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Javier E

'Insanely cheap energy': how solar power continues to shock the world | Energy | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-continues-to-shock-the-world

solar power history economics

shared by Javier E on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Over the last two decades, however, the IEA has consistently failed to see the massive growth in renewable energy coming. Not only has the organisation underestimated the take-up of solar and wind, but it has massively overstated the demand for coal and oil.
  • Jenny Chase, head of solar analysis at BloombergNEF, says that, in fairness to the IEA, it wasn’t alone.
  • “When I got this job in 2005, I thought maybe one day solar will supply 1% of the world’s electricity. Now it’s 3%. Our official forecast is that it will be 23% by 2050, but that’s completely underestimated,”
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  • This rapid radical reduction in the price of PV solar is a story about Chinese industrial might backed by American capital, fanned by European political sensibilities and made possible largely thanks to the pioneering work of an Australian research team.
  • “We’ve got to the point where solar is the cheapest source of energy in the world in most places. This means we’ve been trying to model a situation where the grid looks totally different today.”
  • Every time you double producing capacity, you reduce the cost of PV solar by 28%
  • In the very early years of the industry, the received wisdom had been that a 20% conversion rate marked the hard limit of what was possible from PV solar cells. Green, however, disagreed in a paper published in 1984.A year later, his team built the first cell that pushed past that limit, and in 1989 built the first full solar panel capable of running at 20% efficiency.
  • It was a moment that opened up what was possible from the industry, and the new upper limit was “set” at 25% – another barrier Green and his team would smash in 2008. In 2015, they built the world’s most efficient solar cell, achieving a 40.6% conversion rate using focused light reflected off a mirror.
  • “The first reaction was: that’s the future. Everybody said that’s the future. But they also said it was one step too early. What they meant was that there was no market for it yet. In China at the time, if you mentioned solar, people thought of solar hot water.”
  • All that would change when Germany passed new laws encouraging the uptake of solar power. Quickly it became clear there was a massive global demand and the world’s manufacturers were struggling to keep up with supply.
  • Spying an opportunity for investment, a consortium that included Actis Capital and Goldman Sachs came knocking to pitch Shi on taking the company public. When the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2005, it raised $420m and made Shi an instant billionaire. A year later he would be worth an estimated $3bn and crowned the richest man in China, earning him the moniker “the Sun King”.
  • Around 2012 the world market was flooded with solar panels, sending the price plummeting through the floor, leaving SunTech vulnerable. Already under intense financial pressure, disaster struck when an internal investigation found a takeover bid it had launched had been guaranteed by €560m in fake German government bonds.
  • In a quirk of history, what had begun as an American drive to wean itself off oil was eventually taken up by China, which made solar power dirt cheap in the process.“The Chinese approach to renewables is all about energy security,” Mathews says. “At the scale from which they’re building new industries, they would need colossal imports of conventional fossil fuels, which would cripple them economically.
  • “They can get around that problem, which is a geopolitical obstacle, by manufacturing their own energy equipment.”
  • “We think a 40% module, rather than the 22% you can do nowadays with PERC, is what the industry will be doing once we perfect this stacking approach,” Green says. “We’re just trying to find a new cell that will have all the qualities of silicon that we can stack on top of silicon.
  • “The International Energy Agency now says solar is providing the cheapest energy the world has ever seen. But we’re headed towards a future of insanely cheap energy.“It’s a fundamentally different world we’re moving into.”
Javier E

How China's buses shaped the world's EV revolution - BBC Future - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...le-revolution-began-with-buses

