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| A collage of typical climate and weather-related events: floods, heatwaves, drought, hurricanes, wildfires and loss of glacial ice. (Image credit: NOAA) |
calls for shredding regulations to curb greenhouse gas pollution from cars, oil and gas wells and power plants, dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government and boosting the production of fossil fuels — the burning of which is the chief cause of planetary warming.
The official GOP plan is instead to plant a trillion trees; alas a new study this week found that “would have a minimal effect on halting global warming, partly because of the long lag time for trees to reach maturity and absorb large amounts of carbon. The analysis by John Sterman, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Andrew P. Jones, executive director of the nonprofit Climate Interactive, found that planting a trillion trees would only prevent 0.15 degrees Celsius (0.27 Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100.”
+Picking up on a tactic employed by U.S. utilities, UK gas companies have found PR agents to carry out a massive attack on electric heat pumps.
The PR campaign subjects heat pumps to intense criticism. Powered by electricity, heat pumps are currently set to play a key role in decarbonising heating and replacing gas boilers, which heat around 85 percent of Britain’s homes and account for 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions nationwide.
Negative stories about electric heat pumps have featured in outlets such as The Sun, Telegraph and The Express, in which damning headlines dub the technology “Soviet-style”, “financially irrational” as well as “costly and noisy”. Broadcast media has amplified similar messages on BBC 2’s Newsnight, LBC, TalkTV and GB News.
Meanwhile, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak has vowed to deal with this year’s record heat by…”maxing out” the country’s oil and gas reserves. According to the Guardian, he approved a hundred new drilling licenses for the North Sea, something he said was
compatible with net zero commitments given the anticipated part-reliance on fossil fuels for years to come, saying it was more carbon-intensive to ship oil and gas from other countries.
But experts said this ignored the fact that much of the UK’s imported gas comes by pipeline and tends to be produced more cleanly than its British equivalent. Environmental groups said Sunak’s plan would “send a wrecking ball” through climate commitments.
Tory and Labour MPs said Sunak’s “economically illiterate” announcement was “driving a coach and horses” through previous promises, and warned the prime minister he was “on the wrong side of history” and that modern voters wanted leaders who “protect, and not threaten, our environment”.
In response, Greenpeace UK decorated one of Sunak’s several (unoccupied) mansions with a black shroud yesterday
Fungal disease expert Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist, immunologist, and professor at Johns Hopkins University, says that humans normally have tremendous protection against fungal infections because of our temperature. “However, if the world is getting warmer and the fungi begin to adapt to higher temperatures as well, some . . . are going to reach what I call the ‘temperature barrier,’” he says, referring to the threshold at which mammals’ warm body temperatures usually protect them from infection.
+A new study in Nature finds that warming temperatures should make airplane rides much more turbulent
Here we show using climate model simulations that clear-air turbulence changes significantly within the transatlantic flight corridor when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is doubled. At cruise altitudes within 50–75° N and 10–60° W in winter, most clear-air turbulence measures show a 10–40% increase in the median strength of turbulence and a 40–170% increase in the frequency of occurrence of moderate-or-greater turbulence.
+Job ad of the week: Royal Bank of Canada, one of the world’s biggest fossil fuel lenders, is looking for a new Head of Climate Transition. One of their responsibilities will be to “Develop and implement effective and lasting responses to Climate Activism.”
Less hilariously, Reuters reports that banks are doing their best to hide the emissions in their portfolios. “Banks with big capital markets operations in the working group argued that they should assume responsibility for only 33% of the emissions of activities financed through bonds and stock sales because they do not have control over the borrowers as they do with loans.”
+Emily Pontocorvo offers a good explainer on hydrogen policy, making a strong case that an upcoming decision by the Treasury Department could be crucial in determing whether the fossil fuel industry will simply get to keep using natural gas to produce the stuff.
