Month: July 2024

William S Becker in The Hill:

With less than four months to go until the presidential election, the economy is delivering some good news. At this point two years ago, inflation was above 9 percent. Last month, it dipped to 3 percent, while wages continued to grow. 

The bad news is that a new villain has arrived on the scene. Call it “climate inflation.”  

Over a generation, we’ve seen global climate change progress from science to a heated political debate and now to a hotter world. It’s become a kitchen table issue that threatens the financial as well as physical security of America’s families. 

Anyone worried about rising costs of living and higher taxes should be concerned. Yet, climate change is getting too little attention in presidential campaigns, especially since President Biden and Donald Trump have diametrically opposed views. Trump and his newly named running mateJD Vance, don’t believe global warming is a real issue, while Biden deserves credit for doing more to confront climate change than any president in American history 

The physical risks of climate change are indisputable. Last year alone, 28 big weather disasters (each causing more than $1 billion in damages) cost a total of $93 billion, the highest on record. Over the last decade, big weather disasters caused more than $1.2 trillion in reported damages. The actual damages were significantly higher because the government doesn’t count disasters where damages are less than $1 billion.

Continue reading “Climate Inflation: The Carbon Tax You Are Already Paying”

Video: Trump today In Michigan: Elon Musk gives me $45 million a month. We have to make life good for people like him

pic.twitter.com/VWvDLJCKeA

— Mike Walker (@New_Narrative) July 20, 2024

So, what’s up with the Tesla board, that they allow this to keep killing their brand?

Quartz:

The electric vehicle maker’s favorability among Democrats has dropped to 16% as of July 16, down 20 percentage points from January, Yahoo Finance reports, citing new data from analytics firm CivicScience. Favorability among Republicans has also dropped, falling 13 percentage points to 23%.

CivicScience CEO John Dick told Yahoo Finance that the firm’s data has found that “Democrats, more closely than Republicans, associate Elon Musk and his actions with the brand.” 

That might be a problem for Tesla going forward.

Just look at California, a state known for its rapid adoption of clean energy and promotion of EVs and related technology, including charging infrastructure. Although Tesla’s Model Y remains the best-selling car in the Golden State, registrations fell 17% year-over-year last quarter, with the the California New Car Dealers Association noting that sales “may have peaked.” It’s Tesla’s third straight quarter of registration declines in California.

Musk has repeatedly criticized the state. Last week, Musk said he’d move X’s and SpaceX’s headquarters out of California, joining Tesla in Texas.

“Californians’ love affair with electric vehicle giant Tesla may have peaked,” the dealers association said in April, noting that rivals are providing more options for consumers interested in EVs. And many of those alternatives come without the baggage of supporting Musk, who has become increasingly controversial over the past few years. 

Since Musk purchased Twitter, now X, he’s increasingly turned his attention to politics, often complaining about diversity initiatives, spreading claims about election fraud, criticizing vaccinations, and issuing critiques of the Biden administration’s handling of immigration and border security. His public comments — often coming in the form of a tweet — spell trouble for a company whose reputation is uniquely tied to its CEO.

“He completely alienated most of his buying base. … It’s going to kill the business,” Tesla short seller Mark Spiegel told Yahoo Finance. “I can’t imagine a single Democrat, or, let’s say, very few of them, willing to buy a Tesla at this point.”

Musk’s favored ticket of Trump and Ohio senator and venture capitalist J.D. Vance are not big fans of current pro-EV politics or, to an extent, EVs at all. Both Trump and Vance are advocates for domestic natural gas and oil production and oppose relying on clean energy, with the latter calling EVs a “scam.”

Joe Biden has been the best President, all in all, of my lifetime.
Last night, he confirmed my estimations of him, by dropping out of the race, an act of Patriotism as is seldom seen the political arena. He threw his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Major Democratic influencers have been rallying quickly behind the pick.
More on Harris’ Climate record:

Bloomberg Green (newsletter):

As VP, Harris has often acted as spokesperson for her boss’s climate priorities at home and abroad. She was one of several administration officials who fanned out across the country last year to tout the one-year anniversary of the IRA. Harris, 59, stood in for Biden at last year’s COP28 climate summit, where she announced that the US would contribute $3 billion to a climate aid fund for developing countries. 

Back in 2019, when Harris (then a US senator from California) launched a presidential bid, her climate agenda was more ambitious than Biden’s. She supported a carbon tax and proposed $10 trillion in private and public climate spending. She also said she would work to ban fracking. That prompted Republican attacks when Biden became the Democrats’ nominee and chose her as his running mate. 

In the Senate she sponsored climate equity bills and backed an effort by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline. However, she chose to leave the Environment and Public Works Committee — which her predecessor Barbara Boxer had chaired — in favor of a seat on Judiciary

New York Times:

Vice President Kamala Harris has for years made the environment a top concern, from prosecuting polluters as California’s attorney general to sponsoring the Green New Deal as a senator to casting the tiebreaking vote as vice president for the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate investment in United States history.

