I spent time last week talking to Clyde Taylor, who has been a farmer for decades in Rosebush, Michigan, in the next county over to the west.
I documented the construction of Isabella wind in 2020, and those turbines now surround Clyde’s farm, although he does not have one on his land. I did ask him how the process of building that facility played out in the community.
Clyde does has a piece of a new c0-located solar farm though, and he knows quite a bit about that, because Clyde worked for years at Dow Corning, parent company of nearby Hemlock Semiconductor, the largest US producer of Polysilicon, which is the raw material for microchips as well as solar panels. Hemlock is currently undergoing a billion dollar plus expansion to feed growing demand for solar components.
Above, I interviewed a number of the most senior climate scientists for this Yale piece, I believe on the 30th anniversary of James Hansen’s 1988 Senate Testimony, where he announced that the signal of human caused climate change had been detected. How have his projections held up? Pretty well as of 2018.
More recent graph of global temps vs model predictions below, current as of March of this year.
Hansen’s predictions have thus become a target of climate denier misinformation. It began way back in 1998, when the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels – who has admitted that something like 40% of his salary comes from the fossil fuel industry – arguably committed perjury in testimony to Congress. Invited by Republicans to testify as the Kyoto Protocol climate agreement was in the works, Michaels was asked to evaluate how Hansen’s predictions were faring 10 years later.
Utilities in the developed world are stressing over how to keep up with demand from data centres and artificial intelligence searches. But globally, keeping people cool is likely to be a much bigger drain on electricity grids and a more pressing power sector challenge.
Worldwide, data centres and air conditioners are both projected to triple their electricity use over the coming decade, and will severely test utilities that are already under strain from aging grids and lengthy backlogs for new supply.
Indeed, electricity demand from data centres is projected to rise by roughly 800 terawatt hours (TWh) by 2035, from around 416 TWh in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
That is enough to power around 75 million American homes for a year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
Global demand for cooling systems, however, is set to rise by around 1,200 TWh by 2035, or nearly as much electricity as the entire Middle East consumes annually, data from think thank Ember shows.
Global warming exceeding 2 degrees Celsius above the 2001-2010 average would likely cut global food production capacity from six staple crops by nearly a quarter. Credit: Adapted from Hultgren et al. (Nature, 2025)
The good news: If you’ve been looking at those calorie restriction diets, this could help.
Of the many impacts of the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis, damage to the global food system is one of the most terrifying. But the overall impact of climate change on crops — and how much it can be offset by farmers’ adaptations — has been hard to establish and hotly debated.
The new analysis,eight years in the making, is “the first attempt to really tackle both of those problems,” said Solomon Hsiang, a study author and professor of global environmental policy at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
The scientists analyzed six crops — maize, soybeans, rice, wheat, cassava and sorghum — in more than 12,000 regions across 54 countries.Together, these crops provide more than two thirds of humanity’s calories.
They also measured how real-world farmers are adapting to climate change, from changing crop varieties to adjusting irrigation, to calculate the overall impact of global warming.
Their findings are stark. Every 1 degree Celsius the world warms above pre-industrial levels will drag down global food production by an average of 120 calories per person per day, according to the study, published Wednesday in Nature.
More than ever, need to focus on biggest bang-for-buck solutions to climate.
Big fossil gas users have the power to hold Oil/gas players accountable for their emissions, as a condition to enter those markets, Europe, and now Japan and Korea have. “Access to Market” is a giant stick that could be wielded against intransigent actors – including those in the US that want very much to increase LNG exports to those economies.
Methane emissions come from surprising places. Researchers estimate that roughly half of those in U.S. oil fields come from wells that don’t produce significant amounts of oil or gas. Their owners often rely on equipment that is in disrepair or are just trying to avoid the costs of properly sealing them and shutting them down. We need to make it worth their while to act quickly.
A big source of methane emissions is the venting and flaring of gas at oil wells that don’t have pipeline connections to capture it.
But there are tools that can help. Installing an electric actuator on a pipeline can prevent leaks and costs only about $3,500. This can save enough methane a year to equal up to 33 barrels of oil. The recovered methane can be sold as natural gas.
