Ok, I was invited on the local Community College Public Affairs program this week, and it went fairly well. They seem to like me over there. The original idea as a discussion between me and the “Environmental Policy Specialist” at the Mackinac Center, a local Koch-funded right wing “think tank” – you know the kind. Anyway, for whatever reason he bugged out at the last minute, and I had the whole half hour. The host then did an “Aftershow” segment on my recent field work in Greenland, so by all means enjoy.
DAVID DEPAPE, THE man now charged with attempted homicide and a raft of other felonies for allegedly attacking Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with a hammer in the couple’s San Francisco home early this morning, has a long history of sharing extreme ideas online, including several conspiracy theories popular among far-right conservatives.
At the time of his arrest on Friday, DePape, 42, maintained a subscription-model blogwhere he vented rage over Covid-19 precautions and espoused beliefs shared by the conspiracist QAnon movement. The page also includes dedicated sections for Holocaust denial, climate change denial, transphobia, racism, misogyny, voter fraud conspiracy theories, Second Amendment absolutism, screeds against groomers and “pedos,” and trashing actress Amber Heard, the ex-wife of Johnny Depp.
DePape posted similar hard-right and conspiratorial content on his Facebook page, which the platform deleted on Friday.
The guy had anti-trans stuff, “groomer” slurs, election conspiracies, covid conspiracies, J6 conspiracies, “global elite” stuff. In other words, mainstream 2022 Republican Party talking points.
I went back to Greenland after a 4 year hiatus with scientist and Dark Snow buddy Marek Stibal of Charles University. His team is investigating some puzzling reports of methane emissions from melting glaciers.
Bret Stephens writes a climate denial mea culpa in today’s New York Times.
Stephens was the reason a lot of climate scientists and citizens dropped their Times subscription a few years ago, when he was hired on as an opinion writer with a decided taste for reality denial. This is the media’s idea of “diversity of opinion”, see? You want people who are willing to write false disinformation on your pages to show that you’re “open minded”. Or something.
Nevertheless, we’re going to need everyone, even insufferable assholes, so great. Longish article, excerpts here.
For anyone who has entertained doubts about the warming of the planet, a trip to Greenland serves as a bracing corrective. Flying low over the vast ice sheet that covers most of the island, I immediately noticed large ponds of cerulean meltwater and dozens of fast-flowing streams rushing through gullies of white ice and sometimes disappearing into vertical ice caverns thousands of feet deep. Such lakes, scientists report, have become far more common over the last two decades, occurring earlier in the year at higher elevations. Last year, it even rained at the highest point of the ice sheet, some 500 miles north of the Arctic Circle. That’s a first since record keeping began in the 1980s. –
And then there’s the testimony of the market.
In the coastal town of Ilulissat, I had dinner with Bo Møller Stensgaard, a geologist and the C.E.O. of Bluejay Mining, which plans to mine for copper, nickel, cobalt, zinc and ilmenite.
The receding of the ice sheet has opened additional land for exploration, Stensgaard said, and warmer weather has lengthened the season when ships can travel to the island without the risk of being frozen in. “I can put people in the field longer,” he added,
Having spent long months in tents doing geological fieldwork, he sees the transformation not just as an entrepreneur.
“I’ve seen glaciers disappear completely,” he said. “I’ve seen starving polar bears because of disappearing sea ice. These are personally disturbing changes.”
But, since the minerals he hopes to mine are critical for any future green-energy transition, climate change is creating opportunities in Greenland to address the reason it is melting.
FOR YEARS, I saw myself not as a global-warming denier (a loaded term with its tendentious echo of Holocaust denial) but rather as an agnostic on the causes of climate change and a scoffer at the idea that it was a catastrophic threat to the future of humanity.
It’s not that I was unalterably opposed to the idea that, by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, modern civilization was contributing to the warming by 1 degree Celsius and the inches of sea-level rise the planet had experienced since the dawn of the industrial age. It’s that the severity of the threat seemed to me wildly exaggerated and that the proposed cures all smacked of old-fashioned statism mixed with new-age religion.
Hadn’t we repeatedly lived through previous alarms about other, allegedly imminent, environmental catastrophes that didn’t come to pass, like the belief,widespread in the 1970s, that overpopulation would inevitably lead to mass starvation? And if the Green Revolution had spared us from that Malthusian nightmare, why should we not have confidence that human ingenuity wouldn’t also prevent the parade of horribles that climate change was supposed to bring about?
I had other doubts, too. It seemed hubristic, or worse, to make multitrillion-dollar policy bets based on computer models trying to forecast climate patterns decades into the future. Climate activists kept promoting policies based on technologies that were either far from mature (solar energy) or sometimes actively harmful (biofuels). –
That was my frame of mind when, in April 2017, I wrote my first column for The Times, “Climate of Complete Certainty.” The blowback was intense. Climate scientists denounced me in open letters; petitions were circulated demanding that I be fired. The response mainly hardened my conviction that climate activists were guilty of precisely what I charged them with: intellectual self-certainty that is often a prescription for disaster.
