Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label mother earth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mother earth. Show all posts

Friday, May 19, 2023

What You Hear

... is the sound of Mother Earth taking a small measure of vengeance.

Enjoy while you can, and if you can ignore what it's going to mean for your grandkids.

Iceberg crashing in Diskobay, Greenland

Saturday, April 22, 2023

Today's Today

Earth Day 2023

MAGA rubes love to bitch about electric cars actually being powered by coal - it's one their favorite things in the whole wide world. So I'm wondering if they'll stick with it, or move on to something else as we try to keep things from getting completely outa hand.

I think most of us have finally begun to grok the part about how they don't give a fuck about reality - they just try to bull their way through, and truth be damned.

My guess is that they'll go after the obvious point that it's likely to make the power companies mad because they have to do stuff they're not used to doing (ie: making their emissions less deadly), while not doing some of the shitty things they've always been able to get away with (ie: externalizing the costs by leaving their mess for communities and local governments have to clean it all up and take care of the people harmed by their shitty behavior).

We'll see.


EPA proposal would nearly eliminate power plant emissions by 2040

A long-awaited climate rule, which is sure to face legal challenges, would push plants that burn fossil fuels to use carbon-capture technology or hydrogen

The Biden administration soon will unveil a proposal to require power plants to nearly eliminate their greenhouse-gas emissions by 2040, a second try to regulate one of the country’s biggest contributors to climate change after the Supreme Court struck down the last attempt, according to three people familiar with the plans.

If implemented, fossil-fuel-burning power plants probably would have to use technology to capture their carbon dioxide emissions from their smokestacks or switch to other fuels to meet the limits set in the rules, according to the three people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a plan that is not yet public. The proposal is still under final analysis at the White House and could change before the Environmental Protection Agency completes and announces it.

The agency has been planning an announcement for the coming days, but final details are in flux, and a formal proposal could be more than a week away, according to several people familiar with the planning. Turning that proposal into a final rule package would be likely to take months more, and, according to two of the people familiar with the details, many of the proposal’s most stringent standards would not take effect until the 2030s, giving industry years to come into compliance gradually.

Although its greenhouse-gas emissions have been declining, the electric-power sector remains the country’s second-largest contributor to climate change, being responsible for a quarter of such emissions nationwide in 2021, according to EPA data. That has long made power plants a top target for climate regulations, and President Biden has previously promised to eliminate their emissions by 2035.

The Supreme Court has loomed over the effort, ruling last year that the EPA during the Obama administration had exceeded its authority by building the first attempt at such regulations around a new system to push power companies to switch fuels across their fleets, and replace coal with cleaner options. The updated rules that Biden has promised have been held up for months in part because the agency has been trying to craft them in accordance with that decision so they might survive a conservative-majority court.

The administration’s plan is to stick with rules that apply within a plant’s fence line, with limits on the amount of what each plant can emit, according to four people familiar with the effort. They will be applied through rules for new gas- and coal-fired plants, and existing coal-fired plants, those people said.

The policy would not mandate any type of technology or fuel, according to the two people familiar with the latest details. But they said the limits it sets would be so stringent that to meet them, fossil-fuel-burning plants most likely would need to use carbon-capture technology or be capable of switching to use hydrogen, which burns without greenhouse-gas emissions.

Some of these details were previously reported by the New York Times.

“EPA cannot comment because the proposals are currently under interagency review,” agency spokeswoman Maria Michalos said in an emailed statement. “But we have been clear from the start that we will use all of our legally-upheld tools, grounded in decades-old bipartisan laws, to address dangerous air pollution and protect the air our children breathe today and for generations to come.”

Wednesday, November 09, 2022

Today's Birthday

Carl Sagan, Nov 9, 1934 - Dec 20, 1996

"...to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot - the only home we've ever known."

Tuesday, August 16, 2022

On The Other Hand

Here's an Op/Ed piece at NYTimes put up by a couple of brainy guys, saying the Carbon Capture part of The Inflation Reduction Act is not the good thing we all thought it was.

I'll stop a little short of agreeing the whole thing is a boondoggle for the Dirty Fuels Gang, because its inclusion may well be the reason we got Joe Manchin to sign on to it.

