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Energy Tough Love Blog – A weblog from Community Energy Systems

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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Do Carbon Credits Work – In some cases, NOT

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Mitigation efforts always sound sensible to sensible people. There are always people who have a knee jerk, industry involved NO WAY reaction. Just like with cigarettes: doesn’t cause it -you can’t prove it, to ok maybe it exists but there is nothing you can do about it, to those methods won’t work, to if you outlaw it you will put people out of work. But most people (as far as the carbon economy goes) Carbon Taxes, Carbon Trading and Carbon Reduction methods all seem OK. But how can you tell if they work, or in this case DON’T?

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-climate-solution-actually-adding-millions-of-tons-of-co2-into-the-atmosphere?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Environment

The Climate Solution Actually Adding Millions of Tons of CO2 Into the Atmosphere

by Lisa Song, ProPublica, and James Temple, MIT Technology Review
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New research shows that California’s climate policy created up to 39 million carbon credits that aren’t achieving real carbon savings. But companies can buy these forest offsets to justify polluting more anyway.

This story was co-published with MIT Technology Review.

Along the coast of Northern California near the Oregon border, the cool, moist air off the Pacific sustains a strip of temperate rainforests. Soaring redwoods and Douglas firs dominate these thick, wet woodlands, creating a canopy hundreds of feet high.

But if you travel inland the mix of trees gradually shifts.

Beyond the crest of the Klamath Mountains, you descend into an evergreen medley of sugar pines, incense cedars and still more Douglas firs. As you continue into the Cascade Range, you pass through sparser forests dominated by Ponderosa pines. These tall, slender trees with prickly cones thrive in the hotter, drier conditions on the eastern side of the state.

All trees consume carbon dioxide, releasing the oxygen and storing the carbon in their trunks, branches and roots. Every ton of carbon sequestered in a living tree is a ton that isn’t contributing to climate change. And that thick coastal forest can easily store twice as much carbon per acre as the trees deeper inland.

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Go there and read probably a gazillion words. Take a weekend. More next week.

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Mothers Against Climate Change – April Fools joke – or Serious Movement

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MACC doesn’t sound nearly as good as MADD but I suppose it could always work. I mean mothers are a potent source of social change. However, it took 100 years for them to get the vote and we do not have 100 years. I guess if my Grandma, Mable Ross, had started such a movement we would be in pretty good shape now. It also seems like a pretty “white” movement. I suppose that is where you have to start. GOOD LUCK LADIES!

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-moms-who-are-battling-climate-change?utm_source=pocket-newtab

News Desk

The Moms Who Are Battling Climate Change

A new initiative seeks to tap into mothers’ concern for the world their children are inheriting.

By Lizzie Widdicombe

Three years ago, I had a baby. I won’t go into the details, but suffice it to say that she is extremely cute, and I enjoy being her mother. A few months after her birth, I was scrolling on my phone, and I came across news of a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It described a future world that will have experienced 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming. In this world, the oceans are acidifying, and most coral reefs have been bleached to death; hundreds of millions of people face severe drought, and even more face deadly heat waves. The kicker? This planet—the 1.5-degree-warmer one—was the best-case scenario. Scientists were using the report to argue that we should try to shoot for that. The Paris climate accord aims to limit the global-temperature increase to “below 2 degrees Celsius.” At present, both goals seem like a stretch. According to the U.N., all of the world’s current pledges would only cut carbon emissions by one per cent—a far cry from the nearly fifty per cent needed this decade in order to meet our goals. So, 1.5 degrees is coming. According to some researchers, we could get there around 2030, when my daughter will be entering middle school.

I did some further Googling: What will the world look like when she’s middle-aged? When her children are middle-aged? I found a Web site that lets you plot major events in your child’s life against the projected global-temperature increase. Even the “optimistic” scenarios show the world warming two degrees during her lifetime. The more realistic scenarios—the ones based on what countries are actually doing to reduce emissions, not what they’ve pledged—show it heating up to three degrees. There is a universe of difference between those numbers, but they are both awful, bringing rising seas, heat waves, food and water shortages, wildfires, droughts, and hurricanes, not to mention the loss of biodiversity. Naturally, this line of research prompted a nervous breakdown. I had always understood, intellectually, that climate change was an existential threat, but it was only after my daughter’s birth that it became real to me.

I’m not alone. According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communications, twenty-six per cent of Americans report feeling “alarmed” about climate change, up from less than half that number six years ago. About the same number of people describe themselves as “concerned”—which seems like the way you should feel about your child’s “Animal Crossing” addiction, not the fact that the Thwaites Glacier could slide into the ocean during his lifetime, flooding coastal cities.

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Go there and read. Join up. More next week.

