Month: March 2020

Last ditch attempt to promote Nazi Youth is not enough.

The Heartland Institute, which has been a conduit for anti-science information for decades, is failing financially, even as it’s efforts reach full flower in the current corona-virus denial we see coming from the Republican Party and its base.

Above, I was fortunate to attend one of Heartland’s “climate conferences” in 2012 – and fortunate also not to have ever been back.

Huffington Post:

An influential climate-denial think tank bankrolled by President Donald Trump’s far-right billionaire donors has laid off nearly a dozen staffers amid financial troubles, according to three former employees.

The Illinois-based Heartland Institute ― which captured headlines last month for promoting a German teenager with ties to neo-Nazis as the climate denier’s alternative to acclaimed youth activist Greta Thunberg ― pink-slipped at least 10 staffers Friday, shedding what one former employee described as “more than half” the organization’s staff.

“Heartland is broke,” Nikki Comerford, the nonprofit’s events coordinator on staff for nearly 21 years, told a former colleague in a text message, a screenshot of which HuffPost reviewed.

Comerford blamed Frank Lasée, the former Wisconsin Republican state lawmaker who took over as Heartland’s president last July, for squandering the organization’s budget during his nascent tenure and leaving the group in dire financial straits. Another former employee accused Lasée of mismanaging the budget, and private Facebook posts from other current staffers expressed dismay over the state of the organization, but HuffPost could not independently verify the state of Heartland’s finances because the nonprofit’s tax filings for 2019 are not yet due.

“Frank Lasee spent all of our money in six months including the savings,” she wrote in a text. “They had to lay off more than half the staff today and more coming. What an asshole.”

Lasée did not respond to an email requesting comment on Friday night, but HuffPost confirmed the details with two former employees who left Heartland between 2016 and 2017 but maintained ties to the organization.

–

When, in late 2017, then-Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt began planning a sort of mock trial on climate science, pitting credible researchers against industry-backed rogues, Heartland submitted a list of 145 names of contrarian scientists to consider.

A HuffPost investigation found that the list included a child sex offender: Oliver Manuel, a nuclear chemist whose crank theories about the sun alienated even the most ardent climate deniers, and who was convicted of attempted sodomy of an 11-year-old girl. In a response to the exposé, EPA distanced itself from Heartland. Five days after the story was published, Heartland, which is known to attempt to publicly discredit journalists and critics, disputed the nature of the list in a statement calling HuffPost “shameful and even disgusting.”

Continue reading “Nazi “Greta” is Heartland Institute’s Death Rattle”

This is a wow.

Nice to remember what science is for, and what it can do.

Exxon CEO dancing around a fusillade of questions about climate change from traditionally friendly financial press, in first few minutes of this vid.
Climate questions up front, then corona virus discussion, revealing quote on climate attitudes toward the end.

Note the trend line on the stock graph.

He notes that the industry is not investing enough in new resources, “irrespective of whether you plan for a 2 degree scenario, or a more standard scenario”.

Mass extinction is the “more standard” scenario?

Here’s a good test case for what I call the “People’s Carbon Tax”.

Stopping the gas industry from moving Liquified Fossil Gas on trains is something that is understandable, and do-able with local actions around geographic, legal, and legislative pinch points.

Has the added benefit of very likely avoiding some ugly disasters. Above, aftermath of gas pipeline explosion.

Washington Post:

The Trump administration is moving to allow railroads nationwide to ship liquefied natural gas as part of a push to increase energy exports — a practice that hasn’t been permitted until now because of the uncertain hazards it presents.

A proposed Transportation Department rule allowing liquefied natural gas, or LNG, shipments and imposing no additional safety regulations has drawn widespread criticism from local elected officials, attorneys general from 15 states and the District of Columbia, firefighters’ organizations, unions that represent railroad employees, environmentalists, and the National Transportation Safety Board. President Trump has set a deadline of May 10 to put the rule into effect, nearly eight months before results are expected from a Federal Railroad Administration study of the safety of the tank cars that would be used.

Small amounts of LNG have been transported by rail on a trial basis in Alaska and Florida. But if the new rule is adopted, trains of 100 or more tank cars, each with a capacity of 30,000 gallons, could start carrying LNG, primarily from shale fields to saltwater ports, where it would be loaded onto ships for export. They could traverse dozens or hundreds of different jurisdictions across the country, some that rely on volunteer firefighters as first responders, while others are major population centers.

While the proposed rule has caught the attention of regulators and public safety experts, it has largely escaped notice by the general public, and the window to comment on the rule recently closed.

Energy companies and railroads have been pushing to lift the ban at a time when a domestic gas glut has depressed U.S. prices. Trump, eager to prop up exports of fossil fuels, ordered the Transportation Department last April to devise the rule and imposed a quick 13-month deadline. Critics say that leaves nowhere near enough time to assess the dangers and design the safeguards that should be required.

“The risks of catastrophic LNG releases in accidents is too great not to have operational controls in place before large blocks of tank cars and unit trains proliferate,” the NTSB, an independent federal agency, wrote in a comment on the proposed rule.

CNBC:

General Motors wants to make it a two-horse race between itself and Tesla with its next generation of all-electric vehicles starting next year.

