human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 19:38
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In 2022, Europe saw wind and solar power overtake nuclear power and natural gas for the first time.
Thanks to a record rollout of renewable energy sources combined with conservation measures, the continent’s emissions footprint actually positioned the EU to remain within reach of its goal to slash emissions by at least 55 percent in seven years’ time.
The secret to Europe’s success was its expansive deployment of solar photovoltaics and wind farms, which had a combined generation that jumped by 15 percent in 2022 over the previous year.
In Germany, no one was certain whether people would cooperate of their own volition. But research has shown that in combination with a relatively mild winter, conservation efforts by individuals, businesses, and even factories reduced overall gas consumption by 15 percent. Individual motivations varied: many saw no alternative in the face of soaring energy bills and inflated consumer prices; others framed their sacrifice in terms of solidarity with the people of Ukraine or as a boon to climate protection. Whatever the reason, Europeans embarked on the energy-saving actions that efficiency experts have long advocated — and hope to make permanent.
“There was a positive attitude about conserving energy,” says Neuhoff. “People seemed to understand that they have to save gas to prevent the crisis from escalating — and they did.” And, emphasizes Neuhoff, “Industry cut back even more than ordinary people.” Citing high energy prices and the scaling back of some production, the industrial sector slashed gas use by around 25 percent.
More at https://e360.yale.edu/features/europe-energy-crisis-winter-gas-coal-wi
nd-solar-emissions
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Are Texas wind and solar really more subsidized than oil and gas? (Editorial)
April 6, 2023
Roughly 15 years after derricks at the Spindletop oil field first rained black gold in southeast Texas at the turn of the 20th century, a different spigot began flowing: a fire hose of taxpayer dollars into the coffers of oil companies.
Since 1916, when the federal government first allowed firms that extracted natural resources to immediately deduct related costs — including construction, wages, drilling, fuel and other expenses — oil and gas companies have benefited from hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies entrenched in our tax code. States such as Texas duplicate those efforts with generous oil and gas subsidies of their own, reasoning that doing so enhances job creation and economic development. Only in the 21st century did federal support for renewable energy sources such as wind and solar begin to keep pace with oil, gas, and coal. Congress was motivated in part by a global awakening that carbon emissions from fossil fuels directly contribute to climate change.
Somewhere along the way, the notion of special treatment emerged. Critics began to claim that renewables — those darlings of the Left — were being showered with unfair government advantages that skewed the energy playing field and made it harder for oil and gas to compete. That thinking recently led Gov. Greg Abbott to suggest that Texas should exclude renewable energy projects from the newest version of the popular "Chapter 313" tax break program.
We actually think the government has a right, even a duty, to encourage industries that can save our warming earth from Armageddon. We also think it's important to lay out the facts and set the record straight on the idea that wind and solar have an unfair advantage.
It's just not that simple. Calculating federal subsidies is something of an inexact science, particularly when factoring indirect subsidies, such as the discounted cost of leasing federal lands for drilling, or foregone consumption taxes, to say nothing of the environmental and public health costs from carbon pollution that companies usually don't pay.
Abbott is correct that renewables get substantial federal help. One study from the conservative-leaning think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation found that from 2010-2019, wind and solar received $71 billion in federal subsidies compared with $38 billion for oil and gas. Congress' recent passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which has even more generous tax credits, will further tilt the balance of federal subsidies toward renewables. As Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told us recently, the new law will make investing in clean energy "irresistible," even for Big Oil companies.
Of course, Texas helps make up for that subsidy imbalance: A University of Texas Energy Institute study from 2018 — the most recent analysis of its kind — found that the state doled out roughly $1.8 billion in direct subsidies for oil and gas compared with $1 billion for wind and only $19 million for solar between 2010-2019. Even if you consider the $976 million subsidy provided to build transmission lines to deliver wind power from West Texas to big cities, just one subsidy cutting taxes on gas wells that are hard to develop costs Texas taxpayers $1 billion.
Another problem with Abbott's desire to kick renewables out of the revamped 313 program? It would basically require Texas to cut off its nose to spite of its face. Robust federal support over the next decade creates even more opportunity for Texas' energy industry to grow, create more jobs, and produce more clean energy. Why would Texas' energy producers not want a slice of that pie?
Federal subsidies aren't just "corporate welfare," as critics describe them. They're seed money for investment in a state that wants to maintain its dominance in wind and solar. This is a state that's evolved past binary categories of dirty and clean energy. Today, traditional fos
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Solar and Wind power will never make a dent in the energy we need. They will only be supplemental to Nuclear power.
You'd better start building those Nuclear power plants, or your Green Dream is DOA.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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Quote:Already more than halfway there:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Solar and Wind power will never make a dent in the energy we need. They will only be supplemental to Nuclear power.
