In a summer of climate fueled disasters, news reports connecting fires, droughts, floods and other extremes with climate change have been sparse. Here are a few recent bright spots.
Much thanks to Anne Thompson (@annenbcnews) for her efforts to bring mainstream network news coverage to climate change and its impacts. We owe her and @NBCNightlyNews our thanks.
A domino-like cascade of melting ice, warming seas, shifting currents and dying forests could tilt the Earth into a “hothouse” state beyond which human efforts to reduce emissions will be increasingly futile, a group of leading climate scientists has warned.
This grim prospect is sketched out in a journal paper that considers the combined consequences of 10 climate change processes, including the release of methane trapped in Siberian permafrost and the impact of melting ice in Greenland on the Antarctic.
The authors of the essay, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, stress their analysis is not conclusive, but warn the Paris commitment to keep warming at 2C above pre-industrial levels may not be enough to “park” the planet’s climate at a stable temperature.
They warn that the hothouse trajectory “would almost certainly flood deltaic environments, increase the risk of damage from coastal storms, and eliminate coral reefs (and all of the benefits that they provide for societies) by the end of this century or earlier.”
“I do hope we are wrong, but as scientists we have a responsibility to explore whether this is real,” said Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. “We need to know now. It’s so urgent. This is one of the most existential questions in science.”
Rockström and his co-authors are among the world’s leading authorities on positive feedback loops, by which warming temperatures release new sources of greenhouse gases or destroy the Earth’s ability to absorb carbon or reflect heat.
Their new paper asks whether the planet’s temperature can stabilise at 2C or whether it will gravitate towards a more extreme state. The authors attempt to assess whether warming can be halted or whether it will tip towards a “hothouse” world that is 4C warmer than pre-industrial times and far less supportive of human life.
Katherine Richardson from the University of Copenhagen, one of the authors, said the paper showed that climate action was not just a case of turning the knob on emissions, but of understanding how various factors interact at a global level.
“We note that the Earth has never in its history had a quasi-stable state that is around 2C warmer than the preindustrial and suggest that there is substantial risk that the system, itself, will ‘want’ to continue warming because of all of these other processes – even if we stop emissions,” she said. “This implies not only reducing emissions but much more.”
New feedback loops are still being discovered. A separate paper published inPNAS reveals that increased rainfall – a symptom of climate change in some regions – is making it harder for forest soils to trap greenhouse gases such as methane.
Previous studies have shown that weakening carbon sinks will add 0.25C, forest dieback will add 0.11C, permafrost thaw will add 0.9C and increased bacterial respiration will add 0.02C. The authors of the new paper also look at the loss of methane hydrates from the ocean floor and the reduction of snow and ice cover at the poles.
Rockström says there are huge gaps in data and knowledge about how one process might amplify another. Contrary to the Gaia theory, which suggests the Earth has a self-righting tendency, he says the feedbacks could push the planet to a more extreme state.
Driving down costs for car buyers was a stated rationale of the Trump administration’s decision last week to lower Obama-era fuel economy standards and challenge California’s ability to set its own vehicle emission limits.
But as the White House advocates for fewer environmental mandates, it is still mulling new automobile tariffs that could add to the price of new cars and trucks, negating whatever savings consumers realize from relaxed fuel efficiency standards.
“I want to highlight the contradiction,” said Jennifer Thomas, vice president for federal government affairs at the Alliance for Automobile Manufacturers. “Any savings that consumers might be seeing in the future as a result of their actions on fuel economy might be wiped out if we continue down the path we are currently on.”
The Trump administration unveiled its proposed rollback of fuel efficiency standards last week, as the Commerce Department weighs a plan to impose 25 percent tariffs on foreign-made auto parts and imported cars. The auto industry has started highlighting the disconnect between the two policies as it lobbies the White House and Commerce Department, which could announce a decision on whether to impose the tariffs on autos and auto parts within weeks.
