#fossil fuel reduction

[creativemedianews]

Ofgem approves Britain's largest grid investment for 'electricity super highway'

Ofgem approves Britain's largest grid investment for 'electricity super highway' #climatetargets #EasternGreenTwo

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

"An oil executive is leading the UN climate summit. It’s going as well as you’d expect."

“#AlJaber’s comments are absurd and troubling, betraying both an ignorance about the science and a dismissiveness about the need for rapid #decarbonization, which is at the very center of the proceedings over which he is in principle presiding as #COP28 president,” University of Pennsylvania climate scientist #MichaelEMann told Vox.

"“The outcome of COP28 must be that all the oil, gas, and coal nations of the world see that now we are truly at the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era for the world economy. And that we are now starting to bend the curve, properly,” Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told CNBC."

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Igor Bobic and Chris D'Angelo at HuffPost:

Former President Donald Trump is more than happy to fulfill the oil and gas industry’s wish list if he’s reelected — but he has an asking price. Trump reportedly solicited top oil and gas executives to give $1 billion for his campaign to return to the White House, vowing in return to undo many of President Joe Biden’s green energy policies if he is elected in November.

Trump hosted the country’s top fossil fuel CEOs at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida last month when he “stunned” executives with the ask, according to The Washington Post. The $1 billion sum would ultimately be a “deal” for the fossil fuel industry, Trump reportedly told the executives, because of the money they would save with him in office. An anonymous industry source told the Post that Trump is likely to get some funds. The oil and fossil fuel industry has long made its alliances with the Republican Party, which generally supports and promotes fossil fuels. Ahead of the 2024 election, the industry has been drawing up “ready-to-sign” executive orders for Trump if he wins the presidency, aimed at expanding natural gas exports and increasing offshore oil leases, Politico reported this week.

A second Trump term would mean a sharp departure from Biden’s agenda of clean energy, electric vehicles and historic efforts to fight climate change. The former president has falsely called global warming a “hoax” and has vowed to unravel Biden’s landmark climate programs included in the Inflation Reduction Act. Republicans have spent the entirety of Biden’s term condemning what they describe as the administration’s “war” on energy, even though U.S. oil production and exports of natural gas have never been higher. They accuse Biden of being beholden to “radical environmentalists” — an ironic talking point given Trump and the GOP’s unflinching loyalty to the fossil fuel industry.

[...] Trump appears to be laying the groundwork to quickly implement many of the policy priorities of Project 2025, the sweeping blueprint that right-wing organizations have compiled to guide Trump if he is reelected in November. Certain sections of that pro-Trump memorandum are little more than an oil industry wish list. As HuffPost previously reported, the energy section of the chapter for the Interior Department was authored by Kathleen Sgamma, the president of the Western Energy Alliance, a prominent oil and gas trade association. Trump’s quid pro quo with the industry comes as the world’s coral reefs are in the midst of a global bleaching event — only the fourth such event on record. Hundreds of climate scientists told The Guardian this week that global temperatures are on track to soar well beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, the aspirational goal of the landmark Paris climate accords. For years, scientists have warned about the disastrous consequences of failing to keep temperatures under the 1.5-degree mark, from rising seas and increasingly extreme weather to famines and severe social and economic disruptions. The fossil fuel industry is most responsible for the crisis and has spent decades denying and downplaying the threat, with the help of industry-allied Republicans.

Donald Trump is in the pocket of Big Oil executives, as he told its magnates he wants $1BN to undo President Joe Biden’s clean energy and green initiatives to instead push the pro-fossil fuels and climate change denialist agenda.

[head-post]

COP28 countries reach landmark deal to “transition” away from fossil fuels

The COP28 climate talks in Dubai have culminated in a historic agreement that will see the world phase out all fossil fuels for the first time.

The president of this year’s UN-organised summit, Sultan Al Jaber of the UAE, brokered an agreement that was strong enough for the US and the EU on the need to sharply curb the use of fossil fuels while keeping Saudi Arabia and other oil producers on board.

