Month: June 2019

Elizabeth Warren on Climate and Jobs

From a recent MSNBC Town Hall.


Inside Climate News compared candidate programs, below.

Biden’s program stops short of embracing the most politically challenging policy elements that the most ardent supporters of the Green New Deal would like to see linked to a climate plan, like universal jobs and health care.

Still, Biden said he “believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face,” his campaign’s online summaryof the plan said. “Our environment and our economy are completely and totally connected.”

Biden promised investment in “coal and power plant communities and other communities impacted by the climate transformation” as part of his plan. “This is support they’ve earned for fueling our country’s industrial revolution and decades of economic growth,” the plan said. “We’re not going to leave any workers or communities behind.”

Also, for the first time, Biden said he would not take campaign contributions from oil, gas or coal companies or their executives. That appears to put him in line with the majority of Democratic presidential candidates, who have signed a No Fossil Fuel Funding pledge.

How Does It Compare to Others?

Biden’s platform is not that far from that of Jay Inslee, for example, the Washington governor who says climate change is Issue No. 1, but who’s far behind Biden in early polls.

For both candidates, the goal is a clean energy economy, achieved in part through massive infrastructure spending to hasten the transition and build greater resilience for communities suffering climate impacts.

Biden foresees $1.7 trillion in spending over the next 10 years, and $3.3 trillion in investments by the private sector and state and local governments. That’s about on par with the size of the $5 trillion climate plan of former U.S. Rep Beto O’Rourke of Texas, who was the first of the Democratic presidential contenders with a detailed climate plan. Both Biden’s and O’Rourke’s plans are about half the size of Inslee’s proposed $3 trillion in federal spending and $6 trillion in private spending over the next decade.

Neither candidate mentions carbon taxes as a means to fund this effort or unleash market incentives for clean energy, although Biden calls for “an enforcement mechanism … based on the principles that polluters must bear the full cost of the carbon pollution they are emitting.” He said it would include “clear, legally-binding emissions reductions,” implying a carbon cap approach.

Biden said he would pay for his plan by “reversing the excesses of the Trump tax cuts for corporations” and ending fossil fuel industry subsidies.

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Cheering the Volcano

The eruption of Mt Pinatubo, in 1991, was a critical moment in climate science.

As the video above explains, James Hansen’s temperature projections included, as a test – a built-in assumption of a large volcanic eruption in the tropics in the early 90s.

Experts comment on the accuracy of Hansen’s projections, as proven out in his modeling of the global change following the eruption.

Short version: It happened, and it showed the models were correct.

Now, a new major eruption in Indonesia might be large enough to help test and refine the models yet again.

Below, my 2009 video explaining how well models like Hansen’s have worked.

Grim, but that’s where we are. Go Ash clouds!

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Clueless: SecState on Climate – “People should just move..”

Above, for me, 2012 felt like a watershed for climate – in that the impacts were becoming so clear, and to an increasing number of people.
I remember finishing the edit on this and wiping away tears.
I didn’t imagine then that the then-CEO of Exxon, who has a starring role, would become a climate-clueless Secretary of State years later – to be followed by an even more clueless replacement.
For both of them, the glib answer to any climate change is that the uncouth, unwashed masses will simply “adapt”.

Climatewise, 2019, so far, feels a lot like 2012.

Here, said clueless fake-religious hack SecState, Mike Pompeo glibly pronounces that populations affected by climate change will simply move, blithely oblivious, apparently, that those populations are moving, and the US is locking them up and destroying their families at the border.
It’s not going to get better any time soon.

CNN:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo downplayed climate change as a longstanding trend, suggesting that that modern societies could adapt to a changing environment, possibly with people moving to different places.

“The climate’s been changing a long time. There’s always changes that take place,” Pompeo said during an interview with the Washington Times published Friday, when asked whether he thought climate change was man-made and how best to address it. He did not mention anything about man-made pollution in his remarks.

“Societies reorganize, we move to different places, we develop technology and innovation,” he added. “I am convinced, I am convinced that we will do the things necessary as the climate changes.”

When asked about a potential technological solution, Pompeo replied that “it’s not just technological” and cited the Netherlands, which are partially below sea level, as an example of a successful response. 