Also, we have to start somewhere, and it should be pretty obvious that starting "way over there" where the lefties want us to be wasn't working, so let's get something going and see what happens. If we can keep Dems in place, we could get a chance to fix it down the road a ways - assuming we do get started, and that "down the road a ways" isn't too far.


NYT: (pay wall)

Every Dollar Spent on This Climate Technology Is a Waste

Dr. Harvey is a professor of environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. House is the chief executive officer of KoBold Metals, a metals exploration company.

The technology called carbon capture and storage is aptly named. It is supposed to capture carbon dioxide emissions from industrial sources and pump them deep underground. It was a big winner in the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Congress last week.

What the technology, known as C.C.S., also does is allow for the continued production of oil and natural gas at a time when the world should be ending its dependence on fossil fuels.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden said he will sign this week, does more to cut fossil fuel use and fight climate change than any previous legislation by expanding renewable energy, electric cars, heat pumps and more. But the law also contains a counterproductive waste of money, backed by the fossil fuel industry, to subsidize C.C.S.

Fifteen years ago, before the cost of renewable energy plummeted, carbon capture seemed like a good idea. We should know: When we launched a start-up 14 years ago — the first privately funded company to make use of the technology in the United States — the idea was that the technology could compete as a way to produce carbon-free electricity by capturing the carbon dioxide emissions emitted by power plants and burying them. But now it’s clear that we were wrong, and that every dollar invested in renewable energy — instead of C.C.S. power — will eliminate far more carbon emissions.

Even so, this technology has broad political support, including from Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, an ally of the coal industry, because it enables the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels while also preventing the resulting carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. Industry campaigns such as “Clean Coal” have also promoted the technology as something that could ramp up quickly to bridge the gap to the deployment of large-scale renewable energy. But by promoting C.C.S., the fossil fuel industry is slowing the transition away from fossil fuels.

Under the Inflation Reduction Act, facilities using this technology will be eligible for generous tax credits provided they break ground by the end of 2032 — an extension of the current deadline of 2025. Those benefits come on top of $12 billion in government investments in C.C.S., as well as technology that would pull carbon dioxide directly from the air, which were included in the infrastructure bill signed by President Biden last fall.

C.C.S. is seen as a solution to the emissions problem for a range of industries, from fossil-fuel-fired electricity generating plants to industrial facilities that produce cement, steel, iron, chemicals and fertilizer.

Where C.C.S. has been most widely used in the United States and elsewhere, however, is in the production of oil and natural gas. Here’s how: Natural gas processing facilities separate carbon dioxide from methane to purify the methane for sale. These facilities then sometimes pipe the “captured” carbon dioxide to what are known as enhanced oil recovery projects, where the carbon dioxide is injected into oil fields to extract additional oil that would otherwise be trapped underground.

Of the 12 commercial C.C.S. projects in operation in 2021, more than 90 percent are engaged in enhanced oil recovery, using carbon dioxide emitted from natural gas processing facilities or from fertilizer, hydrogen or ethanol plants, according to an industry report. That is why we consider these ventures oil or natural gas projects, or both, masquerading as climate change solutions.

The projects are responsible for most of the carbon dioxide now being sequestered underground in the United States. Four projects that do both enhanced oil recovery and natural gas processing account for two-thirds to three-quarters of all estimated carbon sequestered in the United States, with two plants storing the most. But the net effect is hardly climate friendly. This process produces more natural gas and oil, increases carbon dioxide emissions and transfers carbon dioxide that was naturally locked away underground in one place to another one elsewhere.

In an effort to capture and store carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel-burning power plants, the Department of Energy has allocated billions for failed C.C.S. demonstration projects. The bankruptcy of many of these hugely subsidized undertakings makes plain the failure of C.C.S. to reduce emissions economically.

The Kemper Power Project in Mississippi spent $7.5 billion on a coal C.C.S. plant before giving up on C.C.S. in 2017 and shifting to a gas-powered plant without C.C.S. The plant was partially demolished in October 2021, less than six weeks before President Biden signed the infrastructure bill with its billions of taxpayer money for C.C.S.: good money thrown after bad. The FutureGen project in Illinois started as a low-emission coal-fired power plant in 2003 with federal funds, but ultimately failed as a result of rising costs.

