Month: May 2022

Because of course they are.

Raw Story:

US oil and gas firms took advantage of energy worries over the Ukraine war to push their fossil fuel products and resist climate change regulatory measures, an analysis showed on Wednesday.

The London-based think tank InfluenceMap analyzed advertisements and declarations by the companies in the weeks before and after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

It said the companies spread the misleading message that US climate change policies were to blame for rising energy prices and that more US-produced oil and gas was the solution.

As Western countries that import Russian hydrocarbons looked for alternatives in order to cut ties with Russia, InfluenceMap detected “an active effort from the US oil and gas industry to capitalize on the war in Ukraine”.

They pushed “long-standing policy asks relating to the continued expansion of oil and gas,” despite the widely-documented role such operations play in driving deadly global climate change, InfluenceMap said.

The group identified one of the key players in the messaging effort as the American Petroleum Institute, a lobbying organization that has numerous major fossil fuel companies among its members.

InfluenceMap said it detected a surge in the number of ads about US-based energy and energy independence placed via one of the API’s Facebook pages in the weeks before and after the Russian invasion.

One series of ads received nearly 20 million views on the social platform.

“The sector has quickly mobilized around the war in Ukraine and high gas prices to promote the need for more ‘American-made energy’, often relying on potentially misleading or questionable claims,” InfluenceMap Program Manager Faye Holder said in the report.

It also analyzed public statements by oil and gas executives, finding that several of them publicly blamed climate change policies or promoted US-produced energy as part of the solution to the energy crisis.

Continue reading “Oil Companies Using Ukraine War to Resist Climate Action”

Deutsche Welle:

The American solar industry is on its knees, and the unlikely culprit is one tiny, struggling company you’ve probably never heard of.

Auxin Solar is a solar panel manufacturer based in San Jose, California. It supplies just 2% of America’s solar modules.

Yet a petition filed by the company to the US Department of Commerce in February could be responsible for severe disruptions to future solar installations in the US — cutting them nearly in half this year and next, according to the biggest solar trade group in the country.

“The largest concern for the solar industry is uncertainty,” Marcelo Ortega, renewables analyst at Rystad Energy, told DW.

Auxin Solar’s petition prompted the department to launch a probe into whether US solar companies are skirting decade-old tariffs on Chinese solar imports. Solar installers, which compose much of the US industry, are threatened with tariffs up to 250%.

Critically, levies may be imposed retroactively on installers’ purchases — a possibility that is grinding the American solar industry to a halt.

Washington Post:

The first climate casualty emerged this week when an Indiana utility announced that it was extending the life of two coal-fired power plants because the solar energy needed to replace their electricity output will not be available. The utility placed the blame squarely on the Commerce investigation. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) warned in a letter to Raimondo that the sudden tumult created by the investigation is jeopardizing a state plan to quickly install enough new solar to power 2.5 million homes.

Canary Media:

The tariff circumvention inquiry that has brought U.S. solar installations to a shuddering halt is predicated at least in part on a misinterpretation of data, Canary Media has learned.

U.S. solar-panel manufacturer Auxin Solar relied heavily on research by BloombergNEF, a respected clean energy analysis firm, when it successfully petitioned the U.S. Commerce Department earlier this year to investigate potential circumvention of tariffs on solar cells and modules. Auxin cited BNEF solar-manufacturing research as it attempted to build a case that Chinese manufacturers are funneling components through factories in four Southeast Asian countries to get around U.S. solar import tariffs. It mentioned BNEF 38 times in its petition. 

And the Commerce Department, in its March memo initiating the inquiry, repeatedly noted Auxin’s use of BNEF research to build the case for the inquiry. The memo mentions BNEF 19 times. 

Continue reading “Tiny, Slipshod Solar Company Threatens US Industry”

I’ve posted recently on rooftop solar scammers that operate across the country.
Above and below, an Atlanta TV station investigated claims vs performance of some of those shady solar installers (who constantly bombard my YouTube feed with come ons).

Below, key indicator that your installer may be a scammer.

Continue reading “Local TV Sting Operation Snares Solar Scammers in Atlanta”

If you have not been listening to Amy Westervelt’s Drilled podcast, shame on you.

