Month: July 2024

Green Car Congress:

Joby Aviation has successfully flown a first-of-its-kind hydrogen-electric air taxi demonstrator 523 miles, with water as the only by-product. The aircraft, which takes off and lands vertically, builds on Joby’s successful battery-electric air taxi development program, and demonstrates the potential for hydrogen to unlock emissions-free, regional journeys that don’t require a runway. 

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The vast majority of the design, testing and certification work we’ve completed on our battery-electric aircraft carries over to commercializing hydrogen-electric flight. In service, we also expect to be able to use the same landing pads, the same operations team, and Joby’s ElevateOS software that will support the commercial operation of our battery-electric aircraft.

—JoeBen Bevirt, Founder and CEO, Joby

The landmark test flight, believed to be the first forward flight of a vertical take off and landing aircraft powered by liquid hydrogen, was completed last month using a converted Joby pre-production prototype battery-electric aircraft fitted with a liquid hydrogen fuel tank and fuel cell system. It landed with 10% of its hydrogen fuel load remaining. 

KPAX Missoula:

The world’s first hydrogen-powered commercial passenger ferry will start operating on San Francisco Bay as part of plans to phase out diesel-powered vessels and reduce planet-warming carbon emissions, California officials said Friday, demonstrating the ship.

The 70-foot catamaran called the MV Sea Change will transport up to 75 passengers along the waterfront between Pier 41 and the downtown San Francisco ferry terminal starting July 19, officials said. The service will be free for six months while it’s being run as part of a pilot program.

Library of Congress:

Nineteenth century American song books that used notes in different shapes to aid singers and teach singing came to be known as “shape-note hymnals” and the style of singing from these “shape-note singing.” Christian hymnals using this system were among the most enduring uses of this notation. Among the most popular was The Sacred Harp by B. F. White, first published in Georgia in 1844. As a result of this popularity, the style of singing is also sometimes called “sacred harp.”

Below, same song, from a group in Ireland.

Continue reading “Music Break: Shapenote Singing from the Sacred Harp”

The lax enforcement and flaccid regulation of Texas utilities was largely responsible for the deadliness of the 2021 Winter storm blackouts.
Now, as a Category One hurricane has blacked out much of Houston for close to a week, evidence that nothing’s changed in Gov. Abbot’s Texas.

Houston Chronicle:

But the enforcement tools that worked to hold companies accountable for the 2011 failures had been removed under Gov. Greg Abbott’s appointees on the utility commission. Hearst Newspapers reported last week that commissioners in November cut ties with the Texas Reliability Entity — the specialists hired — leaving state regulators without an external independent reliability monitor.

Four months before that, the governor’s commissioners had also disbanded the Oversight & Enforcement Division. The head attorney was told he no longer had a job; nine other team members were reassigned throughout the utility commission.

Several pending cases were dropped. According to commission records, by the end of 2020 the number of enforcement cases had fallen 40 percent.

Critics and former employees say the division was cut precisely because it was working — the state’s most recent move in a 25-year campaign to pare down oversight to favor energy companies and their largest customers, starting when Texas began deregulating its electric market in the 1990s.

CenterPoint officials have said clearing so many downed trees and branches is posing a challenge in restoring power, but compared to other electricity providers, we found CenterPoint didn’t spend much on preventative maintenance. @jrogalskikhou https://t.co/a789R37M7R

— KHOU 11 News Houston (@KHOU) July 12, 2024

Continue reading “Houston’s Blackout Suffering Continues – Utility Malpractice Blamed”

Aging Dams are potential killers.
Climate is speeding up the clock.

Do we get it now? Anybody?

NATO Climate Change and Security Impact Assessment 2024:

Kremlin-backed actors have been found to be pushing climate change denialism across the Alliance, all while actively attempting to derail climate change mitigation policies and renewable energy investments. Russian state media routinely amplify uncertainty around climate change and downplay the phenomenon as exaggerated or even positive. They frame global warming as a “hoax” and emission-reduction plans as a form of “Western imperialism” engineered to undermine the development of emerging economies. Denial of anthropogenic climate change persists in Russia largely due to the entangled ties between the fossil fuel industry and political power, and the country’s ongoing dependence on fossil fuels as a dominant source of government revenue. Individuals whochallenge scientific consensus on climate change continue to hold political power.

