human actions, global climate change, global human solutions by 1kiki

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

human actions, global climate change, global human solutions

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Tuesday, November 26, 2024 17:23
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PAGE 17 of 20

Sunday, February 11, 2024 7:57 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

That's not what the WEF says.

Apparently you didn't read their article I linked, because you have the mind of a 5 year old.

But I don't believe shit the WEF says either, so who knows.
6ix, you confirmed for the one trillionth time that the kind of people who vote for Trump are assholes, which I knew long before you were born. Have you wondered why you have difficulty thriving in America, 6ix? Since you can't accept that you are a stupid asshole, you immediately were attracted to Trump's explanation that your struggles are not your fault. For example, Trump tells you that your CO2 emissions are not changing the climate because "Climate Change Is A Chinese Hoax". Trump absolves you of all responsibility. Nothing is your fault, 6ix.

I just built this yesterday in my house that I paid cash for, and my monthly energy expenditures at home are constantly 10% to 40% less than my "efficient neighbors" according to my power company.

I'm doing just fine. I don't need Trump to tell me how awesome I am.

I suggest that you do something with your life. If you were able to accomplish something on your own that was a source of pride for you, you wouldn't need to parrot whatever MSNBC tells you to think online and remind strangers online everyday that you are perfect and have no vices because you vote Democrat in order to feel good about yourself.

Your lies are self-destructive. I think it really gets to you that I've actually turned my life around after I quit drinking and I don't fit into your little "Texas Republican" mold you've solidified in your mind.

I'm going to keep getting better, regardless of who wins elections, and you're just going to keep sliding further into insanity.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Sunday, February 11, 2024 8:06 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I'm doing just fine. I don't need Trump to tell me how awesome I am.

The "before" picture, with a metal grill in that opening, was perfectly adequate. All your efforts amount to little difference. You are wasting life, 6ix, on piddling around.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, February 11, 2024 8:09 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I'm doing just fine. I don't need Trump to tell me how awesome I am.
The "before" picture, with a metal grill in that opening, was perfectly adequate. All your efforts amount to little difference. You are wasting life, 6ix, on piddling around.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

This was adequate for you, huh?

No thanks, buddy. I'll let the Socialists like you settle for adequate.

How many hours this week have you wasted away watching movies and TV shows that you pirated when you're desperately trying to find anything in the world to keep your mind from your chronic obsessing over Trump?

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Sunday, February 18, 2024 1:34 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

In all, solar and battery storage will be responsible for more than 80 percent of all new electricity capacity in the US this year.

The EIA says the US generates nine times more electricity today than it did in 1950. The demand is expected to double or triple again by 2050.

The 62.8 GW of new electricity capacity planned for this year will be 55 percent more than the 40.4 GW of electricity that was added in 2023.

The vast majority — 36.4 GW, or 58 percent — will come from new utility-scale solar installations. Last year, only 18.4 GW of solar capacity was added to the grid as supply chain and permitting issues continued to impact the solar industry.

In addition, another 14.3 GW, or 23 percent, will be provided by new battery storage facilities, 23 percent of the total.

https://cleantechnica.com/2024/02/17/us-eia-predicts-solar-will-accoun
t-for-58-of-new-electricity-generation-capacity-in-us-in-2024/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, February 18, 2024 1:54 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:.
How many hours this week have you wasted away watching movies and TV shows that you pirated when you're desperately trying to find anything in the world to keep your mind from your chronic obsessing over Trump?

SECOND doesn't waste his time trying "not" to obsess about Trump, he wastes his time obsessing about Trump. And Russia. And "Trumptards". And whoever hapoens to be on his shitlist that month. He's got those ideological turds polished to a high shine.
That's what happens when your mind is a closed, dark maze.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Sunday, February 18, 2024 2:46 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:.
How many hours this week have you wasted away watching movies and TV shows that you pirated when you're desperately trying to find anything in the world to keep your mind from your chronic obsessing over Trump?

SECOND doesn't waste his time trying "not" to obsess about Trump, he wastes his time obsessing about Trump. And Russia. And "Trumptards". And whoever hapoens to be on his shitlist that month. He's got those ideological turds polished to a high shine.
That's what happens when your mind is a closed, dark maze.

For the record, 6ix has lived in his house for two decades but only now is 6ix fixing what is in those pictures. 6ix has been obsessively writing about the excruciatingly slow-moving carpentry in just that one opening in the wall for months. Slowness is a prime characteristic of a retard. Related, 6ix and Signym want Ukraine destroyed and Trump returned to power and climate change is a Chinese Hoax for them, which is why I refer to them as Trumptards. Signym is selling a climate change solution called the One Trillion Trees Initiative, a Trump plan, and 6ix mocks electric cars as coal-burners.
https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/trump-administration-furthers-commit
ment-one-trillion-trees-initiative

Neither 6ix nor Signym has a problem with Russia conquering the world because neither has acknowledged that Russia killed 62 million Russians (plus Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny this week) and that Russia would do the same to the world as it is now doing to Ukraine.
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/16/1232050539/alexei-navalny-death-russia-
putin-critics

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, February 18, 2024 3:52 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Ross Gelbspan, Who Exposed Roots of Climate Change Deniers, Dies at 84

A longtime investigative journalist, he wrote books and articles that documented a campaign of disinformation intended to sow doubt about global warming.

By Trip Gabriel | Feb. 16, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/business/media/ross-gelbspan-dead.h
tml

Ross Gelbspan, an investigative journalist whose reporting on climate change exposed a campaign of disinformation by oil and gas lobbyists to sow doubt about global warming — a denialism that was embraced by Republican officials and, in some cases, by a credulous news media — died on Jan. 27 at his home in Boston. He was 84.

The cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, his wife, Anne Gelbspan, said.

Mr. Gelbspan’s career included reporting on dissidents in the Soviet Union and on F.B.I. harassment of domestic critics, and his interest in the climate crisis, like those other subjects, came from a sense of outrage that powerful interests were suppressing information needed for democracy.

“I didn’t get into the climate issue because I love the trees — I tolerate the trees,” he said on YouTube last year. “I got into the issue because I learned the coal industry was paying a handful of scientists under the table to say nothing was happening to the climate.”

In a 1995 cover story for Harper’s Magazine headlined “The Heat Is On,” which he expanded into a 1997 book with the same title, Mr. Gelbspan shined a light on a group of scientists that coal and oil groups had paid to tell lawmakers and journalists that global warming wasn’t a serious threat. He dug up a 1991 memo from the fossil fuel lobby calling for a strategy to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” At a news conference, President Bill Clinton held up the book and said he was reading it.

“In ‘The Heat Is On,’ Ross was the first to do a serious debunking of the campaign by the oil and coal companies to promote and finance a pseudoscientific narrative of denial,” Robert Kuttner, co-editor of the magazine The American Prospect, to which Mr. Gelbspan contributed, said in an email. “He combined a deep concern about our common future with the passion and skill of a dogged investigative reporter.”

Mr. Gelbspan wrote in Harper’s that one of the prominent climate skeptics, Richard S. Lindzen of M.I.T., speaking on behalf of a coal lobbying group, testified in 1994 at a government hearing that a doubling of carbon emissions over the next century would cause temperatures to rise no more than a negligible 0.3 degrees Celsius. Since that testimony, the planet has already warmed 0.86 degrees Celsius, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In a second book, “Boiling Point” (2004), Mr. Gelbspan was tough on his own profession, accusing reporters of laziness in falling for the “manufactured denial” of the fossil fuel industry.

Many journalists, he said, were undermined by their ethic of even-handedness, which added false balance to stories that reflexively included climate skeptics.

“For many years, the press accorded the same weight to the ‘skeptics’ as it did to mainstream scientists,” he wrote. “The issue of balance is not relevant when the focus of a story is factual. In this case, what is known about the climate comes from the largest and most rigorously peer-reviewed scientific collaboration in history.”

Reviewing “Boiling Point” in The New York Times, Al Gore, the 2000 Democratic presidential nominee, wrote, “Part of what makes this book important is its indictment of the American news media’s coverage of global warming for the past two decades.”

But Mr. Gelbspan’s chief targets remained companies like Exxon Mobil, which funded the denial of climate science, and industry-supporting officials, mainly Republicans, such as President George W. Bush, who ran for the White House promising to cap carbon emissions from power plants, then reneged under industry pressure months into his tenure. That same month, his administration withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement by industrial countries to reduce warming emissions.

(Last year, The Wall Street Journal disclosed that newly uncovered documents showed that Exxon sought to muddle scientific findings that could hurt its business even after the company publicly said it would stop funding think tanks and scientists who minimized threats to the climate.)

“It is an excruciating experience,” Mr. Gelbspan wrote, “to watch the planet fall apart piece by piece in the face of persistent and pathological denial.”

Mr. Gelbspan, a newspaper reporter and editor for 31 years before he left daily journalism to focus on books, worked for The Philadelphia Bulletin, The Washington Post, The Village Voice and The Boston Globe.

In 1971, he spent three weeks in the Soviet Union for a four-part series that ran in The Voice. “It was a very sobering trip,” he later recalled, describing interviewing political dissidents in bugged apartments, memorizing his notes before destroying them so they wouldn’t be confiscated and being interrogated for six hours by the K.G.B. before he was allowed to leave Moscow. The experience was an awakening “to the brutal realities of life in a totalitarian state,” he said.

Mr. Gelbspan joined The Globe in 1979. As special projects editor, he oversaw a series on job discrimination against African Americans in the Boston area, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for local investigative specialized reporting. Although Pulitzers are given to reporters and to newspapers, The Globe named Mr. Gelbspan a “co-recipient” of the prize for conceiving and editing the series.

In 1991 he published another book, “Break-ins, Death Threats and the F.B.I.,” an investigation of what he called secret federal harassment of critics of the Reagan administration’s policies in Central America.

Ross Gelbspan was born on June 1, 1939, in Chicago to Eugene Gelbspan, who ran a kitchen supply company, and Ruth (Ross) Gelbspan. He received a B.A. in political philosophy from Kenyon College in Ohio in 1960.

While covering the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 in Stockholm, he met Anne Charlotte Broström, a native of Sweden. They married the next year. She spent 25 years as a nonprofit developer of low-cost housing for homeless families in Massachusetts.

Besides his wife, he is survived by their daughters, Thea and Johanna Gelbspan, and a sister, Jill Gelbspan.

Early in his coverage of global warming, Mr. Gelbspan read the work of some climate skeptics and, for a time, became convinced that there was no crisis. Then he met with James J. McCarthy, a Harvard professor of oceanography and a leading climate expert who was co-chairman of the U.N.’s panel on climate change. He convinced Mr. Gelbspan that the skeptics were wrong.

“When I asked McCarthy about whether climate change posed a truly serious threat,” Mr. Gelbspan recalled on YouTube last year, “he said as slowly and clearly as possible: ‘If this unstable climate we are now beginning to see began 100 years ago, the planet would never be able to support its current population.’”

Reflecting on his reporting on the environment, Mr. Gelbspan added that he had felt “both a young man’s sense of wonder and an old man’s despair.”

“I was a reporter,” he continued, “and in the face of my sadness over our collective human failure, my only response has been to look reality in the eye and write it down.”

Download the free book Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists Have Fueled a Climate Crisis from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Ross+Gelbspan

The dedication from the book: To Tottie—who never bargained for this kind of heaviness when we married thirty years ago and who has responded with so much unqualified support and love and thoughtfulness. Together we marvel at the irony that our personal world overflows with fulfillment and contentment — even as our larger world is darkened by a gathering of intensifying furies (The Trumptards 6ix, Signym, Trump and their ilk are furious).

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, February 19, 2024 3:16 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

SECOND doesn't waste his time trying "not" to obsess about Trump, he wastes his time obsessing about Trump. And Russia. And "Trumptards". And whoever hapoens to be on his shitlist that month. He's got those ideological turds polished to a high shine.
That's what happens when your mind is a closed, dark maze.

