Month: July 2018

They’re counting on you burning out. Don’t – we need you.

Here’s help.

Daily Kos:

Today seems like the right time to do a thread I’ve been thinking about for a while on how to handle the seemingly never-ending deluge of depressing and disturbing news. My tips are based on my time as a CIA military analyst in which I dealt daily with disturbing content.

There are several risks to being overloaded with disturbing/negative content.

• Complacency – becoming so used to the deluge that it all starts to seem normal.
• Paralysis – that is, being so overwhelmed, you can’t figure out what to do/how to move forward.
• Crisis perspective – you get trapped in the Breaking News cycle where everything seems like a potentially world-ending crisis to you.
• Depression/PTSD – you don’t have to be on the frontline of a war have either/both. Disturbing content is absolutely a trigger.

There are also serious physical consequences to living a negative content overloaded life. I had a colleague who didn’t know he had stage 4 brain cancer because the symptoms were the same as our very stressful careers–exhaustion, random fevers, stress, and dizziness.

So, what do you do? First, I strongly urge you not to ignore the news/current events. Ignorance is one reason we have this society. It won’t make the problems go away & contributes nothing to their solving. Now that that’s established, here’s how to make it easier to handle:

1. TAKE ACTION. Volunteer for a food pantry, canvass for a political candidate, donate to a NGO, visit a sick friend. Seriously. Service of some kind in your community lets you be part of SOLUTIONS. You will see RESULTS when otherwise you’d feel helpless.

2. Conversely, for those who may take tip #1 to the extreme–know that you alone can’t save the world. Accept your limits. You aren’t a 7/11. You can’t always be open. At the end of every day when I reached my limit, I silently told myself, “I’ve done what I can today.”  (Note: Repeating that to myself did not stop me from feeling like I could have done more most days. But it was important to tell myself anyway because I am human. We are human. It’s good we *feel* things.)

3. RESEARCH BEFORE PANICKING. Easier said than done, but everything will seem like crisis/earth-ending if you don’t know what has/hasn’t happened before. If it has happened before, it’s can be hugely comforting to know how it was resolved and/or what might happen next. Continue reading “Twitter Thread – Psycho-Survival Hacks in a Dark Time”

I really enjoyed interviewing Wind Developer Marty Lagina.
Marty came from an Oil and Gas background, he’s an engineer – but he has seen the opportunity in wind, and lately, solar development, around Michigan.

I asked him to address a common bugaboo that windbaggers bring up about renewable energy – the existence of subsidies.

My take is that just about every thing that we identify as part of modern America, starting with the Erie Canal in 1821, got a boost from a public/private partnership.

And, Marty correctly notes that fossil fuels still receive enormous amounts of government funds.

Climate Change News:

The study found that the world’s seven major industrial democracies spent at least $100 billion (£70 billion) a year to prop up oil, gas and coal consumption at home and abroad in 2015 and 2016 despite their pledge to end fossil fuel subsidies by 2025.

While France topped the overall ranking, the UK scored the fourth lowest score out of seven and the US was last. The data analysed does not cover the Trump administration.

Shelah Whitley, head of the climate and energy programme at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and lead author of the report, told DeSmog UK the research found that all G7 countries had increased their support for fossil fuel exploration since countries committed to limit global temperature rise “well below” two degrees under the Paris Agreement in 2015.

Describing the finding as “shocking”, she added: “Increased support for fossil fuel exploration is one of the most egregious activities that countries can be doing and directly counters their pledges under the Paris Agreement. Yet, they are still doing it.”

Scientists have previously warned that more than 80% of global coal reserves, half of all gas reserves and more than a third of the world’s oil reserves had to stay in the ground to prevent dangerous global warming of more than two degrees.

Co-author Ivetta Gerasimchuk, from the International Institute for Sustainable Development, said: “G7 governments committed to phase-out fossil fuel subsidies back in 2009, but since then have made very little progress.

Below, Marty points out Wind’s key advantage over Natural Gas.

Continue reading “Wind Energy: What About Those Subsidies? And, the Key Advantage over Natural Gas..”

Independent:

Feeding seaweed to cows could slash the amount of climate change-inducing methane emissions from their burps.

Preliminary research has indicated a small amount of marine algae added to cattle food can reduce methane emissions from cattle gut microbes by as much as 99 per cent.

