Month: September 2023

New piece by Jeff Berardelli, Chief Meteorologist of WFAA Tampa, interviews author of a study published on the one year anniversary of Hurricane Ian’s landfall.

“One in One hundred year event in Progress”. We’re going to have to recalculate those odds.
Early reports “Worse than Ida”, which caused massive damage and many deaths when the remnants that had come a thousand miles over land came thru in 2021.
This storm consists of remnants of Storm Ophelia, still hanging around, combined with a system coming in from the west.
Once again, in a climate changed world, you don’t need major hurricanes to cause major hurricane damage.

Greece might be an example of a relatively developed European country that could slide into chaos under repeated battering by climate fueled wildfires and storms.
Fires denuded hillsides earlier in the summer, and now in a matter of a few weeks, devastating rains have compounded the damage and misery, including significant impacts on key agricultural areas.

Associated Press:

 A second powerful storm in less than a month hammered parts of central Greece on Thursday, sweeping away roads, smashing bridges and flooding thousands of homes.

The storm — called Elias — caused extensive flooding in the central city of Volos and left hundreds stranded in nearby mountain villages. The fire service carried out multiple rescues and evacuations, authorities said. Rescuers were also searching a mountainous area for the pilot of a private helicopter that went missing in the bad weather . 

“All of Volos has turned into a lake,” Volos Mayor Achilleas Beos told state television. “People’s lives are in danger. Even I remained trapped, and 80% of the city is without power. … I don’t know where God found so much water. It’s like the story of Noah’s Ark.”

Bad weather earlier this month struck the same area, killing 16 people, and causing more than 2 billion euros ($2.1 billion) in damage to farms and infrastructure.
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Residents in Volos used plastic buckets and blooms to push the mud out of their homes and to try to protect their belongings. Among them was 83-year-old Apostolis Dafereras, who has lived in a suburb of the city since 1955.

“I have never seen anything like this,” Dafereras said, looking out the window of his ground-floor home as knee-high flood water gushed past. Earlier, he and other residents on his street tried to push mud and flood water out of his home.

As Donald Trump reinforces fossil fueled messaging in Detroit, in rural Michigan, social media organized anti clean energy groups, which I have documented here, take aim not only at clean energy, but also the Battery and EV manufacturing sites needed to support a clean transition.
The tactics, the messaging vectors, and even some of the key players, are the same in many instances.

Above, local news report from some months back shows what rural township meetings look like during this process. In this case, a Gotion Inc. EV Battery project has finally been approved and is now hiring, but not without an elaborately coordinated “anti” movement pushing back on, among other things, “Chinese Spies” in the EV industry.

CNN:

The auto industry has announced more than $100 billion in electric car investments, creating more than 100,000 American jobs. A second Donald Trump presidency could derail the push.

Despite Former President Donald Trump’s claims at a Detroit rally Wednesday that EVs are “too expensive” and “don’t go far enough,” consumers are increasingly demanding EVs because of falling costs, a wider variety of vehicle availability, and a flood of government and manufacturing investments.

But EV adoption has been slow – just 7.2% of the market last quarter, up from 5.7% the same time a year prior, according to Cox Automotive. Organic demand alone probably isn’t enough to justify automakers’ massive investments in EV technology.

That’s why automakers are counting on Biden administration incentives to give consumer demand an artificial boost. Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency is pushing for EVs to account for up to two-thirds of new cars sold in the US by 2032 through a combination of tax incentive carrots and miles-per-gallon-floor sticks.

Without these carrots and sticks, which Trump wants to reverse, US automakers’ plans will likely blow up.

“The possibility of a sudden shift [of policy] would be pretty shocking for the industry to absorb,” said Barry Rabe, a professor of public policy and environmental policy at the University of Michigan. “I can’t imagine the industry is going to want to be jerked back and forth every four or eight years.” 

And while Trump may denounce EVs, many lawmakers in his party are capitalizing on these investments and welcoming the transition. More than half of new clean energy projects announced since passage of the IRA have been located in GOP-led districts.

Georgia has seen the most EV jobs announced and is home to major factories from established manufacturers like Hyundai and Kia to EV upstarts like Rivian. The state’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has pledged to make Georgia the “electric mobility capital” of the country.

Automakers have announced more than $120 billion in EV investments and 143,000 new US jobs in the last eight years, with more than 40% of those investments happening since the passage of the IRA, according to the Environmental Defense Fund. 