SECONDRATE: For the record, 6ix has lived in his house for two decades but only now is 6ix fixing what is in those pictures. 6ix has been obsessively writing about the excruciatingly slow-moving carpentry in just that one opening in the wall for months. Slowness is a prime characteristic of a retard.

Actually , the prime characteristic of a retard is NOT BEING ABLE TO LEARN.

I'm continually amazed by all of the skills that SIX has learned, from computer software and hardware to carpentry, major house-fixes like foundation repair, hydrology, plumbing, wiring, LADA diabetes management, and car repair.

What have YOU learned lately?

All you do is obsessively post lies and hate 24/7/365.

Get off your ass. Stop lying. Learn something new. Do something useful that you can take pride in. You'll feel better, I promise.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Monday, February 19, 2024 7:05 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

SECOND doesn't waste his time trying "not" to obsess about Trump, he wastes his time obsessing about Trump. And Russia. And "Trumptards". And whoever hapoens to be on his shitlist that month. He's got those ideological turds polished to a high shine.
That's what happens when your mind is a closed, dark maze.

SECONDRATE: For the record, 6ix has lived in his house for two decades but only now is 6ix fixing what is in those pictures. 6ix has been obsessively writing about the excruciatingly slow-moving carpentry in just that one opening in the wall for months. Slowness is a prime characteristic of a retard.

Actually , the prime characteristic of a retard is NOT BEING ABLE TO LEARN.

I'm continually amazed by all of the skills that SIX has learned, from computer software and hardware to carpentry, major house-fixes like foundation repair, hydrology, plumbing, wiring, LADA diabetes management, and car repair.

What have YOU learned lately?

All you do is obsessively post lies and hate 24/7/365.

Get off your ass. Stop lying. Learn something new. Do something useful that you can take pride in. You'll feel better, I promise.

Thanks sigs.

Yeah. It's as if he's saying that I've spent every waking hour working on that opening for months to the exclusion of everything else I've done in that time.

I haven't lived here for decades. I've lived here 12.5 years. 5 of those years I wasted to drinking, which is a problem I brought with me to the house, with only the first two of them actually getting anything done. I'm not going to apologize to Second for that waste of time. I've already made apologies to anybody that I was going to apologize to for that behavior a long time ago.

I've also never once used the word carpentry. It's not carpentry. I'm not a carpenter.

The overlook isn't done yet either, but as I finish that, I'll also be working on repairing and refinishing those stairs. Just like I repaired and refinished that entire room after I began working on the overlook.

And I'm sure I'll be doing other things in the meantime, like helping my friend clear out his dad's garage and house, and helping my brother learn more about his computer while setting up his MacOS/Windows dual platform stuff over the phone, and helping my aunt get all of her stuff setup online... And seriously... do you know how much it takes to cook up this sweet blue meth in my bathtub? The shit literally sells itself but cooking just takes up so much of the day.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, February 19, 2024 7:36 PM

Biden’s green fantasy of two-thirds electric cars sales in 2032 is just not happening

Heavy, short-ranged, slow to charge, hard to maintain. But at least they're expensive

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/02/06/biden-green-evs-elec
tric-cars-target-energy-madness/

Everybody who was going to buy a coal burning car now already has one. That's it. It's over.

2/3rds of dealerships don't even want them on their lots anymore.

You got got, son.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Monday, February 19, 2024 8:49 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack
Thanks sigs.

Yeah. It's as if he's saying that I've spent every waking hour working on that opening for months to the exclusion of everything else I've done in that time.

I haven't lived here for decades. I've lived here 12.5 years. 5 of those years I wasted to drinking, which is a problem I brought with me to the house, with only the first two of them actually getting anything done. I'm not going to apologize to Second for that waste of time. I've already made apologies to anybody that I was going to apologize to for that behavior a long time ago.

I've also never once used the word carpentry. It's not carpentry. I'm not a carpenter.

The overlook isn't done yet either, but as I finish that, I'll also be working on repairing and refinishing those stairs. Just like I repaired and refinished that entire room after I began working on the overlook.

And I'm sure I'll be doing other things in the meantime, like helping my friend clear out his dad's garage and house, and helping my brother learn more about his computer while setting up his MacOS/Windows dual platform stuff over the phone, and helping my aunt get all of her stuff setup online... And seriously... do you know how much it takes to cook up this sweet blue meth in my bathtub? The shit literally sells itself but cooking just takes up so much of the day.

I laughed so loud dear daughter asked me what I was laughing about!
So, of course, I gave her some background ... showed her a few of your before and after pictures... read her the insult and then your reply. She missed the reference to Breaking Bad (LOL!) but thought it was funny too.

This has got to be one of the funniest answers I've ever read on this website.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Monday, February 19, 2024 10:22 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack
Thanks sigs.

Yeah. It's as if he's saying that I've spent every waking hour working on that opening for months to the exclusion of everything else I've done in that time.

I haven't lived here for decades. I've lived here 12.5 years. 5 of those years I wasted to drinking, which is a problem I brought with me to the house, with only the first two of them actually getting anything done. I'm not going to apologize to Second for that waste of time. I've already made apologies to anybody that I was going to apologize to for that behavior a long time ago.

I've also never once used the word carpentry. It's not carpentry. I'm not a carpenter.

The overlook isn't done yet either, but as I finish that, I'll also be working on repairing and refinishing those stairs. Just like I repaired and refinished that entire room after I began working on the overlook.

And I'm sure I'll be doing other things in the meantime, like helping my friend clear out his dad's garage and house, and helping my brother learn more about his computer while setting up his MacOS/Windows dual platform stuff over the phone, and helping my aunt get all of her stuff setup online... And seriously... do you know how much it takes to cook up this sweet blue meth in my bathtub? The shit literally sells itself but cooking just takes up so much of the day.

I laughed so loud dear daughter asked me what I was laughing about!
So, of course, I gave her some background ... showed her a few of your before and after pictures... read her the insult and then your reply. She missed the reference to Breaking Bad (LOL!) but thought it was funny too.

This has got to be one of the funniest answers I've ever read on this website.

Well the secret is out now thanks to Second.

The REAL reason I don't smoke cigarettes in the house isn't because I don't want all my walls and trim to turn yellow and watch my family who doesn't smoke frown and wrinkle their noses up when they come over and have to smell the stale nicotine in the air.

I just really love the smell of that bathtub meth and I'd rather smoke outside in the snow than taint it with my cheap cigarette smoke.

That's also why I quit eating broccoli and I fart in jars now.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Thursday, February 22, 2024 9:00 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Exxon warns Baytown, other hydrogen projects unlikely

By James Osborne | Feb 22, 2024

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/exxon-baytown
-hydrogen-tax-credit-biden-18677668.php

WASHINGTON – A year after Exxon Mobil announced it would be part of a team planning to build the largest clean hydrogen facility in the world, executives are warning the project at its Baytown refining and petrochemical complex along the Houston Ship Channel might no longer happen.

At issue are draft rules issued by the Treasury Department late last year, which include no incentive to produce clean hydrogen fuel using natural gas with reduced methane emissions. That would limit Baytown and other proposed blue hydrogen projects, which use electricity from natural gas plants and store carbon emissions underground, to the lowest tier of hydrogen tax credit, making them less economic, said Mark Klewpatinond, global business manager for hydrogen at Exxon Mobil.

"If were not able to differentiate natural gas production, it's highly unlikely Baytown would proceed," he said. "It needs to compete for capital against other projects we have."

Exxon is part of the HyVelocity Hub, a coalition of energy companies and nonprofits seeking to develop a clean hydrogen hub in Houston through $1.2 billion in funding from the Department of Energy. Representatives of HyVelocity declined to comment.

The warning from Exxon and other hydrogen developers comes as cities such as Houston and Los Angeles move to develop large-scale clean hydrogen projects despite questions about whether the tax credit included in 2022's Inflation Reduction Act will be enough to get the nascent industry off the ground.

Following failed efforts by former President George W. Bush and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Biden administration is moving to shift the industrial sector, along with heavy duty transportation like trucks and cargo ships, to clean hydrogen fuel in line with their goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

But producing hydrogen fuel is hugely energy intensive, and the Biden administration is seeking to ensure it doesn't mistakenly incentivize the construction of a raft of hydrogen facilities with high greenhouse gas footprints.

As the tax credits are currently written, critics say, green hydrogen projects, which rely on electricity to convert water to hydrogen, will likely need to get all their power directly from wind and solar farms to be eligible for the highest $3 per kilogram tax credit. Projects using electricity from the power grid would need to be able to document their electricity came from renewable sources to claim any of the credit. So-called blue hydrogen projects would likely have to settle for tax credits worth up to 60 cents per kilogram – even if their overall emissions are lower than some green hydrogen projects.

"If you can't count upstream and midstream emissions, that is going to push a significant amount of production out of the most lucrative bands," said Brian Murphy, an analyst with S&P Global Commodity Insights. "That’s going to mean fewer projects in the near term."

A spokesperson for the Department of Treasury said the agency is looking for more information on certain, "key issues" and would "consider all comments in developing final regulations.”

New tax rules

Not all clean hydrogen developers are worried about the tax rules.

British industrial firm Linde announced early last year, months before the draft tax credit rules were released, that it was going to start construction on a $1.8 billion blue hydrogen facility in Beaumont. And Pennsylvania-based Air Products said in November it would go ahead on building a $4.5 billion blue hydrogen plant in Louisiana.

But the majority of clean hydrogen projects, of which there are dozens in the works around the country, are on hold waiting to see if the Treasury Department loosens up the rules around claiming the hydrogen tax credit, said Frank Wolak, president of the Fuel Cell & Hydrogen Energy Association.

"Companies with captive customers who want to get ahead of the curve are building" he said. "But most projects are waiting for the final guidance to see if they're economic. Right now theres a lot of things proposed and planned but not a lot of (final investment decision)."

The Biden administration has come under increasing pressure from environmentalists around hydrogen fuel, with groups like the Sierra Club advocating for only hydrogen facilities that build their own renewable energy facilities - not using existing ones - to receive federal subsidies.

But companies like Exxon, which is slated to make a final investment decision on its Baytown project this year, are pushing them to allow some flexibility in the early stages, lest this hydrogen energy push suffer the same failures as past efforts.

"When we look at the market it's blue hydrogen. It's what is available today to deliver those clean energy goals," Klewpatinond. the Exxon executive said. "Green hydrogen may play a part in the future, but it has challenges to scale up. Blue hydrogen is expensive but green hydrogen is even more expensive."

So far, the Biden administration has indicated some willingness to negotiate, with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm saying at an event in Washington Wednesday the administration was, "asking sincerely for input."

And they're feeling pressure from more centrist Democrats, including Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania.

"When developing the Inflation Reduction Act, we intended for the clean hydrogen incentives to be flexible and technology-neutral. Treasury’s draft guidance does not fully reflect this intent," Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., said in a statement late last year.

The administration last year released a roadmap projecting 10 million tons of clean hydrogen production a year by 2030, enough to replace most existing carbon-polluting hydrogen plants. And it has committed to distributing $7 billion to seven hydrogen hubs around the country, including the one in Houston.

But energy analysts are projecting the clean hydrogen market will take longer to develop, likely a decade or more, beginning with existing hydrogen customers such as refineries and chemical plants and only later expanding into transportation.

"It's only the last couple years we've been doing this. Its important to remember that," John Larsen, a partner at the research firm Rhodium Group, said at an event in Washington earlier this month. "Hydrogen wasn’t a real option before (the tax credit) and now it is."

Feb 22, 2024

By James Osborne

James Osborne covers the intersection of energy and politics from the Houston Chronicle’s bureau in Washington D.C.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, February 23, 2024 10:55 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Texas lawmakers target large 'climate-friendly' banks — and avoiding boycotts won't stop them

By Chris Tomlinson | Feb 23, 2024

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article
/texas-blackrock-climate-change-esg-taxpayers-18672606.php

Texas lawmakers have never hesitated to use the power of the state to punish those with whom they disagree.

