I spent yesterday near Rosebush, MI, in Isabella County, watching this turbine go up.
This is one of the big ones, 588 feet to the tip – so triply awesome and impressive. The engineers took plenty of time in preparation, but then made it look easy when it went up.
Inspiring for those of us that care about our kids.
Below, the tiny dot is the upper body of a worker helping join the blade assembly to the turbine’s nacelle. Click pic for larger image.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately documenting the construction of Michigan’s soon-to-be largest wind farm, which is just a short drive from my home in Midland, MI, in the next county over, Isabella.
The tiny burg of Rosebush is currently the epicenter, and it’s been a respite of peace in the Covid era to sit for hours listening to birds and crickets among the quiet farms and fields, something that gratefully, will not change when the turbines go into operation.
So, Dominion Energy and Duke Energy finally cancelled the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Stakeholders in the proposed new gas pipeline may be frothing and fuming now, but the activists and land owners who fought tooth and nail in court against the project have just done them a huge favor. In fact, the message to all fossil fuel stakeholders is clear: get out now while you have a chance.
The Atlantic Coast Pipeline was supposed to carry gas over 600 miles from West Virginia and on into markets in Virginia and North Carolina. You can bet your bottom dollar that Dominion and Duke would have kept pouring money into the legal slugfest if they thought those markets were strong enough to support the project. Dropping it like a hot potato is a clear sign that the regional energy market has shifted, or is about to shift.
Renewable energy is the first thought that comes to mind. North Carolina is one of the top ten states for solar energy and Virginia has a fairly strong solar profile as well. Meanwhile, both states are committed to exploiting their rich offshore wind resources— as are most of the states along the US east coast.
In fact, Dominion itself is pushing the offshore wind envelope. The company recently inked a deal with offshore wind powerhouse Orsted for 12 megawatts in offshore turbines for Virginia. That sounds like small potatoes but the project is intended to model practices for many turbines more to come. All in all, the company has committed to 3,000 megawatts in wind and solar either or in operation under development by early 2022.
North Carolina is a bit behind the curve for offshore wind, but then again the entire sector was languishing in the doldrums during the Obama administration, mainly due to state-based pushback from certain elected officials (you know who you are). Now the gloves are off and North Carolina is poised to develop an offshore wind lease area of its own.
All of this renewable energy activity is so exciting, but when it comes to heating peoples’ homes it is hard to beat fossil gas. Kidding! In many countries around the world, electric heat pumps are the heating technology of choice, and the trend is finally catching on in the US.
Continue reading “How Heat Pumps Threaten Pipelines”If heat pump mania hits Virginia and North Carolina, the potential for growth in electricity demand would be a more attractive target for energy stakeholders than natural gas.
Electric heat pump retrofits on existing buildings are still uncommon in the US, but the trend is growing for new construction. As of 2019 heat pumps accounted for 40% of new single family residential construction and 50% of new multi-family buildings.
That’s a huge leap considering that as of 2019, heat pumps only provided for 5% of existing residential buildings in the US. However, the push is on for banning fossil gas hookups in new construction.
The retrofit market is also set to blow up. Building electrification advocates have been making the environmental and health case for all-electric retrofits, and now they are zeroing in on the bottom line benefits, too. That goes for landlords as well as individual homeowners. Massachusetts is one state where the financials already work out.
“Because heat pumps are fundamentally more efficient that other sources, on a per btu basis, your tenants will be paying less for their heat than they would elsewhere. Also, because they can run backwards as air conditioners, you no longer need to permit window units,” explains Nomer Caceres of MassLandlords.net. “This will tend to lower your vacancy rate and window repair costs, and keep your tenants happier.”
Grifter Michael Shellenberger’s “Apology” for climate science is predictably making the rounds on right wing and white supremacist media outlets, much like Michael Moore’s recent career-ending movie mishmash.
Neither will have an impact on the climate debate, or solutions.
