New report on climate change released today

[bleubird]

I am all for green tech,but until we upgrade the power grid it it pointless. There solar and wind projects on hold because the grid can not handle it.

 

[SigmatheZeta]

My favorite thing to do is walk around smiling in 110 degree heat and saying, "Isn't it a beautiful day?"

If I want to get information about climate change, I ask a climate scientist. If I want my car repaired, I ask a car mechanic. My life is easy. Your life can be easy, too.

 

[Swammerdami]

Electricity generated by wind power is now cheaper than electricity from coal or even natural gas. Solar power is also cheaper, with a price dropping quickly. Solutions for the storage problem are being developed. Reasons why wind power is not rising more rapidly in the U.S. are (1) many of the best on-land sites have already been taken, (2) the Orange Buffoon whinged fart-tweets against wind power so the FoxNews-Nazi-QOPAnon factions are opposed.

Money For Green Energy Creates More Jobs Than Fossil Fuel Investment, New Study Finds | HuffPost Latest News - "The findings are true across the world, but the U.S. could see some of the biggest benefits from spending on renewables and nature restoration."

'creates more jobs for the same result' = 'is vastly more expensive and inefficient'.

It's not a good thing.

Creating jobs to get a larger amount of electricity, or more reliable electricity is a possible win. Doing so but getting less electricity, or less reliable electricity is not.

Inefficiency is not made laudable by reframing it as 'job creation'. Digging the tunnel for a new subway line creates more jobs if it's done by hand, with teaspoons, than it does if you use a Tunnel Boring Machine. But that doesn't mean teaspoon tunnelling is the better option.

It is amusing that in bilby's first sentence "more" on the left-side of an equation mutates into "vastly more" on the right-side. Do you even try?

This is an interesting topic and I hope some experts will appear to clarify further. But I think I can clear up some misconceptions.

First, I agree that framing green energy as "creating more jobs than carbon energy" seems peculiar, and for the reason bilby points out. Consider this just another attempt to appeal to ordinary people, many of whom are, understandably, worried about job loss.

Note that jobs is not a perfect proxy for cost. Instead cost is best measured in ... (did you guess?) ... dollars! The dollar costs of wind and solar power are less than coal or even natural gas on a per Megawatt-hour basis. Cite:  Cost of electricity by source. That's without even including the costs of CO2 emissions and coal-related health costs. Nor does it include government tax subsidies which are still high for carbon fuels. How do we explain the discrepancy? I'm not sure. Imported fuel doesn't create American jobs; is that part of it? Much of the revenue from coal or gas revenue goes to land-owners rather than workers; I think that's part of the discrepancy.

And finally, examine the attached (12 year-old) graph from World Resources Institute. Natural gas saves hugely on jobs compared with wind during installation, but when operation and maintenance (O&M) are factored in over a plant's lifetime, that advantage is much tinier.

While Googling I found that it is AEI — a puppet of the Koch-QOPAnon Bullshit Machine — that is pushing the "Green jobs are bad" meme that bilby has adopted. No wonder they omitted O&M from their arithmetic. As I showed in a thread some months ago, AEI has no integrity and will doctor numbers in whatever way best suits their political agenda.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Electricity generated by wind power is now cheaper than electricity from coal or even natural gas. Solar power is also cheaper, with a price dropping quickly. Solutions for the storage problem are being developed. Reasons why wind power is not rising more rapidly in the U.S. are (1) many of the best on-land sites have already been taken, (2) the Orange Buffoon whinged fart-tweets against wind power so the FoxNews-Nazi-QOPAnon factions are opposed.

Are solutions for storage really being developed? Is that remotely possible?

 

[bilby]

Electricity generated by wind power is now cheaper than electricity from coal or even natural gas. Solar power is also cheaper, with a price dropping quickly. Solutions for the storage problem are being developed. Reasons why wind power is not rising more rapidly in the U.S. are (1) many of the best on-land sites have already been taken, (2) the Orange Buffoon whinged fart-tweets against wind power so the FoxNews-Nazi-QOPAnon factions are opposed.

Money For Green Energy Creates More Jobs Than Fossil Fuel Investment, New Study Finds | HuffPost Latest News - "The findings are true across the world, but the U.S. could see some of the biggest benefits from spending on renewables and nature restoration."

