Solutions Abound

 I'm away right now, but thought I would share a Twitter post by Mike Hudema, who devotes himself to matters of the environment. His posts show what is possible and indirectly cast light on the fact that our governments, which, although renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels when all things are considered, do little to wean us off of those fuels and continue to heavily subsidize them. This, of course, conveniently ignores the increasingly dire climatic disaster engulfing our planet.

Note To Justin And Rachel

Please explain again why your insistence that we need to build more pipelines is valid, given these facts:

A new world record price for electricity set earlier this month signals a radical disruption in global energy markets — and Canada, whose economy was once powered by some of the world's cheapest electricity, will not escape the effects.

The new price, described by the news site Electrek as the cheapest electricity on the planet, was less than 2 cents per kilowatt hour, "part of a pattern marching to 1 cent per kWh bids that are coming in 2019 (or sooner)," the site declared.

The record was not set in a place where energy is traditionally cheap. Nor is it from a traditional electricity source.

But the fact the power will come from solar is only one part of a series of profound changes, including mass battery storage, that is in the process of shaking up the world energy market.

[The University of Calgary's Blake] Shaffer says that in order to be effective in an integrated power network with backup systems like gas and hydro, intermittent power sources like wind only have to fall below the price of the of the cheapest alternative. Carbon pricing gives wind an even greater advantage over gas.

"It seems like at these prices, and that's what's really amazing about how low we're getting in solar, is that, yeah, it can compete, even though battery technology is expensive these days," says Shaffer. "You can out-compete coal and natural gas at these levels."

Given that 65% of the world's electrical power is currently generated by fossil fuels but is destined to fall with this new reality, I guess I just don't understand your pipeline passion, Justin and Rachel, especially given your seemingly contradictory position that we must move away from fossil fuels to mitigate climate change.

I await being enlightened on this issue.

The Lethal Dysfunction Of The Far Right: A Mound of Sound Guest Post

Problem: you're already getting hammered by early-onset climate change. Solution: deny it's happening, look the other way, think happy thoughts.

It sounds ridiculously dysfunctional and it is but that is the approach being taken by governments, state and municipal, in parts of the American south.

Take North Carolina, for example, where the uber-rightwing state legislature has found a solution to scientific projections of at least a metre of sea-level rise this century - pass legislation banning any mention of that.

And then there's posh Miami, Florida where real estate prices are sky high and still climbing. Miami now floods regularly and there's nothing anyone can do about it. The problem is that the city is very low-lying and it sits atop a dome of porous limestone through which rising sea water passes virtually unobstructed. Seawalls and dikes don't work here because sea water simply comes up from underneath. The city already stands defenceless against seasonal high tides and regular storm surges.

Philip Stoddard is particularly well-placed to judge what is happening in Miami. Tall, thin, with a dry sense of humour, he is a politician, having won two successive elections to be mayor of South Miami, and a scientist, a biology professor at Florida International University.

"The thing about Miami is that, when it goes, it will all be gone," says Stoddard. Nor will south Florida have to wait that long for the devastation to come. Long before the seas have risen a further three or four feet, there will be irreversible breakdowns in society, he says. "Another foot of sea level rise will be enough to bring salt water into our freshwater supplies and our sewage system. Those services will be lost when that happens."

"You won't be able to flush away your sewage and taps will no longer provide homes with fresh water. Then you will find you will no longer be able to get flood insurance for your home. Land and property values will plummet and people will start to leave. Places like South Miami will no longer be able to raise enough taxes to run our neighbourhoods. Where will we find the money to fund police to protect us or fire services to tackle house fires? Will there even be enough water pressure for their fire hoses? It takes us into all sorts of post-apocalyptic scenarios. It makes one thing clear though: mayhem is coming."

Yes, mayhem is coming. So how are Florida's rightwing leaders responding?

"...what really surprises visitors and observers is the city's response, or to be more accurate, its almost total lack of reaction. The local population is steadily increasing; land prices continue to surge; and building is progressing at a generous pace. ...signs of construction - new shopping malls, cranes towering over new condominiums and scaffolding enclosing freshly built apartment blocks - could be seen across the city, its backers apparently oblivious of scientists' warnings that the foundations of their buildings may be awash very soon.