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The Future Is Built In Batteries – Where the structure becomes the storage device

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While I have always said the storage is NOT the problem in renewable energy because you can always pump something like water or air during good times and discharge it in bad times. The storage of energy in moving things was always gonna be a problem and batteries were only an interim solution. Now some people are getting a handle on this problem, and I am supper EXCITED about it. This article is real techincal. Sorry.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210322091632.htm

Big breakthrough for ‘massless’ energy storage

Date:
March 22, 2021
Source:
Chalmers University of Technology
Summary:
Researchers have produced a structural battery that performs ten times better than all previous versions. It contains carbon fiber that serves simultaneously as an electrode, conductor, and load-bearing material. Their latest research breakthrough paves the way for essentially ‘massless’ energy storage in vehicles and other technology.

Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology have produced a structural battery that performs ten times better than all previous versions. It contains carbon fibre that serves simultaneously as an electrode, conductor, and load-bearing material. Their latest research breakthrough paves the way for essentially ‘massless’ energy storage in vehicles and other technology.

The batteries in today’s electric cars constitute a large part of the vehicles’ weight, without fulfilling any load-bearing function. A structural battery, on the other hand, is one that works as both a power source and as part of the structure — for example, in a car body. This is termed ‘massless’ energy storage, because in essence the battery’s weight vanishes when it becomes part of the load-bearing structure. Calculations show that this type of multifunctional battery could greatly reduce the weight of an electric vehicle.

The development of structural batteries at Chalmers University of Technology has proceeded through many years of research, including previous discoveries involving certain types of carbon fibre. In addition to being stiff and strong, they also have a good ability to store electrical energy chemically. This work was named by Physics World as one of 2018’s ten biggest scientific breakthroughs.

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Go there and read. It is kinda long too. More next week.

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We Are Living in a Climate Emergency – According to the f%$!ing Scientific American

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This according to 13,000 scientists who think it is now or never for things to change. This is a stunning development. One I never thought would happen until the END. And I will be honest here, we are nowhere near the end. I think we have at least 20 years before things are completely out of control. I never thought I hear these kinds of statement until it was too late. Like hearing “the Titanic is sinking” when it is already half way down and there is no going back. But then again – maybe i better rethink. Anway:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-are-living-in-a-climate-emergency-and-were-going-to-say-so/

Climate | Opinion

We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We’re Going to Say So

It’s time to use a term that more than 13,000 scientists agree is needed

We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We're Going to Say So
Increasingly dangerous wildfires are just one consequence of climate change. Here, a man watches in 2013 as the Springs fire in California approaches. Credit: David McNew Getty Images

An emergency is a serious situation that requires immediate action. When someone calls 911 because they can’t breathe, that’s an emergency. When someone stumbles on the sidewalk because their chest is pounding and their lips are turning blue, that’s an emergency. Both people require help right away. Multiply those individuals by millions of people who have similar symptoms, and it constitutes the biggest global health emergency in a century: the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now consider the following scenarios: A hurricane blasts Florida. A California dam bursts because floods have piled water high up behind it. A sudden, record-setting cold snap cuts power to the entire state of Texas. These are also emergencies that require immediate action. Multiply these situations worldwide, and you have the biggest environmental emergency to beset the earth in millennia: climate change.

Given the circumstances, Scientific American has agreed with major news outlets worldwide to start using the term “climate emergency” in its coverage of climate change. An official statement about this decision, and the impact we hope it can have throughout the media landscape, is below.

The planet is heating up way too fast. It’s time for journalism to recognize that the climate emergency is here

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Go there and read. We will see if it catches on. More next week.

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How We Drained The Largest Lake West Of The Mississippi – OH My

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This is the story of a man named Boswell and Boswell had a very lovely wife (Sorry Brady Bunch) who turned the San Joaquin Valley from a lush river and lake wildlife area into the nation’s bread basket. Also how it destroyed a massive habitat This was and is a despicable enterprise. Sort of on the order of a Nuclear Testing site in the desert. Or a Copper Mine for that matter. If you want to hear a video about it. There is This:

https://digg.com/video/heres-why-the-united-states-drained-its-ninth-largest-lake

If you want to read about it. You can go here:

http://www.tularebasinwildlifepartners.org/history.html

Hydrologic History of the Tulare Basin

The Tulare Basin historically supported an amazing complex of wetland habitats, unique in the world. This largely flat and arid region served as the floodplain for water flowing west from the southern Sierra Nevada, north from the Transverse Ranges, as well as from small intermittent arroyos flowing east from the Coast Ranges. Oak woodlands and riparian forests formed green corridors across the broad prairie on the eastern edge of the Tulare Basin. Freshwater tule marshes and alkaline wetlands adorned the slow-moving sloughs and shallow margins of Kern, Buena Vista, Goose, Tulare, and Summit lakes. Emergent marsh vegetation, such as tules and cattails, grew in permanent standing water at the shallow edges of freshwater wetlands. Upslope from the marshes, water intermittently flooded iodine bush scrub and alkali grassland habitats.

This highly-productive, shallow water system supported abundant populations of endemic lake-adapted fishes such that American white pelicans (Pelacanus erythrorhynchos) nested by the thousands on islands in Tulare Lake and Buena Vista Lake. The Tulare Basin’s extensive wetland habitats historically attracted significant numbers of resident and migratory waterbirds, including grebes, pelicans, cormorants, herons, egrets, ibises, geese, swans, ducks, rails, sandhill cranes, plovers, stilts, avocets, sandpipers, phalaropes, gulls, and terns.

