Climate Change 2018 Review: Part 2 – The Good! by Bruce Melton Climate Change Now Initiative, 501c3 (Link to Article) So much happened in our climate change world in 2018 that we are printing this article in two parts: The Bad, and The Good. We started with the bad. If you missed Part 1, you…
Nearly Two Billion Dollars spent on Anti-Climate Science Legislative Lobbying 2000 to 2016 Robert Brulle at Drexel University reminds us of what makes Congress work, “public opinion is only one, relatively minor input” into decisions made by Congress. (Grossmann 2014) Data for Brulle’s latest work comes from the 1995 Lobbying and Disclosure Act that requires all…
Are We Really On Track To Meet Paris Energy Generation Commitments Without Carbon Regulations? Paris commitments are generally about 80 percent emissions reductions by 2050 and net zero, or 100 percent emissions reductions by 2080. Because of the dramatic fall in costs of alternative energy construction, one could validly say that today we are…
Global Environmental Sustainability and a Healthy Climate: Climate Policy 2.0 We all want a healthy climate and assume that emissions reductions will give us this healthy climate, but emissions reductions alone allow triple to quintuple the warming we have already seen. Today, the public and policy makers –almost completely– believe emissions reductions strategies can…
Trump’s Climate Reform Mayhem By Bruce Melton First Published in the Austin Sierran, February 2018 Last month’s list of eleven actions taken by President Trump that threaten the world we live in was just a preview. Trump and his administration have annihilated virtually the entire U.S. climate reform platform. They have already, or are in…
Thirty Years of Warnings: Union of Concerned Scientists 1988 Thirty years of warnings and very little has changed. Except for a few numbers, this letter from the Union of Concerned Scientists could be dated 2018 instead of 1988. “Hottest Ever” or “________ of the last _______ years have occurred in the last decade” or “glaciers…
The greatest climate dude of all time has done it again. James Hansen, 32 year director of the U.S. national climate modeling agency, the NASA Goddard institute for Space Studies, published a new fundamental piece of climate work last month. He looks at the additional negative emission on top of Paris reductions that are needed…
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has completed a new study that accounts fro global fossil fuel subsidies. Highlights of the study are listed below (from the report introduction): Post-tax energy subsidies are dramatically higher than previously estimated—$4.9 trillion (6.5 percent of global GDP) in 2013, and projected to reach $5.3 trillion (6.5 percent of global…
Princeton researchers have been testing abandoned oil wells in Pennsylvania and have revealed some surprising results. What do these findings mean? Stanford estimates that there are three million abandoned wells in the U.S. but this is just a guess. Some of the drilling goes back to the 19th century. Also a guess is how many…
Burning Buried Sunshine 196,000 pounds of plants are required to produce a gallon of gasoline. It takes 40 acres of plants, roots, stalks and leaves, to go 20 miles in the average car. I ran across this paper in my archives from 2003 and the information is oh-so timely. It is just incredible how much…
