Point of departure for discussion: "This doesn’t just puncture economic orthodoxy – Meadway’s critique is also aimed at parts of the left that are committed to maintaining current levels of consumption, just in a supposedly environmentally sound way. "...industrial capitalism is responsible for anthropogenic climate breakdown" [economic] degrowth, "a terrible name", is a necessity "The idea that we can all have an electric car is, according to him, just not possible: “There is not enough copper on the planet … We can’t get the lithium to produce the batteries, these things can’t actually happen.” Original article (note, I did not copy and paste this, I typed it by hand): We can’t pretend the ecological crisis is separate’: the economist thinking differently about climate breakdown Maya Goodfellow "James Meadway, once a Labour adviser and now a podcast host, says the separation between climate and economy has to end Wed 10 Jan 2024 12.00 GMT James Meadway is an economist who is not at all impressed with economics. Formerly an adviser to John McDonnell when he was Labour shadow chancellor, Meadway has plenty to say about what mainstream economics gets wrong. But one of his central gripes is the way it treats the environment. “We cannot simply pretend that … the entire ecological crisis is a separate and distinct thing from what’s happening in the economy,” says Meadway, who now works on climate finance. And yet that is precisely what happens. This critique informs the podcast, Macrodose, which Meadway presents and which has recently turned one year old. Its tagline is “Your weekly fix of climate economics”. Every Wednesday, in 15 minutes or so, Meadway analyses the key economic stories of the week. Part of the aim is to make economics more accessible because, he says, it is often thought of as something so difficult that “you have to be really clever to do it”. Macrodose also grew out of Meadway’s increasing frustration with how the environment was either neglected altogether or mishandled by economists. What you have is reporting on these extreme weather events, he says, gesturing to one side, and then separately, motioning “over here”, the discussion around what’s going on in the economy. James Meadway. Photograph: James Meadway Meadway has a matter-of-fact tone that makes him sound pretty convincing, and the podcast has had close to 200,000 listens across more than 60 countries, with an average audience of roughly 7,000 a week. So suited is his voice for the disembodied world of podcasting that it’s a little odd to sit in the offices of Planet B – the company that produces the podcast – and listen to him speak in person. Meadway gives numerous examples of the disconnect between economics and the environment in popular discourse. For example, a large part of the recent surge in inflation was the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he says, but it was also “pretty insistently, certainly over the last summer, things like various major water transport riverways in Europe drying up because it was so hot”. He points to the Panama Canal, where a drought means fewer ships can use it, so they either have to wait or go all the way round South America. This drives up the cost of transporting goods and this has a knock-on effect on prices in the shops. We can expect more of this, he warns. In one episode, he explains that some financial institutions are starting to catch up to this but that their response is still lacklustre. He laments the fact that most of the discussion is focused on putting up interest rates to deal with inflation – Meadway thinks this is a “disastrous” idea that will make no difference “to how much water there is in the Rhine”, one of Europe’s rivers that dried up over the summer. Environmental disasters such as wildfires stop food and items being made, and if society cannot feed itself there will be no economic growth, Meadway says. Photograph: Miguel Oses/AP Meadway started thinking about the climate because it was unavoidable; it was everywhere he looked. And he thought it unsatisfactory that economics was not addressing it enough or in the right way. But this hardly came as a surprise. As a student, he arrived at the London School of Economics eager to understand why some people are incredibly rich and others are not, but instead his undergraduate economics degree was three years of “relatively difficult maths” that had “absolutely no immediate reference to a whole list of real-world problems you might face”. Others agree. In 2014, economics students around the world wrote a manifesto criticising the narrow way economics was taught, pinpointing a “lack of intellectual diversity”. Beyond universities, the BBC was criticised by a group of economists in 2020 for inappropriately describing the country’s economy like that of a household. A subsequent report found “too many journalists lack understanding of basic economics or lack confidence reporting”. After the 2008 financial crisis, Meadway says that the economics curriculum has improved. Still, aside from ecological economists – he mentions EF Schumacher – as a discipline, he says, it remains “kind of useless on