'creates more jobs for the same result' = 'is vastly more expensive and inefficient'.

It's not a good thing.

Creating jobs to get a larger amount of electricity, or more reliable electricity is a possible win. Doing so but getting less electricity, or less reliable electricity is not.

Inefficiency is not made laudable by reframing it as 'job creation'. Digging the tunnel for a new subway line creates more jobs if it's done by hand, with teaspoons, than it does if you use a Tunnel Boring Machine. But that doesn't mean teaspoon tunnelling is the better option.

It is amusing that in bilby's first sentence "more" on the left-side of an equation mutates into "vastly more" on the right-side. Do you even try?

Why would you assume that jobs require the exact same modifiers as efficiency? They're different terms, so there's no reason for them to be the same on both sides of the equation.

And please feel free to shove your smug "Do you even try" right up your arse. If you can't make your argument without resorting to cheap debating tricks, you should probably not make it at all.

This is an interesting topic and I hope some experts will appear to clarify further. But I think I can clear up some misconceptions.

First, I agree that framing green energy as "creating more jobs than carbon energy" seems peculiar, and for the reason bilby points out. Consider this just another attempt to appeal to ordinary people, many of whom are, understandably, worried about job loss.

Note that jobs is not a perfect proxy for cost. Instead cost is best measured in ... (did you guess?) ... dollars! The dollar costs of wind and solar power are less than coal or even natural gas on a per Megawatt-hour basis. Cite:  Cost of electricity by source. That's without even including the costs of CO2 emissions and coal-related health costs. Nor does it include government tax subsidies which are still high for carbon fuels. How do we explain the discrepancy? I'm not sure. Imported fuel doesn't create American jobs; is that part of it? Much of the revenue from coal or gas revenue goes to land-owners rather than workers; I think that's part of the discrepancy.

And finally, examine the attached (12 year-old) graph from World Resources Institute. Natural gas saves hugely on jobs compared with wind during installation, but when operation and maintenance (O&M) are factored in over a plant's lifetime, that advantage is much tinier.

While Googling I found that it is AEI — a puppet of the Koch-QOPAnon Bullshit Machine — that is pushing the "Green jobs are bad" meme that bilby has adopted. No wonder they omitted O&M from their arithmetic. As I showed in a thread some months ago, AEI has no integrity and will doctor numbers in whatever way best suits their political agenda.

Electricity isn't a commodity; It's a service.

Cost is only half of the viability equation; The other half is price.

Wholesale electricity prices vary dramatically over the course of a day, and where solar power forms a significant fraction of generating capacity, they are often very low, or even *negative* during the peak of solar production, and typically very high just after sunset.

Negative wholesale prices are possible, only because it's common for solar and wind to be given a hidden subsidy in the form of price guarantees - they get paid a set minimum price even if the market price is far lower. Without these guarantees, the price at which solar power could be sold would be lower than even the very low cost of generating it.

Nuclear power plants sell electricity 24x7. They don't stop working at sunset, they don't reduce their output if it's cloudy. The electricity they generate is worth many times what solar generation is worth. So if they cost a few times more, then they are still worthwhile.

And it's highly debatable whether they actually cost a few times more - the sources that say they do tend to be far from independent, and are mostly lobbyists, whose claims should be taken with a large grain of salt.

Nuclear power is undeniably worth more than wind or solar power. So if they were to cost about the same amount, nuclear would be the better investment.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Electricity generated by wind power is now cheaper than electricity from coal or even natural gas. Solar power is also cheaper, with a price dropping quickly. Solutions for the storage problem are being developed. Reasons why wind power is not rising more rapidly in the U.S. are (1) many of the best on-land sites have already been taken, (2) the Orange Buffoon whinged fart-tweets against wind power so the FoxNews-Nazi-QOPAnon factions are opposed.

Saying wind power is cheaper than coal or natural gas is Enron accounting. Without the storage capacity wind must be backed up by gas generators and those generators cost money that should be allocated to the wind power but isn't. Same with solar.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Nuclear power plants sell electricity 24x7. They don't stop working at sunset, they don't reduce their output if it's cloudy. The electricity they generate is worth many times what solar generation is worth. So if they cost a few times more, then they are still worthwhile.