Do you or your company refuse to do business with Israel? Then you cannot do business with the state of Texas. Do you boycott gunmakers? Don’t even think about applying for a state contract.

The newest boycott legislation, though, goes much further. If a financial services firm refuses to do business with coal, oil or natural gas businesses or offers products that allow investors to avoid the fossil fuel industry, then no government authority in Texas can contract its services. If a company invests in those corporations — but demands they tackle climate change — the punishment is the same.

Texas’ law could cost taxpayers $22.5 billion in higher interest rates and fees over the next 30 years, a study by an economist at the Wharton School calculated. This column is part two of a three-part series on the conservative war against considering environmental, social and governance factors, known as ESG, when investing.

For years, Big Oil executives have complained about a growing movement to boycott and divest from fossil fuel companies. Proponents of ESG investing have produced research showing how public companies contributing to climate change, income inequality and corruption pay less in total shareholder returns than socially responsible companies.

Doing good and doing well are connected, they argue.

Oil and gas corporations call ESG investing discrimination, and they’ve asked state lawmakers across the country to pass anti-boycott laws like Senate Bill 13, which became Texas law on Sept. 1, 2021.

Texas is arguably the first state to pass anti-ESG legislation, which first emerged from conservative think tanks after large companies began advertising themselves as “climate-friendly” in the early 2000s. Conservative groups, such as the Texas Public Policy Foundation, lobbied Republican lawmakers to pass the bill, which Democrats mostly opposed.

SB13 requires the comptroller, Texas’ elected chief financial officer, “to prepare and maintain a list of all financial companies that refuse to deal with, terminate business activities with, or otherwise take any action that is, solely or primarily, intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or limit commercial relations” with the fossil fuel industry.

The law created a new entity within the comptroller’s office, the Texas Treasury Safekeeping Trust Co., to implement the law. Comptroller Glenn Hegar reviewed banks’ public statements on climate change and, on March 16, 2022, sent letters to 19 firms that appeared to violate the statute.

“The Comptroller has determined you may be a financial company that boycotts energy companies,” the form letter said. “You must complete and return answers to the questions enclosed with this letter.”

Comptroller attorneys disclose little about how they determined that UBS, BlackRock and other global financial institutions landed on their list. But membership in two associations — the Climate Action 100+ and the Net Zero Banking Alliance/Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative — appeared to have triggered a review.

Climate Action 100+ members pledge to pressure 170 of the world’s largest companies, many of them significant emitters of greenhouse gases, to change their business plans to comply with the Paris climate accord. If the world wants to limit global warming without permanently damaging life on Earth, these companies must change their ways.

The Net Zero Banking Alliance is a United Nations-backed group of global banks “committed to financing ambitious climate action to transition the real economy to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.”

BlackRock, UBS, JPMorgan Chase and the other companies joined the groups but did not divest from fossil fuel companies. Most kept issuing bonds, buying stocks and offering investment vehicles so their clients could make money from fossil fuels.

“We do not boycott energy companies,” BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm, said in a letter to the comptroller obtained via a public information request. “On our clients’ behalf, BlackRock currently has approximately $310 billion in assets invested in energy companies globally, including over $115 billion invested in Texas energy companies alone.”

In letters between UBS and the comptroller, high ESG ratings from the global ratings firm MSCI were also prima facie evidence against the firms. But UBS pointed out that some oil and gas companies also have high ESG ratings.

“UBS AG has an MSCI ESG Rating of AA — the same ranking as Baker Hughes, ConocoPhillips, Cheniere, and Schlumberger,” a letter dated Sept. 28, 2022, observed.

The problem with protecting oil and gas, though, is the high cost to Texas taxpayers. Only a few companies can handle the $50 billion in bonds that Texas governments issue yearly. Companies compete by offering lower interest rates than others. But when you take the biggest players out of the competition, the cost of those bonds goes up.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, February 26, 2024 1:36 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Livestock feed isn’t the only reason the US grows so much corn. There was a big spike in corn acreage starting in the early 2000s, when Congress mandated that billions of gallons of gasoline for cars be mixed with biofuels, which is mostly ethanol made with corn.

It was a terrible policy because corn is an inefficient use of land to produce energy: “It takes about 100 acres worth of biofuels to generate as much energy as a single acre of solar panels,” wrote agriculture and environmental writer Michael Grunwald in the New York Times. But it’s been hard to roll back, given the political power of the farm lobby: Ethanol policy is “mainly a way to suck up to farmers and enrich agribusinesses,” Grunwald wrote.

Almost 40 percent of US corn goes into gas tanks and 40 percent is fed to livestock.

More at https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24079424/factory-farming-facts-meat
-usda-agriculture-census

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Monday, March 4, 2024 5:21 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Drastic and Irreversible Climate Geoengineering Worries Scientists

https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/drastic-and-irreversible-climate
-geoengineering-worries-experts-5592858

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Thursday, March 7, 2024 7:28 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Inside Big Oil’s Plot to Keep Their Emissions Confidential

The Securities and Exchange Commission voted Wednesday to require some companies to disclose emissions. The rule is far weaker than originally proposed—and the industry will probably sue anyway.

By Kate Aronoff | March 6, 2024

https://newrepublic.com/article/179578/sec-emissions-disclosure-rule-f
ossil-fuels

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday voted 3–2 to finalize a rule on what companies disclose about their greenhouse gas emissions and how climate change stands to impact their business. On its face, that wouldn’t seem to be much cause for alarm. Companies are already required to disclose information on their management structures, overall financial health, and the kinds of risks facing their business. Large segments of the oil and gas industry, though, as well as their beneficiaries in the Republican Party, are treating the possibility of having to disclose climate-related information as if it were an existential threat. And as a result, the SEC’s rule is much weaker than it could have been.

At an industry conference last month, Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, a trade association for oil and gas producers, laid out her group’s strategy for stopping new regulations and administrative actions in their tracks; the main goal, she emphasized, was to kill any version of the SEC’s climate disclosure requirements. At the North American Prospect Expo, or NAPE, Summit for the energy industry in Houston early last month, she described the potential SEC rule as one of several attempts to “decapitalize, defund, or de-bank our industry.” An audio recording of the speech, which was open to all attendees, was provided to The New Republic by an audience member who asked to remain anonymous so as not to jeopardize future attendance.

On some level, industry pressure has already worked: The SEC rule that came to a vote on Wednesday was considerably weaker than the version that was first proposed in March 2022. It lacked the strongest part of the original proposal: that companies be required to disclose what are known as Scope 3 emissions. Those are the emissions linked to products it purchases from third parties, activities like business travel, and the use of its products by consumers. Scope 3 emissions account for as much as 90 percent of a given company’s emissions. Fossil fuel executives and lobbyists’ heated opposition to being required to disclose these emissions is a big part of why that component was dropped. SEC Chair Gary Gensler has said that the rule received 24,000 comments during the required public comment period that ended this morning—the largest ever number of comments filed on a single proposal. By the time the rule was released, even disclosing Scope 1 and 2 emissions—roughly speaking, those generated by corporate operations—was in question. It will now only be required of larger, SEC-registered companies—about 40 percent of America’s 7,000 public companies registered with the SEC—that determine these disclosures are “material” to investors.

David Arkush, director of the watchdog group Public Citizen’s Climate Program, and an expert on climate-related financial regulation, described Scope 3 requirements as “the most concrete, quantitative, decision-useful information that was in the proposal. It’s a really big disappointment that it’s been dropped. It’s ultimately better to finish this rule than not,” he added, “but losing Scope 3 is a big step backward, even though it’s still a step forward from the existing state of affairs.” Many advocates also see the SEC’s watering down of disclosure rules as a response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in West Virginia v. EPA last summer, which raised the prospect of a wide-reaching challenge to agency rulemaking.

Even before the results of the rule were announced, Sgamma said industry groups were eager to sue over the rule. “People are standing in line to litigate that,” she said, adding that the Alliance probably wouldn’t mount its own legal opposition given how many groups are likely to join the fray. Asked over email whether there was any version of the final rule that her group or the industry at large might be happy with, she said, “No. SEC has no statutory authority to regulate climate change.”

In her speech last month, Sgamma elaborated on why her group and others see disclosure requirements as so dangerous. “If you can make an oil and gas company look like it’s emitting too much” carbon dioxide emissions, Sgamma warned, “eventually that becomes a reason to say, ‘Oh, you can’t fund that because it emits CO2 emissions.’”

Despite the fact that U.S. oil and gas companies have enjoyed record profits and levels of production under the Biden administration, industry groups have consistently complained that the White House is conspiring to undermine their industry’s reputation on Wall Street. In reality, these companies have themselves to blame: Over the past decade, shale drilling companies, especially, burned through investor cash as they collectively looked to extract as much oil and gas as possible. Many firms—particularly the smaller and midsize drillers that predominate the Western Energy Alliance’s membership roster—struggled to make a profit. After years of watching their money go up in smoke, frustrated investors started to demand that companies focus on turning a profit rather than rapid-fire production. That was followed by the Covid-19 pandemic, when demand for fuel crashed amid worldwide travel restrictions. While fossil fuel executives’ fortunes have turned around dramatically in recent years, they’re still mostly blaming any real and (often) imagined woes on Democrats.

Throughout this period, the Western Energy Alliance itself has faced declining membership. In 2021, E&E News reported that the group had lost a third of its members. As part of a short-lived public relations push to burnish its green credentials, BP left the group, along with two other trade associations that have opposed climate policies. According to BP, the company chose to leave the Alliance over its opposition to federal methane regulations. Over email, Sgamma blamed her group’s decline in membership on consolidation within the industry that continues to “shrink the pool of Western companies.” She said, as well, that companies “continue to have trouble being banked or raising capital” and called that “a function of ESG pressure, not true market forces.” ESG is an abbreviation for the “environmental, social, and governance” investment principles that Republicans have targeted at the state and federal level over the last several years. (SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, a Donald J. Trump appointee, parroted the anti-ESG movement’s favorite talking points as she spoke during the SEC meeting Wednesday morning, claiming any disclosure requirements at all would open the door for “ethical investors” and “special interest groups to achieve what they cannot accomplish through normal political channels.”)

Sgamma’s talk outlined three “models,” or strategies, for tanking everything from regulations to presidential appointments. Citing the injustice of everything from disclosure requirements to methane regulations, tailpipe emissions standards to closing off federal lands to oil and gas production, she proposed action. “We could sit here and have a little parade of misery and feel bad about ourselves, or we could look at real solutions,” she told the crowd.

“Whatever happens with the election we will still have basically 50-50. We’re maybe gonna take the Senate, lose the House, as far as Republican,” Sgamma said, adding that “nothing’s gonna come out of Congress for the next two years. So this political environment is going to remain a dumpster fire, but we can still win.” While she appeared to identify her organization with Republicans, Sgamma went on to clarify that the Western Energy Alliance is officially nonpartisan.

“It’s no secret the majority of the Democratic Party is hostile to American oil and natural gas. We like divided government, as one-party rule is bad for American energy,” Sgamma wrote over email when asked to clarify where her group stands vis-à-vis partisan politics. “I was referring to the dumpster fire of our politics as a whole, from the mismanagement of Republicans in the House, the current hostile Administration, to a potential chaotic Trump Administration.”

In Houston, Sgamma described her first “model” for political action, however, as “fairly partisan.” It revolves around leaning on Republican-controlled state officials—including attorneys general and treasurers—working with Republican-controlled congressional committees. Sgamma brought up the example of the New York Stock Exchange’s attempt to create a new asset class for so-called “natural assets,” which it recently withdrew from consideration by the SEC. The failure of that proposal, Sgamma argued, was thanks to a pressure campaign spearheaded on the one hand by Utah Treasurer Marlo Oaks—who corralled 23 state treasurers and comptrollers to oppose the proposal—and, on the other, by the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. The subcommittee, chaired by Republican Paul Gosar, will hold its second hearing this week on the topic. Congressional Republicans also filed legislation to prevent the SEC from ever advancing similar proposals.