The final agreement calls for countries to phase out fossil fuels from their energy systems in a swift and orderly fashion, which helped convince sceptics. The agreement also calls for countries to contribute to the global transition effort – rather than explicitly forcing the transition on their own.

The so-called “UAE Consensus” ends the hottest year on record, which led to droughts and devastating wildfires. Al Jaber, who’s also chief executive officer of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co, noted:

 “Together we have confronted the realities and sent the world in the right direction.”

Read more HERE

[kp777]

By Jake Johnson

Common Dreams

Aug. 22, 2023

"Calling hydrogen clean energy is a scam to prop up the oil and gas industry," said one campaigner.

More than 95% of hydrogen produced in the United States is made using fossil fuels, but that hasn't stopped its backers—including industry groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—from touting the energy source as critical to the fight against climate change.

A diverse coalition of advocacy organizations on Tuesday implored the Biden administration to stop buying into the hype.

In a letter to officials at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), more than 180 groups called on the administration to abandon plans to invest in hydrogen projects, warning that "a large-scale buildout of hydrogen infrastructure will further exacerbate the climate crisis and disproportionately harm people of color, low-income communities, and Indigenous peoples."

Two recently enacted pieces of legislation—the Inflation Reduction Act and a bipartisan infrastructure measure championed by oil industry ally Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—include benefits for the hydrogen industry.

The latter bill authorized the Department of Energy to spend roughly $8 billion on developing Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs (H2Hubs), drawing outrage from community organizers in Colorado, New Mexico, and other states behind the Western Interstate Hydrogen Hub, a project aimed at expanding U.S. hydrogen production.

"We recognize that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act directs DOE to fund these hubs, but we ask DOE to find a different path and reject this false solution. It's time for DOE to do the right thing," the groups wrote in their letter on Tuesday.

The groups behind the letter—including the Center for Biological Diversity and Food & Water Watch—note that hydrogen production generates significant planet-warming emissions.

"Hydrogen lifecycle emissions which use carbon capture and storage are 20% greater than directly burning natural gas or coal, and 60% greater than burning diesel oil, because of the increased fossil fuels required to power it," the letter states. "The process of producing gray and blue hydrogen is a major source of fugitive methane emissions from flaring, transportation, and other upstream processes—releasing even more potent greenhouse gases and exacerbating atmospheric warming over the next two decades."

"President Biden can't claim to be a climate leader while his administration continues to embrace the hydrogen climate scam and other policies that continue to perpetuate fossil fuel production and infrastructure."

As Nature explained in an editorial warning against "overhyping" hydrogen, "Most hydrogen is currently made by processes—such as steam reformation of natural gas (methane)—that produce large amounts of CO2 as a by-product."

"Although 'green' hydrogen can be made by using electricity from renewable sources to split water molecules," the outlet added, "this process is costly compared with more conventional production methods."

Silas Grant, a campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity, said Tuesday that "calling hydrogen clean energy is a scam to prop up the oil and gas industry."

"The Biden administration's plans to expand this dirty energy will only increase oil and gas extraction at a time when the climate emergency demands the opposite," said Grant. "We need investment in affordable, reliable, community-supported renewable energy like wind and solar."

The coalition's letter comes two months after New Mexico-based advocacy organizations urged the Biden administration to reject funding for the Western Interstate Hydrogen Hub, arguing the initiative would "devastate public health, clean air, Indigenous sacred places, and the climate."

"The climate crisis poses a grave threat to all life on Earth," the groups wrote in a letter to the U.S. Energy Department. "DOE has the power to help lead a transformation to a more sustainable future. To do so, you must help phase out fossil fuels and reject false solutions like hydrogen."

But the Biden White House has yet to waver in its support for hydrogen, claiming in a brief last month that "clean hydrogen has the potential to play an important role in decarbonizing the U.S. economy."

