Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Most complete description I’ve seen of upcoming Ford F-150 EV features.

My very conservative neighbor already stoked about this.

Climate Science Legal Defense Fund link here.

They call it “The Great Resignation”, as post-Covid, more and more people are looking for meaningful work.
It’s hitting the fossil industry hard.

Let’s give these folks the opportunity they need.

Reuters:

The oil and gas industry risks a huge workforce shortage as more than half of workers in the sector seek to move into the renewable energy industry, a survey published on Tuesday showed.

The survey conducted as part of a report by recruitment firm Brunel and Oilandgasjobsearch.com showed that 43% of workers want to leave the energy industry altogether within the next five years.

When asked which sectors they’d pursue employment opportunities in, 56% of those working in oil and gas said renewables, compared to 38.8% last year.

Energy companies ranging from Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L) and BP (BP.L) to smaller exploration firms cut tens of thousands of jobs in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic as they tightened budgets.

Now, as energy demand and prices recover strongly around the world, many companies are finding it hard to recruit again.

Oil and gas companies have faced growing pressure from investors, activists and governments to fight climate change, making them less attractive to young professionals.

While BP, Shell and many of its peers reduce spending on oil and gas, they are also seeking to rapidly grow their low-carbon and renewables businesses, often retraining staff.

“With more workers gravitating towards the renewables sector, it’s likely that the industry will continue to see an exit from those in traditional sectors,” the report said.

“The higher salaries offered by the renewables and mining sectors are making roles in these areas more appealing, which adds to the pressure faced by recruiters in the oil and gas sector.”

The survey found that 10% of employers have had to pay retirees to come back to take unfilled job openings due to the skills shortage.

And 82% of recruiters said that one in 10 of their open positions have been unfilled for more than three months.

Trend is not new, but accelerating. Below, CBS report from 2020.

Jeff Masters in Yale Climate Connections:

The 2021 Atlantic hurricane season draws to an official close on November 30, after generating an extraordinary 21 named storms (third highest on record), seven hurricanes, four major hurricanes, and an accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) of 145. Those numbers compare with the 1991-2020 averages for an entire season of 14.4 named storms, 7.2 hurricanes, 3.2 major hurricanes, and an ACE index of 123. As documented by Brian McNoldy, Senior Research Associate at University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, 2021 marked the sixth consecutive year with an ACE index above 129: “this has never happened before, not during the satellite era, not since records begin in 1851. This sustained level of tropical cyclone activity in the Atlantic is unprecedented even for four years, let alone six!”

One hurricane will surely get its name retired – Ida, with $64.5 billion in damage and 96 deaths, ranking as the fifth most costly weather disaster in world history, according to NOAA. Two other hurricanes generated more than $1 billion in damage: Hurricane Elsa, which affected the eastern U.S. July 7-9, killing one person and causing $1.2 billion in damage, and Tropical Storm Fred, with $1.3 billion in damage during its trek up the U.S. East Coast August 10-17. 

Digging beyond these numbers, we’ve come up with a list of the top-10 most unusual things about the Atlantic hurricane season of 2021:

1. Second consecutive year to run through the entire alphabet

Perhaps the most remarkable trait of the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season is that for the second year in row, the entire alphabetical list of names for storms was exhausted. The 21 named storms of 2021 were the third highest on record, behind only 2020 (30) and 2005 (28). However, nine of this year’s storms were “shorties” – named storms that lasted two days or less. This ties a record set in 2007 for the most “shorties” since 1968, when the National Hurricane Center began tracking subtropical storms and counting them in seasonal totals of activity. (Note that these subtropical storms were numbered rather than named until 2004’s Subtropical Storm Nicole.)

As explained in a post here earlier this year, improved technology has allowed the identification of weak, short-lived tropical cyclones that would have escaped detection in previous years. No link between warming of the oceans from increased greenhouse gases and the observed increase in the number of Atlantic named storms has been firmly established. According to this year’s Sixth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global frequency of tropical cyclones will likely hold steady or decrease as global warming continues. Among those tropical cyclones, though, the proportion that reach Category 4 or 5 will very likely increase.

We’re going to be on a rollercoaster as fossil fuels wind down globally, and renewable, clean energy ramps up. That was a lock even before Covid threw a tank-sized wrench in the works.
Fossil interests will work hard to blame bottlenecks and hiccups on the green transition, so I’ve been looking hard at the interlocking, interrelated forces that are going to make this winter..interesting.