And it's highly debatable whether they actually cost a few times more - the sources that say they do tend to be far from independent, and are mostly lobbyists, whose claims should be taken with a large grain of salt.

Nuclear power is undeniably worth more than wind or solar power. So if they were to cost about the same amount, nuclear would be the better investment.

The few times higher bit is real--but it's an artifact of insane regulation, not an inherent cost. Rather than do the sane thing and require the nuke plants to be at least as safe as any competing source of power they are required to be as safe as reasonably achievable--which guarantees they're uneconomic because if they were economic they could pile on still more safety systems to fuck it up.

 

[lpetrich]

Rebecca Watson on Twitter: "A new study ..." / Twitter

A new study found that conservative think tanks and blogs have been running a coordinated disinformation campaign to lie to the general public about climate change to benefit the fossil fuel industry. The level of detail in the study is impressive 1/5

Researchers built an AI that analyzed ~250,000 climate change documents released by rightwing groups over the past 20 years, finding 5 major lies:
1) It's not happening
2) It's not us
3) It's not bad
4) Solutions won't work
5) We can't trust scientists
2/5

They plotted the incidence of those lies over time, finding that the first 3 got less popular as the science got more undeniable. The popularity of #4 (policies don't work) peaked every time a climate change bill was introduced in Congress. 3/5

Finally, they compared the rate of the lies with conservative think tank donors. They found that the more money an organization took from the fossil fuel industry, the more likely they were to spread the lie that scientists are unreliable 4/5

So if you spent Thanksgiving arguing with family who don't trust the scientists who made a safe & effective vaccine, you can thank the fossil fuel industry. They're killing us quickly w/ covid while they kill us slowly w/ climate change. 5/5

• Study: How Conservative Think Tanks are Destroying the Planet - YouTube
• Study: How Conservative Think Tanks are Destroying the Planet – Skepchick - has a transcript of her YouTube video
• Computer-assisted classification of contrarian claims about climate change | Scientific Reports

The researchers worked from the global-warming denialist pages of several conservative think tanks (CTT's) and blogs.

Supplementary Tables S4 and S5 provide a full list of the blogs and CTTs included in this study, as well as the number of documents provided by each source. In total, we collected 255,449 climate change relevant documents—which contain over 174 million words (tokens)—from these 53 sources over the studied time period. Almost all of the CTTs (95%) and the majority of blogs (64%) were from the United States. The only non-US CTT was Canadian while there were a number of non-US blogs (Australia, 12%; Iceland, 6%; New Zealand, 6%; Canada, 3%; Czech Republic, 3%, Germany, 3%; and UK, 3%).

The 20 CTT's included a lot of familiar suspects, like the Cato Institute and the Heartland Institute, the two with the most documents.

The researchers first made a random selection of global-warming denialist documents, and from reading those documents, they then assembled a taxonomy of denialist claims.

With these data in hand, we adopted a supervised learning approach to classify relevant claims by (1) employing a team of climate-literate coders to categorize a sample of 87,178 paragraphs along the three levels specified in our taxonomy (Methods and Supplementary Methods) and (2) training a model to accurately classify around 4.6M paragraphs from our corpus of contrarian blogs and CTTs.

Seems like the researchers used their human coders to prepare a training set for their AI algorithm. Something like "this paragraph says that GW isn't happening" and "this paragraph says that GW is a natural phenomenon" and "this paragraph says that GW is very tolerable" and "this paragraph says that doing anything about GW would be too expensive" and "this paragraph says that doing anything about GW would deprive us of our freedoms". Once that was done, the AI training algorithm would then try to find some function that would take each paragraph and return each coding. This function would then be used to research the denialism corpus for evidence of correlations and trends.

