QUICK NEWS, August 14: Climate Is The Elephant In The Room; Long-Term, NatGas Is Not The Answer; Why Wind Is Such A Good Choice
Climate Is The Elephant In The Room If you care about identity politics your priority has to be saving the planet; You expect to find climate change denial on the right. But from the left too, there is a strange silence about the single most pressing issue facing humanity
Matthew Todd, 14 August 2017 (UK Guardian)
“…[The climate crisis gets much less attention in the daily news than other stories even though it is] smashing temperature records, raising sea levels, driving diseases into places they’ve not been before, and which may lead, as Professor Stephen Hawking suggests, to a need for the human race to flee the planet…Partly it’s because of the tens of corporate millions spent by the biggest polluters to create doubt that stalls legislation…But what is surprising is that the left are not more fired up…[This is something] on which all other issues rest and rely…This is not a case of either/or – it is possible to campaign on multiple issues at the same time, but for too long, too many progressives have stayed silent over climate change…[We can start] by watching Al Gore’s new film An Inconvenient Sequel…The Earth itself could not be clearer…[I]n Iraq birds are falling from the sky as the country suffers through 50C heat. Spain has just broken its all-time temperature record, hitting a shocking 46C amid a European heatwave named Lucifer. We are on the verge of something literally unimaginable from which scientists say there will be no way back…” click here for more
Processed for posting by Jessica Wunder
Long-Term, NatGas Is Not The Answer Switching from coal to natural gas will not save our planet; If as little as 3 percent of natural gas leaks in the course of fracking and delivering it to the power plant through a pipe, then it’s worse than coal.
Bill McKibben, August 8, 2017 (Seattle Times)
“…[The natural-gas industry recently claimed ‘the U.S. leads the world in absolute reductions in carbon emissions, due in large part to the increased availability and affordability of natural gas.’ This is true on the surface…[But methane, which is the scientific name for natural gas, traps heat about 80 times more effectively, molecule for molecule, than CO2…If as little as 3 percent of natural gas leaks in the course of fracking and delivering it to the power plant through a pipe, then it’s worse than coal…And, sadly, it’s now clear that leakage rates are higher than that. In January 2013, aerial surveys of a Utah fracking basin, for instance, found leak rates as high as 9 percent. Data from a Harvard satellite survey showed that between 2002 and 2014, U.S. methane emissions increased more than 30 percent…[Some experts] say that because of the boom in fracking and the conversion to gas, America’s total greenhouse-gas emissions may actually have gone up…” click here for more
Processed for posting by Jessica Wunder
Why Wind Is Such A Good Choice 5 Things You Should Know About Wind Energy
August 8, 2017 (U.S. Dept. of Energy)
“…From utility-scale wind farms to small distributed wind applications to the nation’s first offshore wind project, the U.S. wind industry continued to grow in 2016…Across all 50 states, wind energy powered more than 101,000 jobs in the United States in 2016, an increase of 32% from 2015…The first American offshore wind farm began operating off the coast of Rhode Island [in December 2016]…More offshore wind projects are anticipated in the near future, bringing with them the promise of new jobs and low-cost, carbon-free energy…Prices of wind turbines and their installation costs have plummeted over the past eight years…[Combined with the ongoing development of larger, more efficient wind turbines and record-low interest rates, land-based wind power prices] compare favorably to natural gas prices in 2017 and beyond…” click here for more
Processed for posting by Jessica Wunder
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