Lester Brown has a new book called The Great Transition. It says the tide has turned against fossil fuels and the transition to renewables is now unstoppable.
Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com
wind and solar
Here are some fun facts on the wind and solar revolution.
Rooftop solar is growing worldwide by 50% per year. In 1985 solar cost $12 per watt, but today’s prices are closer to 36 cents per watt. Every five hours the world adds 23 MW of solar—which was the global installed capacity in 1985.
In January of 2014 Denmark got 62% of its electricity from wind. In 2013 Ireland got 17% of its electricity from wind, and Spain and Portugal both exceeded 20% from wind. Today China gets more electricity from wind (91,000 MW) than it does from nuclear reactors. The United States is second in the world in installed wind turbines, with South Dakota and Iowa obtaining over 26% of their electricity from wind…
The renewable energy revolution will enable civilization to stop the growth of highly polluting fossil fuels. It will enable society to leave the majority of the remaining reserves of fossil fuels alone and unburned. Acceleration of this revolution helps in solving many problems and is a key to restoring and maintaining the life support systems of the earth.
money, debt, investment, and growth
It’s interesting how economists talk about money, debt, investment, and growth. If you’re not an economist, you have to tie your brain lobes in a few knots to make sense of it. This is Michael Spence from NYU:
high unemployment, high and rising debt levels, and a global shortage of aggregate demand are constraining growth and generating deflationary pressures. And now, as then, the level and quality of investment have been consistently inadequate, with public spending on tangible and intangible capital – a critical factor in long-term growth – well below optimal levels for some time.
Of course, there are also new challenges. The dynamics of income distribution have shifted adversely in recent decades, impeding consensus on economic policy. And aging populations – a result of rising longevity and declining fertility – are putting pressure on public finances.
Nonetheless, the ingredients of an effective strategy to spur economic growth and employment are similar: available balance sheets (sovereign and private) should be used to generate additional demand and boost public investment, even if it results in greater leverage. Recent IMF research suggests that, given excess capacity, governments would probably benefit from substantial short-run multipliers. More important, the focus on investment would improve prospects for long-term sustainable growth, which would enable governments and households to pursue responsible deleveraging.
Here’s what I think it means. “Global shortage of adequate demand” means people aren’t spending enough money to support productive activity in the economy. Either they don’t have the money or they are saving it instead of spending it. Of course, we need a productive economy to generate the jobs and wages that get people money to spend. So it’s a chicken and egg problem that can spiral downwards once it gets started (“deflationary pressures”). Governments also aren’t investing in productive activity, either because they are afraid of debt or aren’t taking in enough taxes, or both. “Available balance sheets” means they should just wish new money into existence (governments can do that!) and spend it on investments like infrastructure, education, and research that tend to support long-term growth, which would get people more money, which they could spend to support more productive activity, and so on in a virtuous cycle. Money isn’t really real, as long as we think it is real. Debt doesn’t matter, as long as we believe it does matter. Belief in money and fear of debt usually stops us short of the absolute physical limits placed on us by our physical environment.
Washington State drought
Washington State has a snowpack problem.
“Snowpack is down to just 16% of normal,” Inslee said. “This is an unprecedented low. Several mountain areas have already melted out and have little to no measurable snow left…. On the Olympic Peninsula, where there would normally be 80 inches of snow today in the mountains, the glacier lilies are blooming.”
No mandatory rationing has been ordered, but because conditions recently worsened, Inslee took the step to declare the statewide emergency. Fellow Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown of California declared a statewide drought emergency in 2014, and last month ordered municipalities across the state to cut water use by 25%.
In Oregon, Gov. Kate Brown has declared a drought emergency in seven of the largest counties. Seven other counties have requested that an emergency be declared. Combined, that’s about two-thirds of the state.
alternatives to minimum parking
Seattle has a brilliant, and in retrospective obvious, idea for an alternative to required minimum parking requirements for development. Instead of taking them out of the code entirely, allow developers or landlords to provide transit passes or car share memberships instead. This makes perfect sense. If you wanted to be more equitable, you could channel some or all of the money into a fund that low-income people in the neighborhood could use for transportation. For those who are just catching up, most cars sit parked most of the time and take up enormous amounts of space, generally equal or greater than the space taken up by housing. By reducing this wasted space, you create more space for housing, businesses, parks, or some combination. Depending on what you convert the land to, you can also reduce water pollution, flooding, and heat; reduce stress; improve physical health; improve appearance and property values; and maybe even grow some food. It’s an obvious win for everyone – why are we still letting car industry propaganda drive our culture and shape our cities?