china EV buses transport public response climate change history policy

shared by Javier E on 20 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • After around two decades of government support, China now boasts the world's largest market for e-buses, making up more than 95% of global stock. At the end of 2022, China's Ministry of Transport announced that more than three-quarters (77% or 542,600) of all urban buses in the country were "new energy vehicles", a term used by the Chinese government to include pure electric, plug-in hybrids, and fuel cell vehicles powered by alternative fuels such as hydrogen and methanol. In 2022, around 84% of the new energy bus fleet was pure electric.
  • . In 2015, 78% of Chinese urban buses still used diesel or gas, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI). The NGO now estimates that if China follows through on its stated decarbonisation policies, its road transport emissions will peak before 2030.
  • China is also home to some of the world's biggest electric bus manufacturers, such as Yutong, which has been raking up orders across China, Europe and Latin America.
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  • "China has really been at the forefront of success in conversion of all vehicles to electric vehicles, especially buses," says Heather Thompson, chief executive officer of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), a non-profit focusing on sustainable transport solutions. "The rest of the world is trying to do the same, but I think China is really out ahead."
  • At the time of China's 2001 entry into the World Trade Organisation, the international automotive industry was dominated by European, US and Japanese brands. These companies had spent decades perfecting internal combustion engine technology. To compete, Beijing decided to find a new track for its auto industry: making cars that did not use conventional engines.
  • That same year, the central government launched the so-called "863 plan" for EV research and development. There were numerous practical challenges, however, in the way of mass electrification. Not many manufacturers were making new energy vehicles, buyers were few and there was a lack of charging infrastructure in existence. The answer? Buses.
  • "The Chinese government adopted a very smart strategy," says Liu Daizong, ITDP's East Asia director. "They realised quite early on that they should drive [the EV industry] through electric buses," he notes, since their public service status meant Beijing "could have a strong hand on their electrification".
  • "Bus routes were fixed. This means when an electric bus finished a round, it could return to the depot to recharge," explains Xue Lulu, a mobility manager at the World Resources Institute (WRI) China. The typical daily mileage of a Chinese bus ­– 200km (120 miles) – was a realistic range for battery makers to meet.
  • The following year, the country began its large-scale rollout of new energy buses, with the "Ten Cities and Thousand Vehicles" programme. Over three years, the programme aimed to provide 10 cities with financial subsidies to promote 1,000 public-sector new energy vehicles in each, annually. Its goal was to have 10% new energy vehicles in the country by the end of 2012.
  • Strong policy support from both central and regional governments "gave manufacturers confidence in setting up production lines and stepping up research efforts," says Liu.
  • Together, these strong and consistent government signals encouraged Chinese manufacturers to expand their EV production capacity, bring down costs and improve their technologies. One such company was Build Your Dream, better known as BYD. The Shenzhen-based firm, the world's largest EV maker in 2022, ballooned its business a decade before by supplying electric buses and taxis for China's EV pilot cities.
  • "Back then, most buses used diesel, which was a main source of nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions," says Xue, referring to the air pollution that smothered Beijing and other Chinese cities in the early 2010s. Yet in 2013, a new plan from central government cited tackling air pollution as one of the reasons for rolling out EVs.
  • This addition proved to be critical: it not only connected EV uptake with people's health, it also indirectly tied the e-bus campaign to local officials' political performance, as the central government would soon hand air-quality targets to all provinces.
  • The years 2013 and 2014 proved to be important for China's EV push. For the first time, the central government made EV purchase subsidies available to individual consumers, not just the public sector, opening the floodgate to private ownership. Additionally, it offered discounted electricity tariffs to bus operators to make sure the cost of running electric buses would be "significantly lower than" that of their oil or gas-powered equivalents.
  • The new economic push, plus local government's determination to battle air pollution, generated great enthusiasm for e-buses. By the end of 2015, the number of EV pilot cities rocketed from 25 to 88. In the same year, the central government set a target of 200,000 new energy buses on the road by 2020 and announced a plan to phase out its subsidies for fossil-fuel-powered buses.
  • To further stimulate the market, many cities devised various local policies on top of national incentives. For example, Shenzhen, a southern city with a population of more than 17 million, encouraged government agencies to work with private companies to create a full range of renting mechanisms for bus operators
  • Different cities' bus operators also designed different charging strategies. "Buses in Shenzhen had bigger batteries, so they normally charged overnight," says Xue, of WRI China. Between 2016 and 2020, Shanghai, another electric bus hub, subsidised the electricity e-buses used -- regardless of the hours of the day -- to give them more flexibility in charging.
  • Generous financial support did lead to problems. In 2016, an EV subsidy fraud shook China, with some bus operators found to have exaggerated the number of e-buses they had purchased. So that same year Beijing shifted its EV subsidy rules so bus operators could only receive financial support when a bus's mileage reached 30,000km (19,000 miles).
  • one year later, the government announced the so-called "dual-credit" policy. This allowed new energy vehicle makers to rake up credits which they could sell for cash to those needing to offset "negative credits" generated from making conventional cars.
  • it wasn't only China's buses that had benefitted.China's e-bus campaign helped create a big and stable market for its wider EV industry, brought down the costs and created economies of scale. In 2009, the year the e-bus campaign was rolled out, the total number of new energy vehicles sold stood at 2,300; by 2022, it was 6.9 million, analysis by Huang Zheng,
  • By 2022, the country had also built the world's largest EV charging network, with 1.8 million public charging stations – or two-thirds of the global total – and 3.4 million private equivalents. This means that on average, there is one charging pillar for every 2.5 of China's 13.1 million new energy vehicles.
  • Cold weather is a problem, too, as it can make a battery's charging time longer and its range shorter. The reason China has not achieved 100% electrification for its buses is its northern regions, which have harsh winters, says Xue.
  • To make e-buses truly "green", they should also be charged with renewable power, Wang says. But last year coal power still accounted for 58.4% of China's energy mix, according to the China Electricity Council, a trade body..
  • Globally, however, China is now in a league of its own in uptake of e-buses. By 2018, about 421,000 of the world's 425,000 electric buses were located in China; Europe had about 2,250 and the US owned around 300. A
  • But earlier this year, the European Commission announced a zero-emission target for all new city buses by 2030. And some countries are increasing their overall funding for the transition.
  • In 2020, the European Commission approved Germany's plan to double its aid for e-buses to €650m (£558m/$707m), then again in 2021 to €1.25 billion euros (£1.07m/$1.3bn). And the UK, which last year had the largest electric bus fleet in Europe with 2,226 pure electric and hybrid buses, has announced another £129m ($164m) to help bus operators buy zero-emissions fleets.
  • Countries have thus responded to China's manufacturing lead in divergent ways. "While the US has opted for a more competitive angle by fostering its own e-bus production, regions like Latin America are more open to trade with China due to a more friendly trading setup through [China's] Belt and Road Initiative,"
  • In order to avoid direct competition from Chinese manufacturers, the US has come up with a "school-bus strategy", says Liu. The Chinese don't make the iconic yellow vehicles, so this could ignite American e-bus manufacturing and create a local industry chain, he suggests. Backed by the US Environmental Protection Agency's $5bn (£3.9bn) Clean School Bus Programme, the national effort has so far committed to providing 5,982 buses.
  • In contrast, many Latin American cities, such as the Colombian capital of Bogota and the Chilean capital of Santiago, are greening their traditional bus sectors with the help of Chinese manufacturers, who are the largest providers to the region. In 2020, Chile became the country that had the most Chinese e-buses outside of China, and this year Santiago's public transport operator announced it has ordered 1,022 e-buses from Beijing-based Foton Motor, the biggest overseas deal the firm had received.
  • Chinese manufacturers are likely to receive a lot more orders from Chile and its neighbours in this decade. According to latest research by the global C40 Cities network, the number of electric buses in 32 Latin American cities is expected to increase by more than seven times by 2030, representing an investment opportunity of over $11.3bn (£8.9bn)
  • In June 2023, BloombergNEF forecast half of the world's buses to be entirely battery-powered by 2032, a decade ahead of cars. And by 2026, 36% and 24% of municipal bus sales in Europe and the US, respectively, are expected to be EVs as they begin to catch up with China
  • To meet the global climate goals set by the Paris Agreement, simply switching the world's existing bus fleets might not be enough. According to ITDP, the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions from urban passenger transport globally must stay below the equivalent of 66 gigatonnes CO2 between 2020 and 2050 for the world to meet the 1.5C temperature goal. This emissions limit will only be possible when the world not only adopts electric buses, but goes through a broader shift away from private transport
  • "We can't just focus on [replacing] the buses that exist, we need to actually get many, many more buses on the streets," Thompson adds. She and her team estimate that the world would need about 10 million more buses through 2030, and 46 million more buses cumulatively through 2050, to make public transport good enough to have a shot at achieving the Paris Agreement. And all those buses will need to be electric.
  • In China therefore, even though EVs are being sold faster than ever, its central government has instructed cities to encourage public transport use, as well as walking and riding bikes.
  • In Wang's hometown, meanwhile, which has just over three million residents, the local government has gone one step further and made all bus rides free. All citizens need to do is to swipe an app, with no charge, to get onto the bus. "My aunt loves taking buses now," says Wang. "She says it is so convenient."
Javier E