You'd better start building those Nuclear power plants, or your Green Dream is DOA.
"According to its roadmap for bringing energy-related CO2 emissions to net zero by 2050, global nuclear capacity would need to almost double from current levels to reach 812 gigawatts (GW) in 2050."
https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/explainers/role-nuclear-power-
energy-mix-reducing-greenhouse-gas-emissions/
Parenthetically, that is why OPEC+ raised its prices recently since it has to make all the money it will ever make in the next 27 years because by 2050 OPEC+ will be out-of-business. If OPEC+ does connive to stay operating after 2050, we will be dead meat roasting in the Summer Sun. What a vile smell from the smoke of humans being barbecued. Let's avoid that future rather than make the Saudi Arabian King living in his air-conditioned palace richer and richer forever and ever as he sells more and more crude for many centuries to come.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Simple Math and the Climate Crisis
About a decade ago, I wrote an essay for this magazine that went quite viral, simply because it laid out the math of climate change as we understood it at the time. Scientists calculated that in order to have any real chance of meeting the climate goals the world had agreed on, our atmospheric bucket had space for about 585 gigatons more carbon dioxide. And new data showed that the fossil-fuel industry had in its reserves — the stuff it had told shareholders and banks it would dig up and burn — about 2,795 gigatons worth of CO2. Which is to say: five times too much.
From that math, you could derive a powerful result: The fossil-fuel industry was a rogue enterprise. If the various companies (and countries that operated like companies — think Saudi Arabia) carried out their stated business plan, there was no drama about the outcome: Earth as we had known it would no longer exist, and in its place would be something much hotter and more dangerous.
That remains true — truer, even. Mark Campanale, whose London-based NGO Carbon Tracker provided those numbers a decade ago, has kept an ongoing count, and here’s where we stand. The fossil-fuel industry has continued to explore and prospect, and now controls reserves of coal, gas, and oil that, if burned, would produce 3,700 gigatons of carbon dioxide. That’s 10 times the amount that scientists say would take us past the temperature targets set in the Paris Climate Agreement.
Another way of saying this: If we are to meet the climate targets set by scientists, we have to leave 90 percent of the fossil fuels we have discovered underground. And at current prices that means stranding about $100 trillion worth of assets in the soil. If you want to understand why the battle over climate progress is so fierce — why the fossil-fuel industry fights so hard, with all the political influence it can buy — remember that $100 trillion. That’s a lot of incentive.
$34 per Megawatt Hour
That’s the new figure from the investment bank Lazard for the average cost of utility-scale solar power. That is, if you have a bunch of solar panels in a field, that’s how much it costs to produce electricity from them. To understand why it’s a figure that could change the world, you need to know a couple of other things.
One, it’s far, far lower than it was a decade ago: The price of renewable energy has dropped as much as 90 percent since then.
And two, it’s lower than any other way of producing energy. The only thing that comes close is a wind turbine catching the breeze, which checks in at $39 per kilowatt hour. Running a gas-fired power plant, still the most common solution in America, runs you $59; a coal-fired power plant, in these calculations, produces power at $108 a megawatt hour; nuclear is more expensive yet.
We’re used to thinking of renewable clean energy as “alternative energy,” the Whole Foods of energy compared with the Piggly Wiggly of gas or coal: luxe, not mainstream. But that has shifted dramatically. And that’s an advantage that should continue to grow. A remarkable study from Oxford scientists published in 2021 makes clear that solar and wind power (and the batteries to store that power when the sun sets or the wind drops) are firmly set on what economists call “learning curves.” That is, the more you build them out, the better you get at doing it, and so the price drops. At the moment, when solar installations double, the price drops by a third.
The power of that learning curve is so great that it tends to overwhelm all the obstacles that get in the way. Not all power sources are on learning curves, however. Fossil fuel was pretty cheap from the start, but it hasn’t gotten significantly cheaper. That’s because it’s less a technology than a commodity — and you have to work harder to find that commodity now that the easy stuff has been burned. The coal is farther back in the mine; the oil is down at the bottom of the ocean now, or under a polar ice cap. There’s hope — but no certainty yet — that nuclear power might ge
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Millions face threat of flooding from glacial lakes
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64547096?link_id=18&
;can_id=fe717fa18038b0a9182b9992b93e4e7e
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EPA lays out rules to accelerate sales of electric cars and trucks
The Biden administration on Wednesday proposed the nation’s most ambitious climate regulations to date, two plans designed to ensure two-thirds of new passenger cars and a quarter of new heavy trucks sold in the United States are all-electric by 2032.
The new rules would require nothing short of a revolution in the U.S. auto industry, a moment in some ways as significant as the June morning in 1896 when Henry Ford took his “horseless carriage” for a test run and changed American life and industry.
