US Consumers now fully competing with global market, where users are paying many times as much as Americans are used to paying.
A rational free market will know what to do next.
Below, Houston Chronicle energy reporter James Osborne on what increased exports mean for US gas prices.
Or in a lot of cases, pivot “back” to climate denial. Many of these same folks have been in the climate denial game for decades.
Ciaran O’Connor, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), told the PA news agency that coronavirus misinformation on topics such as vaccines and lockdowns could evolve to focus on climate policy.
“‘Green lockdowns’ is a term that’s bandied about in these conspiracy communities… that’s a merging of Covid worlds and climate disinformation worlds,” he said.
Mr O’Connor said conspiracy groups “will frame” climate policy as a “loss of civil liberties and loss of freedoms”.
“If you think about the Covid protest movements – be it anti-mask, anti-lockdown, or anti-vaccines – the branding and the language that’s been used by these kinds of conspiracy units has always been around,” he said.
“This is a civil liberties argument.
“The climate dialogue, rhetoric and discussion is gonna be rolled into that kind of civil liberties discussion, I think (that) is where you’re going to see a lot of these groups go.”
Dr Jonathan Bright, an associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, agreed, adding that there “could be more activity” from climate conspiracy groups in 2022.
“I think people are going to be thinking about climate change misinformation quite a lot,” Mr Bright told PA.
The experts were also concerned that conspiracy groups and communities have traded mainstream platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, for Telegram – a platform with comparatively relaxed content guidelines.
“Telegram has… taken a very robust ‘we’re not interested approach’ to any media pressure to get it to moderate its content,” Dr Bright said.
Continue reading “Covid Deniers May Pivot to Climate Denial”Mr O’Connor added: “Telegram has become the platform of choice for far-right, extreme right wing groups, for conspiracy communities, (and) for extremist communities in general. Facebook and YouTube… they do have community guidelines, they do enforce them.
NASA will no doubt be having a press conference on their updated global temperature records, soon – for now, Zeke Hausfather alerted me to some of the European numbers, from the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Zeke points out that 2021 is “cooler” – definitely a relative term for the 5th warmest year in the record – due to the impact of the current La Nina conditions in the Pacific. I did an explainer on the El Nino-La Nina cycle a few years ago with Kevin Trenberth, Josh Willis and others.
One of the better visual metaphors I’ve seen, comes from the recent tornado outbreak in Kentucky.
An empty theater screen opens up to horrifying reality.
New video will be on the topic of off-the-charts weather events from December.
Like Texas, Europe is running out of gas.
My recent Yale Climate Connections video (see below) was a look forward into this winter, and the energy crunch in Europe as rebounding economies energy appetites rebounded faster than expected, and not enough natural gas was put away for the coming winter. Exacerbating this was an unprecedented “black swan” “wind drought” , (since resolved), meaning renewable supplies were lower than expected over the summer. Meanwhile, French nuclear output has suffered from deferred maintenance coming out of Covid.
The crunch has given new political leverage to the Putin regime, which is a major supplier of natural gas to the European Union, and pumped up prices globally, as countries scramble to make up the gap with US supplied LNG (Liquified Natural Gas). Of course, this has an impact on US consumers, who, 5 years ago never had to worry about competition from a world market.
Lessons: higher gas prices can only create more pressure to accelerate the renewable transition, there is a need improve transmission connectivity, as well as more energy (especially long term electricity) storage.
The retired salt caverns, aquifers, and fuel depots that hold Europe’s stockpiles of natural gas have never been so empty at this point in winter.
Just four months after Amos Hochstein, the U.S. envoy for energy security, said Europe wasn’t doing enough to prepare for the dark and cold season ahead, the continent is grappling with a supply crunch that’s caused benchmark gas prices to more than quadruple from last year’s levels, squeezing businesses and households. The crisis has left the European Union at the mercy of the weather and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wiles, both notoriously difficult to predict.
“The energy crisis hit the bloc when security of supply was not on the menu of EU policymakers,” says Maximo Miccinilli, head of energy and climate at consultants FleishmanHillard EU. He expects the energy crunch to keep prices volatile and also trigger more political tension between regulators in Brussels and the leaders of the bloc’s 27 member states.