The conversion of this water system to a lake-and-slough wetland to agriculture began in the mid-1800s when European settlers began to build canals and diversion structures to irrigate their crops.  This early irrigation infrastructure upstream from Tulare Lake slowly cut off the lake from its source waters, shrinking the lake’s footprint.  By 1899 – less than 50 years after irrigation was initiated – Tulare Lake went dry for the first time in history.

FOR STARTERS
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Go there and read. More next week.

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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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The Oil Companies Have Poisoned The World – I am not talking about their refined fuels

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I am talking Plastics. A friend of mine once remarked to me that he thought he probably would be carrying around a pound of DDT by the time he died. That may be true but think about a pound of plastic by-products circulating around your body. 60 years again the stuff didn’t even exist. Bakelite did exist and other form forms as well. But not the “soft” stuff. The stuff that universally breaks down. Now plastic and it’s by-products are everywhere AND there is more coming. Yum!

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-world-is-stuck-with-decades-of-new-plastic-it-can-t-recycle?utm_source=pocket-newtab

The World Is Stuck With Decades of New Plastic It Can’t Recycle

We’ve been hoodwinked into thinking recycling is a solution.

Quartz

  • Zoë Schlanger

Ants are useful creatures. As the most numerous insects on Earth, they have colonized nearly every habitat on land. So when a researcher wants to understand how far a contaminant has spread, they turn to ants.

In 2012, a group of French researchers found phthalates in the body of every ant they sampled. Ants from France, Hungary, Spain, Morocco, the Greek island Egine, and Burkina Faso all had at least some of the common plastic additive embedded in their skin. In the conclusion to the paper announcing their findings, they added a restless-sounding note: “In an attempt to find ants bearing no phthalate on their cuticle,” they wrote, they would next look farther afield. There had to be ants out there not yet full of plastic.

But there were not. Five years later, the team published their follow-up. They had sampled ants from the most remote forests of Guyana, and the areas in the Amazon rainforest farthest from any urban center. Again, phthalates were embedded in their skin. “These findings suggest that there is no such thing as a ‘pristine’ zone,” they wrote in a 2017 paper.

Or, as Pete Myers, an environmental health expert and adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University put it, “there is no untouched centimeter.”

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Go there and read. More next week.

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When The World Stops – We all get OFF

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When the atmosphere is so gunked up and the ocean so full of crap then the currents both in the atmosphere and the ocean slow down and eventually stop. At that point we all die. End game. Checkmate. But here I’ll let these people tell you in more technical language. I am sure if you don’t believe me, you will believe them.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/atlantic-currents-seem-to-have-started-fading-last-century/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

In deep —

Atlantic currents seem to have started fading last century

Another predicted impact of climate change may be here.

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The major currents in the Atlantic Ocean help control the climate by moving warm surface waters north and south from the equator, with colder deep water pushing back toward the equator from the poles. The presence of that warm surface water plays a key role in moderating the climate in the North Atlantic, giving places like the UK a far more moderate climate than its location—the equivalent of northern Ontario—would otherwise dictate.

But the temperature differences that drive that flow are expected to fade as our climate continues to warm. A bit over a decade ago, measurements of the currents seemed to be indicating that temperatures were dropping, suggesting that we might be seeing these predictions come to pass. But a few years later, it became clear that there was just too much year-to-year variation for us to tell.

Over time, however, researchers have figured out ways of getting indirect measures of the currents, using material that is influenced by the strengths of the water’s flow. These measures have now let us look back on the current’s behavior over the past several centuries. And the results confirm that the strength of the currents has dropped dramatically over the last century.

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Go there and read some. If there is one, More next week.

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Ban Cars! Ban Cars! Ban Cars! – We will try anyway

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It seems really weird that we all started out on bikes after horses and before cars were really affordable. There was a real love affair with bikes in the modern urban environment around the 1900s. Especially women who had never been allowed to get about. Bikes came on strong before mores or laws could be erected (so to speak) and women just went bonkers. Now every envirofreak (no offense intended) wants to go back to them. We shall see. We shall see.

The City Where Cars Are Not Welcome

As automakers promise to get rid of internal combustion engines, Heidelberg is trying to get rid of autos.

By Jack Ewing

HEIDELBERG, Germany — Eckart Würzner, a mayor on a mission to make his city emission free, is not terribly impressed by promises from General Motors, Ford and other big automakers to swear off fossil fuels.

Not that Mr. Würzner, the mayor of Heidelberg, is against electric cars. The postcard-perfect city, in southern Germany, gives residents who buy a battery-powered vehicle a bonus of up to 1,000 euros, or $1,200. They get another €1,000 if they install a charging station.

But electric cars are low on the list of tools that Mr. Würzner is using to try to cut Heidelberg’s impact on the climate, an effort that has given the city, home to Germany’s oldest university and an 800-year-old castle ruin, a reputation as a pioneer in environmentally conscious urban planning.

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Go the read – once you catch your breath. More next week.

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