How will everything change under climate change? | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ng-change-under-climate-change

climate change capitalism crisis culture economics science

shared by Javier E on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • what is wrong with us?
  • entire
  • We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and would benefit the vast majority – are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.
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  • it is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when those elites were enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.
  • Very little, however, has been written about how market fundamentalism has, from the very first moments, systematically sabotaged our collective response to climate change.
  • The core problem was that the stranglehold that market logic secured over public life in this period made the most direct and obvious climate responses seem politically heretical
  • How, for instance, could societies invest massively in zero-carbon public services and infrastructure at a time when the public sphere was being systematically dismantled and auctioned off
  • How could governments heavily regulate, tax, and penalise fossil fuel companies when all such measures were being dismissed as relics of “command and control” communism?
  • And how could the renewable energy sector receive the supports and protections it needed to replace fossil fuels when “protectionism” had been made a dirty word?
  • With hindsight, it’s hard to see how it could have turned out otherwise. The twin signatures of this era have been the mass export of products across vast distances (relentlessly burning carbon all the way), and the import of a uniquely wasteful model of production, consumption, and agriculture to every corner of the world (also based on the profligate burning of fossil fuels)
  • Because of those decades of hardcore emitting, exactly when we were supposed to be cutting back, the things we must do to avoid catastrophic warming are no longer just in conflict with the particular strain of deregulated capitalism that triumphed in the 1980s. They are now in conflict with the fundamental imperative at the heart of our economic model: grow or die.
  • so much carbon has been allowed to accumulate in the atmosphere over the past two decades that now our only hope of keeping warming below the internationally agreed-upon target of 2C is for wealthy countries to cut their emissions by somewhere in the neighbourhood of eight to 10% a year. The “free” market simply cannot accomplish this task. Indeed, this level of emission reduction has happened only in the context of economic collapse or deep depressions.
  • our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.
  • , it is eminently possible to transform our economy so that it is less resource-intensive, and to do it in ways that are equitable, with the most vulnerable protected and the most responsible bearing the bulk of the burden. Low-carbon sectors of our economies can be encouraged to expand and create jobs, while high-carbon sectors are encouraged to contract. The problem, however, is that this scale of economic planning and management is entirely outside the boundaries of our reigning ideology. The only kind of contraction our current system can manage is a brutal crash, in which the most vulnerable will suffer most of all.
  • So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us. Gentle tweaks to the status quo stopped being a climate option when we supersized the American Dream in the 1990s, and then proceeded to take it global
  • a landmark report. It stated that, “in the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us.”
  • Climate change presents a profound challenge to this cautious centrism because half measures won’t cut it: “all of the above energy” program, as US president Barack Obama describes his approach, has about as much chance of success as an all-of-the-above diet, and the firm deadlines imposed by science require that we get very worked up indeed.
  • we need to think differently, radically differently, for those changes to be remotely possible. A worldview will need to rise to the fore that sees nature, other nations, and our own neighbours not as adversaries, but rather as partners in a grand project of mutual reinvention.
  • That’s a big ask. But it gets bigger. Because of our endless procrastination, we also have to pull off this massive transformation without delay. The International Energy Agency (IEA) warns that if we do not get our emissions under control by a rather terrifying 2017, our fossil fuel economy will “lock-in” extremely dangerous warming.
  • “The door to reach two degrees is about to close. In 2017 it will be closed forever.” In short, we have reached what some activists have started calling “Decade Zero” of the climate crisis: we either change now or we lose our chance
Javier E

Emissions by Makers of Energy Level Off - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...akers-of-energy-level-off.html

global warming CO2 emissions

shared by Javier E on 14 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Carbon dioxide emissions from the world’s energy producers stalled in 2014, the first time in 40 years of measurement that the level did not increase during a period of economic expansion, according to preliminary estimates from the International Energy Agency.
  • The research suggests that efforts to counteract climate change by reducing carbon emissions and promoting energy efficiency could be working, said Fatih Birol, the agency’s chief economist and incoming executive director. “This is definitely good news,” he said
  • Dr. Birol noted that many nations have promoted energy efficiency and low-carbon energy sources like hydroelectric, solar, wind and nuclear power. China, he noted, has worked to reduce carbon emissions as part of an intensive effort to limit environmental damage from economic development. That China appears to be successfully moving down that path, he said, portends well for the deal struck with the United States in November. China committed in that agreement to turning around its growth in carbon emissions by 2030, or earlier if possible, while increasing the share of non-fossil fuels in energy production to 20 percent of its menu.
Javier E

How Environmental Movement Plans to Leverage the Coronavirus Pandemic - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ronavirus-pandemic-11586164191

environmental movement pandemic crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • groups including Greenpeace, the International Energy Agency and the World Resources Institute are seizing the crisis as an opportunity to press governments to make industrial stimulus packages contingent on modernizing energy systems.
  • . “Any loans must come with strings attached to reduce emissions so that in the months to come the government can steer high-carbon industries toward the cleaner, healthier and more resilient future we all need,”
  • “We are asked by many governments around the world to give them advice on how they can shape the energy component of these stimulus packages in order to boost the energy resilience and accelerate the energy transition,” said Fatih Birol, executive director at the IEA.
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  • A slowdown in activity during the 2009 economic downturn reduced carbon emissions and air pollution, but emissions rose 6% the following year, data from the International Energy Agency showed, as governments unleashed stimulus programs to reinvigorate growth.
  • the rapid changes in regions around the world resulting from measures to stop the spread of the virus could yet bring about long-term behavioral changes such as walking to work and increased teleconferencing over travel.
  • “Financial incentives from governments embedded in stimulus packages to move people toward using energy less and less mobility may be part of the results we are going to see after the shock is over,”
mattrenz16