Although the situation came to a head abruptly, it’s been years in the making. Europe is in the midst of an energy transition, shutting down coal-fired electricity plants and increasing its reliance on renewables. Wind and solar are cleaner but sometimes fickle, as illustrated by the sudden drop in turbine-generated power the continent recorded last year.
Moscow’s increased leverage over its neighbors became apparent at the tail end of the last winter, an unusually cold and long one that depleted Europe’s inventories of gas just as its economies were emerging from the pandemic-induced recession. Over the summer, state-controlled Gazprom PJSC began capping flows to the continent, aggravating shortages caused by deferred maintenance at oil and gas fields in the North Sea and raising the stakes on a costly and long-delayed pipeline project championed by the Kremlin.
At the same time, countries from Japan to China were boosting their imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in preparation for the coming winter. All of this left Europe struggling to replenish its dwindling stockpiles during the warm months, when gas is less expensive.
Continue reading “Europe’s Winter of Uncertainty due to Poor Planning”Still, Europe’s leaders betrayed no alarm. On July 14, the European Commission unveiled the world’s most ambitious package to eliminate fossil fuels in a bid to avert the worst consequences of climate change. With their eyes trained on longer-term goals, such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions at least 55% by 2030 from 1990 levels, the politicians did not sufficiently appreciate some of the potential pitfalls that lay immediately ahead on the road to decarbonization.
New York Times has a major interview with Katharine Hayhoe, I excerpt below.
I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Hayhoe in 2012, when she was just starting to get some attention for her messaging – including a good deal of hate mail, which continues today.
Dr. Hayhoe gets a lot of attention because she is an unabashed Christian, as well as a scientist. It’s important to note that she is far from alone in being a scientist informed by a spiritual perspective. I’ve met a number of others who not only evangelical, but just about every flavor of spiritual perspective across the spectrum.
We’ve spoken a number of times since then, and the gracious, humorous person you see here is very much the real thing.
One of humanity’s most valuable players.
You talk a lot about the importance of trying to communicate with people outside of our respective bubbles. You do that out of necessity because you’re doing the work you do while living in an conservative part of a conservative-leaning state. Where might cross-ideological conversations, particularly about climate change, happen for people who aren’t in a similar situation?
So here’s the interesting thing: Your question contains a misconception. The misconception is that climate action isn’t occurring because of the people who aren’t on board with it. The reality is that more than 70 percent of people in the U.S. are already worried about climate change, and about 35 percent of those are really worried. So the biggest problem is not the people who aren’t on board; the biggest problem is the people who don’t know what to do.44According to research conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 26 percent of people believe climate change is an urgent problem but are unsure what they can do to solve it. And if we don’t know what to do, we do nothing. Just start by doing something, anything, and then talk about it! Talk about how it matters to your family, your home, your city, the activity that you love. Connect the dots to your heart so you don’t see climate change as a separate bucket but rather as a hole in the bucket of every other thing that you already care about in your life. Talk about what positive, constructive actions look like that you can engage in individually, as a family, as an organization, a school, a place of work. Add your hand to that giant boulder. Get it rolling down the hill just a little faster. Even if we live in a progressive bubble, most of the people are not activated, and we activate them by using our voice.
Continue reading “Katharine Hayhoe on Communicating Climate as an Evangelical”How do you see rational thinking and emotionally driven behavior as working together — or not — in this context?
That is something that I have thought about but nobody has ever asked me before. I think it’s Jonathan Haidt66The social psychologist and author of “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.” who says that we think that people use information to make up their minds but they don’t. People use what Haidt calls our moral judgment. We use moral judgment to make up our minds and then use our brains to find reasons that explain why we’re right. There’s no way to separate the emotional from the logical. We think it’s possible to convince people to act rationally in their best interests: Well, look at people who, as they are dying, are rejecting the fact that they have Covid. Look at people who are still rejecting simple things like taking a vaccine and wearing masks. We are primarily emotional, and emotions are engaged deeply with climate change because it brings up the most profound sense of loss: People on the right, for example, deeply fear losing their liberties because of climate solutions. So what we need to do is to show everyone how climate solutions are not only not incompatible with who they are but help more genuinely express who they are and what we care about; make us an even more-genuine advocate for national security, an even stronger supporter of the free market, an even more independent person or, in my case, a more genuine expression of my faith.
