It's all about big boys with blow up toys

Economist and all-round stand up guy Paul Krugman skewers the Trump boys.

... Clean energy has become a bogeyman in the culture wars: mining and burning coal are considered “manly” activities, while renewable energy is portrayed as woke and effeminate. Real men don’t worry about black lung and airborne particulates, let alone climate change.

So a combination of big money and fragile male egos drives Green Derangement Syndrome. And the same is true for both the Iran debacle and the refusal to learn from the catastrophe by turning to Ukraine.

Why was the United States so unprepared for the Iranian drone threat, despite the obvious successes of Ukrainian drones against Russia? Well, as investigative reporters delve into the story, I would urge them to follow the money.

America has a huge, highly profitable defense industry, dedicated to a suite of technologies that are rapidly being rendered obsolete, as $4 million Patriot missiles, that take years to build, are being used to shoot down $35,000 Shahed drones that can be manufactured in months.

So it wouldn’t be surprising if defense-industry interests are playing a significant role in the Trump administration’s refusal to admit that the rules of war have changed — the same way that fossil fuel companies have campaigned against the new realities of energy technology. After all, a deal with drone-savvy Ukrainians would mean less money going to US defense contractors.

While this is speculative, we do know that recognition of the drone revolution in warfare by Trump and his inner circle would require that they abandon their fantasy of macho military power ...

... In military strategy as in energy policy, Trump is betraying America in the service of money and machismo. 

This country will have to grow up, one way or another, whether frying or fried. 

Might the warming world be a boon to women?

That's probably overstating it, but apparently women need to be warmer than men to feel comfortable. 

According to the BBC,  there's a measurable reason why women tend to think air conditioning is set too high while men want the temperature lowered. Or so a new study suggests.

... women feel the cold more readily - one small sample test the researchers carried out suggests that women are comfortable at a temperature 2.5C warmer than men - between 24-25C.

According to Prof Paul Thornalley, of Warwick Medical School, variation in average metabolic rate and body heat production between men and women "may explain why there is a difference in environmental temperature required for comfort between males and females".

The body's metabolism is responsible for growth and the production of energy, including heat. Resting metabolic rate is the minimal rate of energy expenditure per unit of time while we are at rest, calculated through a standard set of equations. On average women have a lower metabolic rate than men.

"A great determinant of resting metabolic rates is the fat free body mass in people's bodies," says Thornalley - accounting for around 60% of the individual difference in men and women's resting metabolic rates. Because men have more fat free body mass - all the components of the body like skin, bones and muscle, but excluding fat - than women, they have a higher resting metabolic rate.

... This higher proportion of body mass which is able to produce heat involuntarily means that on average men don't feel the cold as easily as women - and, in sultry summer months, means they have a lower tolerance for hot weather because their bodies produce more heat at a resting metabolic rate, getting warmer quicker.

Well maybe. Obviously people are different; individuals of both sexes may experience temperatures quite differently. And, the BBC points out, convention dictates to some women that we wear less clothes ...

Warmer winters: afflicted by ticks

Winter ain't what it used to on Martha's Vineyard island off Massachusetts. Our warming world means fewer truly cold days. And islanders connect those warmer days with an increasing infestation with disease bearing ticks, both long present Lyme disease carriers and the new Lone Star variety that brings the Alpha-gal allergy syndrome. 

An islander created this chart showing the frequency of freezing winter temperatures:

Click to enlarge.

With all the recent posts about the tick population on the island, and a body of entomology research indicating that warmer winter temperatures lead to less seasonal tick die off, I thought I would look at the trends in the number of cold days seen here each winter over the past few decades. This plot shows the number of days when the minimum temperature at MVY [airport] falls below various levels. Data are shown since 1970 and are from the official weather observing station at the airport. This shows that winters are not as cold as they used to be, with the number of days below freezing now about 15 fewer than 1970, and the number of days below 15F about half as many days as we saw back then.

The ticks are thriving on the rodents that carry them through the warmer winters. From the rats, they move on to the deer population in the spring. One consequence of the increasing tick population is that a great many of the hunters who used to thin the deer herd during hunting season have become allergic to meat following Lone Star tick bites -- leading to less hunting.

Ah, climate change. Can humans adjust?

