Tuesday, March 20th, 2018
James Temple, - MIT Technology Review
Stephan: Several readers have written me asking why I feel such a sense of urgency about making the transition out of the carbon era. The answer is that it takes time to make substantive changes in a society's infrastructure. And yes, I know about the internet but, in my opinion the internet is an anomaly with unique circumstances. So how long in this instance. Here is MIT's take. It is not reassuring: we don't have 400 years.
Credit: Denis Doyle
Fifteen years ago, Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution, calculated that the world would need to add about a nuclear power plant’s worth of clean-energy capacity every day between 2000 and 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change. Recently, he did a quick calculation to see how we’re doing.
Not well. Instead of the roughly 1,100 megawatts of carbon-free energy per day likely needed to prevent temperatures from rising more than 2 ˚C, as the 2003 Science paper by Caldeira and his colleagues found, we are adding around 151 megawatts. That’s only enough to power roughly 125,000 homes.
At that rate, substantially transforming the energy system would take, not the next three decades, but nearly the next four centuries. In the meantime, temperatures would soar, melting ice caps, sinking cities, and unleashing devastating heat waves around the globe (see “The year climate change began to spin out of control”).
Caldeira stresses that other factors are likely to significantly shorten that time frame (in particular, electrifying heat production, which accounts for a […]
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Tuesday, March 20th, 2018
Benjamin Storrow, - E&E News
Stephan: Some good news. In spite of everything Trump and the GOP are doing to keep carbon energy alive, particularly coal, it is dying.
Indiana Republican Rep. Larry has a new bill to subsidize coal plants.
Credit: Rep. Larry Bucshon/Flickr
President Trump has pledged a coal revival, but America’s utilities aren’t listening.
U.S. power companies are set to unplug almost 12 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity this year, or about 4 percent of the American coal fleet, according to an E&E News review of federal figures. More than half of those retirements were announced after Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
Analysts said an economic maelstrom is responsible for the trend. Capacity prices for reserve electricity, long a moneymaker for coal plants, remain low in many parts of the country. Competition from natural gas remains stiff, with no apparent uptick in gas prices in sight. And renewables, improving on cost and performance, continue to eat up coal’s market share.
“All of those are suppressing the economics of existing coal plants,” said Metin Celebi, an analyst who tracks the power sector at the Brattle Group.
The closures underscore the challenges facing Trump and congressional Republicans, who have launched a concerted effort […]
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Tuesday, March 20th, 2018
Kyle Mantyla, - Right Wing Watch
Stephan: Stephen Hawking kept alive by demons. Really.
The christofascist world view is a strange mixture of physicalism, fascism, and early Iron Age thinking. I put these reports in SR from time to time because it is a trend to which tens of millions of Americans subscribe, and I think it is important that real world Americans need to be aware of it.
Cristofascist pastor Mike Shoesmith
On his radio program last week, Donald Trump-loving pastor, conspiracy theorist and birther Carl Gallups interviewed Mike Shoesmith, the executive editor of PNN News, who claimed that famed physicist Stephen Hawking was able to live for decades with ALS because he was being kept alive by demons.
Shoesmith, who normally appears on Gallups’ program to complain about women, insisted that it was no coincidence that Hawking died just weeks after Billy Graham passed away, explaining that Graham’s ministry “really kicked off” in 1942, which prompted the devil to use Hawking, who was born in 1942, to counter Graham’s preaching.
“[Graham] is a hundred percent devoted,” Shoesmith said. “The Lord sees his heart, gives him a tremendous ministry, and who do you think is sitting in the background going, ‘I have to do something about this, this guy is sold out, I have to do something’? Who do you think is sitting in the background doing that? The devil, right?”
“So, in 1942, that is when Billy Graham’s ministry really takes off, and who do you think was […]
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Dana Ullman, - Huffington Post
Stephan: Dana Ullman, an old friend, is arguably the most knowledgeable advocate for homeopathic medicine in the U.S.. This essay Dana has written brings some clarity to a subject that is often lost in a miasma of misinformation.
What made this Swiss study particularly stand out for me was the fact that it directly contradicts an Australian study which I covered in SR some months ago. Why is this? I suspect because homeopathy is partly a local spacetime medical system and partly a nonlocal one, and there are variables that are often not properly taken into account .
In the interest of full disclosure I feel I need to note that I, personally, have had two significant healings using Homeopathy, and have witnessed several others, in my family. We use homeopathic products regularly because they have no additives, toxins, hormones, or poisons, and they either work or they don't and there are no side-effects.
Homeopathy medicines
Credit: Slate.com
The Swiss government has a long and widely-respected history of neutrality, and therefore, reports from this government on controversial subjects need to be taken more seriously than other reports from countries that are more strongly influenced by present economic and political constituencies. When one considers that two of the top five largest drug companies in the world have their headquarters in Switzerland, one might assume that this country would have a heavy interest in and bias toward conventional medicine, but such assumptions would be wrong.
In late 2011, the Swiss government’s report on homeopathic medicine represents the most comprehensive evaluation of homeopathic medicine ever written by a government and was just published in book form in English (Bornhoft and Matthiessen, 2011). This breakthrough report affirmed that homeopathic treatment is both effective and cost-effective and that homeopathic treatment should be reimbursed by Switzerland’s national health insurance program.
The Swiss government’s inquiry into homeopathy and complementary and alternative (CAM) treatments resulted from the high demand and widespread use of alternatives to […]
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Stephan: Here is the latest bit of gobsmacking stupidity from the Trump administration. It will assure that if there is an environmental crisis in your neighborhood that your government will not be there to help you. Consider Puerto Rico.
Yet Trump's approval rating has actually gone up. There is an ugly truth no one wants to talk about: The problem with America I am afraid is Americans. Our children will condemn us for that truth as we go into the future unprepared, and they attempt to hang onto a civilized society..
FEMA failures in Puerto Rico
The United States is still reeling from last year’s megadisasters. Puerto Rico lingers in the longest blackout in US history after Hurricane Maria tore through the island, and the scorched earth left behind from record-breaking fires in California is now causing floods and mudslides.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was on the front lines of many of these calamities, had to go back to Congress last September to ask for billions more dollars to handle the gargantuan relief efforts.
With some of the dust settled, it’s clear that the events in 2017 fit the pattern of extreme weather we expect as average global temperatures go up, with strong climate change signals emerging in fires and rainfall.
FEMA has, and will continue to, respond to climate change-influenced disasters. But the agency’s new strategic plan for 2018-2022, released Thursday, doesn’t mention climate change or global warming at all. (emphasis added) That’s despite the fact that the 38-page document projects more frequent and more expensive disasters. This is a glaring omission from an agency […]
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