Battery plants from US and foreign automakers like Nissan and Mercedes-Benz are being built in states like Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama.

Continue reading “Fossil Fueled Campaign Uses Similar Tactics Against Clean Energy, Battery Manufacturing”

I have many questions.

Helion Energy:

EVERETT, Wash. – September 27, 2023 – Helion, a fusion power company, and Nucor Corporation, the largest steel producer and recycler in North America, today announced an agreement to develop a 500 MWe fusion power plant at a Nucor steel manufacturing facility in the United States. This collaboration is aimed at accelerating the future of clean energy in the industrial manufacturing sector.

The agreement between the two companies, which includes an investment by Nucor in Helion, will accelerate the journey towards sustainable, carbon-free industrial manufacturing. By deploying 500 MWe of fusion power, they will make history in the steel sector.

Fusion power will revolutionize energy supply for Nucor’s steel manufacturing operations, providing baseload zero-carbon electricity. Nucor is already a leader in decarbonizing the steel industry and this project reinforces the company’s commitment to becoming the cleanest steel manufacturer globally. This is the first fusion energy agreement of this scale and is expected to pave the way for global decarbonization in industrial manufacturing.

Nucor CEO Leon Topalian emphasized the significance of this collaboration stating, “This project marks a tremendous milestone in the potential for the use of nearly limitless clean electricity for industrial manufacturing. By entering this agreement, we are demonstrating our commitment to be the cleanest steel producer in the world, while setting an example for all manufacturing companies.”

Helion CEO David Kirtley added, “We’re passionate about helping the world reduce its dependence on carbon-based energy sources with abundant, clean fusion power. We are excited to partner with Nucor, a leader in decarbonization in the steel industry. A project like this is only made possible by working with a forward-looking company like Nucor which is committed to decreasing its carbon emissions.”

Helion, with a history of innovation in fusion technology, has already achieved remarkable milestones, including the construction of six working fusion prototypes and being the world’s first private fusion company to achieve 100-million-degree plasma temperatures. The company is currently building its seventh prototype, Polaris, which is expected to be the first to demonstrate electricity production from fusion.

About Helion

Helion is a fusion energy company focused on generating zero-carbon electricity from fusion. Its mission is to build the world’s first fusion power plant, enabling a future with unlimited clean electricity. To keep up with the latest progress, follow Helion on LinkedIn and Twitter.

The fossil fuel strategy around EVs is to cast them as some kind of evil plot by the Chinese Communist Party, something, something, take over America, something something, all the jobs to China, something something.
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain is having none of it, above.

Detroit News:

Republican Donald Trump railed against electric vehicles during a campaign stop in suburban Detroit Wednesday night, saying they’re too expensive, aren’t capable of traveling far enough and would spur job losses for Americans.

Trump, a former president who’s seeking to challenge current Democratic President Joe Biden next year, made the comments during a speech at Drake Enterprises, a parts supplier in Clinton Township. Amid a historic strike by the United Auto Workers against Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, Trump said: “Your current negotiations don’t mean as much as you think.”

Trump argued that regardless of the outcome of the strike, the bigger threat to employees was the shift to electric cars and trucks, which he described as a “hit job” on Michigan and Detroit.

“You can be loyal to American labor or you can be loyal to the environmental lunatics,” Trump said at one point. “But you can’t really be loyal to both. It’s one or the other.”

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About 400 to 500 Trump supporters were inside a Drake Enterprises facility for the speech. Drake Enterprises employs about 150 people, and the UAW doesn’t represent its workforce. It wasn’t clear how many auto workers were in the crowd for the speech, which was targeted at them.

One individual in the crowd who held a sign that said “union members for Trump,” acknowledged that she wasn’t a union member when approached by a Detroit News reporter after the event. Another person with a sign that read “auto workers for Trump” said he wasn’t an auto worker when asked for an interview. Both people didn’t provide their names.

While Trump has had some success in attracting working people across Michigan and the Midwest, there is an unmistakable tone of skepticism this time around among those blue collar workers.

Continue reading “Trump in Detroit as Sock Puppet for Fossil Fuel Industry”

Leon Hirth is a professor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.

Shared by Leon Hirth on Twitter/X:

There is lots of optimism on Twitter when it comes to SMRs. Markets don’t share the enthusiasm. The one traded company that develops SMRs, NuScale Power, has lost 60% of its value within a year.

