Month: October 2019

Gas Barons are Worried, and They Should Be

Above, new ad campaign from American Petroleum Institute.

Desmogblog:

Fracking has produced so much natural gas in the U.S. that prices are at historically low levels due to the “glut” of natural gas — something a recent article in Natural Gas Intelligence predicted could last another five years. Lingering low gas prices could mean that in 2020 global buyers of liquefied natural gas (LNG), a major growth area for the industry, “could start rejecting U.S. cargoes.”

A recent analysis by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis colorfully summarized what the glut and predicted low prices into the 2020s meant to the gas industry.

“…heads must be exploding in the board rooms of oil and gas producers throughout the U.S. and Canada,” wrote authors Tom Sanzillo and Kathy Kipple.

While environmental advocates certainly “demonized” coal due to its contributions to climate and other air pollution, the main reason coal use in the U.S. has declined is that it is too expensive to compete with cheaper natural gas and renewables — much like nuclear power. And now the same dynamic is happening to natural gas, even with historically low prices driven by an oversupplied market.

As we have noted before on DeSmog, natural gas prices can only go up from here, while renewable energy and storage prices just keep falling.

The economics of the U.S. coal industry have led to several major bankruptcies in 2019 — something echoed by the fracking firms producing a glut of natural gas but a shortage of profits (which DeSmog has been investigating for more than a year).

Scott Forbes, a vice president with leading energy industry analyst Wood Mackenzie, gave a similarly bleak assessment for the fracking industry:

“I talk to those guys, all the fracking companies, on a daily basis. I’m very engaged in what they are doing with their business, and I completely believe that the current model is unsustainable.”

Natural Gas Intel:

Countries across the globe are enacting more stringent regulations to reduce carbon emissions and the gas industry has to do a better job of policing itself, he said.

“As we sit around our boardroom, we think about cataclysmic events,” driven by weather events in developed countries, such as the heat wave this summer in Europe or U.S. hurricanes.

“Cataclysmic weather events that are climate linked will start to change regulators’ minds once and for all,” Coleman told the audience.

“I think everybody realizes what we’re trying to do here to get to a lower carbon world, which is an expensive mix.” And “regulators can spend lots of money when it comes to getting votes.”

To that end, he advised operators to “be careful to meet promises,” as “there’s a lot of rhetoric” by companies that are eyeing zero-net carbon status by 2050. The messages are “all aspirational,” but people are watching.

Continue reading “Gas Barons are Worried, and They Should Be”

Flight Shaming, Personal Action, and Climate Catastrophe

Above, Travel guru Rick Steves imposes a carbon tax on his tour business.

Confession:

I, from time to time, as part of my mission to communicate global climate change in a comprehensive and convincing manner, fly in airplanes.

I also watch television, use a computer, drive a car, and occasionally take a hot shower.

But as George Monbiot observes below,  “The big polluters’ masterstroke was to blame the climate crisis on you and me.

While everyone should consider whether any flight actually necessary, it’s important to be aware that the low hanging fruit for climate action is still coal, oil, and gas, in that order.  In the meantime, while carbon free flight is further off,  we’re a lot closer to disruptive technology in the airline industry than most people think.

I would add, we’re not in this predicament because scientists fly to remote areas to do research, go to conferences, or, to be sure, because Grandmothers fly to see their grandchildren, or honeymooners visit the Caribbean.
We’re here because we’ve been using huge amounts of coal, oil, and gas for 200 years, and the companies who control that production recognized 50 years ago that there were problems on the horizon, but chose a deliberate policy of concealing, distorting, fogging, obfuscating and confusing the settled science on that issue. And for that, they will be remembered as history’s greatest villains, leaving the Hitlers, Husseins, and Genghis Khans forgotten in the dust.

improvesociety

George Monbiot in The Guardian:

Let’s stop calling this the Sixth Great Extinction. Let’s start calling it what it is: the “first great extermination”. A recent essay by the environmental historian Justin McBrien argues that describing the current eradication of living systems (including human societies) as an extinction event makes this catastrophe sound like a passive accident.

While we are all participants in the first great extermination, our responsibility is not evenly shared. The impacts of most of the world’s people are minimal. Even middle-class people in the rich world, whose effects are significant, are guided by a system of thought and action that is shaped in large part by corporations.

The Guardian’s polluters series reports that just 20 fossil fuel companies, some owned by states, some by shareholders, have produced 35% of the carbon dioxide and methane released by human activities since 1965. This was the year in which the president of the American Petroleum Institute told his members that the carbon dioxide they produced could cause “marked changes in climate” by the year 2000. They knew what they were doing.

Even as their own scientists warned that the continued extraction of fossil fuels could cause “catastrophic” consequences, the oil companies pumped billions of dollars into thwarting government action. They funded thinktanks and paid retired scientists and fake grassroots organisations to pour doubt and scorn on climate science. They sponsored politicians, particularly in the US Congress, to block international attempts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. They invested heavily in greenwashing their public image.

