Month: November 2021

British Columbia Flooding: First Person Account

Enda Brophy is a Professor at Simon Fraser University. He wrote about his experience in this week’s British Columbia flooding event on Twitter.

Since Sunday afternoon my wife and I have been thrust into a climate disaster that has been otherworldly, entirely surreal, and profoundly eye-opening. 

After hours of white-knuckle driving back to Vancouver from Kelowna through the worst storm I’ve ever seen, on Sunday night we arrived in Hope to find that our last road home had been swept away in two spots.

We missed the mudslides on Highway 7 by 45 minutes. It was closed when we arrived and we cursed our luck. Can’t bear to think of the people we have lost, the lives upended, the pain that to follow if deaths are confirmed.

Since we got to Hope we’ve been among about 1200 displaced people whom the community has taken in and cared for. We’ve been fed and sheltered at the local high school and have slept two nights in our car. We’ve played lots of games of cards.

We have immense gratitude to the community in Hope for showing us what humanity is and what it can be. The generosity of spirit and solidarity we’ve seen here has been deeply moving and inspiring.

The theatre is putting on free daytime movies for kids. Locals are putting up the displaced. The craft brewery @mtnbrewing offered us a shower and to do our laundry. Camaraderie has been everywhere. 

Since we’ve arrived in Hope we’ve had front row seats to the effects of the climate crisis and it’s been impossible not to think about this deadly serious predicament we’re in.

First, the obvious: lack of radical climate action is inexcusable at this point. Whatever we lose as a result of game-changing policies or direct action will not be half as bad as what we’re facing.

Second, the time spent in Hope is a powerful reminder that when the chips are down mutual aid remains the most efficient way to ensure everyone is fed, kept warm, and housed.

Last for me is the lesson that we will need a massive expansion of entirely public emergency infrastructure to deal with further disasters. We will be living moments like this with increasing frequency and severity.

Biden Blamed for Oil Lease Sale, but a Trump Judge Opened the Door

A lot of hyperventilating about a oil/gas sale this week, one that was initially blocked by the Biden administration, then allowed by a (I’m told Trump appointee) judge.
In any case, the real work is to continue moving forward with EV infrastructure and doing good communication on the advantages off a decarbonized economy.

Unfortunately you have to read at least halfway down in the press accounts to get the fuller picture.

Guardian:

Once in office, Biden quickly moved to realize at least part of this vision, calling a temporary halt to the issuance of oil and gas drilling permits across America’s vast publicly owned lands and ocean territory pending a review into how they are conducted.

Experts have said that the development of new oil and gas fields must stop this year if the world is to avoid more disastrous heatwaves, floods and other climate impacts, with fossil fuel production on America’s public lands causing around a quarter of the country’s overall greenhouse gas pollution.

However, the oil and gas industries immediately objected to Biden’s move, claiming it imperiled jobs and risked pushing up energy prices, and a dozen states sued to lift the moratorium. In June, a federal judge in Louisiana agreed with the states and found that the government hadn’t taken the required steps to pause new leases.

This courtroom setback has forced the Gulf of Mexico sale, according to the Biden administration. A spokeswoman for the Department of the Interior said it is “complying” with the court ruling while also appealing it and devising a better system to measure the emissions impact of oil and gas lease sales.

Jen Psaki, Biden’s press secretary, said on Monday: “It’s a legal case and legal process, but it’s important for advocates and other people out there who are following this to understand that it’s not aligned with our view, the president’s policies, or the executive order that he signed.”

But legal experts say the court decision doesn’t, in itself, prevent the administration from stopping or delaying a scheduled lease sale, or from scaling it back.

“The Louisiana opinion doesn’t force the administration to move forward with any particular lease sale – the Department of Interior still has discretion over that,” said Max Sarinsky, a senior attorney at the New York University School of Law. “If they were to postpone, I’m almost certain they would be sued by oil and gas interests, but that’s another matter.”

Gate’s Modular Reactor Announced for Wyoming

CNBC:

TerraPower, a start-up co-founded by Bill Gates to revolutionize designs for nuclear reactors, has chosen Kemmerer, Wyoming, as the preferred location for its first demonstration reactor. It aims to build the plant in the frontier-era coal town by 2028.

Construction of the plant will be a job bonanza for Kemmerer, with 2,000 workers at its peak, said TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque in a video call with reporters Tuesday.

