Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world’s largest oil companies, said its crude production peaked in 2019, another sign of the accelerating shift from fossil fuels amid concerns about climate change.
The European oil major on Thursday laid out its strategy to transform its century-old fossil fuel business into a clean energy leader and meet the company’s net-zero emissions target by 2050. Shell said it will invest as much as $6 billion a year into renewable energy projects while divesting from oil and gas projects to the tune of $4 billion a year.
“We must give our customers the products and services they want and need – products that have the lowest environmental impact,” Shell CEO Ben van Beurden said in a statement. “At the same time, we will use our established strengths to build on our competitive portfolio as we make the transition to be a net-zero emissions business in step with society.”
European oil majors are moving aggressively to transition away from fossil fuels in the face of increasing investor pressure and government regulations aimed at avoiding the worst consequences of climate change. French oil major Total in recent weeks announced plans to develop 16 solar projects across the U.S., including four in the Houston area. British oil major BP last year sold its petrochemicals business and is investing in new wind projects around the U.S.
Shell said it will use its legacy oil and gas business to generate the capital needed to build a low-carbon business of “significant scale” by the early 2030s. In the near term, the company said it will spend around $8 billion a year on oil and gas exploration while spending up to $6 billion a year on renewables and biofuels as well as up to $9 billion a year on its natural gas and petrochemicals business.
Microsoft has taken some admiral positions on climate – notably a commitment to go “Carbon Negative” by 2030 – see above. But how does that square with support for science denying lawmakers?
After the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol last month, tech giant Microsoft paused all its political contributions. The company wanted to reassess its priorities.
On Friday, Microsoft released a new political giving policy. It officially suspends all Microsoft PAC donations to lawmakers who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results for the next two years. The company said it will also cut off “State officials and organizations who supported such objections or suggested the election should be overturned.”
These changes are a big step forward in the fight against disinformation. They show that big corporations—which have historically shunned litmus tests for political giving—can admit that some lies are simply too big and dangerous to support.
But what about other big, dangerous lies? What about the lie that humans don’t cause climate change?
Microsoft’s new policy doesn’t touch that one, and it reveals how far corporations still need to go to address their own responsibility for deadly political propaganda. Because while election fraud might be the “big lie” of the moment, it’s not the only big lie Microsoft routinely fuels with its political giving.
“Value of Solar” is a critical buzzword in energy circles. It means, what is the net value of solar energy, say on my rooftop, to the larger grid?
Do non-solar grid customers end up subsidizing the solar folks? Or is the “Value of Solar” – in terms of avoided costs to the utility, high enough to create value for the larger community?
New study by my friend Josh Pearce at Michigan Tech says, yes, that value is high. Above see Josh’s take on subsidies to Renewables, vs Subsidies to fossil fuels, from my interview a year ago.
One of the most common arguments against supporting PV and other renewables through public incentives is that those power consumers that do not install a clean energy power generator are the most affected, as they have to bear the cost of the incentives without enjoying the benefits and financial advantages that the renewable energy systems can ensure. This argument has been used in the past, and often with success, by government, power utilities, and regulators to slow down or stop the advance of PV, especially among homeowners and small and medium-sized businesses.
A research group from Michigan Technological University has now sought to shed light on the true value of solar power generated by net-metered PV systems in the United States, and has found that non-PV consumers enjoy more benefits than commonly thought.
In the study A review of the value of solar methodology with a case study of the U.S. VOS, published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, the scientists explained that their value estimations for grid-tied photovoltaic systems have proven that solar panels are beneficial not only for electric utilities but also for electricity consumers. “Anyone who puts up solar is being a great citizen for their neighbors and for their local utility,” research co-author Joshua Pearce said. “Customers with solar distributed generation are making it so utility companies don’t have to make as many infrastructure investments while, at the same time, solar shaves down peak demands when electricity is the most expensive.”
The academics explained that utility customers that own a rooftop solar array are under-compensated in most of the states as what they called the “value of solar” eclipses the net metering tariffs paid by the utilities. The U.S. group developed a model that takes into account realistic costs and liabilities utility companies can avoid with an increasing share of rooftop PV capacity.
Interesting clip I stumbled over, posted by the “eco-right” RepublicEn group.