 

[lpetrich]

Taxonomy of claims:

1. Global warming is not happening
   1. Ice isn't melting
      1. Antarctica isn't melting
      2. Greenland isn't melting
      3. Arctic isn't melting
      4. Glaciers aren't vanishing
   2. Heading into ice age
   3. Weather is cold
   4. Hiatus in warming
   5. Oceans are cooling
   6. Sea level rise is exaggerated
   7. Extremes aren't increasing
   8. Changed the name
2. Human Greenhouse Gases are not causing global warming
   1. It's natural cycles
      1. It's the Sun
      2. It's geological
      3. It's the ocean
      4. Past climate change
      5. Tiny CO2 emissions
   2. Non-Greenhouse Gas forcings
      1. CO2 is trace gas
      2. Greenhouse Effect is saturated
      3. CO2 lags climate
      4. Water vapor
      5. Tropospheric hot spot
      6. CO2 high in past
   3. No evidence for Greenhouse Effect
   4. CO2 not rising
   5. Emissions not raising CO2 levels
3. Climate effects are not bad
   1. Sensitivity is low
   2. No species impact
      1. Species can adapt
      2. Polar bears OK
      3. Oceans are OK
   3. Not a pollutant
      1. CO2 is plant food
   4. Only a few degrees
   5. No link to conflict
   6. No health impacts
4. Climate solutions won't work
   1. Policies are harmful
      1. Policy increases costs
      2. Policy weakens security
      3. Policy harms environment
      4. Rich future generations
      5. Limits freedom
   2. Policies are ineffective
      1. Green jobs don't work
      2. Markets more efficient
      3. Policy impact is negligible
      4. One country is negligible
      5. Better to adapt
      6. China's emissions
      7. Techno fix
   3. Too hard
      1. Policy too difficult
      2. Low public support
   4. Clean energy won't work
      1. Clean energy unreliable
      2. Carbon Capture and Sequestration is unproven
   5. We need energy
      1. Fossil fuels are plentiful
      2. Fossil fuels are cheap
      3. Nuclear is good
5. Climate movement/science is unreliable
   1. Science is unreliable
      1. No consensus
      2. Proxies are unreliable
      3. Temp is unreliable
      4. Models are unreliable
   2. Movement is unreliable
      1. Climate is religion
      2. Media is alarmist
      3. Politicians are biased
      4. Environmentalists are alarmist
      5. Scientists are biased
   3. Climate is conspiracy
      1. Policy is conspiracy
      2. Science is conspiracy

 

[lpetrich]

The conservative think tanks (CTT's) and the blogs have different focuses and interests.

In general, CTTs focus predominantly on the shortcomings of climate solutions (category 4) and attacks on climate science and scientists (category 5). While the initial years of the series were marked with approximately equal levels of emphasis on these two categories, category 4 gained prominence following 2008. This shift in the focus of the (mainly US-based) CTTs coincides with the transition of power from Republican to Democratic hands and the corresponding threat of climate legislation: in 2007, for the first time since 1993, the Democrats obtained a majority in both congressional chambers and in 2008 Senator Obama, consistently leading the presidential election opinion polls, promised comprehensive climate legislation in his presidential campaign. However, category 4 claims have dominated the CTT discourse for the remainder of the sample period, indicating a more permanent shift towards attacks on climate solutions.

Seems like the CTT's are mostly interested in lobbying.

Blogs, on the other hand, have consistently devoted the largest share of their claims to attacking climate science and scientists. Yet, even for blogs, discussion of climate policy has risen over the last decade while challenges to the reliability of climate science and the climate movement have been on a downward trend, indicating that future contrarian claims are likely to increasingly focus on climate solutions.

Seems like a more theoretical sort of interest.

For both CTTs and blogs, claims which outright deny the existence and severity of anthropogenic climate change (categories 1–3) have been stable or have declined in relative terms in recent years. Claims for categories 1–3 are much more likely to be present in blogs than in CTT materials, although the pre-2010 period exhibited non-trivial levels of these claims even among CTTs. These results suggest that the blogs seem to be acting as the pseudo-scientific arm of the climate change counter-movement, with authors from this corpus being more likely to offer alternative explanations for scientific observations and predictions found within the climate science literature. This result is consistent with social network analysis finding the most central networked contrarian blogs are focused on science rather than policy30.

Seems like straight denialism is becoming less and less convincing, so the denialists are moving away from that sort of claim. They are now taking refuge in arguments that nothing can be done about global warming, at least nothing that would not be economically debilitating.

 

[lpetrich]

CTT interest in lobbying is evident in when they are most active with some of their claims.

