Last March, AB InBev announced every single bottle of beer it brews will be done with renewable energy by 2025. The company is making progress on that pledge and by this spring, every bottle of Budweiser brewed in the U.S. will be made with renewable electricity. This week the brand is unveiling a new symbol it will be putting on each bottle produced with 100% renewable energy.
AB InBev is using Budweiser, its flagship brand and the globe’s biggest international beer brand, to drive its renewable energy program, both internally and in its goal to encourage more companies to sign on to similar goals and adopt the new emblem. Every day around the world, 41 million Budweisers are sold, and the company says switching to renewable electricity in Bud brewing operations is the equivalent of taking 48,000 cars off the road every year.
Budweiser’s vice president of global marketing Brian Perkins says that while a lot of companies make sustainable commitments, they’re often five or 10 years in the future and not immediately in the consumer domain, too far off to have consumers talking about consistently. “What’s interesting and different about this is it’s a consumer-facing symbol on the packaging, so when people are getting together for beers all over the world, they’re going to know those beers were brewed with 100% renewable electricity,” Perkins says. “That, to me, is a seismic shift because then we’re going to have everyday people talking about it and talking about the issue.”
It’s no secret that consumers are increasingly aware of companies’ stance on climate change and how they address it in their business practice and supply chains. And while this is most definitely a keen marketing move, Perkins says it’s primarily a business decision.
“People have been getting together for beers for more than 3,000 years,” he says. “We’re the biggest beer company in the world, Budweiser is the biggest beer brand in the world, so it’s massively in our business interest to help create a healthy planet so people can keep getting together for beers over the next 3,000 years.”
The U.S. electricity will be sourced from the Thunder Ranch Wind Farm in Oklahoma, which is powered by Enel Green Power, and will roll out to additional markets as they reach 100% renewable electricity in their Budweiser brewing operations. “And that’s just the beginning,” says Perkins. “There’s a solar field in Texas coming online in the next couple of years, as well as more similar infrastructure and deals happening in some of the bigger countries where we operate.” Continue reading “This 100 Percent Renewable Bud’s for You, and the Whole Planet”
Month: January 2018
Months After Harvey’s Record Rains, Texas Sliding into Drought
Fortunately I have recent interviews with Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon to parse the mixed signals.
Billy Bob Brown has been farming in the Amarillo area for nearly half a century, and this is the longest dry spell he’s ever seen.
The region hasn’t received measurable rainfall in more than 100 days, according to the National Weather Service, and Brown is worried about the fate of his crops. He already can’t grow corn because it’s been so dry.
…
The Texas Panhandle has become ground zero in a drought that has crept into much of the state just five months after Hurricane Harvey — including areas that suffered massive flooding during the storm.
More than 40 percent of Texas is now in a moderate to severe drought, according to the latest data from the U.S. Drought Monitor. That’s compared to 4 percent on Aug. 29, a few days after Harvey slammed into the South Texas coast.
August was the wettest month in the state in 124 years, but every month since then — aside from December — has been considerably dry, he said.
Part of Beaumont, which saw nearly 50 inches of rain when Harvey stalled over southeast Texas as a tropical storm, is now in a moderate drought.
#Harvey was a 1-in-1000 (!) year storm or more for so many areas in SE Texas- incredible. Really ran out of words to describe how anomalous this event was 👀 pic.twitter.com/AMDbN5lPM2
— Eric Blake 🌀 (@EricBlake12) January 25, 2018
Continue reading “Months After Harvey’s Record Rains, Texas Sliding into Drought”
Photographic Evidence: Boulders Show Impact of Superstorms
One of the controversial aspects of James Hansen’s most recent paper on climate change and superstorms has been that a lot of people just don’t believe one of the key assertions, that giant boulders in the Caribbean show indications of having been moved up to cliff tops by giant storm waves, in previous warmer climates.
Now new evidence to establish that might be true.
On the rocky shores of a windswept island just west of Ireland, the 620-ton boulder looks almost at home. But careful analysis of its position over the last few years has revealed something odd: between the summers of 2013 and 2014, the boulder shifted a couple meters toward the sea. That discovery is causing scientists to rethink what they know about the impacts of powerful storms.