Quick freeze in Texas over the New Year Weekend showed the lessons of the Valentine’s Day blackout of last winter have not been learned.
Texas’s natural gas industry had almost a year to prepare for last weekend’s cold blast and avoid another loss of production. But yet again, instruments froze, output plunged and companies spewed a miasma of pollutants into the atmosphere in a bid to keep operations stable.
Though Saturday’s cold front wasn’t as severe as the February storm that killed hundreds and knocked out power to much of the state, nearly 1 billion cubic feet of gas was burned or wasted due to weather-related shutdowns, according to filings with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. At the same time, production plunged to the lowest level since the last freeze, BloombergNEF data shows.
That has environmental implications. Natural gas is composed mostly of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. And the roughly dozen gas facilities that reported problems with the cold also emitted a combined 85 tons of sulfur dioxide and 11 tons of carbon monoxide, among other pollutants, according to a Bloomberg review of environmental filings.
“We know this is pollution that can hurt people’s health and, overwhelmingly, this is avoidable,” said Luke Metzger, executive director of the nonprofit Environment Texas. “These facilities could be investing in better insulation and other kinds of things that would prevent equipment from freezing,” he said. “It’s easier to pay a fine.”
It’s a stark reminder of the industry’s continued vulnerability to extreme weather. Despite calls for producers to harden their infrastructure against cold, much of the industry has managed to avoid doing so. The Texas Railroad Commission, the state’s top regulator of the industry, plans to adopt some weatherization standards but those won’t go into effect until 2023, and they include loopholes that allow some companies to opt out of compliance.
At the height of the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, veteran journalist Ted Koppel was working out on the treadmill when he came across an episode of “The Andy Griffith Show” — it caught his attention because of something he heard earlier that day while listening to WMAL, a Virginia-based conservative talk radio station. A listener had called in to explain that they used to live in the Washington area, but couldn’t stand how “woke” it had become, so they fled to the South. They said something along the lines of, “We moved down here to the Carolinas, and boy, life is just wonderful. People are so lovely. They’re so neighborly. Everything is so nice.”
Koppel, 81, started thinking about how “The Andy Griffith Show” was also set in the Carolinas, in the fictional town of Mayberry, N.C. After his workout, he went online and discovered that the CBS comedy was an even bigger hit than he remembered; the series, starring Griffith as the good-natured sheriff and Ron Howard as his adorable young son, was one of the most-watched shows from its debut in 1960 until it went off the air in 1968. And, more intriguingly, while Mayberry was not real, the city of Mount Airy, N.C., claims to be the prototype on which it was based, and still draws thousands of tourists every year looking to relive their beloved show.
So Koppel, the former ABC “Nightline” host and now a senior contributor to “CBS Sunday Morning,” called his producer, Dustin Stephens, and suggested that they travel down to Mount Airy. Koppel was curious: What made the show so popular? And what was it about this community that makes people want to come visit decades later?
What started with those general questions wound up evolving into one of the most striking TV segments of the year, as Koppel was visibly taken aback by the fierce nostalgia for a time and place that literally never existed — and how it connects to the misinformation that has infiltrated America’s politics.
“People looking back at that program seem to confuse the program with what reality was like in those days, wishing that we could only restore some of the good feelings, some of the kindness, some of the decency,” Koppel said in an interview. “But what they’re really reflecting on is not what was going on in a particular North Carolina community. What they’re reflecting on is what was going on in the creative minds of a bunch of scriptwriters out in Hollywood.”
On a base level, Koppel understands why people connect — and cling to — the show about a friendly small town where any minor issue was resolved in 30 minutes with commercial breaks. It’s the same reason people now repeatedly binge-watch “The Office” and “Friends” and “Seinfeld”: When life is a nightmare, TV comedy is an excellent escape.