If the two rules from the Environmental Protection Agency are enacted as proposed, they would put the world’s largest economy on track to slash its planet-warming emissions at the pace that scientists say is required of all nations in order to avert the most devastating impacts of climate change.
The government’s challenge to automakers is monumental. Last year, all-electric vehicles accounted for just 5.8 percent of new cars sold in the United States. All-electric trucks were even more rare, making up fewer than 2 percent of new heavy trucks sold.
Nearly all major automakers have already invested billions in producing electric vehicles at the same time as they continue to manufacture the conventional vehicles powered by gasoline, which deliver their profits. The proposed regulations would require them to invest more heavily and reorient their processes in ways that would essentially spell the end of the internal combustion engine.
The E.P.A. is “proposing the strongest-ever federal pollution technology standards for both cars and trucks,” said Michael S. Regan, the agency’s administrator, in remarks outside E.P.A. headquarters on Wednesday. “Together, today’s actions will accelerate our ongoing transition to a clean vehicle future, tackle the climate crisis head on and improve air quality in poor communities all across the country.”
“This is historic news,” he said.
The E.P.A. cannot mandate that carmakers sell a certain number of electric vehicles. But under the Clean Air Act, the agency can limit the pollution generated by the total number of cars each manufacturer sells. And the agency has set that limit so tightly that the only way manufacturers can comply is to sell a certain percentage of zero-emissions vehicles. Each model year that the rule is in effect, car companies will report to the federal government the average greenhouse emissions of all new cars sold. Companies that fall short of the standard could be penalized in different ways, including fines of billions of dollars.
The proposed regulations will surely face legal challenges from those who see them as government overreach. A group of about a dozen Republican attorneys general has filed lawsuits against the Biden administration’s climate polices, and one of its leaders, Attorney General Patrick Morrisey of West Virginia, suggested the group would fight the newest proposals.
“This administration is hell bent on destroying America’s energy security and independence by making us dependent on resources and components that can come only from abroad,” Mr. Morrisey said. “Over the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a closer look at the proposed rule, and we’ll be ready to once again lead the charge against wrongheaded energy proposals like these.”
The proposed tailpipe pollution limits for cars, first reported by The New York Times on Saturday, are designed to ensure that 67 percent of sales of new light-duty passenger vehicles, from sedans to pickup trucks, will be all-electric by 2032. Additionally, 46 percent of sales of new medium-duty trucks, such as delivery vans, will be all-electric or use some other form of zero-emissions technology by the same year, according to the plan.
The E.P.A. also proposed a companion rule governing heavy-duty vehicles, designed so that half of new buses and a quarter of new heavy trucks sold, including eighteen-wheeler big rigs, would be all-electric by 2032.
Combined, the two rules would eliminate
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Another blizzard of bullshit.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
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Quote:Signym, what is wrong with you? Between your accusations that Ukrainians are Nazis and that NATO, EU, UK and USA are evil, there is something seriously out of balance about you. Could it be that the Russian economy prospers by selling fossil fuels? Climate change is unstoppable so long as fossil fuels keep getting burned. Fortunately, engineers have engines that do NOT burn fossil fuels. For example, here is Volvo and its giant earth-movers. Russians won't like this because it cuts into their fuel sales:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Another blizzard of bullshit.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Electric has infiltrated heavy equipment.
Volvo’s latest all electric excavator: EC230. It is a 23 metric tonne (25 ton) machine. It is just like their diesel version but with batteries and an electric motor. 264KW of battery power. They have it structured for 4 to 5 hr run time then a 150KW, 1 hr charge and your good for the rest of the day. The battery life is 2000 to 5500 charging cycles.
https://www.volvoce.com/global/en/this-is-volvo-ce/what-we-believe-in/
innovation/ec230-electric-customer-pilot/
Volvo Construction Equipment (Volvo CE) has started testing the world's first fuel cell articulated hauler prototype, the Volvo HX04.
The fuelling process for hydrogen vehicles is fast – the Volvo HX04 is charged with 12kg hydrogen in circa 7.5 minutes, enabling it to operate for approximately four hours. Fuel cells work by combining hydrogen with oxygen, and the resulting chemical reaction produces electricity which powers the machine. In the process, fuel cells also produce heat that can be used for the cab's heating. Fuel cells only emit one thing – water vapour.
In principle, a fuel cell works much like a battery except that it generates its own electricity from the hydrogen onboard as needed rather than being charged from an external source. Vehicles with fuel cell electric powertrains have an uptime, range, and fuelling time similar to that of combustion engine-powered vehicles.
https://www.aggbusiness.com/feature/hydrogen-power-haulers
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The Jihadists are going to love 'em.
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Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.
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