Among the signatories of one petition was an oceanographer, John Englander, who runs an educational and advocacy group, theRising Seas Institute. Two years later, on a visit to New York, he wrote me out of the blue and asked to meet. Unlike most of my detractors, his note was so cordial that it seemed churlish to say no. We met the next day.
Englander is a trim, affable and eloquent man of 72 who once ran the Cousteau Society and reminds me of a bearded Patrick Stewart, albeit with an American accent. His pitch was simple: The coastline we have taken for granted for thousands of years of human history changed rapidly in the past on account of natural forces — and would soon be changing rapidly and disastrously by man-made ones. A trip to Greenland, which holds one-eighth of the world’s ice on land (most of the rest is in Antarctica) would show me just how drastic those changes have been. Would I join him?
Again, it seemed churlish to say no (though the pandemic would delay my trip by two years). More to the point, if my main objection to the climate activists was my impression of their overweening certitude, didn’t it behoove me to check my own? Where — except in the risk of changing my mind — was the harm in testing my views?
Mark Jacobson on Stanford posted a new interview where he talks about how an increasingly clean grid will be firmed up thru the course of the day.
Reminded me os some conversations I’ve had with researcher Jonathan Koomey and Amol Phadke of UCLA about how existing gas turbines will help to manage the gradual conversion to a renewable grid. There is an assumption, for instance, in the study that Phadke authored on the path to a 90 percent renewable grid, that existing gas facilities will be managed to deal with those times where sun and wind are low, such as some times during North American winter. As energy storage and transmission improve, thee need for that backstop will steadily decline.
On Monday, the wholesale spot price of European natural gas went negative. For an hour, suppliers were willing to pay almost €16 to someone able to suck up a megawatt hour of gas, about the equivalent of an average UK household’s monthly consumption. It was a remarkable turnround for a market that saw record prices of over €300/MWh towards the end of August.
Of course, there were special forces at work. Although the negative price was recorded on the main Dutch benchmark for European gas, it was not seen everywhere across the continent. It lasted for one hour only and a more standard spot price now around €50/MWh remains twice the norm for European gas. And it occurred because liquefied natural gas supplies keep arriving in Europe when storage facilities are effectively full.
But it is important not to get too distracted by these caveats. All European gas prices have tumbled since Vladimir Putin decided to stop supplying the continent through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline at the end of August. Day-ahead prices are similar to the hourly rate of €50/MWh, month-ahead prices for November are €100/MWh, less than a third of the peak, and future prices for November 2023 are also down from almost €300/MWh to around €140.
It goes without saying that the tumbling cost of gas was neither Putin’s intention nor the consensus expectation when the Russian president weaponised European gas supplies during the summer. At the time, sector specialists expected wholesale prices to shoot higher and industry was worried. The voice of German industry, the BDI, warned of a “massive recession”. It was economists who came closest to understanding the likely effect of Putin’s energy aggression; people and industries tend to respond to price incentives so they predicted that consumption was likely to fall.
The energy crisis sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is likely to speed up rather than slow down the global transition away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner technologies like wind, solar and electric vehicles, the world’s leading energy agency said Thursday.
While some countries have been burning more fossil fuels such as coal this year in response to natural gas shortages caused by the war in Ukraine, that effect is expected to be short-lived, the International Energy Agency said in its annual World Energy Outlook, a 524-page report that forecasts global energy trends to 2050.
Instead, for the first time, the agency now predicts that worldwide demand for every type of fossil fuel will peak in the near future.
One major reason is that many countries have responded to soaring prices for fossil fuels this year by embracing wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear power plants, hydrogen fuels, electric vehicles and electric heat pumps. In the United States, Congress approved more than $370 billion in spending for such technologies under the recent Inflation Reduction Act. Japan is pursuing a new “green transformation” program that will help fund nuclear power, hydrogen and other low-emissions technologies. China, India and South Korea have all ratcheted up national targets for renewable and nuclear power.
And yet, the shift toward cleaner sources of energy still isn’t happening fast enough to avoid dangerous levels of global warming, the agency said, not unless governments take much stronger action to reduce their planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions over the next few years.
Based on current policies put in place by national governments, global coal use is expected to start declining in the next few years, natural gas demand is likely to hit a plateau by the end of this decade and oil use is projected to level off by the mid-2030s.
Meanwhile, global investment in clean energy is now expected to rise from $1.3 trillion in 2022 to more than $2 trillion annually by 2030, a significant shift, the agency said.
“It’s notable that many of these new clean energy targets aren’t being put in place solely for climate change reasons,” said Fatih Birol, the agency’s executive director, in an interview. “Increasingly, the big drivers are energy security as well as industrial policy — a lot of countries want to be at the leading edge of the energy industries of the future.”
The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) just released its Emissions Gap Report 2022 – and let’s just say, the news isn’t good. So brace yourselves: You’re likely to see a slew of frightening, doom-mongering headlines about it today, unleashing a fresh wave of terror over those of us who care about the planet. But rather than panicking, here’s what to do instead.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 