Similarly, “The Andy Griffith Show,” a viewing experience that Koppel compared to “chomping down on a marshmallow,” was an antidote to everything going on in the world at the time, which never showed up on the sunny series: Tens of thousands of American troops killed in Vietnam War. Race riots throughout the country. Assassinations.
Continue reading “Help Us, Opie Wan – Media, Myths, Misinformation, and Mayberry”“If there’s any period that matches our current period in terms of how terrible things were and how difficult things were, the 1960s were it,” Koppel said.
It rarely has hurricanes, tornadoes or wildfires. Its temperatures have increased at a slower rate than elsewhere in the United States.
But West Virginia is deceptively vulnerable to climate change because a huge number of its residents live in flood zones, and global warming is intensifying the kind of rainstorms that have caused deadly river overflows across the state.
Environmentalists are highlighting West Virginia’s surprising climate vulnerability after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said he would not support the “Build Back Better Act,” which features ambitious plans to reduce emissions and adapt to global warming.
A recent state-by-state analysis of flood risk found that West Virginia has the highest percentage of roads, commercial properties and infrastructure in danger of being flooded — ahead of every state in the continental U.S., including Florida and Louisiana.
Fifty-one percent of West Virginia’s infrastructure facilities face significant flood risk. So do 46 percent of its road miles and 37 percent of its commercial properties, according to the nonprofit First Street Foundation. Each of those figures is roughly twice the national average.
For residential properties, 28 percent in West Virginia is at risk of being flooded — a figure that is behind only Louisiana and Florida, according to First Street.
“We were super surprised to see West Virginia at the top of the list,” First Street research director Jeremy Porter said.
West Virginia’s flood risk results largely from its steep, mountainous terrain, which has forced people to build at the bottom of river valleys. And that risk is growing.
“With the changing climate, in particular with the increase in impacts from heavy precipitation events that fill rivers and river valleys, you’re seeing more and more flooding,” Porter said.
The federal government’s flood maps severely understate West Virginia’s flood risk because the maps don’t account for flooding caused by rainfall or small tributaries — two major flood sources in West Virginia, Porter said.
Parts of West Virginia are still recovering from a cascade of devastating river floods in June 2016 that killed 23 people, wiped out thousands of buildings and caused $1.1 billion in damage. NOAA said the flooding resulted from a “thousand-year” downpour — rainfall so intense that it’s expected to occur only once every 1,000 years.
“Creeks and rivers turned into raging torrents, washing away anything in their paths,” NOAA wrote.
Federal Emergency Management Agency records show that West Virginia has experienced more flooding disasters since the 1950s than any state except for California and Texas, which are roughly 10 times as large and have roughly 20 times as many people.
FEMA records also show that West Virginia has one of the nation’s highest per capita rates of flood insurance claims, according to an E&E News analysis of National Flood Insurance Program data.
Yet West Virginia residents are among the nation’s most skeptical of climate change — an outlook that helps explain Manchin’s opposition to “Build Back Better” and other climate legislation.
“There’s a lot of identity tied to coal and timber,” said West Virginia University geography professor Jamie Shinn, who is an expert in climate adaptation. “That makes it really complicated” to link flooding to climate change.
A 50-state survey in 2018 by Yale University’s Program on Climate Change Communication showed that West Virginians were the least likely to think that climate change is occurring or that climate change is human-induced.
They also were the least likely to worry about climate change, to think corporations or individuals should do more to address climate change, to talk about climate change with friends and relatives, to believe there is a scientific consensus about climate change, and to think climate change will harm the U.S.
“There’s a correlation between climate change and anti-fossil fuels in people’s minds,” Shinn said. “It’s scary to think about making an economic transition when what has been the economic foundation for a century is the extractive industry.”
Continue reading “Reddest States Face Deepest Climate Danger”A changing climate poses the greatest economic risks to the red states where voters and the politicians they elect are the least likely to believe in the threat of a warming world, according to a new report.
