tingilinde

a texas group taking up the fight against your children and grandchildren

Gearing up for a heavy promotion of fossil fuels.

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The fishing companies challenging federal permits for the Vineyard Wind project were from the Bay State as well as Rhode Island and New York, and a video made by the opponents featured a bearded fisherman with a distinct New England accent.

But the financial muscle behind the fight originated thousands of miles from the Atlantic Ocean, in dusty oil country. The group bankrolling the lawsuit filed last year was the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based nonprofit organization backed by oil and gas companies and Republican donors.

With influence campaigns, legal action and model legislation, the group is promoting fossil fuels and trying to stall the American economy’s transition toward renewable energy. It is upfront about its opposition to Vineyard Wind and other renewable energy projects, making no apologies for its advocacy work.

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a paper trail

For environmental lawsuits against oil companies.

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It became a years-long quest, and as he pressed on, Muffett noticed one report kept coming up in the footnotes of the memos and papers he was poring through — a 1968 paper commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute, the powerful fossil fuel trade group, and written by Elmer Robinson and Bob Robbins, scientists at the Stanford Research Institute, known as SRI. Muffett wasn’t sure what it said, but it was cited so often he knew there must be something big in it. Then part of Stanford University, SRI wasn’t an ordinary department, but a contract research outfit that had been intertwined from its founding with oil and gas interests. The paper had been delivered privately to the petroleum institute, not published like typical academic work, and only a few copies had spilled into the public realm. Long since forgotten, they had been gathering dust in a handful of university libraries. Eventually, through an interlibrary loan, Muffett managed to get a hold of one.

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impact of a megadrought

A catastrophic scenario for the Colorado River and those who depend on it.

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Worse, officials warn, is the possibility of an even more catastrophic event. That is if the water level falls all the way to the lowest holes, so only small amounts could pass through the dam. Such a scenario — called “dead pool” — would transform Glen Canyon Dam from something that regulates an artery of national importance into a hulking concrete plug corking the Colorado River.

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a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

 

changing their tune

With massive federal aid on the table utilities are changing their climate goals.

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Just two years ago, DTE Energy, a Michigan-based electric utility, was still enmeshed in a court fight with federal regulators over emissions from a coal-burning power plant on the western shore of Lake Erie that ranks as one of the nation’s largest sources of climate-changing air pollution.

But in September, Gerard M. Anderson, who led DTE for the last decade, was on the South Lawn of the White House alongside hundreds of other supporters of President Biden, giving a standing ovation to the president for his success in pushing a climate change package through Congress — a law that will help accelerate the closure of the very same coal-burning behemoth, known as DTE Monroe, that his company had been fighting to protect.

Mr. Anderson’s position reflects a fundamental shift among major electric utilities nationwide as they deploy their considerable clout in Washington: After years of taking steps like backing dark-money groups to sue the government to block tighter air pollution rules, DTE and a growing number of other utilities have joined forces to speed the transition away from fossil fuels.

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english architecture and dealing with climate

A history of dealing with a cold damp climate.  And now change is coming.

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“Our biggest challenge is our existing buildings,” says Julie Hirigoyen, CEO of the United Kingdom Green Building Council. “And in the U.K. our homes are some of the draftiest and leakiest across most of Europe.” But choices made to protect from the cold can also trap the heat. Many find themselves living in spaces ill-equipped for either season. There is, says Hirigoyen, “a huge piece of work to be done” when it comes to retrofitting local architecture for both hot and cold weather.

Much of this country’s housing stock was built more than a century ago, and too much of it built poorly and unsustainably. And there are enormous inequities in British housing, creating social fissures that will be exacerbated this coming winter as people deal with soaring fuel prices. But an architectural tour of this country’s houses — from grand iconic structures, like the Elizabethan Hardwick Hall to more modest Victorian Terrace homes and modern tower blocks — suggests that the lessons learned over the centuries about how to deal with the harsh realities of weather may apply today. As one advocate for making older structures more sustainable says, “Buildings are vessels and we’ve forgotten how to sail these ships.”

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all of those boxes

A must-read piece on cardboard.

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Every day, Walls told me proudly, the exercise was repeated enough times to paper over a two-lane highway from the gates of the mill almost to El Paso, Texas, 1,350 miles. Impressive in itself, but to get a real sense of the scale of the modern corrugated industry, you have to do some extrapolation: Take those 1,350 miles and add the output of the 25 other paper mills I.P. maintains from Georgia all the way out to Washington State. Add again the yield from the dozens of paper mills owned by the company’s competitors. Suddenly, you’re no longer talking about thousands of miles of paper, but millions of miles.

And it’s barely enough to meet demand: Cardboard manufacturers broke production records in 2021, and they’ve been breaking them basically every quarter since. By 2025, according to one estimate, the size of the international market for corrugated packaging will reach $205 billion, commensurate with the gross domestic product of New Zealand or Greece.

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the danger of low earth orbit satellite constellations

There may well be a serious environmental risk.  The alarm is getting louder and louder.  Here's a bit of current status.

 

 

 

a journey to thwaites

Studying a retreating glacier in the Antarctic. 

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The continent is shaped like a hitchhiker’s fist, its scraggly thumb pointing west. Thwaites, which is named for a late, eminent geologist, is on the southern side of the thumb, where it meets the hand. There are bigger glaciers elsewhere in Antarctica, and they are also showing signs of weakness, but Thwaites is especially concerning. Its adjoining ice shelf—a large floating expanse of ice, which extends from the glacier out over the water—acts like a cork in a wine bottle, holding much of the rest of the glacier in place. If the cork decays and gives way, the glacier could begin to flow rapidly, and eventually it and a larger stretch of surrounding ice in West Antarctica might slide or calve into the ocean. Thwaites is often known as the Doomsday Glacier, because, in this worst-case scenario, sea levels could rise by several feet or more, inundating many of the world’s low-lying coastlines.

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climate change from a to z

A large report (audio or text) by Elizabeth Kolbert A longish essay in The New Yorker

Starting, of course, at A

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Svante Arrhenius was, by nature, an optimist. He believed that science should—and could—be accessible to all. In 1891, he got his first teaching job, at an experimental university in Stockholm called the Högskola. That same year, he founded the Stockholm Physics Society, which met every other Saturday evening. For a fee of one Swedish crown, anyone could join. Among the society’s earliest members was a Högskola student named Sofia Rudbeck, who was described by a contemporary as both “an excellent chemist” and “a ravishing beauty.” Arrhenius began writing her poetry, and soon the two wed.

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pledges