The Texas Clean Energy and Hydrogen Energy California C.C.S. projects were allocated over half a billion dollars collectively, then dissolved. The list goes on, with at least 15 projects burning billions of dollars of public money without sequestering any meaningful amount of carbon dioxide. Petro Nova, apparently the only recent commercial-scale power project to inject carbon dioxide underground in the United States (for enhanced oil recovery), shut down in 2020 despite hundreds of millions of dollars in tax credits.

These projects failed because renewable electricity generation outcompetes C.C.S. Renewable power now is cheaper than coal-fired power without C.C.S. Add the cost of the energy required to couple C.C.S. with fossil fuel power and it becomes hopelessly uncompetitive. We can only guess how much more the full costs of C.C.S. would exceed renewable power because, after decades of promotion and many billions of dollars spent, we still have next to no real-world data about the costs of running, maintaining and monitoring large C.C.S. projects.

These C.C.S. projects are subsidized by Section 45Q of the federal tax code, which now offers companies a tax credit for each metric ton of carbon dioxide injected into the ground. Those enhanced oil recovery subsidies would rise under the new law, from $35 to $60 per ton. The legislation also significantly broadens the number of facilities eligible for tax credits. And those facilities will be able to claim the tax credit through a tax refund. The 45Q program is nominally a program to fight climate change. But since nearly all carbon dioxide injections subsidized by 45Q are for enhanced oil recovery, the 45Q program is actually an oil production subsidy.

The Internal Revenue Service does not provide information about who gets the credits. But we do know that it issued more than $1 billion of these credits as of 2020.

These subsidies create a perverse incentive, because for companies to qualify for the subsidies, carbon dioxide must be produced, then captured and buried. This incentive handicaps technologies that reduce carbon dioxide production in the first place, tilting the playing field against promising innovations that avoid fossil fuels in the steel, fertilizer and cement industries while locking in long-term oil and gas use.

Industry campaigns for C.C.S. also have shifted their decades-long disinformation fight: Instead of spreading doubt about climate science, the industry now spreads false confidence about how we can continue to burn fossil fuels while efficiently cutting emissions. For example, Exxon Mobil advertises that it has “cumulatively captured more carbon dioxide than any other company — 120 million metric tons.”

What Exxon Mobil doesn’t say is that this carbon dioxide was already sequestered underground before it “captured” it while producing natural gas and then injected it back into the ground to produce more oil. These advertising campaigns lend support to government programs to directly subsidize C.C.S.

Solving climate change requires resources; misappropriating these resources makes solving the problem harder. We have no time to waste. We need to stop subsidizing oil extraction and carbon dioxide production in the name of fighting climate change and stop burning billions in taxpayer money on white elephant projects. Clean power from carbon capture and sequestration died with the success of renewable energy; it’s time to bury this technology deep underground.

Sunday, July 18, 2021

Our Mom Is Sick

There's no Ark being built for us. No one is going to whisk us all away from the mess we've made here, and magically transport us to the next green spot where life is fun and we can frolic like a buncha fuckin Eloi. Nobody - not Branson, not Musk, not Bezos - nobody.

And there are no more Green Spots. This is it. When you foul your nest, you live in your shit.

WaPo, Front page, above the fold:

Bootleg Fire: (pay wall)

As the Bootleg Fire burns, locals are faced with the realities of climate change — and remain skeptical

In a row of small conservative towns, the flames are unlike anything they’ve seen before.
Instead of concerns over global warming, though, there is blame directed at environmentalists, marijuana farmers and potential looters.

- snip -

The West has been beset by historic drought and heat waves this year exacerbated by climate change, but among the small towns that have been threatened by the Bootleg Fire — Sprague River, Beatty, Bly — there is little talk of global warming. Instead, residents vent about the federal government’s water policies and forest management. They blame liberal environmentalists for hobbling the logging industry and Mexican marijuana farmers for sucking up the area’s water.

“Now the top end of the Forest Service are a bunch of flower children,” said Jim Rahi, 71, who was filling up his 3,600-gallon water tanker to deliver to firefighters in the town of Lakeview, east of the spreading fire. “That’s what the real problem is. It’s not that much hotter. It’s environmentally caused mismanagement.”

