Dr Volts continues:  I’m going to pull out a few slides and make a few points. These are not necessarily the most important slides, just my personal triggers.

First: “team transitory” turned out to be correct, yes? That’s settled?

What technology is going to be most commonly used to firm up renewable energy? This slide suggests a pretty clear answer.

Remember when US conservatives threw a big tantrum about the shift away from incandescent light bulbs? It didn’t matter. Didn’t slow things down a bit.

Their bitching about gas stoves & ICE vehicles won’t matter either. Our media makes them loud, but they just don’t matter.

One underdiscussed development was the *huge* dropoff in hydropower production in 2023, thanks to some droughts. It heavily distorted the macro energy numbers (almost wiped out wind+solar growth!). Hydro is, somewhat contrary to its branding, more variable than we’d like.

Is minerals/metals supply going to be a meaningful constraint on the clean-energy transition? I’m looking at this graph and I’m thinking, no.

Grid congestion is rapidly rising to the top of clean energy’s problem list. We need: reconductoring; grid-enhancing technologies; new transmission; more & better coordinated DERs.

FERC & state PUCs need to get on top of this.

Nat’s slides show costs plunging for one clean energy technology after another. But not this one.

And this is the one oil & gas companies are pinning all their decarbonization hopes on! It’s a farce.

There is a ton of other good information in the presentation – it’s 200 slides, so just be prepared.

Some other fun info that popped up while I was reading Dr. Volts:

Every day I see stories about how badly EVs are suffering and how the market is ‘cooling’

I’ve ‘never’ read a piece about the fact ICE sales peaked and have *declined 7 straight years*

Weird 😏 pic.twitter.com/iv071TNTj0

— Justin Guay (@Guay_JG) February 1, 2024

Also, I know we’ve had some discussions about excessive EV battery fires – turns out – more myth than fact – link here (this is a good primer to a lot of info I’ve read over the past few months – due to my concerns about a recall on my vehicle, which has thankfully been repaired, phew!)

There is some interesting info on recycling batteries here – I’ve only just skimmed it, but I’ll pass on the link now.

David Roberts

We are just now entering the S-curve of exponential electric vehicle (EV) adoption, which — given that EV batteries tend to last 10 to 15 years — means we have not yet experienced a huge wave of retired lithium-ion batteries. Analysts expect that wave to show up in earnest around 2030, which leaves us just enough time to scale up, drive down the cost, and perhaps most importantly, decarbonize the technologies needed to recycle all those batteries.

I have  bunch climate stuff set aside, and it’s going to be my “good news” focus for a while, I just need to figure out the best way to present it and how often.  I may just jump in next week and we’ll take it one post at a time.

I want to tell you about the Kia EV9 – but I’ll wait for another thread, where I can explain why it’s exciting, if way out of my price range. The reviews are amazing and the video reviews are a hoot (to quote my Gram).

Hope the info, as much as it may be overload, gives you hope on the future of climate solutions.

The warming of the planet – including the most up-to-date data for 2023 – is entirely consistent with what climate modelers warned decades ago

…Yes, we have failed to prevent dangerous climate change. It is here. What remains to be seen is just how bad we’re willing to let it get. A window of opportunity remains for averting a catastrophic 1.5C/2.7F warming of the planet, beyond which we’ll see far worse consequences than anything we’ve seen so far. But that window is closing and we’re not making enough progress.

We cannot afford to give in to despair. Better to channel our energy into action, as there’s so much work to be done to prevent this crisis from escalating into a catastrophe. If the extremes of this summer fill you with fears of imminent and inevitable climate collapse, remember, it’s not game over. It’s game on.  Read the article in its entirety here.

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The Best Climate Science You’ve Never Heard Of

By Mark Hertsgaard, Saleemul Huq andMichael E. Mann

(note: this is the original full version of our recent Washington Post op-ed, based on a recent press briefing involving the authors, sponsored by Scientific American and Covering Climate Now)

One of the biggest obstacles to avoiding global climate breakdown is that so many people think there’s nothing we can do about it.

They point out that record-breaking heat waves, fires, and storms are already devastating communities and economies throughout the world.  And they’ve long been told that temperatures will keep rising for decades to come, no matter how many solar panels replace oil derricks or how many meat-eaters go vegetarian.  No wonder they think we’re doomed.

But climate science actually doesn’t say this.  On the contrary, the best climate science you’ve probably never heard of suggests that humanity can still limit the damage to a fraction of the worst projections if—and, we admit, this is a big if—governments, businesses, and all of us take strong action starting now.

The science we’re referencing is included in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report, issued last August.  But first, some context.

