Month: October 2023

Joe Fassler in the New York Times:

Worldwide, more than 5,500 private vessels clock in about 100 feet or longer, the size at which a yacht becomes a superyacht. This fleet pollutes as much as entire nations: The 300 biggest boats alone emit 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, based on their likely usage — about as much as Burundi’s more than 10 million inhabitants. Indeed, a 200-foot vessel burns 132 gallons of diesel fuel an hour standing still and can guzzle 2,200 gallons just to travel 100 nautical miles.
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There’s a lesson here: Hugely disproportionate per capita emissions get people angry. And they should. When billionaires squander our shared supply of resources on ridiculous boats or cushy chartered flights, it shortens the span of time available for the rest of us before the effects of warming become truly devastating. In this light, superyachts and private planes start to look less like extravagance and more like theft.

US Superyachts.com:

We at the U.S. Superyacht Association, and the yachting industry at large, are well aware that alternatives to fossil fuels and combating climate change are necessary. In fact, we agree with Fassler’s assertion that disproportionate emissions make people angry. However, further asserting that an entire lifestyle should be shamed out of existence is not the solution. It will only serve to eliminate millions of dollars of economic impact for a host of businesses outside of yachting, including the small businesses in many Times readers’ own neighborhoods, plus put thousands of highly skilled welders, engineers, and more on the unemployment line—some of the last manufacturing craftspeople left in America. Equally important, his assertion that “superpolluting yachts and jets don’t just worsen climate change; they lessen the chance that we will work together to fix it” overlooks the facts that owners, shipyards, naval architects, and suppliers are all indeed working together to fix it.

Continue reading “Climate in Trouble: SuperYachts to the Rescue”

Dave Loomis is a former Economics Professor at Illinois State University, a long time observer of the roll out of clean energy across the US midwest, and now President of Strategic Economic Research in Bloomington, IL.

Insurance Giant Lloyd’s of London is maybe the only “Reinsurance” company that most people have probably heard of.
These are the Insurance Companies that insure Insurance companies. So, yeah, more money than God.
Lloyd’s has warned in the past about impending risks to insurers from rising climate damages. They have developed a new scenario looking at possible consequences “hypothetical” extreme impact climate events, with some sobering numbers.

Lloyd’s of London:

Lloyd’s, the world’s leading marketplace for insurance and reinsurance, today launched a systemic risk scenario that models the global economic impact of extreme weather events leading to food and water shocks, estimating the loss to be $5trn over a five year period.

The scenario explores how a hypothetical but plausible increase in extreme weather events, linked to climate change, could lead to breadbasket crop* failures and significant global food and water shortages. As the event plays out, societies around the world could see widespread disruption, damage and economic loss, promoting major shifts in geopolitical alignments and consumer behaviours.
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1. Systemic Risk: Lloyd’s define systemic risk as a low likelihood, high impact risk which affects either a systemically important global enterprise or multiple sectors, societies, or national economies. They can be global in impact, often hitting billions of people simultaneously. Among the other systemic risk scenarios modelled in the research are geopolitical conflict, human pandemic and economic stagnation. You can find out more about the threat from extreme weather and food shocks here.

2. Using global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as its central measurement, Lloyd’s model calculates the global economic loss of a series of extreme weather events leading to food and water shocks as:

• $5trn is the global economic loss over a five-year period (the weighted average across the three severities we have modelled)
• The global economic loss ranges from $3trn in the lowest severity scenario up to $17.6trn in the most extreme scenario
• $711bn is the expected global economic loss (the sum-product of the five-year economic loss and the probability of the event occurring)

3. The scenario severities have been given a probability of occurring in the next five years, based on several risk factors. In the extreme weather events leading to food and water shocks scenario, the probabilities for each severity are: Major 2.29% (1 in 50-year), Severe 1.10% (1 in 100-year), Extreme 0.30% (1 in 300-year).

4. Systemic events can affect individual countries, regions or the entire world at once. This data tool uses two different models to illustrate the economic impact an event could have on gross domestic product (GDP). The core output of the model is a global scenario with ensuing impacts to global GDP. The tool also includes regional models which illustrate levels of loss should the events be focused in that that region alone. Our extreme weather scenario is a non-aggregating scenario, meaning the sum of countries’ economic losses will not equate to total regional or global economic losses.

