My column is starting to get good coverage across Michigan. A lot of people who don’t read The New York Times still look to their local paper as a credible source.
This column is starting to break into local papers in small towns, where clean energy siting is gaining momentum.
Peter Sinclair in the Midland Daily News:
“I don’t run into climate deniers that much anymore to be honest,” Andy Dessler told me.
Dr. Dessler is a professor of Atmospheric Science at Texas A&M University.
“Most people for whom credibility matters will not dispute the basic idea that the earth is warming, humans are to blame, and the future warming is going to be geologically large,” he said. “Those people have morphed their arguments.”
The battlefield has changed from climate science to energy science. The same people that 10 years ago were disputing the science of climate change are now disputing whether renewable energy is cheap or whether you can run the economy on it.
“It’s exactly the same people, they’ve just changed climate change to energy,” Dessler said.
A perfect example would be Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy Chris Wright.
Wright is a fracking executive whose portfolio stands to gain dramatically in a world where fossil fuels are aggressively promoted. He preaches a soft form of climate denial, grudgingly acknowledging the physics, but deceptively minimizing the impacts, and denying the viability of clean energy solutions.
In a video recorded a year ago, Wright asserted: “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.”
“We have seen no increase in the frequency, or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, or floods,” Wright said, “despite endless fear mongering of the media, politicians and activists. This is not my opinion, these are the facts, as contained in the ‘Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change Reports.’”
But authors of those studies told The Washington Post that Wright misrepresented, or misinterpreted, their work.
Dr. James Kossin, a retired National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expert, and a lead author of the cited chapter told me, “Mr. Wright’s claims and statements about what the IPCC report says are demonstrably incorrect.”
“It’s remarkably simple to show this,” Kossin said. Research establishes “very high confidence” in the human causation of temperature extremes. That would be heat waves and things like Arctic outbreaks.”
In those cases, we use disclaimers like “virtually certain” that these things are changing to become more intense, or frequent, or both, and virtually certain that human actions have played a substantial role in this.
On extreme precipitation, Kossin added, “we have high confidence that extreme precipitation events are increasing in intensity and frequency, and that human actions are playing a substantial role” and “good confidence that drought extremes are increasing, and human actions are playing a role.”
On tropical cyclones, which include hurricanes, Kossin affirmed “Confidence is high that climate change increases the intensity of storms, it increases the proportion of the strongest storms, .category 4 and 5 storms.
“It increases the amount of rain generated by these storms. These are the things that we have high confidence in.”
Senior Meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters, founder of Weather Underground, backed that up in a recent conversation.
“These ultra-intense hurricanes are getting more numerous, and they’re doing a lot more damage when they hit,” he said. “They’re coming in on top of higher sea levels, delivering a higher storm surge, dumping more heavy rain because of warmer oceans, warmer air, and they’re moving more slowly, which allows them to increase the destructive potential by subjecting areas to longer periods of extreme conditions.”
No surprise that Wright, a gas executive, sees increasing fossil gas production and exports as the path forward.
Wright insists that only fossil fuels can meet energy demand going forward, and more drilling will lower prices, but his numbers don’t add up.
Even his oil baron peers are pushing back.
Harold Hamm, founder of shale company Continental Resources, and a big Trump donor, told Bloomberg, “When you get below the cost of production, you can’t ‘Drill Baby Drill.’”
Matt Randolph, VP of Sentinel Energy in Oklahoma, points out that US gas exports,driven by high prices in Europe, are straining US supplies, and will raise prices for Americans. US consumers are currently paying $4 per million btu for gas, while Europe pays closer to $15.
Christine Guerrero, strategic adviser at Octane Investments told the Wall Street Journal, “U.S. producers are wanting to get paid what global producers are getting paid for natural gas.”
Exactly.
In addition, a critical shortage of gas turbine hardware leaves renewables as the fastest way to get new power on line.
Matt Randolph, VP of Sentinel Energy in Oklahoma, points out that US gas exports,driven by high prices in Europe, are straining US supplies, and will raise prices for Americans. US consumers are currently paying $4 per million btu for gas, while Europe pays closer to $15.
Christine Guerrero, strategic adviser at Octane Investments told the Wall Street Journal, “U.S. producers are wanting to get paid what global producers are getting paid for natural gas.”
Exactly.
In addition, a critical shortage of gas turbine hardware leaves renewables as the fastest way to get new power on line.
Bad faith actors like Wright may be able to slow, but can not stop, this historical shift.
The “energy transition” in the denial industry is a real thing, shifting away from making things up about our climate to become more mixed with “but renewables can’t” or the artful use of the word “energy” to only mean fossil.
But old habits die hard, especially with old denial firms – I just saw a new video this week from Heartland where they dredged up the long-dead “CO2 saturation” joke. They, of course, present no evidence, but they toss in an appeal to authority by claiming “scientists” including ones from MIT and Princeton, doubt CO2 can warm more once it (quite coincidentally) rises to just where it got to a few years back. I didn’t watch the whole thing, but pretty sure it’s the 85-year-old duo of Dick Lindzen and Will Happer they have in mind. Guys who haven’t done science using the scientific method for a long time.
There are always new humans to deceive, so while anti-green-energy is a growing part of the rearguard battle, the old lies about basic climate science are still waved around too. And I’ve looked at a couple videos Dessler’s done at his school and the comments on at least one of those showed how set in the climate disinformation is.
Hoping the economics overpowers the funded attacks against the direction we need to be going. Specific to Texas I would love to see the investors in renewables and batteries there push down the ERCOT barrier so they can export energy same as the fossil guys, but I’m not betting on that happening until perhaps somewhere in the 2030s. But the North American grid would benefit from integrating that piece of land, and the investors would make a lot selling megawatts to the Southeast markets and points west.
Nerd note: Only tangentially related, but I remember learning that the EM band that atmospheric CO2 blocks is made slightly wider than originally expected because of both the Doppler effect of CO2 molecules in motion and variations in the vibrational state of the molecular bonds.
Teslas new ad campaign will have to emphasise their new range of coal fired model 4’s
If mindlessly backing Elon gets another part of the population away from fossil-fueled vehicles, that would be a positive outcome. The rest of the public keeps getting new, fresher options to pick from beyond the narrow, stale Tesla product line.
The market will be glutted with prematurely-sold Teslas at lower prices, which will bring it into the price range of more people (without extra income for Tesla).