Unnatural Selection
Amazon description:
Gonorrhea. Bed bugs. Weeds. Salamanders. People. All are evolving, some surprisingly rapidly, in response to our chemical age. In Unnatural Selection, Emily Monosson shows how our drugs, pesticides, and pollution are exerting intense selection pressure on all manner of species. And we humans might not like the result.
Monosson reveals that the very code of life is more fluid than once imagined. When our powerful chemicals put the pressure on to evolve or die, beneficial traits can sweep rapidly through a population. Species with explosive population growth—the bugs, bacteria, and weeds—tend to thrive, while bigger, slower-to-reproduce creatures, like ourselves, are more likely to succumb.
Monosson explores contemporary evolution in all its guises. She examines the species that we are actively trying to beat back, from agricultural pests to life-threatening bacteria, and those that are collateral damage—creatures struggling to adapt to a polluted world. Monosson also presents cutting-edge science on gene expression, showing how environmental stressors are leaving their mark on plants, animals, and possibly humans for generations to come.
El Nino
More El Nino coverage from Slate. It’s going to be the strongest since 1998! or 2010! or ever!
First off, it’s rapidly intensifying. El Niño is about self-reinforcing feedbacks between the ocean and the atmosphere, and from all accounts, this one has its foot on the accelerator pedal.
If it continues, the impacts will be felt around the globe—here’s my detailed rundown of what to expect. Among them: drought in Australia, Southeast Asia, and perhaps India, with flooding in Peru and Southern California.
Seymour Hersh
Seymour Hersh claims that almost everything we were told about the Bin Laden raid was a lie. I don’t want to believe it, but Seymour Hersh usually turns out to be right. Also, his story just kind of adds up. It’s long but this paragraph kind of sums it up:
This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.
trains
The sad Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia reminded me of this sad article, Why Can’t America Have Great Trains? An excerpt:
Compared with the high-speed trains of Western Europe and East Asia, American passenger rail is notoriously creaky, tardy, and slow. The Acela, currently the only “high-speed” train in America, runs at an average pace of 68 miles per hour between Washington and Boston; a high-speed train from Madrid to Barcelona averages 154 miles per hour. Amtrak’s most punctual trains arrive on schedule 75 percent of the time; judged by Amtrak’s lax standards, Japan’s bullet trains are late basically 0 percent of the time.
And those stats don’t figure to improve anytime soon. While Amtrak isn’t currently in danger of being killed, it also isn’t likely to do more than barely survive. Last month, the House of Representatives agreed to fund Amtrak for the next four years at a rate of $1.4 billion per year. Meanwhile, the Chinese government—fair comparison or not—will be spending $128 billion this year on rail. (Thanks to the House bill, though, Amtrak passengers can look forward to a new provision allowing cats and dogs on certain trains.)
A few decades ago, news of another middling Amtrak appropriation wouldn’t have warranted a second glance; passenger rail was unpopular and widely thought to be obsolete. But recently, Amtrak’s popularity has actually spiked. Ridership has increased by roughly 50 percent in the past 15 years, and ridership in the Northeast Corridor stood at an all-time high in 2014. Amtrak also now accounts for 77 percent of all rail and air travel between Washington and New York, up from just 37 percent when it launched the Acela in 2000.
Trains connect cities and ignore the empty spaces in between, while highways serve those empty spaces. In our U.S. “republican” system (in the original dictionary sense of the word), our politicians disproportionately represent those population and economic dead zones, so that anti-city and economically unproductive nonsense policy positions pay off in power and re-election. These same politicians also find that it doesn’t hurt to throw a little racism, homophobia and xenophobia into the mix just for good measure. It’s about fear of those people in the city who are not like you.
cars are over in the UK
Most Americans haven’t caught on yet, but the tide has turned against widespread car ownership. Here’s an article in the Guardian about the tide turning in the UK:
London, which has pioneered congestion charging and has a well-integrated system of public transport, has led the move away from cars over the past decade, during which time 9% of car commuters have switched to other forms of transport. “People in London have a lot of options and there’s been huge growth across all modes,” says Isabel Dedring, the American-born deputy mayor for transport in the capital. “There’s been a massive increase in investment in public transport…”
Dedring says London has always been progressive in terms of public transport – its narrow, twisting roads were never conducive to the automotive domination that occurred in many US and European cities in the 1960s and 70s, when the car was king. But from the turn of the millennium, there has been a concerted attempt to encourage switching to other modes of transport, and the past decade has seen a 30% reduction in traffic in central London.
“Traffic levels have gone down massively,” says Dedring, “partly because of the congestion charge, but also because we are taking away space from private vehicles and giving it to buses through bus lanes and to people through public realm [developments].” And now to cyclists, too, with the planned “cycle superhighways” and cycle-friendly neighbourhoods being trialled in three London boroughs.