Month: October 2017

The vile racism and misogyny of Breitbart was front and center this week due to the Buzzfeed story pulling back the curtain on the hate-site’s internal dynamic.
I’m all the prouder to have been in (Breitbart editor) Steve Bannon’s cross hairs a year before Republicans elevated his white supremacy to the White House.

Reposted from 1/16/16.

One of climate denialdom’s most deranged and angry voices kind of hates my new video.

Jame’s Delingpole, seen below, whose motto is “I’m evil and right about everything.”(sorry Jimmy, only half right..) – deals in a very special kind of blissfully clueless, fact free invective that climate deniers love because it requires no thought or knowledge whatever.

In fact, Delingpole brags that he never takes time to look at tedious science. He’s too busy with other things.

 

Found an “unblocked” version of Delingpole interview here.

Above, James Delingpole is asked a question. Implodes. He later complained he was “intellectually  raped”.

But he is on to me, and calls me out for my malevolent practice of seeming “measured and reasonable”.

Ok, Jimmy, you got me.

James Delingpole in Breitbart:

The climate alarmists have come up with a brilliant new excuse to explain why there has been no “global warming” for nearly 19 years.
Turns out the satellite data is lying.

And to prove it they’ve come up with a glossy new video starring such entirely trustworthy and not at all biased climate experts as Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann, Kevin “Travesty” Trenberth, and Ben Santer. (All of these paragons of scientific rectitude feature heavily in the Climategate emails)

The video is well produced and cleverly constructed – designed to look measured and reasonable rather than yet another shoddy hit job in the ongoing climate wars.

Below, Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos
sings “America the Beautiful” while Richard Spencer does a Nazi salute Continue reading “Reposting: Racist Hate Site Breitbart Outraged at Climate Science Video”

One of the most hopeful signs in renewable energy is the degree to which the developing world is “leapfrogging” the path that Europe and North America have taken to electrification with more deployments of a distributed, renewable grid, versus the centralized “hub and spoke” model based on large fossil fuel development.

A possible lemon-to-lemonade story is evolving in Puerto Rico.

CNBC:

Tesla is delaying its semi truck unveiling by more than two weeks, as the company diverts resources toward fixing Model 3 bottlenecks and producing more batteries for Puerto Rico and other areas in need.

Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello is expected to speak with Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Friday, according to a spokesman for the government of Puerto Rico.

USAToday:

With the island’s electrical system still in shambles from Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico has taken a step closer to revamping its power grid using Tesla solar technology, Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said Saturday.

Rosselló and Tesla chief Elon Musk had a 25-minute phone conversation Friday night where the two discussed relief efforts as well as Tesla playing a leading role, Rosselló said in an interview with USA TODAY.

Teams from Tesla and Puerto Rico’s energy sector will continue the talks early next week, Rosselló said.

“I told him because of the devastation, if there is a silver lining, we can start re-conceptualizing how we want to produce energy here in Puerto Rico and distribute it and do it in a more reliable fashion,” Rosselló said. “It was a very positive first step

Continue reading “LeapFrog? Tesla, Musk to Focus on Puerto Rico”

Climate Denial and racism are joined at the hip it seems, as I’ve written many times. But we’ve never seen the ugly combination so grossly and simultaneously on display as we have in the post-Maria recovery efforts ongoing in Puerto Rico.

The slow response, and President Trump’s astonishing insults toward Puerto Rican Americans, have clearly made an impression on a demographic that could be important going forward.  Add to that – new polling (below) underlines, again, that Latinos as a group are the Americans most concerned about climate change.

New York Times:

Every day dozens of Puerto Ricans straggle into the Orlando area, fleeing their homes and lives ravaged by Hurricane Maria. In the months to come, officials here said, that number could surge to more than 100,000.

And those numbers could remake politics in Florida, a state where the last two presidential and governor’s races were decided by roughly one percentage point or less.