Now, scientists in California are hoping to help farmers meet strict new emissions targets by performing the first ever tests of seaweed feed in live dairy cows.

While their early results are yet to be released, team leader Professor Ermias Kebreab at the University of California, Davis, said their initial experiments were “very surprising and promising”.

“Results are not final, but so far we are seeing substantial emission reductions,” he said.

“This could help California’s dairy farmers meet new methane-emission standards and sustainably produce the dairy products we need to feed the world.”

Cow digestion relies on millions of microbes in their guts processing and fermenting high-fibre foods.

This process allows the animals to survive on a diet of grass, but it also produces large quantities of methane – a gas responsible for around a quarter of man-made global warming.

Cattle constantly burp and emit the methane being produced in their stomachs. The gas can also be expelled from their rear ends and from manure, but to a lesser extent.

Continue reading “Mitigating Methane in Cow Burps: Promising but Not Easy”

I’ll be giving some presentations in coming weeks devoted entirely to newest developments in renewable energy.

While a lot of readers of this blog may be well briefed on where renewables are, it’s astounding how little this story has percolated down to the general population.

In particular, folks don’t understand that this is no longer a California thing – it’s the most economical path, or will be soon, across a broad swath of America and the world.

Below, major Michigan Utility planner discusses a recent shift in priorities – from fossil dependence, to a future of efficiency, a little wind, and a lot of solar energy. Continue reading “New Video: Solar Shines in the Heartland”

I excerpted the video above from Facebook in this month’s Yale vid, in the post above.

It’s an example of a very large movement of tech companies into the renewable space – they need high quality electricity for expanding data centers. They want to go 100 percent renewable. They’re buying wind and solar power to fill the demand.

In addition, many are purchasing large battery storage systems to balance out the variable renewable energy.

There’s a next step, it turns out.

Scientific American:

The cutting edge in American efforts to green the power sector can be found in a shipping container sitting in the parking lot of a sprawling Microsoft Corp. data center in southern Virginia.

A team of engineers assembled here to conduct a series of tests to simulate the interaction between a data center and a grid operator. Their question: Can extensive battery systems installed at data centers like this one be used to help grid operators smooth out the small spikes and drops in electric demand that occur throughout the day?

It’s technical, tedious work, but the implications for the electric system are sweeping. If they succeed, power companies might not need to build new natural gas power plants. Directly powering data centers with the wind and sun becomes a real possibility. Microsoft engineers even talk about reimagining the way electricity is bought and sold.

“In the future, you don’t have a data center or a power plant. It’s something in the middle. A data plant, for example,” said Sean James, Microsoft director of energy research. “Where this thing isn’t just a load on the grid, it’s an asset on the grid. We’ve been doing a lot of calculations, working with partners to get it just right, but to see it actually going is a special moment for us.”

Technology companies have led a corporate rush into renewables in recent years, pioneering long-term contracts with wind and solar projects that essentially offset the emissions associated with their electricity consumption (Greenwire, April 20). But many firms, no longer content with merely offsetting their emissions, are moving on to the challenge of directly powering their operations with the wind and sun.

The big increases in electricity consumption are part of the reason technology firms have embraced renewables. Wind and solar offer firms two primary benefits: They help companies meet their sustainability goals while providing a hedge against fuel prices. Wind and solar lack fuel costs, meaning they offer electricity buyers long-term price certainty.

Microsoft’s battery project in Boydton is illustrative of how technology companies are finding new ways to green the grid. Data centers like this one are equipped with extensive battery systems to back up your photos, videos and favorite web-based news outlets in the event the power goes out. But most of the time they sit around gathering dust.

The essential question for Microsoft is whether a data center’s batteries can still perform their backup function while also providing a service for the grid.

Continue reading “Data Plant? or Power Center? Changing Grid Spawns Hybrids”

Last night’s post got me thinking I should review just where we are with “Next generation Nuclear power”.

About where I thought.

Lots of ideas. 2030 time frame for working prototypes, which will need a decade or so to prove themselves.
I get it that small,  modular, safe reactors, if economic, would be a big help.
Still – two things.
Investors won’t believe you till you show them.

And tell me again how we can trust every tin-pot dictator with these? Just asking.

