On Netflix – documentary using archival footage to show how climate change became a culture war issue.
Regular readers here know I have used a lot of archival footage myself, so looking forward to viewing this one.
For now, here’s some footage of George W Bush giving a decent explanation of exactly how the greenhouse effect works.
Electricity prices and production were explicitly on the ballot in this election, and nowhere more so than New Jersey’s gubernatorial race, won by Mikie Sherrill over her Republican opponent Jack Ciattarelli.
Heatmap:
Mikie Sherrill was vulnerable. While New Jersey’s gubernatorial elections tend to favor the party not in control of the White House, no party had won three straight terms in the governor’s mansion at Drumthwacket since the Kennedy administration.
Yet the Democratic congresswoman and former Navy helicopter pilot defeated her Republican rival, former New Jersey State Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli, on Tuesday night by a comfortable margin of 56% to 43% at press time.
To get there, Sherrill had to overcome not only historical precedent but a potentially devastating kitchen table issue: New Jersey has seen its already high electricity prices rise faster than almost anywhere else in the country, with retail rates going up as much as 20% this summer alone.
It could have proved politically lethal. Heatmap polling has shown that voters blame their state government and electric utility for rising rates more than anyone currently or formerly in power in Washington, D.C. And they are worried about electricity prices — according to CNN exit polling, the top issues among New Jersey voters were taxes and the economy, with about 60% saying that electricity costs were a “major problem where they live.”
New Jersey League of Conservation Voters:
On energy policy, Ciattarelli has opposed advancing clean solutions that would lower electricity bills for working families while creating union jobs right here in New Jersey – or at least he says he opposes them now.
Before Ciattarelli’s buddy, President Donald Trump, turned against offshore wind, Ciattarelli supported offshore wind development in 2016, joining a bipartisan consensus dedicated to unlocking this critical, cost-saving, natural resource to benefit our state.
Continue reading “The Electric Election: Blue Wave Implications for Climate/Energy”Recent new fracture in the MAGA/Conservative Republican movement illustrated above, is (climate denier) Tucker Carlson sane washing Neo Nazi leading light and Trump Dinner guest Nick Fuentes.
Carlson served up cupcake questions, refusing to even pursue Fuentes profession of admiration for Joseph Stalin, and congenially infused Ne0-Nazi hatred into mainstream discourse in the same way he has platformed Putinist talking points, making him a hero on Russian state media.
When some eyebrows were raised on the choice, one of the first to Tucker’s defense Kevin Roberts, famously of the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025.
Less famously, Roberts was the former head of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a key nerve center of the fossil fuel industry’s global influence campaign.
I’ve pointed out many times the strong correlation between climate denial and racism, which seems strong enough for some ambitious PhD student to consider a thesis exploring the link between anti-science ideations and hate ideologies.
Wall Street Journal Editorial Board:
An old political poison is growing on the new right, led by podcasters and internet opportunists who are preoccupied with the Jews. It is spreading wider and faster than we thought, and it has even found an apologist in Kevin Roberts, president of the venerable Heritage Foundation.
Continue reading “MAGA the Link between Climate Denial, Racism, and Stalin Love”Good primer on the rise of publicly backed state home insurance funds in California and Florida.
Both now economic time bombs in the age of changing climate.
Super unhelpful.
Gates says above, “Shouldn’t we, in our awareness of how little generosity there is, to help measure, should we get them a measles vaccine, or should we get them a measles vaccine, or should we do some climate related activity?”
Gate’s naivety has paradoxically helped empower those who believe in neither climate science nor the science of vaccines, and an administration whose first official act was moving to starve as many of the most vulnerable people in the world.
Between where we are now and “Superbad” outcomes, there is a lot of rough territory.
UPDATE:
Stephen Schneider famously visualized a climate bell curve with “end of the world” on one side, and “good for you” on the other, being the two most unlikely outcomes.
There’s an awful lot to unpleasantness on that curve that sane people would like to avoid, for the sake of their children and other living things.
Below, good response from one of climate science’s smartest communicators, Daniel Swain:
Continue reading “Bill Gates: Climate “SuperImportant” but Not “SuperBad””You may have heard about Bill Gate’s recent memo restating his views on climate change.
It is not, as some, like President Trump, would like to suggest, a repudiation of climate science. I have no problem with a lot of what Gates says, but overall, he displays a disappointing lack of understanding of how his remarks would be interpreted and misused.
Unexpectedly, came across this new clip (above) of Elon Musk’s appearance this week on the All-In podcast, a popular tech-bro billionaire sausage fest, where Musk basically trashes Gate’s clear misunderstanding of where current clean energy technology actually is. I disagree with (unfortunately fascist) Elon’s suggestion that climate is a 50 year out problem, but he’s closer to the mark than Gates, when he suggests that the proper approach is to “lean in” to climate tech and stop subsidizing 19th century, polluting, fossil fuel technology.
Below, the Wall Street Journal’s brain dead gloating response, some key passages from Gate’s piece, and highlights of a cogent response from climate scientist Michael Mann.
The climate conformity caucus is breaking up at long last, and the latest evidence is a change of mind by none other than Bill Gates. The Microsoft billionaire turned liberal philanthropist now says the “doomsday view” about the climate is wrong, and “it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”
You mean humanity isn’t doomed? The only people for whom this is a “tough” message are the climate zealots who remain committed to the idea that rising temperatures are a totalizing emergency. They say this to intimidate politicians into giving them billions of dollars in green subsidies, along with other powers to remake the modern economy and society.
Mr. Gates now sounds like Bjorn Lomborg, the “skeptical environmentalist” whose writing often runs in these pages. Mr. Lomborg has been arguing for years that while warming temperatures are a reality, the world’s poor in particular face far more urgent challenges. He believes, as these columns have also long argued, that the best way to cope with rising temperatures is through innovation, adaptation, and policies that continue to spread economic growth and prosperity.
Now listen to the new Mr. Gates. “Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat,” he writes. “The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been.”
To be clear: Climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved, along with other problems like malaria and malnutrition. Every tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives.
Continue reading “More On Bill Gate’s MisGuided Climate Memo”Bill Gates: “They may need Air conditioning occasionally.”
Words are inadequate.
UNICEF relief donations here.
I don’t think this is the solution, looking more toward large scale fuel cell power for shipping. But cool to see creative efforts that seem to be competitive.
Worth noting, as Mark Jacobson points out, that 40 percent of all cargo shipping is transporting fossil fuels.
Cargo ships schlep thousands of millions of tons of cargo around the world every year, belching out 3% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions as they traverse the seas. But the real damage is done by the contents of their holds. By weight, 40% of maritime trade consists either of fossil fuels on their way to be burned or of chemicals derived directly from fossil fuels.
But this isn’t necessarily bad news, as the climate activist Bill McKibben pointed out in his newsletter. “Because it means that if and when we make the transition to solar power and windpower, we will not just stop pouring carbon into the atmosphere, and not just save money—we will also reduce the number of ships sailing back and forth by almost half,” McKibben wrote.
Of course, that drastic reduction in ships on the sea may not happen as McKibben envisions; after all, solar panels and wind turbines will need to be transported around the world as well. But perhaps the ships operating in that future will have found ways to run on green fuel, in which case they will have decarbonized both themselves and their cargo.