Jim Walsh, policy director at Food & Water Watch, countered Tuesday that investments in hydrogen are "a distraction from real climate action that will cause more pollution, more strain on water resources, and more extraction of climate warming fossil fuels."

"President Biden can't claim to be a climate leader while his administration continues to embrace the hydrogen climate scam and other policies that continue to perpetuate fossil fuel production and infrastructure," Walsh added.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from the Washington Post:

It is an appealing proposition for a nation urgently trying to confront global warming: enlist state-of-the-art machinery to trap and bury harmful greenhouse gas emissions from the most heavily polluting industries, enabling them to otherwise continue business as usual.

Billions of dollars of new subsidies for such carbon capture technology are a signature component of the $370 billion climate package President Biden signed into law in August, with the administration and lawmakers across party lines promising it will help America meet its climate goals.

Yet after years of underwhelming results in carbon capture experimentation, this surge of cash strikes many climate scholars as predominantly a gift to fossil fuel, chemical and industrial agriculture companies seeking a lucrative route to rebrand as “green.” The vastly increased tax credit, which lobbyists of every major oil company pursued, will propel a technology that has failed to deliver in several prominent trials.

The incentives are already driving forward large oil and gas projects that threaten a heavy carbon footprint, with companies including ExxonMobil, Sempra and Occidental Petroleum positioned for big payouts.

“We are spending a vast wad of money on this — huge government subsidies — and it often does not work,” said Bruce Robertson, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an energy sustainability think tank. “It keeps coming back because the oil and gas industry is powerful politically. It sets the agenda on climate change.”

The boosting of the subsidies by billions of dollars came as lawmakers and the Biden administration confronted a narrow path for meaningful climate action. Energy industry consent was crucial for this summer’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, championed by one of the industry’s staunchest allies, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.). Many climate activists overlooked what they saw as throwing good money after bad for carbon capture to win the massive investments in renewable energy and electric vehicles in the legislation.

[touchaheartnews]

Challenges Facing the Rollout of CNG Vehicles: An Investigation

Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) vehicles have been promoted as a cleaner and more sustainable alternative to traditional gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles. As countries worldwide push for greener transportation solutions to address climate change, reduce air pollution, and decrease dependence on fossil fuels, CNG has emerged as a promising option. However, despite its potential, the widespread…

[calicojack1718]

How Does the Wealth Pump Work to Transfer Billions from the Middle Class to the 10%?

We are systematically transferring billions of dollars a year from the middle class to the wealthy, increasing the wealth gap & impoverishing everyone else. Here are two examples of how the wealth pump is taking your money & Biden is stemming the flow.

SUMMARY: In this post, we use Cliodynamics, which involves studying history through big data analysis, to explain how the wealth pump transfers wealth from the 90% to the top 10%. That’s called the wealth pump, and it signifies hard times ahead. We’ll look at two examples, Vivek Ramaswamy’s pump and dump scheme using an Alzheimer drug and subsidies for the fossil fuels industry. We’ll also look…

[thisismenow3]

We can grow meat and it’s good!

Imagine it. No unethical conditions for animals. No resulting human plagues like bird flu or mad cow. We could reduce the number of cows belching methane to just niche animal husbandry and small traditional pastoralists. We could reduce deforestation and hunting of wild animals and the resulting extinctions to make room for pasture and farms. With fixes to our electrical grid it’d be carbon neutral. They could set up grow plants/facilities in every major city and have new food ready within days. It’s boggling how much could change for the better with this, and it could all happen quickly if there was major investment.

[reasonsforhope]

"A 1-megawatt sand battery that can store up to 100 megawatt hours of thermal energy will be 10 times larger than a prototype already in use.

The new sand battery will eliminate the need for oil-based energy consumption for the entire town of town of Pornainen, Finland.

Sand gets charged with clean electricity and stored for use within a local grid.