Biden's Fossil Fuel Moves Clash With Pledges on Climate Change - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ssil-fules-climate-Willow.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • On Wednesday, the Biden administration defended in federal court the Willow project, a huge oil drilling operation proposed on Alaska’s North Slope that was approved by the Trump administration and is being fought by environmentalists. Weeks earlier, it backed former President Donald J. Trump’s decision to grant oil and gas leases on federal land in Wyoming. Also this month, it declined to act when it had an opportunity to stop crude oil from continuing to flow through the bitterly contested, 2,700-mile Dakota Access pipeline, which lacks a federal permit.
  • The three decisions suggest the jagged road that Mr. Biden is following as he tries to balance his climate agenda against practical and political pressures.
  • As important, Mr. Biden is trying to avoid alienating a handful of moderate Republicans and Democrats from oil, gas and coal states who will decide the fate of his legislative agenda in Congress. Among them is Lisa Murkowski, the Republican senator from Alaska for whom the Willow project is a top priority and who grilled Deb Haaland about it during Ms. Haaland’s confirmation hearing for interior secretary in February.Editors’ PicksSummertime … and the Sloganeering Is a Little AwkwardThe Murky World of Private Spies and the Damage They May Be DoingThey’ve Given $6 Million to the Arts. No One Knew Them, Until Now.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story
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  • The multibillion-dollar plan from ConocoPhillips to drill in part of the National Petroleum Reserve would produce more than 100,000 barrels of oil a day until 2050. It is being challenged by environmental groups who said the Trump administration failed to consider the impact that drilling would have on fragile wildlife and that burning the oil would have on global warming.
  • Senator Dan Sullivan, Republican of Alaska, said in an interview that he, Ms. Murkowski and Representative Don Young of Alaska had all met with Ms. Haaland “ad nauseam” about Alaska issues, including the Willow project. Mr. Sullivan said he had repeatedly made the case that Willow’s projected 2,000 jobs and $1.2 billion in revenues should be seen as part of the Biden administration’s focus on environmental equity, as it would directly benefit local and Alaska Native communities in the North Slope.
  • The decision on the Willow project was made as the Biden administration is trying to win Republican support for its infrastructure package and other policies, said Gerald Torres, a professor of law and environmental justice at Yale University. “He is going to need Murkowski’s vote for some things,” he said. “These are political calculations.”
  • Earlier this month, lawyers for the Biden administration also opposed in court shutting down the Dakota Access pipeline, which is carrying about 550,000 barrels of oil daily from North Dakota to Illinois. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe and other activists have fought it for more than five years, contending the pipeline threatens water supplies and sacred sites.
  • A few days later, the Biden administration defended 440 oil and gas leases issued by the Trump administration on federal land in Wyoming that is also the critical habitat of the sage grouse, mule deer and pronghorn. Environmentalists successfully sued the government to stop the leases, arguing that they violated a 2015 agreement that protected that land. But in federal appeals court, the Biden administration defended the decision to allow oil and gas drilling.
  • Environmental activists, who campaigned to elect Mr. Biden, said this week that they were “baffled” and “disappointed” by the decisions but avoided criticizing the president.
  • Still, some said they were running out of patience with the distance between Mr. Biden’s climate policies and his actions at a time when scientists say countries need to quickly and sharply cut fossil fuel emissions or risk irreversible damage to the planet.
  • Still, some said they were running out of patience with the distance between Mr. Biden’s climate policies and his actions at a time when scientists say countries need to quickly and sharply cut fossil fuel emissions or risk irreversible damage to the planet.
  • This month the world’s leading energy agency warned that governments around the globe must stop approving fossil fuel projects now if they want to keep the increase in average global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the Earth will experience irreversible damage.
mattrenz16

Biden Suspends Drilling Leases in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-national-wildlife-refuge.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Tuesday suspended oil drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, unspooling a signature achievement of the Trump presidency and delivering on a promise by President Biden to protect the fragile Alaskan tundra from fossil fuel extraction.
  • The decision sets up a process that could halt drilling in one of the largest tracts of untouched wilderness in the United States, home to migrating waterfowl, caribou and polar bears. But it also lies over as much as 11 billion barrels of oil and Democrats and Republicans have fought over whether to allow drilling there for more than four decades.
  • While the move follows President Biden’s Inauguration Day executive order to halt new Arctic drilling, it also serves as a high-profile way for the president to solidify his environmental credentials after coming under fire from activists angered by his recent quiet support for some fossil fuel projects.
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  • Environmentalists have criticized moves by the White House last month to legally defend a major drilling project elsewhere in Alaska, to pass on an opportunity to block the contentious Dakota Access oil pipeline, and to support a Trump-era decision to grant oil and gas leases on public land in Wyoming.
  • Last month, the world’s leading energy agency warned that governments around the globe must stop approving fossil fuel projects now if they want to prevent the pollution they produce from driving average global temperatures above 2 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the Earth will experience irreversible damage.
  • Experts observed that the timing of the announcement to suspend the drilling leases in the refuge, coming on the heels of the fossil-fuel friendly actions by the administration, could be designed to appease Mr. Biden’s environmental critics.
  • Still, the suspension of the leases alone does not guarantee that drilling will be blocked in the Arctic refuge. The administration has only committed to reviewing the Trump leases, not canceling them. If it determines that the leases were granted illegally, it could then have legal grounds to cancel them.
  • Policy experts also noted that any moves by Mr. Biden to block Arctic drilling could be undone by a future administration.
  • Environmental groups applauded the move but called for a permanent ban on Arctic drilling.
  • Also last month, Mr. Biden opposed in court shutting down the bitterly-contested Dakota Access pipeline, which is carrying about 550,000 barrels of oil daily from North Dakota to Illinois. It also could have decided to halt the pipeline while the Army Corps of Engineers conducts a new court-ordered environmental review, but it opted not to intervene.
rerobinson03

