I was noticing the spike in electric generation from oil in February 2021, but that's actually not surprising as that was when there was deep freeze down south, when dual fuel gas plant couldn't get cheap natural gas, so they burned oil.
Still nothing like 20 years ago when a lot of regularly power plants burned oil, especially in the north east. Oil has fallen out of favor as a generating fuel, with cheap natural gas and tougher air quality standards limiting sulfur to reduce air pollution and acid rain.
According to new data from the Rhodium Group analyzed by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, warming temperatures and changing rainfall will drive agriculture and temperate climates northward, while sea level rise will consume coastlines and dangerous levels of humidity will swamp the Mississippi River valley.
Taken with other recent research showing that the most habitable climate in North America will shift northward and the incidence of large fires will increase across the country, this suggests that the climate crisis will profoundly interrupt the way we live and farm in the United States. See how the North American places where humans have lived for thousands of years will shift and what changes are in store for your county.
What is going to happen in the next 30 years, something we should accept as adults and not deny, while focusing on harm reduction whenever it makes sense from both an environmental and social perspective.
President Biden has signed legislation that will more vigorously regulate climate-warming methane leaks from the oil and gas industry, a move supporters say is key to achieving his ambitious climate goals.
Earlier this month, House lawmakers voted to reverse a Trump administration rollback by passing resolutions under the Congressional Review Act, which gives them the ability to undo agency rules passed in the last months of the previous administration. The Senate approved the measure in April.
The signed resolution reverses an Environmental Protection Agency methane rule finalized last year and leaves in place a stricter 2016 EPA rule, finalized during the Obama administration.
In Chester’s view, a Phoenix heat catastrophe begins with a blackout. It could be triggered any number of ways. During periods of extreme heat, power demand surges, straining the system. Inevitably, something will fail. A wildfire will knock out a power line. A substation will blow. A hacker might crash the grid. In 2011, a utility worker doing routine maintenance near Yuma knocked out a 500-kilovolt power line that shut off power to millions of people for up to 12 hours, including virtually the entire city of San Diego, causing economic losses of $100 million. A major blackout in Phoenix could easily cost much more, says Chester.
But it’s not just about money. When the city goes dark, the order and convenience of modern life begin to fray. Without air conditioning, temperatures in homes and office buildings soar. (Ironically, new, energy-efficient buildings are tightly sealed, making them dangerous heat traps.) Traffic signals go out. Highways gridlock with people fleeing the city. Without power, gas pumps don’t work, leaving vehicles stranded with empty tanks. Water pipes crack from the heat, and water pumps fail, leaving people scrounging for fresh water. Hospitals overflow with people suffering from heat exhaustion and heatstroke. If there are wildfires, the air will become hazy and difficult to breathe. If a blackout during extreme heat continues for long, rioting, looting, and arson could begin.
It might be tempting to shrug at the scorching weather across large swaths of the West. This just in: It gets hot in the summer.
But this record-setting heat wave's remarkable power, size and unusually early appearance is giving meteorologists and climate experts yet more cause for concern about the routinization of extreme weather in an era of climate change.
These sprawling, persistent high-pressure zones popularly called "heat domes" are relatively common in later summer months. This current system is different. Deepening Drought Holds 'Ominous' Signs For Wildfire Threat In The West Environment Deepening Drought Holds 'Ominous' Signs For Wildfire Threat In The West
"It's not only unusual for June, but it is pretty extreme even in absolute terms," says Daniel Swain, climate scientist at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. "It would be a pretty extreme event for August," Swain says, when these typically occur.
It really bothers me to see that they are developing the big farm fields off of Stoner Trail in Johnstown into industrial solar energy facilities. It seems like one of the fastest growing forms of sprawl these days are the mega industrial solar farms which honestly don’t even produce that much energy compared to existing fossil plants which crank out far more energy with far lower environmental and land impacts. Probably a 5 megawatt solar farm sprawled over dozens acres of land compared to the 750 MW gas power plants a few miles down the road.
I think the obsession over climate change has gotten way out of hand, and while we should take reasonable steps to conserve energy and produce it efficiently and cleanly, on the whole nothing really beats fossil energy when it comes to clean, reliable, low environmental impact sources of energy. Roof top solar power and wind power in appropiate locations can be part of the solution but we also need to realistic about the impacts of all sources of energy.
I think we need to get away from the denialism of climate change won’t be inevitable by the left. All the evidence says it will be a serious problem that will hurt real people. But we also need energy to power society – natural gas, oil and coal aren’t going away – despite the denialism that these industrial solar and wind farms represent. Society has to make unpleasant choices and we are going to warm the planet and cause all kinds of pain by doing that but a lot of it is inevitable. But we can choose to protect our environment and our land, by choosing cleaner fossil fuel plants with better pollution controls over these industrial solar and wind farms.
Environmentalists have long promoted renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind farms to save the climate. But what about when those technologies destroy the environment? In this provocative talk, Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and energy expert, Michael Shellenberger explains why solar and wind farms require so much land for mining and energy production, and an alternative path to saving both the climate and the natural environment. Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine Hero of the Environment and President of Environmental Progress, a research and policy organization. A lifelong environmentalist, Michael changed his mind about nuclear energy and has helped save enough nuclear reactors to prevent an increase in carbon emissions equivalent to adding more than 10 million cars to the road. He lives in Berkeley, California.
Personally, I think the way to go is with cleaner natural gas plants, along with some renewables where they make sense and conservation efforts -- and realize that most of climate targets are jokes -- and that we are all going to have to suffer from whatever climate instability is out there. Nuclear is a dying technology, not only is it dangerous, expensive, and silly compared to just burning the fossil fuels directly. But he does make a good point about renewables and the problems they can pose.