Figure 3a examines the dynamics of two prominent policy-related sub-claims—“Climate policies are harmful” and “Clean energy won’t work”—while also overlaying major US climate policy events, from the 2003 Climate Stewardship Act to the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. The highlighted sections of Fig. 3a indicate the relevant beginning and ending dates for these efforts, with the most common being the introduction of and voting on a Congressional bill. The figure demonstrates that claims on the harmful effects of climate policy, particularly for the economy, closely align with changes in the US policy environment: CTTs tend to first ramp up discussion following the announcement of a bill, and then again prior to a bill reaching the floor for a vote.

However,

Claims that challenge the efficacy of clean energy, however, appear less sensitive to policy events and yet have increased considerably over time, with the second quarter of 2020 representing the highest share of these claims to date. Notably, this trend runs counter to the plummeting cost of renewable energy production33.

As renewable energy becomes more and more economically viable, the denialists have tried to fight back by spreading FUD about it - Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

 

[lpetrich]

About unreliability claims,

However, while challenging scientific models, data, and the consensus remains a common rhetorical strategy even today (roughly 10% of claims), our data highlight a clear transition in 2005 towards accusations of alarmism, bias, hypocrisy, conspiracy, and corruption against climate scientists, advocates, the media, and politicians.

The researchers then addressed the question of which kinds of donors fund the advocacy of which kinds of claims.

While existing work has demonstrated how corporate funding is correlated with particular climate change topics amongst CTTs 22, our data are able to test for links between funding and specific contrarian claims. Further, we are now able to investigate the types of claims which are linked to funding from concealed donations from “dark money” funders such as Donors Trust/Donors Capital Fund 25,32

Much of the donation money is essentially laundered through anonymous-donation "dark money" funds like Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund. So it's difficult to find out how much money the fossil-fuel companies have been donating to denialism efforts.

The researchers then compared the advocacy of various claims to how much money comes from 10 "key" donors. Claims 1, 2, 3, 5 had a positive correlation, but Claim 4 had a negative correlation.

 

[TSwizzle]

If “renewables” are so reliably awesome, why did California add five temporary natural gas power plants in September?

A-rapture like cult.

 

[TSwizzle]

Climate alarmist Monbiot (Gruaniad writer) breaks down in tears during interview about Eve extremist group “insulate Britain”.

During his interview with Susanna Reid and Ben Shephard, journalist and activist George Monbiot became emotional and began to cry. Struggling to hold back tears as he spoke about the actions of campaign group Insulate Britain, he said: “What they're desperately trying to say is that time is running out on the greatest crisis we've ever faced.

News

Even Rittenhouse was like, dude.

A -rapture like cult.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Saw an interesting use of gravity energy storage. Potentially much better than chemical batteries.

 

[bilby]

Saw an interesting use of gravity energy storage. Potentially much better than chemical batteries.

Sure. But the only way to make it really practical is to use vast amounts of mass. From an engineering perspective, no gravitational potential system comes close to being as effective as pumped storage hydro. All other proposals either store tiny amounts of energy, or are hugely inefficient.

And even pumped storage hydro suffers from requiring huge amounts of land.

 

[RVonse]

Saw an interesting use of gravity energy storage. Potentially much better than chemical batteries.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Saw an interesting use of gravity energy storage. Potentially much better than chemical batteries.

Sure. But the only way to make it really practical is to use vast amounts of mass. From an engineering perspective, no gravitational potential system comes close to being as effective as pumped storage hydro. All other proposals either store tiny amounts of energy, or are hugely inefficient.

And even pumped storage hydro suffers from requiring huge amounts of land.

Pumped storage is impossible in flat or arid areas. I’m not saying this thing is the future, but was impressed what could be done with PE/KE via gravity. And again, a lot clean than chemical battery storage which is something I think is a serious environmental issue.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If “renewables” are so reliably awesome, why did California add five temporary natural gas power plants in September?

A-rapture like cult.

With present tech renewables will do almost nothing to cut the need for power plants.

They will, however, substantially cut the fuel used by those plants.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Saw an interesting use of gravity energy storage. Potentially much better than chemical batteries.

Barf!

Idiots keep proposing versions of this. It's totally impractical, the amount of mass you need to move is simply too great.

The only practical version of this is pumped hydro--and even that isn't useful for more than a stopgap.