Month: June 2022
Seeding Ravaged Forests from Drones
Cool technology.
Whether the process works to restore forests, and more importantly, sequester carbon, will tell us a lot about how carbon credits and a “net zero” approach will help to mitigate climate change.
Andrew Dessler: Why Investors DO Need to Worry About Climate Change
I posted a few weeks ago about a talk given by a banking executive urging his colleagues not to worry about climate change.
Yesterday, Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M offered a response, above – and of course you don’t really even have to be a physicist to get the depth of delusional thinking and amoral analysis.
HSBC (so named after a founding member Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation) is in damage-control mode after a senior executive said policymakers and central bankers had exaggerated the financial risk of climate change.
Stuart Kirk, the head of responsible investing for the bank’s asset management division, last week compared predictions about the negative effects of climate change to “Y2K” theories that a computer glitch would cause havoc at midnight on Jan. 1, 2000.
“There’s always some nut job telling me about the end of the world,” he said at a Financial Times conference in a presentation titled, “Why investors need not worry about climate risk.”
He added: “What bothers me about this one is the amount of work these people make me do. The amount of regulation coming down the pipes. The number of people in my team and at HSBC dealing with financial risk from climate change.”
Later in the speech, he said: “Who cares if Miami is six meters underwater in 100 years? Amsterdam has been six meters underwater for ages, and that’s a really nice place. We will cope with it.”
Note: Amsterdam is about 6 feet, not 6 meters, below sea level.
You’ll love the way Kirk predicts in 2100 “we going to be 500 percent Richer”...
Continue reading “Andrew Dessler: Why Investors DO Need to Worry About Climate Change”Energy Security Brings Conservatives to Renewables
And increasingly, climate. But more on that another day.
New Hampshire Business Review:
In the past two weeks, New Hampshire residents learned that most of our electricity bills will skyrocket in August. For Eversource’s residential customers, the rate they pay kilowatt-hour will rise from 19 cents to more than 32 cents: 22 cents for the energy, and another 8 cents to deliver it. With this rate, New Hampshire customers will nearly have the highest electricity rates in the United States: higher than Alaska, where most customers pay about 22 cents, and lower only than Hawaii.
Needless to say, if your state is paying nearly as much for energy than a string of isolated atolls thousands of miles from shore, something has to change.
We are now reaping what we have sowed. Over the past 20 years, we have massively built out natural gas-fired power plants in New England, from 15 percent of generation in 2000 to 53 percent in 2021. Natural gas prices set our electricity prices, and pipeline gas in New England is currently two to three times more expensive than the same time last year.
This problem is not going away anytime soon. While it seems to us that prices have gone through the stratosphere, gas is currently fetching 10 times more in Europe. American producers are responding to this powerful price signal to send their product overseas. And with the European Union’s newfound resolve to wean themselves off Russian gas, ever more American gas will not be burned at home.
If you’re hoping that American production will rise again, don’t be so sure. From 2010 to 2018, the low price of gas in the U.S. meant that the American fracking industry lost a cumulative $181 billion, which led the former CEO of the nation’s largest gas producer to call the shale revolution “an unmitigated disaster” for investors.
During the Cold War, John Lehman served as Secretary of the Navy under President Ronald Reagan. Later, he was appointed a Republican member of the 9/11 commission.
Those experiences led him to see U.S. reliance on “Persian Gulf oil” as a major vulnerability that kept America mired in Middle East conflicts.
Lehman became a champion for renewable energy — “an essential element of energy independence,” he said. He lobbied for it during Congressional hearings, and at his rural estate in Pennsylvania, where a peacock and guinea fowl run the grounds, he installed a 34-kilowatt solar array to provide most of the power he needs.
Continue reading “Energy Security Brings Conservatives to Renewables”“It seemed to me, here I was arguing for renewable sources … and I’m not doing anything,” Lehman said. “So I ought to at least get a solar array.”
Heat Challenges Japanese Grid
In a blistering hot June around the Northern Hemisphere, in which heat records have fallen on every continent, Japan is the latest to swelter. On Saturday, temperatures there shot above 104 degrees (40 Celsius) for the first time on record during the month, another clear sign of the sweeping effects of human-caused climate change.
The mercury soared to 104.4 degrees (40.2 Celsius) in Isesaki, a city of more than 200,000 people about 50 miles northwest of Tokyo. That marked Japan’s hottest temperature ever observed during June.
The scorching temperatures — both in Japan and elsewhere — are occurring as summer has barely begun with the typically hotter months of July and August still to come.
Japan is asking Tokyo residents to conserve power, with unusually hot weather stretching the city’s grid as fears increase that the heat could last for longer.
Electricity supply in the capital will continue to be tight Tuesday after households, businesses and utilities took steps Monday to help avoid any blackouts. The country’s government extended a power supply advisory for Tokyo which calls for curbs on consumption.
Sony Group Corp. turned off lights illuminating its logo at some of its bases, convenience operator Seven & i Holdings Co. changed meal-preparation times and electronic store operator Yamada Holdings Co. switched off the majority of display televisions, lights and cooling units.
The country’s grid coordinator ordered power sharing among regional utilities to supply Tokyo Electric Power Co. Those measures appear to be helping to ease pressure, and the city’s power reserves are now forecast to be above the minimum level required for grid stability. While hot weather is expected to keep power supply tight in the capital for the rest of the week, it’s unlikely Tokyo will face blackouts as generation in the rest of the country is strong.
Japan’s latest power crunch comes amid expectations of a long summer of pressure on electricity networks across much of Asia, with blistering heat seen raising demand just as global fuel shortages limit supply. High temperatures and an industrial rebound are already lifting consumption in key regions in northern China and Taiwan, while households and industry face the impact of surging power bills.