Time:

Energy prices in Europe are repeatedly breaking records even before winter really kicks in, and one of the most damaging cost crunches in history is about to get worse as the temperature starts to drop. A super price spike in the U.K. last month forced some industrial companies to cut production and seek state aid, a harbinger for what could play out widely in Europe just as it contends with a resurgence of the coronavirus. For governments, it could mean tension with neighboring countries by moving to protect supplies. For households, it could mean being asked to use less energy or even plan for rolling blackouts.The trouble is that any fix is unlikely to come from the supply side any time soon, with exporters Russia piping only what it has to and Qatar saying it’s producing what it can. The energy industry is instead faced with relying on “demand destruction,” said Fabian Roenningen, an analyst at Rysted Energy.“We have seen it over the last couple of months already, and in many industries, it will most likely continue and even increase,” he said from Oslo. “It’s just not profitable to operate for a lot of the players in the current market conditions.”

The outlook adds to the sense of foreboding in Europe. The region is back at the epicenter of the pandemic again with Covid-19 cases surging and fears about a new variant identified in South Africa swirling the globe. Restrictions are being tightened in some countries, while household budgets are being squeezed by rampant inflation. On top of that, freezing weather could mean the lights going out. A return to lockdown like in Austria would help curb power demand, though few governments want to do that.

France, Europe’s second biggest economy, is particularly at risk. The possibility of a chill in January and February is causing concern for the nation’s grid operator. Availability at nuclear stations, the workhorse of the French power system, is low after the pandemic delayed the maintenance of some reactors, according to a report on Nov. 22.

Power prices there are the highest since 2012 as a cold blast creeps into France and is expected to take hold by Monday when workday demand starts to rise.

Llewellyn King in Forbes:

If Russia is to blame — which prima facie appears to be the case, as Europe gets fully half its natural gas from Russia — then the Europeans are to blame too. The gas buyers of Europe and their political masters bet that Russia needed their market more than they needed Russia’s gas.

It was a gamble and Europe lost. Russia won and has been cutting flows of gas into Europe, sometimes by two-thirds; then, capriciously, increasing them after the damage was done — increasing them to keep the markets see-sawing and prices and the future unsteady.

Future archaeologists picking thru the ruins of our civilization will find this as compelling a compelling indicator of what happened.

As I showed in themes recent video, accelerating climate extremes are putting a squeeze on conservative climate deniers, as their own children are seeing thru the deception.

Don’t expect everyone’s response will be rational acceptance of the facts or responsibility.

Teen Vogue:

Republicans in the United States have a long, treacherous history of climate science denial. That’s changing among younger generations of conservatives, who are more likely to see the climate crisis as a threat to our collective future. But some on the far right are adopting xenophobic, racist ideas about what’s causing climate change — ideas that are rooted in eco-fascism.

Fascism can be defined in many different ways, but typically, the oppressive ideology has characteristics rooted in white identity and violence against marginalized people, such as Black and Brown people, immigrants, and those in the LGBTQ+ community. Vice describes eco-fascism as an ideology “which blames the demise of the environment on overpopulation, immigration, and over-industrialization, problems that followers think could be partly remedied through the mass murder of refugees in Western countries.”

Teen Vogue talked to two experts — anti-racism educator and climate activist Hilary Moore and iconic progressive author Naomi Klein — to help you identify eco-fascist myths and how to call them out.

“Very often, if you have somebody on the far right become an environmentalist, [their ideology] slots itself into a hypernationalist, white supremacist worldview, so it fuels the calls to harden borders at the softer end, [and] at the harder end, it can express itself through the idea that climate change is a divine purging,” Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything, told Teen Vogue. “[Eco-fascism] argues [climate change] is God’s will, that there are too many people anyway, so there’s going to be a great purge and perhaps that’s all for the best. It’s environmentalism through genocide.”

While it’s true human consumption harms the environment, eco-fascists place the blame exclusively on the marginalized. Because consumerism produces massive amounts of garbage, eco-fascists incorrectly blame poor people (of color) for using plastic bags and other cheap, disposable products — often without pointing to the damage done by major polluting corporations, like those in the fossil fuel industry. The young man accused of killing 22 people in El Paso, Texas, last summer included eco-fascist ideas in his manifesto, revealing that his targeting of a Walmart frequented by Mexican immigrants wasn’t a coincidence. The young man accused of carrying out a horrific mass shooting at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, last spring allegedly shared similar beliefs.

“If you look at where there continues to be the highest levels of population growth, it’s the poorest parts of the world with the lowest carbon footprints,” Klein added. “But when [that conversation] immediately moves the discussion to overpopulation, we’re changing the subject from unsustainable overconsumption by the rich to the procreation habits of the poor, and that’s a very political decision.”