Amy Westervelt in Drilled:

Lots of big news on the climate litigation front lately. This week alone we’ve seen two big rulings (and it’s only Tuesday!): the Rhode Island case gets to stay in state court and the Massachusetts fraud case will move forward.

The fossil fuel industry is 0 for 4 on jurisdictional arguments so far this year. The Rhode Island decision marks the 4th in as many months to affirm the plaintiffs’ rights to have the cases heard in state court. Earlier rulings kept California, Baltimore, and Hawaii cases in state court. For those who don’t know, the jurisdictional issue has held these cases up for the past couple of years, with oil companies arguing that climate liability cases belong in federal court where they hope they’ll have a better chance, given that in some early cases federal courts ruled that the Clean Air Act preempted climate liability claims. Not sure how that argument would hold up in a world in which their other pet project—overturning Massachusetts v EPA—was successful though. If the EPA can’t regulate greenhouse gas emissions, because they’re not written into the Clean Air Act explicitly, could you still argue preemption? 

I mean, hell, they’re arguing that fraud is free speech so who knows. On that front, though, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled today that argument is not enough to stop the case from moving forward. ExxonMobil’s special motion to dismiss, its final attempt to get this cased tossed, argued that the company’s public statements on climate policy should be considered as “petitioning speech,” or political opinion, not commercial speech, and thus protected by the First Amendment. The company also invoked the state’s anti-SLAPP statutes, claiming the AG’s suit against it is the exact sort of “strategic litigation” anti-SLAPP laws are meant to prevent. Without ruling on the anti-SLAPP part of the argument, last year a Massachusetts Supreme Court justice ruled that the company’s greenwashing campaigns did not constitute “petitioning speech” and denied the motion. Exxon appealed and an appellate panel heard the argument earlier this year.  

Continue reading “Climate Litigation Creeping Forward”

There is an ongoing tug of war between utilities across America, who in general support solar energy but want to be in charge of building and maintaining utility scale solar generators, and citizens who wish to generate power on their own land and rooftops, and be compensated with a retail rate when the produce more then they need, and share to the grid.

Utilities say they bear the burden of maintaining the grid, and that smaller players who still need grid backup should be paid for power at lower “wholesale” rates, or even pay an additional monthly grid fee when they install solar. High profile fights going on in the major solar states like Florida, Arizona, California, Nevada – but also everywhere across the country. There are 50 states and 50 sets of rules, with no clearly superior approach at this time.
For now, smaller players have won a round in Arkansas.

PV Magazine:

In a state that ranked 30^th in solar installed in 2021, the recent ruling in favor of net metering could boost Arkansas, “the land of opportunity,” to a new level of sustainability. Recently the Arkansas Court of Appeals ruled in favor of solar power, ending a battle among the Arkansas Public Utilities Commission, solar companies including Scenic Hill Solar, utilities including the Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corp. and Petit Jean Electric Cooperative of Clinton.  The ruling essentially upheld the rate structure for net metering, which previously had stated that solar customers would receive the full retail rate for excess energy they send to the grid. In addition, the ruling simplifies the approval process for small solar systems and to aggregate smaller systems.

The history of this legislation dates back to 2001, when the Arkansas General Assembly enacted the Arkansas Renewable Energy Development Act (AREDA). In the ruling, the found that the increasing consumption of renewable resources “promotes the wise use of Arkansas’s natural-energy resources,” Calling solar an “indigenous energy fuel,” the ruling states that increased solar reduces dependence on imported fossil fuels. The General Assembly further found that “net energy metering encourages the use of renewable energy resources and renewable energy technologies by reducing utility interconnection and administrative costs for small consumers of electricity” and that “net-metering would help to . . . attract energy-technology manufacturers, to provide a foothold for these technologies in the Arkansas economy, and to make it easier for customer access to these technologies.”

Washington Post:

Sasan Saadat, a senior policy expert for Earthjustice, said this megadrought is pushing Californians to make environmental choicesthat scientists didn’t expect to come for decades.

For example, to conserve water resources amid dwindling supplies, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California last month ordered unprecedented limits to “nonessential” water use, or any water used for reasons other than public health, marking the most severe cutbacks ever enacted in the state and affecting about 6 million people. 