Finland is doing sand batteries big. Polar Night Energy already showed off an early commercialized version of a sand battery in Kankaanpää in 2022, but a new sand battery 10 times that size is about to fully rid the town of Pornainen, Finland of its need for oil-based energy.

In cooperation with the local Finnish district heating company Loviisan Lämpö, Polar Night Energy will develop a 1-megawatt sand battery capable of storing up to 100 megawatt hours of thermal energy.

“With the sand battery,” Mikko Paajanen, CEO of Loviisan Lämpö, said in a statement, “we can significantly reduce energy produced by combustion and completely eliminate the use of oil.”

Polar Night Energy introduced the first commercial sand battery in 2022, with local energy utility Vatajankoski. “Its main purpose is to work as a high-power and high-capacity reservoir for excess wind and solar energy,” Markku Ylönen, Polar Nigh Energy’s co-founder and CTO, said in a statement at the time. “The energy is stored as heat, which can be used to heat homes, or to provide hot steam and high temperature process heat to industries that are often fossil-fuel dependent.” ...

Sand—a high-density, low-cost material that the construction industry discards [Note: 6/13/24: Turns out that's not true! See note at the bottom for more info.] —is a solid material that can heat to well above the boiling point of water and can store several times the amount of energy of a water tank. While sand doesn’t store electricity, it stores energy in the form of heat. To mine the heat, cool air blows through pipes, heating up as it passes through the unit. It can then be used to convert water into steam or heat water in an air-to-water heat exchanger. The heat can also be converted back to electricity, albeit with electricity losses, through the use of a turbine.

In Pornainen, Paajanen believes that—just by switching to a sand battery—the town can achieve a nearly 70 percent reduction in emissions from the district heating network and keep about 160 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere annually. In addition to eliminating the usage of oil, they expect to decrease woodchip combustion by about 60 percent.

The sand battery will arrive ready for use, about 42 feet tall and 49 feet wide. The new project’s thermal storage medium is largely comprised of soapstone, a byproduct of Tulikivi’s production of heat-retaining fireplaces. It should take about 13 months to get the new project online, but once it’s up and running, the Pornainen battery will provide thermal energy storage capacity capable of meeting almost one month of summer heat demand and one week of winter heat demand without recharging.

“We want to enable the growth of renewable energy,” Paajanen said. “The sand battery is designed to participate in all Fingrid’s reserve and balancing power markets. It helps to keep the electricity grid balanced as the share of wind and solar energy in the grid increases.”"

-via Popular Mechanics, March 13, 2024

--

Note: I've been keeping an eye on sand batteries for a while, and this is really exciting to see. We need alternatives to lithium batteries ASAP, due to the grave human rights abuses and environmental damage caused by lithium mining, and sand batteries look like a really good solution for grid-scale energy storage.

--

Note 6/13/24: Unfortunately, turns out there are substantial issues with sand batteries as well, due to sand scarcity. More details from a lovely asker here, sources on sand scarcity being a thing at the links: x, x, x, x, x

[mostlysignssomeportents]

An end to the climate emergency is in our grasp

On June 20, I'm keynoting the LOCUS AWARDS in OAKLAND.

The problem with good news in the real world is that it's messy. Neat happy endings are for novels, not the real world, and that goes double for the climate emergency. But even though good climate news is complicated and nuanced, that doesn't mean it shouldn't buoy our spirits and fill our hearts with hope.

The big climate news this past week is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's clarion call about surging CO2 levels – the highest ever – amid a year that is on track to have the largest and most extreme series of weather events in human history:

https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/during-year-of-extremes-carbon-dioxide-levels-surge-faster-than-ever

This is genuinely alarming and you – like me – have probably experienced it as a kind of increase in your background radiation of climate anxiety. Perhaps you – like me – even experienced some acute, sit-bolt-upright-in-bed-at-2AM anxiety as a result. That's totally justifiable. This is very real, very bad news.

