Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Infrastructure week. at last.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

People are complicated. Love is not.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Bark louder, little dog.

In my day, never was longer.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

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Climate Solutions: Feedback Request

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Climate Solutions: Feedback Request

I’m working on doing – at least monthly, maybe more – Climate Solution posts.  I have some ideas of what I would like to begin with:

New battery technology

Innovations in and expectations of solar panels, wind power, geothermal, and heat pumps (those would probably be 2-3 separate posts).

I guess we should really address the gas stove vs. induction vs. electric stovetops topic.  I have several good resources on that controversy.

EV, PHEVs – what’s available now, what’s coming down the pike, including what’s new in national network of charging stations capabilities.

With a bit more research, an update on the Inflation Reduction Act and how it’s influencing smarter energy choices

And we may have someone coming on board to outline the hows and whys of climate activism.

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I have three folks I follow pretty closely and feel like they provide solid information: David Roberts’ Volts podcast, Matt Ferrell’s Undecided videos, who is in the process of building a net-zero house, and Ricky “Two-bit Da Vinci” videos, who is retrofitting an old house to be net-zero. I also follow Al Gore and Climate Reality for the latest news. And, I’m taking a workshop in April on climate solution innovations.

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Here’s what I’d like to know from you – what other topics would you be interested in? I don’t promise I have the resources to find answers to every topic, but I will do my best.

Also, do we have any experts out there who want to contribute, either through guest posts, Q&As, or helping find answers to various questions?

And finally, anyone you think I should be following on social media for climate solution information?

Thanks in advance.

I’ll leave you with David Roberts’ list of podcasts/transcripts on the Inflation Reduction Act here. 

 

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Lula da Silva Wins* – A Good Day For Climate Action

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Brazil’s democratic institutions have long been under siege by President Jair Bolsonaro. As a result, millions of citizens have now questioned the credibility of Brazil’s elections. You’re not alone if you see a pattern closer to home. Bolsonaro is referred to as the “Tropical Trump” for various reasons, this being just one of them.

One of the reasons the world has been missing Brazil is the destruction of the Amazon, the world’s lungs. Lula and Bolsonaro envisioned opposite fates for the Amazon at a crucial moment. If deforestation continues at current rates, as favored by Bolsonaro, the Amazon will pass an irreversible threshold in just a decade or two. Scientists warn that it would transform the rainforest into a savanna that would release billions of greenhouse gases.

As president, Lula demonstrated great success in drastically reducing Amazon rainforest deforestation. Sadly, Bolsonaro has openly supported clear-cutting and burning in the Amazon for agriculture, reversing this trend. Additionally, he undermined current environmental safeguards and legalized unlawful activity. In protected regions and Indigenous territory, illegal mining and logging grew during his watch, leading to pollution, destruction, and violence.  READ the entire article here.  His newsletter is good weekly read.

More on this at a later date when I can read up more on his policies and the impact this will have on the planet’s “lungs”.

*as of the writing of this, Bolsonaro has yet to concede.

Open thread

 

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Climate Solutions: The Inflation Reduction Act Bill Passage

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This is a Biden Big Fucking Deal. To understand it, I went to the experts I trust to tell it like it is:

Climate Solutions: The Inflation Reduction Act Bill Passage

David is having some health issues, so instead of blogging, he recorded his thoughts:

 

I hope this is somewhat helpful and at the very least, gets you started on understanding the pros and cons of this legislation. If you have anyone that is your go-to for understanding this bill, post it in the comments.

x-posted at LivingLightly

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Climate Solutions: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

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This interactive map will give you details on the number of jobs, traffic, electric savings, lives saved, along with types of jobs created.  Give it a look.

How were these numbers calculated?

All the numbers on this site are estimates. We can’t know exactly how many jobs will be created or deaths will be avoided thirty years in the future. But we do have good data on how many people it takes to install a solar panel, and how pollution affects human health. Using these data, it’s possible to make projections about how moving towards net zero will create benefits for Americans.

