Month: April 2022

BBC:

Striding onto the streets of Glasgow, 16-year-old Amy O’Brien joined tens of thousands of other marchers last November for a Global Day of Action for Climate Justice. O’Brien is an activist with Fridays for Future Ireland, a youth movement that uses school strikes to campaign for climate justice. She had taken the train and ferry from her home town of Mitchelstown in County Cork to Glasgow to attend the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26). But while the journey was motivated by her activism, it also had a deeply personal side effect: it gave her hope.

O’Brien had spent half her life worrying about the impact of global climate change, to the point of feeling an intense fear over the planet’s future – an increasingly common phenomenon among children and teenagers. Now the sight of so many diverse banner-carrying campaigners, of all ages, offered her “a glimmer of the future that is possible”.

“It was a really colourful scene, and there was music and there were people dancing,” O’Brien recalls. “At one point it started lashing with rain, and so you would think it would dampen the scene, but actually there was such a bright, hopeful and exuberant protest. Everyone seemed so happy to be together, showing up for the world we want to see.”

O’Brien has been acutely aware of the climate crisis since the age of eight, when she first learned in primary school about the impact of melting Arctic ice on polar bears.

“Even at the start, I was upset for animals and that nature was having to change because of us,” she says. “I felt a bit powerless.” By age 13 or 14, “fear kicked in” as she witnessed increased flooding of Cork’s River Lee, and learned how extreme weather was displacing people in countries like India and the Philippines. “Their lives are torn apart, and these are the same people who contributed the least to this crisis,” O’Brien says. “I started to feel fear and hurt for what they were already going through.”

The intense feeling that O’Brien experiences in the midst of the climate crisis, has a name: eco-anxiety, defined by the American Psychological Association as “a chronic fear of environmental doom“.

Eco-anxiety can be caused by the stressful and frightening experience of “watching the slow and seemingly irrevocable impacts of climate change unfold, and worrying about the future for oneself, children and later generations”, according to a report published by the association and two other organisations, Climate for Health and Eco-America. It may come with “feelings of loss, helplessness, and frustration”, and guilt, as the sufferers feel they are unable to stop climate change.

Continue reading “Helping Kids with Climate Anxiety”

Putting in my app.

Washington Post:

Hundreds of people around the world are applying for a coveted job to run the world’s most remote post office. The position is based in Antarctica, and one of the key specifications is the ability to count penguins.

Four candidates will be chosen to fill the five-month role at Port Lockroy— affectionally dubbed the “Penguin Post Office.” The nearly-80-year-old building is on British-owned Goudier Island, which is about the size of a football field and is populated by hundreds of penguins.

The post office doubles as a museum and is managed by the U.K. Antarctic Heritage Trust. Each year, the British charity hires four postmasters to live on the island from November to March.

Although employees each have unique roles, they are collectively responsible for maintaining the historic site and catering to the thousands of tourists who come by boat during the season. The staff is also in charge of wildlife monitoring — which includes tallying penguins — and environmental data collection.

Applicants are warned it’s not a glamorous job. Employees must live without running water, Internet or cellphone service for five months. The team resides together in a small lodge, where they sleep in bunk beds and share a single bathroom and camping toilet. Visiting ships will offer showers when they stop by.

Continue reading “Help Wanted: Must Sort Mail, and Count Penguins”

I love these absolute legends 💙💙💙 pic.twitter.com/YDLDXiotVu

— CCTV_IDIOTS (@cctv_idiots) April 22, 2022

Above, CBS News on the steady onslaught of lawsuits against major oil companies, especially Exxon, as the costs of climate impacts continue to rise.
Below, Josh Pearce of Michigan Tech on the Fossil Fuel industry’s exposure to legal risk. It only takes one win to break the dam, and the fossil industry will face retribution far greater than what the Tobacco industry saw when similar suits began to break against them in the 90s.

Lab meat growers ready to slaughter the old ways.
Still “playing with taste and texture”.

Wall Street Journal:

Upside Foods has privately raised $400 million from investors including the Abu Dhabi Growth Fund and Scottish fund manager Baillie Gifford, company officials said, a vote of confidence that Upside’s lab-grown meat can gain regulatory approval and be sold to U.S. consumers.

Formerly called Memphis Meats, Upside is one of several startups attempting to produce edible meat in a lab using animal cells cultivated in large brewery-like facilities. Upside hasn’t sold products to the public but expects to sell chicken after U.S. regulatory approval. The company also has made beef, pork and duck products.

So-called cultured meat is one of two fast-growing alternatives to meat produced by traditionally farmed animals, the other being plant-based products. Proponents say lab-grown meat could reduce the need for animal antibiotics and help decarbonize the food industry by reducing land and water usage as well as emissions. It could also eventually cut the time it takes to produce meat products and simplify supply chains, they say.

