tingilinde

the anti-business gop

Their ideology amounts to opposing anything Democrats offer.

 

 

a realistic approach to fighting pollution

Richard Revesz and honest cost-benefit regulation. Of course the GOP and polluting donors will fight it tooth and claw.

a tip of the hat to Greg

 

adapting cymbeline

The first time I read Cymbeline was also the last time.  What a strange strange play..  and the ending seemed contrived - especially for Shakespeare.  But a project has been busy adapting it to modern times - specifically to the anthropocene era.  CBC's Ideas show had an episode last year.  (audio and partial transcript)..  it sort of makes sense.

snip

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But Canadian scholars Randall Martin and Rebecca Salazar argue that Cymbeline contains important lessons for us now in the Anthropocene.

"It's a play of emotional and experiential extremes. It's a play of resilience, focused mainly on the journey of Imogen from the court into her own banishment. She goes into Wales, eventually returns to the court, and that journey symbolically represents a regeneration of the anti-environmental attitudes of the court," said Martin.

"That represents a kind of a beacon for what we need to face the current crisis with the kind of resilience and survivor skills that Imogen demonstrates."

The play is famous for its sprawling, knotted plot. But Salazar believes the chaotic storyline makes the play fit for adaptations about the climate crisis, "particularly because it's such a huge problem that's attacking us on more fronts and larger scales than we've ever been able to comprehend."

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co2 removal

Much is riding on the success of carbon dioxide removal.  There's been a good deal of pre-purchasing, but very little actually removed.  Many of the schemes are unproven - one of the most popular is to grow/cut/pelletize forests, burn them at generators while removing the carbon dioxide at the point of combustion where it's concentrated. These technologies tend to be expensive and inefficient, but...

Also, to really make a dent you need to be talking about removing a billion tons or more.

 

 

issues in the ignorosphere

The sky is falling - literally ...

snip

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The good news for climate scientists is that the data on cooling aloft do more than confirm the accuracy of the models that identify surface warming as human-made. A new study published this month in the journal PNAS by veteran climate modeler Ben Santer of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found that it increased the strength of the “signal” of the human fingerprint of climate change fivefold, by reducing the interference “noise” from background natural variability. Sander says the finding is “incontrovertible.”

But the new discoveries about the scale of cooling aloft are leaving atmospheric physicists with new worries — about the safety of orbiting satellites, about the fate of the ozone layer, and about the potential of these rapid changes aloft to visit sudden and unanticipated turmoil on our weather below.

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a misleading symbol

The recycling symbol is misleading and is often used in greenwashing products and packaging.

snip

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The “chasing arrows” logo, designed by a college student for the first Earth Day in 1970, has become ubiquitous on everything from cartons of milk to shampoo bottles as a way to nudge users to recycle packaging rather than discard it.

But the widespread use of the symbol on products that are not routinely accepted for recycling is helping stoke “consumer confusion about what is recyclable and/or compostable” and is leading to “deceptive or misleading” claims on packaging, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

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china and evs

They're very much in the driver's seat - so to speak.

One way around it is to focus on smaller cars.  Something that is unlikely in North America, but likely in the rest of the world.

 

 

notes on green hydrogen

Adam Tooze comments on an oversold "solution" 

snip

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The members of the hydrogen coalition are all obviously incumbent fossil fuel and petrochemical interests looking for a bridge to the new era. If realized, their ambitious hydrogen projects may overload the available supply of green power, for little real benefit. By diverting badly needed clean power, green hydrogen vanity projects may even slow down the energy transition. And the subsidy regimes that are being put in place could become self-perpetuating. As Gernot Wagner and Danny Cullenward recently warned, “hydrogen could become the next corn ethanol”, a ruinously inefficient and environmentally damaging creature of subsidies that are too big to kill.

***

What hydrogen exposes is that there is still huge uncertainty about many basic parameters of the low-carbon future, about the technologies that will emerge as dominant, the likely structure of prices and the patterns of supply and demand for key materials and other inputs.

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two charts to consider

It's striking that global energy R&D is only about $30 billion a year with only a fraction going to alternate energy.  

compare that with US health and fitness club expendatures 

 

 

a white nose syndrome update

There may be a bit of hope for the little brown bat.

snip

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That's really significant, because it seems to be a stronghold where these bats are mostly surviving and then spreading out throughout New England in the summer," said Alyssa Bennett, a small mammal biologist for the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife. She has studied bats and white nose syndrome for more than a decade.

"We're hoping that it's a source population for them to recover," Bennett said as critters flitted and swooped around her.

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