There are more than a million Puerto Ricans in Florida, a number that has doubled since 2001, driven largely until now by a faltering economy. But their political powers have evolved slowly in this state, and the wave of potential voters from the island could quickly change that calculus.

If the estimates hold, and several officials said they might be low, the Puerto Rican vote, which has been strongly Democratic, could have rough parity with the Cuban vote in the state, for years a bulwark for Republicans in both state and national races.

“What’s clear is that this is going to be a more powerful swing group,” said Anthony Suarez, a lawyer here, who has run for office as both a Republican and a Democrat. “Just like everybody has to go to Miami and stop in Versailles to have coffee to court the Cuban community, that is going to start happening here.”

In Central Florida, home to more than 350,000 Puerto Ricans, their political impact has already been felt. Last year, Representative Darren Soto, a Democrat, became the first member of Congress of Puerto Rican descent elected from Florida when he won a Central Florida district with a large Puerto Rican population.

Mr. Soto said any significant shift in population in such a highly competitive state could have an enormous impact.

Continue reading “Latinos Were Already Concerned About Climate Change. Then Came Maria..”

CNN Money:

Elon Musk is offering to solve Puerto Rico’s energy crisis — for the long haul.

Millions of Puerto Ricans are living in the dark at home after Hurricane Maria pummeled the island, knocking out its already fragile electric grid. Two weeks later, only 9% of residents have electricity, according to Puerto Rican government figures.

Musk, the CEO of electric-car maker Tesla (TSLA), suggested his company’s solar power unitcould be a long-term solution.

“The Tesla team has done this for many smaller islands around the world, but there is no scalability limit, so it can be done for Puerto Rico,” Musk tweeted Thursday morning, adding that the decision is up to Puerto Rican government officials.

They didn’t take long to respond.

A Tesla-powered system would be a complete reversal for Puerto Rico’s energy grid. Right now, the island imports and burns oil to generate electricity.

Under that antiquated system, ordinary Puerto Ricans have been paying exorbitantly high electric bills for years. Several told CNNMoney this week that a monthly electric bill can easily go for $250.

Tesla has built solar energy grids for islands before, such as Kauai in Hawaii. However, that island’s population is about 70,000 people. Puerto Rico has 3.4 million residents.

Musk has previously stepped into other energy crises around the world. In July, he promised to deliver the world’s largest lithium ion battery to help communities in South Australia that have been suffered from power shortages.

https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/916348611574882304

Washington Post:

Two new studies of Greenland, using sophisticated technologies and large scientific teams to pull together and process the data, have now gone further in taking the full measure of the island through that ever-so-basic scientific act: mapping.

The first, a comprehensive seabed mapping project, relying in part on new data from NASA’s OMG (“Oceans Melting Greenland”) mission, concludes that the Greenland ice sheet is far more exposed to the planet’s warming oceans than previously known — and has more ice to give up than, until now, has been recognized.

The massive study, published last month in Geophysical Research Letters, pulls together a large number of data records to provide a comprehensive map of the shape of the seabed around and lying beneath Greenland’s glaciers, based on state of the art soundings taken by ships and other data sources.

The research — which pulls together a body of evidence that has now been accumulating for a while — measures the depth and contours of the ocean floor both beneath liquid water in Greenland’s fjords and beneath ice in places where the ocean may someday flow. The work was led by Mathieu Morlighem of the University of California at Irvine, with no less than 31 other authors from institutions in the United States, Canada, Britain and across Europe.

The researchers have found that Greenland contains more total ice above sea level than previously thought — the entire ice mass is capable of raising sea levels by 24.3 feet, about three inches more than previously realized.

Still more significant is how much of that ice is vulnerable to warm water that reaches the bases of the ice sheet’s deeper glaciers. The new research finds that “between 30 and 100% more glaciers are potentially exposed to [warm Atlantic water] than suggested by previous mapping, which represents 55% of the ice sheet’s total drainage area.” In other words, more than half of Greenland’s ice lies in or flows through areas that could be influenced by warming seas.