Biden Aims to End Arctic Drilling. A Trump-Era Law Could Foil His Plans. - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ANWR-drilling-Biden.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — President Biden may be forced to hold a new lease sale for oil drilling in the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, despite his vows to slash fossil fuel pollution and his action this week to suspend Arctic drilling leases that had been awarded in the final days of the Trump administration.
  • Last month, the world’s leading energy agency warned that governments around the globe must stop approving fossil fuel projects now if they want to prevent the pollution they produce from driving average global temperatures above 2 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the Earth will experience irreversible damage.
  • Mr. Parenteau and other legal experts noted that the Biden administration could find ways to delay or diminish the second auction of drilling leases. For example, while the law requires the Interior Department to hold an auction, it does not require that the agency actually award any leases, he said.
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  • Until that law was passed, the fate of the refuge had depended on which political party controlled the White House and Congress. Republicans wanted to allow drilling, Democrats to keep the area off limits.
  • But Ms. Brisson said that even if the lawsuits were successful, they only concern the past activities of the Trump administration. A legal victory would not overturn the mandate in the 2017 law to hold two separate lease auctions, she said, “just the way it was carried out.”
  • Given that, there are questions as to how much interest a second sale would generate, especially since there was little interest in the first one. Twenty-two out of 32 tracts were offered in that sale, nearly 1.1 million acres in areas that were thought to have the greatest potential for oil development.
martinelligi

Why Ford Unveiling The Electric F-150 Lightning Is A Big Deal : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ns-to-embrace-electric-vehicle

climate

shared by martinelligi on 20 May 21 - No Cached
  • For the company, it represents a big strategic bet on the rise of electric vehicles — one that nearly every rival automaker is also making. And it's also a symbol for the vision of America that President Biden has been promoting: made in America, pairing blue-collar roots and high-tech ambitions, fighting climate change without making compromises.
  • Behind all this buzz and boosterism is an incredibly daunting challenge for the auto industry. According to a report out this week from the International Energy Agency, for the energy sector to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, electric vehicles would need to go from 5% of global sales to 60% in less than a decade. Five years later, in 2035, all new cars would need to be electric.
  • Ford's not the only one hoping there's a big pool of would-be buyers who aren't interested in a Tesla or a Nissan Leaf but would happily spring for an electric version of their favorite pickup.
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  • The F-150 carries extra symbolic and economic weight. It's America's best-selling vehicle and has been for 40 years. Ford sells more than 1 million F-series trucks per year, raking in more than $40 billion annually, more than McDonald's or Nike bring in as entire companies
  • Ford argues that the perks of electrification will speak for themselves, such as the effortless torque that's characteristic of all electric motors and the potential for new, practical features. (The hybrid F-150 has an option that allows you to run power tools off the car's battery at a work site, for instance.)
anniina03

How Hard Is It to Quit Coal? For Germany, 18 Years and $44 Billion - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rmany-coal-climate-change.html

politics US history Crisis culture economics

shared by anniina03 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Germany announced on Thursday that it would spend $44.5 billion to quit coal — but not for another 18 years, by 2038.
  • The move shows how expensive it is to stop burning the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel, despite a broad consensus that keeping coal in the ground is vital to averting a climate crisis, and how politically complicated it is.
  • Germany doesn’t have shale gas, as the United States does, which has led to the rapid decline of coal use in America, despite President Trump’s support for coal. Germany also faces intense opposition to nuclear power. After the Fukushima disaster in 2011, that opposition prompted the government to start shutting down the country’s nuclear plants, a transition that should be complete by 2022.
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  • “Germany, one of the strongest and most successful industry nations in the world, is taking huge steps toward leaving the fossil fuel era,” Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said at a news conference in Berlin.
  • Environmental organizations criticized the government plan for being too slow and for not expanding renewable energy sources quickly enough. “The majority of the necessary reductions are being pushed to the end of the 2020s,” said Christoph Bals, policy director for the environmental group Germanwatch.
  • Renewable energy is getting cheaper. Private investors are shying away from new projects. There is far greater awareness of the deadly particulate matter pollution that comes out of coal-fired power plants.Editors’ PicksA Meticulous Account of Trump’s Tenure Reads Like a Comic Horror StoryTech Bro Uniform Meets Margaret Thatcher. Disruption Ensues.Olivia Palermo Got a Lot Out of That InternshipAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyYet coal remains ascendant in some parts of the world, in part because it has been the go-to fuel for so long, it employs millions of people globally, and because the industry often enjoys robust political backing.
  • Eastern European countries, particularly Poland and the Czech Republic, still rely heavily on coal. The European Union this week created a €100 billion fund to aid their transition to cleaner fuels.
  • The Asia-Pacific is where coal continues to grow. China, which consumes half of the world’s coal, continues to build more coal plants at home and abroad. According to the International Energy Agency, China’s domestic coal demand is projected to keep growing for at least the next two years, before it levels off. China’s coal expansion puts its own climate targets at risk
  • And even as it reels from wildfires made more intense by climate change, Australia, one of the world’s biggest coal exporters, is digging for more, encouraged in part by the growing Asian market. Among the most contentious projects is a new $2 billion coal mine in the country’s northeast.
nrashkind

Oil and gas companies will only survive the climate crisis if they spend more now - CNN - 0 views

