Month: April 2022

Washington Post:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged the U.N. Security Council to seek “full accountability” for the actions of Russian forces in Ukraine, which he described as the “most terrible war crimes” since World War II. In a video address, he accused Russia of mass atrocities across the country, including killing unarmed civilians and crushing people with tanks.

“This undermines the whole architecture of global security,” Zelensky said. “They are destroying everything.”

Prior to those remarks, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the alleged actions in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha were a “deliberate campaign to kill, to torture, to rape, to commit atrocities.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said earlier the E.U. will impose an import ban on coal worth more than 4 billion dollars per year as part of new sanctions against Moscow in response to the mounting evidence of atrocities in the city northwest of the Ukrainian capital, saying the violence “can not and will not be left unanswered.” The new measures will need approval from all 27 member states.

On the way to banning coal from everywhere, I hope, but its a start.

Disempowering the Petro dictators should have been done long ago. So terribly sad that the world waited for the fossil-fueled violence that has been part of life in the Middle East for decades to come to Europe.

Report from San Diego station KGTV on the challenges of getting enough EV charging stations on line to handle the expected ramp of EV adoption.

Cutting thru the fog of denial has often felt for me like trying to deprogram cult members. New research confirms that it’s do-able if you put in the effort.

Salon:

A groundbreaking new study paid viewers of Fox News Channel to watch CNN for 30 days. Those viewers ultimately became more skeptical and less likely to buy into fake news. The early impacts, after just three days, showed that the viewers were already starting to change.

The findings of the study, written by David E. Brockman and Joshua L. Kalla, explained that the experiment used content analysis comparing the two networks during September of 2020.

During this period, the researchers explained that “CNN provided extensive coverage of COVID-19, which included information about the severity of the COVID-19 crisis and poor aspects of [Donald] Trump’s performance handling COVID-19. Fox News covered COVID-19 much less,” said the study. “The coverage of COVID-19 it did offer provided little of the information CNN did, instead giving viewers information about why the virus was not a serious threat. On the other hand Fox News extensively but highly selectively covered racial issues, and its coverage of these issues provided extensive information about [Joe] Biden and other Democrats’ supposed positions on them and about outbreaks of violence at protests for racial justice in American cities. CNN provided little information about either. The networks both covered the issue of voting by mail, but again dramatically different information about it (in addition to offering different frames).”

It was “far from obvious,” the authors surmised, that viewing different networks would affect the beliefs and attitudes of the viewer. In fact, It wasn’t so much that viewers were tuning in because they already felt that way, but that their attitudes were actually being formed from the Fox network.

The Fox viewers were nearly all very conservative and strong Republicans, the study explained. “Of 763 qualifying participants, we then randomized 40 percent to treatment group. To change the slant of their media diet, we offered treatment group participants $15 per hour to watch 7 hours of CNN per week, during Sept. 2020, prioritizing the hours at which participants indicated they typically watched Fox News.”

At the three-day mark, the viewers took a survey. “We found large effects of watching CNN instead of Fox News on participants’ factual perceptions of current events (i.e., beliefs) and knowledge about the 2020 presidential candidates’ positions,” they found. They discovered changes in attitudes about Donald Trump and Republicans as well as a large effect on their opinions about COVID.

The viewers also evolved to believe that if Donald Trump made a mistake, “Fox News would not cover it — i.e., that Fox News engages in partisan coverage filtering.”

The findings might suggest that the most cost-effective way for Democrats to win elections is to start running their own infomercials or commercials on the Fox networks.

The recent Conger Ice Shelf collapse in East Antarctica made me recall a 2013 video, above, which featured several researchers, but specifically my conversation with Carys Cook of Imperial College, London. Money quotes start at about 2:30 in if you are in a rush. (video is 6 minutes and change)
Got to admit, it’s kind of unsettling.

Below, CBS News wrap of the recent unexpected collapse of an East Antarctic ice shelf the size of New York City.

More detail below:

The Weather Network:

The Conger Ice Shelf in East Antarctica, thought to be stable and relatively unaffected by climate change, completely disintegrated in mid-March. Here’s what the experts are saying about this event.