Victorious Canadian leader brings more than sticking it to Trump

I was so glad to pass along that Canada had repudiated Donald Trump in an election in which the American bully had made himself an issue, I didn't do much research on Mark Carney, the guy who led the Liberal Party victory. 

It turns out, according to US environmentalist champion Bill McKibben, Carney is not just some smart, central banker turned politician who grabbed a chance to save his party from electoral purgatory and stick a nationalist finger in Donald Trump's eye: 

... though he was elected a little by accident (albeit after a brilliant campaign) it means something far more: in Carney we now have the world leader who knows more than any of his peers about climate change. And who knows roughly twenty times as much about climate and energy economics as anyone else in power. He may turn out to be a truly crucial figure in the fight to turn the climate tide.

I’ve been watching Carney for a long time. A graduate, of course, of both Harvard and Goldman Sachs, he was governor of the Bank of Canada during the 2008 financial crisis and performed admirably enough that the queen asked him over to run the Bank of England.  (It’s probably not quite how that works, but close enough). While in that job, he had the fun of trying to deal with the UK’s Brexit decision, and by all accounts again performed better than one might have expected. So now he gets the task of cleaning up after Trump’s insane tariffs. 

But actually it’s the much bigger mess—the one in the atmosphere—that I suspect has long interested him most. In 2014, at a World Bank panel, he quite forthrightly pointed out that we would need to leave the “vast majority” of fossil fuel reserves in the ground if we were at all serious about holding the increase in the temperature of the planet below two degrees. This was, on the one hand, clearly obvious to anyone who had looked at the physics, but on the other hand not something that most leaders were willing to say at the time, or to this day. Those of us who had recently launched the fossil fuel divestment campaign found it to be a great boost—one of three or four crucial moments that turned this into one of the largest anti-corporate campaigns in history. 

McKibben credits Carney with helping win the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, the high water mark of international recognition of the planet-wide emergency we are living. 

[Carney] now finds himself leading a nation hard hit by climate change: Canada has a front row seat the melt of the Arctic, which is the fastest-heating part of the earth; it has watched its boreal forests burn like never before in recent years. ...

... I’d say that the rest of the world is going to recognize Carney as the most likely person to midwife us through this transition. I think he’s not done playing a world-historical role, and for that if nothing else we can thank Donald Trump.

• • •

Karen Kelly pointed me to this updated version of a Canadian nationalist statement even more appropriate to the moment. Enjoy.

Breathing a little easier

Even two decades ago, the gray haze over Kathmandu obscured the magnificent views of the surrounding mountain ranges. The valley is prone to temperature inversions, meaning warmer air at higher altitudes traps airborne pollution. It was hard to breath while trudging about and dodging exhaust-belching mini-buses and trucks even in 2006 when I took this picture out a hotel window.

According to Bill McKibben via The Guardian, Nepal is doing as well as anywhere replacing its fossil fuel fog with less polluting electric vehicles. 

A heartening report from Kathmandu, one of the world’s smokiest cities, shows that the Nepali capital is rapidly cleaning its air as electric minibuses and cars start to dominate the local scence

More than 70% of four-wheeled passenger vehicles – largely cars and minibuses – imported into Nepal last year were electric, one of the highest rates in the world. The figure reflects a remarkable growth in the use of electric vehicles (EVs), which saw the country import more than 13,000 between July 2023 and 2024, up from about 250 in 2020-21.

Nepal’s government has set ambitious targets for wider take-up of EVs, with the aim that 90% of all private-vehicle sales and 60% of all four-wheeled public passenger vehicle sales will be electric by 2030.

Makes sense. Nepal produces abundant, clean, hydroelectric power as water runs off the Himalayas. 

Chinese made BYD vehicles are available to Nepalese buyers. Great to see.

Who's on the take?

The map shows the difference between the amount the federal government spends in a state and the amount the state pays in federal taxes. Blue means a state receives more than it gives, orange the reverse. Source.

Perhaps the creators of this visual should have rendered the orange as blue and the blues as shades of red and pink. (Click to enlarge.) The result wouldn't be a perfect fit with our political divisions; New Mexico, Hawaii, Vermont and Oregon are reliably Democratic. Still the map correlates all too well with Republican states being takers while Dems pay the federal bills.

