Category Archives: environmentalism

Some Good News On Climate Change – We’re no longer totally f$%@ed.

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But we’re also far from totally unf$@%*ed!”

I am quoting here. I always try to stay positive and I know regular readers find that hard to believe because I have been saying for awhile that Human’s will go extinct. Still I like to think that my Stepson Gus, and my nieces and nephews like Taylor and Cory will have pleasant lives of their own. I hope that their kids will too. So here is an article that spreads some of that positivity.

This article is from last year but, spread the old news, same as the new news.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/23/1042973/climate-change-action-progress-clean-energy/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Climate change

The rare spots of good news on climate change

It looks increasingly clear that we’ll at least sidestep the worst-case scenarios.

December 23, 2021

The deadly consequences of climate change only grew clearer this year, as record-shattering heat waves, floods, and wildfires killed thousands and strained the limits of our disaster responders.

In the closing days of 2021, scientists warned that the eastern ledge of a Florida-size glacier is about to snap off of Antarctica and US legislators found they may have flubbed their best chance in a decade to enact sweeping climate policies.

But amid these stark signs, there were also indications that momentum is beginning to build behind climate action. Indeed, there’s good reason now to believe that the world could at least sidestep the worst dangers of global warming.

Princeton energy researcher Jesse Jenkins accurately, and colorfully, pinpointed the weird moment we’ve arrived at in a recent tweet: “We’re no longer totally f$%@ed. But we’re also far from totally unf$@%*ed!”

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Russia Farts in Ukraine’s Face – This is what happens when a “gas station” goes to war

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The predictions were: “Russia will be in Kyiv in hours”, “Putin will replace Ukrainian President with puppet”,  “Russia’s Air Force will crush Ukraine”, “Attacked on 4 sides Ukraine will surrender”.  To that Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians said  NYET! With just 78 planes in the air and Tanks running out of fuel the Russian attack appears uncoordinated and without passion. There are even rumors of Russian Units laying down their guns. In part here is why. Think about Brazil attacking Spain.

https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-economy-basically-big-gas-station-harvard-economist-2022-2

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Harvard economist and former Obama advisor says Russia is ‘basically a big gas station’ and is otherwise ‘incredibly unimportant’ in the global economy

Matthew Loh
Feb 21, 2022, 9:57 PM

Russia’s economy is “incredibly unimportant in the global economy except for oil and gas,” Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and former advisor to President Barack Obama, told The New York Times.

“It’s basically a big gas station,” he said.

His comments come as the West prepares heavy sanctions on Russia if it invades Ukraine. While they have the potential to throw the Russian economy into chaos, these measures could also reverberate to further damage the US, Europe, and the rest of the world as they battle inflation and rising energy prices — a ripple effect that the West hopes to mitigate.

On Monday, Moscow declared the independence of two breakaway regions of Ukraine and sent troops there — escalating the prospect of a major war. President Joe Biden has already ordered sanctions on the separatist regions — Donetsk and Luhansk — prohibiting US citizens from engaging in any exports, imports, or new investments in these areas.

Despite Russia’s size and wealth in raw materials, its economy is more on par with Brazil than with nations like Germany, France, and the UK, according to the latest nominal GDP data from the World Bank. According to the World Bank, Russia’s economy is smaller than Italy’s and South Korea’s, two nations with less than half of Russia’s population.

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Go there and read. More next week when gas prices will be above $4.

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We Need To Rebuild Our Power Grid – Or suffer devastating increased costs for natural disasters

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This is a first for this blog. We have never posted an “OP/ED” piece before, but Ms. Granholm knows what she is talking about. So listen up!

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/perspectives/clean-energy-economy-build-back-better-agenda/index.html

Extreme weather keeps knocking out America’s power. Here’s what we must do

Opinion by Jennifer M. Granholm for CNN Business Perspectives

Jennifer M. Granholm is the 16th United States Secretary of Energy. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own.

Perspectives Jennifer M Granholm

The image of a collapsed electrical tower and power lines that Hurricane Ida tossed into the Mississippi River illustrated a fundamental challenge facing the nation: Our power systems weren’t built to withstand extreme weather events. Without major investments to reinforce, modernize and clean our grid, the question will not be whether it fails, but when.

