Month: October 2023

Panama Canal’s Drought Bottleneck Continues

US Energy Information Agency (EIA):

A drought is limiting ship traffic through the Panama Canal. The resulting delays caused shipping rates through the Panama Canal for Very Large Gas Carriers (VLGCs) to reach record highs, which increased the cost of shipping liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) from the United States. 

According to the Panama Canal Authority (APC), water levels at Gatún Lake are the lowest since at least 1995 as a result of an extended dry season and lower-than-normal precipitation on the Panama Canal. Gatún Lake is the artificial lake that vessels pass through to transit between the Atlantic and Pacific locks, and it holds the water supply needed to operate the lock systems of the canal. 

In response to the low water levels, the APC enacted transit restrictions to conserve water beginning in January 2023. The number of vessels allowed to transit the canal was limited to 32 per day on July 30 and will be further restricted to 24 per day on November 7, down from its typical 36 per day. The transit restrictions have resulted in long delays; in August, more than 160 vessels had to wait to transit the canal.

VLGC rates have reached record highs because of the delays at the Panama Canal. Rates for VLGCs, which carry primarily propane (and, to a lesser extent, butane), on the Houston-Chiba (Japan) route reached $250 per ton for the week ending September 29, the highest since rates were first published in 2016. The Houston-Chiba route usually passes through the Panama Canal because it takes nearly half the time compared with going across the Atlantic and through the Suez Canal.

In August, Neopanamax-sized ships traveling through the locks had to wait at least 17 days to pass through the canal in all directions of travel. The unpredictability of waiting days resulted in some vessels, especially VLGCs, returning empty (ballast) from East Asia back to the U.S. Gulf Coast via alternative routes such as the Suez Canal or around the Cape of Good Hope, according to ship tracking data.

Videos: Wildfire’s Little Known Knock-On Impacts

Everything’s connected – that’s what makes climate impacts so pernicious and pervasive.
Wildfires don’t just burn trees and houses.
They have a wide range of infrastructure impacts.
This video series is very well done and takes time to focus on some of the pesky knock-on effects of climate driven wildfires. Above, vulnerability of water systems to wildfire.
Below, wildfire —–> Blackouts —-> Health care unavailable.

Otis/Acapulco a Preview of Coming Coastal Attractions

Incredible catastrophe still playing out in Acapulco, following devastating Hurricane Otis last week. The storm’s rapidly intensification is likely a preview of future attractions along the US Gulf and East Coasts, as the video above discusses.
Otis and its implications have largely disappeared from the mainstream media radar.

Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Nearly a week after Hurricane Otis blew up like an atomic bomb and then slammed intoMexico’s iconic Pacific resort city of Acapulco with 165-mile-per-hour winds, grief-stricken residents are still pulling dead bodies from the city’s main harbor.

“It was really horrible,” Luis Alberto Medina, a fisherman, told the Reuters news service. “We’ve already found the bodies of others.” But six other people that Medina knew or worked with on the waterfront are still lost, as authorities now concede the toll of the dead or missingon the Mexican coast is nearing 100 and could go higher, as thousands continue to suffer without power or provisions.

In normal times, such death and destruction in a North American citythat’s long been a hugely popular tourist destination for U.S. citizens would be a Page 1, top-of-the-hour story. But in a crazy, mixed-up world from Maine to the Middle East to Capitol Hill, Hurricane Otis barely dented American news media. And that’s a shame — not only because of the human tragedy getting ignored, but because the massive storm may have been nature’s most powerful warning yet that climate change has quickly shifted from a scientific theory to a five-alarm emergency.

Less than a day out, weather forecasters were describing Otis as a tropical storm that might bring heavy rain to Acapulco, but little more. But in the course of 12 hours over the overheated Pacific waters — in what some meteorologists are calling the most extreme example of “rapid intensification” they’ve ever seen — Otis gained an astonishing 115 mph in wind speed to become a major hurricane, in what National Hurricane Center forecaster Eric Blake called “a nightmare scenario.”

“Something like this was bound to happen,” Michael Mann, director of Philadelphia’s Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, told me, as he noted that the Pacific Ocean near Acapulco was unusually warm for this time of year, the result of both record temperatures linked to fossil-fuel pollution as well as the El Niño weather pattern. “It’s going to happen to Miami.It’s going to happen to Tampa,” Mann said.

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For More and More Scientists, Climate is an “Emergency”

Our path has gone from Bunny Slope to beyond Double Black Diamond.

Washington Post:

On Monday, scientists released a paper showing that the world’s “carbon budget” — the amount of greenhouse gas emissions the world can still emit without boosting global temperatures more than 1.5 degrees Celsius — has shrunk by a third. The world only has 6 years left at current emissions levels before racing past that temperature limit.

“There are no technical scenarios globally available in the scientific literature that would support that that is actually possible, or can even describe how that would be possible,” Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, told reporters in a call.

Tim Lenton, one of the co-authors on Ripple’s most recent paper and a professor of earth system science at the University of Exeter, said that 2023 has been filled with temperatures so far beyond the norm that “they’re very hard to rationalize.” “This isn’t fitting a simple statistical model,” he said.