Temperatures in Tokyo will be as high as 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) this week, according to the country’s meteorological agency, above the 30-year average of 22.5 Celsius. The rainy season in the greater Tokyo area ended the earliest on record going back to 1951, pointing to longer and hotter periods that’ll pressure the grid.
Continue reading “Heat Challenges Japanese Grid”The nation’s meteorologist expects hotter-than-normal weather through the summer, and forecasts temperatures to surge over the next month. Power prices are already trading at a record high for this time of year — a trend that is likely to continue as households ratchet-up air conditioning.
Three Arguments for Climate Optimism (or at least less Pessimism)
Insects and Angel’s Wings
Description:
Insect populations are crashing so fast that entomologists are warning of increasing crop failures and broken food chains. According to a report in the journal Biological Conservation, a quarter of the world’s insects could be wiped out within just a decade, and in Britain alone, climate disruption and intensive farming have caused a 60% decline in flying insects in just 20 years.
To mark Insect Week, we are celebrating the tiny creatures on which human life depends by releasing a haunting short film by ecological writer Jay Griffiths and artist-activist Gaby Solly. Voiced by Sir Mark Rylance, Almost Invisible Angels is the latest in a series of collaborative artworks curated by Paint the Land, an initiative which links high-profile writers, with well-loved and emerging visual artists, to create rural and urban landscape art responding to the climate and ecological emergency.
“When I heard about the collapse of insect populations, I cried for three days,” Jay Griffiths writes in her blog. “I saw in one awful moment a vision of the desolated world, a devastated wasteland.” The idea for the film came to Jay in a dream: “I saw Tintern Abbey in it’s woodland home, filled with insect-angels, and the Red Rebels: in this half-dream I half-heard the voice of Mark Rylance in my head. It was the tears and the song that his voice carries.”
Dreams tell us what we really know about something, what we really feel. Dreams are an awakening. In many spiritual traditions dreams are seen as rooted to our consciousness, and to ignore them would be to sever ourselves from our connected whole. Dream of insects this week, and cherish them by campaigning against insecticides, joining a rewilding project, taking part in a bug survey:
– or simply marvelling at their beauty.
The Weekend Wonk: Climate Denial and Misogyny
We knew that climate deniers were also misogynists, and I’ve posted on it over the years, but they keep making it even more clear.
In a week where women’s rights have been set back 100 years, and on the eve of what everyone assumes will be an equally disastrous ruling against the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases (or anything else), time to review why all this goes together, and none of it is a surprise.
Above, my first interview with Katherine Hayhoe in 2012.
Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Climate Denial and Misogyny”One scientist was called Climate Barbie.
Another was described as an “ugly fake scientist.” A third had an erect penis drawn on her car window while she was in the field researching sea-level rise.
Such is the life of many female climate scientists in 2018.
All researchers face the risk of being criticized when speaking publicly about their findings. But women in the field describe being attacked based on their gender. They’ve endured insults, sexual taunts and degrading comments about their professional acumen. Most of their harassers use social media, email and the phone for their attacks. But there’s a fear that it could become physical.
Threats of death, rape and other forms of violence have left a number of researchers feeling concerned for their safety. They worry about opening envelopes with handwritten addresses and answering phone calls from unfamiliar numbers. Anonymous emails that try to entice a response cause agitation.
“We get this additional layer of hate mail, and people, I think, find it easier to put us down because we are women, or feel like they have more right in telling us what is right or wrong despite our expertise, which is always frustrating,” said Andrea Dutton, a geologist at the University of Florida and an expert on sea-level rise.
Chinese Battery Could Be Breakthrough
If I was range anxiety, I’d be getting anxious right now.
Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited, abbreviated as CATL, is a Chinese battery manufacturer and technology company founded in 2011 that specializes in the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage systems, as well as battery management systems.
Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. unveiled an electric-car battery it said has a range of over 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) on a single charge and is 13% more powerful than one planned by Tesla Inc., a major customer.
CATL, as the world’s biggest maker of electric-car batteries is known, will start manufacturing the next-generation “Qilin” next year, according to a video the Chinese company streamed online Thursday. The battery charges faster than existing cells, and is safer and more durable, CATL said.
The Qilin battery, named after a mythical Chinese creature, has an energy density of up to 255 watt-hour per kilogram, Ningde, Fujian-based CATL said.
“It’s an important advancement for CATL as it keeps them at the forefront on the innovation side,” said Tu Le, managing director of Beijing-based consultancy Sino Auto Insights. “Being the lowest cost provider isn’t enough to command loyalty, there needs to be more to it — and that seems to be the Qilin battery for CATL.”
CATL’s shares climbed 5.9% in Shenzhen, closing at the highest since Feb. 9.
Meanwhile, other major auto makers not sleeping either – see below:
Continue reading “Chinese Battery Could Be Breakthrough”Greta at Glasonbury
Apparently BBC blocking actual footage of the speech, I’ll keep looking.
Greta Thunberg has told Glastonbury festivalgoers that ‘we have been lied to’ as the ongoing climate crisis continues to worsen. The Swedish environmental activist appeared on the Pyramid Stage this afternoon, taking aim at world leaders.
Addressing the vibrant Glastonbury crowd, Thunberg said that “we have been lied to, we have been deprived of our rights as democratic citizens and been left unaware.” She added: “Today our political leaders are allowed to say one thing and do another.”
Later in her short speech, the 19-year-old told the Glastonbury crowd: “We have allowed greed and selfishness the opportunity for a small amount of people to make very large amounts of money. You and I have been given a historic responsibility to set things right.”