Climate Change

July was the hottest month on record – CNN

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July was the hottest month on record – CNN

July 2019 has replaced July 2016 as the hottest month on record, with meteorologists saying that global temperatures marginally exceeded the previous record.

The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Programme, which analyzes temperature data from around the planet, said that July was around 0.56 °C warmer than the global average temperature between 1981-2010.

That's slightly hotter than July 2016, when the world was in the throes of one of the strongest El Niño events on record.

Sorry, scooters aren’t so climate-friendly after all – MIT Technology Review

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Sorry, scooters aren’t so climate-friendly after all – MIT Technology Review

Bird boasts that its dockless electric scooters allow customers to “cruise past traffic and cut back on CO2 emissions—one ride at a time. Its rival Lime claims the vehicles “reduce dependence on personal automobiles for short distance transportation and leave future generations with a cleaner, healthier planet.”

But the mere fact that battery-powered scooters don’t belch pollution out of a tailpipe doesn’t mean they’re “emissions free,” or as “eco-friendly” as some have assumed. The actual climate impact of the vehicles depends heavily on how they’re made, what they’re replacing, and how long they last.

Why Company Lawyers Fear Climate Change Litigation | Fast Forward | OZY

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Why Company Lawyers Fear Climate Change Litigation | Fast Forward | OZY

A couple of months ago, nearly 3,500 European in-house lawyers were sent a survey asking a simple question: Do you expect your organization to face legal risks because of climate change?

Almost 50 percent of those who answered said they did, which was unfortunate, considering only about 15 percent said their legal departments were well prepared to deal with such threats. Those numbers are instructive because the survey was carried out by the Dutch Association of In-House Counsel and the Dutch law firm Houthoff, and most of those questioned were Dutch.

The Netherlands has become a central battleground in a new class of lawsuits spreading around the world amid a rising sense of urgency about the need to tackle climate change. In 2015, a Dutch court ordered the government to speed up its efforts to cut carbon emissions in a historic ruling that has inspired environmental groups in other countries to pursue similar action.

100 percent renewable

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Lately it’s been trendy to talk about going 100 percent renewable energy in 20 or 30 years and going 50 or 70 percent in a decade or so. In some parts of country, especially rural communities with lots of hydroelectric that might be possible but for the rest of us that’s probably an unattainable goal.

I’ve thought a lot about this in my own life when I eventually own land and an off-grid home. I think I can probably get more than 90 percent of my electricity via solar panels and battery storage but there are going to be times in November and December I’ll probably have to occasionally fire up a gasoline generator to produce the rest of my electricity needs and keep my batteries healthy.

But that’s just electricity. I doubt I’ll ever have or want to invest in enough solar panels and batteries to generate all my energy needs on-site. It takes a lot of renewable energy to make up for the energy dense fossil fuels we use every day. Propane will be used for the stove and oven, and as an accessory source of heat to the wood stove, all of which emit carbon. I also imagine my truck and farm tractor would burn diesel and my ATV or side by side would burn gasoline.

Electricity is great if you have many massive generating plants and many electrical consumers to distribute the load to an instantaneous fashion but is impossible to store in mass. Small amounts of electricity can be stored chemically in batteries or mechanically in pump storage but those facilities are costly and difficult to build in an environmentally responsible manner.

Electric cars are technology superior to internal combustion engines and they use energy much more efficiently than their combustion counterparts. But the intense amount of energy required to move a car forward for any distance will stress most on site renewable systems, as cars consume hundreds of kilowatt hours of power to get from place to place. Storage of that quantity of energy is possible on board with modern technology but refueling takes time as batteries have to store the energy mechanically and by no means is that an instant process. No instant refills like gasing up.

I’m not hopeful for an all renewable grid or even fully addressing climate change before its too late. I think people have their heart in the right place but sometimes their heart doesn’t align with math or science.

How I imagine a renewable low carbon future would look like

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As I noted the other day, I’m skeptical about the future of a few industrial solar farms and electric cars powering out future in a few years. I think it’s going to take some big market changes and price rather government regulation and left-wing green shaming will slow the climate crisis down.

Everything fossil fuel related has to become much more expensive. It’s going to hurt the poor at first, there is no way around it. But higher prices are a powerful signal for market and personal action change. If the price for fossil based electricity shoots up, your home and business will have a very strong incentive to install lots of solar panels and battery storage so you can avoid buying as much power as possible from the fossil based grid.

Likewise motoring will only change when the price of gasoline shoots up, and your forced to drive less, get a small car, or go electric with your car. Obviously, if you don’t have a lot of solar on your roof and you don’t plan your day around sunny weather to charge your car, you can forget about motoring. Maybe consider walking or taking a bicycle to your destination?

A lot of people want a free lunch with renewable energy. But there is no free lunch when it comes to converting sunshine for our prolific modern use of energy. If we want to become a carbon neutral society we have to become much more dependent on natural rhythms of the earth and use a lot less energy overall.

We have to:

  • Require buildings to produce and store most of their energy on site, relying on the grid only as a last resort
  • Using the bulk of our energy on sunny days when cheap and plentiful solar energy exists in excess – including only charging electric cars at peak solar output
  • Radically reduce electricity use especially at night and on cloudy days. We can store and move some power around but much less than we are used to with the fossil grid
  • Make motoring so expensive that it’s only used for special purposes, instead relying on walking, bicycling and electrified public transportation for getting around cities
  • Reduce heating and air conditioning in buildings, instead relying on windows that open, shade, dimmed lights to keep people cool in the summer and wearing warm clothes and blankets in the winter.
  • Make conservation of energy a national obsession, forcing people to view all energy use as a waste and a burden to one’s own finances.