Folks, I’m a car guy – and I firmly believe the future is electric. Gina McCarthy and Secretary Granholm hit the road to talk about the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework’s historic investments in electric vehicles and how we’re going to ensure the future is made in America. pic.twitter.com/xZDXu7BpXr
I appeared on the Art Lewis Show this morning, out of WSGW in Saginaw, Michigan. The station has historically been a very conservative talk station, that has a wide coverage area over Central Michigan, in a lot of the areas where pitched battles are being fought around siting clean energy. Over the last few years, one time climate skeptic Art Lewis, who has held court in the morning drive time slot for many decades, has been inviting me on to discuss clean energy, and the science behind a changing climate. In this case, our springboard for discussion was the very warm winter that we’ve been having over most of North America. We went on to discuss the various solutions to climate change as well. The interview starts about 6:12 in.
The sheer size and scale of wind turbines, which can stand over 800 feet tall and rotate at up to 200 miles per hour, is often used against them. Speaking in Britain’s House of Commons last year, Neil Parish, then an MP and chair of an influential environmental committee, expressed a typical view: “Why do people come to many of our great constituencies? Because they are beautiful,” he said. “Tourist[s] love to come to them, but I promise that they do not come looking for solar or wind farms.”
Except there is growing evidence that, at least sometimes, they do. A number of companies now offer wind farm tours to curious tourists who are keen to understand how the turbines work and what they’re like up close. In Scotland, adventurous visitors can mountain bike and hike around an onshore wind farm, and boat tours in the UK and US offer the chance to sail right underneath a turbine’s blades. In Denmark, small groups can even climb an offshore turbine themselves. While there’s no data to indicate the size of this nascent slice of the hospitality sector, there is ample research to suggest that travelers are not only unfazed by wind farms, but find them objects of fascination.
“They’re the biggest rotating devices on the planet. They dwarf a 747. At sea, they’re a little otherworldly,” says Jeremy Firestone, a University of Delaware professor who took a group of students to visit a wind farm off the shore of Rhode Island in 2016. He called the experience “like Disneyland for adults.”
The wind farm Firestone visited, about four miles from Block Island, has been in operation since 2016: It was the first commercial offshore wind farm in the US. Tours started the same year, and now run around five times annually. Boat captain Charlie Donilon, who piloted Firestone’s tour and still runs them today, supplements the view with informative chatter about wind power and construction of the giant turbines. Many of Donilon’s clients are academics looking to learn more about renewable energy, but some are pleasure-seekers throwing in a wind farm tour alongside lunch and a trip to the nearby lighthouse.
“I thought, ‘This is definitely going to be a moneymaker,’” Donilon says, comparing wind farms to America’s greatest infrastructure. “It’s hard to believe that these giant structures were built by man. You might put them in the same category as the space shuttle, or the Hoover Dam.”
The two biggest and most critical reservoirs in the Southwest US are Lake Mead, which is behind the Hoover Dam. and Lake Powell, formed by the Glen Canyon dam. Both have been shrinking radically over the last 2 decades. There’s been talk about whether recent rains and snow might have stemmed that process – but no. One wet year will not be enough.
Water levels in Lake Powell dropped to a new record low on Tuesday. The nation’s second-largest reservoir is under pressure from climate change and steady demand, and is now the lowest it’s been since it was first filled in the 1960s.
Water levels fell to 3,522.16 feet above sea level, just below the previous record set in April 2022. The reservoir is currently about 22 percent full, and is expected to keep declining until around May, when mountain snowmelt rushes into the streamsthat flow downstream to Powell.
Powell, which straddles the border of Utah and Arizona, is fed by the Colorado River. Warming temperatures and abnormally dry conditions have cut into the river’s supplies, and the seven states that use its water have struggled to reduce demand. That imbalance has dealt an alarming blow to the reliability of water supplies for 40 million people, and is threatening the ability to generate hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam, which holds back Lake Powell.
Even though strong snow and heavy rains have blanketed the West this winter, climate scientists say the severity of a 23-year megadrought means that one wet year won’t be nearly enoughto substantially boost Lake Powell.
Those dropping water levels have spawned a crisis for the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency which manages the West’s largest dams, including Glen Canyon Dam and the hydroelectric turbines within. At 3,490 feet, a level referred to as “minimum power pool,” Reclamation may be unable to generate hydropower for 5 million people across seven states. At 3,370 feet, the reservoir hits “dead pool,” at which point water can no longer pass through the dam by the power of gravity.
I pointed out some time ago, above, that the cost of insuring property and homes in at-risk areas for climate impacts, is going to drive insurance cost increases for all of us across the country. That was true just looking at risks to coastal areas, and communities in the WUI – Wild Urban Interface – across the west, where wild fires continue to take a terrible toll.
The trend continues, as the New York Times points out this weekend.
When the Agriculture Department finished its calculations last month, the findings were startling: 2022 was a disaster for upland cotton in Texas, the state where the coarse fiber is primarily grown and then sold around the globe in the form of tampons, cloth diapers, gauze pads and other products.
In the biggest loss on record, Texas farmers abandoned 74 percent of their planted crops — nearly six million acres — because of heat and parched soil, hallmarks of a megadrought made worse by climate change.
That crash has helped to push up the price of tampons in the United States 13 percent over the past year. The price of cloth diapers spiked 21 percent. Cotton balls climbed 9 percent and gauze bandages increased by 8 percent. All of that was well above the country’s overall inflation rate of 6.5 percent in 2022, according to data provided by the market research firms NielsonIQ and The NPD Group.
It’s an example of how climate change is reshaping the cost of daily life in ways that consumers might not realize.
West Texas is the main source of upland cotton in the United States, which in turn is the world’s third-biggest producer and largest exporter of the fiber. That means the collapse of the upland cotton crop in West Texas will spread beyond the United States, economists say, onto the store shelves around the world.
