I was fortunate to have a conversation with Nobel Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in prepping for my most recent Yale Climate Connections video – check that here if you have not yet seen.
There was much more than I could include in the original vid, so I’m publishing more of his comments here.
Longer piece, worth a read, excerpted here.
David Wallace Wells in New York Magazine:
Continue reading “Climate Fueled Pandemics to Come”COVID-19 is not a climate-change pandemic — as far as we know, nothing about the emergence or spread of the coronavirus bears the recognizable imprint of global warming. But if the disease and our utter inability to respond to it terrifies you about our future staring down climate change, it should, not just as a “fire drill” for climate change generally but as a test run for all the diseases that will be unleashed in the decades ahead by warming. The virus is a terrifying harbinger of future pandemics that will be brought about if climate change continues to so deeply destabilize the natural world: scrambling ecosystems, collapsing habitats, rewiring wildlife, and rewriting the rules that have governed all life on this planet for all of human history.
–
The Arctic also stores terrifying diseases from more recent times. In Alaska, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu that infected as many as 500 million, and killed as many as 50 million — about 3 percent of the world’s population, and more had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. Scientists suspect smallpox is trapped in Siberian ice, among many other diseases that have otherwise passed into human legend — an abridged history of devastating sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun. Many of these frozen organisms won’t actually survive the thaw; those that have been brought back to life have been reanimated typically under fastidious lab conditions. But in 2016, a boy was killed and 20 others infected by anthrax released when retreating permafrost exposed the frozen carcass of a reindeer killed by the bacteria at least 75 years earlier; more than 2,000 present-day reindeer died.
In the course of doing some searching for the post below on the economics of fracking, google was apparently listening, and threw up a link for me to an NBC report on the contradictions of fracking economics – from February of this year, before the Corona virus really took off, and before the current price war.
Things were already somewhat grim at that time. This is a valuable historical review.
Energy Exec: “Trump needs to do something or he will lose all the energy states in this election.”
Long but very worthwhile NYTimes piece, excerpted here.
Continue reading “Fracking’s Economic Sham: Stripped Bare by Virus/Trade War”Ever since the oil shocks of the 1970s, the idea of energy independence, which in its grandest incarnation meant freedom from the world’s oil-rich trouble spots, has been a dream for Democrats and Republicans alike. It once seemed utterly unattainable — until the advent of fracking, which unleashed a torrent of oil. By early 2019, America was the world’s largest producer of crude oil, surpassing both Saudi Arabia and Russia. And President Trump reveled in the rhetoric: We hadn’t merely achieved independence, his administration said, but rather “energy dominance.”
Then came Covid-19, and, on March 8, the sudden and vicious end to the truce between Saudi Arabia and Russia, under which both countries limited production to prop up prices. On March 9, the price of oil plunged by almost a third, its steepest one-day drop in almost 30 years.
As a result, the stocks that make up the S.&P. 500 energy sector fell20 percent, marking the sector’s largest drop on record. There were rumblings that shale companies would seek a federal lifeline. Whiting Petroleum, whose stock once traded for $150 a share, filed for bankruptcy. Tens of thousands of Texans are being laid off in the Permian Basin and other parts of the state, and the whole industry is bracing for worse.
On the surface, it appears that two unforeseeable and random shocks are threatening our dream.
In reality, the dream was always an illusion, and its collapse was already underway. That’s because oil fracking has never been financially viable. America’s energy independence was built on an industry that is the very definition of dependent — dependent on investors to keeping pouring billions upon billions in capital into money-losing companies to fund their drilling. Investors were willing to do this only as long as oil prices, which are not under America’s control, were high — and when they believed that one day, profits would materialize.
Even before the coronavirus crisis, the spigot was drying up. Now, it has been shut off.
The industry’s lack of profits wasn’t exactly a secret. In early 2015, the hedge fund manager David Einhorn announced at an investment conference that he had looked at the financial statements of 16 publicly traded shale producers and found that from 2006 to 2014, they spent $80 billion more than they received from selling oil. The basic reason is that the amount of oil coming out of a fracked well declines steeply after the first year — more than 50 percent in year two. To keep growing, companies have to keep plowing billions back into the ground.
The industry’s boosters argue that technological gains, such as drilling ever bigger wells, and clustering wells more tightly together to reduce the cost of moving equipment, eventually would lead to a gusher of profits. Fracking, they said, was just manufacturing, in which process and human intelligence could reduce costs and conquer geology.
Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man
And daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking
Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away
The late John Prine’s most famous song might be “Paradise”, a lament about the rape of appalachian landscapes by “Mr Peabody’s Coal trains” and “the world’s largest shovel”. It was one of the first songs I learned when I picked up a guitar in college.
I wasn’t clear the first time I heard it that there was an actual Peabody coal, that really had been raping landscapes across the heartland.
Peabody, like every other coal company around the world, was hit hard by the renewable energy revolution, and filed for bankruptcy in 2016.
The bankruptcy filing was a cat-scan into the workings of the anti-science movement and its funding.
Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private-sector coal company, has provided funds to a network of individuals, scientists, non-profits and political organizations espousing climate change denial and opposition to efforts to tackle climate change, according to newly available documents reviewed by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD/PRWatch).
The recipients of funding from Peabody Energy were made public in the company’s recent bankruptcy filings.
Although the documents filed so far do not show the scale or precise dates of funding—they only list current creditors—they demonstrate for the first time that Peabody Energy has financial ties to a very large proportion of the network of groups promoting disinformation around climate change.
* Willie Soon. According to the list, prominent and controversial climate change denial scientist Willie Wei-Hock Soon has received cash from Peabody.
Soon, who is not actually a Climate Scientist but an Aerospace Engineer, works for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and espouses the widely discredited position that it is sun spots and not CO2 that is a major driver of change in the climate.
He is known to have received significant funds from the fossil fuel industry for his work in the past, including from ExxonMobil and Southern Company.
But this is the first known support from Peabody Energy for Soon, whose role with the Smithsonian Institute has proven to be quite controversial.
Who else is financially tied to Peabody?
* The Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), which recently released a film—”Climate Hustle“—spreading disinformation about climate change. Its position is that increased CO2 is “beneficial” to plant growth and therefore a good thing for the planet.
* Similar views on climate change are promoted by numerous other groups that have received funds from Peabody, including the Center For The Study Of Carbon Dioxide And Global Change. The group’s founder, current Chairman and former President, Craig Idso told an American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) conference in 2011: “CO2 is not a pollutant. It is a benefit. It is the very elixir of life.”
* ALEC is another recipient of Peabody funding. Peabody sits on the ALEC corporate board, participates in the Energy, Environment and Agriculture task force, and according to the bankruptcy filings it has provided funding for numerous other ALEC events and “scholarship funds” to bring state legislators to ALEC conferences and events. A lobbyist from Peabody Energy told legislators at a ALEC conference that it is seeking “guerrilla warfare” against the EPA. ALEC has long promoted climate change denial at its annual meetings and through its “model” legislation.
Continue reading “Mr Peabody’s Gravy Train”* The State Policy Network (SPN), a network of corporate funded think tanks at the state level, which works to promote an agenda closely tied to that of ALEC on a range of issues.
SPN and its member think tanks have increasingly been active opposing action to tackle climate change at the state level, in particular in opposition to the Obama-administration’s Clean Power Plan.
* Select SPN members are also listed as having had direct financial ties to Peabody, including the Independence Institute from Colorado, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation. (In 2013, CMD co-released a report on SPN titled “The Powerful Right-Wing Network Helping to Hijack State Politics and Government.“)