I was a little surprised to see Texas and Florida so far on the taker side. There's some correlation between the size/population of a place with being a taker; the little places take more from the whole. By those measures, those two might be expected to contribute more to national wellbeing than they give. But apparently not.

Economist Paul Krugman explains the obvious:

High productivity in California (and New York, also included) plays a significant role in making America richer; the nation excluding these powerhouses would have about 6 percent lower GDP per capita.

California makes an especially large contribution to U.S. technological dominance. As I noted a month ago, 8 of America’s top 9 technology companies — all of them if you count pre-Cybertruck Tesla — are based either in Silicon Valley or in Seattle.

And while Hollywood doesn’t dominate films and TV the way it once did, Los Angeles still plays a major role in America’s cultural influence (and still generates a lot of income.)

Republicans are balking at providing disaster assistance to Californians burned out by the wild fires ... because, you know, Gavin Newsom, and something or other ...

In an additional post, Krugman catalogues how the country has rescued Florida and Texas in recent decades. He concludes: 

All indications ... are that Republicans intend to exploit the tragedy in Los Angeles, and in general turn the federal government into an extortion racket. Let’s not pretend otherwise.

Realtime apocalypse: alongside the devastation, the politics

Magazine journalist and historian Garrett M. Graff brings perspective to the Los Angeles hell fire. 

California's Fires Show How Climate Will Destabilize Our Politics and Daily Life

... Over the past few decades, we’ve spent most of our national focus thinking about climate change as a technology and economic challenge. Can we move away from fossil fuels and adopt renewables at a fast enough pace to change the arc of warming? How can we use tax incentives and industrial policy to drive the adoption of electrical vehicles faster? How can we better create batteries and power storage solutions to smooth out the variability of solar and wind energy? How quickly will the cost of solar panels continue to fall? How do we impose more appropriate costs on carbon?

... But the California fires underscore how, as we actually begin to live the effects of even that “better-than-it-could-have-been” era of warming, the tech and economic challenge is going to take a backseat to a bigger crisis. We are unprepared for how climate is about to be the main driver of our politics, nationally and internationally.

Climate change isn't just one more political priority on our already over-crowded list of national to-dos. It is a threat multiplier that affects every single other priority already on it, from the air we breathe to the food we eat to how much we pay for a house.

So much of the world is about to either have too much water or not enough. And that’s going to change and destabilize everything in our political calculations. 

The globe’s changing climate is about to put an enormous number of people in motion—people who find their homes increasingly unlivable, their local economies in collapse, or their houses simply destroyed.

Already, we’re seeing between 20 million and 30 million people a year displaced worldwide by climate disasters, from droughts and desertification to hurricanes and typhoons. In 2018, the World Bank estimated that just three regions — Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia — will generate 143 million more climate migrants by 2050. That’s an enormous number of people in motion in the world. Others have pegged that number even higher: A 2020 study by the Institute for Economics & Peace figured there might be 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050.

... It’s been easy to overlook how much of our current national angst over immigration and the border is a story of how climate change is already destabilizing Central America. While there’s been a lot of attention to how drugs and gang violence have driven much of the migration to the US southern border, that flow is also heavily affected by climate. “Farmers in Central America have experienced multiple droughts since 2014, resulting in crop losses of 70 percent or more during some harvests and often affecting consecutive growing seasons,” the US Institute of Peace wrote in 2022. “Droughts were likely a key driver of large increases in family migration from Honduras and Guatemala to the United States in 2018 and 2019.”...

... Moreover, this is not a problem that stops at our borders.

... What happens when major cities and urban areas in the US simply become unlivable, too hot, too dry—or, even, entirely dry? [We're seeing in L.A.]

... Think of what this means for internal migration, political representation, dysfunction, taxes. Think of what this means for workforce talent and economic development.

Individuals may very well make choices to live in uninsurable places — the lure of a beachfront house is strong! — but that’s going to be a much harder sell for companies.

Thirteen million people represent, in the roughest math, somewhere between 20 and 30 electoral votes and seats in the US House of Representatives that may shift in the years ahead simply because of shifting climates.

... We don’t really know what will happen in the years ahead because we don’t understand what happens when you pile all these risks on top of one another. ... 

