Month: October 2018

Well, not quite – anymore – it was once true that there were a hard core group of lefties that who said climate change was some kind of globalist power grab, but you only hear that from the right wing now.  The lefty magazine “CounterPunch” was a hotbed of that shit, especially when Alexander Cockburn was writing for them.

Today, the sin is often one of omission.
Ted Glick is a long time peace and environmental activist.

Ted Glick’s Blog:

Michael Moore’s “molotov cocktail to the system” movie, Fahrenheit 11/9, has a number of good things to say and good sections. I was particularly appreciative of the sections on lead poisoning criminality in Flint, Michigan, recent progressive electoral victories and campaigns within the Democratic Party, and the West Virginia teachers strike. His critique of the Clinton/corporate/dominant wing of the Democratic Party was also on target.

However, I was appalled that there was virtually nothing about the climate crisis. Out of the two hours, there might have been a literal total of 10 seconds of footage about something related to that huge, world-overarching issue.

For example, the struggle at Standing Rock was nowhere to be found in this progressive movie about US politics and progressive activism since 2016.

15 years ago I began my transformation from a progressive activist and organizer primarily working in the arena of independent politics into someone primarily working on the climate crisis. The impetus for that life-change was a disastrous heat wave in western Europe in August of 2003. 35,000 or more people died as a result of it. This unprecedented, massive human tragedy caused me to spend the next several months studying the reality of global heating, how bad it is, how relatively close we are to climate tipping points, and who was working against this looming world catastrophe.

I was disturbed to learn that almost no one on the left and not that many within the environmental community were doing so, at least on a consistent basis. And so, in January of 2004, I started doing work in this area, co-founding with Fr. Paul Mayer the Climate Crisis Coalition and staying active ever since.

It has been encouraging to see the growth of an activist climate movement, an anti-racist climate justice movement and an inclusion of the climate issue as a major one on the part of many groups within the progressive movement. It was very significant that in his history-making Presidential campaign in 2016 Bernie Sanders spoke about this issue consistently and strongly. And there could be other positive examples.

So is Michael Moore’s climate blindspot in this movie an exception to the prevailing reality on the left? Continue reading “Climate Denial on the Left?”

The Mountains are high, and the Emperor is far away. – Chinese Proverb

Connections between the Chinese Central Government in Beijing and the people has historically been weak, with much regional autonomy and little loyalty. The proverb has thus come to generally mean that central authorities have little influence over local affairs, and it is often used in reference to corruption.   –   Wikipedia

Really bad news, if true.

China building renegade coal plants.

However, read on – mitigating factors may make this phenomenon somewhat self limiting.

Guardian:

Chinese coal-fired power plants, thought to have been cancelled because of government edicts, are still being built and are threatening to “seriously undermine” global climate goals, researchers have warned.

Satellite photos taken in 2018 of locations in China reveal cooling towers and new buildings that were not present a year earlier at plants that were meant to stop operations or be postponed by orders from Beijing.

The projects are part of an “approaching tsunami” of coal plants that would boost China’s existing coal capacity by 25%, according to the research group Coalswarm.

The total capacity of the planned coal power stations is about 259GW, bigger than the American coal fleet and “wildly out of line” with the Paris climate agreement, the group said in a new report.

“This new evidence that China’s central government hasn’t been able to stop the runaway coal-fired power plant building is alarming – the planet can’t tolerate another US-sized block of plants to be built,” said Ted Nace, executive director of CoalSwarm, which is funded by international green groups and private donations.

Continue reading “Is China Hiding a Renegade “Coal Tsunami”?”

Renew Economy:

It’s now been just over 18 months since those famous “billionaire tweets”  – between Australian software pioneer Michael Cannon-Brookes and Tesla founder Elon Musk – set in motion a process that would see South Australia install the largest lithium-ion battery in the world.

The Tesla big battery, officially known as the Hornsdale Power Reserve (it is located next to the 317MW Hornsdale wind farm) has defied skeptics, and even the experts, in almost every conceivable way.

They said it couldn’t be done. Batteries can’t be that big. They can’t be built that quick. They won’t work. Ten months on from its installation, the Tesla big battery has emphatically proven its worth – faster, quicker, more accurate, more reliable and more flexible than even the market operator thought possible.

More importantly, it has given a glimpse of the future, how a grid can be effectively managed with a very high share of wind and solar – not just faster, but also cleaner, smarter and more reliable than the dumb and ageing fossil fuel grid we now depend on, and which has become victim to endless market rorting from the industry incumbents.

So much so that it may turn out to be the best value investment that the South Australia Labor government ever made, although their political opponents may be reluctant to admit it.

As RenewEconomy revealed exclusively last Friday, the Tesla big battery is making money that promises a quick return on investment, something not thought possible when the battery was built on time and on budget.

Share listing documents from its owner, the French renewable energy developer Neoen, reveal the construction price ($A90 million), the government contract ($A4 million a year, paid in monthly instalments, for system security), and total revenue of $A14 million in the first six months of 2018.

One day out from the second anniversary of the state-wide blackout that helped trigger its construction – it is worth reminding ourselves just how skeptical everyone – from the market operator all the way through to the rusted on renewable technology deniers – was about the technology.