It will also provide new clean-energy jobs to a region dominated by the coal and gas industry. Today, a local power plant, a coal mine and a natural gas processing plant combined provide more than 400 jobs — a sizeable number for a region that has only around 3,000 residents.

“New industry coming to any community is generally good news,” Kemmerer Mayor William Thek told CNBC. “You have to understand, most of our nearby towns are 50 miles or more from Kemmerer. Despite that, workers travel those distances every day for work in our area.”

For TerraPower, picking a location was a matter of geological and technical factors, such as seismic and soil conditions, and community support, said Levesque.

Once built, the plant will provide a baseload of 345 megawatts, with the potential to expand its capacity to 500 megawatts.

For reference, 1 gigawatt, or 1,000 megawatts, of energy will power a midsize city, and a small town can operate on about 1 megawatt, according to a rule of thumb Microsoft co-founder Gates provided in his recent book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.” The United States uses 1,000 gigawatts and the world needs 5,000 gigawatts, he wrote.

It will cost about $4 billion to build the plant, with half of that money coming from TerraPower and the other half from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program.

“It’s a very serious government grant. This was necessary, I should mention, because the U.S. government and the U.S. nuclear industry was falling behind,” said Levesque.

“China and Russia are continuing to build new plants with advanced technologies like ours, and they seek to export those plants to many other countries around the world,” Levesque said. “So the U.S. government was concerned that the U.S. hasn’t been moving forward in this way.”

Once built, the plant should provide power for 60 years, Levesque said.

The Kemmerer plant will be the first to use an advanced nuclear design called Natrium, developed by TerraPower with GE-Hitachi.

Natrium plants use liquid sodium as a cooling agent instead of water. Sodium has a higher boiling point and can absorb more heat than water, which means high pressure does not build up inside the reactor, reducing the risk of an explosion.

Also, Natrium plants do not require an outside energy source to operate their cooling systems, which can be a vulnerability in the case of an emergency shutdown. This contributed to the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, when a tsunami shut down the diesel generators running its backup cooling system, contributing to a meltdown and release of radioactive material.

Continue reading “Gate’s Modular Reactor Announced for Wyoming”

BC Storm Damage is Extreme

https://twitter.com/RobinMonks/status/1460690606410194949?s=20

Jeff Masters in Yale Climate Connections:

An intense low-pressure system brought an atmospheric river of water vapor and torrential rains to southern British Columbia and northwestern Washington state on Monday, generating devastating flooding that virtually isolated the city of Vancouver from the rest of Canada. The floods came less than five months after the most extreme heat wave in global history affected the same region, fueling destructive wildfires.

Flooding and landslides from Monday’s storm cut the three main highways connecting the city of Vancouver, located on the Pacific coast, with the interior portions of Canada. Damage to some of these highways was extreme, and will result in months-long closures. In addition, all rail access to Vancouver was cut by the flooding, with closures expected to last days or weeks. These closures may have significant impacts on the Canadian economy, since the Port of Vancouver is the largest port in Canada, and fourth-largest in North America. Canada is one of the world’s largest grain exporters, and the flood damage will interrupt exports of wheat and vegetable oil, potentially causing a rise in global food prices, which are already at a 46-year high.

On Monday, a large swath of southern British Columbia recorded four to 10 inches of rain in 24 hours, setting numerous records for most precipitation in a day. One of the highest 24-hour amounts observed was 11.59 inches (294.3 millimeters) in Hope, British Columbia.

Continue reading “BC Storm Damage is Extreme”

GM Opens Key New EV Assembly Line

30 new EVs coming very soon. Lots of orders booked.
Yet newer upstarts like Rivian and Lucid are getting more love in the market. How long will that last?

Feds Review: Texas Blackout Primarily Due to Gas Failure

Houston Chronicle:

WASHINGTON – A shortage of natural gas during the winter storm that swept Texas and other states in the south central United States in February was primarily caused by the oil and gas industry’s failure to weatherize its systems, resulting in more than 58 percent of generation outages occurring at natural gas-fired power plants, the Federal Energy Regulatory Agency reported Tuesday.

Over a more than 300-page report, federal officials catalogued how one of the largest blackouts in the nation’s history came to pass, leaving millions of people in Texas without power for days on end. And while all parts of the region’s energy industry shouldered some of the blame, federal officials reported natural gas operators’ equipment freezing up was responsible for more than twice as much of the gas supply shortages as were rolling blackouts and downed power lines.