Continue reading “NATO Defense Study: Russians Pushing Climate Disinformation”

Above, Al Jazeera in-depth report, about 30 minutes.

Below, interview with Washington Post reporter Sarah Kaplan, who recently dove into this topic.

MarketPlace:

Scott: And you talk about how this is only going to get worse. A study showed that rising temperatures could add as much as 1.2 percentage points to annual global inflation by 2035. Talk about that study and what these researchers found.

Kaplan: Yeah, so this was research from the European Central Bank and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and they basically looked at the correlation between high temperatures and prices in a bunch of different countries. And they found that there is this very strong link that when you have higher temperatures, there tend to be price spikes. All of that really can add up to cause not just price spikes for individual items, but inflation for everything that people need to buy.

Scott: And it’s not just food, right? I mean, I’ve done a lot of reporting on the rising cost of homeowners insurance, but you also talk about auto insurance. I imagined businesses will face higher premiums that they will pass on to customers too. How is that affecting the overall cost of living?

Kaplan: The cost of insurance is one of the main contributors to the high inflation that we’ve been seeing in recent years, and experts say that that is very much connected to the increased occurrence of weather disasters. I think one of the things that is really important about climate change is the way that it is creating weather that is not just more extreme, but it’s more unpredictable. You know, insurance is all about sort of weighing the risk of something and trying to price it accordingly. But if you don’t know what the risk is because it keeps changing, that makes the entire endeavor much more difficult.

Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Climate a Driver of “Permanent Inflation””

More good news from the rural Midwest.

Building on the momentum for clean energy deployment, supporters of Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s siting reform are out telling the stories of farmers who will be able to keep farms in the family, and greedy developers at bay, with help from Solar and wind development.
This messaging will be important in November, when Republicans will be using conspiracist messaging about “globalist” “Green New Deal” plots, they hope to knock off a couple of vulnerable Dems, and retake Michigan’s lower House.

In Delhi’s hellish summer, heat deaths often not recorded as another cause.
Magnified by vulnerable population, and whiplash between water shortages and sudden flooding. Mosquito diseases like malaria, and diseases of polluted water threaten co-incident health threats.

Similar problem in tracking heat deaths in the US, as I posted elsewhere on this page.

New York Times:

“It’s difficult for us to know how many people are impacted by extreme heat when we look at emergency room data,” said Kelly Turner, a heat expert at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Many hospitals don’t have a code for heat or extreme heat. If, for instance, what actually happened is someone came in with headaches and pulmonary issues, that’s what’s going to be coded.”

The dire health ramifications of heat have become a subject of intense interest in the Biden administration. At a visit to the District of Columbia’s emergency operations center last week, Mr. Biden unveiled a draft of first-of-their-kind Labor Department regulations that would protect roughly 35 million workers exposed to extreme heat on the job.

“Extreme heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States,” Mr. Biden said at the event. “More people die from extreme heat than floods, hurricanes and tornadoes combined. Say that again: combined.”

Weather.com:

​ Western heat wave has already smashed all-time record highs and heat streaks, even by standards of the Desert Southwest and California.

T​his scorching heat kicked off around the July Fourth holiday weekend, and will only slowly relent through the upcoming weekend.

New York Times:

Extreme heat, intensified by climate change, has blanketed much of the United States this summer, killing more than a dozen people in Oregon in recent days. Large parts of California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah have been under excessive heat warnings, which local officials believe contributed to more than 90 deaths in the West this month.

The consequences are increasingly playing out in the nation’s emergency rooms, where medical workers are confronted with heat-stricken patients whose soaring body temperatures can be fatal if not addressed quickly.

Around 2,300 people died from heat-related illnesses in the United States in 2023, triple the annual average between 2004 and 2018. Nearly 120,000 heat-related emergency room visits were recorded across the United States last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In part, those figures are because heat waves last longer now than they did decades ago, as an Environmental Protection Agency report released last week made clear.

On Thursday, more than 60 million Americans were under heat alerts from the National Weather Service. Temperatures have at times this summer run between 10 and 30 degrees above average in Western states. Some places like Las Vegas, which hit 120 degrees on Sunday, have broken records.

Continue reading “Heat Emergencies Challenge Health Care, Flyers”