And yet…

The news isn't all bad, and even this terrible dispatch from the NOAA is best understood in context, which Bill McKibben provides in his latest newsletter post, "What You Want is an S Curve":

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/what-you-want-is-an-s-curve

Financier and their critics should all be familiar with Stein's Law: "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." This is true outside of finance as well. One of the reasons that we're seeing such autophagic panic from the tech companies is that their period of explosive growth is at an end.

For years, they told themselves that they were experiencing double-digit annual growth because they were "creating value" and "innovating" but the majority of their growth was just a side-effect of the growth of the internet itself. When hundreds of millions of people get online every year, the dominant online services will, on average, gain hundreds of millions of new users.

But when you run out of people who don't have internet access, your growth is going to slow. How can it not? Indeed, at that point, the only ways to grow are to either poach users from your rivals (through the very expensive tactics of massive advertising and sales-support investments, on top of discounts and freebies as switching enticements), or to squeeze your own users for more.

That's why the number of laptops sold in America slowed down. It's why the number of cellphones sold in America slowed down. It's why the number of "smart home" gizmos slowed down.

Even the steepest hockey-stick-shaped exponential growth curve eventually levels off and becomes an S-curve, because anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop.

One way or another, the world's carbon emissions will eventually level off. Even if we drive ourselves to (or over) the brink of extinction and set up the conditions for wildfires that release all the carbon stored in all the Earth's plants, the amount of carbon we pump into the atmosphere has to level off.

Rendering the Earth incapable of sustaining human civilization (or life) is the ultimate carbon reduction method – but it's not my first choice.

That's where McKibben's latest newsletter comes in. He cites a new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute, which shows a major reversal in our energy sources, a shift that will see our energy primarily provided by renewables, with minimal dependence on fossil fuels:

https://rmi.org/insight/the-cleantech-revolution/

The RMI team says that in this year or next, we'll have hit peak demand for fossil fuels (a fact that is consistent with NOAA's finding that we're emitting more CO2 than ever). The reason for this is that so much renewable energy is about to come online, and it is so goddamned cheap, that we are about to undergo a huge shift in our energy consumption patterns.

This past decade saw a 12-fold increase in solar capacity, a 180-fold increase in battery storage, and a 100-fold increase in EV sales. China is leading the world in a cleantech transition, with the EU in close second. Cleantech is surging in places where energy demand is also still growing, like India and Vietnam. Fossil fuel use has already peaked in Thailand, South Africa and every country in Latin America.

We're on the verge of solar constituting an absolute majority of all the world's energy generation. This year, batteries will overtake pumped hydro for energy storage. Every cleantech metric is growing the way that fossil fuels did in previous centuries: investment, patents, energy density, wind turbine rotor size. The price of solar is on track to halve (again) in the next decade.

In short, cleantech growth looks like the growth of other technologies that were once rarities and then became ubiquitous overnight: TV, cellphones, etc. That growth isn't merely being driven by the urgency of the climate emergency: it's primarily a factor of how fucking great cleantech is:

https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/the_incredible_inefficiency_of_fossils.pdf

Fossil fuels suck. It's not just that they wreck the planet, or that their extraction is both politically and environmentally disastrous. They just aren't a good way to make energy. About a third of fossil fuel energy is wasted in production and transportation. A third! Another third is wasted turning fossil fuels into energy. Two thirds! The net energy efficiency of fossil fuels is about 37%.

Compare that with cleantech. EVs convert electricity to movement with 80-90% efficiency. Heat pumps are 300% efficient (the main fuel for your heat pump is the heat in the atmosphere, not the electricity it draws).

