Above, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Gavin Schmidt grapple with the unexpectedly hot extremes of 2023.
Below, Science YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder describes a current controversy around climate models that are “running hot”.
Hossenfelder discusses a paper by James Hansen and colleagues which argues for a higher climate sensitivity, and thus a planet that crosses catastrophic thresholds sooner than we thought. Below, Michael Mann pushes back.
Let me preface my commentary by saying that I have nothing but the greatest respect for James Hansen. He has been a fundamental contributor to the advance of our science and a personal hero to me and many other climate scientists of my generation. I believe (and have stated) that he was wronged by the Nobel committee in not sharing in the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for fundamental contributions to climate science.
It has always been risky to ignore his warnings and admonitions. I say as much in my profile of Jim (a short excerpt of which is shown above) from my 2015 book Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change. So it with no pleasure whatsoever that I find myself in a position to have to criticize his latest work.
I’ve posted before on the topic of “Who Killed the Electric Car”, and if you have not seen that documentary, by all means, do so now.
But I stumbled across this 10 minute jewel of historical research (above) that taught me a lot that I did not know, and is well worth your time. I maintain that the current momentum of the EV industry is unstoppable, but many of the same forces that succeeded in killing General Motors’ EV-1 in the early 2000s are at work today. They will not succeed in stopping the EV transition, but they might well succeed in ending the dominance of the US auto industry permanently.
Good CNN look at what is happening to coastal Maine. The Lobstermen and Fishermen who have traditionally made a living in the area are being driven out by climate driven migration of their target species, while insurance costs to protect their infrastructure on shore have soared out of reach to all but the ultra-wealthy who are replacing fishing shacks and docks with mega mansions.
I spent quite a bit of time on North Haven island in Penobscot Bay, when my son was managing a farm there for several years. The face of the community is being forever altered by the combination of rising seas and weather extremes.
NORTH HAVEN — For more than a century, the Browns have been building and repairing boats from a cavernous post-and-beam shop at the water’s edge of the Fox Island Thoroughfare, but the combination of increasingly severe weather and a steadily rising sea is threatening to wash it away.
But the people of this island, with its 400 year-round residents located about 12 miles east of Rockland, aren’t letting go without a fight. They’ve come together to try to resurrect a boatyard devastated by back-to-back storms, record-setting high tides, and the looming threat of climate change.
“The support has been overwhelming,” said Kim Alexander, a fourth-generation member of the Brown family. “People started showing up before the (first) storm was even done. Young ones, old ones, family, friends, neighbors, old customers, competitors: Everybody’s trying to help us save the place.”
Wednesday’s storm swept through and almost took the waterfront shop where they have been repairing and building boats since 1901. The storm surge knocked out a wall and opened the building to the ocean. The floor buckled. Anything that wasn’t nailed down or stored up high was washed away.
In 2017, rock climber Alex Honnold went on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to promote Free Solo, the then-new documentary about his unassisted climb of Yosemite’s El Capitan. “Is there anything bigger than that?” Kimmel prompted as a closing question.
“I mean, there are technically some bigger walls in the world,” Honnold said. “But they’re in very remote places — like Greenland.”
Five years and an Oscar later, Honnold was scrambling off a boat at the base of Ingmikortilaq, a crumbly sea cliff that towers nearly 1,000 feet higher than El Cap over an iceberg-ridden fjord in eastern Greenland. His intended first ascent was the culmination of a six-week adventure across ice fields and glaciers.
This time, Honnold wasn’t alone. The Greenland expedition included two other legendary climbers, Hazel Findlay and Mikey Schaefer, as well as Aldo Kane, who provided safety and technical support; Adam Kjeldsen, a Greenlandic guide; and perhaps most surprisingly, Heïdi Sevestre, a Frenchglaciologist who helped set up or run 16 different studies to collect data for scientists around the world.
The team’s adventure is captured in Arctic Ascent with Alex Honnold, a three-part docuseries that premieres on Hulu and Disney+ on February 5. Ahead of its release, I spoke separately with Honnold and Sevestre about the expedition, the importance of climate science, and their respective climbs. (While Sevestre, previously a non-climber, didn’t attempt Ingmikortilaq, she did scale a 1,500-foot rock face known as the Pool Wall while drilling rock cores for samples.) Our conversations have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Pool of Early adopters for EVs has kind of tapped out – getting to the next level is a challenge. Note: interviewer above is reliable climate denier on the CNBC crew.
Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab has told suppliers it wants to start production of a new mass market electric vehicle codenamed “Redwood” in mid-2025, according to four people familiar with the matter, with two of them describing the model as a compact crossover.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed on a post-earnings call on Wednesday that the company expects to start production of its next-generation EV at its Texas factory in the second half of 2025.
