Month: November 2022
November Warmth Setting Records
Good news!
BOSTON – There is some absolutely gorgeous weather on tap for the rest of this week and possible record warmth this weekend into early next week!
Not much to say other than enjoy! The next week of weather will feel more like September/October than November.
Consider Boston — the city is forecast to sit at 72 degrees Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Areas west of town in the Merrimack Valley could see mid- to upper 70s; it’s not impossible that a rogue 80 populates the map.
“To put it into perspective, normal highs in early November are in the mid to upper 50s,” wrote the National Weather Service office serving the Boston area. “Given record high temperatures for the dates in the mid to upper 70s, it is conceivable that we could see record warmth this weekend. There are no signals for a precipitation event of any significance through Monday.”
In New York, where the average early November high is 55 degrees, Saturday, Sunday and Monday are predicted to soar to near 70. And Washington, D.C., is eyeing highs in the mid-70s, compared to averages in the lower 60s.
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As the undulating jet stream brings in a blob of cold air, look for strong storms across the plains in coming days.
Nobel Economist Joseph Stiglitz on Oil Company Windfall Profits
PBS on Oil Companies Windfall Profits
Saudi Aramco – 42 billion dollar profit in one quarter. Exxon 20 billion.
War is good business.
Investors Warm to GeoThermal
Continue reading “Investors Warm to GeoThermal”The future of clean, renewable energy is underneath our feet. Quite literally.
The core of the earth is very hot — somewhere between 7,952 degrees and 10,800 degrees Fahrenheit at the very center. If we can drill down from the surface into what’s called superhot rock, then we could access the heat of the earth and turn it into a massive source of zero-carbon, always available energy.
A new report out Friday from the Clean Air Task Force, a non-profit climate organization, finds that this category of clean, baseload superhot rock energy has the potential to be cost-competitive with other zero-carbon technologies — while also, very critically, having a small land footprint.
The Clean Air Task Force commissioned a non-profit geothermal organization, the Hot Rock Energy Research Organization, and an international clean energy consultancy, LucidCatalyst, to estimate the levelized cost of commercial-scale superhot rock electricity. They determined that it could eventually cost between $20 and $35 per megawatt hour, which is competitive with what energy from natural gas plants costs today.
This is not reality yet. Currently, there are no superhot rock geothermal energy systems operating and delivering energy, Bruce Hill, the chief geoscientist at Clean Air Task Force and the author of the report, told CNBC. But money is flowing into research projects and companies that are working to develop the technology.
The report posits that superhot rock energy can be commercialized in the 2030s, and argues that its unique set of features — it’s a clean source of inexhaustible baseload energy with a small footprint — make the investment worthwhile.
“It will take public and private investment similar to those being allocated to nuclear, carbon capture, and hydrogen fuels,” Hill told CNBC. “Geothermal programs receive far less funding from Congress and the U.S. Department of Energy than these other programs. Superhot rock geothermal isn’t even in the decarbonization debate — but given a decade or two of aggressive investment it could be producing baseload power — local, energy dense, clean-firm (baseload) and competitive,” from a price perspective.
Not Just Bees. Climate Could Crash Insect Population
Continue reading “Not Just Bees. Climate Could Crash Insect Population”The swings in temperature that accompany global warming could spell trouble for insect populations the world relies on for pollination and food production.
A paper led by Northeastern doctoral student Kate Duffy and published in an October edition of Nature Climate Change uses data science to show that, in addition to rising temperatures, fluctuations in temperature increase the risk of insect extinction in the decades ahead.
Of the 38 insect species studied in the research led by Duffy, nearly all were at risk of being wiped out at some point between 2050 and 2100.
“We found that there were an increasing number of events where the population crashed to zero under future climate simulations,” says Duffy, who in August obtained her Ph.D. in interdisciplinary engineering from Northeastern’s Sustainability and Data Sciences Laboratory in the civil and environmental engineering department.
She says catastrophic events can represent conditions that are too hot or too cold for insects, which being cold blooded, cannot generate their own form of internal heat.
Insect population collapse would devastate the food chain and sanitation, which depends on insects for cross-pollination and waste disposal, says Auroop Ganguly, a Northeastern professor and director of the SDS Lab and Kate’s dissertation adviser.
“They fill so many critical ecosystem niches,” Duffy says.
Duffy’s paper, to which Northeastern ecology and complexity researcher Tarik Gouhier, contributed, combines data from field studies of insect population growth and the latest generation of earth systems models.
The study determines, mathematically and statistically, what is expected to happen to insect populations around the world during a time of high greenhouse gas emissions.
“This ability to generate insights by connecting across disparate scales—from global climate or earth system models to laboratory and field studies—is something that goes to the heart of adaptation science. This is something incredibly interesting,” Ganguly says.
Wind Turbines, Midland County, MI
“A Windfall of War” – Biden’s Warning to Big Oil
Windfall profits taxes are made by oil companies squeezing consumers for every penny they can get away with. They have been making outsized profits, but instead of investing these gains into more oil production or renewable alternatives, oil companies have engaged in a frenzy of stock buybacks and a buildup of cash reserves over the last two years as pandemic restrictions have eased and demand has rebounded.3
Indeed, eight of the biggest oil companies in the world posted record-breaking second quarter 2022 profits totaling $51 billion. Phillips 66 posted a 981% increase in quarterly profits, while ExxonMobil and Chevron each reported a rise or 273% and 276% respectively. 4 California refiners alone reported more than $26 billion in second quarter profits by capitalizing on the Russia- Ukraine war. They raised prices at the pump because their cartel-like hold on the market allowed them to do it.
The Only Issue for the Coming Week. Vote.
From the top of the ticket to the bottom, there is a distinct difference in tactics.
This candidate for Michigan House has his phone number tweeted out by his Republican opponent.
Continue reading “The Only Issue for the Coming Week. Vote.”Graph of the Day: Decoupling Growth from Carbon
In 2009, coal was still an attractive option for countries looking for affordable energy, its average costs coming in well below renewables. But by 2020, both wind and solar had become far cheaper per unit of energy. In some markets, capital-intensive new installations even worked out cheaper than existing coal plants.
In response, India’s appetite for coal has quickly waned. In 2019, the International Energy Agency forecast that the country’s installed capacity of coal would grow by around 80 per cent between 2018 and 2040.
A year later, they revised that to just 10 per cent.
Similar patterns have played out elsewhere. For the best part of the past 200 years, one rule held across the world: if a country’s economic activity expanded, so did its carbon emissions. But starting in the 1980s with the advent of nuclear power, it became increasingly common to see countries cutting emissions while growing GDP.
The pace of this decoupling has now accelerated as the shift from carbon-intensive manufacturing to services and from dirtier to relatively cleaner fossil fuels has been supercharged by proliferating cheap renewables. In 2016, 70 countries — more than one in three worldwide — had a run of at least five years in which carbon emissions declined while GDP grew.
Green growth is already here. Even putting aside the climate justice argument, there has long been an assumption that developing countries would have to go through dirty growth. But here again the data paint a promising picture.
While developing countries do follow an environmental Kuznets curve, where the carbon-intensity of GDP increases before falling away again, each successive cohort traces a cleaner path than the last.