things like climate change”. Most likely you’ll still be taught that the environment is an externality to the economy. What exactly does that mean for the way many economists understand the ecological crisis? Meadway gives the example of CO2 emissions: if you accept they are harmful, you might increase the price of carbon, believing this will change how the economy operates and in turn affect the environment. Carbon pricing, as it’s known, has been roundly criticised by certain academics and economists for, among other things, failing to work and failing to meet the scale of the challenge. The problem, Meadway explains, is that it treats the environment as subordinate to humanity’s actions; as if it’s at “our beck and call” to be “exploited” at will. “Once you have floods and wildfires,” he says, “that is the environment imposing itself on us, it’s not intellectually credible to start to think only that we have a problem to deal with. In fact, the problem is dealing with us.” Meadway is not just telling listeners that industrial capitalism is responsible for anthropogenic climate breakdown – he describes this as accepted by “pretty much everyone” – but on focusing on the feedback this produces. What happens after we’ve “merrily burned” huge amounts of coal and oil and polluted every river and sea on the planet, he asks. This doesn’t just puncture economic orthodoxy – Meadway’s critique is also aimed at parts of the left that are committed to maintaining current levels of consumption, just in a supposedly environmentally sound way. The idea that we can all have an electric car is, according to him, just not possible: “There is not enough copper on the planet … We can’t get the lithium to produce the batteries, these things can’t actually happen.” Meadway was an adviser to John McDonnell when he was a Labour shadow chancellor. Photograph: Thomas Mukoya/Reuters Or consider semiconductors – the focus of one Macrodose episode. Semiconductors are essential to almost all electronics on the planet but producing them requires huge amounts of water, he explains. When there was a drought in Taiwan, where one of the factories that produces 90% of the world’s semiconductors is based, it had to restrict production. There is not an “endless bounty that we can magically exploit”, Meadway says. Radicals as well as the mainstream need to accept “the relationship of humanity to nature isn’t a simple hierarchy”, he says. What we are seeing is “the effects of environmental crisis” being “mediated through the structures of capitalism”. This certainly feels a long way away from how most UK politicians talk about the subject. Given this is a world he used to inhabit, I wonder what he would now say to Labour, the party he used to work for. His number one piece of advice: “Stop talking about growth”. They do it to sound “economicsy”, he says, but it’s “totally unspecific” and that growth is actually quite hard to achieve. Growth cannot be relied on to “produce the goods it used to produce for all of us”, he says, so “you have to start having an argument about redistribution” instead. “We’re just not going to have so much growth in the future because of the climate crisis,” he says. If we run out of food and there are extreme water shortages, where is the growth going to come from, he asks. “There isn’t some technology we can invent that can make that happen.” Meadway wants Labour to “get the basics right”, such as explaining who they’re going to tax to fund public spending and detail what they are going to spend the money on. Does he, then, think degrowth, which argues for reducing and changing current forms of production and consumption in a way that lessens environmental destruction and minimises inequality, is the way forward? Almost before I’ve finished asking the question, he wryly replies that it needs a rebrand – it’s a “terrible name”, he says – but he does think the movement and the people around it are thinking in the “right way”. “We actually have to deal with this now,” he says, adding that we have to do that in a way that is just and protects most people from the worst effects of what is happening. That is what we should all be focused on.
In an era of climate change, Alaska's predators fall prey to politics With Alaska's wildlife numbers declining, agencies are blaming — and culling — predators. The true threat is much more complex. https://grist.org/science/alaska-predator-control-caribou-wolves-bear-hunt/
"Though they make important decisions like when hunting seasons open, how long they last, and how many animals hunters can take, they are not required to have a background in biology or natural resources. They also do not have to possess any expertise in the matters they decide. Board members, who did not respond to requests for comment, tend to reflect the politics of the administration in office; currently, under Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy, they are sport hunters, trappers, and guides. " Lol, that's just rich (emphasis mine). Now in theory, they could be managing the "resource" for future business, but in practice, if you need a paycheck today... we know how that goes.