...We’re entering some really rocky waters. As I quoted former US intelligence leader Sue Gordon saying a few weeks ago: “Our institutions are not keeping up with the turn of the Earth, and they’re being devalued in the moment,” she told me. “Society requires government, yet we’re running out of the structures that make it work.”

As I often say, go read it all.

I sometimes muse that some shock will come to us here in the USofA that knocks us sideways and drives us toward more responsible humanity -- about climate, in politics, in sharing our unparalleled wealth. Instead we have given ourselves Donald and his merry band of cruel crooks and con men. Yet our better impulses persist. Ain't humanity great? The L.A. fire will produce heroes -- and knaves (looters?) -- that's who we are.

For the fourth Sunday in Advent: we work in joyful hope

Bill McKibben is one of the best of us. Diana Butler Bass asked the Methodist environmental activist for his 2024 Advent reflection.

... Even in 2024, there are some things to be looking forward to. For me, the most important is the real possibility that in the next few years, we could be seeing quick end to human beings making their living by setting things on fire, coal, gas, oil, anything else.

Because all of a sudden, we've really figured out how to capture the power of the sun that the good Lord hung 93 million miles up in the sky. That star that we need to make our North Star in the climate fight.

This year, just to give you one example, so many people just went out in the country of Pakistan and installed solar panels on their roofs, on their farms, everywhere else, that the use of diesel fuel dropped 30% in a year. Those are the kind of numbers that help us deal with climate change

And they're because we're using our God-given wits to make the most of the world around us. It won't be easy. It'll require lots of activism and pushing to make it happen. We'll have lots of opportunities to do that. But there are powerful forces afoot in God's world that give us some real chance.

He's not blowing hot air. Quite separately in his own substack, McKibben has described the progress humankind is making on ending our dependence on fossil fuels which pollute the atmosphere and alter the climate. 

Here’s a contestant for the dumbest headline of all time (and no shade on the writer, because They Do Not Write The Headlines). The normally insightful team at Bloomberg produced an article about the remarkable fact that as the Chinese market breaks decisively for EVs, this is driving down demand for gasoline. Instead of heralding this as a potentially mammoth breakthrough in the climate fight, here’s how they titled it: “China’s EV Boom Threatens to Push Gasoline Demand Off a Cliff.”

The more rapid-than-expected uptake of EVs has shifted views among oil forecasters at energy majors, banks and academics in recent months. Unlike in the US and Europe - where peaks in consumption were followed by long plateaus — the drop in demand in the world’s top crude importer is expected to be more pronounced. Brokerage CITIC Futures Co. sees Chinese gasoline consumption dropping by 4% to 5% a year through 2030.

“The future is coming faster in China,” said Ciaran Healy, an oil analyst at the International Energy Agency in Paris. “What we’re seeing now is the medium-term expectations coming ahead of schedule, and that has implications for the shape of Chinese and global demand growth through the rest of the decade.”

For a global oil market, which has come to rely on China as its main growth driver for most of this century, that will erode a major pillar of consumption. The country accounts for almost a fifth of worldwide oil demand, and gasoline makes up about a quarter of that. The prospect of a sharp drop from transport is also coming on top of tepid industrial consumption due to slowing economic growth.  ...

The U.S. may not be at its best. But though we're often a shortsighted, self-centered species, we humans collectively do have an instinct leaning toward trying to leave something for future generations.

If warming stalls, thank China

 

If David Wallace-Wells is right, in the increasingly possible world in which climate change is halted by a rapid transition away from burning fossil fuels, we'll all have to thank China. 

In climate world, something that once seemed almost unthinkable may now be happening. Preliminary data shows that while global carbon emissions are continuing to rise, China’s emissions may already be peaking — the longtime climate villain turning the corner on carbon before the planet as a whole does.

Forecasts like these are not perfectly reliable, but already China has completely rewritten the global green transition story. You may be familiar with the broad strokes of that story: that thanks to several decades of mind-boggling declines in the cost of solar, wind and battery technology, a new wave of climate advocacy and dramatically more policy support, the rollout of various green energy technologies is tracing an astonishing exponential curve upward, each year making a mockery of cautious projections from legacy industry analysts.

But while this is often hailed as a global success, one country has dominated recent progress. When you look at the world outside of China, those eye-popping global curves flatten out considerably — green energy is still moving in the right direction, but much more slowly.