In fact, the rock is one of more than a thousand boulders—including a handful of Very Large Boulders (VLBs and yes, that’s a technical term) weighing over 50 metric tons—shuffled around by the powerful storms that pounded Ireland’s west coast during the winter of 2013-2014, the stormiest in decades. Described in a new paper in the journal Earth Science Reviews, these boulders offer some of the first concrete evidence that storm waves, not just tsunami waves, can pack enough punch to hurl giant chunks of Earth around. (For comparison, 100 metric tons is about half the weight of a Boeing 747.)
In a warming world where more energy in the oceans and atmosphere could mean more powerful storms, that’s an important insight.
“Ten years ago, it was possible to say storms can’t move 50 ton boulders,” lead study author Rónadh Cox, a professor of geosciences at Williams College, told Earther. “If you were building a model of storm intensity or thinking about risks posed by severe storms, then your upper level for storm energy were to some extent informed by that understanding.”
“What our work is showing is in fact yes, storm waves can be tremendously strong,” she continued.
Continue reading “Photographic Evidence: Boulders Show Impact of Superstorms”
Heavy Precipitation Increasing in a Warming World
Yeah, you’re eyes aren’t lying.
Get ready for rain: climate change is already driving an increase in extremes of rainfall and snowfall across most of the globe, even in arid regions. And this trend will continue as the world warms, researchers report today in Nature Climate Change.
The role of global warming in unusually large rainfall events in countries from the United Kingdom to China has been hotly debated. But the latest study shows that climate change is driving an overall increase in rainfall extremes1.
“In both wet and dry regions, we see these significant and robust increases in heavy precipitation,” says Markus Donat, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, who is the study’s lead author.
Warm air holds more moisture, and previous research has found that global warming is already increasing the odds of extreme precipitation events. But climate models typically differ as to how that might play out at regional scales. Some models suggest that dry areas could become drier, but the new findings confirm that this rule does not hold over land; some areas see declines, but most get wetter.
“The paper is convincing and provides some useful insights,” says Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. “What is particularly new in this article is the demonstration of such a signal for observed changes in dry regions.”
Donat and his team defined as ‘extreme precipitation’ as the maximum rainfall or snowfall seen in a single day and collected data on this from some 11,000 weather stations from 1951 to 2010. The team identified areas that were wetter and drier than the global average, and then tracked changes in daily precipitation events as well as cumulative annual precipitation in those areas.
Continue reading “Heavy Precipitation Increasing in a Warming World”
“Ain’t Gonna Happen.”: Trump’s Pathetic, Backwards and Doomed War on the Planet
Worried about Republican lust to despoil, poison and pollute offshore areas?
Listen to veteran journalist Keith Schneider’s 4 minute analysis above, and you won’t need a chill pill.
As in so, so many examples we have from the Trump administration, just because they say it, does not make it so.
President Donald Trump and Republicans have tried again and again during the past year to turn back the clock on energy — pushing policies that would help fossil fuels stave off advances by solar and wind.
But they have repeatedly come up short.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s proposal to force electricity customers to subsidize ailing coal plants ran aground early this year. The Senate rebuffed efforts to water down tax credits for solar and wind power. And Trump’s move this week to impose a tariff on imported solar panels should put only a crimp in the growth of sun-powered energy, analysts have said, despite the outcry it’s generated from most of the U.S. solar industry.
Trump spent his campaign promoting an “America First” energy policy that translated to more oil, gas and especially coal — even as he slammed solar as expensive and hammered wind turbines as ugly. But after growing rapidly during the Obama years, wind and solar energy may have come too far for even a pro-fossil-fuel administration to stuff back into the barrel — especially after creating tens of thousands of jobs in red and blue states alike.
In addition, Trump and his appointees face limits on their authority. And in some cases, he has taken a compromise position, for example by choosing a solar tariff low enough to ease the damage to U.S. companies that rely on access to low-cost panels from abroad for solar power plants and rooftop arrays.