Over the year, we’ve gotten a full view of the dangers ahead. Even before Ida, we had wildfires and heatwaves threatening to overload the grid, droughts straining hydropower generation, and a polar vortex that froze gas production. This pummeling is part of a long trend driven by climate change — one that will continue to worsen if we keep spewing carbon pollution.
As UN Secretary-General António Guterres has said, this is a code red for humanity. But luckily, the Biden administration has a plan to respond: the Build Back Better Agenda, which will make essential crucial investments to protect our infrastructure against climate impacts, and put our nation on track to build a clean energy economy.
While some have questioned the scope of the President’s historic proposals, we should weigh their concern alongside the exponentially skyrocketing costs of cleaning up after extreme weather events. In the 1980s, it cost about $18 billion a year to clean up after climate disasters. Then the extreme weather intensified, so the costs ballooned. In the 1990s, we spent about $27 billion annually to clean up. In the 2000s, it cost almost $52 billion annually. In the 2010s, cleanup costs exploded to $81 billion. Then in the last five years, we’ve spent a whopping $121 billion per year to clean up after an angry Mother Nature.

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Go there and read the rest. More next week.

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Joe Biden Is Turning Out To Be My Kind Of President

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Do I need to say more?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/08/business/energy-environment/biden-solar-energy-climate-change.html

From 4% to 45%: Biden Offers Ambitious Blueprint for Solar Energy

The Energy Department analysis provides only a broad outline, and many of the details will be decided by congressional lawmakers.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Unions And Climate Change – Some of their stances are just bad

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As A HUGE disclaimer, my wife are both union members. Our prents were Union members. My great grandfather was a card carrying Socialist and ran for City Alderman in Chicago as such. So I believe in Unions. But when they get stuck on saving jobs no matter what. They get a little lost and sometimes real lost. These becomes apparent with police unions – though appropo to this topic. They protect bad cops for jobs sake. Well, the IBEW and other unions are no better. Instead of saying, “We will change power plant jobs for better jobs in the green sector”. They say, “We will not lose the jobs we have”. They act like it is heroic when it is pathetic.

https://www.vox.com/2019/5/22/18628299/green-new-deal-labor-union-2020-democrats

The Green New Deal is fracturing a critical base for Democrats: unions

National labor leaders oppose the Green New Deal but some state unions endorse it. That’s a challenge for presidential contenders.

By Umair Irfan Updated

As a statement of principles and goals, the Green New Deal seems to take economic justice and workers’ rights pretty seriously. It calls for a federal jobs guarantee. It says we need workforce retraining, strengthening collective bargaining rights, retirement security, and universal health care.

The resolution decries “antilabor policies” and says it must be fleshed out with input from “frontline and vulnerable communities, labor unions, [and] worker cooperatives,” with the goal of creating “high-quality union jobs.”

Which is why it was so surprising that the leader of the national AFL-CIO — the largest federation of labor unions in the United States, representing more than 12.5 million workers — recently came out against the proposal.

“We weren’t part of the process, so the worker’s interest wasn’t really figured into it,” AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka said in April. “We would want a whole bunch of changes made so that workers and our jobs are protected in the process.”

(Disclosure: I was on the bargaining committee of the Vox Media Union. We organized with Writers Guild of America, East, which is affiliated with the AFL-CIO.)

But this week, Maine Gov. Janet Mills signed her state’s version of a Green New Deal with the backing of labor unions.

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Go there and read. More next week

 

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How The Future Is The Future Of The Grid – The future where Grandpas never die

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And Tomorrow never comes. Yep, it is just like Flying Cars and all those other thing you saw on the Jetson’s and still haven’t happened yet. Why because the Power Structure doesn’t want them to happen. Imagine if you will – electricity is like a crude spear made of rock and a stick. Nuclear Power is the pointy rock on tip of the spear and society is a human body. That spear is plunged in to the human body NOT so that it dies, but so it heals. Now whoever controls the shaft of that spear controls the human. THAT is the way the power grid was DESIGNED. To change power grids you have to pull the spear out. The human dies.

https://www.theverge.com/22419206/smart-grid-renewable-energy-power-sector

The grid needs to smarten up to reach clean energy goals

Smart grids were supposed to come to the rescue a long time ago

By Justine Calma
Illustration by Alex Castro

In the future, our vehicles and homes will be in constant conversation with the power grid. Smart thermostats will send information about how much energy the home is using or potentially wasting to heat or cool itself. Solar panels will say how much energy they have on hand, while electric vehicles will share information about when and where they’re charging and how much juice they need for their travels. Solar and EV batteries might even offer up the energy they’re storing in case it’s needed elsewhere.