On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump said he would slap 20 percent to 25 percent tariffs on such foreign-made vehicles and auto parts, part of his pitch to Detroit auto workers, who helped him defeat Hillary Clinton in Michigan in 2016. He’s now pushing Commerce to deliver on that promise.
But all cars made in the United States, whether manufactured by U.S. companies or foreign firms with plants here, rely on imported automobile parts. Tariffs will add about $2,000 to the cost of a typical U.S.-made car and $6,000 to an imported one, according to an analysis by the American Automotive Policy Council, a research arm of General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.
Toyota says the price increase would be even higher — an extra $2,800 to $3,000 for its Tundra full-size pickup and Sienna minivan, both assembled in the United States.
“The cost increase would be significant,” said Thomas, speaking to journalists Friday at a National Press Foundation event. “You’re putting new cars out of reach of most American families.”
This year’s unusually warm summer in the Nordic region has increased sea water temperatures and forced some nuclear reactors to curb power output or shut down altogether, with more expected to follow suit.
The summer has been 6-10 degrees Celsius above the seasonal average so far and has depleted the region’s hydropower reservoirs, driving power prices to record highs, boosting energy imports from continental Europe and driving up consumer energy bills.
Nuclear plants in Sweden and Finland are the region’s second largest power source after hydropower dams and have a combined capacity of 11.4 gigawatts (GW).
Reactors need cold sea water for cooling but when the temperature gets too high it can make the water too warm for safe operations, although the threshold varies depending on the reactor type and age.
Unscheduled power output cuts in Swedish and Finnish reactors could push prices even higher, said Vegard Willumsen, section manager at Norway’s energy regulator NVE.
“If nuclear reactors in the Nordics shut down or reduce power due to the heatwave, it could also put pressure on the supply and consequently on the Nordic power prices,” he added.
As Europe struggles through a major heat wave, the French energy company EDF says it has halted a fourth nuclear reactor, this time one at the country’s oldest nuclear plant at Fessenheim in eastern France.
In a statement, EDT said the Fessenheim nuclear reactor was temporarily shut down Saturday.
Since Thursday, four French nuclear reactors in three power plants near the Rhine and the Rhone Rivers, including Fessenheim, have had to be temporarily shut down. EDF said the decision was made to avoid overheating the rivers.
Nuclear power plants use water from the rivers to cool down the temperatures of their reactors before sending the water back into the rivers. Rivers that are unusually warm can experience mass fish die-offs, which has happened in Germany in the past week.
Above, “The Road Not Taken” movie trailer reminds us that President Carter installed solar panels, symbolically, on the White House. Reagan removed them, setting up decades of planetary rape and war in service of a fossil agenda.
Blindered blunders in new NYTimes piece on what happened to climate action that kept us from solving the problem.
Nathaniel Rich taking heat for Pollyanna view of the fossil fueled, bad faith greed of the Republican Party and denialist bad actors.
Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979. By that year, data collected since 1957 confirmed what had been known since before the turn of the 20th century: Human beings have altered Earth’s atmosphere through the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels. The main scientific questions were settled beyond debate, and as the 1980s began, attention turned from diagnosis of the problem to refinement of the predicted consequences. Compared with string theory and genetic engineering, the “greenhouse effect” — a metaphor dating to the early 1900s — was ancient history, described in any Introduction to Biology textbook. Nor was the basic science especially complicated. It could be reduced to a simple axiom: The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet. And every year, by burning coal, oil and gas, humankind belched increasingly obscene quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Expenditures on renewable energy – Big drop in transition Carter to Reagan
Why didn’t we act? A common boogeyman today is the fossil-fuel industry, which in recent decades has committed to playing the role of villain with comic-book bravado. An entire subfield of climate literature has chronicled the machinations of industry lobbyists, the corruption of scientists and the propaganda campaigns that even now continue to debase the political debate, long after the largest oil-and-gas companies have abandoned the dumb show of denialism. But the coordinated efforts to bewilder the public did not begin in earnest until the end of 1989. During the preceding decade, some of the largest oil companies, including Exxon and Shell, made good-faith efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible solutions.