Here, in a 1979 interview, Free Market DemiGod Milton Friedman, in the course of explaining his approach to government regulation (he doesn’t like it) demonstrates a weaselly, sophomoric attitude towards mandatory airbags that sounds ludicrous and utterly callous, in light of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives that those devices have now saved. (without leading us into a socialist hellscape) He also, intriguingly, makes the case for a carbon tax to curb particulate pollution. Truly though, he makes me think of the most infuriatingly punchable, obnoxious, pseudo intellectually phony freshman on the floor in your dorm.
Short version: Climate risks and impacts may still seem abstract to people who are not directly effected, or who do not make the connection between, say, wildfires and sea level, and climate. (Media continues to do a terrible job connecting climate disasters with human activities) Better results come when we connect climate action with positive short term gains for average citizens, as in the Covid relief package. Linking popular Covid action with climate action increases Democratic/Progressive support without a corresponding dampening of Republicans.
Matto Mildenberger is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work focuses on the political drivers of policy inaction in the face of climate change.
And here’s the top line, here’s what we found. So the answer is yes, we see about a five or so percentage point increase in support for costly energy and climate policies after exposure to a wildfire across the entire state. And we do a lot of work in this paper to sort of make sure we’re really getting at cause and effect so that we can really say that it’s the wildfire exposure itself which is causing this increase in ballot support. But it’s really heterogeneous. Where we’re finding all of that effect being concentrated in precincts and parts of the state that are predominantly Democrat, that have an above average number of Democratic voters.
Whereas when we look at the electoral precincts in part of the state that are more Republican and tend to have more Republican voters, we see a complete flatline. No responsiveness, no shift in people’s voting or opinion preferences as a result of this experience. So what we’re actually seeing is that this direct experience is not really moving everyone towards a sort of common share purpose of addressing climate change, it’s actually polarizing the public further, and it’s making Democrats who already accept climate science and support climate policy, it’s ratcheting up their commitment to this, and making them more committed to climate policy, helping them prioritize this issue, and making them more willing to invest in costly solutions.
Whereas we’re seeing essentially a no responsiveness on the Republican side. And to go back to your first question, this is actually pretty consistent with the political story in D.C. right now, where over the last two years we’ve actually seen the prioritization of energy and climate policy ratchet up within the Democratic Party, as reflected in President Biden really being the first climate President that we’ve ever had who is trying to address this existential threat at the scale of the crisis, while we have not seen a lot of movement on the Republican side, and if anything, the polarization over the last five years within the Republican Party on this issue has only deepened.
Stone: Let me ask you a question. It’s very interesting what you bring up. I recall reading that research, and a couple of things hit me. One is that you said that the exposure to a wildfire would make someone, particularly if they were a Democrat, more likely to support policy. That was actually a very specific effect though, because I think that was, if I recall the research correctly, there was a 5% or so increase in tendencies to support that policy if you were within three miles of the fire itself.
So I’m no expert on this by any means, but almost that immediate exposure would make me think that that number would be much higher. Number two, if we’re looking at the Republicans who you say didn’t have any response, is there any insight that you can provide into how they’re connecting these severe climate impacts with what they’re seeing? Are they attributing it to something else? What’s going on there?
Mildenberger: Yeah, I think this is a really good question. So to think a little bit about how people are being exposed, yes, so we find that the strongest effect of the wildfire exposure on voting outcomes amongst Democrats is right adjacent to the wildfire itself. And then as you move away from the wildfire to sort of 25, 30 miles away, then that effect is going to decay. And then by the time you’re a certain distance away from the wildfire, then it no longer is a personal experience in quite the same way. People don’t appear to sort of view it as a personal experience if it’s happening to the other part of the state.
Air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil was responsible for 8.7m deaths globally in 2018, a staggering one in five of all people who died that year, new research has found.
Countries with the most prodigious consumption of fossil fuels to power factories, homes and vehicles are suffering the highest death tolls, with the study finding more than one in 10 deaths in both the US and Europe were caused by the resulting pollution, along with nearly a third of deaths in eastern Asia, which includes China. Death rates in South America and Africa were significantly lower.
