Energy
Solar homes sell for more – pv magazine USA
It seems like you are seeing more and more grid-tied homes with solar in New York, mainly because of the state's policies that make it quite affordable. Solar is also becoming a bigger part of most off-grid cabins and homes in remote locations -- the technology has gotten inexpensive, and it's hard to imagine a future where most buildings don't have solar going forward.
When Did the Anthropocene Begin? A Great Climate Debate – The Atlantic
That idea might soon carry the weight of scientific fact. Later this month, a committee of researchers from around the world will decide whether the Earth sprang into the Anthropocene, a new chapter of its history, in the year 1950. If accepted, this delineation will signal a new reality, that human activities, not natural processes, are now the dominant driver of change on Earth’s surface—that carbon pollution, climate change, deforestation, factory farms, mass die-offs, and enormous road networks have made a greater imprint on the planet than any other force in the past 12,000 years.
Starting next week, the committee’s 37 members will vote on two questions. First, should the Anthropocene be added as a new epoch to the Geological Time Scale, the standard scientific timeline of Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history? Second, should the Anthropocene, if it does exist, commence in the middle of the 20th century?
Bill McKibben Book ‘Falter’ Details Possibility of Human Extinction – Rolling Stone
Oh, it could get very bad.
In 2015, a study in the Journal of Mathematical Biology pointed out that if the world’s oceans kept warming, by 2100 they might become hot enough to “stop oxygen production by phyto-plankton by disrupting the process of photosynthesis.” Given that two-thirds of the Earth’s oxygen comes from phytoplankton, that would “likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.”
I think the politicians aren't taking the threat of Climate Change seriously, because it would require difficult choices in the short-term, that aren't popular. In democracies, it's very difficult for elected officials to do things that will get them unelected by enacting policies that the public doesn't really like. Most people are focused on what "feels good today", with ignorance of the long-term consequences of their actions. It's actually, pretty damn scary where we as a globe are rapidly plunging towards.
NPR
After speaking at the International Union of Operating Engineers International Training and Education Center, Trump signed two executive orders aiming to make it easier for companies to build oil and gas pipeline projects — and harder for states to block them.
"Republican lawmakers and energy groups have long accused blue states of blocking pipeline projects using a section of the Clean Water Act," NPR's Nathan Rott reports for our Newscast unit. "One of Trump's executive orders will aim to weaken that power. Whether that actually happens will remain to be seen. Executive orders only do so much — and lawsuits are sure to follow."
Trump's pipeline orders mark his latest effort to push for infrastructure projects his administration says will "unleash American energy."
NPR
Journalist Nathaniel Rich talks about the missed opportunities in our recent history that could've halted or slowed climate change. Rich says that from 1979 until 1989, climate change was viewed as a bipartisan problem — then the the oil industry "descended and bared its fangs" and everything changed. His new book is 'Losing Earth.'
This is a very fascinating interview on Fresh Air tiday, very much worth listening to.
Global CO2 Emissions Hit an All-Time High in 2018; is a Hothouse Earth in our Future? by Dr. Jeff Masters
The discouraging news on record-high CO2 emissions in 2018 should be a reminder to go back and look at the most talked-about climate science paper of the past year—“Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene“, which was the subject of 460 news stories in 326 news outlets. Using existing results from climate models but no new modeling of their own, the researchers’ analysis found that a warming threshold likely exists beyond which we would set in motion a series of vicious cycles (feedbacks) in the climate system that would catapult us into a “Hothouse Earth” climate extremely dangerous to the existence of modern civilization--defined as having a much higher global average temperature than any period of the past 1.2 million years. This threshold might be crossed even if we manage to limit global warming to the Paris Accord target of 2.0 degreesC above pre-industrial levels, they said.