Continue reading “Kamala on Climate”

50% acceleration of global sea level rise since 1993 pic.twitter.com/0SSgSvbssN

— Prof. Jason Box (@climate_ice) July 22, 2024

Leiria Economica:

According to a new study of the Greenland ice sheet, the climate model E3SM v.2 may do just that.overestimation of whitenessa basic property of ice. Which affects the speed of its dissolution. and thus rising ocean levels

Scientists need to make predictions about the future climate of our planet. Numerical representations of the Earth systemIn other words, models that are able to Accurately determines the albedo of different surfaces on our planet. To predict its tendency to heat or reflect solar radiation.

One common simplification used in most future climate models is to assume that Mountain glaciers and ice caps are associated with high albedo value.and above all constantIn fact, these surfaces are white in color and therefore must reflect a large portion of the light energy they receive.

However, the simplifications used in the modeling do not necessarily represent reality. In reality, at the edge of these large areas, the ice is often gray because it is bare (without snow) but also filled with darker holes, lakes in general, or even stained with algae and dust. Therefore, these sectors are quite wide depending on the area. Its albedo is much lower than the surrounding snow-covered ice, and therefore it warms up more quickly.

Based on this principle, researchers from the laboratory of Professor Charlie Zender at the University of California, Berkeley, have been interested in a model called E3SM (Energy Exascale Earth System Model). According to their results, the second version (v.2) of this model I overestimated the whiteness of the snow by about 5%

Continue reading “Why Sea Level Rise May Be Faster than Forecast”

PBS interviews with storm chasers as well as NOAA researchers on this season’s historic spate of tornadoes.

A reminder that Project 2025 seeks to break up and disperse NOAA and the National Weather Service, selling off America’s scientific Crown Jewels for parts – because in their minds, these science organizations are “hot beds woke alarmism”.
As interesting, and critically important, as all the questions scientists are raising about these phenomena, if the MAGA loyalists have their way, we may never know the answers.

Increased turbulence, passengers boiling on the tarmac, cancelled and diverted flights, windows blowing out – now this.

NPR:

Summer temperatures across the U.S. are so high that they’ve created problems at cruising altitude, causing some overheated beverages to burst midair on a number of Southwest Airlines flights.

Many of the airports where Southwest has a large presence — such as Phoenix, Las Vegas, Austin, Dallas, Houston and Sacramento — are located in cities that have already broken temperature records this year, as a result of heat waves fueled by climate change.

Southwest confirmed to NPR that heat has warped some cans and caused others to burst upon opening, an issue it’s been communicating with employees about since the spring. But it stressed there haven’t been any reported incidents involving customers.

“We’re aware of the issue and have been taking steps to keep onboard beverages cooler, especially in our airports experiencing extreme temperatures,” spokesperson Chris Perry said in a statement.

Some 20 flight attendants have been injured by exploding cans this summer, including one who required stitches, according to CBS News. The union that represents Southwest flight attendants, TWU Local 556, has not responded to NPR’s request for comment.

“For the Safety of our Employees and Customers, we are taking education and mitigation measures on all heat-related hazards,” Perry added.

The issue appears to be unique to Southwest, which handles in-flight beverages differently than other airlines.

Continue reading “Exploding Pop Cans Add to Airlines Hot Weather Woes”

Taking hold everywhere, the oldest, most proven energy storage technology, pumped hydro, is ramping up once again in the energy transition. Compressed Air Storage is a newer tech, but equally easy to understand. Abandoned mines offer opportunities for both.
Stories here from all over.

Worth remembering that we will be doing much less mining in a renewable world, but for those communities that have been left behind with abandoned or tapped out mines, there very well can be a future.
These sites already have most of the necessary industrial site permitting, as well as good access to electrical transmission infrastructure, and there are thousands of them in the US and worldwide. Here, stories from Australia and two corners of the US.

Below, Australian Engineering Firm Mott MacDonald produced this piece describing conversion of an abandoned Gold Mine in Australia to pumped storage.

Continue reading “Abandoned Pits and Shafts are Goldmines for Energy Storage”

Project 2025 is your one-way ticket to the 19th century, the wondrous age of Robber Barons, Polio, massive child mortality, and women who knew their place.

PBS News Hour:

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump again vowed to shut down the Education Department and endorsed a Louisiana law mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools. He has also pledged to cut funding to schools with vaccine requirements.