The estimates we use are all based on publicly available scientific projections. They’re not always available at a local level, however, so we use various techniques to sort out where in America the benefits are likely to end up. The description below explains how we do that. We’re continuing to improve our methods, so if you have ideas on how we could do a better job, be in touch!

Renewable Job Impacts

Stanford University’s 100% Wind, Water, and Solar (WWS) Project (Jacobson et al. 2022) studies how the U.S. can make the transition to fully renewable power by 2050. As part of their study, they project how many long-term jobs will be created by building and operating new renewable energy infrastructure in every state (a “long-term” job is one that creates 40 years of employment). They also project the total amount of compensation these new jobs will earn in each state. The Jacobson et al. data include separate estimates for different kinds of renewable infrastructure (residential rooftop solar and offshore wind, for example, are likely to generate jobs in different places).

Much more at the link. I’m off for the day.

Consider this an open thread.

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Climate Crisis: Stop Burning Things

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A must-read. I pulled a few excellent sections of this very informative piece, hoping to intrigue you enough to read it all.

Bill McKibben is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and a contributing writer to The New Yorker. He writes The Climate Crisis, The New Yorker’s newsletter on the environment.

On the last day of February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most dire report yet. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, had, he said, “seen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this.” Setting aside diplomatic language, he described the document as “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” and added that “the world’s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home.” Then, just a few hours later, at the opening of a rare emergency special session of the U.N. General Assembly, he catalogued the horrors of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and declared, “Enough is enough.” Citing Putin’s declaration of a nuclear alert, the war could, Guterres said, turn into an atomic conflict, “with potentially disastrous implications for us all.”

What unites these two crises is combustion. Burning fossil fuel has driven the temperature of the planet ever higher, melting most of the sea ice in the summer Arctic, bending the jet stream, and slowing the Gulf Stream. And selling fossil fuel has given Putin both the money to equip an army (oil and gas account for sixty per cent of Russia’s export earnings) and the power to intimidate Europe by threatening to turn off its supply. Fossil fuel has been the dominant factor on the planet for centuries, and so far nothing has been able to profoundly alter that. After Putin invaded, the American Petroleum Institute insisted that our best way out of the predicament was to pump more oil. The climate talks in Glasgow last fall, which John Kerry, the U.S. envoy, had called the “last best hope” for the Earth, provided mostly vague promises about going “net-zero by 2050”; it was a festival of obscurantism, euphemism, and greenwashing, which the young climate activist Greta Thunberg summed up as “blah, blah, blah.” Even people trying to pay attention can’t really keep track of what should be the most compelling battle in human history.

So let’s reframe the fight. Along with discussing carbon fees and green-energy tax credits, amid the momentary focus on disabling Russian banks and flattening the ruble, there’s a basic, underlying reality: the era of large-scale combustion has to come to a rapid close. If we understand that as the goal, we might be able to keep score, and be able to finally get somewhere. Last Tuesday, President Biden banned the importation of Russian oil. This year, we may need to compensate for that with American hydrocarbons, but, as a senior Administration official put it,“the only way to eliminate Putin’s and every other producing country’s ability to use oil as an economic weapon is to reduce our dependency on oil.” As we are one of the largest oil-and-gas producers in the world, that is a remarkable statement. It’s a call for an end of fire.

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The constant price drops mean, Farmer said, that we might still be able to move quickly enough to meet the target set in the 2016 Paris climate agreement of trying to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. “One point five is going to suck,” he said. “But it sure beats three. We just need to put our money down and do it. So many people are pessimistic and despairing, and we need to turn that around.”

