense for individual producers to cooperate in lowering output, knowing that everyone would benefit sooner or later from the inevitable price increase.

But what happens if confidence in the eventual resurgence of demand begins to wither? Then the incentives to cooperate begin to evaporate, too, and it’s every producer for itself in a mad scramble to protect market share. This new reality — a world in which “peak oil demand,” rather than “peak oil,” will shape the consciousness of major players — is what the Doha catastrophe foreshadowed.

Continue reading “Oil’s Big Dive”