tingilinde

poland springs and maine

Blue Triton and other companies and groundwater right issues.

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Maine’s bill threatened BlueTriton’s access to the groundwater it bottles and sells. The legislation had already gotten a majority vote on the committee and was headed toward the full Legislature, when a lobbyist for BlueTriton proposed an amendment that would gut the entire bill.

“Strike everything,” starts the proposed amendment, which was written in a Word document that contained a digital signature showing that it had been created by Elizabeth M. Frazier, who represents BlueTriton and is one of the most influential lobbyists in Maine. The document was emailed by Ms. Frazier to lawmakers in the days after the committee vote.

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monitoring biodiversity using sound and machine learning

a tip of the hat to Sukie - note.  This is a 25 minute podcast

 

the grid

A huge build-out is necessary. New projects are beginning to happen, but it's far from enough. 

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The federal government has limited authority to direct grid planning, in contrast to the way it oversaw the Interstate Highway System. Some regions, like Texas and the Southeast, have resisted expanding transmission ties with their neighbors. And some utilities are wary of new long-distance lines that might undercut their local monopolies.

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an update to part of sustainable energy without the hot air

Fifteen years ago David MacKay published an excellent approach to estimating energy use and demand for a number of situations  Sadly cancer took him not long afterwards as it was intended to be a continuing effort.  One section, on sustainable energy for the UK, came to the conclusion that solar and wind were insufficient for a number of reasons (including the UK's high latitude).  Wind and solar technology and costs have undergone dramatic changes and a new work has updated his conclusions. Here's a piece by Hannah Ritchie with a high level summary. 

Here's the policy paper by O'Callaghan et. al. from Oxford and their high level summary

and David's 2008 book (there free version)

 

 

another piece on this year's canadian wildfires

From the NY Times Magazine and worth the read.

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In fact, here is a list of countries that, all together, have a smaller carbon footprint than this year’s Canadian fires: Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, the Bahamas, Bahrain, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brunei, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Estwatini, Ethiopia, Fiji, Finland, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Greece, Greenland, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Mauritius, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, North Korea, North Macedonia, Norway, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, the Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Samoa, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Sudan, Suriname, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Uruguay, Vanuatu, Western Sahara, Yemen, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Try to read every country on that list. The Canadian fires have released more carbon than all of them combined, much of it coming from remote regions of forest where fire control and suppression would be simply impractical even if it wasn’t also, for reasons of forest ecology, inadvisable.

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how americans look at climate change

Pew conducts a survey. They tend to be more careful than most. 

As one might imagine, there's a partisan divide

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Republicans and Democrats have much different expectations for how climate change will impact their lives. Just under half of all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents expect to make no sacrifices in their everyday lives because of climate change. By comparison, 88% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents expect to have to make at least minor sacrifices.

These partisan gaps are closely tied to differing expectations about national impacts: 86% of Democrats expect harms from climate change in the U.S. to get worse during their lifetime; just 37% of Republicans say the same.

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an uplifted bird

Catching a ride on a typhoon.

a tip of the hat to Om

 

tracking canadian fires

The role of a satellite tracking system.

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As the fires raged, NASA scientists tracked them with a new system—the Fire Events Data Suite (FEDS). The system draws upon NOAA and NASA satellite data to provide more frequent monitoring of fire activity, growth, and behavior than has been available in the past. The system, pioneered by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, draws on data from sensors aboard the Suomi NPP and the NOAA-20 satellites called VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite).

VIIRS identifies active fires during the day and night by detecting their thermal infrared energy. The sensor is carried by multiple satellites—each capable of observing the entire planet every 12 hours—allowing the FEDS system to quickly absorb new information about the location and intensity of fires. The system can then generate maps of individual fires’ perimeters, revealing how a fire changes over time and the total area it has burned.

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heating homes with hydrogen don't make sense

In the UK a 20% hydrogen 80% methane mix is proposed and pushed hard by the fossil fuel industry and the conservative government.  Studies show it's much more expensive and polluting that using heat pumps. 

 

photosynthesis is very inefficient

So why not convert the land used to produce corn ethanol for vehicles into much more efficient solar farms to generate electricity for electric cars and - well - everything else electric?

It won't happen for a variety of reasons - mostly political.