“Climate change is a secret driver of inflation,” said Nicole Corbett, a vice president at NielsonIQ. “As extreme weather continues to impact crops and production capacity, the cost of necessities will continue to rise.”
As the effects of global change become all the more obvious, for instance in this anomalously warm winter – I am getting asked more and more to explain how scientists know that what we are seeing is not “just a natural cycle”. One of the first things I have pointed people to in presentations is the research done in the early 1950s by the US Military in developing the first generation of heat seeking missiles. Obviously, they needed to determine how heat radiation was propogated thru the atmosphere – so, using for the first time the tools of high technology, they measured the radiative properties of all atmospheric gases, at all altitudes, temperatures, and weather conditions. Those findings became the building blocks for modern climate models that emerged in the ’70s and ’80s. We know the data is correct, because the missiles built with that knowledge built in do find their targets, and are one of the most important factors in US domination of air spaces over the last 70 years. Not coincidentally, some of the most important, seminal papers on the prospective effects of climate change were published during that mid-1950s period, including this one by Gilbert Plass, one of the senior researchers on the Air Force’s project.
Here, some videos well-worth reviewing for anyone who might be asked to talk about climate changes in any historical context.
Below, a classic “Climate Denial Crock of the Week” video used a then-newly uncovered recording from a production by General Electric corporation, “Excursions in Science”, which were radio plays designed to inform, which really put a lot of today’s productions to shame. Episode 646 debuted on a vinyl recording in 1956.
In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray keeps waking up to the same alarm, in the same hotel room, on the same day, in Punxsutawney, PA – day after day after day. Things don’t change, until he changes.
Building a nuclear reactor is hard. It’s expensive, and it takes a long time – time that we do not have. A few months ago, Mark Jacobson of Stanford described the current state of reactor development in the US – see below. Things have continued to slip since then.
Georgia Power Co. has again delayed the projected startup for two new units at its Vogtle nuclear power plant near Augusta, saying its share of the costs will rise by an additional $200 million.
Southern Co., the utility’s Atlanta-based parent, announced the delays and higher costs on Thursday as it announced its yearly corporate earnings for 2022.
Georgia Power says Unit 3 could now begin commercial operation in May or June, pushing back from the most recent deadline of the end of April. The company also now says Unit 4 will begin commercial operation sometime between this November and March 2024. The company previously has promised commercial operation of Unit 4 by the end of 2023 at the latest. When complete, the two units will be the first entirely new U.S. reactors in decades.
Georgia Power wrote off $201 million in additional costs on its earning statement, reflecting increased costs.
Despite the Vogtle delays, Southern Co. still announced strong revenue and profits. The company reported profits of $3.5 billion for the year, or $3.28 per share.
The total cost of the project to build a third and fourth reactor at Vogtle will cost all its owners more than $30 billion. Georgia Power owns 45.7% of the project, while Oglethorpe Power Corp. owns 30%, the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia owns 22.7% and the city of Dalton owns 1.6%.
Georgia Power had already pushed back the startup of Unit 3 by a month after it discovered that a pipe that is part of a critical backup cooling system was vibrating during startup testing. Construction workers had failed to install supports called for on blueprints. Those supports have now been installed, the company said Thursday, but Southern Co. Chairman and CEO Tom Fanning told investors that “we found a few additional issues to address.”
“We will continue to take the time to get it right and will not sacrifice safety or quality to meet the schedule,” Fanning told investors on a conference call Thursday.
Fanning told investors that other issues causing delays included a slowly dripping valve that required a now-completed repair, as well as a problem involving the flow through the reactor coolant pumps that hasn’t been pinpointed.
Pushed along by climate change and forces across the Pacific Ocean, spring has arrived weeks early in the South and is now reaching up the East Coast into the Mid-Atlantic.In New York, temperatures are rising and bringing on warmth usually not seen until mid-March. Washington, DC’s famous cherry blossom trees are on pace to bloom early.
The mainly absent winter may cheer people who hate the cold and those looking for lower heating bills. But it plays havoc with nature and agriculture. Warmer temperatures bring plants out of dormancy sooner, which can hurt migrating animals, and if a late cold blast arrives, the freeze can damage trees and their fruit.
“Consistently warmer temperatures are causing wild fluctuations in the climate, which is disrupting the wildlife,’’ said Deborah Landau, director of ecological management for the Nature Conservancy.
It can also help ticks and mosquitoes thrive to spread Lyme disease, anaplasmosis and deadly eastern equine encephalitis, as well as adding to the allergy burden for humans when pollen stays in the air longer, said Theresa Crimmins,director of the USA National Phenology Network, which tracks the onset of spring.
“It definitely is an anomalously early and warm spring in the Northeast this year; I had been hesitant to not overstate things, but it really does look pretty notable,’’ Crimmins, also a research professor at the University of Arizona, said by email.
Of all the seasons, winter has been warming the fastest and losing most of its bite due to the global heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels. This trend has shown up in data and was highlighted again last year when the US updated its normal temperature charts. Everywhere in the country, with the exception of parts of the upper Great Plains, normal temperatures — based on 30-year averages — rose.
“Breaking back-to-back daytime highs in the middle of February is pretty noteworthy, and pretty rare,” says Geoff Coulson, a meteorologist with Environment Canada, suggesting these temperatures would be normal for late April.
“And it’s been part and parcel of a generally milder than normal winter, not just in Toronto, but across many areas in the province.”
Coulson said that in the coming months, researchers at Environment Canada will be analyzing factors like ocean currents to determine the role climate change played in this extreme winter. One warm day is not that unusual, and a warm month happens from time to time, but this winter every month has seen significantly warmer-than-average temperatures.