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shared by nrashkind on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The oil and gas industry needs to work harder and faster to tackle the climate crisis if it wants to remain profitable, a leading energy group says.
  • Since 2015, the industry has directed less than 1% of its annual capital expenditure towards low-carbon businesses, according to the report.
  • BP invested $500 million in low carbon activities in 2018, about 3% of annual capital expenditure, according to its annual report.
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  • Shell has a three-year target beginning in 2019 to reduce its carbon footprint by 2-3%, while ExxonMobil has invested $9 billion over almost two decades in lower-emission energy solution
  • "The first immediate task for all parts of the industry is reducing the carbon footprint of their own operations," said Birol.
  • "As of today, around 15% of global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions come from the process of getting oil and gas out of the ground and to consumers. A large part of these emissions can be brought down relatively quickly and easily," he said.
  • The cost of developing these technologies represent an investment in companies' ability to prosper in the long term, the report said.
  • The seven largest oil and gas companies account for just 12% of oil and gas reserves, 15% of production and 10% of emissions from industry operations, according to the report.
  • The International Energy Agency's report will be presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday.
criscimagnael

Using a City's Excess Heat to Reduce Emissions - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-carbon-emissions-cities.html

shared by criscimagnael on 22 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • The London Underground is the oldest subway system in the world, so it might seem an unlikely source of innovation for one of the thorniest problems facing humanity in the 21st century: climate change.
  • While public transit is usually more environmentally friendly than other methods of travel, the Underground is playing a more direct role in a groundbreaking experiment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings.
  • The local council for the Borough of Islington in London has developed, planned and installed a way to provide heat and hot water for several hundred homes, a school and two recreation centers, all using otherwise-wasted thermal energy generated mostly by the electric motors and brakes of the Underground’s trains.
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  • Islington’s project is just one of many innovations by cities around the world to provide heat to residents and businesses while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving efficiency and saving people money.
  • Stockholm is also using heat from sewage, as well as tapping data centers and other sources to supply heat for much of the city.
  • If you can start to use a whole array of waste heat streams, you’re taking out a big chunk of greenhouse gas emissions,
  • We don’t really need to burn gas at 1,000 degrees centigrade [1,832 degrees Fahrenheit] to get your bath to 30 degrees centigrade,” Dr. Gluyas added. “What we need to do is work with nature to optimize the use of heat.
  • The concept of district heating networks is not new and may, in fact, date from 14th-century France or even, some say, the Roman Empire
  • New York City has one of the world’s largest district systems to provide heat, cooling and, in some cases, even electricity to many buildings in Manhattan.
  • Though perhaps less wasteful than having a boiler in every single building, it is not the most efficient district heating system, as it was designed to heat a building on the coldest day of the year with all the windows open — partly a public health legacy of the 1918 pandemic.
  • But the innovation — which took more than five years to plan and build, and began operations in March 2020 — was to feed in heat from the Underground.
  • Typically, the hot air from the Underground is released into the air through stations and ventilation shafts. In this case, however, air is drawn from a ventilation shaft at an abandoned Underground station into an energy center where a series of heat transfers take place, eventually leading to delivery of the heat into the buildings in the network.
  • For our residents, locally, this is absolutely the right thing to do,” because it saves money in an area where many residents struggle to afford heat, Mr. Townsend said. “And this is a perfect solution for big cities across the world.
  • Heat from wastewater and sewage now provides about 70 percent of the space heating and hot water for the 43 buildings connected to the network, with the remaining 30 percent coming from natural gas, though the goal is to end that by 2030. The electricity powering the heat pumps is 97 percent zero-carbon, supplied by hydroelectric dams.
  • Every time we take a shower, do the dishes or do a load of laundry, the water is still hot when it goes down the drain,” said Ashley St. Clair, Vancouver’s senior renewable energy planner.“It’s flowing under our streets, and we’re already collecting it through the traditional infrastructure of wastewater pipes, and to be able to tap into that waste heat is really the ultimate circular economy.”
  • And it cannot come soon enough: This year alone, Vancouver has experienced several bouts of extreme weather, made more likely and intense because of climate change: heat domes, wildfires and catastrophic flooding, which recently cut the city off by road and rail from the rest of Canada. Having its own heat and hot water supply has been an additional benefit of the project, Ms. St. Clair said.
  • Stockholm, Mr. Rylander said, has particularly good connectivity to Northern Europe, Finland and Russia, which makes it attractive to data center companies, as does Sweden’s relatively clean power mix. However, they use biomass to produce a significant amount of heat and power, the renewable classification of which is debated by experts.
  • “If you establish a data center in a cold place like Sweden, it’s stupid to waste the heat, because heat has power and value in a cold country.”
  • “We’re very clear that we are an experiment, and we are doing the work that will enable others to benefit from it.”
Javier E

Opinion | Climate Change Is Real. Markets, Not Governments, Offer the Cure. - The New Y... - 0 views

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climate climate change markets response analysis strategy