“You just plug it in, and somehow it automatically talks to its nearest neighbors,” explains Ben Kroposki, a director at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “[It] says, ‘Hey, I just want to let you know I’m out here. I can provide these kinds of services back.’”

That conversation is the backbone of what’s called a “smart grid.” While America’s aging grid system was built to send electricity in one direction — from power plants to homes and businesses — smart grids are a two-way street. Homes and buildings send information and electricity back to the grid or to other homes and buildings. An electric vehicle battery, for example, might be able to provide power to an area in the middle of a blackout. A smart grid also listens for directions from the utility, so that it charges whenever solar or other renewable energy is most abundant.

It’s a simple enough idea that for more than a decade has been sold as a way to improve the efficiency, environmental impact, and resiliency of the power sector. But electricity grids still have a long way to go to get “smart.” They’ve managed to fail spectacularly under the stressors of climate change and more extreme weather.

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Go there and read a whole lot of extra stuff. More next week.

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Bill Nye Thinks We Can Beat The Heat – I have never been this upbeat

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I do not know what to say. I have never argued against Bill Nye and I do not propose to start here. If Bill Nye thinks we can beat climate change by a combination of Massive investments and New technology. Then today I believe him. Tomorrow will be something else.

https://news.yahoo.com/bill-nye-to-congress-im-scared-too-about-climate-change-205114192.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9sb2dpbi55YWhvby5jb20v&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAMm1u5c7vwGY8bbrr24UhPXel7HWK3P-VSFsYW_Td-hoOHSkcldT4qMeksmSKF0P3nM-08WaNE9ujFXwZr_fFvDQnm9ACKQh2nrSm7JQw6puItFU8VgE8B8J8HT0qYIGQjAXLgmdQaY6gJpTreqfz_ySThTJuAvWJgm1ZFzM3qrH

That is the biggest header I have ever seen.

Bill Nye to Congress: ‘I’m scared too’ about climate change

David Knowles

·Senior Editor
·3 min read
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Testifying before the House Committee on Homeland Security on Tuesday, Bill Nye told lawmakers that he was “scared too” about climate change, and that the U.S. needed to “invest in a big way” to solve the problem.

Nye, whose public television program “Bill Nye the Science Guy” has helped educate children in the U.S. on a wide range of scientific topics, testified on his own behalf. Asked by Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, how the nation could address climate change when so many people did not believe it was real, Nye recounted his own dealings with skeptics.

“I’ve fought this for 30 years: trying to get people to accept the science of climate change. I offered four bets to two notorious climate deniers. I offered them $10,000 that 2016 would be the hottest year on record, 2010-2020 would be the hottest decade on record. Neither one of them would take either one of the bets,” Nye responded.

He added: “They wouldn’t take the bets because they’re scared.

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Go there and read happy thoughts. More next week.

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We get requests for links all the time, so readers this is a link for Black Owned Businesses:

https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/support-black-owned-businesses/

This one is for people wishing to buy a Husky Dog:

https://yourdogadvisor.com/alaskan-husky/

Some Things Billed As Environmental Aren’t – In this case TESLA

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I repeat this only once. Elon Musk is a genius. His Electric Cars are also amazing and GENERALLY good for the environment, especially if charged by Solar and Wind Power. But they need some fire suppression ability because 4 hours and 30,000 gallons of water is like a major house fire. That’s is when these type of wrecks are uncommon. What happens when they are everywhere?

