As I’ve pointed out many times, the Trump/Russia story is not separate from climate story.
I’m pressing my House Rep to respond, following President Trump’s refusal to apply congressionally mandated new sanctions on Russia.
This billboard is going up on a well travelled local artery Monday morning.
Continue reading “Update: Trump Refuses to Apply Mandated Sanctions on Russia”
Wind energy is still, for the moment, the gorilla in the new energy room. But that rumbling you hear is an emerging new tech earth quake across the heartland.
How big is solar in Iowa? Can solar energy become the next wind power?
Drive through Washington County, and it seems virtually every hog and turkey barn boasts solar panels on the roof.
Washington County, where virtually every hog and turkey barn has solar panels on the roof, leads the state in commercial solar installations, according to SEIA. Winneshiek County has more residential solar than any other county in Iowa.
In fact, Washington County had 88 solar energy projects with over $700,000 in state tax credits between 2012 and 2014, according to the Iowa Department of Revenue. Linn County had 34 projects during the same period with more than $150,000 in state tax credits.
Across the state, as the price of photovoltaic cells and related equipment continues to decline and technology continues to improve, more businesses and homeowners are installing solar energy systems to cut their utility bills.
The latest figures from the Washington, D.C.-based Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) show roughly 27 megawatts of solar energy have been installed in Iowa. That ranks the state 29th in the country in installed solar capacity.
Contrast that with wind-generated energy, in which Iowa ranks No. 1 in the nation with more than 31.3 percent of its electricity generated by wind turbines, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
“We are probably where the wind industry was 10 or 12 years ago,” said Barry Shear, president and CEO of Eagle Point Solar of Dubuque. “We will certainly not get to the place where wind is because of the nature of solar.
“Solar can be a wonderful energy source that complements wind, which typically produces better at night than in the daytime. Solar obviously does not produce electricity at night.”
Installed solar photovoltaic system prices in the Iowa have dropped steadily — by 6 percent from 2014 and 48 percent from 2010, according to SEIA. Last year, $16 million was invested on solar panels and related equipment in Iowa to install 6 megawatts of solar electric capacity.
Meanwhile, there are roughly 50 companies in the state employing more than 300 people in the solar energy supply chain, according to SEIA.
That includes 30 contractor/installers, eight manufacturers, four product developers, two distributors and three companies engaged in other solar activities such as financing, engineering or legal support.
Moxie Solar of North Liberty is an example of a relatively young but growing renewable energy contractor specializing in solar power. The company, with 18 employees, has experienced three-year revenue growth of 536 percent.
The Iowa Utilities Board has given MidAmerican Energy the green light for the utility’s plans for a $3.6 billion wind energy investment, the largest renewable energy project in the state.
The state board on Friday gave final approval for the utility’s Wind XI farm.
Not just the NRA.
Climate Denial Geezers are on the agenda for youthful activists.
Generation Z – millennials’ younger brothers and sisters – are increasingly finding their voices in the Trump era, expanding media-savvy campaigns for racial equality and gun control to encompass climate change. A group of high school students are now planning a nationwide series of climate marches on July 21st, when they will confront lawmakers in Washington, D.C. with a list of their demands for a livable climate.
“I’d say I do about three hours of conference calls every single day,” says Jamie Margolin, a 16-year-old high school sophomore in Seattle who is the lead organizer of the march. “I’m not new to the climate activism world.”
It’s true. Margolin is one of 13 young plaintiffs suing Washington state government for not taking sufficient action to address climate change. She frequently spends lunches answering emails instead of hanging out with friends. And the Seattle teen is not an anomaly: Statistically, young women of color such as Margolin are the demographic most engaged on climate issues.
Margolin started planning the upcoming climate march, which she calls Zero Hour, last August, after the Trump administration announced its plans to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. She recruited Mrinalini Chakraborty, head of strategy for the national Women’s March, to help the students file for permits and plan logistics. Now, the organizing committee includes dozens of youth from Connecticut to California. The official websitefor the march launched last week.
Now, the group is drawing inspiration from the teen-led movement for federal gun control in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Margolin was particularly impressed when the Parkland students confronted lawmakers about accepting money from the NRA – which produced some predictably awkward stammers. Her team is considering making similar demands for politicians to refuse money from the fossil fuel industry.
Continue reading “Kids Coming at Climate Deniers, Solving Climate Science, Leading the Way”
James Hansen – Columbia University:
Today’s governments are wittingly leaving young people with a grinding, growing climate mess.
Delayed response of climate to human-caused rising atmospheric CO2 threatens to leave young people a situation out of their control. The primary action required to avoid that outcome is rapid reduction of fossil fuel emissions. However, our “Young People’s Burden” paper1 shows that more is required: it is also necessary to extract CO2 from the air.
A study led by David Beerling and his group in Sheffield, UK, proposes a change to agricultural practices that could increase the rate of the natural weathering process that removes CO2 from the air. Logistical infrastructure to apply appropriate (basaltic) rock dust to managed croplands already exists due to the common need to apply crushed limestone to reverse acidification.
