Month: December 2023

End Game of Science Denial – There is No Objective Truth but What We Tell You

Tucker Carlson is distinguished for being too dishonest even for Fox News to keep him on board, and shared responsibility for the near billion dollar judgement against Fox in a recent defamation lawsuit from Dominion voting systems.
Carlson continues trying to stay visible and relevant, recently appearing on conspiracist, “comedian”, and fellow climate denier Alex Stein’s Blaze Network show. (Blaze is a project of the also Too-Awful-For-Fox Glenn Beck)
In this appearance, Tuck managed to admit he was “open” to theories that the moon landing was faked, and underlined his hard core Anti-Vax credentials, explaining that vaccinations are an “assault”.

I can remember when climate deniers used to get all huffy when Al Gore compared them to moon landing deniers. Apparently, that’s now a badge they proudly wear as a sign of their “independent thought”.
One of the hallmarks of authoritarian movements, historically, is an all-out attack on the very idea that there can be objective truth, in science, history, or simple objective fact – a point that was made eloquently and succinctly by journalist Rachel Maddow in a recent essential interview with Chris Hayes.

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Graphs Show EV Sales Unexpected Jump

What slowdown? Build a product people want and they will buy it.

Whitehouse.gov:

EV sales have risen rapidly during this period from roughly 20,000 sales per month in 2020 and 2019 to over 90,000 per month in 2023 (Figure 7). At the start of 2023, forecasters estimated that beginning in 2026, more than one million EVs would be sold each year, and by 2030, nearly 1.8 million EVs would be sold—more than five times the forecast in 2021 (Figure 8). Actual sales have surpassed these forecasts. More than one million EVs have already been sold in 2023—three years ahead of the projections made earlier this year and 18 years ahead of the projections made in the beginning of 2021.

Attention Republicans: Middle America Noticing Climate Change

What’s remarkable here is not the report – we just passed the Warmest November globally – but who’s doing the reporting – WBAY in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Implications for 2024 election, given Wisconsin’s battle ground status. I keep asking Republicans how they think climate denial plays out for them in the future, and have not gotten a good answer.

Shadowy Groups Funding Clean Energy Opposition

More evidence for what we already knew. Above, local TV reporting from Iowa.
Below, new reporting from Midwest Energy News.
Shadowy tentacles of the oil/gas industry reaching into local communities to slow the development of solar energy.

Energy News:

An anonymously funded group is spreading misinformation about a rural Ohio solar project, according to project backers and others who reviewed claims made at a recent event.

Knox Smart Development was incorporated last month by Jared Yost, a Mount Vernon resident and opponent of the planned 120 megawatt Frasier Solar project. Three weeks later, on Nov. 30, the group hosted a catered “town hall meeting” at a Mount Vernon theater that included speakers with ties to fossil fuel and climate denial groups.

A company official with the solar developer, Open Road Renewables, was denied entry to the event, which was attended by approximately 500 people and featured complimentary food and drinks following the program. 

It’s unclear who funded Knox Smart Development so it could pay for the event.

“There are people with concerns who are helping us, and they’ve all asked to remain anonymous,” Yost said when asked about its funding sources as people left the theater. “So we have local concerned citizens who are helping to fund this, including myself.”

A Dec. 7 filing advised developer Open Road Renewables and others that the Ohio Power Siting Board was ready to start review of the application for the Frasier Solar Project, which was filed in October. The project would be located in Clinton and Miller townships, both in Knox County. Yost and Knox Smart Development filed to participate in the case as parties on Dec. 8.

An early version of Knox Smart Development’s website included the text, “Our mission: Empowering America,” with a hyperlink to a page for an organization called The Empowerment Alliance. Research by the Energy and Policy Institute, an energy and utility watchdog group, has linked the Empowerment Alliance to the natural gas industry. 

Dave Anderson, the institute’s policy and communications director, found a National Review Ideas Summit program guide that characterized The Empowerment Alliance as a project of Karen Buchwald Wright and her husband, Tom Rastin. Wright is the board chair of Ariel Corporation, which makes compressors for the natural gas industry. Its headquarters is in Mount Vernon.

The Empowerment Alliance’s highest paid contractor for the past four years, according to Internal Revenue Service filings, has been a group called Majority Strategies. Its chief strategist, Tom Whatman, emceed the Nov. 30 event for Knox Smart Development.  Whatman is also the former executive director of the Ohio Republican Party.

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Northeast Storms a Preview of What’s Coming

“Brutal” storms in Northeast, and still worst of the flooding is on the way.

As heavy precipitation increases generally due to climate change, some sections of the country will be hit harder than others.

The Northeast and New England are very much in the bulls eye.

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US Real Estate May be Overvalued due to Climate Risk

A Staten Island neighborhood, pre and post Hurricane Sandy. First Street Foundation photo

I posted recently about newly identifed “Climate Abandonment” areas, neighborhoods identified in a new peer reviewed study, where residents have moved out due to increasing local climate risk.
The most common risk factor is flooding, and typically, these residents don’t move very far – they want to hold on to family structures, jobs, community – but it means that within some areas, even relatively prosperous areas, there are pockets of at-risk housing that could be, or already has been, devalued – and those residents left behind will find their holdings reduced in value.
A separate study from Environmental Defense Fund, published earlier this year in Nature Climate Change, showed that significant blocks of real estate may be overvalued due to as yet unpriced climate risks.

Environmental Defense Fund:

A new study published in the journal Nature Climate Changeexamines the potential cost of unrealized flood risk in the American real estate market, finding that flood zone property prices are overvalued by  US$121–US$237 billion. Authored by researchers from Environmental Defense Fund, First Street Foundation, Resources for the Future, the Federal Reserve, and several academic institutions, the study also examined how unpriced flood risk throughout the country could impact communities and local governments, finding low-income households particularly vulnerable to home value deflation.  

“Increasing flood risk under climate change is creating a bubble that threatens the stability of the US housing market. As we’ve seen in California in the last few weeks, these aren’t hypotheticals and the risk is more extensive than expected—and that risk carries an enormous cost,” said Dr. Jesse Gourevitch, a postdoctoral fellow at Environmental Defense Fund and lead author of the study. “These risks are largely unaccounted for in property transactions, encouraging development in flood-prone areas. Accurately pricing the costs of flooding in home values can support adaptation to flood risk, but may leave many worse off.” 

Currently, more than 14.6 million properties in the United States face at least a 1% annual probability of flooding, with expected annual damages to residential properties exceeding US$32 billion. Increasing frequency and severity of flooding under climate change is predicted to increase the number of properties exposed to flooding by 11% and average annual losses by at least 26% by 2050. The increasing cost of flooding under climate change has led to growing concerns that housing markets are mispricing these risks, thus causing a real estate bubble to develop. 

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Financial Times Video: Are Small Modular Reactors the Future?

Above, short update on the small modular reactor concept.

Accurately points out that we don’t really have a working example to evaluate. And we won’t for several years, given the recent failure of the farthest-along SMR project, NuScale. Also rightly points out the cost hurdle for adopting nuclear.

It’s hard to build nuclear plants, as my Yale video pointed out a few years ago.