Cleantech is just getting started – it's still in the hockey-stick phase. That means those efficiency numbers are only going up. Rivian just figured out how to remove 1.6 miles of copper wire from each vehicle. That's just one rev – there's doubtless lots of room for more redesigns that will further dematerialize EVs:

https://insideevs.com/news/722265/rivian-r1s-r1t-wiring/

As McKibben points out, there's been a lot of justifiable concern that electrification will eventually use up all our available copper, but copper demand has remained flat even as electrification has soared – and this is why. We keep figuring out new ways to electrify with fewer materials:

https://www.chemanalyst.com/NewsAndDeals/NewsDetails/copper-wire-price-remains-stable-amidst-surplus-supply-and-expanding-mining-25416#:~:text=Global%20Copper%20wire%20Price%20Remains%20Stable%20Amidst%20Surplus%20Supply%20and%20Expanding%20Mining%20Activities

This is exactly what happened with previous iterations of tech. The material, energy and labor budgets of cars, buildings, furniture, etc all fell precipitously every time there was a new technique for manufacturing them. Renewables are at the start of that process. There's going to be a lot of this dematerialization in cleantech. Calculating the bill of materials for a planetary energy transition isn't a matter of multiplying the materials in current tech by the amount of new systems we'll need – as we create those new systems, we will constantly whittle down their materials.

What's more, global instability drives cleantech uptake. The Russian invasion of Ukraine caused a surge in European renewables. The story that energy prices are rising due to renewables (or carbon taxes) is a total lie. Fossil fuels are getting much more expensive, thanks to both war and rampant, illegal price-fixing:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-oil-price-fixing-conspiracy-caused

If not for renewables, the incredible energy shocks of the recent years would be far more severe.

The renewables story is very good and it should bring you some comfort. But as McKibben points out, it's still not enough – yet. The examples of rapid tech uptake had big business on their side. America's living rooms filled with TV because America's largest businesses pulled out all the stops to convince everyone to buy a TV. By contrast, today's largest businesses – banks, oil companies and car companies – are working around the clock to stop cleantech adoption.

We're on track to double our use of renewables before the decade is over. But to hold to the (already recklessly high) targets from the Paris Accord, we need to triple our renewables usage. As McKibben says, the difference between doubling and tripling our renewables by 2030 is the difference between "survivable trouble" and something much scarier.

The US is experiencing a welcome surge in utility scale solar, but residential solar is stalling out as governments withdraw subsidies or even begin policies that actively restrict rooftop solar:

https://twitter.com/curious_founder/status/1798049929082097842?s=51

McKibben says the difference between where we are now and bringing back the push for home solar generation is the difference between "fast" and "faster" – that is the difference between tripling renewables by 2030 (survivable) and doubling (eek).

Capitalism stans who argue that we can survive the climate emergency with market tools will point to the good news on renewable and say that the market is the only way to transition to renewables. It's true that market forces are partly responsible for this fast transition. But the market is also the barrier to a faster (and thus survivable) transition. The oil companies, the banks who are so invested in fossil fuels, the petrostates who distort the world's politics – they're why we're not much farther along.

The climate emergency was never going to be neatly solved. We weren't going to get a neat novelistic climax that saw our problems sorted out in a single fell swoop. We're going to be fighting all the way to net zero, and after that, we'll still have decades of climate debt to pay down: fires, floods, habitat loss, zoonotic plagues, refugee crises.

But we should take our wins. Even if we're far from where we need to be on renewables, we're much farther along on renewables than we had any business hoping for, just a few years ago. The momentum is on our side. It's up to us to use that momentum and grow it. We're riding the hockey-stick, they're on that long, flat, static top of the S-curve. Their curve is leveling off and will start falling, ours will grow like crazy for the rest of our lives.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/12/s-curve/#anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-eventually-stops

[femboycatofmystery]

Hey folks let me anti-doomscroll you for a quick second:

Batteries and Solar have been getting cheap very quickly for a long time now and not only is it not stopping, but even at the rates it's at the economics of energy are shifting rapidly. The costs of decarbonizing all forms of electric power are now more down to infrastructure and planning than bulk cost. Compare and contrast to the turn of the century when Solar was so prohibitively expensive that saying we'd meet any meaningful fraction of our needs with photovoltaics would have gotten you laughed out of the room.