“We didn’t expect these results,” Saadat told The Climate 202 when asked about the intensifying weather events Californians face almost every day because of human-caused climate change. “They’re the result of the procrastination of our failures from before,” Saadat said. And, he added, “things will get much worse if we continue to procrastinate.” 

Despite California being known as a beacon for environmental policy across the country, state Sen. Dave Cortese (D) said state legislators have put the drought on the backburner. 

According to Cortese, a matter of what issues should take priority has been a source of delay for California’s state legislature. Part of the reason for the delay, he said, was hoping that the drought would end. The other part, however, is that the legislature was preoccupied with other issues, such as the pandemic, homelessness and wildfires.

But now, he said, that “can’t be an excuse anymore,” adding that the state needs to “make this the highest priority.” 

“These fights have to happen because we have no choice, to sit on our hands is going to result in a multiplicity of disasters and catastrophic consequences.” 

Continue reading “Megadrought Pushing Hard Choices in California, West”

The most solidly established evidence of a changing climate is increasing frequency of extreme heat events.

Nature:

Human-induced climate change made the deadly heatwave that gripped India and Pakistan in March and April 30 times more likely, according to a rapid analysis of the event. Temperatures began rising earlier than usual in March, shattering records and claiming at least 90 lives. The prolonged heat has yet to subside.

“High temperatures are common in India and Pakistan, but what made this unusual was that it started so early and lasted so long,” said co-author Krishna AchutaRao, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, in a press release. “We know this will happen more often as temperatures rise and we need to be better prepared for it,” AchutaRao said.

To quantify the role of climate change in the extreme heatwave, a global team of researchers from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative used the average daily maximum temperatures across northwestern India and southeastern Pakistan between March and April to characterize the heatwave. They then compared the possibility of such an event occurring in today’s climate compared with the climate in pre-industrial times, using a combination of climate models and observation data going back to 1979 in Pakistan and 1951 in India.

The team found that climate change increased the probability of the heatwave occurring to once in every 100 years; the odds of such an event would have been once every 3,000 years in pre-industrial times, says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and researcher at Berkeley Earth, a non-profit organization in California that focuses on climate change and analysis of global temperatures. The researchers also show that the event was around 1 ºC warmer than it would have been in a pre-industrial climate.

Climate clincher

“This study is really well done. It follows in the footsteps of a lot of excellent work that the WWA has done,” says Hausfather. “It shows an unambiguous role of climate change in making extreme heat events like this worse.”

In India, March’s temperatures were consistently 3–8 ºC above average, reaching highs of 44 ºC — the highest they’ve been since records began 122 years ago. Pakistan reported temperatures that exceeded 49 ºC in some regions. The heatwave was coupled with below-average rainfall in the region. Pakistan received 62% less rainfall than usual for March, and India 71% less. Although the lack of rain added to heating from the land’s surface, it also reduced the humidity of the heatwave — potentially decreasing health impacts, says Hausfather.

Continue reading “The Urgent Crisis: Extreme Heat Events”

Good short summaries from local Texas media on current status of the giant, and vulnerable, ERCOT electric grid. Looks like the system has made it through the current heat wave without major dislocations. Can they withstand the summer peak?

The stability of Texas power supply has emerged as an issue in the current Texas gubernatorial campaign, following several weeks of near shortages in a record May heatwave. Texans still stinging from the February 2021 blackouts, caused largely by the failure of gas supplies and gas generators.

Canary Media:

While I was scrolling through the app recently, the algorithm pointed me to science communicator and sustainability scientist Alaina Wood, better known on TikTok as The Garbage Queen. She’s part of a collective of activists known as EcoTok. Since joining TikTok at the beginning of the pandemic, she’s amassed more than 265,000 followers and has even interviewed Bill Nye the Science Guy as part of TikTok’s Earth Day celebration.

The video of Wood’s that initially caught my attention featured her debunking another viral video that she classifies as ​“climate doom.” Wood goes on to say that videos like this are exacerbating the climate anxiety that many are struggling with today.

On TikTok, The Garbage Queen stands out because she, as a scientist, understands the gravity of the climate problem better than most. But at the same time, she spreads a message of hope and possibility to a large and growing following of the climate-curious.