Sgamma’s “grassroots model,” by contrast, is better suited to be used “for things that are easy to understand for the public,” like federal regulations regarding gas stoves, fuel efficiency, and tailpipe emissions—“all these rules trying to tell you which type of car you can drive, that you can’t use your gas stove,” she elaborated. (None of the rules Sgamma referenced would actually require consumers to purchase particular kinds of appliances or electric stoves. Instead, they require manufacturers to sell products that comply with certain emissions standards.) Such “grassroots” efforts, she added, rely on collaborating with other industries and trade associations. “Working with stakeholders is really important, because if we just say things as an industry nobody cares. We’re not a sympathetic industry, right? We need to work with others,” Sgamma told conference attendees.

The final model Sgamma presented she dubbed the “bipartisan” model. “You could call it the Senator Joe Manchin model because he’s been key to it,” she said, though she noted there were several vulnerable Democrats—including Montana Senator Chuck Testa, Nevada Senator Jackie Rosen, and Pennsylvania’s Bob Case—who were “perhaps pick off-able on some of these issues as well.” In November, Manchin sent a letter to Gensler, the SEC chair, calling on him to postpone rulemaking on climate risk and emissions disclosures and extend the public comment period. Manchin’s website also catalogs his “efforts to block the Biden Administration’s ESG policies.” That includes leading an effort to overturn a relatively anodyne Labor Department rule clarifying that federal pensions managers are allowed to consider ESG factors when making investment decisions.

Now that the SEC rule has been finalized, it’ll only be a matter of time before Republicans start filing lawsuits in sympathetic federal courts to bring it down. Arkush, of Public Citizen, said it’s also likely that groups who supported more comprehensive requirements could sue too, in courts less packed with GOP appointees. This new rule’s future could come down to which judges end up hearing those challenges. It’s very unlikely, though, that companies will be able to escape disclosure requirements now in place in the European Union, California, and other jurisdictions. For now, as ever, the fossil fuel industry and the politicians it donates to will keep trying to deny the inevitable.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Saturday, March 9, 2024 8:50 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

What’s slowing down America’s clean energy transition? It’s not the cost

New report finds renewable energy faces organised opposition and grid connectivity issues.

By Hilary Beaumont | 7 Mar 2024

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/3/7/whats-slowing-down-americas
-clean-energy-transition-its-not-the-cost

For the first time, clean energy in the United States is at the same price as energy from burning fossil fuels thanks to policy measures, including President Joe Biden’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). But a new report says non-cost barriers are now slowing the country’s transition to renewables.

The report, released in February by the Clean Investment Monitor, analysed different modelling scenarios and found that the IRA is expected to meet its goal of reducing GHG emissions by roughly 40 percent by 2030.
https://assets-global.website-files.com/64e31ae6c5fd44b10ff405a7/65d56
8670df0b04daed42371_Clean%20Investment%20in%202023%20-%20Assessing%20Progress%20in%20Electricity%20and%20Transport.pdf

Passed in 2022, the IRA is the largest investment to address the climate crisis ever passed in the US. The investment is significant in a country that is one of the world’s largest contributors to GHG emissions. (China, the US and India are the world’s top three emitters.)

The report found that electric vehicle sales were at the top of the projected range in 2023, and investment in utility-scale clean electricity reached record levels last year. However, factors like local opposition to renewables and long delays in grid connection are slowing the pace of the clean energy transition.

Trevor Houser, one of the lead authors of the report, said two decades of policy work, including the passing of the IRA, have reduced the cost of clean energy to the point that it is competitive with coal and fossil gas (called “natural gas” by the fossil fuel industry), and can be deployed without increasing prices for households and businesses.

“It’s exciting to see those two decades of work paying off and these new, cleaner technologies having achieved a level of cost reduction and a point of scale where they can be widely deployed,” Houser said.

Now, the only issue is the speed of the transition. In the last two years, high inflation and supply chain issues led to temporary price increases. “That appears to be correcting now,” Houser said.

The bigger obstacles, he said, are ramping up manufacturing, connecting transmission lines, and addressing growing opposition to renewables.

“The thing that’s more concerning to me is the ability to get local acceptance and to get projects permitted and built fast enough,” he added.

Opposition to renewables

The area of land needed to deliver solar and wind power is much larger than coal or fossil gas plants, leading to tension when homeowners and other groups hear of renewable projects proposed nearby.

“People are supportive of wind and solar, generally, but just don’t want it right next to them,” Houser explained. “The way that a lot of homeowners are very supportive of homeless shelters just as long as it’s not on their block.”

But this NIMBYism, an acronym for “not in my backyard” that reflects the opposition of residents to developments in the vicinity of their homes, is not isolated to a few corners of the country. A 2023 report by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School found organised opposition in 35 states, resulting in at least 228 significant local restrictions against wind, solar and other renewable energy facilities.

The report found that nearly 300 projects had encountered serious opposition, ranging from letter-writing campaigns to lawsuits.

“Delays from litigation alone can kill a project,” noted Matthew Eisenson, the report’s author and senior fellow at the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

While some concerns are rooted in impacts to tribal lands, resources and sacred sites, known as “green colonialism”, Eisenson said opposition from tribes affects only a small percentage of renewable energy projects.

Instead, he said, most complaints about clean energy projects are from non-Indigenous communities with concerns about visual impacts, community character, impacts on property values and loss of agricultural land. The most intense opposition can be found in the Midwest, especially Ohio and Michigan, and parts of the South, including Virginia, according to Eisenson’s research.

Opposition has been especially effective at the municipal level, where town and county boards are staffed by common citizens who aren’t experts in energy policy, he said. Often it only takes a small number of people to show up at meetings to block a project. “But that’s not to say that a majority of people in all these communities actually support stopping projects,” Eisenson said.

Opponents have successfully passed not only local bans but also state laws. Eisenson pointed to Ohio, where a state law enacted in 2021 allows counties to establish restricted areas where wind and solar projects are banned. At least 16 counties have since established restricted areas on solar farms.

Offshore wind, especially, has faced fierce opposition from non-environmental groups, and it is “the area where we see the highest correlation between misinformation and opposition,” Eisenson said. “There has been a concerted misinformation campaign to tie whale beachings to offshore wind development and exploration.”

Eisenson is concerned that all this pushback is having a significant impact on the rollout of renewables. “There’s still a big question mark about how much of this infrastructure actually gets built,” he said.

Referring to the NIMBYism, Houser said the question is when to put the collective interest of the climate over the interest of the individual. “The challenge now for policymakers is, can they prioritise rapid construction to clean energy for climate relative to some other issues when there are trade-offs?” he said.

Backlogged grid

Another major obstacle that’s slowing the renewable transition is a backlog in connecting clean energy to the grid.

The grid is the transmission system that moves power across long distances towards cities, where local distribution brings power to homes and businesses. But delays have emerged as new projects ask to be connected to the grid, explained Lori Bird, director of US Energy for the World Resources Institute, a global research organisation.

New projects must apply to connect to the grid. “They have to go through a study process to be able to get an interconnection agreement,” she said.

The process includes assessing impacts to the grid, and whether they can meet requirements and provide reliable power.

“There’s very large backlogs of projects in the queues,” Bird said. “One issue is that study processes have been taking longer than they have in the past, and larger projects are taking longer to interconnect. So it’s a volume issue, it’s a staffing issue.”

The good news, Bird said, is that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), recently issued an order to speed up the process. Instead of studying projects based on their order in the queue, they will now be studied in regional clusters, making it faster to assess them together. The order also imposes penalties on transmission providers that don’t complete studies on time and requires projects to be closer to completion in order to enter the queue.

She said it’s too soon to say whether the FERC rules will speed up connection, but she hopes it will “make the process go more smoothly.”

All these non-cost barriers are “a good problem to have”, pointed out Houser.

“For clean electricity, we have reached a tipping point where it’s not a question of whether we’ll decarbonise – it’s how fast. That is a huge victory. The amount of avoided global climate damage from reaching that tipping point is very large.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, March 10, 2024 10:49 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

US uranium miners resurrected by nuclear revival and Ukraine war

By Jamie Smyth, Harry Dempsey | Sunday, March 10, 2024

https://www.ft.com/content/d4af145b-5ab3-477b-bfed-5bf42dc1cfdb

Over a 40-year career, Scott Melbye watched the US uranium industry fall from its position as the world’s leading producer of the radioactive ore that powers nuclear reactors to an also-ran with negligible production.

Now, the president of the Uranium Producers of America is leading an industry charge to revive mothballed mines and invest in new production to capitalise on soaring prices and policies aimed at reducing the US’s dependence on Russian imports.

At least five US-listed producers are reopening uranium mines in Texas, Wyoming, Arizona and Utah that were idled following a market crash caused by the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan in 2011. A handful of exploration companies are searching for new deposits of uranium, which has tripled in price since the start of 2021 because of a resurgence in interest in nuclear energy.

“We’ve been on sleep mode for too long and now our membership is energised again,” said Melbye, who is also a senior executive at Uranium Energy Corp, a Texas-based company reopening mines in Wyoming and Texas.

“There is the broad bipartisan support for nuclear energy, the role it plays in the green transition and of course Ukraine-Russia has highlighted the need to secure our energy independence,” he said.

The restart of US production comes amid a global revival in the uranium industry with producers in Australia, Canada and other nations seeking to increase production.

They are responding to a blistering rally in uranium prices, which reached a 16-year high above $100 a pound in January and remains elevated at $92 a pound. This is being driven by governments’ renewed interest in nuclear energy, an emissions-free power source that advocates say will play a key role in the energy transition.

About 60 nuclear plants are under construction and a further 110 are planned, according to the World Nuclear Association, which forecasts demand for uranium will double to 130,000 tonnes by 2040. A more immediate boost to demand has come from extensions to the lifetime of reactors currently producing. Last year uranium demand was 65,650 tonnes. It is forecast to rise to 83,840 tonnes by 2030.

Prices have also been raised by tight supply, after a drought of investment in new projects in the 2010s.

Global uranium production dropped by a quarter to 47,731 tonnes from 2016 to 2020 following the market crash after Fukushima. Expansion plans by the world’s largest producer Kazatomprom — which accounts for 23 per cent of global output — have stalled because of shortages of sulphuric acid, which is used in their leach mining operations in Kazakhstan.

“They’ve run into some ramp up issues,” said Ur-Energy Inc chief executive John Cash, which is restarting production at two mines in Wyoming.

He said geopolitics is driving prices higher over concerns that the main export route for Kazakh and Uzbek uranium bound for the US runs across Russia and out of St Petersburg port. In 2022 Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Russia supplied just under half of all uranium purchased by US nuclear plants, according to US government data.

“No one really knows how Vladimir Putin will attempt to put his thumb on those countries going forward. So, diversification now is the name of the game,” said Cash, adding that US and European utilities are signing more contracts with Ur-Energy following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The US Congress is considering banning Russian uranium imports in a move that would further shake up the sector.

Most analysts forecast Kazakhstan’s output will flow increasingly to Russia and China in the future because of high logistics costs to ship uranium via alternative routes that avoid Russia, such as the Caspian Sea, and an increase in long-term deals to supply China.

Melbye said the growth in the nuclear sector and western nations’ increased focus on energy security had opened an opportunity for US producers. If conditions remain supportive, the domestic industry could increase annual production to more than 20mn pounds, he said.

UEC has spent almost $600mn acquiring uranium assets over the past three years in the US and Canada, including a Wyoming mine formerly owned by Russian energy giant Rosatom. It plans to restart the operation in August and has applied for a licence to increase the annual capacity of a related processing plant to 4mn pounds, up from 2.5mn pounds.

“We’ve got a pretty significant structural deficit that needs to be closed in the coming years,” said Melbye, who acknowledged US producers would face competition from overseas rivals such as Canada and Australia.

