Month: December 2022

Year in Review: Weathercasters Increasing Climate Coverage

I got updates from a number of TV Meteorologists around the US who are increasingly integrating Climate into their reporting – sometimes still facing blowback, but winning in the ratings!

ABC’s Ginger Zee feels there is an increased interest among her audience as people feel climate impacts in their own lives.

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2022: The Year the Transition Kicked Into Gear

The Bumpy Ride begins in earnest.

Leah Stokes in the New York Times:

For almost half a century, the world has talked about quitting its addiction to fossil fuels. Yet, year after year, we remain stuck with the same old dirty energy system.

The consequences of that delay are now upon us, with the climate crisis breaching our front door. Extreme rainfall in Pakistan affected more than 33 million people this year, with some communities converted into lakes. In Florida, Hurricane Ian caused more than $50 billion in insured damage, making it the second-most-expensive hurricane in the country’s history. In the western United States, drought left the nation’s two largest reservoirs nearly three-quarters empty.

But when we look back a decade from now, we may find that 2022 was an inflection point. New policies in the United States and Europe and elections in Australia and Brazil are creating momentum for the shift toward clean energy. If moving away from dirty energy is like rerouting a giant ship, then this could be the year when world leaders started to turn the tanker around.

An energy transition sounds smooth and orderly. But in a year with a brutal war that turned global energy markets upside down, we learned that’s not the way this kind of change will happen. It’s going to be a bumpy ride — an energy disruption.

If we look at the periods when the energy system shifted dramatically, whether in 1979 or 2022, there’s a clear pattern: crisis. When energy supply grows scarce and fossil fuel prices shoot through the roof, governments act.

The responses might be Band-Aids — bringing down prices in the short term but doing little to change dependence on dirty energy. Or they could be like major surgery — fundamentally altering energy infrastructure. It’s the latter changes that really count, because they’re harder to reverse.

After more than three decades of largely failed efforts, the U.S. Congress passed a series of climate bills aimed squarely at infrastructure. The biggest one, the Inflation Reduction Act, is projected to invest around $370 billion in clean industries. Much of the funding will flow through unlimited tax credits to households for everything from electric vehicles to solar panels to heat pumps that run on electricity rather than gas.
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Below, YouTube Electric Viking doesn’t always get the details right but I love his enthusiasm.

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How to Handle Trolls: By Greta Thunberg

Climate deniers not so great at owning the libs.

UPDATE:

Cold Weather Outbreaks in a Warming World

The recent severe weather and cold outbreak across North America (that is rapidly whiplashing into unseasonable warmth) caused me to review some conversations I had recently with Judah Cohen PhD of MIT, and Martha Shulski PhD, State Climatologist of Nebraska.
Both independently mentioned observations of increased cold weather outbreaks, especially centered in the late February time period, over the last 30 or 40 years. Striking to hear this independently from both of them.

Elon Musk has Lost His Damn Mind

In the last day, Elon Musk has been promoting a truly demented twitter thread by a Russian official predicting revolution, destruction and mass death in the United States in 2023.
Meanwhile, Tesla stock continues an epic tumble.

On one hand, making me feel better about not owning the stock.
On the other hand, has me wonderng,who is going to play him in the movie? (make suggestions below)

Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times:

Not long ago, Tesla’s electric vehicles were far and away the best on the market. If you wanted a stylish, long-range, easy-to-charge and feature-packed E.V., Elon Musk would be your most likely supplier — even if you hated his guts.

But not anymore. In the past year I test drove many fantastic new E.V.s that hit the market in 2021 and 2022 — cheap ones, expensive ones, big ones, small ones, strange ones, boring ones. Ford’s F-150 Lightning, the electric version of the longtime best-selling vehicle in America, and its Mustang were terrific inside and out, nicely designed, roomy and fun to drive. The Kia EV-6’s striking, futuristic exterior had strangers stopping me to ask what cool ride I was driving. There are also great models by Chevy, Mercedes and Rivian. Although I liked the Teslas I drove (the uber-expensive Model S Plaid, which can go from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in about two seconds, was terrific fun), the truth is that many of the best electric wheels on the market today are not made by Musk.

The new competition makes Musk’s recent role as the town crier for the red-pilled online right especially puzzling and, for his car company, perilous. His chaotic and polarizing tenure as Twitter’s chief executive — during which he’s embraced far-right tropesabout gender and journalism and public health and generally behaved like a rich bully on a power trip — already seems to be battering Tesla’s brand. The Wall Street Journal reported last month on a survey by Morning Consult showing that perceptions of Tesla have been falling steadily since May, shortly after Musk began his bid for Twitter; between October and November, the period when Musk took ownership of Twitter, sentiment among Democrats toward Tesla plummeted, while favorability among Republicans rose slightly.

“He’s talking people out of buying cars that they want to buy,” Ross Gerber, the C.E.O. of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management, told me.

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