climate change – This is Not Cool

As Winter Sets in, European Emissions Keep Dropping as Renewables Soar

European wind energy production, January 2, 2024

German emissions were at their lowest point in around 70 years, as Europe’s largest economy managed to reduce its dependence on coal faster than expected, a study published Thursday showed.

Europe’s biggest economy emitted 673 million tonnes of the greenhouse gases last year, 73 million tonnes fewer than in 2022, according to the energy think tank Agora Energiewende.

The figure was at its lowest point “since the 1950s”, Agora said in a statement, while warning that Germany had work to do to further reduce its emissions.

The drop was “largely attributable to a strong decrease in coal power generation”, Agora said.

Germany resorted to the fuel in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when Moscow cut off gas supplies to the European giant. But since then, Berlin has managed to pare back its use significantly.

Electricity generation from renewable sources was over 50 percent of the total in 2023 for the first time, while coal’s share dropped to 26 percent from 34 percent, according to figures published by the federal network agency on Wednesday.

The cut in coal use accounted for a reduction of 46 million tonnes in CO₂ emissions, the think tank estimated.

The renewables record brought Germany closer to its target to produce 80 percent of its electricity from wind and solar by 2030, Agora chief Simon Mueller said.

“When it comes to the generation of electricity, we are on a very good path,” Economy Minister Robert Habeck said in a statement.

Bloomberg:

Strong wind generation and low demand during the holiday period sent electricity prices below zero in Germany, while wholesale markets turned negative for some hours in France, Denmark and Britain.

Renewables Only Getting Started

Canary Media:

Renewable energy already beats fossil fuels on cost globally — and according to analysts, the gap is only going to grow.

By 2030, technology improvements could slash today’s prices by a quarter for wind and by half for solar, according to the authors of a recent report from clean energy think tank RMI. (Canary Media is an independent affiliate of RMI.)

These remarkable and ongoing cost declines have made clean energy so attractive that it now outcompetes fossil fuels for new investment: 62percent of global energy investment is expected to flow to clean energy technologies this year.

That cash is helping push renewables to new heights. According to estimates from the International Energy Agency, global clean energy capacity is expected to jump a jaw-dropping 107 gigawatts to more than 440 gigawatts this year — its largest increase ever.

What we’re living in “is an energy technology revolution,” said report co-author Kingsmill Bond, an energy strategist at RMI. It’s obvious from the data, yet the point is often lost in “a consistent drumbeat of counternarratives” about how difficult it is, and will be, to leave fossil fuels behind, he added.

“U.S. fossil-fuel demand peaked 15 years ago,” Bond said. “This is happening; people have just missed it.”

Renewable energy costs have fallen, and are projected to keep falling, because these technologies are riding “learning curves”: For every cumulative doubling of the deployed tech, its cost declines by a quantifiable percentage that varies by technology. Learning curves are a robust phenomenon that’s been observed for over 50 kinds of tech. Over the past 40 years, the average learning rate has been 20% for solar and 13% for wind.

Greenland’s Hairline Fractures Magnify Melting Mystery

Alun Hubbard is one of the hardest of hard core glaciologist, and a friend that I’ve spent some time with in Greenland over the years. As the pictures richly illustrate here, he knows ice, up close and personal.

Alun Hubbard in The Conversation:

I’m striding along the steep bank of a raging white-water torrent, and even though the canyon is only about the width of a highway, the river’s flow is greater than that of London’s Thames. The deafening roar and rumble of the cascading water is incredible – a humbling reminder of the raw power of nature.

As I round a corner, I am awestruck at a completely surreal sight: A gaping fissure has opened in the riverbed, and it is swallowing the water in a massive whirlpool, sending up huge spumes of spray. This might sound like a computer-generated scene from a blockbuster action movie – but it’s real.

A moulin is forming right in front of me on the Greenland ice sheet. Only this really shouldn’t be happening here – current scientific understanding doesn’t accommodate this reality.

As a glaciologist, I’ve spent 35 years investigating how meltwater affects the flow and stability of glaciers and ice sheets.

This gaping hole that’s opening up at the surface is merely the beginning of the meltwater’s journey through the guts of the ice sheet. As it funnels into moulins, it bores a complex network of tunnels through the ice sheet that extend many hundreds of meters down, all the way to the ice sheet bed.

When it reaches the bed, the meltwater decants into the ice sheet’s subglacial drainage system – much like an urban stormwater network, though one that is constantly evolving and backing up. It carries the meltwater to the ice margins and ultimately ends up in the ocean, with major consequences for the thermodynamics and flow of the overlying ice sheet.

Scenes like this and new research into the ice sheet’s mechanics are challenging traditional thinking about what happens inside and under ice sheets, where observations are extremely challenging yet have stark implications. They suggest that Earth’s remaining ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are far more vulnerable to climate warming than models predict, and that the ice sheets may be destabilizing from inside.

Texas is New Ground Zero for Skyrocketing Home Insurance Prices

Dallas Morning News (Paywall):

There’s no secret that Texas has a housing affordability crisis. Too few houses built after the pandemic, high land costs and mortgage rates and burgeoning population are among key factors.

Less evident is the increasing difficulty of homeowners to obtain affordable insurance. And that’s the reason for Texas policymakers to think proactively about the repercussions of extreme weather and outdated building and land-use policies on affordability and insurability.

Insurance is all about anticipating risks, and Texas’ staggering population growth and weather patterns have added new levels of risk. Decades ago, hail would land in an empty field. Now hail will hit a $500,000 house and $45,000 car, and an insurer will have financial exposure.

This year, Texas encountered 16 weather or climate disaster events with losses of more than $1 billion, the highest yearly count since 1980. As a result, Texas Department of Insurance statistics show that homeowner premiums rose 10.8% in 2022, the highest percentage increase since 12.9% in 2012

To reduce their financial exposure this year, some carriers no longer accept new homeowners insurance business in North Texas, are choosing not to renew existing policies or are linking homeowners insurance with bundled auto policies, according to a recent Dallas Morning News story. Other companies are increasing deductibles or changing coverage terms, potentially leaving unsuspecting homeowners on the wrong side of a claim.

Even with increased weather risks in the hurricane-prone Texas Gulf and other weather risks elsewhere in the state, Texas is a better risk market than California and Florida, where insurers are bailing out. Still, Texas ranks eighth in the U.S. for overall climate vulnerability, according to Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M University research. And that’s during this year when hurricanes didn’t queue up on the Texas Coast as they often do.

This should be a wake-up call that more frequent severe weather patterns are in the state’s future and could make some regions uninsurable or prohibitively expensive. Unfortunately, Texas’ disaster planning focuses on preparedness and recovery when it also needs to develop comprehensive plans to adjust building and land-use practices to offset the economic impact of bad weather on homeowners and insurers.

US Real Estate May be Overvalued due to Climate Risk

A Staten Island neighborhood, pre and post Hurricane Sandy. First Street Foundation photo

I posted recently about newly identifed “Climate Abandonment” areas, neighborhoods identified in a new peer reviewed study, where residents have moved out due to increasing local climate risk.
The most common risk factor is flooding, and typically, these residents don’t move very far – they want to hold on to family structures, jobs, community – but it means that within some areas, even relatively prosperous areas, there are pockets of at-risk housing that could be, or already has been, devalued – and those residents left behind will find their holdings reduced in value.
A separate study from Environmental Defense Fund, published earlier this year in Nature Climate Change, showed that significant blocks of real estate may be overvalued due to as yet unpriced climate risks.

Environmental Defense Fund:

A new study published in the journal Nature Climate Changeexamines the potential cost of unrealized flood risk in the American real estate market, finding that flood zone property prices are overvalued by US$121–US$237 billion. Authored by researchers from Environmental Defense Fund, First Street Foundation, Resources for the Future, the Federal Reserve, and several academic institutions, the study also examined how unpriced flood risk throughout the country could impact communities and local governments, finding low-income households particularly vulnerable to home value deflation.

“Increasing flood risk under climate change is creating a bubble that threatens the stability of the US housing market. As we’ve seen in California in the last few weeks, these aren’t hypotheticals and the risk is more extensive than expected—and that risk carries an enormous cost,” said Dr. Jesse Gourevitch, a postdoctoral fellow at Environmental Defense Fund and lead author of the study. “These risks are largely unaccounted for in property transactions, encouraging development in flood-prone areas. Accurately pricing the costs of flooding in home values can support adaptation to flood risk, but may leave many worse off.”

Currently, more than 14.6 million properties in the United States face at least a 1% annual probability of flooding, with expected annual damages to residential properties exceeding US$32 billion. Increasing frequency and severity of flooding under climate change is predicted to increase the number of properties exposed to flooding by 11% and average annual losses by at least 26% by 2050. The increasing cost of flooding under climate change has led to growing concerns that housing markets are mispricing these risks, thus causing a real estate bubble to develop.

New Research – US Already has 3 Million Climate Migrants

Bloomberg:

Over the last two decades, as San Antonio and surrounding Bexar County, Texas, grew by more than 600,000 people, some 17% of the city’s blocks experienced a decrease in population.

That delta is largely due to flood risk that climate change exacerbates, according to a new report by the First Street Foundation, a data nonprofit with the mission of communicating climate hazards.

Bexar — sitting in a swath of Texas known as Flash Flood Alley — is part of a national trend of hyper-local migration to avoid flooding, which is hollowing out blocks within cities, the report finds. The research is based on a model, published Monday in the journal Nature Communications, that looks at population changes using granular US Census Bureau data and controls for factors besides flooding, such as nearby job opportunities and school quality.

In all, First Street finds, 3.2 million Americans moved away from high-flood-risk areas between 2000 and 2020. The full extent of the migration has been hidden, however, since most people didn’t move far.

“There appear to be clear winners and losers in regard to the impact of flood risk on neighborhood-level population change,” Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications research at First Street, said in a statement. “The downstream implications of this are massive and impact property values, neighborhood composition and commercial viability, both positively and negatively.”

The analysis also extrapolates these trends 30 years into the future, predicting that vulnerable areas will continue to lose population.

In the US, the frequency of disasters causing at least $1 billion in damages has gone from roughly three a year during the 1980s to an annual average of 17.8 over the period 2018 to 2022, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Global warming has knock-on effects that exacerbate flooding in particular, including sea level rise, more ferocious hurricanes and more frequent and extended downpours.

Below, a Detroit area local news report about recent flooding in Southeast Michigan. No mention of the word “climate”, but neighbors talk about floods becoming more frequent, area disaster manager mentions “significant rainfall that we’re not used to seeing.”

Can the Cowboy State Keep Coal King by Capturing Carbon?

Carbon capture would appear to be delusional just based on the scale, which most folks don’t appreciate. For the moment, Wyoming’s Governor seems to be placating enemies on the right as he pushes green energy, but holds up carbon capture as a sop to the powerful coal industry.

Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis:

“As our report shows, CCS has been around for decades, mostly serving the oil industry through enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Around 80–90% of all captured carbon in the gas sector is used for EOR, which itself leads to more CO2 emissions.”

About three-quarters of the CO2 captured annually by multi-billion-dollar CCUS facilities, roughly 28 million tonnes (MT) out of 39MT total capture capacity globally, is reinjected and sequestered in oil fields to push more oil out of the ground.

The International Energy Agency says annual carbon capture capacity needs to increase to 1.6 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2030 to align with a net zero by 2050 pathway.

“In addition to being wildly unrealistic as a climate solution, based on historical trajectories, much of this captured carbon will be used for enhanced oil recovery,” says Robertson.

What Do Climate Scientists and Midwest Farmers Have in Common? Both Under Attack by Fossil Fuel Interests

In my travels and interviews with midwestern farmers over the last 6 years, I have been continually struck by the similarities of the stories I am hearing of harassment, intimidation, onerous FOIA requests, reputational slurs in local media, and even physical threats they and local governing boards have received when they sought to site clean energy on their land, and in their communities.

The similarities to accounts of scientists like Michael Mann, (above) Malcom Hughes, Ben Santer, James Hansen, and others are not a coincidence. As Mann wrote in his book The New Climate War , as the fossil fuel industry gradually lost the fight to obscure the science of climate change, they moved from climate denial to solutions denial.

A decade ago, one of the primary bad actors in the attacks on scientists, the “American Traditions Institute”, which had been leading attacks on scientists, began to focus on mobilizing right wing extremists against what the coal industry then recognized was an existential threat, the suddenly-economically-competitive wind industry, and the prospect that solar would soon follow.
ATI has been rebranded as “E&E Legal” in recent years, and continued from the same playbook.

Guardian:

A network of ultra-conservative groups is ramping up an offensive on multiple fronts to turn the American public against wind farms and Barack Obama’s energy agenda.

A number of rightwing organisations, including Americans for Prosperity, which is funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, are attacking Obama for his support for solar and wind power. The American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), which also has financial links to the Kochs, has drafted bills to overturn state laws promoting wind energy.

Now a confidential strategy memo seen by the Guardian advises using “subversion” to build a national movement of wind farm protesters.

The strategy proposal was prepared by a fellow of the American Tradition Institute (ATI) – although the thinktank has formally disavowed the project.

This Carbon Cap Solution is Thick as a Brick

I have questions.

Wall Street Journal:

American Airlines is joining the race to remove carbon from the atmosphere, tapping a novel method that is much cheaper than many existing approaches and could boost the fledgling industry.

The airline company is purchasing credits from a startup that uses bricks of carbon-absorbing plant material to sharply lower costs, potentially making carbon removal a widely used climate solution earlier than anticipated. It is one of the first carbon-removal deals by an airline and shows how some of the biggest corporate emitters are trying to find new ways to cut their environmental footprint.

“We’re excited about this new technology because it is within reach for us,” Jill Blickstein, American’s vice president of sustainability, said in an interview.

Graphyte, the startup working with American, collects agricultural waste products such as sawdust or tree bark that naturally absorb carbon dioxide. It compresses that dried biomass into shoebox-size bricks and seals it using a special barrier to prevent the plant matter from decomposing and releasing carbon. The bricks are then buried and monitored using an embedded tracer substance to ensure they are locking away carbon.

Graphyte charges a fraction of the price companies pay for direct-air capture, the most heavily funded carbon-removal technology. That process—which employs giant fan-like devices to suck up air and separate the carbon—isn’t expected to be deployed at a large scale for at least a few years and costs an average of about $675 a metric ton, according to data provider CDR.fyi.

By contrast, Graphyte is charging American Airlines $100 a metric ton to remove 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide. That is the price the U.S. Energy Department and many industry executives say is the crucial threshold for broadening access to carbon removal.

New Video: Climate Action is our Moon Shot

On this day, 60 years ago, May 25, 1961, John Kennedy challenged America to put a man on the moon before the end of that decade.

Though the technologies needed to achieve that goal had only been envisioned, not yet built, bold expert engineers thought the goal was within reach, and that the alternative, of ceding Cold War technological supremacy to the Soviet Union, was not acceptable.

Similarly today, President Biden has set goals for climate action that some feel are too optimistic. In our case the technologies needed are fully available already, with more improvements sure to come.