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…
Battery Storage Costs Plummet Lazard was founded in 1848 and is a financial advisory and asset management firm that caters primarily to institutional clients. They began preparing a global evaluation of the levelized cost of energy for new energy generation installations in 2009, and for energy storage in 2015. “Levelized costs of energy (LCOE)” are…
Most of us think a healthy climate will result from emissions reductions. Time and again however, the science says this is not so. The reason? Emissions reduction strategies are about 30 years old and we have emitted as much climate pollution in about the last 30 years as we emitted in the previous 200 years….
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…
Emissions: We have the Technology From the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Nature Outlook An article review by Bruce Melton First published in the Austin Sierran in March 2018 Atmospheric carbon capture is not yet a mainstream topic in climate policy, but to meet even the goals of the Paris Agreement, it is something that…
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…
NOAA’s new sea level rise report in January 2017 is a dope slap that describes 17 inches of sea level rise in Florida by 2030. You can see the report here, or check out our review that summarizes the important parts here. The continuing publishing of sea level rise research on emissions reductions and resultant…
Healthy Climate Alliance and 300 ppm CO2 by 2050 (300×2050) The Healthy Climate Alliance asks, why aren’t we seeking to restore our climate to its original healthy state? The answer for 30 years has been that limiting emissions was enough. We could decarbonize our infrastructure, limit warming to 2 degrees C and let nature take…
The “moral imperative challenge” is that thing where we feel it is our duty to create a fossil fuel extinction in order address climate change. This is something our climate culture has been striving for since about 1990. It is ingrained in our emissions reductions psyche and emblazoned across our foreheads. For a generation, emissions…
The Yale Climate Opinion Maps are nothing but astonishing in their depth of coverage. The folks at Yale have accumulated climate opinions nationwide down to the county level in an easy to use interactive format. Their work is truly a fundamentally important way to understand what Americans really think about climate change. Pick your…
New Climate Culture Our climate culture of the last two or three decades, very bluntly, not working out . Yes, carbon emissions are decreasing, or at least they are not increasing as fast a they were or as fast as projected. Possibly, they are even decreasing. But the bottom line is that current warming…
Observations on Declining U.S. Emissions: It’s a widely held belief that the U.S. has been reducing emissions since the peak 2005-2007 before the recession. This is just barely valid today, but several years back it was not. The last time we reported on this, U.S. emission had not fallen as the EPA had insisted, but…
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…
What is the most efficient thing we can do to progress climate change awareness and defeat the Climate Change Counter Movement’s stranglehold on a healthy climate? What can we do when politics has been destroying our ability to act to regulate climate pollution for a generation? What to do when 75 or even 85…
What can we do as individual citizens that is the most meaningful of all climate change actions? How can we best use our time to create the biggest difference? This question has a very surprising answer. The 2016 Yale Program on Climate Communications poll Spiral of Silence is a short, simple “must read” for anyone…
McClatchy reported on a new NOAA sea level rise impact report and made some very good points. But a lot of the true meaning is left out. I like to use well publicized journalism like this to be able to quickly get to the most important pieces of the science being reported on, that are…
The IPCC changed their fundamental philosophy on how they evaluate scenarios of our future climate in their 2013 reporting, but they have yet to acknowledge the most common and meaningful way our climate usually changes, implying negative consequences for traditional climate reform strategies. Popular science however, continues on the path of traditional climate reform strategies…
A quick note on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s review of climate pollution reform technologies: Climate Intervention — Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable Sequestration, June 2017. Theoretical academic publishing on the current state of direct air capture technologies, continues to color academic literature with very dated and inaccurate statements. Part of the challenge…
It’s not the averages that are troublesome. The understating reporting of scientists, journalists and climate science consensus organizations is one of the most confounding parts of climate change today. It’s the extremes that matter, yet extremes are viewed as “uncertainty” in a way almost entirely related to written grammar, rather than the statistical uncertainty of when,…
A never-ending string of stories is needed to move our society from a world of climate science disbelief to one of action. The stories must include two main focus areas: 1) communication of why we distrust climate scientists so much more more than any those of other sciences, and 2) Seven principles of communication of…