New York Times:

The farmer stood in his patch of forlorn coffee plants, their leaves sick and wilted, the next harvest in doubt.

Last year, two of his brothers and a sister, desperate to find a better way to survive, abandoned their small coffee farms in this mountainous part of Honduras and migrated north, eventually sneaking into the United States.

Then in February, the farmer’s 16-year-old son also headed north, ignoring the family’s pleas to stay.

The challenges of agricultural life in Honduras have always been mighty, from poverty and a neglectful government to the swings of international commodity prices.

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The Energy Singularity: Big Utilities Pivoting Hard to Renewables

Very important interview above.

Dave Harwood directs Renewable Energy for DTE, a very large, rust belt utility, that until very recently was up to 70 percent coal reliant.
Now, along with just about every other similar utility, the company is pivoting, and pivoting hard – toward renewables and efficiency, and while they are now talking more openly about climate change as a driver – the real enabling factor here is that energy technology has reached some kind of singularity.

In 2017, the company announced it would be cutting carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050. I applauded at the time, but I noted that with the acceleration in technological change, those plans would almost certainly be revised, and soon.
So here we are 2 years later, and the company is bumping their carbon reduction goal from 2050 to 2040 – and leaving the door open to further acceleration. Now they’re in spitting distance of making change in the time frame that is needed.

Corporate self interest is most definitely a primary incentive here.
The changes are happening so fast, that any company that persists in the old paradigm could very well cease to exist in relatively short order.

USAToday:

The energy landscape changes so fast, even experts have trouble keeping up. Prices for renewable power are plummeting,technologies for storage are becoming more cost-effective and what’s competitive today isn’t what was competitive five years ago –shifts that will only increase in the coming years. 

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Coal is more expensive than other major electricity generation systems. U.S. utilities no longer build coal-fired power plants because newer, more efficient natural gas and renewable power plants produce cheaper electricity.

That’s partly because of clean air requirements, partly because the coal infrastructure is getting older but mostly because “the price of producing power at natural gas plants and with wind and solar has declined so dramatically,” said David Schlissel, director of resource planning analysis at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an energy research firm based in Cleveland. 

–

Coal’s share of the U.S. electricity mix fell from 48% in 2008 to 27% in 2018 and is projected to be 22% in 2020, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the statistical agency of the U.S. Department of Energy.

“We’re retiring a coal plant every month. Coal will all be gone by 2030,” said Bruce Nilles, a managing director at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a think tank in Colorado that focuses on energy and resource efficiency.

Prices per megawatt hour from electricity for coal-fired power plants range from a low of $60 to a high of $143, according to Lazard, a financial advisory firm that publishes annual estimates of the total cost of producing electricity. This is the levelized cost, which includes the cost to build, operate, fuel and maintain a power plant.

Wind is significantly cheaper: Unsubsidized, levelized prices per megawatt hour of electricity from wind range from $29 to $56, according to Lazard’s most recent figures. In contrast, a decade ago, wind costs topped out at $70 per megawatt hour, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s most recent report on the wind technologies market. The energy landscape changes so fast, even experts have trouble keeping up. Prices for renewable power are plummeting,technologies for storage are becoming more cost-effective and what’s competitive today isn’t what was competitive five years ago –shifts that will only increase in the coming years. 

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VW Attempts Image Repair with EVs

Watch Volkswagen’s ID.R smash electric track record at Nürburgring

Electric Hybrid Vehicle Technology:

Following the record set at Pikes Peak, Volkswagen is breaking more speed records for electric mobility as it set the fastest lap of all-time at the famous Nürburgring in an all-electric vehicle.

The VW ID.R, which is powered by two electric motors to produce 500kW the equivalent of 680PS, lapped the Nürburgring-Nordschleife in 6:05.336 minutes. This is 40.5 seconds faster than the previous EV record set in a NIO EP9. Volkswagen Motorsport has released a video of the feat, allowing viewers to get a cockpit perspective of the lap.

Driver Romain Dumas utilized the car’s incredible electric power to set an average speed of 128.5mph (206.96km/h) on what is notoriously known as the most difficult track in the world.