The Detroit automaker during an “EV Day” on Wednesday provided unprecedented details about its plans, including unveiling about a dozen of its upcoming products and announcing spending of more than $20 billion over the next five years on all-electric and autonomous vehicles.

“We thought it was time for people to understand that General Motors has a leadership position in electrification and we’re moving fast,” GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra told reporters.

GM shares closed Thursday down 3.4% to $30.10, which more than wiped out their gain Wednesday, when they closed up 3.3% at $31.53. The company’s stock is down more than 23% in the past year, including a slide of about 18% so far this year.

The event was meant to woo Wall Street into buying into the automaker’s all-electric vehicle plans, but some took away another message as well: GM has Tesla in its crosshairs more than ever.

“We believe the event was a clear shot across the bow against (Tesla CEO Elon) Musk and Tesla which continue to lead the EV landscape by a clear margin,” Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives wrote in a note to investors Wednesday.

GM said its new all-electric vehicles will be capable of 400 miles or more, charge more than 100 miles in 10 minutes and accelerate 0 to 60 mph in as low as three seconds. The performance specifications are all in line or better than Tesla’s current vehicles.

Tesla’s Model 3 is capable of 322 miles of range, 0 to 60 mph in 3.2 seconds and recharge of 172 miles in 15 minutes.

Ives cited GM’s new proprietary “Ultium” battery-cell technology, which can be stacked inside the battery pack either horizontally or vertically, as a “highlight of the event” to compare to Tesla’s vertical cylinder cells.

“Our thoughts for Tesla. GM, given its vast distribution and global customer base, must be taken seriously in this EV arms race,” Ives said, adding GM’s plans are “markedly more aggressive” than in recent years.

Continue reading “GM Wants to make it a Race with Tesla”

Fascinated by the parallels between Corona virus and climate communication.

The planetary response to the virus is like “climate change response” in a test-tube.

We’re seeing the whole range of familiar responses – denial, distortion, silencing/intimidating scientists.
What can we learn from this?

Technology Review:

The Super Tuesday primaries all but narrowed the Democratic presidential field to a two-person race, inflaming a heated battle between the party’s moderate and progressive wings.

The differences are particularly stark on the issue of climate change, where the front-runners—former vice president Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders—have sharply contrasting visions of what’s required and achievable. 

Biden has strived to claim the “middle ground” on the issue from the start, hoping to win over environmentalists as well as blue-collar workers, as Reuters first noted. In a nod to the left, his climate plan adopted (or perhaps co-opted) some of the populist language of the Green New Deal, which he name-checked as a “crucial framework.” But his time lines for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions are far looser than the ones Sanders is calling for, stating only that the economy as a whole should reach “net zero” emissions by 2050. And he’s proposing about a tenth of the amount of federal spending, at $1.7 trillion over 10 years compared with more than $16 trillion.

Biden also wants to use a broader mix of tools in the transition, including developing advanced nuclear power plant, and technologies that can capture carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel plants.

Meanwhile, Sanders wants all of the nation’s power sector and ground transportation to run on renewable sources like wind and solar within 10 years. He rejects carbon capture because it could extend our reliance on fossil fuels, and he wants to prevent new nuclear power plants and begin shutting down existing ones. The senator also intends to ban fracking, end the import and export of oil and gas, and launch civil if not criminal legal investigations into the fossil-fuel industry. (See our full analysis of Sanders’s climate plan here.)

Like most candidates in the field, Biden pledged to rejoin the Paris agreement, and work with world leaders to boost goals for emissions cuts. In addition, he says he’ll push to end fossil-fuel subsidies worldwide.

Also like others, he’s betting big on the promise of innovation, pledging to spend $400 billion over 10 years and create a new agency, ARPA-C, to accelerate research on small modular nuclear reactors, carbon capture, grid-scale energy storage, and lower-emissions methods for producing steel, cement, hydrogen, and food.

Here are Biden’s positions on other key energy issues:

Continue reading “Comparing Biden and Bernie’s Climate Policies”

I have a hunch, that the stream of ignorance and misinformation from the highest office in the land is not reassuring citizens, voters, or markets.

Bill McKibben in the New Yorker:

There’s nothing good about the novel coronavirus—it’s killing many people, and shutting millions more inside, with fear as their main companion. However, if we’re fated to go through this passage, we may as well learn something from it, and it does strike me that there are a few insights that are applicable to the climate crisis that shadows all of our lives.

Some of these lessons are obvious: giant cruise ships are climate killers and, it turns out, can become floating sick wards. Other ideas evaporate once you think about them: China is producing far less carbon dioxide, for the moment, but, completely apart from the human toll, economic disruption is not a politically viable way to deal with global warming in the long term, and it also undercuts the engines of innovation that bring us, say, cheap solar panels.

Still, it’s worth noting how nimbly millions of people seem to have learned new patterns. Companies, for instance, are scrambling to stay productive, even with many people working from home. The idea that we need to travel each day to a central location to do our work may often be the result of inertia, more than anything else. Faced with a real need to commute by mouse, instead of by car, perhaps we’ll see that the benefits of workplace flexibility extend to everything from gasoline consumption to the need for sprawling office parks.