These efforts continue today, with advertisements by Shell and Exxon that create the misleading impression that they’re switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy. In reality, Shell’s annual report reveals that it invested $25bn in oil and gas last year. But it provides no figure for its much-trumpeted investments in low-carbon technologies. Nor was the company able to do so when I challenged it.

A paper published in Nature shows that we have little chance of preventing more than 1.5C of global heating unless existing fossil fuel infrastructure is retired. Instead the industry intends to accelerate production, spending nearly $5tn in the next 10 years on developing new reserves. It is committed to ecocide.

Good example of the “if you use technology and are concerned about climate you must be a hypocrite” ruse, here from climate denier Piers Morgan on “Good Morning Britain”

Continue reading “Flight Shaming, Personal Action, and Climate Catastrophe”

Climate Policies that People Actually Want

signguy

Stop apologizing for acting on climate change.

Dammit.

Atlantic:

Voters are more worried about climate change than ever, but they also seem to dislike the Democratic Party’s move to the left. So how do voters feel about this new set of progressive policies?

A new survey finds: They like them. At least five aggressive and leftwing climate policies are supported by most registered voters in the United States. Americans seem particularly fond of large spending packages, as Sanders has advanced, and climate policies with a populist bent, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposed climate import fee and her “economic patriotism” plan.

The poll was conducted by YouGov Blue and Data for Progress, a liberal think tank. While I try to avoid explicitly ideological surveys, I trust this data because YouGov is a reputable, nonpartisan firm that also conducts polls for CBS News and The Economist.

Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, also told me that the poll’s findings are in line with other research. “Climate policy is very popular,” she said. “If you highlight the cost, it’s less popular. If you highlight new taxes, it’s less popular. But if you highlight job creation or the air-pollution benefits, it’s more popular.”

She added that many climate policies are especially favored now because the public tends to take views opposite those of the sitting president, a concept known as thermostatic public opinion. “With Trump being president, you’re going to find people want more environmental protection now than when Obama was in power,” she said.

These results also align with the results of conservative-leaning surveys. The American Action Network, an advocacy group tied to the House GOP, recently asked Americans in 30 congressional districts—including 12 “battleground” districts and 10 Trump-supporting districts—if they liked the idea of a “Green New Deal” that would move the United States “from an economy built on fossil fuels to one driven by clean energy.”

Shockingly, the idea was more popular than not, with 48 percent of respondents in support and 7 percent undecided. Only when pollsters told people that a Green New Deal could cost $93 trillion did support for the idea collapse. But according to the GOP group’s own math, a Green New Deal that focused only on climate change could cost only $13 trillion.

Results from the new YouGov Blue/Data for Progress poll find majority support for spending along those lines, though the poll never uses the term “Green New Deal.” Here are the five climate policies with the most support:

Continue reading “Climate Policies that People Actually Want”

When “Thousand Year Floods” Just Keep Coming..

I used an  iPhone recording from youtube to open a 2016 video on weather casters and climate science.
Now NPR is profiling the demise of Ellicott City, one of America’s most vulnerable towns – which looks like a dress rehearsal for coming decades. Compare the audio in the NPR report to the iPhone video at 5:29 above.

(apologies, embedding not possible for me so check the NPR link for audio)

UPDATE:

Part 2 here:

NPR:

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Now a story about what happens when climate change hits Main Street. NPR’s Rebecca Hersher has spent the last year visiting a small community in Maryland that’s facing an existential threat from flash floods. It’s called Ellicott City, and she has watched as the people who live and work on the town’s main street have struggled to save the place they love before it’s too late.

REBECCA HERSHER, BYLINE: No matter which way you come when you drive into old Ellicott City in Maryland, you have to go down a long, long hill with rivers on all sides. And when you get to the bottom, the rivers converge around Main Street, and then they dip down and go under the buildings. The original buildings down here were mills. Now there’s about half a mile of restaurants and boutiques that are much more charming because you can hear the water as you window-shop. It’s a small place, the kind of neighborhood where most interactions happen face-to-face and neighbors tend to be friends. Like, for the last 30-something years, the best way to catch up with Sally Tennant was to just walk into her store Discoveries, which I’ve done a lot in the last year.

We’re back.

SALLY TENNANT: Yeah.

HERSHER: How are you doing?

TENNANT: OK.

HERSHER: If you talk to Sally for more than, like, five minutes, she’ll tell you what I now think of as the motto of historic Ellicott City.

TENNANT: It’s one of the best cities in the state of Maryland, a great destination for people all over the nation.

HERSHER: Ellicott City feels special to the people who live there, which is why what’s happening there is so scary. Ellicott City is getting extreme rain.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: Just incredible amounts of rain in the Ellicott City area…

RACHEL SMITH: I think the rain started around 6.