“I believe that the wish of the administration to generate again new jobs in old technologies is clearly determining their policy agenda, but that policy agenda has so far not been able to match up against the realities of the unrelenting pace of the energy transition,” said Jules Kortenhorst, CEO of Rocky Mountain Institute, a clean-energy advocacy group.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is facing criticism from the White House for his unexpected decision to exempt Florida from the administration’s sweeping new proposal to subject essentially all federal waters to offshore oil and gas drilling, according to news reports.
One White House official accused Zinke of going “rogue” by abruptly removing Florida from the list of states only one week after the Interior Department released its five-year offshore drilling plan, Axios reported Sunday. Oddly, Zinke announced his decision to let Florida off the hook on Twitter, instead of through more formal channels.
Continue reading ““Ain’t Gonna Happen.”: Trump’s Pathetic, Backwards and Doomed War on the Planet”
Uber Capitalist: We Have to Change Capitalism to Deal with Climate
Markets waking up to the truth – there are no “externalities”.
Capitalism must change to avert climate change, according to the vice-chair of the world’s largest asset manager, Blackrock.
Two weeks ago, Blackrock boss Larry Fink shook the corporate world with a letter demanding social responsibility in return for the support of his company, which manages around $6 trillion in assets.
On Wednesday, at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, vice-chair Philipp Hildebrand expanded on that theme.
Fiduciary duty – asset managers’ legal responsibility to make clients the best return on their money – is often deployed as a reason not to consider how investments might impact the climate. But that concept was “evolving”, said Hildebrand.
He called on academics to look more deeply at the issue. The European Commission recently launched a public consultation seeking for contributions from the financial world.
“We will hopefully demonstrate that at a minimum there is not a negative trade-off and there may even be better performance,” said Hildebrand.
That would mean funds like Blackrock could become duty-bound to consider environmental risks such as climate change while making investments. It would create a dramatic shift, he said, but warned it would take time.
“We have to be realistic, we also have an enterprise to run, we have shareholders, this is a complicated story. Nobody is served by reducing this to very simple, fast things that we have to do immediately. We have to change capitalism. This is really what’s at stake here. And frankly we need a new contract between companies, investors and governments,” said Hildebrand.
Former US vice-president Al Gore, who was on the panel with the Blackrock executive, agreed that the field of research was still evolving. But said: “In 26 sectors of the economy, the vast majority of them, the companies that integrate ESG (environmental, social and governance) into their business plans perform better.”
He added: “For many years investors and asset managers have said ‘well I would like to invest with attention to these things, but my fiduciary duty to my clients keeps me from doing it’. The revolutionary change… is that now it may be becoming clear that if you do not integrate these factors into your investing, you’re violating your fiduciary responsibilities.”
Continue reading “Uber Capitalist: We Have to Change Capitalism to Deal with Climate”
Tesla’s Giant Battery in Oz Bringing in Big $$
I didn’t get past Econ 101, but to my untrained eye, this looks like Catnip for Capitalists.
On December 1, Tesla’s 100MW battery system went online in South Australia after meeting founder Elon Musk’s self-imposed 100-day construction deadline. In the weeks since, the massive battery system has seemingly lived up to its potential as a reliable source of clean energy. When a coal plant tripped on December 14, Tesla’s Australian battery stepped up within milliseconds to keep the grid running.
Now, the giant Australian battery has begun to prove its financial worth. According to a report by Renew Economy, Tesla’s Australian battery system may have earned its owners, Neoen, around $1 million AUD ($800,000 USD) over the course of just a couple of days.
Currently, 70MW/39MWh of the battery’s capacity is reserved for the South Australian government to use when needed. Neoen has control over the remaining 30MW/90MWh, which they can choose to trade on the wholesale market. Based on the figures provided by Renew Economy, Neoen was able to sell electricity at around $14,000 AUD per MWh on January 18 and 19, while barely paying anything at all to generate electricity.
More good news. Recent data suggests new Tesla batteries have a very long active life.
Continue reading “Tesla’s Giant Battery in Oz Bringing in Big $$”
Should You Go Vegan?
I FLUNKED out of veganism the first time because I wasn’t getting the vitamins and micronutrients I needed. I was out of balance. I went to the doctor feeling lethargic and vaguely unwell and was told I had two options: give up being vegan or start taking large amounts of nutritional supplements. I chose meat and dairy. The quantities of pills I had to take irritated my stomach and I wasn’t willing to tough it out.