The enormous death toll is higher than previous estimates and surprised even the study’s researchers. “We were initially very hesitant when we obtained the results because they are astounding, but we are discovering more and more about the impact of this pollution,” said Eloise Marais, a geographer at University College London and a study co-author. “It’s pervasive. The more we look for impacts, the more we find.”
The 8.7m deaths in 2018 represent a “key contributor to the global burden of mortality and disease”, states the study, which is the result of collaboration between scientists at Harvard University, the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester and University College London. The death toll exceeds the combined total of people who die globally each year from smoking tobacco plus those who die of malaria.
Scientists have established links between pervasive air pollution from burning fossil fuels and cases of heart disease, respiratory ailments and even the loss of eyesight. Without fossil fuel emissions, the average life expectancy of the world’s population would increase by more than a year, while global economic and health costs would fall by about $2.9tn.
The new estimate of deaths, published in the journal Environmental Research, is higher than other previous attempts to quantify the mortal cost of fossil fuels. A major report by the Lancet in 2019, for example, found 4.2m annual deaths from air pollution coming from dust and wildfire smoke, as well as fossil fuel combustion.
The U.S. coal industry isn’t likely to prosper under the Biden administration, but it wasn’t exactly gangbusters under the previous one either, despite all those promises.
“There’s a real gap between rhetoric and reality in the coal industry,” said Clark Williams-Derry, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “The rhetoric was that the administration was going to help the coal industry. The reality was that by pursuing what you might call an all-of-the-above energy strategy, in particular one focused on oil and gas, that actually hurt the coal industry.”
Williams-Derry said many utilities switched from producing electricity with coal to doing it with natural gas because, thanks to fracking, gas has become dirt cheap and readily available.
“Coal had built its reputation as the cheap way to generate power,” he said. “And over the course of the past, let’s say eight to 12 years, it has become the most expensive way to generate power.”
On top of natural gas, the price of wind and solar power continues to drop.
NEW REPORT: NATURAL GAS COUNTIES’ ECONOMIES SUFFERED AS PRODUCTION BOOMED
Since the start of the fracking boom, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia’s biggest gas-producing counties have seen declines in their share of jobs, income, and population
February 10, 2021
JOHNSTOWN, Pennsylvania, – A new Ohio River Valley Institute report titled, “Appalachia’s Natural Gas Counties: Contributing more to the U.S. economy and getting less in return” quantifies the decade-long failure of natural gas boom in the Marcellus and Utica fields to deliver growth in jobs, income, and population to the 22 Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia counties that produce more than 90% of the region’s natural gas.
Contrary to the predictions of the oil and natural gas industry, which a decade ago published economic impact studies saying the expected boom in natural gas production would give rise to over 450,000 new jobs in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis show that jobs in the 22 counties crept up by a paltry 1.7% while nationally the number of jobs grew by 10%.
It should not have been this way. Natural gas production in the region substantially exceeded the projections contained in the industry studies. And economic output in the 22 counties grew by 60%, more than three times the rate of output growth nationally. But little of the income generated by that growth entered local economies. Between 2008 and 2019, as the counties’ contribution to the nation’s economy grew from $2.46 per thousand dollars of output to $3.31, their piece of the national economic pie got smaller.
• Their share of the nation’s personal income fell by 6.3%, from $2.62 for every $1,000 to $2.46. • Their share jobs fell by 7.5%, from 2.8 in every 1,000 to 2.6. • Their share of the nation’s population fell by 9.6%, from 3.2 for every 1,000 Americans to 2.9 for every thousand.
The latest sighting of winter – zombie – fires was recorded on 23 January by the village of Saydy in the Tomponsky district of Yakutia, some 400km north-east of the republic’s capital Yakutsk.
Local man Ivan Zakharov who filmed the fire at -50C told The Siberian Times: ‘It is burning near the area hit by last summer’s wildfires.
‘This area suffered extremely hot and dry weather. It must be either peat on fire here, or, as some hunters who noticed these fires suggest, possibly young coal (lignite).’
A much bigger burning area was filmed higher up north from Saydy by the village of Udarnik, also badly hit by wildfires last summer.
‘The fire is burning in the area close to the village of Udarnik. The summer fire didn’t stop.
‘The filming was made in November, but as the local tell us, several fires are still active’, reported Tomponsky Vestnik newspaper that shared the video.
