We *def* don't recommended this, but Model S floats well enough to turn it into a boat for short periods of time. Thrust via wheel rotation.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 19, 2016
Preppers take note.
With increased coastal flooding and extreme precip, might be a good sales point.
Low-cost, high-performance electric batteries are a game changer for the two key clean energy sectors: power generation and transportation. They enable much greater adoption and penetration of both renewable energy and electric vehicles — not just electric cars but electric buses and electric planes.
Since lithium-ion batteries have only just crossed the key price point for enabling widespread usage in both sectors — $300 per kilowatt-hour — we are really just at the beginning of the battery-driven clean energy revolution.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) projects that over the next 25 years, small-scale battery storage will become a $250 billion market. They “expect total behind-the-meter energy storage to rise dramatically from around 400 MWh in today to nearly 760 GWh in 2040″ — nearly a 2,000-fold increase!
BNEF makes the case we’ve crossed a similar tipping point for electric car batteries in this new chart, above.
BNEF projects that in 2040 over one third of all cars sold will be electric. That’s more than 40 million electric vehicles (EVs), almost a hundred times larger than the 2015 EV market. Battery prices are coming down so fast that within a decade or so, EVs will actually compete with gasoline-powered cars directly on sticker price — while having vastly lower monthly fuel and maintenance costs.
ExxonMobil has sued Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey over her investigation into whether the energy giant lied about climate change to mislead its shareholders and the public.
Exxon’s complaint was filed Wednesday in federal district court in Fort Worth, Texas. Healey’s office has subpoenaed millions of documents from the company going back four decades, and Exxon claims Healey is “abusing the power of government to silence a speaker she disfavors.”
The complaint argues that Healey’s investigation violates the First and Fourth amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect free speech and prohibit unreasonable searches; that the investigation violates Massachusetts’ four-year statute of limitations; and that the company does not do business in the state.
Cyndi Roy Gonzalez, a spokesperson for Healey’s office, said the First Amendment “does not protect false and misleading statements in the marketplace” and that “Exxon’s assertion that we cannot investigate it because the company has not engaged in business here in Massachusetts is completely preposterous.”
The legal war on decades of disinformation is being waged on many fronts. Here in the Commonwealth (God save it!), attorney general Maura Healey is being sued by poor little embattled Exxon for trying to “intimidate” the company through her demand for the documents proving that the struggling small business had been lying about its complicity in demolishing the planet. We are flirting dangerously close to the classic law-school definition of “chutzpah” here. Per DeSmog:
In its 33-page filing against Massachusetts AG Healey, Exxon lays out what it sees as the “facts” about the efforts of Attorneys General to prudently investigate the company’s historical relationship with climate science.
The first of the “Facts” that ExxonMobil lays out in making its case is that 20 Attorneys General, led by New York AG Eric Schneiderman, held a press conference in New York City dubbed “AGs United for Clean Power.”
The horrors! Yes, this is in fact… a fact. Twenty courageous AGs bravely stepped in front of cameras and microphones — a press conference! — to rail against Washington gridlock on climate policy and announce their leadership efforts to find ways to hold the oil industry accountable for its insidious work to block climate policy action at the federal and state levels over the past several decades.
So Exxon’s first “fact” oddly confirms the legitimate and ordinary efforts of state AGs to work together to get things done in the absence of Washington leadership. In short, to identify and hold accountable those who have encouraged doubt and distraction in order to delay action on the most pressing issue of our time.
Over the ensuing five pages of its Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief, Exxon proceeds to list 34 more “facts” that rehash the details of the March 29, 2016 press conference. Seriously, five pages of quotes and ‘facts’ pulled from a very public, YouTubed press conference… imagine the hourly rate these Exxon attorneys earned for transcribing cherry-picked quotes?
So let’s sum this up – here we have a frivolous SLAPP-like lawsuit filed by a massive multinational oil company in an industry-friendly Texas jurisdiction seeking the court’s heavy-handed smackdown of a totally reasonable investigation (known in legal parlance as a Civil Investigative Demand or CID) launched by the attorneys general of 17 states. Continue reading “Exxon Sues to Make Lying “protected speech””
A Republican-led congressional committee sought on Friday to assert oversight over inquiries that about 20 states are making into Exxon Mobil and climate change, reiterating demands to know more about state attorneys general’s consultations with environmental groups.