–

• Dr. Paul Offit:Before vaccines, diphtheria was the most common killer of teenagers. Before vaccines, pertussis, or whooping cough, killed 8,000 people, mostly children, every year. Polio before vaccines would cause 30,000 people, mostly children, to be paralyzed every year and kill as many as 1,500.Rubella, or German measles, when it infected pregnant women, would cause 20,000 cases of birth defects every year. Is that what we want? Do we want to go back to that time, before vaccines saved our lives and prevented all this suffering and hospitalization and death?
• Laura Barron-Lopez:Bottom line, you’re concerned that even just the rhetoric could lead to an uptick in deaths amongst children when it comes to measles, correct?
• Dr. Paul Offit:Right.I think what happened over the last few years, with the masking mandates and with the vaccine mandates is, we leaned into this libertarian left hook. And now for the last few years, every year, there’s been hundreds of pieces of legislation pushing back on mandates. And so we have been pushing and pushing and pushing, to the point that now we’re starting to see measles again.And, in 2022, there was a case of polio in Rockland County, New York, in an area where the immunization rates were only 30 percent. This is a man who never left this country. So these are not diseases that you want to see come back.

Scientific American:

Project 2025, the sweeping right-wing blueprint for a new kind of U.S. presidency, would sabotage science-based policies that address climate change, the environment, abortion, health care access, technology and education.

Continue reading “Project 2025’s Anti Science Agenda Would Cost Lives”

Waffle House a leader in deployment as fast charging soars.

Waffle House.

Bloomberg:

At the current pace, public fast-charging sites will outnumber gas stations in the US in about eight years — but charger momentum is only expected to accelerate. North American operators will spend a collective $6.1 billion on charging infrastructure this year, nearly double their 2023 investment, according to BloombergNEF estimates. That annual spend is expected to double again by 2030.

“We’re seeing demand for fast charging skyrocket,” said Sara Rafalson, executive vice president at EVgo Inc., which operates almost 1,000 stations in the US. “We’re continuing to build bigger and bigger stations because we need to keep up with that demand.”

EV cords are increasingly being added by retailers eager to attract the nearly 10% of US car buyers who are plugging into battery-powered vehicles. Gas station operators, in particular, are jumping on the electron bandwagon. In the second quarter, Shell debuted 30 new charging stations, while Enel opened 11, Pilot Travel Centers opened eight and another seven showed up at Flying J rest stops, according to the federal tally. 

“We’re getting past a turning point where fueling stations and convenience stores are really seeing the value proposition,” said Sam Houston, senior vehicles analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s a very welcome turn from how they were behaving in the regulatory space even as recently as a couple years ago.” 

U.S. Bank also sees EV charging as business development: It switched on chargers at 39 branches in California in the second quarter. Meanwhile, Waffle House added charging cords to the parking lots at two of its Florida restaurants.

Triple Pundit:

The inclusion of Waffle House in the Tennessee EV charging station program is all the more impressive because competition for the installation contracts was fierce. Only 30 new charging stations are planned for the first round of buildout, but the state Department of Transportation received applications for contracts covering 167 different locations.

Continue reading “Range Anxiety Receding as Chargers Multiply. And they Have Waffles.”

New paper discussed is here.
Some smart people pretty concerned about these findings.

Low latency carbon budget analysis reveals a large decline of the land carbon sink in 2023 – Piyu Ke et al:

In 2023, the CO2 growth rate was 3.37 ± 0.11 ppm at Mauna Loa, 86% above the previous year, and hitting a record high since observations began in 1958[1], while global fossil fuel CO2 emissions only increased by 0.6 ± 0.5%[2,3]. This implies an unprecedented weakening of land and ocean sinks, and raises the question of where and why this reduction happened.

Chris Gloninger on X:

Concerning paper from Cornell about our global carbon sink – here is a 🧵on the findings:
The average CO2 growth rate during 2013-2022 was 2.42 ± 0.08 ppm per year.
In 2023, it increased to 3.37 ± 0.11 ppm per year at the Mauna Loa station (MLO) and 2.82 ± 0.08 ppm per yr 1/ 

The OCO-2 satellite observations showed a growth rate of 3.03 ± 0.14 ppm per year.
The higher MLO growth rate compared to MBL in 2023 indicates a potential CO2 source anomaly in the tropics. 

Emissions increased by 0.1 to 1.1% in 2023 relative to 2022, which only partially explains the growth rate anomaly.
This suggests that natural carbon sinks in the land and oceans were significantly reduced in 2023.  

Global temperatures in 2023 were 0.6°C above the 1991-2020 average and 1.48°C above pre-industrial levels.
Extreme summer temperatures and droughts in the northern mid-latitudes contributed to weaker carbon sinks.
—

I don't say this in a mean way, but I really hope this paper is simply wrong.

A rapid deterioration of the land carbon sink in the near future could have really ugly consequences. https://t.co/utteWjrrpZ

— Dr. Robert Rohde (@RARohde) July 18, 2024

Continue reading “Big Deal if True: Earth Not Absorbing as Much CO2?”