Cameco, the world’s second-biggest producer, said it would produce at full capacity this year at its McArthur River and Cigar Lake operations in Saskatchewan. Its three suspended mines in the US are a lower priority than the expansion of McArthur River but “don’t rule those out either as they are on our batting line-up further down the list”, said chief executive Timothy Gitzel during full-year results last month.

Many experts are sceptical about the long-term prospects for US production because of its smaller scale operations and higher cost basis than rival producers. A recent analysis of projected cost estimates of several proposed uranium projects in the US, Canada and Namibia by TradeTech and uranium.info found the cost of mining was highest at US operations.

Liberum head of commodities strategy Tom Price said the fact that Washington was keen to add domestic sources of uranium would probably underpin some of the new US mining operations. But US buyers would seek to access cheaper sources of uranium in countries such as Canada and Australia.

“As global production increases and prices get down to levels of around $70 per pound, then I think a lot of the bravado in the US industry will tone done and less projects will come into the trade.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Tuesday, March 12, 2024 5:38 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Solar Power Milestone

It accounted for 53% of new capacity

By Tik Root | March 11, 2024 5:01 AM

https://laist.com/brief/news/climate-environment/solar-renewable-energ
y-milestone

Solar accounted for most of the capacity the nation added to its electric grids last year. That feat marks the first time since World War II, when hydropower was booming, that a renewable power source has comprised more than half of the nation’s energy additions.

The 32.4 gigawatts that came online in the United States last year shattered the previous high of 23.6 gigawatts recorded in 2021 and accounted for 53 percent of new capacity. Natural gas was next in line at a distant 18 percent.

SEIA called 2023 the best year for renewables since the Second World War. Texas and California led a solar surge driven mostly by utility-scale installations, which jumped 77 percent year-over-year to 22.5 gigawatts.

Experts generally expect renewable energy to keep on its torrent trajectory.

“It’s very likely to continue because solar and wind are now very well established,” said Rob Stoner, director of the MIT Energy Initiative. “Solar costs continue to fall far below where we ever thought they would.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, March 23, 2024 7:01 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly: 1982 to March 21, 2024

https://twitter.com/EliotJacobson/status/1771201408978534415

https://jabberwocking.com/the-north-atlantic-meltdown-is-getting-even-
worse/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Monday, March 25, 2024 7:40 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The world’s biggest clean energy plant

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/19/business/india-adani-green-energy-p
lant-climate-intl-hnk/index.html

The success of the Khavda Renewable Energy Park is critical to India’s efforts to reduce pollution and hit its climate goals while meeting the burgeoning energy needs of the world’s most populous nation and fastest-growing major economy. Coal still accounts for 70% of the electricity India generates.

India is comfortably placed to grow at an annual rate of at least 6% in the coming few years, analysts say, and may become the world’s third largest economy before the end of this decade.

As it develops and modernizes, its urban population will shoot up, leading to a massive rise in the construction of homes, offices, shops and other buildings. According to analysts, India is set to add the equivalent of a London to its urban population every year for the next 30 years.

Electricity demand is expected to skyrocket in the coming years because of factors ranging from improved living standards to climate change. The latter has been fueling deadly heatwaves across India, and as a result, air conditioner ownership is set to see a sharp spike in the coming years.

By 2050, India’s total electricity demand from residential air conditioners is set to exceed the total energy consumption in the whole of Africa today, the IEA said.

India cannot rely on fossil fuels for its burgeoning needs without disastrous consequences for efforts to tackle the climate crisis.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, March 25, 2024 11:43 AM

Sounds to me like we should be talking about population control and not talking about fairy tales.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, March 27, 2024 3:03 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Sounds to me like we should be talking about population control and not talking about fairy tales.

Did you notice that he is bragging about how they have cranked up the costs of energy so much that reliable cheap energy is now more expensive than the outrageously expensive renewables?
As soon as Trump takes office again, the bottom will drop out of the Fake Renewable Market.

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Monday, April 1, 2024 11:04 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Climate Change Indicators: U.S. Green House Gas Emissions

Angry Bear | April 1, 2024 7:00 am

https://angrybearblog.com/2024/04/climate-change-indicators-u-s-green-
house-gas-emissions

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Wednesday, April 3, 2024 6:13 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The consensus is in: cooling the planet will be impossible without direct human intervention.

By Gwynne Dyer | 8:32, Apr. 1, 2024

https://thewalrus.ca/seven-truths-climate-crisis/

As the climate crisis deepens and the negative impacts multiply, public opinion and politics are finally responding, but there is no guarantee that our actions will be big and fast enough to avoid an outcome that is catastrophic for human beings and quite disruptive, at least, for the entire biosphere. We are not even sure yet how big and how fast those actions need to be, because the discipline of climate science is only about forty years old. But the answer is almost certainly: very big and very fast.

“How extreme it could get,” says Tim Lenton, professor of climate change and earth system science at the University of Exeter, “depends on two main things: how intent we are on burning all the fossil fuels we already know about and how sensitive the Earth’s climate is to that carbon injection. We could get to 8°C of warming fairly readily, but we probably wouldn’t, because it would be so catastrophic well before we reached that point that it would terminate our activities. We are still able to trigger warming of the order of 5°C globally, burning only a fraction of the fossil fuels, if we consider the feedbacks and tipping points. Very sobering for those of us who work on this day in, day out.”

Scientists can now predict with some confidence how much extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will cause how much warming: there is still a range of possibilities, but the range has narrowed, and all the possibilities past 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are bad.

We are coming up on 425 ppm and adding 2.4 ppm a year.

Almost nobody in the climate science community really believes anymore that we can stop the warming at a place that is relatively safe without direct human intervention of some sort in the climate system. Doing so merely by cutting emissions and planting lots of trees would have been possible (with a huge crash programme) in the year 2000, and it was still imaginable (just) in 2010, but it now hardly seems credible.

Just as an aide-mémoire, these are the inconvenient facts that we must always bear in mind.

We Are Running Out of Time

Actually, we probably have run out of time. Like soon-to-be bankrupts, we can go on fiddling the books for a while longer, but we cannot stay below the 1.5°C higher average global temperature that was our recommended maximum increase according to the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015. As Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told me in 2020: “We have been lulling ourselves into a comfort zone, believing we have a lot of time, but 2020 is the year when we need to bend the curve down on global emissions.?.?.?.?You cannot succeed if you bend later.?.?.?.?If you bend later, the speed by which we have to reduce emissions is no longer possible to achieve in any democratic way. You would simply have to bulldoze every coal-fired plant overnight.”

Much more at https://thewalrus.ca/seven-truths-climate-crisis/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Thursday, April 11, 2024 4:50 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Global surface temperatures in March were 0.1C higher than the previous record for the month, set in 2016, and 1.68C higher than the pre-industrial average, according to data released on Tuesday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

https://climate.copernicus.eu/climate-bulletins#55c9d9ab-fb45-4667-94b
0-084c3423879b

This is the 10th consecutive monthly record in a warming phase that has shattered all previous records. Over the past 12 months, average global temperatures have been 1.58C above pre-industrial levels. This exceeds the 1.5C benchmark set as a target in the Paris climate agreement.

“Stopping further warming requires rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions,” said Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Michael E Mann, the scientist whose 1999 “hockey-stick graph” showed the sharp rise in global temperatures since the industrial age, said the current trends were to be expected given the continuing rise in emissions. But he said that should not be a source of comfort. “The world is warming AS FAST as we predicted – and that’s bad enough,” he tweeted.

Opposition to this view comes not from science, but the fossil fuel industry – in particular the 57 companies linked to 80% of emissions – which stands to lose trillions of dollars. Last month, Saudi Aramco chief executive Amin Nasser was applauded at an oil industry conference in Houston for declaring: “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.” This was despite the fact that his country and others had agreed just four months earlier to move away from fossil fuels at the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai.

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2024/apr/09/tenth-consecutive-month
ly-heat-record-alarms-confounds-climate-scientists

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Thursday, April 11, 2024 5:31 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

You should see the sea surface temperature.

Yanno, probably the reason why people resist the thought of global climate change isn't so much thst they doubt the science, it's that all of the "solutions" put forward by TPTB always seem to threaten their standard of living, as low as it might be.

For people who have air conditioning, it's "don't use A/C". For people who can afford to eat meat, it's "eat bugs". For people who can't even afford to eat meat, it's "die, already".

I'll bet if you told people that you could make a good start on solving climate shift problem by killing off the richest million people, ending war, and employing a crap ton of people at reasonable wages for forest management, better- if more labor-intensive - farming practices, and remediating old houses to be energy efficient, they'd be a lot happier if you told them that commuter cars would be limited to 3000 lbs and trucks and vans would only be sold for legitimate business purposes.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Thursday, April 11, 2024 9:46 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
You should see the sea surface temperature.

Yanno, probably the reason why people resist the thought of global climate change isn't so much thst they doubt the science, it's that all of the "solutions" put forward by TPTB always seem to threaten their standard of living, as low as it might be.

For people who have air conditioning, it's "don't use A/C". For people who can afford to eat meat, it's "eat bugs". For people who can't even afford to eat meat, it's "die, already".

I'll bet if you told people that you could make a good start on solving climate shift problem by killing off the richest million people, ending war, and employing a crap ton of people at reasonable wages for forest management, better- if more labor-intensive - farming practices, and remediating old houses to be energy efficient, they'd be a lot happier if you told them that commuter cars would be limited to 3000 lbs and trucks and vans would only be sold for legitimate business purposes.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

Signym, your angry poor white trash orientation is showing. Trump and Putin know how to manipulate your psychology.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, April 11, 2024 1:43 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
You should see the sea surface temperature.

Yanno, probably the reason why people resist the thought of global climate change isn't so much thst they doubt the science, it's that all of the "solutions" put forward by TPTB always seem to threaten their standard of living, as low as it might be.

For people who have air conditioning, it's "don't use A/C". For people who can afford to eat meat, it's "eat bugs". For people who can't even afford to eat meat, it's "die, already".

I'll bet if you told people that you could make a good start on solving climate shift problem by killing off the richest million people, ending war, and employing a crap ton of people at reasonable wages for forest management, better- if more labor-intensive - farming practices, and remediating old houses to be energy efficient, they'd be a lot happier if you told them that commuter cars would be limited to 3000 lbs and trucks and vans would only be sold for legitimate business purposes.

SECOND: Signym, your angry poor white trash orientation is showing. Trump and Putin know how to manipulate your psychology.

You can't come up with a rational response, and you feel threatened, so you resort to name-calling?
Of course. It's what you do.

The wealthiest use more resources and create more global warming emissions than everyone else. Case in point: One space joyride emits more GHGS than the poorest BILLION people do in a year. And how 'bout those private jets and yachts, hmmm??? Their control of policy that got us in this mess in the first place?

War: The Pentagon is the single biggest institutional emitter of GHCs in the ENTIRE WORLD. Now take into account all the production of war materiel, not only by our MIC but all of the militaries around the world who are preparing to defend themselves. If we could reduce the Pentagon to its original function .. defened our borders -currently undefended ... we could reduce our own emissions by 90%.

Forestry: One bad forest fire year in CA undid 18 YEARS of CA decarbonization. 18:1. Hard to find a ROI better than that! Multiply that by however many states have vulnerable forests. And it's not CA state forests that burned, it was Federally "managed" forests.

I do recommend that ordinary people sacrifice, too. Those trucks and passenger vans and SUVs that haul a couple of tons (or more) pf vehicle around to get groceries from the supermarket? Totally unnecessary luxury. And if you should unexpectedly need to haul a load of furniture or take the extended family on a road trip ... there's always rental.

Let's tackle the biggest problems and hte biggest emitteres first in a rational, sincere, and effective effort to slow down climate change, not pick on "little people" in a naked power- and money-grab by the already obscenely powerful.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Thursday, April 11, 2024 2:00 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Hidden Behind Climate Policies, Data From Nonexistent Temperature Stations

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hidden-behind-climate-policies-dat
a-nonexistent-temperature-stations

It's both important that this be brought up, and unfair that it's presented as it is.