Consider solar power, which is presently dominating the global green transition and giving the world its feel-good story. In 2023, the world including China installed 425 gigawatts of new solar power; the world without China installed only 162 gigawatts. China accounted for 263 gigawatts; the United States accounted for just 33. As recently as 2019, China was installing about one-quarter of global solar capacity additions; last year, it managed 62 percent more than the rest of the world combined. Over those same five years, China grew its amount of new added capacity more than eight times over; the world without China didn’t even double its rate. ...

He goes on to survey similar progress in China in wind, batteries and other technologies. 

While American politicians argue about tariffs to try to protect an anemic manufacturing capacity for the green energy transition, Xi Jinping saw Chinese green tech as an economic driver replacing China's collapsing real estate bubble -- and the rest is history.

The full article is at a gift link and well worth reading.

It's happening ... the clean energy transition

California hit 100 days this year with 100% carbon-free electricity for at least a part of each day — a big clean energy milestone. 

And it's happening with only the most concerned and attentive citizens talking about it.

David Kurtz laments:

Climate change got short shrift in the [Harris/Trump] debate, a single question framed in the most unsophisticated, open-ended way:

The question to you both tonight is what would you do to fight climate change? And Vice President Harris, we’ll start with you. One minute for you each.

It’s a measure of the degraded state of our public discourse about climate change that the debate question would be so general and non-specific – with an entire 60 seconds to respond.

But maybe that's just how it has to take place. What is happening is just too novel, too fast, for most of us and our information systems to assimilate. 

Bill McKibben, prophet of both climate doom and climate hope, has lots more. 

Statistics numb the brain so let me say it another way: we are on the cusp of a true explosion that could change the world. We are starting to put out the fires that humans have always relied on, and replace them with the power of the sun.

... Bloomberg predicted last week that global installations of new solar modules would hit 592 gigawatts this year—up 33 percent from last year. The point is, when you’re doing this a few years in a row the totals start to grow very very fast. When something that provides one percent of your electricity doubles to two percent, that doesn’t mean much—but when something that supplies ten or twenty percent goes up by a third that’s actually quite a lot. And more the next year. 

... That is, the use of natural gas to generate electricity has dropped by almost a third in one year in the fifth largest economy in the world. In 2023, fossil gas provided 23% more electricity to the grid than solar in that six month period. In 2024, those numbers were almost perfectly reversed: solar provided 24 percent more electricity than fossil gas, 39,865 GWh v 24,033 GWh. In one year. That’s how this kind of s-curve exponential growth works, and how it could work everywhere on earth,  

For McKibben, this is how the election matters: 

... if Trump wins, there’s tons that he can do to slow the transition down. He can’t “kill wind,” as he has promised. But he can make it impossible for it to keep growing at the same rate—right now there are teams in the White House managing every single big renewable project, trying to lower the regulatory hurdles that get in the way of new transmission lines, for instance. A Trump White House will have similar teams, just operating in reverse.

Again, he can’t hold it off forever—economics insures that cheap power will eventually win out.

But eventually doesn’t help here, not with the poles melting fast. We desperately need clean energy now. That’s what this election is about—will Big Oil get the obstacle it desperately desires, or will change continue to play out—hopefully with a big boost from the climate movement for even faster progress.

The bold type here is McKibben's except in that last paragraph. We citizens are not focused on climate and energy; for most of us, it's all just too big and too scary to contemplate. But it's happening; this election will help determine how fast and even, perhaps, how equitably.

Good news from Calfornia and a surprising competitor

In this season of anxiety and political discontent, we're quietly chugging along out here on the Left Coast in the direction of a sustainable energy mix.

Here's Bill McKibben:

Something approaching a miracle has been taking place in California this spring. Beginning in early March, for some portion of almost every day, a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower has been producing more than a hundred per cent of the state’s demand for electricity. Some afternoons, solar panels alone have produced more power than the state uses. And, at night, large utility-scale batteries that have been installed during the past few years are often the single largest source of supply to the grid—sending the excess power stored up during the afternoon back out to consumers across the state. It’s taken years of construction—and solid political leadership in Sacramento—to slowly build this wave, but all of a sudden it’s cresting into view. California has the fifth-largest economy in the world and, in the course of a few months, the state has proved that it’s possible to run a thriving modern economy on clean energy. ...