Meanwhile, although there are lots of complicated moving parts and a surprising amount of gross politics attached, gas cars are now less good in most ways than electric. Again, at the turn of the century this would have sounded laughable.

Many industries have specific needs that prevent direct conversion to electric, but hydrocarbon fuels are not intrinsically fossil fuels and can be made as a storage medium for solar. Hydrocarbon fuels made in this way are intrinsically carbon neutral. The technology is relatively young, but from a basic math perspective looks very doable.

Inflation actually has more to do with the above than it does with whatever it is the federal reserve does, and pulling down a supply of energy from the sky that requires less infrastructure to get (which is true because that's why it's cheaper now) directly helps.

The current "business as usual" scenarios with global warming are lower than they used to be, because the solar transition is just sort of happening because of economics without a lot of government help. All of the above lower the amount of friction and pushback we face when trying to get the government to do something.

By the way, the Inflation Reduction Act, passed by Joe Biden a couple years back, is explicitly designed to accelerate these trends.

As disastrous as the current projections for global warming are, it's important to keep two things in perspective: first, that they are exactly that, disasters, not the end-of-the-world kind but more sort of the hurricanes and floods kind, and second, while they certainly will get worse before they get better, they can and will get better. What we do now from a policy perspective has an outsize impact on how much flooding, droughts, and other weather-related costs we will face in the decades to come, but "human civilization ends" is not actually particularly likely. It is much more realistic to say "we could have a huge number of climate-related disasters or a moderately increased number, and every little bit of policy work helps move the needle".

We can and we will solve global warming, the question is not if but when, and how many lives can we save or improve by acting as soon as possible. Imagining this as an almost-certain death sentence for the future of humanity and nature is not merely unrealistic, but wildly counterproductive. It is paralyzing and enervating when what will do the most good is planning, policy, and communication.

Remember, despair is not a tool for positive change. Hope is the real language of revolution.

[head-post]

German Greens emphasise the need for carbon capture and storage

The German Greens have adopted an election programme for the European Parliament that stresses the need for carbon capture and storage.

The German Green Party, like most of their European counterparts, has long opposed carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a costly distraction from efforts to reduce global warming CO2 emissions.

The party’s reluctance to change its position has long prevented the adoption of a coherent carbon and CCS strategy, as required by successive Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

Now the party is reversing this position and campaigning for the 2024 EU elections on a platform open to this technology. In hard-to-recover sectors such as the cement industry, “we want to take advantage of technological opportunities and capture, store and, if necessary, use CO2 directly in the production process,” says the Greens’ new party programme.

Read more HERE

[zvaigzdelasas]

Hydrogen-powered trucks are expected to reach life-cycle cost parity with their fossil-fuel-burning peers in China by 2027 even without the aid of subsidies, a milestone which the world’s biggest producer and consumer of the zero-emission energy source, seeks to achieve eight years ahead of Europe.

This will push forward the country’s ambition to dominate the market for hydrogen fuel cells in the transport sector as Beijing’s enabling environment starts paying off, an industry executive said.[...]

“China has developed a world-leading industry in commercial vehicle applications for hydrogen fuel cell technology, with enterprises ranging from upstream raw materials to downstream products over the past decade,” said Robin Lin, chairman and president of Refire Group, a Chinese supplier of hydrogen fuel cell technologies.[...]

China has stepped up its game this year with the central and local authorities releasing a variety of hydrogen-related policies and incentives, following the release of its first national-level guidelines for the hydrogen energy industry in 2023.

Nearly a third of its end-2023 fleet of 18,000 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles were sold last year alone, according to data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, indicating the gathering pace. In a further sign of accelerating offtake, China targets to have at least 50,000 units on the road by 2025, according to its national plan.