Rock dust has potential to improve soil fertility and provide protection against pests and diseases so there is hope that costs could be offset by financial benefits. If it proves feasible to employ such practices on a large scale an important benefit could be reduction of ocean acidification, which threatens marine biocalcifiers such as corals and shellfish. Further study and field assessments are needed to verify benefits and address potential obstacles to large-scale adoption.
Farming crops with rocks to reduce CO2 and improve global food security
- Enhanced rock weathering involves adding minute rock grains to cropland soils which dissolve chemically taking up carbon dioxide and releasing plant essential nutrients.
- Unlike other carbon removal strategies enhanced rock weathering doesn’t compete for land used to grow food or increase the demand for freshwater.
- Other potential benefits include reducing the use of agricultural fertilizers and pesticides, lowering the cost of food production and increasing farm profitability.Farming crops with crushed rocks could help to improve global food security and capture CO2 from the atmosphere, a new study has found.
The pioneering research by scientists at the University of Sheffield together with international colleagues suggests that adding fast-reacting silicate rocks to croplands could capture CO2 and give increased protection from pests and diseases while restoring soil structure and fertility.
Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Enhanced Weathering – Rock Dust, Soils, and Climate”
Below, Maher makes a serious point about unserious journalists.
Continue reading “Bill Maher with Stoneman Douglas High School students”
Punk move is what we’ve come to expect.
Interior Department emails show that its decision to shrink the Bears Ears National Monument was largely centered on allowing for oil and gas exploration on the protected site, The New York Times reports.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) first suggested reductions to the monument that was created under President Obama, citing the vast oil and natural gas deposits under parts of the monument in emails with the department last March.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke opened the department’s controversial inquiry into altering boundaries for national monuments just one month after Hatch’s office provided maps of the reserves on the site.
And Trump’s final decision to shrink the 1.3 million acre Bears Ears monument by nearly 85 percent closely followed the boundaries of the map showing those reserves.
Matthew Whitlock, a spokesman for Senator Hatch, said that the senator has been involved in discussions around Bears Ears for years. He emphasized that some of the land had long been designated to help fund local schools, and that Senator Hatch’s interest was to protect the school funding.
The internal Interior Department emails and memos also show the central role that concerns over gaining access to coal reserves played in the decision by the Trump administration to shrink the size of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by about 47 percent, to just over 1 million acres.
Mr. Zinke’s staff developed a series of estimates on the value of coal that could potentially be mined from a section of Grand Staircase called the Kaiparowits plateau. As a result of Mr. Trump’s action, major parts of the area are no longer a part of the national monument.
“The Kaiparowits plateau, located within the monument, contains one of the largest coal deposits in the United States,” an Interior Department memo, issued in the spring of 2017, said. About 11.36 billion tons are “technologically recoverable,” it projected.
From the start of the Interior Department review process, agency officials directed staff to figure out how much coal, oil and natural gas — as well as grass for cattle grazing and timber — had been put essentially off limits, or made harder to access, by the decision to designate the areas as national monuments.
– Continue reading “Zinke Dink : Stripping and Selling America’s Treasures”
Above, Jay Inslee, then in congress, now Governor of Washington, takes climate denial kingpin “Lord” Monckton comically to task.
Governor Inslee is now testing the the political viability of a carbon tax.
This week in the statehouse in Olympia, Wash., Gov. Jay Inslee fought but failed to bring a vote on a historic climate change policy that he has pursued for years: instituting the nation’s first tax on planet-warming carbon dioxide pollution.
The fate of the Senate vote, which was canceled on Thursday after it became clear that it could not gain enough support even in the Democratic-majority legislature of this West Coast state, was being watched closely around the country and the world. But for Mr. Inslee the loss of this week’s carbon-tax battle was just one step in a war to keep pushing his carbon plan, either as a ballot initiative this year — or possibly as part of a platform in a 2020 challenge against President Trump for the presidency.
In an interview, Governor Inslee declined to say whether he intends to run for president, but his name is increasingly appearing on lists of possible Democratic contenders.
Here, Governor Inslee questions the President on plans to arm teachers.
Advocates and opponents of climate change action are paying close attention to Mr. Inslee’s next steps. Economists broadly agree that taxing the carbon pollution produced by burning fossil fuels is the most efficient way to fight climate change. But politicians agree that it is also a nearly surefire way to get voted out of office.
After all, a carbon tax is, by design, an energy tax. Among other things it would most likely raise the prices that voters pay for gasoline and electricity, which is why the idea has long been seen as politically toxic.
In the days before the vote, Governor Inslee said he would like to change that perception. “We are not afraid of being a vanguard,” he said in an interview in Washington, D.C. “We invented commercial jet airliners and the best software in the world,” he said, referring to Boeing and Microsoft, two global companies that rose up in his state. “In this case, we’re developing a new policy system, and we hope it would be followed.”
If he does run for president, Governor Inslee is expected to make climate change central to his platform. Governor Inslee, who has spent the past decade of his political career focusing on climate change, earning the sobriquet “greenest governor in America,” sees the issue as a way to directly attack Mr. Trump, who has mocked established climate science, rolled back environmental regulations and promised to withdraw the United States from the landmark Paris climate accord.
Below, former climate skeptic Jerry Taylor discusses the difficulties of convincing conservatives on a carbon tax.
Continue reading “Presidential Dark Horse Floats Carbon Tax”