Although there is no strict definition of what it means to be vegan, the basic principle is to avoid animal-derived products. Dietary vegans mostly stick to avoiding animal-derived foods. For ethical vegans, it’s a philosophy not just a diet, which rules out traditional tattoos and silk, to name just a few. In both cases, truly steering clear of anything that is animal-derived can be much trickier than it first appears to be.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Wesley Woodyard couldn’t wrap his head around an NFL player giving up meat. So he dogged Derrick Morgan, Jurrell Casey and DaQuan Jones about their plant food for weeks.
“Y’all crazy with this vegan thing,” Woodyard said one Friday night early in training camp before a Tennessee Titans practice. “I’m from LaGrange, Georgia. I’m going to eat my pork.”
Before the end of August, Woodyard swallowed his pride and joined the Titans’ vegan movement. He wasn’t the only one. By the start of December, 11 Titans, mostly starters, were on the plant-based meal plan with varying levels of commitment.
Bad Cli-Fi – Hey it’s not the End of theWorld. Oh, Wait…
A new paper from UCLA researchers took a look at the history of such stories and compared them to the real, existential threats facing life on Earth and — spoiler alert — fiction and reality don’t line up and that gap could have dangerous consequences.
Some of civilization’s earliest stories contain doomsday tales. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem from Mesopotamia written around 2,100 B.C., destruction came in the form of great floods. Christian tradition echoes these tales in the Bible, foreseeing Armageddon as “a final spiritual reckoning, or a battle between God and the armies of unrepentant sinners,” the paper noted.
In more modern narratives, people are frequently the cause of our own demise. “Technology run amok” is a particularly popular theme, according to authors Peter Kareiva, director of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, and Valerie Carranza, who graduated from UCLA in 2016 and worked as a researcher in Kareiva’s lab.
Whether it is the artificially intelligent machines in “The Terminator” or the genetically engineered dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park,” the idea that something of our own creation could turn on us connects with audiences, earning the movies billions of dollars.
When it comes to stories of environmental catastrophe, human and corporate greed are often villains, as they are in films like “Erin Brockovich” and Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax.” And as the planet continues to heat up, so have anxieties about climate change. This is reflected in Hollywood blockbusters such as “The Day after Tomorrow” and “Waterworld.”
But the UCLA researchers argue that there’s something missing from these popular stories: actual science.
This recent vid discusses credible research by senior scientists outlining one of the climate issues that eerily parallels the classic cli-fi film, The Day After Tomorrow.
Continue reading “Bad Cli-Fi – Hey it’s not the End of theWorld. Oh, Wait…”
The Citizen Scientist Who Discovered Modern Climate Change
I’m excerpting a small part of a fascinating, long piece in Wired – describing the research of the early 20th century engineer Guy Callendar – who detected and predicted the greenhouse effect well before it took hold in the mainstream of science. Although Svante Arrhenius had theorized (presciently) about the problem decades before, Callendar made some of the first observations actually demonstrating the effect.
None of this is why Guy Callendar’s name will be boldfaced in tomorrow’s textbooks. Instead it will be because he was willing to delve into fields he knew nothing about, atmospheric science among them. Nobody knows why he got so interested in the air. Callendar himself attributed it to ordinary curiosity: “As man is now changing the composition of the atmosphere at a rate which must be very exceptional on the geological time-scale, it is natural to seek for the probable effects of such a change.”
In the early 1930s Callendar began collecting measurements of the properties of gases, the structure of the atmosphere, the sunlight at different latitudes, the use of fossil fuels, the action of ocean currents, the temperature and rainfall in weather stations across the world, and a host of other factors. It was a hobby, but a remarkably ambitious one: He was producing the first rough draft of the huge climate models familiar today. After years of calculation, in 1938 he came to a surprising conclusion: People were dumping enough carbon dioxide into the air to raise the world’s average temperature.
Below, Mike MacCracken’s famous talk at Sandia Labs in 1982 outlined much of what we know today about climate change, and credited Callendar.
Continue reading “The Citizen Scientist Who Discovered Modern Climate Change”