For many years, the scientific rule of thumb was that a sizable amount of temperature rise was indeed locked into the earth’s climate system.  Scientists believed—and told policymakers and journalists, who told the public—that even if humanity hypothetically halted all heat trapping emissions overnight, carbon dioxide’s long lifetime in the atmosphere combined with the sluggish thermal properties of the oceans would nevertheless keep global surface temperatures rising for 30 to 40 more years.  Since shifting to a zero-carbon global economy would take at least a decade or two, temperatures were bound to keep rising for at least another half century.

But guided by subsequent research, scientists dramatically revised that lag time estimate down to as little as 3 to 5 years. The updated finding is included in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group I, that made headlines last August.  Indeed, it underlies the widely-now used concept of a “carbon budget”. It allows us to specify (with some uncertainty range) the maximum amount of carbon that we can still burn if we are to keep global surface warming below the critical level of 1.5C (3F).

Most importantly, it tells us that if humanity slashes emissions to zero, global temperatures will stop rising almost immediately.

To its credit, Scientific American did discuss this updated science in a short article last October. But why isn’t this reason for cautious optimism more widely known?

There’s plenty of blame to go around. Two of the co-authors of this article are climate scientists, while the other is a veteran journalist.We can collectively attest that scientists aren’t always the best natural communicators, journalists and scientists typically don’t speak the same language, and much gets lost in translation. Add to that the concerted headwind of a fossil fuel industry-funded disinformation campaign, and you have the makings of a substantial breakdown in communication.

That’s a shame, because this revised timeline implies a paradigm shift in how humanity can respond the to the climate emergency.  The implications fall into three categories—the three P’s of psychology, politics, and policies.

Psychology is arguably the most important, for it makes possible the rest.  Knowing that global temperature rise can be stopped almost immediately means that humanity is not doomed after all.  We can still save our civilization, at least most of it, if we take rapid, forceful action.  This knowledge can banish the sense of inevitability that paralyzes people and instead inspire them towards greater resolve and activity.

This psychological shift can in turn transform the politics of climate change, for it can entice more people to join the fight—or to stay in the fight rather than succumbing to despair…   Continue reading here

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We need the right kind of climate optimism

Climate pessimism dooms us to a terrible future. Complacent optimism is no better.

By Hannah Ritchie Updated Mar 21, 2023

We environmentalists spend our lives thinking about ways the world will end. There’s nowhere that I see doomer culture more vocal than on my home turf.

With leading activists like Roger Hallam, co-founder of the popular climate protest movement Extinction Rebellion, telling young people that they “face annihilation,” it’s no surprise so many of them feel terrified. In a large recent international survey on youth attitudes toward climate change, more than half said that “humanity is doomed” and three-quarters said the future is frightening. Young people have good reasons to worry about our ability to tackle climate change, but this level of despair should be alarming to anyone who cares about the well-being of future generations — which is, after all, what the climate movement is all about.

As the lead researcher for Our World in Data, an organization that aims to make data on the world’s biggest problems accessible and understandable, I’ve written extensively on the reasons to be optimistic about the future. The prices of solar and wind power, as well as of batteries for storing low-carbon energy, have all plunged. Global deforestation peaked decades ago and has been slowly declining. Sales of new gas and diesel cars are now falling. Coal is starting to die in many countries. Government commitments are getting closer to limiting global warming to 2°C. Deaths from natural disasters — despite what news about climate change-related fires and hurricanes might appear to suggest — are a fraction of what they used to be. The list goes on.

But here, I don’t want to talk about whether pessimism is accurate. I want to focus on whether it’s useful. People might defend doomsday scenarios as the wake-up call that society needs. If they’re exaggerated, so what? They might be the crucial catalyst that gets us to act on climate change.  Continue reading here….

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Okay, doomer. Leaving hopelessness behind, young climate activists are flipping the script on climate doom-and-gloom. They not only believe we can still win the fight, they’re working to convince others of the same. Speakers: Allegra Kirkland (moderator), Isaias Hernandez, Kristy Drutman, Alaina Wood This is a conversation from Aspen Ideas: Climate in Miami Beach, Florida. Now in its second year, Aspen Ideas: Climate is co-organized by the Aspen Institute and the City of Miami Beach. In addition to plenary sessions, breakout discussions, announcements, and private roundtables, the event features a tech expo and career fair, a climate solutions showcase, a public arts program, and excursions. Aspen Ideas: Climate takes place March 6–9, 2023. #AspenIdeasClimate

So what can you do? Here are some resources Earthday.org, Rewiring America, Kiss the Ground, Climate Reality/Al Gore

There are many more resources (you can even check back on previous Climate Solution posts for others), but I have to walk the dogs and get my day started.

Let’s all quit doomscrolling and instead tackle climate change, one day at a time.  – TaMara