The Hartford issued the following statement follwing a request for comment for this article:
“The homeowners’ insurance environment in California has unique challenges that have required us to reconsider the viability of writing new homeowners’ business in the state. Based on these challenges and our analysis of the trends, we have decided to stop offering new homeowners policies starting Feb. 1, 2024. We do not enter into this decision lightly, and we appreciate and support efforts like Commissioner Lara’s Sustainability Insurance Strategy to help bring stability to the market.”
The Hartford said it will be watching those efforts, and it continue to write all its other existing products in California, such as business insurance and personal auto, and will continue to renew existing homeowners’ business consistent with its underwriting guidelines.
State Farm General Insurance Co. announced at the end of May that it had stopped accepting new policy applications for property/casualty insurance in California for reasons including increased risks from wildfires and inflation. The decision followed a similar move by Allstate Corp. last year.
Other large carriers that have announced a reduced appetite for writing California homeowners insurance include American International Group (AIG) and Chubb.
A new report from Gallagher Re released late last year showed the threat of damaging wildfires in conjunction with inflation and pricing challenges has led to a distressed insurance and reinsurance market, particularly in California.
Ralph Larossa, CEO of PSEG, discusses the state of the utility sector.
Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG) is a publicly traded (NYSE:PEG) diversified energy company headquartered in New Jersey, and one of the ten largest electric companies in the U.S.
California’s Salton Sea region has been touted as an emerging “Lithium Valley” because of large deposits of the mineral that underpins energy storage for electric vehicles and thousands of other applications. The prospect has been for potential huge resource to be extracted with minimal surface impact while producing clean energy as a by-product. That time is now.
I’m finally convinced: California’s Imperial Valley will be a major player in the clean energy transition.
After a dozen years of engineering, permitting and financing, the Australian firm Controlled Thermal Resources is ready to start building a lithium extraction and geothermal power plant at the southern end of the Salton Sea, more than 150 miles southeast of Los Angeles. A groundbreaking ceremony is planned for Friday near the shore of the shrinking desert lake.
John Podesta, who once served as President Clinton’s chief of staff and is now President Biden’s clean energy advisor, will be at the groundbreaking. When I talked with him ahead of the event, he stressed the importance of the U.S. lessening its reliance on China and other countries for critical minerals such as lithium — and the particular benefits for Imperial County, an agricultural mecca that sits along the U.S.-Mexico border and has some of California’s lowest incomes.
“The work is going to be done by union labor. These are going to be good jobs,” Podesta said.
Unlike solar panels and wind turbines, geothermal plants can generate pollution-free electricity 24 hours a day by tapping into a powerful pocket of underground heat thousands of feet below the Salton Sea. If we want to transition away from planet-warming fossil fuels and power our homes and businesses with 100% climate-friendly energy, geothermal can help.
Lithium, meanwhile, is a key ingredient in the batteries that power electric cars — and also store solar and wind energy for times when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. And unlike many other lithium mines, Controlled Thermal’s “Hell’s Kitchen” project — and others planned for the Salton Sea region — would do little environmental damage.
But until now, I wasn’t sure whether Hell’s Kitchen would move forward.
Companies have been trying to resolve the economic and technical barriers to Imperial Valley lithium extraction for years. Some of my first stories for the Desert Sun newspaper, nearly a decade ago, were about Simbol Materials, a startup that claimed it had cracked the code. In 2015, I wrote about Simbol’s plans for a lithium plant that would employ 400 construction workers.
New Hampshire voter: President Biden has done a better job than people give him credit for. He’s got a lot done on infrastructure and he’s actually done something to combat climate change which almost nobody else has pic.twitter.com/d7o3DdRUSr
The Biden administration is delaying a decision on a Louisiana liquefied natural gas (LNG) export project that would be the United States’ largest, but which has raised the ire of environmentalists, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.
With an export capacity of around 20 million metric tonnes per year, Venture Global LNG’s Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2) project would be twice the size of the company’s present CP plant. If built, it would make Venture Global one of the largest LNG companies in the world.
The Biden administration is pausing a decision on whether to approve what would be the largest natural gas export terminal in the United States, a delay that could stretch past the November election and spell trouble for that project and 16 other proposed terminals, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
The White House is directing the Energy Department to expand its evaluation of the project to consider its impact on climate change, as well as the economy and national security, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss internal deliberations. The Energy Department has never rejected a proposed natural gas project because of its expected environmental impact.
The move comes as Mr. Biden gears up for what is likely to be a contentious re-election campaign. He is courting climate voters, particularly the young activists who helped him win election in 2020 and who have been angered by his administration’s approval last year of the Willow project, an enormous oil drilling operation in Alaska.
It also comes as the United States leads the world in both liquefied natural gas exports and oil and gas production. The country has seven export terminals with five more already under construction.
European gas demand is down about 35% from its peak. Why? In part, gas price spikes destroyed gas demand. Gas cannibalized gas. Also, EE, Electrification and RE displace gas. Europe slashes gas demand, as gas does security, economic and climate damage to EU. Credit @ira_josephpic.twitter.com/2mRucc3Wxg