Just a few weeks after scientists logged the smallest sea ice extent for Antarctica in over 40 years, temperatures soared across the eastern part of the continent to roughly 30°C higher than normal. In the aftermath, satellite imagery captured something completely unexpected. The Conger Ice Shelf — a roughly 1,200 square kilometre sheet of glacial ice along the coast of East Antarctica — had shattered in just a matter of days.
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Continue reading “Scientists React to Unsettling East Antarctica Shelf Collapse”

The craziness that 40 years of focused attacks on science and fact has given us is not diminishing.
If you don’t get it that the two parties are not the same, you have not been paying attention.

Bill Maher’s kind of lost me a number of times in recent years, but he’s spot on and deadly accurate here.

I talked about this urgent issue in a recent Yale Climate Connections video. In typically (not) helpful fashion the YouTube algorithm tagged is as ‘age restricted” – but if you can get past the extra click, worth a look.

Below, even Steve Bannon, judging by his facial expressions, is finding Michelle Bachman’s most recent ravings a bit much.

Continue reading “The Fruits of Science Denial: If You Think Today’s GOP is Crazy, .. See What’s Waiting in the Wings”

The day before the Russian invasion of Ukraine I wrote about Vladimir Putin’s imposition of a global carbon tax. Glad to see the Wall Street Journal has finally caught on.

Greg Ip in Wall Street Journal:

So the U.S. seems set to benefit from Russia’s shrunken market share. Will the climate? Past oil-price spikes such as after the 1973 Arab embargo did spur conservation but little permanent migration from fossil fuels because the alternatives weren’t practical. Now, though, electric vehicles are fast gaining mainstream acceptance. If gasoline stays above $4 per gallon, that will nudge the trend along.

Meanwhile, even as the European Union shifts gas supply from Russia to the U.S., its total consumption is set to decline as it steps up its transition to net zero. The Netherlands and Portugal have announced new offshore wind investment, Belgium is delaying the closure of nuclear-power plants, and France is ending subsidies for new gas heaters while increasing them for electric heat pumps.

Energy markets are notoriously fickle and much could go wrong with this scenario. Shortages of critical metals have driven up the prices of batteries and solar panels, dimming their appeal, while shortages of inputs and labor are hampering U.S. shale production. Soaring energy costs and inflation may precipitate recession, destroying demand and driving prices back down.

And the war could end. A peace agreement could weaken Europe’s resolve to replace Russian with U.S. gas. Even without such an agreement, informal boycotts of Russia could fade with time.

But if Russian oil and gas are stigmatized for the long run, it’s a good bet that both the climate and the U.S. will be better off.

Gernot Wagner for Bloomberg Green:

It’s rare to be able to point to Economics 101 to give the full picture of how to address a particular policy challenge—and how not to. This is one of those instances. 

Taxes and other regulations drive a wedge between what consumers pay and what producers get. That wedge comes with its own costs. It also has some clear benefits. For one, fossil energy use comes with massive external costs, from local air pollution to climate change. That calls for governments to step in and put a price on otherwise unpriced consequences of energy extraction, transportation and use. 

With energy prices spiking, governments are inclined to provide relief via direct subsidies or various forms of tax holidays. The trouble is that doing so sets the wrong incentives. High energy prices tell consumers to use less of that particular form of energy, and they tell producers to look for alternative supplies. Artificially lowering energy prices has the exact opposite effect. 

Continue reading “Making the Most of Putin’s Carbon Tax”

Canary Media:

Legacy energy and utility interests might not want you to know this, but the energy transition is now in full effect in the United States. We’re well beyond the ​“what if” stage, when we wondered how the grid would adjust to renewable energy, and are now decisively in the era of solar and storage.

Power plant developers and operators plan to add 85 gigawatts of new capacity to the U.S. power grid in 2022 and 2023, and 60 percent (51 gigawatts) of this total will be made up of solar power and battery storage projects (often paired together), according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Texas, California and New York are leading this revolution in clean energy capacity additions in the U.S.

The remaining 34 gigawatts of planned capacity additions over the next two years will consist mostly of fossil gas (16 gigawatts) and wind (15 gigawatts). However, both of these sources will be handily eclipsed by new solar and battery storage deployments.