The Treasury Department got involved because the Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed last summer, created a generous tax credit to make these other, cleaner ways of producing hydrogen more competitive. One method, called electrolysis, involves splitting hydrogen off of water molecules using electricity. The process is emissions-free, as long as the electricity comes from a carbon-free source. Companies will be able to earn up to $3 for every kilogram of hydrogen produced this way. But before anyone can claim the credit, the Treasury has to write rules for what counts as clean electricity.
But one influential Princeton study found that hydrogen production from electrolysis is so energy-intensive that in order to be sure that it has a low carbon footprint, these deals should follow three guidelines: The “booked” clean energy should be generated locally, from a recently-built power plant, and matched to the hydrogen facility’s operations on an hourly basis. Otherwise, you might have a hydrogen plant in New Mexico “buying” energy from a wind farm in Texas that’s already been operating for half a decade. Or you might have that same plant buy lots of local solar power, but then keep operating at night. In either case, a natural gas plant will likely have to ramp up to meet the real-time energy demand.
Without these guardrails, the authors warn, the Treasury could end up directing billions of taxpayer dollars to facilities that emit twice as much carbon as those making hydrogen from natural gas today.
+It turns out that the large language models used in artificial intelligence require incredible amounts of water to cool servers, all too often located in arid areas. As Bloomberg reports,
The race to build large language models used in generative AI has created a surge in demand for more powerful processors. The specialized chips required for AI—broadly known as accelerators—emit so much more heat than general-purpose chips do that data center operators are having to rethink their cooling systems entirely, says Colm Shorten, a data center sustainability expert at real estate investment firm JLL.
Shaolei Ren, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at University of California, Riverside, has conducted research estimating that training GPT-3 in Microsoft’s US data centers directly consumed 700,000 liters of water in about a month—not including the indirect water use associated with electricity generation. The team has also calculated that every short conversation of 20 to 50 questions and answers with ChatGPT represents about 500 milliliters of water.
+Canada’s wildfires—concentrated in the far north—are displacing huge numbers of First Nations people across the country.
The blazes have taken a particularly devastating toll on Indigenous communities because they live on the frontline of many fires and depend on forests for food and their homes are in remote areas that are not a firefighting priority since they are sparsely populated and have few buildings.
“We are basically refugees of climate in this territory,” Mandy Gull-Masty, grand chief of the Cree Nation in Quebec, said. “We are constantly escaping either risk of fire or impact of smoke in the community.”
While no one has been killed by the fires that have threatened Indigenous communities, they have inflicted immeasurable damage to the forest ecology and cultural heritage, disrupting a way of life that’s reliant on hunting and fishing for food.
+Good for Elise Joshi, a Gen Z climate leader, who worked up the nerve to interrupt Biden’s press secretary to ask for climate action
"Excuse me for interrupting, but asking nicely hasn't worked out," said Joshi. "A million young people wrote to the administration pleading not to approve a disastrous oil drilling project in Alaska, and we were ignored. So I'm here channeling the strength of my ancestors and generation."
And good for the pipeline watchdogs Waadookawaad Amikwag, or “Those Who Help Beaver” in Anishinaabe, who uncovered yet another leak in the Line 3 pipeline that Biden allowed to be built across Minnesota. “The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources confirmed it’s investigating the rupture near Moose Lake, south of Hill City in Aitkin County, at a wild rice lake in an area with complex wetlands and peat bogs.”
+Elections matter. Replacing the Trump-like Bolsonaro in Brazil with a Lula administration featuring the tireless Marina Silva as environment chief has apparently managed to cut deforestation in the Amazon 60 percent from a year ago.
The rapid progress highlights the importance of political change. A year ago, under the far-right then president, Jair Bolsonaro, the Amazon was suffering one of the worst cutting and burning seasons in recent history. But since a new administration led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took power at the start of the year, the government has penalised land grabbers, mounted paramilitary operations to drive out illegal miners, demarcated more indigenous land and created more conservation areas.
Please go here for the news updates: https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/where-should-i-live
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