Still, the products have so far only been approved to sell to consumers in Singapore and cost much more than meat produced by killing animals.

The Series C fundraising round is one of the largest ever in the nascent cultured-meat industry’s history and values Berkeley, Calif.-based Upside at more than $1 billion, the company said. The round was co-led by the government-owned Abu Dhabi Growth Fund and existing investor Temasek Holdings Ltd., a Singaporean government investment firm. Tyson Foods Inc., Cargill Inc. and other existing investors including Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group Corp. also participated. The company raised $161 million in a Series B financing in 2020.

As many as 63 million people may have to consider moving.
Those with homes may wish to consider whether their real estate value has peaked, or will soon, due to climate impacts. Others may judge that they have some time to examine options.
Locations in the midwest are looking good, but they are not without their own risks, and the way that legacy communities like Cincinnati, Cleveland, Duluth, Minneapolis and Detroit manage their growth will be key.
There are, as well, possible adaptations that some at-risk communities can make, like raising existing homes – but the ultimate solution is to stop emitting heat trapping gases.

Above, reminder that Eastern Ukraine, the disputed territories coveted by Vladimir Putin, have huge natural gas reserves.
Below, Germany in particular, exposed to large dependence on Russian natural gas. As outrage spreads about Russian atrocities, a moral and economic crisis looms.

Financial Times(paywall):

The war in Ukraine is reordering the global energy landscape. Shocked by the devastation visited on Ukrainian cities by Russian bombs, the EU has imposed swingeing sanctions on Russian hydrocarbons. Coal is banned; oil could be next. Gas may also be on the agenda.

But talk of a full-scale embargo on Russian energy is spreading panic in Germany, which until the war received 55 per cent of its imported gas from Russia. The fear is that any sudden gas shut-off could paralyse large parts of the country’s industry. Martin Brudermüller, chief executive of the chemicals group BASF, says it would plunge German business into its “worst crisis since the second world war”.
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Meanwhile, the government is pushing for more wind farms and solar parks to increase its share of renewable power. But it might also allow Germany’s coal-fired power stations, which are slated for closure by 2030, to operate for longer — a bitter pill for the Greens to swallow. Habeck’s ministry says that since Russia invaded Ukraine, the government has reduced its dependence on Russian coal from 50 to 25 per cent, oil from 35 to 25 per cent, and gas from 55 to 40 per cent.

The plan is for Germany to all but wean itself off Russian gas by mid-2024 and become “virtually independent” of Russian oil by December. Eon’s Birnbaum, however, says it will take three years for Germany to fully break its addiction to Russian energy imports. Others, though, disagree. According to a report by the DIW think-tank, Germany could easily fill its gas supply gap were Russian exports to stop, partly by increasing pipeline imports from Norway and the Netherlands, tapping more LNG via import terminals in Rotterdam, Zeebrugge and Dunkirk, and forcing industry to conserve energy.

“German industry has been developing these horror scenarios, saying we just can’t do without Russian gas, and by doing this they’re taking the whole economy hostage,” says Claudia Kemfert, an energy expert at the DIW. “But we’re living in a different world now . . . We can’t do business with Russia any more and industry has to realise that.”

But government officials dismiss suggestions that Germany can somehow make do without Russian gas. “Russian gas imports are still, in our view, irreplaceable,” says one.

Yahoo Finance:

U.S. natural gas is on a tear. Prices have almost doubled this year to the highest since the shale revolution more than a decade ago, driving up energy costs and helping fuel the fastest inflation in 40 years.

Yet the gas market, once considered a yawn among traders because of its predictability, could be setting the stage for a even wilder rally over the next few months, triggering bets on prices that would have seemed unimaginably high just a few months ago.

“There’s just too much uncertainty around trying to predict a price ceiling here — and if there is even a ceiling,” said Emily McClain, a senior analyst at Rystad Energy in Houston.

The rally has been supercharged by a surge in demand — from an unusually chilly spring that stoked heating needs, to a spike in exports as Europe tries to wean itself off Russian gas amid the war in Ukraine. That’s cut U.S. inventories to almost 20% below typical levels. At the same time, traders are staring down forecasts for a hotter-than-normal summer that will almost certainly bolster demand for gas to generate electricity as air conditioners get cranked higher. But what’s really getting the bulls excited is that the market has lost much of its ability to curb consumption through higher prices.

In the past, when natural gas became too expensive, power-plant owners would just dial down some of their gas-fired generators and turn up those burning coal, effectively putting a ceiling on demand and preventing prices from skyrocketing. But utilities’ move away from coal is shrinking inventories and drastically reducing their ability to pivot from gas, leaving the market more vulnerable to wild moves. “There is a path to some crazy prices,” said Paul Phillips, senior strategist at Uplift Energy Strategy in Denver.

Continue reading “Russian Gas: Moral, and Economic Hazard for Germany, Europe, US”