Warning: as this is not an unmoderated forum, the "faint of heart" can in fact find succour with and expect action by the moderator, the easily offended needn't necessarily "stay away", and the following post may upset and offend some readers. Note: All complaints should be directed to the moderator by liberal use of the 'Report' link, as "several" reports make a complaint more valid. Disclaimer: copy and paste is an unusual and discouraged practice on this forum, as complainers have pointed out. The following post has thus been hand-typed. Enjoy the article and have a good day! "The effectiveness of Energy Citizens, which involved making oil and gas workers the “human face” of the fossil fuel industry to create the impression of widespread grassroots support, contributed to the defeat of U.S. climate legislation in 2010." How Fossil Fuels Found Their Influencers Edelman, the world’s largest PR firm, used its authoritative research on consumer trust to help fossil fuel companies fight climate action. Adam M. Lowenstein Still from The American Petroleum Institute’s “Vote 4 Energy” video. The world’s largest public relations firm has used insights from its lauded annual global survey of consumer trust and corporate credibility to help fossil fuel and petrostate clients to promote climate obstruction. According to a new briefing from the Clean Creatives, an advocacy group focused on cutting the public relations industry’s ties with fossil fuels, the PR juggernaut Edelman has employed its purportedly definitive “trust barometer” — the newest edition of which will be released Monday at the World Economic Forum — to help fossil fuel companies more effectively manufacture public trust. With Edelman’s help, these corporations turned oil and gas workers into a positive public face for fossil fuels, obscuring the role of the profit-hungry executives who actually pull the strings. The trust barometer has “always been positioned as this quasi-academic contribution of Edelman: ‘We’re just looking at how things are shaped in the world,’ as if they’re doing it in some magnanimous gesture or service to the world,” Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity, told The Lever. “This report shows that the trust barometer is built to generate business.” Clean Creatives’s findings, which are being published for the first time by The Lever, include the revelation that “Energy Citizens,” an ultimately successful astroturf campaign launched by the American Petroleum Institute while Edelman was the organization’s single largest contractor, hewed closely to Edelman’s proprietary insights about trust. The effectiveness of Energy Citizens, which involved making oil and gas workers the “human face” of the fossil fuel industry to create the impression of widespread grassroots support, contributed to the defeat of U.S. climate legislation in 2010. In 2014, well after Edelman had begun to use the annual trust barometer to construct its own reputation as an objective and authoritative source on trust in society, the firm leveraged its survey findings for TransCanada, a Canadian oil and gas giant that needed help persuading the public to support the construction of Energy East, its controversial tar sands pipeline from Alberta to the Atlantic coast. In “Grassroots Advocacy” documents leaked by Greenpeace, Edelman suggested a “recruitment goal” of 35,000 “advocates” for the pipeline — including 1,200 TransCanada employees, or around a quarter of the company’s workforce — who would be “tagged and tracked” in part by “how they perform over time” in pushing for the pipeline. “Edelman’s recommended approach to public relations is built upon the provision of insights from research; our work with Energy East will be no different,” Edelman advised TransCanada at the time. These insights stemmed in part from “research data from our annual trust barometer.” According to Duncan Meisel, executive director of Clean Creatives, such examples illustrate how Edelman has used its insights — under the guise of studying public trust — to help the fossil fuel industry fight climate action. “When Edelman finds that engagement from employees and ‘people like me’ is an important part of developing trust in corporations, you immediately see those tactics being deployed on behalf of the American Petroleum Institute and companies like TransCanada,” said Meisel. “It’s clear that the trust barometer isn’t just a reflection of Edelman’s perspective on trust... More...
The economics are bad, because the EROEI is poor. Fossil fuel energy density gave H. sapiens the greatest party ever thrown, but when that punch bowl is empty this civilization is finished.
Federal regulators approved sweeping changes to the electric grids that could make it easier to add more wind and solar energy. The new rules will change how U.S. power lines are planned and funded. The move is the most significant attempt in years to upgrade and expand the country’s creaking electricity network. Monday, May 13, 2024 4:28 PM ET https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/climate/electric-grid-overhaul-ferc.html --------------------------------------------------- This set of changes align with my earlier commentary about needed to reform the U.S. power grid towards being a micro-grid which will allow many more discrete power sources while moving away from a big utility hub & spoke configuration.