(Editor: And it's still early in the season)

Germany:

Germany comes to grips with massive flood damage as some regions brace for more rains

The death toll in the devastating floods that hit Europe climbed to 183 on Sunday as rescue workers searched for bodies amid the receding waters while new storms hit alpine areas further south.

Heavy rain drenched parts of the German states of Bavaria and Saxony overnight as flooding also spread to Austria and Switzerland.

At least 156 people have died in Germany alone since once-in-a-century summer rainfall caused rivers and dams to burst. So far 27 people have died in Belgium.

On Saturday night, areas of Bavaria were declared a disaster zone as the southern state on the border with Austria was also hit by flash floods. At least one person died in the Berchtesgadener district.

The receding waters in parts of Germany have allowed the first assessments of the scale of the damage. Finance Minister Olaf Scholz told Germany’s Bild am Sonntag newspaper that he would submit a plan for at least 300 million euros in emergency aid to the cabinet this week.

As new areas prepared for flooding, others were still reeling from the earlier inundations. German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the village of Schuld in the state of Rhineland Palatinate on Sunday, where entire homes were swept away last week by the swollen Ahr river, a tributary of the Rhine.

She described herself as “shocked” by the devastation and said the situation was “terrifying” in the affected areas. She pledged rapid, immediate help.

“Thankfully in Germany, we are living in a prosperous country, Germany is a strong country and we will counteract this natural disaster,” she said, adding that in the long term the government would “focus policymaking more on climate protection than we have in recent years.”

Human-caused climate change is believed to have had an affect on the intensity of the rains.


Canada’s farmers brace for new heat wave as scorching summer leaves cherries roasting on trees

As devastating heat waves sweep swaths of the globe, farmers in Canada are facing a crippling phenomenon: Crops are baking in fields.

Cherries have roasted on trees. Fields of canola and wheat have withered brown. And as feed and safe water for animals grow scarce, ranchers may have no choice but to sell off their livestock.

“It will totally upend Canadian food production if this becomes a regular thing,” said Lenore Newman, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia.

A heat dome roasted Canada in late June, leading to hundreds of “sudden and unexpected” deaths, according to officials, and sparkedfear among Canadian farmers and climate experts. A village in British Columbia claimed the nation’s highest recorded temperature, clocking in just shy of 115 degrees. This weekend, another scorching wave is expected to return to the nation.

Newman said farmers are resilient and have been planning for slow, constant climate change. But no model predicted this summer’s spike, which she characterized as a “thousand-year” event that cannot become the norm.

“We can’t farm like this, where there’s a giant disruption every year,” she said. “Or we’re going to have to really rethink how we produce food.”

The climate stress is especially unwelcome at a time when the pandemic has put pressure on supply chains and food production. Floods, early freezes, droughts, pests and other emergencies have also strained Canada’s farming industry over the past several years. Multiple municipalities have declared states of agricultural disaster because of the heat and drought.

On the shores, shellfish have popped open, broiling by the millions. “You could smell the destruction,” Newman said.

Your actions will determine your fate - not mine


Thursday, April 22, 2021

Today's Tweet



Today's Today, and thank you, President Normal.

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Today's Today

HAPPY EARTH OVERSHOOT DAY!

It's your choice - you can become Green, or you can become Red.

Justin King aka: Beau Of The Fifth Column:


Monday, April 22, 2019

Today's Today

Earth Day

(paraphrasing Albert Schweitzer)
We have lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. 

Humankind will end, destroying ourselves by destroying our home.



Rachel Carson:





Silent Spring exerpt - as performed by Kaiulani Lee:




In case you wanna hear the whole thing (11 hours - and worth it):

Today's Pix

Don't let it slip away

Click it

















Friday, April 22, 2016

A Lousy 10 Million

Figure out two things: 
1) how to get the nerds the support they need
2) how to stay the fuck outa their way


Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Happy Earth Day


It ain't easy - nothing really worth doing is ever particularly easy.  First, you pick a day; you commit to it; and then you get yourself off of that stoopid fucking merry-go-round.

It can majorly suck at first, but almost before you know it, lotsa things have gotten better, you're saving money, and c'mon - there really isn't anything more important for us to be doing, is there?

Be nice to your mom - she's the only one ya got.