Grist:

There are reactors that burn nuclear waste. There are reactors designed to destroy isotopes that could be made into weapons. There are small reactors that could be built inexpensively in factories. So many ideas!

To former Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, an advisor to Terrestrial, it feels as if something new is underway. “I have never seen this kind of innovation in the sector,” he said. “It’s really exciting.”

Other reactors, like Terrestrial’s molten-salt-cooled design, automatically cool down if they get too hot. Water flows through conventional reactors to keep them from overheating, but if something halts this flow — like the earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima — the water boils off, leaving nothing to stop a meltdown.

Unlike water, salt wouldn’t boil off, so even if operators switched off safety systems and walked away, the salts would keep cooling the system, Irish said. Salts heat up and expand, pushing uranium atoms apart and slowing down the reaction (the farther apart the uranium atoms, the less likely a flying neutron will split them apart, triggering the next link in the chain reaction).

“It’s like your pot on the stove when you are boiling pasta,” Irish said. No matter how hot your stove, your pasta will never get hotter than 212 degrees Fahrenheit unless the water boils off. Until it’s gone, the water is just circulating and dissipating heat. When you replace water with liquid salt, however, you have to get to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit before your coolant starts to evaporate.

This stuff can sound like science fiction — but it’s real. Russia has been producing electricity from an advanced reactor that burns up radioactive waste since 2016. China has built a “pebble bed” reactor that keeps radioactive elements locked inside softball-sized graphite spheres.

In 2015, to keep track of the startups and public-sector projects working on trying to provide low-carbon energy with safer, cheaper, and cleaner nuclear power, the centrist think tank, Third Way, started mapping all of the advanced nuke projects across the country. There were 48 dots on the first map, and now there are 75, spreading like a candy-colored case of measles.

“In terms of the number of projects, the number of people working on it, and the amount of private financing, there isn’t anything to compare it to unless you go back to the 1960s,” said Ryan Fitzpatrick who works on clean energy for Third Way.

Back then, just after Walt Disney released the film “Our Friend the Atom” promoting nuclear energy, when the futuristic notion of electricity “too cheap to meter” seemed plausible, electric utilities had plans to build hundreds of reactors across the United States.

Continue reading “Just Where are we on Next-Gen Nukes?”

Suggestion to US trading partners still in the Paris Agreement – If you’re going to have a trade war, well, could it be targeted on carbon emitters?

Inside Climate News:

As the Trump administration’s trade war heats up, a group of experts is proposing a new way to counter protectionism—and prod the United States back into climate action at the same time.

In a commentary in the journal Nature, the team of trade and climate policy experts called for a global punitive tax on imports based on their carbon footprint.

It’s an idea that was invented to address the problem of “free riders”—nations that refuse to join the global practice of putting a price on carbon, such as a tax or a cap-and-trade market mechanism. To avoid giving the free riders a competitive advantage in world trade, the carbon price would be collected on their products as an import tariff at the border.

The border tax would “level the emissions playing field by imposing the same economic burden on domestic and external manufacturers,” the team writes in the article, published online Monday.

Nature:

More and more countries are shielding domestic producers from foreign competition — a process known as protectionism. Since January, US President Donald Trump has slapped tariffs of up to 50% on many imports, including washing machines, solar cells, soya beans, steel and aluminium. Hopes that allied countries would be exempt were dashed after a tumultuous G7 meeting in June.

Economies affected have begun to respond in kind. China hit back with levies on US$34 billion worth of US goods. The European Union increased tariffs on jeans, motorbikes and bourbon imported from the United States. And Trump has since threatened to add tariffs on another $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. A trade war is unfolding.

Meanwhile, nations are reviewing the pledges they made to cut emissions as part of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Everyone knows that current pledges will not keep global warming below the ‘safe’ limit of 2 °C above preindustrial levels — even if all nations deliver on their promises. The question is how to strengthen actions so that emissions drop sharply once the Paris framework takes effect in 2020.

The Paris process has two main problems. First, the pledges are uneven. Countries that do little will benefit from hefty cuts made by others. In the ultimate free ride, the United States will withdraw from the Paris Agreement in 2020, leaving others to do more. Second, carbon emissions ‘leak’ across borders. A country can keep its budget low by buying carbon-intensive goods made elsewhere. Some regions, such as Western and Northern Europe, import a considerable share of high-emission goods, allowing them to emit less themselves (see ‘Carbon balance’).