There’s a lesson in this, and it is that technology developments are happening faster than most people have imagined. And will continue to do so, no matter how attached conservatives and political ideologues are to the technologies of the past. As we noted at the time of the tweets, it signalled the start of the end of the fossil fuel industry.
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Continue reading “Tesla’s Giant Battery Confounds Critics”

Popular Science:

A researcher watching Russia’s largest High Arctic glacier was surprised when his gaze shifted to its nearby neighbor. What he saw there raised questions about how glaciers work—and what we may be facing as the world warms.

“I kept on seeing this other ice cap in the southern part of the scenes I was looking at via satellite,” says University of Colorado geologist Michael Willis. He was studying the Academy of Sciences Glacier, Russia’s largest, but what really caught his eye was the nearby Vavilov Ice Cap. It was doing something totally unexpected, he says: moving, and quickly. The ice cap—the term refers to a type of glacier, of which “polar ice cap” is a subset—is of a kind that’s supposed to be very stable. “This kind of ice cap shouldn’t be displaying this kind of behavior,” Willis says.

In this instance, though, the ice cap was practically galloping along: “surging” at a pace of 82 feet per day in 2015, as Willis and his colleagues found. Previously, its average speed was just about two inches per day. Using a combination of historic data from an earlier study, and data from two current satellite information systems, they traced the glacier’s movement and its degree of ice loss.

All glaciers “move” as ice freezes or melts on their edges, shifting their location. But it’s not just the ice visible from the air that’s important to this process—things happening deep under the surface have influence as well. One of these unseen processes might be behind the dramatic movement, says Willis. Over the period of study, he says, the bottom of the ice changed from “rough and sticky,” meaning stable, to “slick,” meaning there’s water down there lubricating the ice cap’s movement. The presence of water under the ice suggests the existence of a slightly warmer layer—or water somehow getting in from the surface.

Continue reading “Galloping Glacier Might be a Warning”

Great narration by Josh Willis of NASA.

OMG is the flagship aerial observation effort by NASA.

Fox News:

A song from Paul McCartney’s latest album contains a song targeted at Donald Trump and climate change deniers.

The 76-year-old Beatles star spoke in an interview with BBC News to promote his new album “Egypt Station” about one of his new songs, “Despite Repeated Warnings.” The track is described as a diatribe about climate change deniers in which he complains that they’re often loud, but uninformed.

“People who deny climate change… I just think it’s the most stupid thing ever,” McCartney said.

He continued: “So I just wanted to make a song that would talk about that and basically say, ‘Occasionally, we’ve got a mad captain sailing this boat we’re all on and he is just going to take us to the iceberg [despite] being warned it’s not a cool idea.'”

When pressed, the star revealed that the real subject of his new song is the president. However, he notes that the message can apply to a lot of people.

“Well, I mean obviously it’s Trump but there’s plenty of them about. He’s not the only one.”

The star previously mentioned Trump’s views on climate change while promoting a short film urging people to not eat meat for one day a week in order to help the environment.

“It’s not the total solution, but it’s part of the solution. A lot of people have been saying this for a long time but there’s resistance,” he told Radio 1 Newsbeat. “Particularly when you’ve got someone like Trump who says that it (climate change) is just a hoax.”

He continued: “A lot of people like myself think that’s just madness so it’s maybe a good time now to try and focus people’s attention and say ‘look, forget about him we can do something.'”

For me, the new song has strong echoes of the early post-Beatle work, like Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey, below – Continue reading “Music Break: Paul McCartney’s New Song Addresses Climate”

Entertaining all ideas – but storing all that carbon is a big one. Also, you still have to frack the gas to keep this running.

When someone says, “You don’t know what you’re up against.” – hard won movie wisdom says pay attention.

CBS News:

A North Carolina city dealing with fallout from Hurricane Florence has been swarmed by aggressive mosquitoes nearly three times larger than regular mosquitoes. One resident, Robert Phillips, describes their rise as “a bad science fiction movie.”

North Carolina State University entomology professor Michael Reiskind told The Fayetteville Observer that Florence’s floodwater has caused eggs for mosquito species such as the Psorophora ciliata to hatch. These mosquitoes, often called “gallinippers,” are known for their painful bite and often lay eggs in low-lying damp areas.

The eggs lie dormant in dry weather and hatch as adults following heavy rains. Reiskind said the state has 61 mosquito species, and “when the flood comes, we get many, many billions of them.”

He said a silver lining is the mosquitoes aren’t transmitting many diseases.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper has ordered $4 million to fund mosquito control efforts in 27 counties that are under a major disaster declaration, his office said Wednesday in a news release.

“Increased mosquito populations often follow a hurricane or any weather event that results in large-scale flooding,” the release said. ‘While most mosquitoes that emerge after flooding do not transmit human disease, they still pose a public health problem by discouraging people from going outside and hindering recovery efforts.”

The funding will allow efforts to start as early as Thursday.

North Carolina has still been facing other after-effects of the powerful storm, which made landfall in the state nearly two weeks ago. Residents have been dealing with fallen trees, floodwaters and debris, and the recovery process is just beginning