In a letter, some 17 members of Congress and ranking members of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee said they have broad jurisdiction that allows them to review investigations carried out by states. The committee was pushing back against state officials who have said they are not subject to federal oversight.
The standoff is the latest in a high-stakes battle between the world’s largest publicly traded oil company and a coalition of state attorneys general who have said they would go after Exxon in a bid to force congressional action to tackle climate change.
About 20 state officials jointly said in March they would participate in inquiries into whether Exxon executives misled the public by contradicting research from company scientists that spelled out the threats of climate change.
Continue reading “Science Committee Seeks to Squash Exxon Investigation”
Above, National Hurricane Center video on the 2016 season.
Description:
NHC Director Rick Knabb discusses the Hurricane Specialist Unit operations area and chats with Senior Hurricane Specialist Dr. Jack Beve
Earth System Science Center, Penn State University:
The prediction is for 18.9 +/- 4.4 total named tropical cyclones, which corresponds to a range between 14 and 24 storms with a best estimate of 19 named storms. This prediction was made using the statistical model of Kozar et al. (2012, see PDF here). This statistical model builds upon the past work of Sabbatelli and Mann (2007, see PDF here) by considering a larger number of climate predictors and including corrections for the historical undercount of events (see footnotes).
The assumptions behind this forecast are (a) the persistence of current North Atlantic Main Development Region (MDR) sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies (0.88 °C in late-April 2016 from NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch) throughout the 2016 hurricane season, (b) development of a La Niña (Niño3 anomaly of -1°C) in the equatorial Pacific during boreal Fall/Winter 2016-17 (Climate Prediction Center April 2016 ENSO Discussion), and (c) climatological mean conditions for the North Atlantic Oscillation in Fall/Winter 2016-17.
If no La Niña develops (Niño3 anomaly between +/- 0.5 °C), then the prediction will be lower: 16.1 +/- 4.0 storms (range of 12-20 storms with a best guess of 16).
FYI, ESSC has a pretty good track record for predictions, see here, and place your bets:
WWSB in Tampa has this informative intro to hurricanes 2016, first 3 minutes.
After a long drought in landfall hurricanes on the US east coast, could this year return to the mean?
Below, my new video has MIT’s Kerry Emanuel, probably the world’s most quoted hurricane expert weighing in, along with others. Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Atlantic Hurricane Season is On”
Where we are now. If there is a big melt season this year, I’ll be live blogging it between June 29 and July 15.
NASA reports that some parts of Greenland were 36°F (20°C) warmer than “normal” — and remember, in this map, the new “normal” is the 2001–2010 average, which means it already includes a century of human-caused warming.
As we reported in mid-April, rainfall plus scorching temperatures over the country jump-started the summer melt season weeks early. On April 11, a remarkable 12 percent of Greenland’s massive ice sheet was melting — “smashing by a month the previous records of more than 10 percent of the ice sheet melting,” according to the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI).
The record temperatures in June also led to an unusually high ice melt — covering nearly 40 percent of the ice sheet:
This graph shows the spikes in Greenland melting observed this spring. As glaicologist Jason Box recently told me, the weather in Greenland tends to come in waves of 10 days or so – and the spikes indicate warm spells that are extreme. A major controlling factor of this year’s peak melt will be whether or not a warm air mass settles over the ice sheet during the warmest weeks of summer.
Continue reading “Plunging Sea Ice could Amp Greenland Melt”
This video raises a lot of questions, but it does show that dealing with Sea Level rise is going to require a lot of creativity, and resources. Geo-engineering is not just about solar radiation management, it implies that a number of adaptation strategies of this type will be considered. First step would be to bridge Gibraltar, with the possibility of adding Locks in the future to control Mediterranean water levels.
The video claims that ecological effects to the region would be manageable, but another major objection would be whether building such a structure would itself have a major effect on climate.
There are similar ideations floating around for other regions, like the Baltic.
Back from Austin. Packing for Greenland – flying Monday.