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Harder to solve may be the human-rights challenges that come with new mining efforts, such as the use of so-called “artisanal” cobalt mining, in which impoverished workers pry the metal from the ground with spades, or the plan to build a lithium mine on a site in Nevada that is sacred to Indigenous peoples. But, as we work to tackle those problems, it’s worth remembering that a transition to renewable energy would, by some estimates, reduce the total global mining burden by as much as eighty per cent, because so much of what we dig up today is burned (and then we have to go dig up some more). You dig up lithium once, and put it to use for decades in a solar panel or battery. In fact, a switch to renewable energy will reduce the load on all kinds of systems. At the moment, roughly forty per cent of the cargo carried by ocean-going ships is coal, gas, oil, and wood pellets—a never-ending stream of vessels crammed full of stuff to burn. You need a ship to carry a wind turbine blade, too, if it’s coming from across the sea, but you only need it once. A solar panel or a windmill, once erected, stands for a quarter of a century or longer. The U.S. military is the world’s largest single consumer of fossil fuels, but seventy per cent of its logistical “lift capacity” is devoted solely to transporting the fossil fuels used to keep the military machine running.

The entire article is worth your time.

I like the vlogbrothers. Hank and John create videos for each other, every morning-ish. And Hank here is my energy whenever anyone tells me they must, must, must, have a gas stovetop. And knowing that utilities are charging hefty fees to disconnect (not remove) a gas line to your home and convert stoves and furnaces to electricity, gives you an insight into their fear of renewable energy.

Let the arguments commence (but I do urge you to read the article before condemning it).

(x-posted at Living Lightly)

 

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Report from On the Ground in Kentucky

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Report from 206inKY:

Just wanted to let the BJ community know that I survived the tornado and am safely at an airbnb in a nearby city. My house took a direct hit, but we are vastly more fortunate than most in the tornado’s path, with mainly just roof damage. I live in a heavily-wooded neighborhood, and the tornado appears to have hopped off about 25 feet off the ground as it passed over my block, taking out the entire tree canopy but leaving houses mostly intact aside from falling trees and utility poles.

There are 18 trees down on my property, including several huge walnut and cedar trees that were uprooted, but only two trees hit my home despite falling on all four sides of the house. There is no major structural damage besides the roof and electrical connections, which were shaved off by a huge tree that fell directly parallel to the house.

My neighboorhood looks like multiple bombs exploded—it’s hard to describe the chaos and destruction. But the areas of the tornado’s path both before and after it reached my house are even worse, with entire buildings razed, which is why I’m sure it hopped off the ground before touching down again.

The tornado itself was the most terrifying experience of my life. I hid in the basement with my partner, son, and dog. It was about 15 minutes of ordinary thunderstorm followed by a huge roar and this crazy change in air pressure that felt like my ears and limbs were exploding. I was certain that I was dying from the air pressure change, and then it was gone.

I saw a new side of the South over the past few days. The morning after the storm, truckloads of people from other parts of town grabbed their chainsaws and immediately got to work clearing the road and driveways. Then on Sunday, hundreds of volunteers from surrounding rural counties descended on my area with heavy equipment and cleared everybody’s yard house by house.

What seemed like months of work was cleared in two days. They actually apologized that they couldn’t get the heaviest logs up the hill out of the backyard, even though they were already doing thousands of dollars worth of free labor. The love and generosity was breathtaking.

So glad you are safe!

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Climate Solutions: Sustainable Cactus Leather

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Not a lot makes me smile these days. These guys make me smile:

Leather production is a very toxic process. It uses an amazing amount of water that is contaminated with toxic chemicals for processing and tanning. And of course, cattle take a lot of water – in growing feed and growing cows.

And the final insult to the environment, tanned leather can take decades to biodegrade, becoming just another burden on landfills.

And what of “vegan” leathers – most are made of petroleum products, with all the issues around plastic production and disposal.

Adrián López Velarde and Marte Cázarez offer an alternative:

Desserto®  is a highly sustainable plant based material as an alternative to leather made from cactus, often distinguished by its great softness at touch while offering a great performance for a wide variety of applications and complying with the most rigorous quality and environmental standards. The aim is to offer cruelty free, sustainable alternatives, without any toxic chemicals, phthalates and PVC. The result, Desserto® , the cactus material, is partially biodegradable and has the technical specifications required by the fashion, leather goods, luxury packaging and furniture industries.

That’s why I find Desserto leather alternative products so inspiring and I hope their process proves successful over time. For now, I am going to search out products made from their cactus leather and give it a try for myself.

cross-posted at LivingLightly

 

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