It would be easy to be all doom and gloom -- but citizen activism and applied science are making this happen.

Meanwhile, sheer economic self-preservation is making renewable energy boom in Texas. Yes, Texas!

Traditionally considered to be "oil country," Texas continues to have a heavy fossil fuel presence in the state. Though it may not seem like the likeliest candidate on the surface, the state is a pioneer of clean and renewable energy production. Texas generated roughly 15% of the country's electricity from all-renewable sources in 2022, according to the Energy Information Association.

While it was wind power that helped blow Texas to the top of the clean energy production charts, increased solar capacity in recent decades has helped its standing. Through 2022, Texas was the second-largest producer of solar energy behind California, according to data from the Solar Energy Industries Association. ...

 We're smarter big apes than we sometimes realize.

Humans might be smarter than we often seem

We have, I think, gotten to where we don't have to be told that the climate is changing -- warming and also becoming more unpredictably wild.

But perhaps more than we recognize, the human species -- subset United State-ians -- is finally doing something about reducing fossil fuel use by adding renewable energy sources.

Click on images to see more

Renewables are taking off -- the curve is escalating fast.

 

Solar and wind, enhanced by batteries, are beating the costs of old-fashioned oil and coal energy. As the graph highlights, we may have unthinkingly unbalanced the climate with older fuels, but human science is coming to our undeserved rescue.

 

That particularly means solar energy installations; the number just goes up and up.

 

The energy transition is hard and disruptive, but we seem capable of achieving it. And the transition in China, which matters even more than we do in the US of A, seems on a strong path.

 

All graphs snagged from the economist/curmudgeon Noah Smith.

Recycling that could become self-sustaining

It's hard to stay enthusiastic about urban recycling when you've seen urban trash haulers just dump your recycling into the same truck with the solid waste.

But industrial recycling may well be an important part of our response to climate change. Instead of proliferating waste, let's hope our eager engineers can figure out how to make money off it.

Such a thing may be underway in north western Nevada, a region fast becoming a tech-industrial hub.  

According to Bloomberg: 

In the scrublands of western Nevada, Tesla co-founder JB Straubel stood on a bluff overlooking several acres of neatly stacked packs of used-up lithium-ion batteries, out of place against the puffs of sagebrush dotting the undulating hills. As if on cue, a giant tumbleweed rolled by. It was the last Friday of March, and Straubel had just struck black gold.

Earlier that day, his battery-recycling company, Redwood Materials, flipped the switch on its first commercial-scale line producing a fine black powder essential to electric vehicle batteries. Known as cathode active material, it’s responsible for a third of the cost of a battery. Redwood plans to manufacture enough of the stuff to build more than 1.3 million EVs a year by 2028, in addition to other battery components that have never been made in the US before.

It’s a turning point for a US battery supply chain that’s currently beholden to China. ... Redwood is attempting to break that stranglehold by creating a domestic loop using recycled critical metals.

... EVs already have a much smaller environmental footprint than internal combustion cars, even in countries that still get most of their electricity from coal. While the toll of mining the raw materials for batteries is considerable, more than 95% of the key minerals can be profitably recycled.

At Redwood, nothing goes to landfill, and no water leaves the facility except the sanitary waste from sinks and toilets. There are no gas lines; everything is electric. It’s also built for scale, allowing the company to quickly break down a truckload of assorted batteries without manual sorting or tedious disassembly.

Recyclers will eventually need to match the pace of car factories. For example, a Tesla factory just 250 miles away in Fremont, California, produced 560,000 EVs last year — more than one every minute. When it’s time for those cars to be recycled, they will generate almost 10 times as much EV battery material as the entire US market processed last year. If recyclers can handle all of that, they would begin to rival traditional mining operations.

“Once we've changed over the entire vehicle fleet to electric, and all those minerals are in consumption, we’ll only have to replace a couple percent each year that’s lost in the process,” said Colin Campbell, Redwood’s chief technology officer and the former head of powertrain engineering at Tesla. “It will become obvious to everyone that it doesn't make sense to dig it out of the ground anymore.”

My emphasis. This Bloomberg article goes on to raise the considerable obstacles that battery entrepreneurs could encounter, including reaching necessary scale to supply the new industry, while China may find it in its interest to undercut the costs of their output.  