“The (report) highlights the need for substantially better coordination between the natural gas system and the electric system to ensure a reliable supply that nearly 400 million people across North America depend upon to support their way of life,” Jim Robb, president of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, said in a statement.

The Texas Oil and Gas Association and the American Petroleum Institute did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The report comes nine months after a historically cold winter storm caused the largest forced power outages in the nation’s history, and was the third largest blackout after the Northeast blackout in 2003 and the West Coast blackout in 1996. All in all the storm knocked out 61,800 megawatts of power across the Midwest and South, including 34,000 megawatts on Texas’s power grid.

At one point there was so little power the Texas grid almost collapsed all together, requiring a “black start” that could take weeks or even months to complete.

Continue reading “Feds Review: Texas Blackout Primarily Due to Gas Failure”

With Insurers on Edge, Regulators Begin to Act on Climate Risk

Bloomberg:

Insurers are getting increasingly worried about the perils of climate risk after a run of natural disasters, according to a report by BlackRock Inc.

The big majority of insurers now see climate as an investment risk and are positioning portfolios accordingly, Charles Hatami, Global Head of the Financial Institutions Group and Financial Markets Advisory at BlackRock said. For its survey, BlackRock spoke with 362 executives at insurance companies representing $27 trillion in investable assets across 26 markets.

As many as 95% of insurance executives who took part in study confirm that climate risk will have a major impact on how they build their portfolios over the next two years. 

While geopolitical risk remains the top concern for insurers, more than one in three respondents now see environmental concerns as a potential headwind, the survey showed. 

In long overdue response to this critical threat, the state of New York took first steps to give direction for insurers on climate change risk mitigation.

New York State Department of Financial Services:

Financial regulators across the globe are increasingly recognizing climate change as a threat to financial stability.  DFS is proud to be the first U.S. financial regulator to issue a holistic set of expectations on managing the financial risks from climate change.  As described in the guidance, DFS expects insurers to take a strategic approach to managing climate risks that considers both current and forward-looking risks and identifies actions required to manage those risks in a manner proportionate to the nature, scale, and complexity of insurers’ businesses.  Specifically, an insurer should: 

  • integrate the consideration of climate risks into its governance structure at the group or insurer entity level;  
  • when making business decisions, consider the current and forward-looking impact of climate-related factors on its business using time horizons that are appropriately tailored to the insurer, its activities, and the decisions being made;  
  • incorporate climate risks into the insurer’s existing financial risk management, including by embedding climate risks in its risk management framework and analyzing the impact of climate risks on existing risk factors;  
  • use scenario analysis to inform business strategies and risk assessment and identification; and  
  • disclose its climate risks and engage with the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and other initiatives when developing its disclosure approaches. 

A clip from my interview with Andy Hoffman of the University of Michigan in part of the video above. Here’s a more complete piece of his statement on insurance. Money quote here is “..if you really want to change a company’s behavior, affect their cost of capital, and insurance companies are doing that.”

Climate Pumped Rain Extreme Unleashes Killer Scorpion Horde

I did not know till today that I’ve been waiting all my life to write this headline.

Did not know until today that I’ve been waiting all my life to write that headline.

Washington Post:

Aswan, Egypt, is one of the world’s driest cities, where it hardly ever rains. Situated along the Nile River and home to more than 1.5 million people, it averages just 0.12 inches (3 millimeters) of rain per year.

But on Friday and Saturday, intense thunderstorms and even hail deluged the desert city and parts of the surrounding region. The Associated Press reported that the torrents caused flooding and power outages, closed schools and left three people dead.

The rains also unleashed something especially sinister: hordes of highly venomous scorpions whose stings hospitalized 503 people, according to Ehab Hanafy, undersecretary of the Health Ministry in Aswan.

Hanafy said the three deaths were “due to storm-related accidents” and “absolutely not because of scorpion stings.”

Aswan Gov. Ahsraf Attia told the AP that those stung and hospitalized were given anti-venom doses and released. Al-Ahram, a government-run Egyptian newspaper, reported that doctors were called back from vacation to assist with treatments.

Scorpion stings are common in the region, and it’s normal for about 100 people per day to require care from stings. But storms increase hospital visits, according to Hanafy.