Paul Harkenos in Undark:

It’s worth noting that in the U.S., and everywhere else in the world, nuclear policy relies heavily on subsidies to be economically competitive. Starting next year, utilities operating nuclear facilities in the U.S. can qualify for a tax credit of $15 per megawatt-hour — a break that could be worth up to $30 billion for the industry as a whole. However, even these giveaways won’t reduce the projected costs of SMR-generated electricity to anywhere near the going prices of wind and solar power.

In the U.S., the only SMR developer with a design approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is NuScale, which plans to deploy six modules at one site in Idaho that will together generate less electricity than a smallish standard nuclear reactor. So far, however, NuScale has yet to lay a single brick. Its biggest win to date is securing $4 billion in federal tax subsidies. In January of this year, NuScale announced plans to sell electricity not at $58 per megawatt-hour, as originally pledged, but at $89 per megawatt-hour, citing higher than anticipated construction costs. The new projection is nearly twice the average global cost of utility-scale solar and onshore wind, according to calculations by BloombergNEF. And without the government subsidies, NuScale’s price tag would be that much higher.

In fact, there’s a fair chance that not a single NuScale SMR will ever be built: The company has said it will not begin construction until 80 percent of its expected generation capacity is subscribed, and currently buyers have signed up for less than a quarter of the plant’s capacity.

Gates’s TerraPower has an even longer way to go, although it too is cashing in on subsidies. The U.S. Department of Energy has pledged up to $2 billion in matching funds to construct a demonstration plant in Wyoming. Yet TerraPower recently announced it’s facing delays of at least two years because of difficulties securing uranium fuel from its lone supplier: Russia.

Michael Mann has a new book that is a significant contribution to the literature of our hinge-of-history moment. In fact, it’s titled, “Our Fragile Moment”.

If you have not read Mann’s previous book, “The New Climate War”, it is the definitive history of the struggle against the fossil fuel misinformation machine, which I found to be strikingly in line with my own first hand experience the events of recent decades.
Cable News viewers will know Dr. Mann from his frequent appearances to interpret the shocking uptick in climate fueled disasters we have seen in recent years. Scientists know Mike as someone who has been a tireless fighter for fact against misinformation – a battle that has made him a target of the fossil fueled disinformation complex.

Below, excerpts from a recent interview on the book.

From Michael Svoboda Interview with Dr Mann in Yale Climate Connections:

YCC: Let’s dig into the details. One of the points you make in your book over and over again is that many factors, on many different time scales, interact with each other to produce the climate. Can you give us some examples of how these factors interacted in different times to produce very different climates? 

Mann: On the very long time scales, there are two factors that ensured a certain amount of resilience in the climate system — homeostasis — over billions of years: the brightening of the sun and Earth’s carbon cycle. [When] you warm up the planet, there’s more cycling of water, which scrubs more carbon out of the atmosphere and sends it off in rivers to the oceans, where it gets buried. This natural restoring mechanism kept the climate in stasis. 

But there are exceptions. And ‘Snowball Earth’ is my favorite. In that case, it was the development of a new photosynthetic mechanism by a bacteria that produced oxygen. The sudden rise in oxygen scavenged the methane from the atmosphere, dramatically lowering the greenhouse effect and plunging us into the destabilizing effects involved in glaciation and into a snowball state. 

So on the longest time scales, there’s this competition between factors that, most of the time, instill resilience in the climate system. But there are exceptions, and Snowball Earth is a reminder that if you hit the system hard enough it can spin out of control. 

YCC: Asteroids would be another exception. 

Mann: Absolutely! Asteroids are an acute example. You’re hitting the system very hard — literally. That’s what chapter four is all about. And in that case, yet again it was a scenario of cooling. It was a sudden cooling due to the KPG impact that killed off all the non-avian dinosaurs. 

One of the points I drive home there is that the dinosaurs lacked the ability to see the asteroid coming. We don’t. Interestingly, the book was already underway when the movie “Don’t Look Up” came out, which presents that analogy directly. 

Continue reading ““Our Fragile Moment”: New Book from Michael Mann”

No place to hide.
No geographic haven from climate impacts, and no business sector unaffected.

YouTuber scientists, Dr Gilbz and Climate Adam are both PhD climate scientists.
Here,they go through the most common climate denial crocks (that’s catchy, someone should make a YouTube series like that) and help us review the answers.

Now that we are in a reborn age of climate denial, it’s regrettably worthwhile.

For deeper dives, see John Cook’s Skeptical Science, or my Climate Denial Crock of the Week YouTube series, here.