But it's happening ... and subsidized by the legislation that the Biden Administration squeezed out of Congress to underwrite sustainability. Weird that a government led by a white haired old guy is so forward looking, but there it is.

By way of Bill McKibben.

Sign of the times

click to read the pole

Marin County aims to educate cyclists and joggers about the implications of climate change warming on sea level rise in San Francisco Bay. Even at the lowest, dark blue, base level of 2 more feet, this whole path adjacent to Mill Valley will be long gone. Just saying ...

Where we gonna go?

U.S. law about refugees and a right of asylum is a snarled tangle of temporary branches, feeble novel shoots, and confused and blocked dead ends. Much of this has become semi-permanent by custom and usage. Republicans are straightforward nowadays in wishing to exclude all newcomers (except maybe white Europeans) while Democrats may mean well, but have not had the legislative power and courage to fix this cruel mess.

And unless we are somehow touched personally by the experiences of refugees and immigrants, most of us don't have to know what a shit show this non-system has become. So we don't know, while those ensnared within it fumble and push their way forward, seeking safety in unwelcoming lands.

Erudite Partner has taken a swing in Nowhere to Run at untangling some the elements of refugee law and practice; the history of how we got to this mess; where global refugees and migrants come from; where they end up; and the forces of war and climate degradation that promise to make these human surges even larger in the coming century. She begins:

Back in 1968, my father announced that, if Richard Nixon were elected president that November, he was going to move us all to Canada. ...

Didn't happen. But the impulse -- and often the necessity --  to move on is part of our interconnected lives. This article is a solid pre-primer.

Electric vehicle anecdata

 

They are coming; one of these days, sooner than we perhaps imagine, we'll mostly all be driving electric-powered cars. And a predictable climate will be the more sustainable for the change, we hope.

 

We're not there yet in this household and won't be for awhile; the beater "Wowser" -- the lime green 2011 Ford hybrid -- is still too good a vehicle to move on. But the next car will almost certainly be electric.

I've found it interesting to quiz folks about the EV transition:

A relative who made a career of selling high end used cars is a doubter. He's not seeing it. But he's also open, if automakers can build what he considers good cars.

 

Another friend who lives in northern rural New England says the EV transition is clearly coming. All the towns have charging stations. So do many houses. She's convinced, though not yet able to become an EV owner herself.

Around San Francisco, we're in Tesla-land. It seems as if every third car is one. And the driverless vehicles striving to take over the cab and Uber business are also EVs. California aims to cut off sales of new gas cars in 2035. 

Meanwhile the business press is dubious, but don't want to miss something. A sample:

Automakers are tapping the brakes on their ambitious electric vehicle (EV) targets, trying to make sense of consumer appetites amid rising interest rates, stubbornly high prices and anxiety about where to recharge. ...

... Despite the doom and gloom, EV sales are growing faster than any other segment in the U.S. — and are on track to surpass 1 million annually for the first time this year.

Not a model of definitive journalism, but that's where we are.

Where are you in this chart?

Discourses of climate delay

 

Except perhaps for a few beloved environmentalist fanatics, we're all there somewhere. Click to enlarge and contemplate.

For myself, I've leaned of late toward technological optimism, balanced with a smidgen of doomism. 

But as in so many arenas, we have no choice but trudge on, in hope. That's what humans do.

Chart by way of Carbon Brief and Adam Tooze.

Searching for sustainability

 

It is not easy to know what to think. The Washington Post today highlights a scary new government report:

The National Climate Assessment, compiled by numerous federal agencies and published every few years at the direction of Congress, paints a picture of a nation whose economy, environment and public health face deepening threats as the world grows hotter.

... But the report adds that the most dire consequences are not inevitable, and that society has the capacity to shape what lies ahead. “Each increment of warming that the world avoids … reduces the risks and harmful impacts of climate change,” the report states.

Meanwhile, another section of the same newspaper celebrates emerging technologies (gift article) which can make a difference. It predicts rapid adoption on a scale that that mirrors how the internet and cellphones took over our lives in the last 30 years.

Judging by the surging sales of green technology, U.S. households appear to be on the verge of a low-carbon future. Millions of Americans are buying electric vehicles, heat pumps and induction ranges. ...