In the Trump era, the U.S. government almost certainly won’t be helpful in this cleanup effort. The key players are methane consumers and importers: states such as New York, Illinois, Colorado and California and countries such as Japan, South Korea and those in the European Union. They should subsidize the oil industry to start aggressive cleanup of methane leaks in 2026 and 2027 and ensure that gas coming into their economies is certified to have next to no methane emissions.
Gas and oil produced with emissions need to be subject to fees, which can pay for loans for cleanup. That gives the oil industry both the funds to plug the leaks and the market incentives to keep their pipelines and ships that transport liquefied natural gas clean.
Anas Alhajji is not necessarily one of the good guys. He’s a chief economist for NGP, a Private Equity firm. But he’s not one of the dumb guys, either.
Love how Mr. Alhajji starts out in the clip above noting that the US Secretary of Energy is executing “energy dominance” policies that have resulted in a 40 percent loss of value to the Oil/gas services company that he founded. Sensible observations about why the wild and wooly glory days of fracking are behind us.
1987, BA in Economics and Law, IUIMBS; 1992, MA in Economics and 1995, PhD in Economics, Univ. of Oklahoma. Professor of Economics: 1995-97, Univ. of Oklahoma; 1997-2001, Colorado School of Mines; 2001-08, Ohio Northern Univ., as George Patton Chair of Business and Economics. 2008, joined NGP as Chief Economist; leads the firm’s macro-analysis of oil, natural gas and related markets, and overall economic environment. Member of the board of several energy-related publications. Academician, author, researcher, speaker, with more than 800 papers, articles and columns. Has addressed various national and international organizations, institutions and conferences.
So when I stumbled across his recent lecture on fossil fuel production in the new Trump era, I was struck by how relevant his analysis was to the current state of the energy transition. “Drill baby drill” is not a thing that makes sense, and his reasoning makes that point all the more compelling.
Below, Alhajji addresses the effects of steel and aluminum tariffs (only 25 % at the time of his talk – now at 50%) will affect plans for massive expansion of LNG export terminals.
PJM has issued a Maximum Generation Alert and Load Management Alert for June 23 as hot weather continues throughout the region PJM serves to ensure the reliable delivery of electricity to its customers across 13 states and the District of Columbia.
PJM issues a Maximum Generation Emergency Alert a day in advance of conditions that may require all generators to operate at their maximum output capability.
A dangerous heat wave moves from the Midwest toward the East Coast this week, and is expected to challenge long-standing heat records. In many places, temperatures could hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit and feel even warmer when humidity is factored in. “High overnight temperatures will create a lack of overnight cooling, significantly increasing the danger,” according tothe National Weather Service. Extreme heat warnings and advisories are in effect from Maine through the Carolinas, across the Ohio Valley and down into southern states like Mississippi and Louisiana. “It’s basically everywhere east of the Rockies,” National Weather Service meteorologist Mark Gehring told The Associated Press. “That is unusual, to have this massive area of high dew points and heat.”
It’s not just a China problem, or a Europe problem, it’s an everyone problem.
Anyone who has taken my Energy Policy course should be able to pick apart the flaws in this logic.(as a gag, but also as a memory tool, I bang on the table and chant "Oil is traded on a global market!" several times during the lecture)
For those who aren't "in the know", oil is cheap to ship globally, so oil prices are basically the same at every major trading port in the world. There isn't really a possibility that prices go up a lot in China without the same change in the US – we all pay the global oil price.
Been hearing about this new form of processed wood as a construction material.
It’s not the “mass timber” construction that I’ve posted about in the past – it’s yet another step in the evolution, with properties that make it look like a potential super material, like carbon fiber. Lighter, stronger, and fire resistant, the material might be a carbon neutral, or carbon negative building material with multiple applications.
Expecting an extreme heat event in the upper Midwest starting tomorrow. PBS program is worth a look. The problem is bigger, and coming sooner, than you think. For some highly populated areas, it’s here today.
Fossil fuel emissions have been warming the Earth steadily in recent decades, but 2024, which was the hottest year on record, in retrospect appears to have been a turning point for the vast apparatus that evaluates and prepares for financial risk.
In its latest annual report on emerging insurance risks, Swiss Re, the Zurich-based reinsurance firm, focused in-depth on extreme heat – a natural catastrophe we don’t normally associate with insurers.