"Not that they're alone. Most of Florida's senior politicians - in particular Senator Marco Rubio, former governor Jeb Bush and current governor, Rick Scott, all Republican climate-change deniers - have refused to act or respond to warnings ...or to give media interviews to explain their stance, though Rubio, a Republican party star and possible 2016 presidential contender, has made his views clear in speeches. 'I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it. I do not believe the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy.'"

Miami, in fact the entire state of Florida, is an invaluable object lesson, a miners' canary to demonstrate rightwing dysfunction at work in the fight against climate change. It's one but just one of several spots in the US expected to be particularly hard hit by global warming. Another is the American southwest from California through to Texas.

In already hot and dry Phoenix, Arizona, they're being warned to expect 10-degrees Fahrenheit warming this century. That translates from an average summer high temperature of 104 soaring to Kuwait City temperatures of 114F. In a region already severely water stressed, heating on this scale could undermine the major cities.

"Climate Central used the IPCC predictions - which generally estimate that summer high temperatures will be seven to ten degrees higher by 2100 - to make an interactive map to compare the current temperatures with cities that already experience those temperatures. For example, Sacramento will feel more like Tucson in the summer. Boston will feel like Miami. And Austin, where the average summer high is currently about 94 degrees, is projected to be more like Gilbert, which has an average summer high of nearly 104 degrees.

Meanwhile, on the clean, renewable energy front, Aviation Week has recently published several articles about space solar power (SSP). The idea is to capture solar energy in near-Earth space, convert it to microwaves and them beam the energy down to power grids on the surface.

“Space solar power has as a concept never been more appealing and more promising than it is right now,” says John Mankins, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory veteran who spent a decade as manager of advanced concepts studies at NASA headquarters. “The new technical architecture, which exploits all of the technological advances of the past 30 years in terrestrial technology—electronics, robotics, materials—makes the approach to space solar power both affordable and scalable.”


Maybe, maybe not. At the very least, though, it's a technology worth exploring.

Some Real Hope For Renewables

I only have time for this quick post, but allow me to direct you to this story about what appears to be a breakthrough in solar power generation and this story that opens up a range of possibilities for electric cars.

Here is some video to accompany the stories:

A Mound Of Sound Guest Post: The Relentless Growth of CO2

I put this item together a while ago but I was reminded of it today while reading a report from the WMO, the World Meteorological Organization, that April will go in the books as the first month in which atmospheric CO2 topped 400 ppm throughout the northern hemisphere. Not just one nasty region here or there, the entire bloody northern hemisphere. That's change you can believe in (sorry Barack).

Scientists say emissions will need to peak by 2020 and then decline rapidly to limit warming to 2C, a target agreed at the 2009 round of UN talks in Copenhagen.

According to the UN climate science panel, the world has already used between half and two-thirds of its “carbon budget” the amount of CO2 that can be released before the 2C goal is impossible.

This got me thinking about our chances of peaking our emissions by 2020 and then slashing them rapidly after that. At that point a quiz I recently spotted in The Globalist popped to mind.

The Globalist website posts a weekly quiz and they're generally pretty thought-provoking.

A recent one dealt with automobile manufacturing in 2013. How many cars were built in 2013? How about 83-million! China accounted for 27% of global sales. More telling was the fact that it wasn't until 2010 that we reached the 73-million auto mark. That's an increase of 10-million in just three years. Even more depressing is the forecast of 100-million cars to be produced in 2018, a third of them for the Chinese market.

What does that information tell you? In eight years we're going to go from producing 73-million cars to building 100-million. That means we'll be adding another hundred million cars a year to the hundreds of millions of older cars already prowling the planet's roads and highways. Now imagine what that's going to mean in the context of oil and gasoline consumption, water consumption (it takes 39,000 gallons of water to build a car), and of course greenhouse gas emissions. Hey kids, we're so screwed!

Another Globalist quiz looked at energy rich Nigeria and how much electricity the average Nigerian consumes in a year. It's about as much as the average person uses to power their microwave over the course of a year. That's because Nigeria is a corrupt petro-state and all that oil wealth mysteriously never makes it down to the ordinary folks.

How about electricity production from renewables? Brazil is the winner in the clean power contest at 82%. Canada comes in at 63% clean electricity, mainly through provincial hydro-electric generation (no thanks to Ottawa). The United States? Under 13%, well below the global average of 20% which also happens to be China's renewable electricity level.

You can find all the quizzes, including archives, here. If, like me, you're interested in issues pertaining to globalization, you can subscribe to their daily e-mail briefing. It's as timely as it is insightful.