5. *Lloyd’s define a breadbasket as a key production region for food grains (rice, wheat, corn, and soy)  

6. As Chair of the Sustainable Markets Initiative (SMI) Insurance Task Force, Lloyd’s is frequently engaged with governments and international organisations such as the United Nations, driving forward the SMI’s mission of accelerating the achievement of global climate, biodiversity, and Sustainable Development Goal targets.

7. The Lloyd’s market has access to write 80% of the world insurance premium and the systemic risk tool has been created to be reflective of the market’s global access. Regional economic loss figures can be found in the data tool and are summarised in the following table. Contact the media team below for further information on regional losses.

Continue reading “Insurance Giant Warns of Extreme Climate Risk”

The phenomenal explosion of fires in Canada this year, which enveloped much of the most populous portion of the US in choking, toxic smoke got a lot of attention.
Starting to hear the word “Pyrocene” – emergence of massive fire regimes which might be driving the larger climate system in unexpected, unpredictable ways.

New York Times:

Fire has been a planetary phenomenon for hundreds of millions of years, and plants and animals that evolved in fire-prone regions have adapted to periodic conflagrations. Some trees have roots that can re-sprout even if the trunk burns, while the mere smell of smoke will rouse some animals from torpor, a form of light hibernation.

But in many regions and ecosystems, fires are becoming larger and more severe. In the United States, wildfires burn far more land today than they did three decades ago, especially in Western states. Globally, the risk of catastrophic fires could increase by more than 50 percent by the end of the century, the United Nations reported.

Climate change is partly to blame, scientists said, but so are other factors, such as the expansion of highly flammable invasive grasses, which helped the deadly fires in Maui spread so quickly. More than a century of fire suppression has also left some forests thick with trees, giving flames more fuel. “When fires burn, they burn with so much intensity,” said Chris French, a deputy chief of the National Forest System in the United States.

Even fire-savvy organisms may find themselves outmatched. In northern Australia, frilled lizards can survive low-severity fires by hiding in the tree canopy. But during severe fires, when flames leap higher, lizards that employ this strategy may perish.

Fires are also spreading into ecosystems where flames are an unfamiliar threat. The megafires that erupted in Australia in 2019 and 2020 scorched the country’s rainforests, which contained many plants that cannot regenerate after burning.

The animals in those ecosystems might be “fire naïve,” said Dale Nimmo, an ecologist at Charles Sturt University in Australia. “They may not have been under any natural selection to detect the subtle cues of fire in the air, or through sound. And so they may not recognize the threat as it approaches.”

The Algerian sand racer, a Mediterranean lizard, lives in a variety of habitats, only some of which experience frequent fires. In a 2021 study, researchers found that lizards collected from fire-prone sites reacted quickly to the smell of smoke, flicking their tongues and running around their terrariums. “In places where fire is not a common threat, lizards did nothing,” said Lola Álvarez-Ruiz, a biologist at the Desertification Research Center in Spain, who conducted the study.

Fires that consume more fuel may also produce more smoke per unit of area burned, threatening animals far from the flames. “All air-breathing animals are going to be impacted by smoke exposure, because the chemicals in smoke are toxic,” said Olivia Sanderfoot, an ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Continue reading “Pyrocene: Fire Fundamentally Changing Global Forests”

Forests are under severe stress, from over harvesting, sprawl, and climate change.
Could native forestry practices have answers?

This is a bit of a wow.

Raw Story:

Global scientists warned Tuesday that 45% of known flowering plant species could be at risk of disappearing, underscoring the need for urgent international action to tackle the planet’s sixth mass extinction—the first driven by human activity.

That figure is among the key findings from State of the World’s Plants and Fungi, the fifth annual report from the U.K.’s Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG) Kew, about such species amid the intertwined biodiversity crisis and climate emergency.