Of course, that’s a lesson that can be learned in reverse as well. The best excuse for an office is people bouncing ideas off one another, and the best excuse for a society is just people bouncing off one another, something that’s getting harder right now, as events start cancelling. But the “social distancing” that epidemiologists now demand of us to stop the spread of infectious diseases is actually already too familiar to lots of Americans. Living lives of comparative, suburban isolation, we already have fewer close friends than we used to. (Health-care authorities warned, on Thursday, of a serious epidemic of loneliness, which older Americans are more vulnerable to. The research shows that, when controlling for all other variables, older Americans who reported being lonely are twice as likely to die prematurely than those who aren’t.) But the patterns that produce this solitude in our culture are so ingrained that we’ve come to take them for granted. Perhaps, in an odd way, the prospect of forced isolation may lead us to embrace a bit more gregariousness when the virus relents. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be penned up in a Wuhan apartment; I can guess, though, that liberation will feel sweet when it comes, not only because people presumably will be safe but because they can be social. A certain kind of environmentalist has long hoped that we’ll learn to substitute human contact for endless consumption; maybe this is the kind of shock that might open a few eyes. (Also, strained global supply chains are a good reminder that local agriculture has very practical benefits.)

Continue reading “Can Corona Virus Teach Us About Climate?”

From where I’m sitting in central Michigan, the flooded fields and soggy ground that set in a year ago are still with us. The rain swollen pond behind my house that used to only fill in spring, has remained thru the winter.

If it’s not climate change, it’s something that looks a lot like it.

Insurance Journal:

For the second year in a row, much of the U.S. is primed to suffer multi-billion dollar flood losses, with farmers already steeling themselves for planting delays.

Relentless storms that have marched across the Midwest and into the South this winter have already filled rivers to the brim and are threatening to make farm fields too soggy to plant as spring arrives. And there isn’t much to suggest an easing ahead. Heavy rains forecast through next week could push waterways higher where the Mississippi and Ohio meet in Illinois, and into northern Mississippi and Arkansas.

Most states in the American heartland have had two to three times more moisture than normal so far this winter, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. As February ends and the rains of March and April approach, it won’t take much to cause major problems for farmers in the planting season, homeowners and businesses.

“Odds are we won’t have the $20 billion in losses we had last year,” said Jeff Masters, a meteorologist with Scientific American in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “But the odds are we will see multi-billion dollar losses.”

Last year’s flooding was the costliest in the last decade, easily overwhelming the 40-year average of about $3.7 billion a year.

Flooding on the Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri, as well as their tributaries, can slow the flow of grain, coal, steel, oil and gasoline across the U.S., and put greater demand on road and rail traffic. Faster currents can limit the number of barges in use or shut down waterways completely, affecting markets. Meanwhile, waterlogged fields can slow or even prevent planting.

Last spring, heavy rains kept farmers from putting more than 11 million acres of corn into the ground, the most ever. That added an extra burden to farmers who were already dealing with fallout from President Donald Trump’s trade war with China.

The locked-in wetness this year and in 2019 could be a sign of climate change, according to Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts. A warmer world means the atmosphere will hold more moisture. This type of “persistence is exactly what we expect to see happen” with climate change, Francis said.

Continue reading “Bracing for Another Season of Midwest Flooding”

Even as the Republican Party tries to pretend they care about climate change, they can’t help themselves.

Intellectualist:

Mandy Gunasekara handed Sen. James Inhoffe his snowball on the Senate floor in 2015 as he mocked climate change.

President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency reportedly is poised to bring back a former official whose views on climate change include supporting the fossil fuel industry and tamping down on renewable energy initiatives, according to The Washington Post.

Mandy Gunasekara joined the EPA in early 2017, overseeing the agency’s Office of Air and Radiation on an acting basis under then-Administrator Scott Pruit for about eight months. She may soon return as chief of staff.

The Post reported that Gunasekara used her time playing a key role in efforts “to scale back federal rules aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of pollution, including replacing the Obama-era Clean Power Plan and federal gas-mileage standards.”

After leaving the EPA a year ago, Gunasekara returned to her home state of Mississippi, where she started what she described as a “pro-Trump nonprofit” called Energy 45, and “has argued on behalf of the president’s support for fossil fuels and other energy policies, writing that his approach ‘has brought both economic prosperity and cleaner air and water.’”

Like other senior staffers at Trump’s EPA, Gunasekara worked for a time under Senator James Inhoffe (R-OK), whose views on climate change are summed up well by the title of his book, “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.”

In early 2015, it was Gunasekara who handed Inhoffe his now-infamous snowball on the Senate floor as he mocked the notion that global warming is real and harmful.

And in her resignation letter to the president upon leaving the EPA, Gunasekara heaped immense praise on Trump’s environmental policies, writing: “Historic resistance from Democrats, the media and even some Republicans has made your accomplishments even more monumental. I am increasingly concerned with the rhetoric from the far-left supportive of Venezuelan-style socialism, government take-overs and crony ‘green new deals’ that do little for the environment and threaten our economic success.”