The problem is, Germany is heavily dependent on Russian natural gas. Rehabilitating nuclear plants only goes so far, because a big part of the challenge is home heating, something nuclear plants don’t affect. Heat pumps can cut that demand if they can be deployed, and I think that’s being done, but it’s not a slam dunk.
Gas that is readily available comes in liquified form, or LNG, which can be shipped in on large tankers. The quandary is that building new LNG port facilities around the world, and in Germany, is hugely expensive, and tends to lock in that infrastructure at a time when we should be moving capital away from that area.
Turns out there is an intermediate technology that I was not aware of – Floating Storage Regasification Units, which can take LNG from tankers, re-gasify it, and get it to shore without an existing massive LNG terminal. Is this a way to get thru the crisis without committing massive resources to permanent gas facilities? Energy experts. help me out.
The Yale Climate Connections video below was produced before the current war, but while a severe gas crunch, and Russian retro-politics, were becoming all too evident.
Above, two of Florida’s most respected TV Meteorologists assess some of the emerging conflicts that Sea Level rise is already bringing to Florida and the east coast of North America. I interviewed both for a forthcoming Yale Climate Connections video on how America’s weather casters are dealing with climate change, and educating their viewers.
Below, “conservative” Ben Shapiro gives his assessment of the sea level issue.
Compare/Contrast.
Ben Shapiro calls climate change a "problem," not an emergency: "When the tide rises, people move inland…Not a huge number of people were killed, presumably, when the land bridge between Russia and Alaska" flooded pic.twitter.com/4pM3wXwjZy
As Vladimir Putin’s Petro-Dictatorship pursues a Genocidal war, using fossil fuels as a weapon against Democracy, European nations are fighting back by speeding up the transition to renewables.
Working on a video this week profiling TV weather casters and their struggles to communicate climate change to their audience – so this is timely. One of the Mets I’m following is Chris Gloninger, Chief Meteorologist for KCCI in Des Moines. As a violent front of extreme weather sweeps across his viewing area, Chris is communicating with a remote crew, and watching as a large funnel appears and appears to be heading directly at the KCCI crew.
I’ll be doing one more interview for this piece today, in fact, and hope I can pull it together soon.
Below, massive peak storm will peak today across the Heartland.
It’s not just roads, bridges and dams that are failing due to climate change. Our most humble infrastructure is in trouble – very expensive trouble – as well.
As climate change intensifies, septic failures are emerging as a vexing issue for local governments. For decades, flushing a toilet and making wastewater disappear was a convenience that didn’t warrant a second thought. No longer. From Miami to Minnesota, septic systems are failing, posing threats to clean water, ecosystems and public health.
About 20 percent of U.S. households rely on septic, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Many systems are clustered in coastal areas that are experiencing relative sea-level rise, including around Boston and New York. Nearly half of New England homes depend on them. Florida hosts 2.6 million systems. Of the 120,000 in Miami-Dade County, more than half of them fail to work properly at some point during the year, helping to fuel deadly algae blooms in Biscayne Bay, home to the nation’s only underwater national park. The cost to convert those systems into a central sewer plant would be more than $4 billion.
The issue is complex, merging common climate themes. Solutions are expensive, beyond the ability of localities to fund them. Permitting standards that were created when rainfall and sea-level rise were relatively constant have become inadequate. Low-income and disadvantaged people who settled in areas with poor soils likely to compromise systems are disproportionately affected. Maintenance requirements are piecemeal nationwide. And while it’s clear that septic failures are increasing, the full scope of the problem remains elusive because data, particularly for the most vulnerable aging systems, are difficult to compile.
“The challenges are going to be immense,” said Scott Pippin, a lawyer and researcher at the University of Georgia’s Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems who has studied the problem along the state’s coast. “Conditions are changing. They’re becoming more challenging for the functionality of the systems. In terms of large-scale, complex analysis of the problem, we don’t really have a good picture of that now. But going forward, you can expect that it’s going to become more significant.”
The Great Lakes are 20 percent of the world’s non-frozen fresh water.
Keeping them viable, or restoring them, is critically dependent on the health of the largest, and northern most lake, Superior. Lake Superior is still, for the most part, overwhelmingly pristine and miraculously unpolluted, but many threats exist, and climate change as always is a threat multiplier. As more frequent extreme rains wash nutrients and pollutants into the Lake, and temperatures warm, there are increasing observations of algae blooms, an indicator of stress on the system.
Misinformation is a key driver of climate risk. The more people who are unable to separate bogus from factual information, the tougher it remains for a democratic society to deal with a Global Crisis.