Thia is an interesting story about adopting leaking wells and sealing them to stop methane from being released. Cary teen adopted an oil well. His goal: Stop it from leaking gas Mateo De La Rocha is a high school senior in Cary, North Carolina, who has found a unique way to clean up pollution: Along with two friends, he recently raised $11,000 to plug an abandoned oil well in Ohio that was leaking gas close to a barn on a horse farm. https://www.wral.com/story/these-te...ed-oil-well-their-goal-shut-it-down/21448999/ As a child in Bolivia, Mateo De La Rocha told his family he wanted to work as a garbage man when he grew up. In La Paz, his home city at the time, trash piles were everywhere. In De La Rocha’s eyes, the local sanitation worker was the only person cleaning up pollution. “I didn’t really see anyone doing anything about it, apart from the garbage man,” he said. His family later moved to the United States, and now De La Rocha is a high school senior in Cary, North Carolina, who has found a unique way to clean up pollution: Along with two friends, he recently raised $11,000 to plug an abandoned oil well in Ohio that was leaking gas close to a barn on a horse farm. It’s an unusually niche cause for young environmentalists to take up, but one with a potentially significant effect on global climate change. As many as 3.9 million abandoned and aging oil and gas wells dot the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The reasons for abandonment vary, but at least 126,000 of these wells are orphans, meaning there’s no longer an owner or company that state regulators can hold responsible for them. And many of the wells leak methane, a greenhouse gas that’s nearly 30 times as powerful as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere over a period of 100 years, and even more powerful over shorter time periods. The EPA estimates that abandoned wells collectively released 303,000 metric tons of methane in 2022, roughly equivalent to how much carbon dioxide 23 gas-burning power plants might release in one year. This estimate, however, is highly uncertain. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocated $4.7 billion to states, tribes and federal agencies to plug orphaned wells, but given their sheer number and the enormous geographic area they cover, these federal funds will not be enough. “No single group is going to solve this problem,” said Andrew Govert, the program manager of a Department of Energy initiative to find undocumented orphaned wells and establish best practices for measuring their pollution. “I think it’s going to take NGOs, government, industry. It’s kind of all hands on deck.” Taking Initiative After completing his Advanced Placement environmental science class, De La Rocha, 18, said he realized that the methane from these abandoned wells was an issue in which individual people could potentially make a difference. He invited his friends and classmates Sebastian Ng and Lila Gisondi to join him. They call themselves the Youth Climate Initiative. “When Mateo approached me about this and I really looked into these methane wells and what we can do about it, it really kind of flipped a switch,” Ng, 17, said. Before, he had felt like there wasn’t anything he could do about climate change, he said, and he would simply joke about the world ending. For Gisondi, 18, talking with her friends about these methane-emitting wells brought climate change from the back of her mind to the forefront. “It was something that I felt like I could actually help with,” she said. When a well is no longer being used to pump oil and gas, it’s supposed to be closed off with cement in a process called capping or plugging. But many have been left open, often in disrepair, polluting groundwater and leaking toxic gases like hydrogen sulfide into the air. The wells can be extremely dangerous for people nearby. After more research, the trio connected with a nonprofit organization called the Well Done Foundation that plugs orphaned wells. The organization was founded by Curtis Shuck, a veteran of the oil and gas industry who came across his first abandoned well in 2019. When Shuck saw that first well, he recalled thinking, “This is embarrassing for me as somebody who’s been in the business, and this can’t continue,” he said. “This orphan well thing has been everybody’s dirty little secret.” He secured the domain name and nonprofit registration for the Well Done Foundation later that same day. Since then, his organization has surveyed more than 1,700 abandoned wells around the country and plugged 44 of what they identified as the most problematic ones. The students in North Carolina agreed to sponsor the 45th, an orphaned oil well on the horse farm in Ohio, near Cuyahoga Valley National Park. The well is next to the farm’s barn and only about 100 yards from the landowners’ house. Melissa and Bill Simmons bought the property in 2016, with two sons and several horses and chickens in tow. Nearly all the properties they had considered in the region had old oil or gas wells on them. At first, they thought, “Everybody else has these things,” Melissa Simmons said. “It must be OK.” The well on their farm had been drilled in 1983 by a