Continue reading “Greenland More Exposed to Melt from Beneath”

ThinkProgress:

When considering the costs and benefits of a fossil fuel project — from building a single pipeline to expanding some of the biggest coal mines in the country — how much consideration should be given to the project’s eventual contribution to climate change-causing carbon emissions?

That’s a question that has plagued regulators, environmental groups, and courts for years. But this summer, in the span of a month, four different decisions came to the same conclusion: when deciding whether or not to allow a fossil fuel project to move forward, you have to take into consideration how the project will impact carbon emissions — even if those emissions would be released far from the boundaries of the project in question.

“At the high level, this wave of court decisions is an indicator that courts are pushing for accountability, and a true accounting of climate and public health costs of these projects,” Mary Anne Hitt, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, told ThinkProgress. “That is going to be a big challenge to Trump’s anti-climate science and pro-polluter agenda.”

The wave of decisions began in mid-August, when a U.S. District Judge blocked a proposed expansion of an underground coal mine in Montana, arguing that the Office of Surface Mining (OSM) failed to properly consider how the proposed expansion would impact climate change. Environmental groups argued — and the court agreed — that OSM focused primarily on alleged economic benefits of the expansion, like local taxes, while refusing to use any metric to analyze the harm that the expansion would cause.

The OSM, in effect, put its “thumb on the scale by inflating the benefits of the action while minimizing its impacts,” the court ruled.

Weeks later, the D.C. Circuit Court vacated permits for an entirely different fossil fuel project on similar grounds. It found that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) had failed to adequately consider how construction of the Sable Trail pipeline — which would run from Alabama to Florida — would result in more greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of natural gas. As a result, the court ruled that FERC, which has been notably loathe to consider the climate impacts of various projects, had to redo its assessment.

It was a win for pipeline opponents who have long argued that FERC acts as little more than a rubber stamp for fossil fuel projects. A recent investigation from the Center for Public Integrity lends credence to those claims, finding that the regulatory body has only rejected two pipeline proposals in the last 30 years.

 

Washington Post:

As of Wednesday, half of Puerto Ricans had access to drinking water and 5 percent of the island had electricity, according to statistics published by the Federal Emergency Management Agency on its Web page documenting the federal response to Hurricane Maria.

By Thursday morning, both of those key metrics were no longer on the Web page.

FEMA spokesman William Booher noted that both measures are still being reported on a website maintained by the office of Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, www.status.pr. According to that website, which is in Spanish, 9.2 percent of the island now has power and 54.2 percent of residents have access to drinking water. Booher said that these measures are also shared in news conferences and media calls that happen twice a day, but he didn’t elaborate on why they are no longer on the main FEMA page.

“Our mission is to support the governor and his response priorities through the unified command structure to help Puerto Ricans recover and return to routines. Information on the stats you are specifically looking for are readily available” on the website maintained by the governor’s office, Booher said.

The statistics that are on the FEMA page, as of Thursday afternoon, include these: There are now 14,000 federal workers on the ground in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, up from 12,300 earlier in the week. All airports, federally maintained ports and post offices are open. More than 30 miles of roadway have been cleared, up from about 20 miles earlier in the week. About 65 percent of grocery stores have reopened, along with nearly all hospitals and dialysis centers. And 64 percent of wastewater treatment plants are working on generator power.

 

Jeff Goodell and I were in Miami for King Tide last year.  Now it’s come around again, and it will only keep getting worse.

Miami Herald:

Pockets of South Florida were underwater on Thursday from heavy storms and high tides.

South Florida is under a flood advisory until 2:15 p.m. Thursday. A flood watch runs through Friday afternoon.

The combination of day-long rain and King Tides submerged parts of Brickell, Miami Beach and Doral, including 87th Avenue from 36th Street to the Dolphins Expressway. On streets and in parking lots, pedestrians with pants at wading length and no shoes made their way while dodging the wake from cars. Some cars stalled out from the rising water.

Continue reading “King Tide, Miami, 2017”