Michael Tobis has penned the best response yet in Real Climate.
Guest commentary by Michael Tobis
This is a deep dive into the form and substance of Michael Shellenberger’s promotion for his new book “Apocalypse Never”. Shorter version? It should be read as a sales pitch to a certain demographic rather than a genuine apology.
Michael Shellenberger appears to have a talent for self-promotion. His book, provocatively entitled “Apocalypse Never” appears to be garnering considerable attention. What does he mean by that title? Does it mean we should do whatever we can to avoid an apocalypse? Does it mean that no apocalypse is possible in the foreseeable future? For those of us who haven’t yet read the book (now available on Kindle), Shellenberger provides an unusual article (at first posted on Forbes, then at Quillette and the front page of the Australian) which appears less a summary than a sales pitch, an “op-ad” as one Twitter wag put it.
It’s called “On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare”. In short, Shellenberger lands clearly on the naysayer soil. Not much to see, everyone. Cheer up, carry on, these are not the droids you’re looking for.
FEW PEOPLE KNOW THAT THE MOON IS MADE OF CHEESE
In support of this insouciance, Shellenberger offers twelve “facts few people know”. Most of the points are defensible to some extent, and most of them raise interesting topics. A main purpose of this article is to provide references to the relevant discussions. But in going through it, it’s worth keeping an eye on the rhetorical purposes of the items, which appear a bit scattershot, and to the rhetorical purpose of the list, which might appear rather obscure.
Clearly labeling the list “facts that few people know” implies that all these points unambiguously refute common beliefs that are widely. And the “apology for the climate scare” indicates further that these beliefs are widely held by a supposedly misguided community of “climate scared”. A defender of the list, Blair King suggests that “[Shellenberger] identified false talking points used repeatedly by alarmists to misinform the public and move debate away from one that is evidence-based to one driven by fear and misinformation”. That does seem to be a fair reading of the stated intent of the list, but it just doesn’t ring true as a whole.
Speaking as a verteran “climate scared” person, the items don’t seem especially familiar. It’s hard to imagine a conversation like this:“Gosh, climate change is an even bigger threat to species than habitat loss.”“I know, and the land area used for producing meat is increasing!”As Gerardo Ceballos said:
This is not a scientific paper. It is intended, I guess, to be an article for the general public. Unfortunately, it is neither. It does not have a logical structure that allows the reader to understand what he would like to address, aside from a very general and misleading idea that environmentalists and climate scientists have been alarmist in relation to climate change. He lists a series of eclectic environmental problems like the Sixth Mass Extinction, green energy, and climate disruption. And without any data nor any proof, he discredits the idea that those are human-caused, severe environmental problems. He just mentions loose ideas about why he is right and the rest of the scientists, environmentalists, and general public are wrong.
What causes the strange incoherence of these “facts few people know”? At the end of this review I’ll propose an answer. Meanwhile, I will consider several questions regarding each item:
Max Boot in the Washington Post:
Why is the United States the only wealthy country where novel coronavirus cases are hitting new highs while elsewhere the virus is being contained? A lot of it has to do with the rejection of science by many on the right. A Gallup survey reports that while 98 percent of Democrats reported wearing a mask outside the home, only 66 percent of Republicans did. The same denialism extends to other important issues: A Pew survey reports that 75 percent of Democrats regard climate change as a top policy priority, compared with only 25 percent of Republicans.
President Trump — who rejects his own government’s warnings about global warming and keeps insisting that the coronavirus will “miraculously” disappear on its own — is more a symptom than the cause of the problem. The right’s reign of unreason long predates his presidency.
This week marks the 95th anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial — the most famous battle of the early 20th century between science and religious fundamentalism. The story is well told in Edward J. Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account, “Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion,” which is even more timely now than when it was published in 1997.