Nor can the Republican Party be blamed. Today, only 42 percent of Republicans know that “most scientists believe global warming is occurring,” and that percentage is falling. But during the 1980s, many prominent Republicans joined Democrats in judging the climate problem to be a rare political winner: nonpartisan and of the highest possible stakes. Among those who called for urgent, immediate and far-reaching climate policy were Senators John Chafee, Robert Stafford and David Durenberger; the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly; and, during his campaign for president, George H.W. Bush. As Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, the acting chairman of the president’s Council for Environmental Quality, told industry executives in 1981, “There can be no more important or conservative concern than the protection of the globe itself.” The issue was unimpeachable, like support for veterans or small business. Except the climate had an even broader constituency, composed of every human being on Earth.
In the decade that ran from 1979 to 1989, we had an excellent opportunity to solve the climate crisis. The world’s major powers came within several signatures of endorsing a binding, global framework to reduce carbon emissions—far closer than we’ve come since. During those years, the conditions for success could not have been more favorable. The obstacles we blame for our current inaction had yet to emerge. Almost nothing stood in our way — nothing except ourselves.
Ah, yes, ourselves. Now settle in, parishioners, for you know what’s coming next. This is a story about humanity, about the frailty and hubris of those tool-wielding primates who realized they could burn old rocks for energy and, in doing so, accidentally cooked the Earth.
If you have not seen my new vid on solar across the Heartland, you need it for better understanding of what is happening.
Utility Dive
The industry has been playing the solar limbo for years now, as prices rapidly plummeted in response to economies of scale, new technology and experience.
The addition of storage is also helping bring down solar prices in some areas. In January, Xcel Energy received a median bid price of $21/MWh for wind-plus-storage projects and $36/MWh for solar-plus-storage projects. That beat out the $45/MWh price for a solar-plus-storage project hit last year in a PPA between Tucson Electric Power and NextEra Energy.
In March, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said costs to install utility-scale solar systems declined 10% to 15% annually from 2010 through 2016. But just how long can prices continue falling?
Solar analyst Ben Attia told Greentech Media that “highly competitive tenders will see cost compression, and there is still room for costs to fall further, but there isn’t as much breathing room on the leading edge.”
For perspective, here are some of Lazard’s electric production prices for 2016.
A huge glut of global solar panels has led to sharp price drops that have muted the effect of the Trump administration’s import tariffs on solar.
Trade wars have unpredictable results, and solar power is a classic case in point.
In 2017, when Trump was considering putting tariffs on imported solar cells and panels, U.S. companies started buying and stockpiling foreign panels, which drove up prices. Then in January, the President imposed a 30 percent tariff.
Unexpectedly, on June 1, the Chinese government cut its own solar installation incentives sharply, to slow what the government saw as a domestic market that had been overheating. Last year alone China added a staggering 53 gigawatts (53,000 megawatts) of new solar capacity — which was more new capacity installed than any other nation had at the start of 2017.
China’s move had an immediate effect, slowing domestic installation and creating a global supply glut. Within weeks, global prices had dropped 12 percent.
“If you are building a large power plant your pricing has certainly come back at least halfway to what it was pre-tariff, if not all the way,” as SunPower Corp CEO Tom Werner told Reuters Monday. “It’s muting the impact of tariffs.”
Prices could fall up to 35 percent this year. And while that is good news for those who want to install solar panels, it undercuts the supposed goal of Trump’s tariffs — to increase domestic production.
The addition of storage is also helping bring down solar prices in some areas. In January, Xcel Energy received a median bid price of $21/MWh for wind-plus-storage projects and $36/MWh for solar-plus-storage projects. That beat out the $45/MWh price for a solar-plus-storage project hit last year in a PPA between Tucson Electric Power and NextEra Energy.