“The resources and services that nature provides—from food to fresh water—have arisen through eons of ecosystem-building by microbes (including fungi), plants, and animals, and their interactions with geochemical processes,” says the report. “Because we are currently degrading ecosystems, releasing greenhouse gases into the air, and polluting water resources at such a rapid rate, we risk destabilizing the global equilibrium that these evolutionary processes have established.”

“Effectively managing the plants and fungi that form the building blocks of our habitable planet is key to halting wider biodiversity loss and restoring Earth’s ecosystems to full function,” the publication stresses.

“Every species we lose is a species that we don’t know what opportunities we’re losing… It could be a cancer-fighting drug, it could be the solution to hunger.”

Continue reading “Flowering Plants on Climate Brink”

We really want these guys to succeed.
After all, if you have indeed solved all the problems associated with nuclear energy, ie no waste, no emissions, no accident risk, no weapons proliferation risk, and you can do it at a competitive price – who would be against that?
The thing a lot of the facile nuclear supporters don’t get is just how daunting the challenges are to get this party started.
What I tell my pro nuclear friends is:
You should support the rapid development of solar and wind energy, which is technology that exists right now and is economically viable – because there is no decarbonizing scenario that does not include a LOT of solar and wind.
What I tell my anti-nuclear friends is:
You should support the rapid development of solar and wind energy, which is technology that exists right now and is economically viable – because there is no decarbonizing scenario that does not include a LOT of solar and wind, and the projections indicate that it’s going to be a while before nuclear gets here, and in the meantime a LOT of innovation is going on that might very well make nuclear irrelevant – but don’t form circular firing squads against the large numbers of smart people who have funding and will be working on this.
Let’s just have the competition and get going, for God’s sake.

Associated Press:

Uranium enrichment is getting underway this week at a facility in southern Ohio, a federally authorized demonstration project considered critical to produce the type of fuel needed for newer, more efficient nuclear reactors.

Bethesda, Maryland-based Centrus Energy Corp. will be producing the high-assay, low-enriched uranium at the American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, about 68 miles (109 kilometers) south of Columbus. That form of uranium contains far more of the isotope U-235 than is typically found in current nuclear reactor fuel. 

At an event on Wednesday, Centrus chief executive and president Daniel Poneman called it “the first launch of a new U.S. technology uranium enrichment plant to begin production in this country since 1954,” the Columbus Dispatch reported. He said it will fuel smaller and more efficient nuclear reactors that will have longer operating cycles as well as fuel for existing reactors.

The 3,800-acre (1,500 hectare) site was where uranium had been enriched until 2001 at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Poneman said the U.S. has since become the world’s biggest importer of enriched uranium. Cleanup and decontamination of the Portsmouth plant are continuing.

Centrus now has 125 workers there, but hundreds more may be added.

Jonathan Rauch in the Atlantic:

The Real Obstacle to Nuclear Power – it’s not environmentalists—it’s the nuclear-power industry itself.

And so environmentalists, I thought, were betraying the environment by stigmatizing nuclear power. But I had to revise my view. Even without green opposition, nuclear power as we knew it would have fizzled—today’s environmentalists are not the main obstacle to its wide adoption.
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So, in this case, what happened is, the “new” nuclear industry has been struggling to get its footing for 20 years, finally looked like it was getting there, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and shut off natural gas to Europe, making clear it was going to use its energy resources as a weapon against global democracy.
At which point, key players in the US nuclear space went “Doh! Maybe relying on Russia to fuel our next generation of reactors is not a good idea!”
Cue a scramble to get most of a billion dollars into the Inflation Reduction Act, to jumpstart a US based industry to produce High Assay, Low Enrichment Uranium (HALEU), now playing out in Ohio, as described above.

Continue reading “New Ohio Plant to Enrich Uranium for Small Modular Reactors. I Wish Them Luck.”

Transmission is good.

Seems simple enough.

Rob Gramlich, Pres. of Grid Strategies LLC:

They Knew it in 1934.

“Experience indicates that marked economies are effected when interconnecting transmission lines are built to tie all generating units and all the consumers of a wide area into one circuit. Without such lines, each generating unit and its market are isolated. The generating unit must provide for a peak load which is much higher than the average load.