shared by Javier E on 31 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • 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?
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  • 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).
  • Expensive efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions in Europe and North America seemed particularly fruitless when China, India and other developing countries weren’t about to curb their own appetite for fossil fuels
  • just how fast is Greenland’s ice melting right now? Is this an emergency for our time, or is it a problem for the future?
  • 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?
  • Greenland is about the size of Alaska and California combined and, except at its coasts, is covered by ice that in places is nearly two miles thick. Even that’s only a fraction of the ice in Antarctica, which is more than six times as large
  • Greenland’s ice also poses a nearer-term risk because it is melting faster. If all its ice were to melt, global sea levels would rise by some 24 feet. That would be more than enough to inundate hundreds of coastal cities in scores of nations, from Jakarta and Bangkok to Copenhagen and Amsterdam to Miami and New Orleans.
  • There was also a millenarian fervor that bothered me about climate activism, with its apocalyptic imagery (the Statue of Liberty underwater) and threats of doom unless we were willing to live far more frugally.
  • “We haven’t had a good positive mass balance year since the late 1990s,” he told me in a follow-on email when I asked him to explain the data for me. The losses can vary sharply by year. The annualized average over the past 30 years, he added, is 170 gigatons per year. That’s the equivalent of about 5,400 tons of ice loss per second. That “suggests that Greenland ice loss has been tracking the I.P.P.C. worse-case, highest-carbon-emission scenario.
  • The data shows unmistakably that Greenland’s ice is not in balance. It is losing far more than it is gaining.
  • scientists have been drilling ice-core samples from Greenland for decades, giving them a very good idea of climatic changes stretching back thousands of years. Better yet, a pair of satellites that detect anomalies in Earth’s gravity fields have been taking measurements of the sheet regularly for nearly 20 years, giving scientists a much more precise idea of what is happening.
  • it’s hard to forecast with any precision what that means. “Anyone who says they know what the sea level is going to be in 2100 is giving you an educated guess,” said NASA’s Willis. “The fact is, we’re seeing these big ice sheets melt for the first time in history, and we don’t really know how fast they can go.”
  • His own educated guess: “By 2100, we are probably looking at more than a foot or two and hopefully less than seven or eight feet. But we are struggling to figure out just how fast the ice sheets can melt. So the upper end of range is still not well known.”
  • On the face of it, that sounds manageable. Even if sea levels rise by eight feet, won’t the world have nearly 80 years to come to grips with the problem, during which technologies that help us mitigate the effects of climate change while adapting to its consequences are likely to make dramatic advances?
  • Won’t the world — including countries that today are poor — become far richer and thus more capable of weathering the floods, surges and superstorms?
  • The average rate at which sea level is rising around the world, he estimates, has more than tripled over the past three decades, to five millimeters a year from 1.5 millimeters. That may still seem minute, yet as the world learned during the pandemic, exponential increases have a way of hitting hard.
  • “When something is on a straight line or a smooth curve, you can plot its trajectory,” Englander said. “But sea level, like earthquakes and mudslides, is something that happens irregularly and can change rather quickly and surprise us. The point is, you can no longer predict the future by the recent past.”
  • In The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, where I used to work, the theoretical physicist Steven Koonin, a former under secretary for science in the Obama administration’s Energy Department, cast doubt on the threat from Thwaites in a voice that could have once been mine. He also thinks the risks associated with Greenland’s melting are less a product of human-induced global warming than of natural cycles in North Atlantic currents and temperatures, which over time have a way of regressing to the mean.
  • Even the poorest countries, while still unacceptably vulnerable, are suffering far fewer human and economic losses to climate-related disasters.
  • Another climate nonalarmist is Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. I call Pielke a nonalarmist rather than a skeptic because he readily acknowledges that the challenges associated with climate change, including sea-level rise, are real, serious and probably unstoppable, at least for many decades.
  • “If we have to have a problem,” he told me when I reached him by phone, “we probably want one with a slow onset that we can see coming. It’s not like an asteroid coming from space.”
  • “Since the 1940s, the impact of floods as a proportion of U.S. gross domestic product has dropped by 70 percent-plus,” Pielke said. “We see this around the world, across phenomena. The story is that fewer people are dying and we are having less damage proportional to G.D.P.”
  • “Much climate reporting today highlights short-term changes when they fit the narrative of a broken climate but then ignores or plays down changes when they don’t, often dismissing them as ‘just weather,’” he wrote in February.
  • Global warming is real and getting worse, Pielke said, yet still it’s possible that humanity will be able to adapt to, and compensate for, its effects.
  • A few years ago, I would have found voices like Koonin’s and Pielke’s persuasive. Now I’m less sure. What intervened was a pandemic.
  • That’s what I thought until the spring of 2020, when, along with everyone else, I experienced how swiftly and implacably nature can overwhelm even the richest and most technologically advanced societies. It was a lesson in the sort of intellectual humility I recommended for others
  • It was also a lesson in thinking about risk, especially those in the category known as high-impact, low-probability events that seem to be hitting us with such regularity in this century: the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; the tsunamis of 2004 and 2011, the mass upheavals in the Arab world
  • What if the past does nothing to predict the future? What if climate risks do not evolve gradually and relatively predictably but instead suddenly soar uncontrollably? How much lead time is required to deal with something like sea-level rise? How do we weigh the risks of underreacting to climate change against the risks of overreacting to it?
  • I called Seth Klarman, one of the world’s most successful hedge-fund managers, to think through questions of risk. While he’s not an expert on climate change, he has spent decades thinking deeply about every manner of risk
  • And we will almost certainly have to do it from sources other than Russia, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and other places that pose unacceptable strategic, environmental or humanitarian risks
  • “If you face something that is potentially existential,” he explained, “existential for nations, even for life as we know it, even if you thought the risk is, say, 5 percent, you’d want to hedge against it.”
  • “One thing we try to do,” he said, “is we buy protection when it’s really inexpensive, even when we think we may well not need it.” The forces contributing to climate change, he noted, echoing Englander, “might be irreversible sooner than the damage from climate change has become fully apparent. You can’t say it’s far off and wait when, if you had acted sooner, you might have dealt with it better and at less cost. We have to act now.”
  • In other words, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That’s particularly true if climate change is akin to cancer — manageable or curable in its earlier stages, disastrous in its later ones.
  • As I’ve always believed, knowing there is grave risk to future generations — and expecting current ones to make immediate sacrifices for it — defies most of what we know about human nature. So I began to think more deeply about that challenge, and others.