company called Pine Top, which is now out of business. About a year after moving in, the Simmons family noticed the well was leaking gas. The boys could hear it hissing when they were outside doing chores. When it rained and water collected in the pumpjack’s nooks and crannies, the family could see gas bubbling up through the water. And eventually, they could smell gas inside the barn and had to leave the doors open, fearing a buildup and explosion. Melissa Simmons contacted the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. She learned that state officials were dealing with a very long list of orphaned wells — more than 20,000 documented so far in Ohio, which is one of the country’s oldest oil-producing regions — and that hers did not warrant immediate action. But after many calls, one official told her about the Well Done Foundation and said the nonprofit group might be able to help. They connected at the end of 2021, more than three years after the Simmons family first noticed the well leaking. Shuck traveled to the farm, confirmed they had a problem and agreed to take on the project. After the Youth Climate Initiative joined the effort, they raised money in small increments over the course of about three months. One of the most poignant donations came from De La Rocha’s 10-year-old cousin, who gave all of his birthday money, a total of $120, to the cause. The fundraiser was featured in a popular newsletter, Gen Dread, that explores the issue of climate anxiety among young people. The students also persuaded the Reimer Family Climate Crisis Fund, a small family foundation based in Austin, Texas, that had previously given to Well Done, to match their donations. The $11,000 the students raised will cover approximately 15% of the project’s total cost. Well Done will cover the rest of the cost through other donations and sponsors. Work began this year. On Thursday, contractors began pouring the cement that will plug the well. A National Problem The Well Done Foundation hopes to scale this adopt-a-well model nationally. The organization has also started the process of potentially getting carbon credits issued through the American Carbon Registry, which runs a voluntary market for individuals and companies to purchase credits that fund projects meant to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Research on the methane emissions from abandoned and orphaned wells is still young. In a 2016 study of 138 abandoned wells, the highest emissions rate the researchers measured was about 150 grams of methane per hour. The average for unplugged wells was about 10 grams per hour. According to measurements by Shuck and his colleagues, the well in Ohio was leaking more than 10,000 grams of methane per hour at one point. Referring to Well Done’s figure, Amy Townsend-Small, a professor of environmental science at the University of Cincinnati who was lead author on the 2016 study, said, “The emission rate is much, much, much higher than any well we’ve ever measured.” Shuck acknowledged that some of the Well Done Foundation’s measured methane emission rates are exceptionally high, which sometimes elicits skepticism. He attributes this to using newer instruments and having measured so many wells. “There’s lots of ways to test,” said Mary Kang, an assistant professor of civil engineering at McGill University in Montreal and the lead author of the first study on methane from abandoned wells, published in 2014. “No one can do it perfectly.” Kang added that there are potential issues with issuing carbon credits in exchange for plugging orphaned wells. One is the fact that wells in the same area could be connected underground through cracks in the rock formations. Plugging one well could simply send methane into the atmosphere through a different, unplugged well. “It’s like Whac-a-Mole,” she said. The Biden administration’s signature climate law, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, established a new program through the Department of the Interior that is responsible for handing out $4.7 billion in federal grants. “The problem is so huge,” Shuck said, that the new federal funds “really are just a down payment. There are so many wells, and these wells are so expensive.” Going forward, the oil and gas industry needs to be responsible for plugging its old wells, said Adam Peltz, an attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund who works on oil and gas issues. And in fact, the Bureau of Land Management recently increased the amount of money it requires oil and gas companies to set aside for well-plugging before they even start drilling, to avoid more wells being orphaned in the future. But for existing orphaned wells, Peltz said, especially those that predate modern regulations, “Whatever it takes to plug them.” Now that final exams, sports tournaments and prom are out of the way, De La Rocha, Ng and Gisondi plan to raise money to plug a second orphaned well this summer. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
A noble gesture, can't fault a young person for trying. Sadly, a global methane "doom loop" is already in motion—nothing to be done about it anymore. Now we must learn to adapt to a difficult future.