Measuring temperature across the globe is fraught with difficulties. One problem is that temperature sensors are unevenly distributed. Most are around cities, which create their own heat domes. You won't find any in the middle of the Brazilian rainforest, and not many in the middle of the Australian outback or at the poles. Sea surface temperature is measured by buoys, some of which are set adrift and a number of which are located to detect El Nino. Because sensors are unevenly distributed it would be unfair to take a simple average, as that would "overweight" some regions and underweight others.

Historic stations are obsoleted, not just by aging equipment but also by development. If a highrise is built where a station used to be, you can't replace it.

And unfortunately there's no satellite detector that can read surface temperatures.

The best can be done is make a good- faith effort to estimate the actual average, AND to note regional anomalies. We know, for example, that the northern Arctic and subartic region is warming far faster than anywhere else. What that ultimately does to ocean and air currents is anyone's guess, but we can already see the jet streams shifting northward, slowing down, and "looping" far further north and south than previously.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Friday, April 12, 2024 8:15 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Let's tackle the biggest problems and hte biggest emitteres first in a rational, sincere, and effective effort to slow down climate change, not pick on "little people" in a naked power- and money-grab by the already obscenely powerful.

Signym, this is what rationality looks like, not another of your "eat the rich" solutions. Each one of these emission sources goes to zero:

Climate Change Indicators: U.S. Green House Gas Emissions

Angry Bear | April 1, 2024 7:00 am

https://angrybearblog.com/2024/04/climate-change-indicators-u-s-green-
house-gas-emissions

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, April 12, 2024 10:10 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Notice, however, that they didn't break out the sources of GHGs by institution or wealth, or mention that the USA has oursourced a lot of its manufacturing emissions to China. Forest fires didn't even get a mention. And altho "agriculture" (and ranching? Forestry?) may not be huge emitters, they have the capacity to be big sinks.

It's like "per capita GDP": if you chose your categories correctly, you can hide a multitude of sins.

One more comment: electricity generation emissions go up steadily. How do you think that'll look if EVs are mandated?

And finally ... didn't hear objections to the whole idea of depopulation when applied to the poor masses. Suddenly, it becomes an issue when it's applied to the biggest emitters, the wealthy?

That's not rationality, that's severe bias.

Just sayin'.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Thursday, April 18, 2024 10:21 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

And finally ... didn't hear objections to the whole idea of depopulation when applied to the poor masses. Suddenly, it becomes an issue when it's applied to the biggest emitters, the wealthy?

That's not rationality, that's severe bias.

Just sayin'.

Signym, I am biased against stupid and lazy people like you. Meanwhile, there are Californians expending money and building a future despite the stupid and lazy people objecting to spending money fixing the problem because killing their enemies ("depopulation" is Signym's term for murder) seems to be a cost-free way around problems:

Apr 15, 2024

In a major clean energy benchmark, wind, solar, and hydro exceeded 100% of demand on California’s main grid for 30 of the past 38 days.

On April 2, the California Independent System Operator (ISO) recommended 26 new transmission projects worth $6.1 billion, with a big number being devoted to offshore wind.

California will entirely be on renewables and battery storage 24/7 by 2035.

California passed a law that commits to achieving 100% net zero electricity by 2045. Will it beat that goal by a decade?

https://electrek.co/2024/04/15/renewables-met-100-percent-california-e
nergy-demand-30-days/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, April 21, 2024 1:56 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Why Wind and Solar Won't Solve Climate Change

By Ted Nordhaus | April 21, 2024

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/04/21/christophers-price-is-wrong-book-
review-climate-change-policy-renewable-energy-wind-solar/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921

Book Review
The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet, Brett Christophers, Verso, 432 pp., $26.07 (that’s the price on the affiliate link), March 2024
Download for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Brett+Christophers+Price

In 2015, the British economist Nicholas Stern argued that the reason for excessive carbon emissions was not just one market failure—the familiar fact that fossil fuel prices do not include the environmental and social costs of burning them—but rather six such failures. Laid out in Why Are We Waiting? The Logic, Urgency, and Promise of Tackling Climate Change, Stern’s fusillade of market failures cut against the prevailing case for pricing carbon, long considered a silver bullet: Get the price of carbon right, the argument went, and market actors would come up with the best and most efficient solutions without the need for policymakers to pick clean-technology winners, devise complex regulatory schemes, or otherwise micromanage the transition.

To his credit, Stern’s diagnosis of multiple market failures was an acknowledgment that climate change could not be solved in such a simple, elegant fashion. But his approach also smacked of dogmatism. In neoclassical economic theory, a properly functioning market will always produce an optimal amount of desired goods at an optimal cost—and when it fails to do so, it must be because prices have been distorted for some reason. The solution, then, is to discover the distortion, get the prices right, and allow the market to deliver the optimal amount of the desired good—in this case, clean energy.

But when one needs to invoke six market failures instead of one, it is fair to ask whether the lens of market failure is really the best or most parsimonious framework for looking at the problem. Like pre-Galilean astronomers, who produced ever more complex epicycles to describe the movement of celestial objects in order to sustain their belief that the Earth sat at the center of the universe, Stern’s proliferating cosmology of market failures was necessary to keep markets at the center of climate policy.

This, more or less, is where Brett Christophers’s new book, The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet, begins. Christophers, a geographer at Sweden’s Uppsala University, argues that getting prices right, whether by making fossil fuels expensive through pricing carbon or making clean energy cheap through subsidies and technological innovation, is entirely insufficient to drive the rapid deployment of renewable energy. Much heavier-handed intervention will be necessary, Christophers argues, including government price guarantees or even public ownership of electricity generation and distribution. The book is convincing at times in its case that neoliberal schemes to deregulate electricity markets can undermine efforts to mitigate climate change. But without intending to do so, Christophers also shows why wind and solar energy alone are unlikely to get us very far in decarbonizing the global economy.

The Price Is Wrong has been hotly anticipated. The New York Times’ David Wallace-Wells previewed it in a column in January. Robinson Meyer, an Atlantic and New York Times contributor and editor of a widely read climate newsletter, described the book as “one of the most insightful and clarifying books yet written on the relationship between climate change and capitalism.”

Readers expecting an anti-capitalist polemic, however, will be disappointed. Christophers is more wonk than firebrand, immersing his audience in an often technical description of how electricity systems have evolved, how electricity markets work, and how renewable energy projects are financed and make money. At the core of his argument is what he describes as a paradox: “If renewables are now cheapest, why is government economic support for renewables still so important?” Why, he asks, “are we still in fact failing on electricity decarbonization?” The answer, he argues, is neoliberalism, the unholy fetishizing of markets as the solution to all policy problems—in this case, climate change.

The fact that renewable energy is failing to decarbonize the electricity sector may surprise many readers accustomed to breathless reports of the rapid growth of renewable energy around the world. What Christophers means by this, though, is that while renewable energy is growing rapidly in many places, these increases are not even keeping up with global growth in the demand for electricity.

Yes, wind and solar generation have grown impressively over the last decade in absolute terms. And yes, the share of global electricity generated by fossil fuels, primarily coal and gas, has fallen somewhat over that time, from around 68 percent in 2012 to around 61 percent in 2022. But total global electricity generation grew by almost 30 percent over the same period, outpacing the rise in renewables. As a result, total emissions from the power sector continued to rise.

So while the cost of renewable energy keeps falling and governments continue to pay lip service to various global climate and emissions targets, most also continue to build new coal and gas plants to power their economies—alongside all those shiny new wind turbines and solar panels.

How, Christophers asks, could this be, if wind and solar energy are as cheap as so many people say they are? His answer centers on what he believes to have been misguided policies to liberalize electricity markets. The drive to break up regulated, vertically integrated utilities and create competitive wholesale electricity markets, he argues, has disadvantaged renewable energy developers, because it forces developers to sell the electricity that they produce much of the time at fire-sale prices, as wind and solar installations often produce lots of electricity at times when it is difficult to sell it for very much. So even though the cost of producing electricity with solar and wind is often very low, it’s not profitable enough for private developers because they can’t sell it for enough to make a return on their investment.

Christophers’s analysis will, no doubt, be news to many renewable energy advocates and developers, who have long called for breaking up vertically integrated monopoly utilities to allow renewable energy producers to compete with conventional generators. The energy transition “will need to harness America’s immensely powerful and creative economic engine, not dismantle it,” Amory Lovins, America’s original renewable energy evangelist, argued in the New York Times in 2019. “We should let competition and flexibility rule our electricity system.”

Christophers attributes the move to liberalize electricity systems around the world over the last three decades to a de facto alliance between neoliberal “powers that be”—who remain undefined in the book—and renewable energy advocates who mistakenly believed that renewable energy could outcompete fossil fuels. But there is another reason that renewable energy advocates and developers have long argued for the creation of competitive wholesale electricity markets. That is because unbundling power generation, sale, and distribution also disconnects the cost of producing wind and solar energy from the cost of operating an electricity system that must deliver power to end-users whenever they need it, regardless of whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.

Hidebound, corrupt, and self-dealing as many of the old monopoly utilities may have been, the expectation in traditionally regulated utility systems was that in exchange for a guaranteed profit through a regulatory monopoly, they would deliver electricity to anyone who wanted it, when they wanted it, at a reasonable price. And for the most part, the monopoly utility system delivered.

These monopoly utilities have often resisted building wind and solar because, in the view of the utilities’ critics, they have perverse incentives to prioritize conventional generation using coal, gas, and uranium over renewable sources. That’s because the prevailing regulatory model pays vertically integrated utilities a set rate of profit on top of their costs, which means that utilities can raise their total profit by raising their costs—usually by overbuilding costly, capital-intensive infrastructure. But there is no reason why these incentives couldn’t, in theory, easily accommodate wind and solar power. These sources are also capital-intensive and, due to their intermittency, must be overbuilt in order to deliver significant amounts of power to the electrical grid.

There is, however, a much less sinister reason why many monopoly utilities have hesitated to add a large share of wind and solar generation to their grids. A consumer-facing utility—as opposed to a mere power producer—must consider the overall cost and complexity of operating an electrical grid that delivers power to users all the time. And from this perspective, the business case for introducing lots of capital-intensive wind and solar that often produce electricity at times when it isn’t needed has never been a strong one.

So a different answer to Christophers’s paradox is that the reason that renewable energy continues to require sustained, direct public subsidies almost everywhere, despite the falling cost to physically produce it, is that it is not actually that cheap. Yes, wind turbines and solar panels might be relatively inexpensive to manufacture and install today. But because they only produce electricity some of the time—and mostly at the same time—the value of that electricity to the grid, and hence the price it can command in competitive markets, continually declines as renewables proliferate. Christophers calls this dynamic “cannibalization.” Others call it value deflation.

The result, Christophers argues, is that nobody can make money on wind and solar despite their low installation cost without sustained public subsidies. Indeed, conventional subsidies, which in many places such as the United States are provided through investment or production tax credits that substantially lower the cost of building wind and solar generation, are not enough. Instead, he argues, continued deployment of renewable energy, consistent with significantly cutting emissions from the electricity sector, will require guaranteeing a profit to renewable energy developers..

Notably, these are not temporary measures that will go away as renewable energy becomes ever cheaper to build. Rather, he argues, the only way to incentivize developers to continue to build more wind and solar, even though they can’t make money doing so if power is priced by the market, is to guarantee them a profit, essentially in perpetuity. Whereas the old, regulated utility system guaranteed utilities a profit to deliver electricity to end-users when they needed it, Christophers suggests that solving climate change will require guaranteeing profits to renewable energy developers to deliver power when those end-users don’t need it.