Not all new technologies make it big: Segway, Palm personal device, 3D television. But those that start ascending this curve tend to transform societies. 

How fast Americans reach that point with green technologies is up to early adopters, about 15 to 20 percent of the population. They set the stage for this exponential growth by trying products before others do.

Let's hope that's right. The most advanced elements among the technologies discussed here are heat pumps to replace oil and gas furnaces.

... Heat pumps are no longer reliant on early adopters despite being early in the cycle, suggesting Americans are well on track to meet net-zero goals by 2050. As far as clean technologies go, it’s the one most popular among Americans so far.

Friends know that the Erudite Partner and I are on the east coast because we're shepherding a heat pump system installation in a jointly-owned family house. The state of Massachusetts offers a great rebate for this project; that yellow blob on the map proves this policy is moving the needle.

Of course nothing about the project is as simple as the contractors promise, but after a month, we're almost there.

Here's the main unit and its mini-split sidekicks. Doesn't look like much, but we're doing our part to get closer to all electric. Now if Massachusetts can just get the offshore wind farms underway ...

Whatever we make of the muddle, we can only keep doing what we each can to sustain a livable climate.

It's not just weather ... and contraction is happening

Thinking of a friend who lives in Baja, California and of so many others in southern California where a novel hurricane path is being cut as I write, here are some observations from our necessary national Cassandra and conscience, Bill McKibben:

... the number of places humans can safely live is now shrinking. Fast. The size of the board on which we can play the great game of human civilization is getting smaller. ... The story of human civilization has been steady expansion. Out of Africa into the surrounding continents. Out along the river corridors and ocean coasts as trade grew. Into new territory as we cut down forests or filled in swamps. But that steady expansion has now turned into a contraction. There are places it’s getting harder and harder to live, because it burns or floods. Or because the threat of fire and water is enough to drive up the price of insurance past the point where people can afford it.

... For a while we try to fight off this contraction—we have such wonderfully deep roots to the places where we came up. But eventually it’s too hot or too expensive—when you can’t grow food any more, for instance, you have to leave.

So far we’re mostly failing the tests of solidarity or generosity or justice that these migrations produce. The EU, for instance, has this year paid huge sums to the government of Tunisia in exchange for ‘border security,’ i.e., for warehousing Africans fleeing drought

... But the size of this tide will eventually overwhelm any such effort, on that border or ours, or pretty much any other. Job one, of course, is to limit the rise in temperature so that fewer people have to flee: remember, at this point each extra tenth of a degree takes another 140 million humans out of what scientists call prime human habitat.

... along with new solar panels and new batteries, we need new/old ethics of solidarity. We’re going to have to settle the places that still work with creativity and grace; the idea that we can sprawl suburbs across our best remaining land is sillier all the time. Infill, densification, community—these are going to need to be our watchwords. Housing is, by this standard, a key environmental solution. Every-man-for-himself politics will have to yield to we’re-all-in-this-together; otherwise, it’s going to be far grimmer than it already is.

As usual, it comes down to solidarity -- among humankind and with all life we share the planet with.

So amazing ...

 By way of Bill McKibben, here's a rousing way to begin the day.

Images via Windows on Earth: see the Earth through the Astronauts' Lens. Best viewed at full screen size.

Let's offer this as a tribute to Montana activists:

HELENA, Mont. — Young environmental activists scored what may be a groundbreaking legal victory Monday when a Montana judge said state agencies were violating their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment by allowing fossil fuel development.

The ruling in the first-of-its-kind trial in the U.S. adds to a small number of legal decisions around the world that have established a government duty to protect citizens from climate change.

... Law professor David Dana at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law said the ruling was a “remarkable win” for the young climate activists and predicted it will be used as a guidepost for attorneys bringing similar suits in other states.

... State officials tried to derail the case and prevent it from going to trial through numerous motions to dismiss the lawsuit. [District Court Judge Kathy] Seeley rejected those attempts.

Julia Olson, an attorney representing the youths, released a statement calling the ruling a win “for Montana, for youth, for democracy, and for our climate.”

They aren't going to fry quietly. Oil barons, mine owners, and their bought-and-paid-for state legislators will do their best to suppress their movement, but don't count them out!