Month: December 2025

Research: Antarctic Melt Could Save AMOC, But Wait…

New Scientist:

While the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is expected to slow or even collapse the Atlantic Ocean current that keeps Europe warm, meltwater from West Antarctica could preserve this vital current.

But it won’t be enough to prevent major changes in the climate. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) would still decline by 60 per cent, and its full recovery would take 3000 years.

“I would tend to say, don’t be so quick to say that the AMOC is going to collapse,” says Sacha Sinet at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “But the things I show here do not change much what will happen for the next century. Probably you will not be alive to tell if the AMOC was stabilised or not by West Antarctica.”

The AMOC is a system of currents that brings warm surface water from the tropics towards northern Europe, where it cools and sinks before flowing south to Antarctica. The current carries 1.2 petawatts of heat – equivalent to the energy generated by 1 million power plants – that keeps Europe much warmer than Labrador or Siberia at the same latitude. But light, fresh meltwater from Greenland’s ice is expected to hinder the sinking of salty, dense AMOC water, slowing down the current.

If the AMOC collapsed, winter cold snaps could reach almost -50°C (-58°F) in northern Europe. This week, Iceland declared AMOC shutdown an “existential” security threat. Sea levels would also be higher along the US east coast, and Africa could suffer more severe droughts.

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Energy, AI and Intelligence

Above, former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt has some sobering news about the energy demands of AI, and the urgency to stay ahead of China in this race.

29 Gigawatts by 2027, 67 more GW by 2030.

I don’t want to live in a world where China dominates in AI. We have to find a way to site necessary infrastructure in a way that supports the grid and keeps rates manageable. I worry that opportunistic politicians on both the left and right are seizing on this issue, amplifying misinformation rather than seeking solutions.

Below, example of the challenge – Illinois state agencies have warned about increasing Data center demands.

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Rebutting Climate Denial’s Golden Oldies, Again and Again

Over the last 7 or 8 years my work has evolved from debunking climate denial misinformation, to debunking misinformation about climate solutions, and working, (with some success) to encourage more siting of clean energy here in the upper midwest. Now it looks like I’m being dragged back to the bad old days.

We’re in a new age of climate denial, and as disgusting as it is, we are still seeing the golden oldies recycled again and again.
So in this case, I had to dig out one of my more detailed videos from the Yale Climate Connections series and repost it
It’s a pretty detailed explainer of how you create and maintain a multi-century temperature record, reconciling measurements from buckets tossed over the side of sailing ships, all the way through satellites gliding overhead.
Climate deniers tell each other that temperature records have been “adjusted” and immediately assume they they are discovering a by the globalist climate cabal.
The truth is more interesting.

Science Breakthrough of the Year: The Rise of Clean Energy

As I was saying..

Science:

This year, renewables surpassed coal as a source of electricity worldwide, and solar and wind energy grew fast enough to cover the entire increase in global electricity use from January to June, according to energy think tank Ember. In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared at the United Nations that his country will cut its carbon emissions by as much as 10% in a decade, not by using less energy, but by doubling down on wind and solar. And solar panel imports in Africa and South Asia have soared, as people in those regions realized rooftop solar can cheaply power lights, cellphones, and fans. To many, the continued growth of renewables now seems unstoppable—a prospect that has led Science to name the renewable energy surge its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year.

That promise comes against a backdrop of downbeat news, highlighted at the U.N. climate meeting in Belém, Brazil, in November. Global carbon emissions continue to creep up as countries fall short of cuts pledged in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C—always a long shot—now seems completely out of reach. But Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist at the University of Oxford and a climate blogger, is among those who see hope. Thanks to renewables, the long-awaited decline of fossil fuels is in sight, she says. China is “just, just on the cusp … of actually starting to push out coal,” and fossil fuel use in the rest of the world is likely to follow.

Continue reading “Science Breakthrough of the Year: The Rise of Clean Energy”

DOE Orders Another Obsolete Coal Plant to Stay Open

Interior Secretary Doug Bergum tweeting out his love for “beautiful coal”.

Utility Dive:

The U.S. Department of Energy on Tuesday ordered TransAlta, a Canadian independent power producer based in Calgary, to continue running its 730-MW, coal-fired Centralia Unit 2 in Washington past its planned retirement at the end of this month.

The DOE has issued a series of similar orders under the Federal Power Act section 202(c) to keep two power plants in Michigan and Pennsylvania from retiring as planned.

Lawsuits are pending in federal court to overturn those orders, which affect Consumer Energy’s majority-owned coal-fired 1,420-MW J.H. Campbell power plant in West Olive, Michigan, and Constellation Energy’s two 380-MW gas- and oil-fired units at its Eddystone power plant near Philadelphia. In part, the suits say DOE failed to show there are emergencies affecting the power systems in the Upper Midwest or the Mid-Atlantic region.