This is, more or less, what Germany has done over the last two decades. That nation’s vaunted Energiewende provided generous feed-in tariffs for wind and solar energy production beginning in the early 2000s and has resulted in lots of renewable power. But those price supports—or “price stabilization,” in Christophers’s lingo—have put German ratepayers and taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of billions of euros in current and future payouts. Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, its households and industry were paying the highest electricity prices in Europe—and now, they are paying the highest in the world. At the same time, Germany’s transition to wind and solar only worked because of plentiful backup electricity generated from using cheap Russian gas. Now that the Kremlin’s spigot is shut, Germany is struggling to keep power affordable not only for consumers, but also for manufacturing companies—the backbone of the country’s economy.

Indeed, if one didn’t know better, one could read long passages of The Price Is Wrong as a damning indictment of renewable energy, not just electricity market liberalization. Christophers sidesteps this issue by again deferring to the “powers that be,” who, in his telling, have determined that electricity systems in most places must be not only liberalized but also powered by renewable energy. The result is that while Christophers makes much of the fact that wholesale electricity markets don’t value electricity from wind and solar producers very highly, but he does not follow that fact to its logical conclusion: that no amount of subsidies, price controls, or state ownership can solve the underlying problem of the intermittency of wind and solar power.

Christophers’s fetishization of renewable energy as the only way to solve climate change is, in its own way, every bit as dogmatic as Stern’s fetishization of prices and market failure. One result is that despite so much discussion of the limits of markets and the need for much bigger state involvement, one crucial phrase hardly uttered across almost 400 pages of The Price Is Wrong is “state planning” or its equivalent. If markets and prices are the coin of the neoliberal realm, central planning is its bane; conversely, someone concerned with the failure of markets might look at what planning can do.

Christophers does cite a few examples, such as China’s plans to build massive state-owned renewables installations in the Gobi Desert to help meet fast-growing electricity demand. But he discusses those plans without reference to China’s state-planned electricity system as a whole. Yes, China is pushing wind and solar—but it is also building nuclear plants. With an eye to the long term, China has even designed much of its new fleet of coal-fired power plants so that a new generation of small, modular nuclear reactors, which China is also commercializing, can be installed in those plants in the future to replace their coal-fired boilers.

Arguably the best case for state-led, low-carbon electricity is entirely absent from The Price Is Wrong: France, which resisted the siren call of deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s and instead built a centrally planned, state-owned electricity system powered not by wind and solar, but by nuclear energy. Nuclear, we are constantly reminded, is much more costly to build than wind and solar. But it is clean energy infrastructure that lasts for 60 to 80 years once built. In a state-planned and state-financed electricity system, those costs can be amortized over many decades.

The result is that France has achieved the lowest carbon intensity of any major economy in the world, with electricity prices among the lowest in Europe. It is the sort of thing that, in Christophers’s telling, the neoliberal “powers that be” frown upon. So for a book that offers itself as a corrective, the absence is striking. France offers, without question, the best case for viewing cheap, abundant, low-carbon electricity as a public good, not a market commodity. Yet Christophers has nothing to say about it.

In the end, Christophers is probably right that the electricity market liberalization genie will not be put back into the bottle in many places. Nor is the world likely to give up on wind and solar energy anytime soon. Moreover, there is unlikely to be a one-size-fits-all solution. France’s faith in centralized, technocratic institutions and love of the atom will not easily be transplanted everywhere. Nor will Texas’s freewheeling electricity markets, along with its abundant wind and natural gas resources.

He is also right (even if he never quite gets around to saying it) that liberalizing electricity systems in order to externalize the cost of growing shares of renewable energy is a project that is likely to bring diminishing returns in terms of decarbonization, along with growing costs to both taxpayers and ratepayers. Sooner or later, low-carbon electricity systems will need a lot of something other than wind and solar in order to deeply decarbonize. Right now, the only commercially demonstrated option at scale is nuclear energy, with hydroelectric power also an option in a limited number of places. And competitive markets with increasing shares of intermittent energy sources not only undermine the economics of renewables, but they also make economically efficient operation of conventional nuclear plants, which are predicated on operating virtually all of the time, impossible.

Getting the balance right—between wind, solar, nuclear, and other low-carbon energy sources; between low-carbon and low-cost electricity systems; and between private markets, competition, innovation, and public infrastructure—won’t be easy. But one thing should be clear: If policymakers want low-carbon, reliable electricity systems, they will need to plan for them, and they will need to invest public resources in something other than intermittent renewable energy to get there. Neither getting prices right, as Stern has argued, nor ignoring what they tell us about the value of renewable energy, as Christophers does, is likely to change that.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, May 1, 2024 7:43 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

I wasn't worried about climate change. Now I am. - Sabine Hossenfelder, Jan 27, 2024

In this video I explain what climate sensitivity is and why it is important. Climate sensitivity is a number that roughly speaking tells us how fast climate change will get worse. A few years ago, after various software improvements, a bunch of climate models began having a much higher climate sensitivity than previously. Climate scientists have come up with reasons for why to ignore this. I think it's a bad idea to ignore this.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, May 3, 2024 5:52 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

I thought Electric Cars Were the Future. I Changed My Mind to Hybrid Vehicles.
EVs will be delayed by decades because the electric grid is expanding too slowly and there will be too few public charging stations.

There are 2,128 Tesla Superchargers locations in the United States as of January 15, 2024.
https://www.scrapehero.com/location-reports/Tesla%20Superchargers-USA/

There are 196,643 retail gas station locations in United States as of Mar 13, 2024.
https://www.xmap.ai/blog/gas-stations-in-united-states-of-america-ever
ything-you-need-to-know

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, May 6, 2024 4:57 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

How EVs became so polarized

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/how-evs-became-so-polarized/ar
-BB1lTxdL

Between 2012 and 2022 about half of all EVs sold went to the top 10 percent most Democratic counties in the United States. Around a third of all EVs sold went to the top 5 percent most Democratic counties. That pattern persisted when researchers analyzed the most Democratic states. “There’s an incredible correlation with political ideology,” said Lucas Davis, a professor of business and technology at the University of California at Berkeley and the lead author on the analysis.

Democratic areas have much more than their fair share of electric cars. So why did electric cars become — and stay — so polarized?

One reason is that Republican leaders have injected electric vehicles into the culture wars. Donald Trump has railed against electric cars, calling support of them “electric car lunacy” and the push for an EV future “very, very stupid.”

Electric cars have taken off across the United States. Even amid news of slowing sales, the country sold almost 1.2 million fully electric vehicles in 2023, more than quadruple the number in 2019.

Personal cars account for 20 percent of U.S. planet-warming emissions, but more Americans still prefer gas-powered ones. If that doesn’t change, it will be almost impossible for the United States to meet its climate goals.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 9, 2024 7:05 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

We asked 380 Climate Scientists About the Future - Wed 8 May 2024 05.00 EDT

In Mérida on the Yucatán peninsula, where Cerezo-Mota lives, the heat is ramping up. “Last summer, we had around 47C maximum (116.6F). The worst part is that, even at night, it’s 38C (100.4F), which is higher than your body temperature. It doesn’t give a minute of the day for your body to try to recover.”

She says record-breaking heatwaves led to many deaths in Mexico. “It’s very frustrating because many of these things could have been avoided. And it’s just silly to think: ‘Well, I don’t care if Mexico gets destroyed.’ We have seen these extreme events happening everywhere. There is not a safe place for anyone.

More at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2024/may/08/hop
eless-and-broken-why-the-worlds-top-climate-scientists-are-in-despair

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, May 9, 2024 10:50 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How EVs became so polarized

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/how-evs-became-so-polarized/ar
-BB1lTxdL

Between 2012 and 2022 about half of all EVs sold went to the top 10 percent most Democratic counties in the United States. Around a third of all EVs sold went to the top 5 percent most Democratic counties. That pattern persisted when researchers analyzed the most Democratic states. “There’s an incredible correlation with political ideology,” said Lucas Davis, a professor of business and technology at the University of California at Berkeley and the lead author on the analysis.

Democratic areas have much more than their fair share of electric cars. So why did electric cars become — and stay — so polarized?

One reason is that Republican leaders have injected electric vehicles into the culture wars. Donald Trump has railed against electric cars, calling support of them “electric car lunacy” and the push for an EV future “very, very stupid.”

Electric cars have taken off across the United States. Even amid news of slowing sales, the country sold almost 1.2 million fully electric vehicles in 2023, more than quadruple the number in 2019.

Personal cars account for 20 percent of U.S. planet-warming emissions, but more Americans still prefer gas-powered ones. If that doesn’t change, it will be almost impossible for the United States to meet its climate goals.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Because you guys are brainwashed idiots.

How's that piece of shit running? Can you even get 200 miles on a full charge anymore?

Good luck selling it on the used market, since there is zero used market for coal burning cars with $30,000 batteries.

You are a stupid, stupid person, and a fool and his money are easily parted.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Thursday, May 9, 2024 11:50 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump requests $1 billion donation from oil execs in exchange for rolling back environmental regulations

Former President Donald J. Trump told a group of oil executives and lobbyists gathered at a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort last month that they should donate $1 billion to his presidential campaign because, if elected, he would roll back environmental rules that he said hampered their industry, according to two people who were there.

About 20 people attended an April 11 event billed as an “energy round table” at Mr. Trump’s private club, according to those people, who asked not to be identified in order to discuss the private event. Attendees included executives from ExxonMobil, EQT Corporation and the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for the oil industry.

The event was organized by the oil billionaire Harold Hamm, who has for years helped to shape Republican energy policies. It was first reported by The Washington Post.

Mr. Trump has publicly railed for months against President Biden’s energy and environmental agenda, as Mr. Biden has raced to restore and strengthen dozens of climate and conservation rules that Mr. Trump had weakened or erased while in office. In particular, Mr. Trump has promised to eliminate Mr. Biden’s new climate rules intended to accelerate the nation’s transition to electric vehicles, and to push a “drill, baby, drill” agenda aimed at opening up more public lands to oil and gas exploration.

Mr. Biden has called climate change an existential threat and has moved to cut the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet and supercharging storms, heat waves and drought.

Over a dinner of chopped steak, Mr. Trump repeated his public promises to delete Mr. Biden’s pollution controls, telling the attendees that they should donate heavily to help him beat Mr. Biden because his policies would help their industries.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/climate/trump-oil-gas-mar-a-lago.ht
ml

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, May 10, 2024 12:08 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Oil industry writes executive orders for Trump to sign

The U.S. oil industry is drawing up ready-to-sign executive orders for Donald Trump aimed at pushing natural gas exports, cutting drilling costs and increasing offshore oil leases in case he wins a second term, according to energy executives with direct knowledge of the work.

The effort stems from the industry’s skepticism that the Trump campaign will be able to focus on energy issues as Election Day draws closer — and worries that the former president is too distracted to prepare a quick reversal of the Biden administration’s green policies. Oil executives also worry that a second Trump administration won’t attract staff skillful enough to roll back President Joe Biden’s regulations or craft new ones favoring the industry, these people added.

Six energy industry lawyers and lobbyists interviewed by POLITICO described the effort to craft executive orders and other policy paperwork that they see as more effective than anything a second Trump administration could devise on its own. Those include a quick reversal of Biden’s pause on new natural gas export permits and preparations for wider and cheaper access to federal lands and waters for drilling.

The initiative is just one example of the efforts underway from multiple advocacy groups with strong policy agendas — including abortion-rights opponents — to fill in the gaps for Trump’s potential return to the White House. The presumptive Republican nominee has been a vocal supporter of the oil and gas industry, but the companies often chafed at the effects of his policies as president, including his trade wars and the legal challenges that thwarted some of his pro-fossil-fuel actions.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/08/oil-industry-orders-trump-day
-one-00156705

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, May 10, 2024 12:15 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Oil industry writes executive orders for Trump to sign

The U.S. oil industry is drawing up ready-to-sign executive orders for Donald Trump aimed at pushing natural gas exports, cutting drilling costs and increasing offshore oil leases in case he wins a second term, according to energy executives with direct knowledge of the work.

The effort stems from the industry’s skepticism that the Trump campaign will be able to focus on energy issues as Election Day draws closer — and worries that the former president is too distracted to prepare a quick reversal of the Biden administration’s green policies. Oil executives also worry that a second Trump administration won’t attract staff skillful enough to roll back President Joe Biden’s regulations or craft new ones favoring the industry, these people added.