Continue reading “Could Trade War Be Climate Tool?”

Two most obvious existential threats to civilization – climate change and nuclear war.

You could probably add in the odd asteroid strike, but that’s more hypothetical. The other two are demonstrably happening.

ChannelNewsAsia:

TOKYO: Japan has amassed enough plutonium to make 6,000 atomic bombs as part of a programme to fuel its nuclear plants, but concern is growing that the stockpile is vulnerable to terrorists and natural disasters.

Japan has long been the world’s only non-nuclear-armed country with a programme to reprocess spent nuclear fuel from its power plants into plutonium.

On Tuesday (Jul 17), a decades-old deal with the United States which allows Japan to reprocess plutonium was renewed, but the pact can be terminated by either side with just six months’ notice.

Plutonium reprocessing is meant to create a new and emissions-free fuel source for resource-poor Japan, but the size of its stockpile has started to attract criticism, even from allies.

Plutonium can be used to create nuclear weapons. Although Japan has vowed the material would never be used for military purposes, it has now amassed vastly more plutonium than it can use, since many of its nuclear plants are still offline after the 2011 Fukushima disaster.

Experts warn the growing stockpile could be dangerous in case of a natural disaster, like the earthquake and tsunami that set off the Fukushima meltdown, and is also an attractive target for terrorists.

 

Continue reading “Growing: Worries. And Japan’s Plutonium Pile..”

Seems appropriate.

This post was inspired by a long twitter discussion by Mike Mann on the subject of agricultural impacts on climate.

First of all, in my presentations, when the question comes up in Q and A, as it always does, “What can I do about climate change?” – My first answer is not, “Give up Meat”.

That’s usually, my second or third answer. The first one is, “If you care about this issue, for God’s sake, Tell someone. Tell your family, your co-workers, your church, your garden club, your bowling team, your yoga class, and above all, your representatives, your newspaper editors, and your online community. Because our leaders have not been hearing from you, and our collective silence on this issue is dysfunctional.”

Then I usually say, “…and by the way, you should eat a lot less meat, – it will save you money and make you healthier.”

Very good discussion in the Guardian here, and worth your time to go to the link.

Guardian:

Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet.

The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife.

The new analysis shows that while meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, it uses the vast majority – 83% – of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Other recent research shows 86% of all land mammals are now livestock or humans. The scientists also found that even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing.

On the other hand:

Doug Boucher, Science advisor to Union of Concerned Scientists:

Movie night at my house last weekend, featuring Cowspiracy. The name says it all. The 2014/2015 movie by that name—“The Film That Environmental Organizations Don’t Want You to See,” according to its website—has uncovered an immense conspiracy between governments and the world’s biggest environmental organizations, to deceive the public about the principal cause of global warming. But the film’s premise is based on badly flawed—and almost unanimously rejected—interpretations of science. Let me explain…

According to Cowspiracy, the major source of global warming pollution isn’t fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas, as the world’s scientists are telling us. No, it’s animal agriculture—not just eating cows, but all other kinds of meat, and eggs and milk and fish too. So the principal solution to global warming isn’t renewable energy. It’s for everyone to become a vegan.

Cows worse than fossil fuels? Not by a long shot

Central to Cowspiracy’s conspiracy theory is the supposed “fact” that a 2009 study found that 51% of all greenhouse gases are produced by animal agriculture.

A good deal of the movie is taken up with interviews with people from environmental organizations, such as the Rainforest Action Network, Oceana, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, who don’t seem to accept this “fact,” and therefore must be part of the conspiracy to cover it up. Greenpeace politely declined, twice, to be interviewed, proving that they’re part of the cowspiracy too.

Since the 51% figure is key to the film’s conspiracy theory, let’s look at the study that it comes from. Ironically, in light of Cowspiracy’s thesis that environmental NGOs are hiding the science, this study proposing this figure on which they rely so heavily was not published in a scientific journal, but in a report by an environmental organization, the Worldwatch Institute. The report’s authors, Jeff Anhang and the late Robert Goodland, were not named in the movie but were described simply as “two advisers from the World Bank.”

Continue reading “The Forever Foodfight: Meat v Meatless”