The reliability impacts of retiring the Campbell and Eddystone units was vetted by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and the PJM Interconnection, respectively, before the grid operators approved the shutdowns.

Continue reading “DOE Orders Another Obsolete Coal Plant to Stay Open”

So Far, Big Oil is a Hard Pass on Trump’s Venezuela Venture

Yee haw.

Politico:

The Trump administration is asking U.S. oil companies if they’re interested in returning to Venezuela once leader Nicolás Maduro is gone, four people familiar with the discussions told POLITICO.

And so far, the answer is a hard “no.”

The administration’s outreach to the industry, previously unreported, is the latest sign the White House is dreaming of a post-Maduro future for Venezuela — and how the world’s oil markets are both helping and hindering that goal.

The markets, glutted with supply and with prices at nearly five-year lows, are giving President Donald Trump an unusually free hand to tighten military pressure on the South American OPEC member, much the way they largely shrugged off U.S. and Israeli missile strikes on Iran in June. But those prices are also way too low to entice companies to take the risk of pouring huge investments into the crumbling Venezuelan oil facilities that former strongman Hugo Chávez seized decades ago, industry officials and analysts said.

The U.S. benchmark oil price was around $56 a barrel Wednesday afternoon, the lowest since January 2021. That means Trump has only limited reason to worry that an attack on Venezuela would send gasoline prices spiraling upward— but it also means U.S. oil companies have better investment options elsewhere.

“There has been the genesis of an outreach with the industry on the potential of reentering Venezuela,” one person familiar with the discussion said. “But frankly, there’s not a lot of interest from the industry, in light of lower oil prices and more attractive fields globally.”

Continue reading “So Far, Big Oil is a Hard Pass on Trump’s Venezuela Venture”

Reliance on Gas Associated with Higher Electric Prices

Ryan Wiser – Lawrence Berkeley Lab

Nice presentation this week in Lansing by Ryan Wiser of Lawrence Berkeley Lab.

Among the key points worth repeating – the price of fossil gas is a major driver, maybe THE major drivers of higher electric prices.

The alternative story about prices is that it comes from increased demand, but at least for now, the LBNL data does not show that – states that had more demand growth often had lower prices, or lower price growth.

Over the past 5 years, states with the highest
load growth generally saw retail electricity
prices decline in real terms – Ryan Wiser, Lawrence Berkeley Lab
Continue reading “Reliance on Gas Associated with Higher Electric Prices”

Scientists, Politicians React to Threat of Climate Center Closure

Daniel Swain is one of our most valuable players – as a frontline atmospheric scientist who is also one of the most fluent communicators you will ever meet.

On Tuesday, after word that the Trump administration is ordering the closure arguably the world’s premier climate research center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, Swain took to his YouTube channel, which he often uses for what he calls “Office Hour” Q and A sessions, and shared his reactions.
He was a bit rushed, because ironically, at that moment, the area near his home was under threat of imminent Pre-emptive electric shut off due to the unseasonable warm, dry and windy conditions creating a fire threat.

At the moment, NCAR’s future is up in the air, and the reaction from scientist and lawmakers has been extremely negative toward the closure. With Trump’s personal influence rapidly fading, there is some hope this initiative will be turned back.

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MAGA’s EV Self Own. Big Job Losses, and a Bleak Future

I have a friend with a long history of union activism with the UAW.
I recall him shaking his head about the lack of awareness of the younger workers about the importance of the union, and the threat posed by the Trump administration to their jobs, pensions, health care, and security.
A lot of those who voted for Trump have now lost their jobs.

The Trump administration’s turn away from EV competition and back to serving their Oil industry donors will cost US automakers whatever competitive position they might have had with the fastest growing auto markets in the world, now being served by China with EVs.

The lesson for the developing world of the Ukraine invasion, and now the US threats against Venezuela, is to shed their dependency on foreign fuel sources, and move toward EVs that can be powered with entirely homegrown renewable energy sources.
Dagger to US global leadership.

Good work, MAGA, auto workers.
Putting yourself out of a job. But at least you can hate EVs.

Ford trying to make lemonade by pivoting battery plants to serve energy storage markets, but meanwhile, thousands of workers will be laid off.

Electrek:

Ford is jumping into the battery energy storage business, betting that booming demand from data centers and the electric grid can absorb the EV battery capacity it says it’s not using.

Continue reading “MAGA’s EV Self Own. Big Job Losses, and a Bleak Future”