According to Lin, China has seen significant reduction in the manufacturing cost of hydrogen fuel cell systems, which account for roughly half the cost of a hydrogen vehicle. The cost has dived from over 30,000 yuan per kilowatt in 2015 to less than 4,000 yuan per kilowatt now.[...]

“In transport, heavy-duty trucks could be the first to achieve successful commercialisation of hydrogen fuel cell technology,” he said.[...]

In China, high-purity hydrogen generated as a by-product from industrial processes, such as Shanxi province, is around 25 to 40 yuan per kilogram at local hydrogen refuelling stations, while high-purity hydrogen in other regions, such as Shanghai, is around 50 to 70 yuan per kilogram at local hydrogen refuelling stations, according to Refire.

13 May 24

[probablyasocialecologist]

The degrowthers are right: There needs to be a lot less physical stuff produced, especially in the way of fossil fuels, and, for anyone with the least sense of justice, this means rich countries consuming less and poor countries consuming more. Such an apparent threat of rich-country austerity meanwhile contains, in truth, the promise of abundance: fewer but more durable goods, less work and more leisure. (Already in the 1990s, the French-Austrian ecosocialist André Gorz wanted to “build the civilization of liberated time” in place of that of wage labor.) The fact that any such global rebalancing of consumption patterns can’t plausibly take place so long as the rich countries of the Global North dictate world history is one more reason that degrowth remains a dead letter under capitalism. It is not, however, the working classes of the Global North that must drastically curtail their lifestyles: The world’s richest 1 percent are responsible for as much carbon emissions as the poorest two-thirds of the global population. Much of the work of degrowth would be accomplished by the dispossession and destruction of the class represented by this sole percentile. As for the idolaters of growth, their god has not only failed but, Cronus-like, has started devouring its children as if these were so many chicken wings. “Growth” fantasizes one kind of fake substance, and “degrowth” another; real intelligence demands attention to how the ingredients of this world are different, not the same. Even so, the advocates of degrowth (a more attractive English word might be Samuel Beckett’s “lessness”) can boast of a sounder moral and political intuition than can the usual apologists for growth: Less stuff, more life! Such an argument may be obviated soon enough, either way, by the specter not of degrowth communism, but of prolonged capitalist contraction. Voters and politicians whistling past the graveyard being prepared for our children may have neglected to consult a recent article in Nature which holds that “the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emissions choices” (emphasis mine). Important factors in this bleak outlook include the declining agricultural yields and the massive and unpredictable damage to infrastructure attendant on climate collapse. In other words, even if carbon emissions are somehow reduced through the magic of the market, climate change can be expected to cause about $38 trillion in damages annually by the mid-century, enough to render overall economic growth infeasible. The choice facing the 21st century, then, is likely not between degrowth and growth. It is more likely between a form of capitalist contraction in which prosperity endures for a few but evaporates for the rest of us, and some kind of socialist or communist degrowth in which the well-being of everyone in general prevails over the wealth of anyone in particular. The precise politics of egalitarian degrowth are no more clear to me than they are to Saitō. But universal crisis will license strategies that theory alone could never discover.

26 August 2024

[clonerightsagenda]

I am not going to say TLT is about fossil fuels because it's about a lot of things and it's reductive to boil it down to anything, but a society fueled by necromancy/death magic/corpses is reminiscent of our society fueled by and built with petrochemicals (oil, natural gas, plastic), and given that within the necromancy framework the role of the cavalier is to be metaphorically, literally, and/or spiritually consumed, it's interesting that the first cavalier was the planet Earth. This new world is still based on devouring the planet.

Does this make Paul a metaphor for nuclear fusion I'm joking but I suppose the question Alecto must resolve is whether we can escape needing to consume to survive.* And maybe we can't - stop trying to make your carnivorous pets vegan - but can we find a method of consumption that's less destructive?

(Some people may see Paul as that answer but I am a Hater who isn't into ego death.)