HERSHER: In July 2016, Rachel Smith had just graduated from high school, and she was working at a coffee shop on Main Street called Bean Hollow.

SMITH: So it started raining, and – no big deal. And then we see the water going down the street start to get a little bit higher until it’s up to the curb of the sidewalk.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Oh, my God.

UNIDENTIFIED OPERATOR #1: Ma’am, what’s going on?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: We are at Bean Hollow in old Ellicott City on Frederick Road. The water is above the door. It’s coming in the building. We need somebody to come in.

UNIDENTIFIED OPERATOR #1: What’s your address?

HERSHER: It happened fast – like, 15 minutes – for Main Street to go from wet to a raging river.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED OPERATOR #2: Howard County 911.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Yes. Hi. This is the Phoenix Emporium.

UNIDENTIFIED OPERATOR #2: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED OPERATOR #1: We are currently underwater, and I have about 15 to 30 people in here, and we are trapped inside.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: There’s people in the water.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Oh, my God.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Oh, my God. Get out.

SMITH: I remember telling the 911 operator that the floor was buckling…

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SMITH: It’s buckling.

…And that we didn’t have a place to go.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED OPERATOR #1: What’s going on?

SMITH: We were afraid the place we were going to go was down.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SMITH: (Screaming).

We just didn’t know what to do.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED OPERATOR #1: What’s happening, ma’am?

HERSHER: Finally, they found a set of stairs and a closet in the back and were able to get out, but the coffee shop and dozens of other businesses were gutted. And when the water went down, the police found out that two people who had been driving when the flood started had been swept away. Their bodies were found the next day more than two miles downstream.

Continue reading “When “Thousand Year Floods” Just Keep Coming..”

Fatboy Slim: Sampling Greta Thunberg’s UN Speech – “Right here, Right Now..”

Guardian:

Fatboy Slim has paid tribute to Greta Thunberg in a performance in Gateshead over the weekend, mixing her speech to the United Nations into a performance of his club favourite Right Here, Right Now.

The mash-up opens with Thunberg’s voice, delivering her blistering speech to world leaders about the climate crisis over the synth melody.

“People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money,” the 16-year-old is heard saying. “You are failing us, and the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you.

“We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.”

The sample of Thunberg saying “right here, right now” is used throughout the song.

The mash-up originally appeared on social media in late September, after musician David Scott from The Kiffness made and shared it to images of ice bergs breaking up.

Fatboy Slim, whose real name is Norman Cook, shared video of the mash-up on Facebook. But he has now integrated Thunberg’s speech into his live show, performing it at his Gateshead show on Friday night.

which lead me to..

 

 

Trump: The Ultimate Deadbeat Wind-Bagger

Wind farm in ocean

“Great and unmatched wisdom” guy stiffs Scottish Court on costs of his predictably dumb war on wind turbines.

Guardian:

Donald Trump’s family firm is refusing to accept a legal bill worth tens of thousands of pounds after he lost a lengthy court battle against a windfarm near his Aberdeenshire golf course, according to the Scottish government.

A Scottish court ruled in February this year the Trump Organization had to pay the Scottish government’s legal costs after his attempt to block an 11-turbine windfarm in Aberdeen Bay ended with defeat in the UK supreme court in 2015.

The Scottish government has said Trump’s firm has refused to accept the sum it had put forward or reach an agreement on costs, so the case is now in the hands of a court-appointed adjudicator.

“As the amount of expenses has not been agreed, we are awaiting a date for the auditor of the court of session to determine the account. We expect payment when this has been completed,” a government spokeswoman said.

The case is expected to be heard quickly. Sarah Malone, executive vice-president of the Trump golf resort, said claims the firm had refused to pay the sum sought by the government are incorrect. “This is not in our control,” she said. “The matter is in the hands of the auditors of the court of session and the Scottish ministers.”

Trump launched his campaign against the Aberdeen Bay windfarm in 2012 after claiming the “monstrous” project, a scheme to test wind turbine technologies, would ruin the view from his golf resort at Menie, north of Aberdeen, and dissuade guests from playing there.

He took his battle to the Scottish parliament, claiming the country’s heavy investment in onshore windfarms would ruin its tourism industry. In one famous exchange with MSPs, Trump insisted the committee did not need to call any witnesses to verify his claims.

“I am the evidence,” he said. “I’m an expert in tourism. I have won many, many awards … if you dot your landscape with these horrible, horrible structures, you will do tremendous damage.”

Trump fell out with Alex Salmond, the then first minister, who had championed Trump’s claims the economic benefits of his Aberdeenshire resort justified bulldozing a very rare dune habitat he was building it on, as well as overriding local planning rules.

After Trump lost the supreme court case in 2015, Salmond branded him a “loser” and Trump retaliated by describing the then former first minister as a “has-been”.

trumpfatgolf

Continue reading “Trump: The Ultimate Deadbeat Wind-Bagger”