On July 10, 1925, high school science teacher John T. Scopes went on trial in Dayton, Tenn., for teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. While “Modernist” (liberal) Protestants and most Catholics and Jews had accepted evolution as a manifestation of God’s design, conservative evangelicals known as “fundamentalists” insisted that God had created the earth in six days and denied that mankind is related to monkeys. At the urging of the fundamentalists, Tennessee passed a law forbidding the teaching of evolution. The prosecution of Scopes was a test case contrived by the town fathers of Dayton to put their sleepy burg on the map.
They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Two of the most famous orators in America volunteered to try the case — William Jennings Bryan, a former secretary of state and three-time presidential candidate for the prosecution, and Clarence Darrow, “attorney for the damned,” for the defense. About two hundred reporters flocked to Dayton to cover the carnival-like proceedings, which were broadcast on radio and filmed for newsreels, and later inspired the play and film “Inherit the Wind.”
Continue reading “Inheriting the WindBags”The culmination of the trial was Darrow’s July 20 cross-examination of Bryan — a populist on economic issues but a conservative on social ones — about whether he took the Bible literally.
The murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have catalyzed a seismic and long-overdue shift in support for the Movement for Black Lives and to defund the police. At the same time, the climate justice movement has finally begun to gain momentum because of the increasing recognition that overcoming our environmental crisis requires addressing and confronting racism. The case of Chevron’s criminal mistreatment of indigenous and rural peoples in Ecuador’s Amazon provides a perfect example of the degree of systemic racism that we must dismantle to be able to hold corporate polluters fully accountable for their illegal and unethical actions.
The overt racism exhibited by Chevron towards Amazon communities in Ecuador helps explain why it has yet to clean up the 16 billion gallons of toxic waste it deliberately dumped into the northern Ecuadorian Amazon between 1964 and 1990, home to over 30,000 indigenous and rural Ecuadorians. But the corporate criminals at Chevron are not the sole culprits. As with the institutionalized system of racism in the U.S., there is complicity within the courts, law enforcement, and in this case even the media.
The ultimate expression of this systemic racism towards the people of Ecuador is the fact that Chevron – even after admitting its environmental crimes in the Amazon – continues to ignore the Ecuadorian court ruling against the company. Our justice system was built this way. This is not the first or last time a corporate polluter will escape justice because of the political and legal influence and loyalty they have been able to buy. This judgment found Chevron had deliberately dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into the rainforest, devastating indigenous communities and killing scores of people from cancers and other oil-related diseases. It has been upheld on appeal by four layers of Ecuadorian courts, including its constitutional court. Chevron has vowed never to pay the judgment even though it fought to have the case tried in Ecuador and had accepted jurisdiction there.
If we melt Greenland, there’s always Mars.
An animation based on images taken by the ESA’s Mars Express showcases the 82-kilometre-wide Korolev Crater on Mars. Located in the northern lowlands of the Red Planet, south of the large Olympia Undae dune field that partly surrounds Mars’ north polar cap, this well-preserved impact crater is filled with water ice all year round. The crater’s floor lies two kilometres below its rim, enclosing a 1.8 km thick domed deposit that represents a large reservoir of non-polar ice on Mars.
Houston Chronicle is a good keyhole to peer into the heart of America’s energy industry.
Continue reading “Energy’s Future Increasingly Renewable…Even in Texas..”BIG SPRING, Texas — Driving through the Permian Basin while on vacation, I couldn’t help but notice an industrial landscape that presages the future of the oil and gas industry.
New drilling rigs were far and few between, while most of the pumpjacks were idle, their horsehead noses no longer dipping down to pull crude from the ground. Towering above them, stretching into the distance, wind turbines spun by the hundreds, generating electricity for Texas’ big cities.
Then I stopped in Lamesa, where Southern Power maintains 410,000 photovoltaic cells generating enough power for 26,000 homes. That’s when it struck me, Texas’s premier oilfield may have a lot of oil, but it has limitless wind and sunlight. Where would you place your bet?