Then there is the whole disabling the auto pilot function. I mean Morons aren’t good for the environment either.

https://slate.com/technology/2021/04/tesla-crash-texas-drivers-seat-fire-autopilot.html?via=rss

The Industry

The Most Disturbing Part of the Latest Tesla Crash

By Aaron Mak

Two men died near Houston, Texas, on Saturday while riding in a 2019 Tesla Model S that, according to local authorities, was speeding into a turn and ended up going off the road and crashing into a tree. It took first responders four hours and more than 30,000 gallons of water to put out the resulting fire, which kept reigniting; when damaged, the lithium ion batteries in electric cars can cause fires that are very difficult to extinguish because of how they store energy. Authorities reportedly attempted to ask Tesla for advice on how to put out the fire, but it’s unclear whether they ended up getting any help.

Besides the fire, there was something especially disturbing about the crash: No one was in the driver’s seat. One of the men was in the passenger seat and the other in the rear. There has been no official confirmation that they had engaged the car’s “autopilot” feature—something that is beloved by many Tesla owners and that critics of the company say is marketed in unsafe ways—though their wives reportedly told authorities that they had been discussing the feature before leaving for their drive.

Unlike the systems that companies like Google and Uber have been developing and testing for years, Tesla’s autopilot is not completely autonomous, though it does allow the cars to accelerate, steer, and brake by themselves. The company warns drivers that they need to be behind the wheel and paying attention in case the system makes a mistake and they have to intervene. There have nevertheless been a number of serious accidents in which the autopilot feature appeared to be involved. For instance, a man died in 2018 while using the autopilot in California; data from his phone indicates that a video game had been active on the device. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also confirmed to the New York Times in March that it is currently investigating the potential role of Tesla’s autopilot feature in 23 crashes.

 

 

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Tomorrow * NO Cars – What then

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If Schumer could pull this off I would be “dancin in the streets”. It would not be as good and banning Airline Flights, but heh I will take whatever I can get. It would be really good for the lower level atmosphere and especially good for bodies of water, whether flowing bodies like rivers or standing bodies like lakes or oceans. Unfortunately, the upper atmosphere is where the real global warming is taking place. Still – I am not minimizing this. IT be good.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/17/22334634/schumer-electric-vehicle-swap-discount-infrastructure-interview

Chuck Schumer wants to replace every gas car in America with an electric vehicle

The Senate majority leader is reviving his plan to give people discounts for swapping their gas car for an electric one

By Andrew J. Hawkins

With the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill signed into law, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is ready to tackle the next major challenge: President Joe Biden’s call for a massive infrastructure bill. As part of that package, Schumer said he plans to include his ambitious proposal to get every American to swap their gas-guzzling car for an electric one.

“It’s a bold new plan designed to accelerate America’s transition to all electric vehicles on the road, to developing a charging infrastructure, and to grow American jobs through clean manufacturing,” Schumer told The Verge in a brief interview this week. “And the ultimate goal is to have every car manufactured in America be electric by 2030, and every car on the road be clean by 2040.”

The top-line details of the “cash for clunkers’’-style plan haven’t changed much since Schumer first proposed it in an op-ed in The New York Times in late 2019. But the political landscape has certainly shifted in favor of the Democrats, breathing new life into the idea. Under the proposal, anyone who trades in their gas car for an electric one would get a “substantial” point-of-sale discount, Schumer says. He wouldn’t say how much of a discount, only that it would be “deep.” A spokesperson later confirmed they are eyeing rebates that are “more generous” than the current $7,500 federal EV tax credit.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Little House Off The Grid – What could be better than that

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I rarely ever do videos. I am a Print man. But this is a great “How To” video. They have a composting toilet and solar panels so they got the TOP and the BOTTOM covered hahahaha. The sleeping loft is amazing. I would prefer a king bed but i sure you could get it in if it was part of the early design. They do live outside alot but there is nothing wrong with that. That would not work in an Illinois winter.

https://digg.com/video/this-ultramodern-off-the-grid-tiny-house-will-blow-your-mind

It is a 150,000 dollar house with 20,000 dollars worth of solar but it is off the grid. So it is worth every penny. Infrastructure for a lifetime is not cheap.

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Go there an watch for 18 minutes. More next week

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