  • For the world to achieve the net-zero goal for carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency, we will have to mine, by 2040, six times the current amounts of critical minerals — nickel, cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese, graphite, chromium, rare earths and other minerals and elements — needed for electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels.
  • The poster child for this kind of magical thinking is Germany, which undertook a historic Energiewende — “energy revolution” — only to come up short. At the turn of the century, Germany got about 85 percent of its primary energy from fossil fuels. Now it gets about 78 percent, a puny reduction, considering that the country has spent massive sums on renewables to increase the share of electricity it generates from them.
  • As in everything else in life, so too with the environment: There is no such thing as a free lunch. Whether it’s nuclear, biofuels, natural gas, hydroelectric or, yes, wind and solar, there will always be serious environmental downsides to any form of energy when used on a massive scale. A single industrial-size wind turbine, for instance, typically requires about a ton of rare earth metals as well as three metric tons of copper, which is notoriously destructive and dirty to mine.
  • no “clean energy” solution will easily liberate us from our overwhelming and, for now, inescapable dependence on fossil fuels.
  • Nobody brings the point home better than Vaclav Smil, the Canadian polymath whose most recent book, “How the World Really Works,” should be required reading for policymakers and anyone else interested in a serious discussion about potential climate solutions.
  • “I’ve talked to so many experts and seen so much evidence,” he told me over Zoom, “I’m convinced the climate is changing, and addressing climate change has become a philanthropic priority of mine.”
  • Things could turn a corner once scientists finally figure out a technical solution to the energy storage problem. Or when governments and local actors get over their NIMBYism when it comes to permitting and building a large energy grid to move electricity from Germany’s windy north to its energy-hungry south. Or when thoughtful environmental activists finally come to grips with the necessity of nuclear energy
  • Till then, even as I’ve come to accept the danger we face, I think it’s worth extending the cancer metaphor a little further: Just as cancer treatments, when they work at all, can have terrible side effects, much the same can be said of climate treatments: The gap between an accurate diagnosis and effective treatment remains dismayingly wide
  • Only when countries like Vietnam and China turned to a different model, of largely bottom-up, market-driven development, did hundreds of millions of people get lifted out of destitution.
  • the most important transformation has come in agriculture, which uses about 70 percent of the world’s freshwater supply.
  • Farmers gradually adopted sprinkler and drip irrigation systems, rather than more wasteful flood irrigation, not to conserve water but because the technology provided higher crop yields and larger profit margins.
  • Water shortages “will spur a revolutionary, aggressive approach to getting rid of flood irrigation,” said Seth Siegel, the chief sustainability officer of the Israeli AgTech company N-Drip. “Most of this innovation will be driven by free-market capitalism, with important incentives from government and NGOs.
  • meaningful environmental progress has been made through market forces. In this century, America’s carbon dioxide emissions across fuel types have fallen to well below 5,000 million metric tons per year, from a peak of about 6,000 million in 2007, even as our inflation-adjusted G.D.P. has grown by over 50 percent and total population by about 17 percent.
  • 1) Engagement with critics is vital. Insults and stridency are never good tools of persuasion, and trying to cow or censor climate skeptics into silence rarely works
  • the biggest single driver in emissions reductions from 2005 to 2017 was the switch from coal to natural gas for power generation, since gas produces roughly half the carbon dioxide as coal. This, in turn, was the result of a fracking revolution in the past decade, fiercely resisted by many environmental activists, that made the United States the world’s largest gas producer.
  • In the long run, we are likelier to make progress when we adopt partial solutions that work with the grain of human nature, not big ones that work against it
  • Renewables, particularly wind power, played a role. So did efficiency mandates.
  • The problem with our civilization isn’t overconfidence. It’s polarization, paralysis and a profound lack of trust in all institutions, including the scientific one
  • Devising effective climate policies begins with recognizing the reality of the social and political landscape in which all policy operates. Some thoughts on how we might do better:
  • They may not be directly related to climate change but can nonetheless have a positive impact on it. And they probably won’t come in the form of One Big Idea but in thousands of little ones whose cumulative impacts add up.
  • 2) Separate facts from predictions and predictions from policy. Global warming is a fact. So is the human contribution to it. So are observed increases in temperature and sea levels. So are continued increases if we continue to do more of the same. But the rate of those increases is difficult to predict even with the most sophisticated computer modeling
  • 3) Don’t allow climate to become a mainly left-of-center concern. One reason the topic of climate has become so anathema to many conservatives is that so many of the proposed solutions have the flavor, and often the price tag, of old-fashioned statism
  • 4) Be honest about the nature of the challenge. Talk of an imminent climate catastrophe is probably misleading, at least in the way most people understand “imminent.”
  • A more accurate description of the challenge might be a “potentially imminent tipping point,” meaning the worst consequences of climate change can still be far off but our ability to reverse them is drawing near. Again, the metaphor of cancer — never safe to ignore and always better to deal with at Stage 2 than at Stage 4 — can be helpful.
  • 5) Be humble about the nature of the solutions. The larger the political and financial investment in a “big fix” response to climate change on the scale of the Energiewende, the greater the loss in time, capital and (crucially) public trust when it doesn’t work as planned
  • 6) Begin solving problems our great-grandchildren will face. Start with sea-level rise
  • We can also stop providing incentives for building in flood-prone areas by raising the price of federal flood insurance to reflect the increased risk more accurately.
  • 7) Stop viewing economic growth as a problem. Industrialization may be the leading cause of climate change. But we cannot and will not reverse it through some form of deindustrialization, which would send the world into poverty and deprivation
  • 8) Get serious about the environmental trade-offs that come with clean energy. You cannot support wind farms but hinder the transmission lines needed to bring their power to the markets where they are needed.
  • 9) A problem for the future is, by its very nature, a moral one. A conservative movement that claims to care about what we owe the future has the twin responsibility of setting an example for its children and at the same time preparing for that future.
lilyrashkind

Oil Prices Top $120 as China Eases Lockdowns - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...na-eases-lockdowns-11653933068

oil prices china

shared by lilyrashkind on 30 May 22 - No Cached
  • China’s emergence from shutdowns stands to raise demand for oil at a time when supplies of some fuels are running low globally. Shanghai Vice Mayor Wu Qing said over the weekend that the authorities will loosen the conditions under which companies are able to resume work this week.
  • Even with an exemption on pipeline imports, an EU ban would amount to a significant blow to Russia’s ability to cash in on its prize commodity. As of 2020, about three quarters of the 2.8 million barrels in crude Russia exported to Europe each day arrived on boats, according to Bruegel, a think tank.
  • Kristine Petrosyan, an IEA analyst, said Russia would struggle to divert all the oil that had flowed to Europe on boats to buyers in Asia. “I don’t think they can reallocate everything,” she said, adding that the voyage from Russia’s Baltic-sea ports to China takes about 60 days, much longer than the runs to European refineries.
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