Last week, I was quoted in an AP article interviewing scientists who are pushing back on the emerging narrative that there’s nothing we can do about climate change — that we’re doomed, no matter what.
Since then, I’ve gotten phone calls, emails, and actual mail in response.
Only one email was from a dismissive (informing me the climate has always changed, and I should learn about dendrochronology, LOL). I got several emails and one phone call peddling crackpot technological solutions to control the climate that absolutely would not work.
I did get a handful of emails from folks asking what could be done, asking for a way forward through anxiety and hopelessness. These are hard emails, and I wish I could give them the time they deserve (I’m working on an FAQ with resources because I get them all the time now).
The majority were from people who wanted to convince me that humanity is doomed. One guy sent me two self-published books on the meaninglessness of life. It was dedicated to the future humans who will unfortunately be born against their will (!?).
Is putting a million new residents in a hot desert environment as the Southwest aridifies in response to Climate Change. Is this a good idea?
UPDATE:
My friend journalist Keith Schneider recently completed a weeks long investigation of Arizona’s “Desert Civilization”, asking the questions that need to be asked.
Arizona’s annual gross domestic product, nearing $380 billion, has more than doubled since 2000. New solar installations, electric vehicle makers, computer chip manufacturers, data centers, and corporate farming companies are piling into the state.
Arizona added nearly 200,000 new jobs last year and issued construction permits for 65,000 new homes, according to state and federal figures.
State government has amassed a budget surplus every year since 2016. The general fund last year, in an unmistakable rebuke to the pandemic, collected $2 billion more in tax revenues than it did in 2020. State economists forecast a $4 billion budget surplus over the next three years.
The economic boom transformed the landscape. Arizona built an impressive array of beautiful homes, attractive neighborhoods, wide highways, thriving businesses, fine universities, high-tech manufacturers, and state-of-the-art irrigated farms. All of it — 114,000 square miles, 73 million acres — is saluted by cactus forests, towering mountains, mesquite desert, and transcendent vistas that touch the horizon.
Arizona, in other words, reveled in its location in a mighty desert, commanded the contemporary 20th century rules of the development game, and reached the pinnacle of its lifestyle appeal and economic influence in the first decades of the 21st.
The question now, as it has been since 1911 when the first big reservoir was completed to supply Phoenix with water, is one of longevity. Can this desert bounty be sustained for another 100 years, or even another 50? That question is more urgent and more relevant than ever. Climate change is disrupting the rules of the development game. Drought and extreme heat are emptying rivers and reservoirs, fallowing tens of thousands of acres of farmland, forcing thousands of homeowners to secure water from trucks and not their dead wells, and pushing Arizona ever closer to the precipice of peril.
So, the widely distributed story this past week was that “150 Eagles were killed by Wind Turbines” – it’s come up a few times, so I activated my one-man crisis response team, and deployed my confidential and highly classified proprietary system for investigating the story.
I read it. (yes, this is why I make the big bucks)
A wind energy company pleaded guilty last week to killing at least 150 eagles at its wind farms and was ordered to pay $8 million in fines and restitution, federal prosecutors said.
The company, ESI Energy, a wholly owned subsidiary of NextEra Energy Resources, was also sentenced to probation for five years, during which it must follow an eagle management plan, after pleading guilty on Tuesday to three counts of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
ESI acknowledged that at least 150 bald and golden eagles had died at its facilities since 2012, and that 136 of those deaths were “affirmatively determined to be attributable to the eagle being struck by a wind turbine blade,” the Justice Department said in a statement.
The deaths occurred across 50 of the 154 wind farms that the company operates in the United States, the Justice Department said.
OK, math is not my strong suit, but let me take a crack. 150 eagle deaths, across 154 wind facilities, over a decade, is less than 1 eagle, per wind farm, per decade. Not wind TURBINE, wind FARM. (which might be 20 or 200 turbines)
So in fact, the story actually goes a long way to confirming what wind advocates have been saying – wind turbines have tiny impact on raptors. There are, however some real threats.
First, some context. During the massive buildout of wind energy across the United States, Bald Eagle populations have actually been soaring.
The number of bald eagles — a species that once came dangerously close to extinction in the United States — has more than quadrupled over the last dozen years despite massive declines in overall bird populations, government scientists announced Tuesday.
A new survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that since 2009, when the last count was taken, the number of eagles had soared to an estimated 316,700 in the lower 48 states. At the species’ lowest point in the 1960s, there were fewer than 500 nesting pairs in those states.