The interconnecting of many markets and many generating units makes it possible for the peak loads in different uses to offset one another in the course of 24 hours, so that the maximum peak load can be brought much nearer to total generating capacity than in the isolated unit 

The total investment required for a given standard of service is thus greatly reduced by interconnection, and with the investment the necessary charge to con- sumers is also reduced.”

(National Resources Board Report, December, 1934, pages 39-40.) 

NASA:

Continuing the temperature trend from this summer, September 2023 was the hottest September on record, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The month also set the record for the highest temperature anomaly – the largest difference from the long-term average.

“What’s remarkable is that these record values are happening before the peak of the current El Nino event, whereas in 2016 the previous record values happened in the spring, after the peak,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of GISS. El Nino is the warm phase of a naturally recurring pattern of trade winds and ocean temperatures in the Eastern Tropical Pacific that influences global temperatures and precipitation patterns.

Meanwhile, NASA’s former Chief Climate scientist James Hansen has been making noise about his projections of increased warming related to diminished particulates in the atmosphere, allowing more solar heating. Hansen says the current El Nino is not particularly strong, that the increased insolation is showing up in the data, and, once the El Nino settles down, the mythical 1.5° C Temperature barrier will have been breached.

James Hansen:

September 2023 smashed the prior global temperature record. Hand-wringing about the magnitude of the temperature jump in September is not inappropriate, but it is more important to investigate the role of aerosol climate forcing – which we chose to leave unmeasured – in global climate change. Global temperature during the current El Nino provides a potential indirect assessment of change of the aerosol forcing. Global temperature in the current El Nino, to date, implies a strong acceleration of global warming for which the most likely explanation is a decrease of human-made aerosols as a result of reductions in China and from ship emissions. The current El Nino will probably be weaker than the 1997-98 and 2015-16 El Ninos, making current warming even more significant. The current near-maximum solar irradiance adds a small amount to the major “forcing” mechanisms (GHGs, aerosols, and El Nino), but with no long-term effect. More important, the long dormant Southern Hemisphere polar amplification is probably coming into play.

Continue reading “James Hansen, NASA, on Global Temperature Jump”

More on the hot war around clean energy siting in Michigan.

Some months ago, I published amazing interviews with farmers and local officials who talked about the harassment, intimidation, and physical threats directed against those who wish to site clean energy on their land.

The ruckus has risen to the level of the state legislature, as major industries and utilities in the state have made it clear that clean energy goals can’t be attained if the confluence of far right politics, social media’s conspiracy culture, and active coordination by fossil fuel interests, keeps roiling a toxic political stew across rural areas in the Midwest.
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Ohio have adopted, with varying success, policies that mandate clean energy siting clearance at the state level, usually a Public Utilities Commission.
Now there is a suite of bills to place that power with Michigan’s Public Service Commission, just as it has been for a century in cases of pipelines, transmission lines and power plants.

Important to know that some of the most effective clean energy advocates across the state have been conservative Republicans like Ed Rivet, above. Ed is Director of the Michigan Conservative Energy Forum (MICEF) and also coordinates a companion group Land and Liberty, that I have collaborated with over the last 4 years or so. Ed and I have become good friends in that process, and I’ve come to regard him as a reliable guide to the thickets of state politics.
In that process, I’ve learned a lot about my state, made a lot of friends from opposite sides of the political spectrum, and, I hope, helped get some clean energy steel in the ground.

Detroit News:

The Michigan House committee on Wednesday began considering a four-bill package that would give a state commission authority over site permits for large solar and wind farm projects — a proposal that would sidestep local governments that have been blocking the developments in recent years.

Residents from rural Michigan, lobbyists and lawmakers packed the Lansing committee room for the first House Energy Committee hearing on the bills introduced Tuesday.

Currently, townships, cities and counties are able to set their zoning and permitting standards as it relates to solar and wind installations. But the proposed legislation would allow landowners and utilities the option of going through either the local community or the Michigan Public Service Commission for projects generating more than 50 or 100 megawatts.

The legislation pits local control against state agency oversight as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration and the Democratic-led Michigan Legislature seek to fasttrack renewable energy goals for Michigan.

Continue reading “(Some) Conservatives Speaking up for Clean Energy in Michigan, Midwest”