Nature – Assessing the Size and Uncertainty of Remaining Carbon Budgets:

The remaining carbon budget (RCB), the net amount of CO2 humans can still emit without exceeding a chosen global warming limit, is often used to evaluate political action against the goals of the Paris Agreement. RCB estimates for 1.5 °C are small, and minor changes in their calculation can therefore result in large relative adjustments. Here we evaluate recent RCB assessments by the IPCC and present more recent data, calculation refinements and robustness checks that increase confidence in them. We conclude that the RCB for a 50% chance of keeping warming to 1.5 °C is around 250 GtCO2 as of January 2023, equal to around six years of current CO2 emissions. For a 50% chance of 2 °C the RCB is around 1,200 GtCO2. Key uncertainties affecting RCB estimates are the contribution of non-CO2 emissions, which depends on socioeconomic projections as much as on geophysical uncertainty, and potential warming after net zero CO2.

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Clean Energy is Unstoppable, but Pain Points Emerge

The clean energy transition endures, nevertheless, growing pains emerge.

New York Times:

Yesterday, Chevron announced a $53 billion acquisition of a midsize rival, as Big Oil consolidates and doubles down on the betthat fossil fuel demand will continue to increase. 

But if you zoom out just a bit, the picture may be a bit clearer. This morning, the International Energy Agency predicted that global demand for oil, natural gas and coal will peak in about seven years, as my colleague Brad Plumer reported. Solar, wind, hydropower, electric vehicles and heat pumps are all projected to surge.

A separate study that came out last week suggests the world may have reached “a global irreversible solar tipping point,” with ever-cheaper solar dominating electricity markets purely because of market forces, without any additional climate policies.

For the past few months, we’ve been telling you all about the U.S. energy transition that’s arriving faster than you think. But the move toward solar is global: the study’s authors expect solar to be the cheapest source of electricity in almost all countries by 2027.

If the I.E.A.’s projections come to pass, oil and gas demand would most likely plateau at slightly above today’s levels for the next three decades, expanding in developing countries and shrinking in advanced economies. Demand for coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, would start declining, though it might fluctuate year to year if, say, coal plants needed to run more often during heat waves or droughts.

“The transition to clean energy is happening worldwide and it’s unstoppable,” Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, told Brad.

A number of technologies have been affected by Covid induced inflation, supply chain issues, and a coordinated pushback of misinformation from the fossil fuel interests.

New York Times:

The Interior Department on Tuesday approved a plan to install up to 176 giant wind turbines off the coast of Virginia, clearing the way for what would be the nation’s largest offshore wind farm yet.

The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, to be built by Dominion Energy, is the fifth commercial-scale offshore wind project approved by the Biden administration. If completed, the 2.6-gigawatt wind farm would produce enough electricity to power more than 900,000 homes, without creating any of the carbon dioxide emissions that are heating the planet.

The decision comes at a perilous time for the offshore wind industry. To fight climate change, the Biden administration wants to install 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power in the United States by 2030. But that plan has run into serious trouble lately, as developers have struggled with soaring coasts, rising interest rates, supply chain delays and bursts of local opposition.

While dozens of offshore wind farms are being planned along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, not all of those projects are guaranteed to be built. In Massachusetts, the company behind the Commonwealth Wind project terminated its contracts with state utilities this year, citing unexpected inflation, and said it plans to rebid at higher prices. In New York, the developers of four proposed offshore wind farms recently asked the state for more money before moving forward. New York rejected that request and it’s unclear if the projects will move ahead.

Continue reading “Clean Energy is Unstoppable, but Pain Points Emerge”

Otis Impact in Acapulco Staggering

Jeff Masters in Yale Climate Connections:

More than two days after Hurricane Otis slammed into Acapulco, Mexico, as a Category 5 hurricane with 165 mph winds, the full scope of the horrific damage it wrought was only gradually emerging. Communications with the region remain limited, power is mostly out, many roads are still blocked, and the airport has been heavily damaged. The death toll stands at 27 and will surely rise.

Damage from Otis is going to reach many billions of dollars. Catastrophe risk modeling firm CoreLogic estimated that insured damages from Otis would be $10-$15 billion USD. This includes only residential, commercial, industrial, and agricultural structures; government property, infrastructure, crops, and livestock were not included in this estimate, and neither were storm surge or flash flood damage. If this estimate is accurate, it is possible that Otis could challenge the $22 billion cost (2022 USD) of Typhoon Mirelle in Japan from 1991 as the most expensive non-U.S. tropical cyclone in history.

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Why Relying on Climate “Adaptation” Will Be a Disaster

Above, then CEO of Exxon Mobil Rex Tillerson in 2012.
Video should start at about 3:20, with his discussion of “Adapting” to climate change.
Below, atmospheric scientist Andrew Dessler discusses some questions about the “we’ll adapt” approach.
Mr Tillerson went on to become Secretary of State for Donald Trump, in no small part because of his friendly relationship with Vladimir Putin.

Andrew Dessler in Climate Brink:

So the next time someone says “we’ll adapt,” ask them if they’re OK with, say, Central Americans adapting to climate change by moving to the U.S. Are they willing to open our borders to climate refugees?

I think you’ll find that the very voices championing adaptation are among the most likely to also oppose immigration. So the #1 way that humans have adapted over the history of humanity is a non-starter to the “we’ll adapt” crowd.

The alternative to migration is adaptation in place, but that’s not particularly attractive to the “we’ll adapt” crowd either. Building sea walls to guard against rising ocean levels, infrastructure to handle extreme precipitation events, or adding air conditioning to mitigate heatwaves all cost a lot of money. 

Who’s going to foot the bill for this? The inescapable answer is that the world’s rich will have to assist the less fortunate. This means, for example, the U.S. paying to help Africa adapt. Within the U.S., the rich will have to pay to help the poor adapt.

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