Buttigieg updates on ground breaking for a new high speed rail between Las Vegas and Southern California.
Additional status report on infrastructure spending.
Below, Brightline founder and chairman Wes Edens talks about what the new Brightline project will mean for the high-speed rail industry in the US. He claims “massive demand” for the high speed service.
Polling is broken, no doubt about it, but I don’t think it’s so broken as t0 upend a result so clear as the one above.
Overwhelming support for climate action, and only going to grow, as young people are those most in favor.
Record heat, hurricanes, wildfires all have been making news in recent years. And while not everyone agrees events like these are the direct result of climate change, they do connect to peoples’ opinions about it: a big majority of Americans feel the U.S. needs to address climate change, with those who report experiencing extreme weather more likely to say we should do so right now.
Views on climate change have long been associated with partisanship, and they still are, but age is a factor, too. Younger Americans, including younger Republicans, are even more likely to say the U.S. needs to take steps to at least try to slow it.
There’s a sense of urgency from many in the public, too. A large majority think it needs to be addressed at least in the next few years, including half who think it needs to be addressed right now.
There’s the sense that we should address climate change, and there’s also some belief that we can.
That extends down to the personal level, too. Most Americans believe humans can do something to at least slow the effects of climate change, and those who think so feel they personally have a responsibility to do something about it.
Report from KOVR CBS 13, Sacramento.
Mark Jacobson of Stanford interviewed on the remarkable run of more-than-100 percent renewable energy in California. Sure, it’s spring, demand is not as high as it will be in August, but this is exactly where you would expect to see the earliest big results.
Multiply by millions, and remember there will be no rescue for most animals caught up in the climate catastrophe.
But, I thought CO2 was what plants crave?
Farmers are warning of food shortages as record rainfall threatens to bring the first season without a harvest on some farms since the end of the Second World War.
Vast swathes of farmland are still under water following an unprecedented period of flooding, with 11 named storms since September and the wettest 18 months on record.
The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board has predicted that wheat yields will be down 15 per cent, winter barley down 22 per cent and oilseed rape down 28 per cent – the biggest drop since the 1980s.
Joe Stanley, an arable and livestock farmer at a research farm in Leicestershire, said he and his colleagues were facing the first year without a harvest since the land was first farmed after the war.
“Unless it basically stops raining today and then it becomes nice and sunny and windy, we’re not going to get any crops in this year. That’s a real danger,” he said. “Many farmers will be in the same situation.”
Continue reading “UK Farmers Warn of First Year Without a Harvest Since WWII”
Hard to keep up with the new clean energy records being set in California.
Stanford’s Mark Jacobson, and Princeton’s Jesse Jenkins are keeping us informed of ever-wilder high records for clean energy production.
Worth noting that spring heating and AC loads are not at their summer peak, but huge solar production and newly built battery storage are turning a lot priors upside down.
As always, more storage and transmission needed, but we are on a roll.
California has hit a new renewables record after exceeding 100 per cent of grid demand with clean energy sources for 30 of the past 38 days.
New data from California Independent System Operator (CAISO) shows that supply from geothermal, hydro, solar and wind exceeded demand for between 0.25-6 hours per day for more than three quarters of days since the start of March.
It is the first time that the US state has succeeded in drawing all of its electricity needs from wind-water-solar (WWS) sources for such a sustained period of time.
“This is unprecedented in California’s history,” Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University who first shared the figures, told The Independent.
“In previous years, WWS supply exceeded demand occasionally on one weekend day, but never two days in a row and never during the week, and never to the magnitude that is now, up to 122 per cent of demand.”
Really nice version of a song I can’t separate from a very specific, and special, time, and place.
Hotter and dryer means more conditions for fires. Hotter and wetter means more fuel for fires.
Above, Mike Flannigan PhD, of the University of Alberta.
At nine years old, Carter Vigh loved soccer, his friends, and dancing to music.
“He was just the kid that everybody wanted to hang out with, and he was always willing to make the time for anybody and willing to stand up for anyone that was being bullied or sad,” said Carter’s mom, Amber Vigh. “He was tiny but mighty.”
Carter also had asthma. The hot temperatures and dense wildfire smoke that enveloped the Vighs’ British Columbia home, 100 Mile House, in the summer of 2023 exacerbated his asthma and killed him.
Carter’s family did everything they knew how to do. They kept Carter inside on smoky days. They made sure he always had his inhaler. On the morning of his last day, they checked air quality measurements before taking him to summer camp. But they’d later learn that the air quality data they’d reviewed was coming from a sensor nearly 100 kilometers (62 miles) away from their home.
“The day that Carter died, if you had asked me up until about 4 o’clock that night, ‘How’s Carter?’ I would have told you he was great,” Vigh said.
Climate change likely played a role in Carter’s death. In a 2023 study, researchers found that recent extreme wildfire seasons in British Columbia were correlated with hot summers and high levels of evaporation. “It is likely that the potential for wildfire will continue to increase in the upcoming century, even under the most optimistic climate scenario,” the study’s authors wrote.
Carter was one of tens of thousands of people whose lives were cut short in extreme weather events in 2023. As climate change intensifies extreme weather, more deaths can be expected. But many lives can still be saved. Carter’s family has partnered with the BC Lung Foundation to improve education and install air pollution monitors across British Columbia.
“People need to realize how insane our climate has become and how dangerous it can be for people that have lung issues,” Vigh said.
“Subsidence is when land sinks relative to sea level, usually owing to extraction of subsurface water, rock or other resources.” It’s happening both inland and in coastal areas, exacerbating sea level rise.
Also, parts of the world, like the US East Coast, are sinking due to “glacial isostatic rebound”, see below.
One in ten residents of China’s coastal cities could be living below sea level within a century, as a result of land subsidence and climate change, according to a paper published in Science today1.
Some 16% of the mapped area of China’s major cities is sinking “rapidly” — faster than 10 millimetres every year. An even greater area, roughly 45%, is sinking at a “moderate” rate, the paper says, meaning a downward trajectory of greater than 3 mm annually. Affected cities include the capital Beijing, as well as regional capitals, including Fuzhou, Hefei and Xi’an.
The situation could see one-quarter of China’s coastal lands slip below sea level within a few decades, posing “serious threats” to the hundreds of millions of people who live on the coast, the paper notes.
“Subsidence is certainly not only a problem in China. Many other parts of the world share the same problem,” says Ding Xiaoli, a geodesist at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Subsidence is when land sinks relative to sea level, usually owing to extraction of subsurface water, rock or other resources.
In the famously low-lying Netherlands, roughly one-quarter of the land has subsided to below sea level. And by 2040, almost one-fifth of the world’s population is projected to be living on sinking land.
Jakarta has become the most rapidly subsiding capital in the world, prompting Indonesia to propose a new capital city.
In the United States, more than 44,000 square kilometres of land across 45 states has been directly affected by subsidence, with more than 80% of the cases relating to groundwater extraction, often for agricultural purposes.
Continue reading “Got That Sinking Feeling? You’re Not Alone. Subsidence a Global Problem”