Six energy industry lawyers and lobbyists interviewed by POLITICO described the effort to craft executive orders and other policy paperwork that they see as more effective than anything a second Trump administration could devise on its own. Those include a quick reversal of Biden’s pause on new natural gas export permits and preparations for wider and cheaper access to federal lands and waters for drilling.

The initiative is just one example of the efforts underway from multiple advocacy groups with strong policy agendas — including abortion-rights opponents — to fill in the gaps for Trump’s potential return to the White House. The presumptive Republican nominee has been a vocal supporter of the oil and gas industry, but the companies often chafed at the effects of his policies as president, including his trade wars and the legal challenges that thwarted some of his pro-fossil-fuel actions.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/08/oil-industry-orders-trump-day
-one-00156705

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

This is a campaign advertisement that Trump didn't have to pay for.

I know 2016 was a long time ago now, but you really should have remembered the lessons.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Friday, May 10, 2024 7:31 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Battery-powered aircraft could lead transition from fossil-fueled flight

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, May 11, 2024 8:30 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Mammoth, the largest industrial facility yet built to filter carbon dioxide out of the air, just powered up in Hellisheiði, Iceland. It’s run by Swiss climate tech company Climeworks, whose clients include JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify, among others.

It was the latest industrial plant built with the purpose of sucking carbon dioxide out of the air, a process called direct air capture (DAC) — with more facilities planned around the world. DAC is supposed to be a way to fight climate change by getting rid of greenhouse gas emissions that have built up in the atmosphere, but the process still has to prove that it can scale up enough to have a meaningful impact.

It’ll have to see if it can replicate that early success in a growing market in the US

Mammoth is the biggest DAC plant running yet. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s relatively small compared to other projects in the pipeline. Climeworks’ operations in Iceland were meant to show the world that this technology can work. Now, it’ll have to see if it can replicate that early success in a growing market in the US.

Back in 2017, Climeworks became the first company to suck carbon dioxide out of the air and sell it as a product used in fizzy drinks and in a greenhouse. It took a big step forward in Iceland in 2021, where it opened the DAC plant Orca to start capturing CO2 and permanently sequestering it underground for clients, including Microsoft.

Orca was the biggest DAC plant in operation until now. Mammoth will be able to capture nearly 10 times as much CO2 as Orca once it’s fully operational, around 36,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. That’s still not a lot of carbon, considering Microsoft alone emitted close to 13 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2022.

More at https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/8/24151905/mammoth-carbon-removal-dire
ct-air-capture-climeworks

For comparison purposes – Annual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions worldwide in 2023 (in billion metric tons) 37.55
https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissions/
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+co2+is+released+each+year

How much solid waste does the world produce per year? 2 billion metric tons. CO2 is 37.55 billion metric tons. That is why CO2 is a bigger problem.
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+solid+waste+does+the+world+pr
oduce+per+year

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, May 11, 2024 1:01 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
World’s Largest Floating Solar Farm Wrecked By A Storm Just Before Launch
Image from video: https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-public/inline-images/panels.JPG

Dr. Willie Soon; Who could have predicted acres of fragile floating structures would be vulnerable to bad weather?

"Madhya Pradesh: Summer Storm Damages World’s Largest Floating Solar Plant at Omkareshwar Dam (Watch Video)
https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1787224785170190752/mediaVi
ewer?currentTweet=1787224785170190752¤tTweetUser=CitizenFreePres

Indore: A summer storm on Tuesday damaged a floating solar plant at Madhya Pradesh’s Omkareshwar dam. The floating solar plant, situated in the backwater of the dam, is the biggest of its kind in the world. A joint venture between Madhya Pradesh Govt and National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC), the project was nearly completed and ready for its launch. A part of the project became operational last week.

The project near the village of Kelwa Khurd, aimed at generating 100 MW of electricity, with additional capacities of 88MW at Indawadi and 90 MW at Ekhand village. However, on Tuesday, summer storms with the speed of 50kmph hit the project and threw the solar panels all around the place. No employee was fortunately injured."

Read more: https://www.lokmattimes.com/national/madhya-pradesh-summer-storm-damag
es-worlds-largest-floating-solar-plant-at-omkareshwar-dam-watch-video-a514/

Anyone who has ever owned a boat, particular a large boat which gets left in the water, knows what a harsh environment the sea can be. Some kind of failure was inevitable. If it hadn’t been a storm, there are plenty of other things which could have gone wrong.

Greens keep telling us we can expect more frequent and extreme superstorms – so what is the point of building vulnerable floating structures?

Plastics tend to disintegrate under tropical sunlight, especially when in contact with water or water spray. Ultraviolet from the sun drives exotic chemical reactions, which leads to chemical breakdown.

Metal sitting in water is difficult to manage, even stainless steel is not immune to corrosion. All metal structures in contact with water need to be protected with sacrificial anodes or comparable protective measures. Electricity and metal are an especially bad combination, any electrical fault which causes a current to run through metal in contact with water can cause corrosion to occur thousands of times faster than normal.

Let us hope developers and politicians take the hint, and stop throwing our money at inherently flawed ideas like floating solar arrays.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/05/09/worlds-largest-floating-solar-f
arm-wrecked-by-a-storm/

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

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Sunday, May 12, 2024 2:45 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

A pair of researchers has published a new paper claiming that global warming is astronomically more dangerous than we've thought until now. Their thesis is simple: historical evidence shows a very strong correlation between average global temps and extreme weather events, and those extreme weather events are very costly.

Interestingly, they do something I haven't seen before. Instead of just projecting what will happen in the future, they go backward and look at the past:

Quote:
Our results also indicate that world GDP per capita would be 37% higher today had no warming occurred between 1960 and 2019 instead of the 0.75°C observed increase in global mean temperature.

World GDP is currently around $100 trillion, so the authors are saying that it would be $37 trillion higher in the absence of climate change. This is the price we're paying every year.

The Macroeconomic Impact of Climate Change: Global vs. Local Temperature
By Adrien Bilal, Harvard University
and Diego R. Kanzig, Northwestern University
May, 2024
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zyOAE8D2zxb85Z6L4izb2Eot2HLXt-t2/view

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, May 14, 2024 7:46 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

‘Unbearable’: Will 45C heatwaves affect who India chooses in election?

Candidates are fainting, voter turnout is lower, and research suggests extreme heat could influence who people choose.

By Bibhudatta Pradhan | 14 May 2024

New Delhi, India – Midway through his address to voters in the searing heat of central India late in April, Minister of Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari fainted and collapsed on stage. When he was revived a few minutes later, Gadkari returned to the podium, blaming the oppressive weather for the bout of unconsciousness.

Gadkari is only one among a series of politicians, election officials and campaign managers who have fainted or fallen sick in recent days, as the temperature in parts of India has reached 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit). One TV anchor collapsed on air due to heat stroke, while she was reading out updates on a heatwave.

More at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/14/india-election-will-a-forty-f
ive-degree-heat-wave-affect-who-voters-choose

The ruling political party has mentioned achieving net-zero emissions by 2070, transitioning to non-fossil fuel energy sources. But what is actually happening? India's coal-fired electricity generation scaled a new high in January 2024 as the world's second-largest coal user after China cranked coal's share of the country's electricity generation mix to a record 80%.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/indias-coal-fired-electric
ity-output-emissions-hit-record-highs-2024-03-12/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, May 14, 2024 8:21 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
World’s Largest Floating Solar Farm Wrecked By A Storm Just Before Launch
Image from video: https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-public/inline-images/panels.JPG

Dr. Willie Soon; Who could have predicted acres of fragile floating structures would be vulnerable to bad weather?

"Madhya Pradesh: Summer Storm Damages World’s Largest Floating Solar Plant at Omkareshwar Dam (Watch Video)
https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1787224785170190752/mediaVi
ewer?currentTweet=1787224785170190752¤tTweetUser=CitizenFreePres

Indore: A summer storm on Tuesday damaged a floating solar plant at Madhya Pradesh’s Omkareshwar dam. The floating solar plant, situated in the backwater of the dam, is the biggest of its kind in the world. A joint venture between Madhya Pradesh Govt and National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC), the project was nearly completed and ready for its launch. A part of the project became operational last week.

The project near the village of Kelwa Khurd, aimed at generating 100 MW of electricity, with additional capacities of 88MW at Indawadi and 90 MW at Ekhand village. However, on Tuesday, summer storms with the speed of 50kmph hit the project and threw the solar panels all around the place. No employee was fortunately injured."

Read more: https://www.lokmattimes.com/national/madhya-pradesh-summer-storm-damag
es-worlds-largest-floating-solar-plant-at-omkareshwar-dam-watch-video-a514/

Anyone who has ever owned a boat, particular a large boat which gets left in the water, knows what a harsh environment the sea can be. Some kind of failure was inevitable. If it hadn’t been a storm, there are plenty of other things which could have gone wrong.

Greens keep telling us we can expect more frequent and extreme superstorms – so what is the point of building vulnerable floating structures?

Plastics tend to disintegrate under tropical sunlight, especially when in contact with water or water spray. Ultraviolet from the sun drives exotic chemical reactions, which leads to chemical breakdown.

Metal sitting in water is difficult to manage, even stainless steel is not immune to corrosion. All metal structures in contact with water need to be protected with sacrificial anodes or comparable protective measures. Electricity and metal are an especially bad combination, any electrical fault which causes a current to run through metal in contact with water can cause corrosion to occur thousands of times faster than normal.

Let us hope developers and politicians take the hint, and stop throwing our money at inherently flawed ideas like floating solar arrays.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/05/09/worlds-largest-floating-solar-f
arm-wrecked-by-a-storm/

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Why SECOND'S posts are brainless: "I clocked how much time: no more than 10 minutes per day. With cut-and-paste (Ctrl C and Ctrl V) and AI, none of this takes much time."
Or, any verification or thought.

Solar Freakin' Roadways would have been a much better investment.

Oh... wait.

--------------------------------------------------

Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Tuesday, May 14, 2024 9:27 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Solar Freakin' Roadways would have been a much better investment.

Oh... wait.

Collapse is common when the engineers are incompetent. From today:

At least 14 killed as billboard collapses in Mumbai during thunderstorm

The billboard collapsed on some houses and a petrol station next to a busy road in the eastern suburb of Ghatkopar following gusty winds and rain. Mumbai’s municipal corporation said 74 people were taken to hospital with injuries following the accident, of which 31 were discharged.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/14/at-least-14-killed-as-billboa
rd-collapses-in-mumbai-during-thunderstorm

No conclusion can be drawn about solar power from the collapse of solar collectors in the wind or the collapse of a billboard, other than being a cheapskate causes failure.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
Wed, November 27, 2024 17:47 - 7510 posts

What's wrong with conspiracy theories
Wed, November 27, 2024 17:06 - 21 posts

Ellen Page is a Dude Now
Wed, November 27, 2024 17:05 - 238 posts

Bald F*ck MAGICALLY "Fixes" Del Rio Migrant Invasion... By Releasing All Of Them Into The U.S.
Wed, November 27, 2024 17:03 - 41 posts

Why does THUGR shit up the board by bumping his pointless threads?
Wed, November 27, 2024 16:43 - 32 posts

Joe Rogan: Bro, do I have to sue CNN?
Wed, November 27, 2024 16:41 - 7 posts

Trump, convicted of 34 felonies
Wed, November 27, 2024 16:38 - 43 posts

Elections; 2024
Wed, November 27, 2024 16:36 - 4845 posts

Biden will be replaced
Wed, November 27, 2024 15:06 - 13 posts

Hollywood exposes themselves as the phony whores they are
Wed, November 27, 2024 14:38 - 45 posts

NATO
Wed, November 27, 2024 14:24 - 16 posts

In the garden, and RAIN!!! (2)
Wed, November 27, 2024 13:23 - 4773 posts

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