Young people see the writing on the wall, choosing to turn their backs on oil and gas during the current oil and gas bust to find more stable careers, my colleague Sergio Chapa reports. Corporate executives are following suit.
British oil giant BP’s decision to sell its petrochemical units is perhaps the most revelatory. For years, BP and other oil and gas boosters have claimed the future of the industry rests in selling chemicals, coatings and plastic in a world that no longer wants to burn fossil fuels.
For just as many years, though, environmentalists have complained about pollution from chemicals and plastic. Consumers from America to Zimbabwe want more reusable and sustainable packaging. Plastics manufacturers promise to recycle more and consume less oil and natural gas.
If BP’s CEO Bernard Looney believed that selling petrochemicals would sustain his huge corporation’s profit margins, he would not have sold those businesses for $5 billion. Neither would his board of directors write off $17.5 billion in oil and gas assets due to temporarily low prices.
The most telling indication of BP’s loss of faith in oil and gas is found in the corporation’s annual Statistical Review of Energy. This year, the company’s analysts stopped measuring energy demand in millions of metric tons of “oil equivalent” and started using exajoules, a unit of measurement for energy of any kind.
Above, Jessica Woycehoski is a resource planner for CMS Energy, Michigan’s largest utility and the 10th largest in the US. Problems for natural gas were becoming evident even 2 years ago when I interviewed her.
Natural Gas in the age of Covid-19 is looking more and more like coal did about a dozen years ago – that is, what was once considered a slam dunk no-brainer for additions to the grid, now reveals glaring weaknesses and contradictions.
I posted yesterday about a cancelled gas pipeline on the East Coast – that developers attributed to increasing uncertainty in the gas world.
I’ll continue to post the bread crumbs that lead me to believe we are seeing an unraveling of natural gas, about a decade sooner than even optimistic renewable fans might have predicted.
Fundamental quandary: Gas is and has been, for a decade, too cheap for frackers to make money. If they start charging enough to make a profit, the renewables, and increasingly, battery storage, will eat them alive.
Any new developments that add more layers of doubt just make investors more skittish.
Stay tuned.
Continue reading “In Covid Economy, More Uncertainty for Gas”LONDON (Reuters) – Prospects for nearly half of the world’s projects to build infrastructure for exporting liquefied natural gas have faltered in recent months, amid rising concerns about climate change, public protests and delays due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report published Tuesday.
Out of 45 major LNG export projects in pre-construction development globally, at least 20 – representing a capital outlay of some $292 billion – are now facing delays to their financing, researchers at Global Energy Monitor found.
That marks a stark shift by investors away from what many had considered a promising fuel market, already buffeted by slower growth in demand, rising competition from renewable energy technologies and opposition over the industry’s climate-warming emissions.
The vice president of the European Investment Bank said the report underlined the unacceptable risk of investing in LNG assets.
Nitrous Oxide – more powerful than methane.
Soils are sources of the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O) globally, but emissions from permafrost-affected soils have been considered negligible owing to nitrogen (N) limitation. Recent measurements of N2O emissions have challenged this view, showing that vegetated soils in permafrost regions are often small but evident sources of N2O during the growing season (~30 μg N2O–N m−2 day−1). Moreover, barren or sparsely vegetated soils, common in harsh climates, can serve as substantial sources of N2O (~455 μg N2O–N m−2day−1), demonstrating the importance of permafrost-affected soils in Earth’s N2O budget. In this Review, we discuss N2O fluxes from subarctic, Arctic, Antarctic and alpine permafrost regions, including areas that likely serve as sources (such as peatlands) and as sinks (wetlands, dry upland soils), and estimate global permafrost-affected soil N2O emissions from previously published fluxes. We outline the below-ground N cycle in permafrost regions and examine the environmental conditions influencing N2O dynamics. Climate-change-related impacts on permafrost ecosystems and how these impacts could alter N2O fluxes are reviewed, and an outlook on the major questions and research needs to better constrain the global impact of permafrost N2O emissions is provided.
Key Points:
