environment: electrical grid electricity sustainability
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Year 4, Month 11, Day 4: Careful With That Axe….
The Boston Herald showcases the local ubermensch of National Grid:
The utility is “fundamentally changing how we operate” to address four areas of the global energy challenge: aging infrastructure, a revolution in energy supplies, extreme weather conditions, and an aging workforce and skills gap, according to Holliday.
The revolution in energy sources is being driven by aging power stations and wires, a growing realization of the impacts of climate and the need to reduce carbon emissions, and shale gas, according to Holliday.
The impacts of increasing extreme weather on National Grid were evident in 2011, when it “learned some hard lessons” responding to Hurricane Irene and an October nor’easter. “Our … restoration efforts were, frankly, disappointing,” Holliday said. “Our planning didn’t account for the magnitude of the logistical challenges hitting our electricity and gas networks simultaneously, across three states and numerous regions. We now look at future scenarios, which include events we haven’t seen before, to make sure we are better prepared.”
We all better hope so. October 25:
If we were serious about preparing for the future, Americans would be doing more to restore our crumbling electrical grid. As demand rises and infrastructure deteriorates, we can expect to see more system failures over the coming decades. Factor in the extreme weather brought by planetary climate change and you have a recipe for disaster.
Our current distribution system was built when we believed that energy from fossil fuels was both unlimited and cheap — two assumptions that have been effectively disproven. Oil and coal are revealed to be very expensive indeed once we include the costs of externalities like environmental damage, public health impacts, and the slow-motion catastrophe of global heating. Revamping the power grid from the bottom up with an emphasis on renewable energy sources — while focusing tightly on conservation, flexibility, and system-wide resilience — will save us trillions of dollars in the coming decades.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists farming media irresponsibility scientific consensus sustainability
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Year 4, Month 11, Day 3: They Asked Me For Some Collateral, So I Pulled Down My Pants
Popular Science notes the existence of Iowa:
At the Iowa Climate Science Educators’ Forum last week, a group of more than 150 scientists representing 36 colleges and universities around Iowa released a statement of action concerning future climate change. Calling climate change a “rising challenge to Iowa agriculture,” this year’s Iowa Climate Statement says that changing weather patterns and an increase in extreme events has put the state’s ability to grow food at risk.
The researchers, who gathered at Drake University in Des Moines, note that Iowa has vacillated between two weather extremes over the past few years. The state went from widespread drought in 2011 and 2012 to the wettest spring on record in 2013 and back to drought this summer. Last year, the group’s report focused mainly on how climate change makes extreme drought more likely.
Iowa is the nation’s top corn and soybean producer, so this state’s problems are really every state’s problems. Combined, Iowa and Illinois grow about a third of the corn in the U.S. The scientists are calling for individual farms and the USDA to work to make the land more resilient in the face of climate change. They wrote:
Iowa’s soils and agriculture remain our most important economic resources, but these resources are threatened by climate change. It is time for all Iowans to work together to limit future climate change and make Iowa more resilient to extreme weather. Doing so will allow us to pass on to future generations our proud tradition of helping to feed the world.
I keep recycling this letter. It’s fast and easy. October 24:
It’s small comfort for Iowa’s farmers to know they’re not alone in facing the troublesome consequences of global climate change. Agriculturists everywhere — midwestern factory farmers and Bangladeshi peasants alike — are reluctantly confronting a future of unpredictable and extreme weather, disrupted planting timetables, and ever-more uncertain harvests.
There are many lessons to take away from this. Obviously, it is essential that the world’s industrialized civilizations begin drastic reductions in greenhouse emissions; there’s no sense in making a disaster even worse. In addition, we need to relearn that diversity is essential to the preservation of our food systems. As the Irish potato famine demonstrated, monocropped agriculture will always eventually fall prey to ecological and environmental disruptions, with disastrous consequences.
There may be differences of opinion about the best way to prepare for the rapidly accelerating greenhouse effect — but one thing is absolutely certain: the first step to addressing any problem is to recognize its existence. Politicians and media figures who deny these new climatic realities are nurturing the seeds of a humanitarian catastrophe.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 4, Month 11, Day 2: And The Horse You Rode In On…
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel offers Senator Ron Johnson an inconvenient truth or three:
This should not come as a surprise, but it appears that a refusal to recognize reality may actually hurt politicians with voters.
Case in point: Wisconsin’s own Sen. Ron Johnson and his stance on climate change.
Last summer, an ad campaign by the League of Conservation Voters targeted several federal lawmakers, Johnson among them, who don’t believe that human activities are a primary cause of climate change. Johnson, who once attributed climate change to sunspots in a meeting with the Journal Sentinel Editorial Board, has steadfastly voted against regulation of emissions that contribute to climate change.
After its ad campaign, the league did a poll of constituent attitudes, in Johnson’s case in the Green Bay market. The results, reported this week by The Washington Post’s Plum Line blog, showed that a “14-point increase in those who feel less favorable toward Johnson based on what they have heard about him; an eight-point increase in his job disapproval; and an eight-point boost in constituents believing Johnson is out of step on climate change.”
Johnson’s Green Bay constituents are right. The consensus among top climate scientists is clear and has been for years. Climate change is happening. Human activity plays a huge role in that. The consequences of doing nothing could be dire and expensive. Johnson is just flat-out wrong.
I’d love to see more like this. October 23:
While conservative politicians and media figures have perpetrated many assaults on reason and factuality over the years, none offers greater potential for damage than their steady stream of disinformation on global climate change. Many right-wing celebrities may once have known the difference between real and spurious science — but after years of peddling superficially plausible nonsense, no longer recognize the distinction. Unfortunately for Wisconsin and the nation, Senator Ron Johnson is such a man.
The greenhouse effect was discovered well over a century ago, and scientists have been warning us about its consequences since the Eisenhower administrations. It testifies to the power of fossil-fuel industries in the world economy that we’ve avoided any meaningful regulation of CO2 emissions for just as long. But the laws of physics trump the laws of a nation, and climatic reality is catching up with deniers like Senator Johnson. And to the rest of us.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: heroes media irresponsibility responsibility sustainability timescales
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Year 4, Month 11, Day 1: My Heart Went Boom
Time Magazine’s Bryan Walsh finds a story that shows we clever apes are too distractable to get ourselves out of this fix:
…it shouldn’t be surprising that a new study in Nature Climate Change confirms the fact that the kind of long-term cooperation demanded by effective climate policy is going to be even more challenging than we thought.
American and German researchers led by Jennifer Jacquet of New York University put together a collective-risk group experiment that is centered around climate change. Here’s how it worked. Each subject in groups with six participants was given a $55 operating fund. The experiment went 10 rounds, and during each round, they were allowed to choose one of three options: invest $0, $2.75 or $5.50 into a climate account. The participants were told that the total amount contributed would go to fund an advertisement on climate change in a German newspaper. If at the end of the 10 rounds, the group reached a target of $165 — or about $27 per person — they were considered to have successfully averted climate change, and each participant was given an additional $60 dollars. (If the numbers seem rough, it’s because I’m converting from euros — the currency used in the experiment — and rounding off.) If the group failed to reach the $165 target, there was a 90% probability that they wouldn’t get the additional payout. As a group, members would be better off if they collectively invested enough to reach that $165 target — otherwise they wouldn’t get the payout — but individually, members could benefit by keeping their money to themselves while hoping the rest of the group would pay enough to reach the target. (That’s the so-called free-rider phenomenon, and it’s a major challenge for climate policy.)
Yes….but. October 22:
Yes, humans are notoriously short-sighted and selfish, so the recent New York University study suggesting that our collective inability to think in the long term bodes poorly for our species’ survival on a climate-changed world is unsurprising. But there’s more to it than one study can possibly indicate. If that same study were performed on people who had fully educated themselves about the generational impacts of climate change, the results would be quite different.
John Adams famously averred his readiness to study politics and war so that his children could learn mathematics and philosophy, allowing their children in turn to study painting, poetry, music, and architecture. Our capacity for similar behavior hinges on our full understanding of the crisis — which should remind our news and opinion media that their profession should not elevate fleeting but profitable scandals over their responsibility to foster the Jeffersonian ideal of a “well-informed citizenry.”
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility economics sustainability
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 31: I Contain Multitudes
The Miami Herald runs an AP story on how labor unions are trying to work with environmental groups:
PITTSBURGH — The nation’s largest labor unions are ready and willing to help fight global warming, but are cautioning environmentalists that workers need new clean-energy jobs before existing industries are shut down.
The four-day Power Shift conference in Pittsburgh is training young people to stop coal mining, fracking for oil and gas, and nuclear power, but organizers also want workers to join the battle against climate change.
Union leaders say their workers want to help build a new, green economy.
“Global warming is here, and we can work and get it fixed together,” United Steel Workers president Leo Gerard said in a Friday night address at Power Shift.
But other labor groups note that while they share the same long-term clean energy goals with environmentalists, there are challenges.
“It’s not just as simple as ‘No Fracking'” or other bans, said Tahir Duckett, an AFL/CIO representative who spoke at a Saturday Power Shift panel that sought to promote dialogue between environmentalists and workers.
Duckett said workers need new jobs to make a transition to clean energy, noting that shutting down industries such as coal “can turn entire communities into a ghost town. We cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend like people aren’t fighting for their very survival.”
This is an interesting conundrum. October 21:
When labor unions say that having new clean-energy occupations in place is a prerequisite for ending old dirty-energy jobs, they oversimplify complex economic realities — and overcomplicate simple environmental ones.
Our country’s economy is largely founded on the (ultimately false) notion that fossil-fuels are cheap energy sources. The extractive industries that bring us oil and coal are some of the most profitable in the world, and their corporate leaders among the planet’s most influential people. As such, they have striven to protect their own interests by blocking public sector investment in renewable energy sources. New “green jobs” are the harbingers of a different economic model built on sustainable principles, and while most of us think that’s desirable, there are powerful forces working against such a transformation; it’s going to take time.
On the other hand is the irrefutable fact that the planet is teetering on the brink of runaway climate change triggered by our civilization’s greenhouse emissions. If we can’t turn this around, our concerns about employment are going to be supplanted by far more elemental worries: surviving on an Earth turned chaotic and hostile. There is no time to spare.
To resolve this contradiction, we must recognize its existence.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists false equivalency idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 30: I’m Looking Through You
The Denver Post’s Vincent Carroll addresses the LA Times’ recent decision to exclude denialists’ letters:
Most skeptics of any sophistication recognize that global warming has occurred and appreciate that some or much of it in recent decades could be caused by human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. But they tend to believe, for example, that there are more uncertainties in the science than generally conceded, that the relative dearth of warming over the past 15 or more years is a blow to the models and that the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has demonstrated consistent bias in favor of alarmist interpretations.
Surely readers should be free to debate such points.
For that matter, are there really no properly credentialed experts who question whether humans are largely responsible for the warming since the 1970s, as the IPCC maintains? Of course there are — and it would be editorial arrogance to exclude their views.
Climatologist Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville declares on his blog that “evidence from my group’s government-funded research … suggests global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution.”
Is that a factual inaccuracy or simply a minority view among climatologists?
Is it factually inaccurate to declare “we don’t know” how large the human contribution to warming is, as Judith Curry, professor of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told an NPR reporter in August?
I’ve criticized Republican candidates who dismiss the mainstream view of global warming as a hoax, and no doubt will again, but I’m also reluctant to shut down reader discussion on issues in which most scientists may share similar views.
Where would it end? What other debates raging among our readers do the arbiters of truth believe we should silence?
Mealy-mouthed. October 20:
Even the most lenient opinion page would be unlikely to print a letter on a medical topic from an advocate of the medieval theory of “humours,” and media outlets don’t feel obliged to allot space to arguments for such regressive or unscientific viewpoints as geocentric cosmology, a flat Earth, or the moral acceptability of slavery.
It’s in this context the the LA Times’ recent decision to reject letters denying the reality of anthropogenic global warming must be understood. While climatologists disagree about particular climate forcing mechanisms or the relative severity of specific effects, there’s no longer any scientific argument about the human causes of climate change. Outlying views will always exist, but this is no reason to treat single dissenters as worthy of equivalent airtime or column inches — especially since, in media handling of climate issues, these contrarian opinions invariably come from the same individuals (Spencer, Curry, and Lindzen).
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes carbon tax corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots Koch Brothers
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 29: Jump Like A Willys
The Palm Beach Daily News reports on Bill Koch, who is (surprise!) an asshole:
As someone who states that he has energy in his DNA, billionaire oil-and-gas mogul Bill Koch says those who think carbon is bad should get a reality check.
Koch addressed an audience of 600 on Thursday for the Palm Beach Chamber of Commerce breakfast meeting at The Breakers, peppering his remarks with off-color jokes and self-deprecating humor.
“Eighty-four percent of the energy used in the world comes from carbon,” he said, explaining that decayed primeval forests below the Earth’s surface are the source of the coal, oil and gas that powers the global economy.
Those who call for taxes on carbon dioxide emissions are “on LSD,” Koch said, making the point that humans produce their share of carbon dioxide naturally and taxes aren’t levied on them. He suggested planting trees as the most efficient way to counter higher carbon levels.
The reliance on fossil fuels is not going away, he said, noting that coal is relatively low in price, that oil has been “pretty cheap” until recently and that there is an abundance of natural gas, available at a price almost competitive with coal.
Spoken like a man who’s never tripped. October 19:
When arch-conservative energy bazillionaire Bill Koch claims carbon-tax advocates are “on LSD,” he’s offering powerful evidence of his own detachment from reality. Yes, human beings produce CO2, and yes, planting more trees is an excellent policy. But the plain fact is that industrial civilization’s carbon dioxide emissions are accelerating, and unless we slow them down, all the trees we can possibly plant aren’t going to scrub our atmosphere rapidly enough to mitigate catastrophic global heating. The greenhouse effect is a scientifically demonstrated phenomenon discovered over 150 years ago and confirmed by countless studies; Mr. Koch’s sneering dismissal of climate science is based only on ideology and has no foundation in fact.
Fossil-fuel advocates like the Koch brothers ignore expensive “externalities” for which we (or our descendants) will eventually have to pay: pollution, health impacts, massive environmental cleanups, global climate change, and a great many expensive and pointless wars. If coal and oil are “cheap” forms of energy, then high-interest credit cards are a source of free money.
Bill Koch’s glib denialism demonstrates that vast quantities of money distort reality far more effectively than any drug.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture farming media irresponsibility sustainability
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 28: We’re Paying For You Like An Adult!
The Des Moines Register, on food and farming:
Farmers already see climate change: While a debate rages over the causes of climate change, farmers in South America and Africa are dealing with the realities of climate change.The consequences of rising temperatures are more extreme weather events, including drought and floods, and changing growing conditions. Scientists and farmers there are struggling to deal with both.
On the science, some experts credit improved plant genetics, in large part, for the ability of farmers in the United States to harvest the eighth-largest corn crop last year, even in a year of record drought. Monsanto has developed a new drought-resistant variety of maize that is being tested in Africa, and it is working with private organizations including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to introduce it to farmers in Africa.
Of course, no debate actually rages, unless you count all the rage on one side. October 18:
While farmers all over the planet are facing increasingly unpredictable harvests due to the complex consequences of climate change, most of their customers continue to live in a state of denial. It’s easy and tempting to attribute this to the irresponsibility of our mass media and its near-pathological inability to address issues of major importance, but there is another factor: the overwhelming success of our large-scale agricultural system, which allows millions of people to eat well every day without putting in hours of work growing their own food. Paradoxically, industrialized farming may well turn out to be one of the first casualties of the accelerating greenhouse effect, as increasingly variable weather and fluctuating extremes make monocropping ever more vulnerable to catastrophic failures.
We cannot solve the problems of climate change without recognizing the reality of the crisis, which demands accurate environmental journalism and an end to “false equivalence” — and we will not last long as a species without a diverse and resilient food supply. For humanity to survive this slowly-unfolding crisis, both our minds and bodies need sustainable nourishment.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists Heartland Institute idiots IPCC
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 27: The Earth Sucks
Joseph Bast is the fetid mouthpiece of the Heartland Institute, and he’s been given a big mouthpiece by USA Today:
Environmentalists hoped the latest study from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would finally end the increasingly acrimonious debate over the causes and consequences of climate change. It has had the opposite effect.
MIT physicist Richard Lindzen called the IPCC report “hilarious incoherence.” British historian Rupert Darwall labeled it “nonsense” and “the manipulation of science for political ends.” Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology says the IPCC suffers from “paradigm paralysis” and should be “put down.”
The most precise criticism of the IPCC’s report came from the editors of Nature, one of the world’s most distinguished science journals: “Scientists cannot say with any certainty what rate of warming might be expected, or what effects humanity might want to prepare for, hedge against or avoid at all costs.”
Just shoot me. Oct. 17:
When the Heartland Institute’s Joe Bast blithely asserts that the IPCC report “exaggerates” the risks of global climate change, his cherry-picking of scientific criticism of the report is grossly mendacious. For example, Bast cites an editorial comment in the journal “Nature” which notes that “scientists cannot say with any certainty what rate of warming might be expected” — but ignores the rest of the article, which reaffirms both that warming is happening and that its consequences are likely to be disastrous.
The IPCC document is the result of collective decision-making, which means that the report’s conclusions actually minimize, rather than inflate, the dangers of runaway climate change. Mr. Bast’s statements are fundamentally dishonest and do a grave disservice to the national discussion of a genuine threat. For USA Today to offer the voices of climate-change denialism such a public forum in a time of genuine planetary emergency is sadly irresponsible.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: IPCC media irresponsibility scientific consensus scientific methodology
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Year 4, Month 10, Day 26: Take Good Care Of Yourself
The Bangor Daily News runs a WaPo piece on the IPCC:
If one body represents the international scientific consensus on global warming, it is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations panel that just released the first portion of its fifth authoritative report on the science.
The report’s headline finding is that “it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
It’s not just that the planet has warmed over the course of many decades, during which people have released massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Among many other things, there is what scientists have called a “human fingerprint” — a pattern of warming in the troposphere and cooling in the stratosphere that is very likely characteristic of human influence.
The authors did not shrink from addressing one of the primary threads that critics have been pulling in their effort to unravel the scientific consensus — the recent flattening of global temperature rise.
This was the hook for some generic media criticism. October 16:
News coverage of the newly issued report from the IPCC is all too often a “balanced” approach in which the opinion of a huge number of climate scientists is countered by the vague assertions of corporate spokespeople.
To cut through the fog and clarify the discussion, we need to understand that scientific speech and writing is careful and rhetorically restrained, while that of our media is sloppy and profligate. Some pundits claim the report represents the views of “environmental extremists” and should therefore be discounted, but in fact, the IPCC’s consensus underestimates some threats and almost entirely omits others, such as melting Arctic methane; the document represents a very conservative assessment of our present level of risk.
And as such, it deserves to be taken far more seriously — for if there is one phrase that we are seeing with accelerating frequency in news about Earth’s climate, it’s “more than expected.” Polar ice melt, oceanic acidification, species loss, extreme precipitation, wildfire severity — all of these phenomena are happening faster and more intensely than scientists’ predictions even a few years ago. By belittling the findings and expertise of climatologists, our media figures and politicians are endangering the health of our planet and the happiness of our posterity.
Warren Senders