Tag Archives: development

How do you save clean energy? This company plans to pump it underground.

New York. California. Hawaii. Colorado. Maine. All of these states and a few others want to get their electric grids running mostly if not entirely on renewable energy in the next few decades. As they ramp up wind and solar farm projects, they’re also going to need ways to store surplus energy to use when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

Start-ups focused on energy storage are scrambling for the cash and opportunities to demonstrate that their system will hold more than a few hours worth of charge. Last week, Quidnet, a Houston, Texas-based company, announced that it lined up a contract with the New York State Energy and Research Development Authority to construct a pilot project for its “Geomechanical Pumped Storage” technology.

Quidnet’s system is a new take on pumped-hydro storage, an existing technology that takes excess energy from the grid during periods of low electricity demand and uses it to pump water up a hill from a lower reservoir to an upper reservoir. Later, when energy is needed, the water is released back down to spin a turbine and generate electricity. Pumped-hydro accounts for 95 percent of the existing energy storage used by utilities in the U.S., but most of these systems were built in the 1970s and 1980s. That’s because it’s expensive and politically difficult to set aside enough land in the mountains to build new pumped-hydropower reservoirs.

Joe Zhou, the CEO of Quidnet, said the company’s technology depends on the same supply chains and expertise used by existing pumped-hydro systems, but gets around those stickier land-use problems by pushing the water underground. To “charge” the battery, the system draws excess energy from the grid to suck water from a holding pond into an underground well, where it’s stored under pressure in the rock. When the energy is needed, the water is released and rushes back to the surface, spinning a turbine similar to those deployed in traditional pumped-hydro systems. The pilot project in New York aims to store 10 hours worth of energy.

Zhou said that Quidnet, which is backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, could deploy these systems in roughly 60 percent of U.S. power markets today, based on the type and structure of rock required for the wells. The conditions are especially ripe in New York. “There’s a tremendous, tremendous energy storage resource in New York. I think it can really help the state advance its clean energy goals,” Zhou told Grist.

Quidnet is one of several companies piloting new energy storage systems across the country. In Vermont, Highview Power plans to build the first liquid air storage project in the U.S that would store more than eight hours of energy, using power from the grid to liquify air and store it in tanks. One of the most anticipated projects is Form Energy’s “aqueous air battery system” in Minnesota, aimed at storing and delivering 150 hours of power to the grid, though how it works remains a bit of a mystery.

Today, with pilot projects that store just 8-10 hours, each of these storage solutions are in hot competition with cheap, efficient lithium-ion batteries, which average around 4 hours of storage. “The closer you play to lithium-ion’s durations, the more lithium-ion can compete,” said Dan Finn-Foley, head of energy storage at the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie. “The reason that all these alternative technologies think that they can catch lithium-ion is due to how the different technologies scale.”

If you have a grid that depends on wind energy and the wind slows down for weeks at a time, you might need hundreds of hours of storage. Increasing the storage capacity of a lithium-ion system is costly; to double it, you need to install another battery, hence doubling the price. Quidnet’s technology, on the other hand, might be able to scale up more cost-efficiently by increasing the size of a surface pond or the volume of a well. That’s how technology like Quidnet’s could ultimately differentiate itself, Finn-Foley explained.

“The fact that they have a pilot program is encouraging,” Finn-Foley said. “You need to be able to show your price point and show your duration and show your efficiencies and demonstrate it. So that’s the next big step, you know, it puts them into the conversation.”

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How do you save clean energy? This company plans to pump it underground.

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‘Put up or shut up’: New York forges ahead with statewide environmental justice measures

Against the backdrop of renewed calls for racial justice nationwide in the aftermath of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the state of New York announced on Tuesday a slate of grants totaling more than $10.6 million to help underserved residents access affordable solar energy. The grants will help offset predevelopment costs to address resource barriers that typically prevent low-income residents — particularly communities of color — from installing clean energy or energy storage in their homes.

The Empire State is set to provide individual grants of up to $200,000 each to affordable housing providers, community organizations, and technical service providers to assist low-income households and install solar and energy storage systems meant to benefit entire communities. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), the government agency administering the program, will be hosting a webinar on July 14 to launch the grant opportunities and provide more information on the application process. The state will accept applications on a quarterly basis through the end of 2024.

This initiative is the result of New York’s landmark environmental justice legislation, which helped bring the state’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) to life in January. The CLCPA made headlines for being the most ambitious emissions-reduction legislation in the country, thanks to its promise that the state will reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and 100 percent renewable electricity by 2040. The CLCPA and the accompanying environmental justice bill require the state to make good on its commitments to address environmental injustice and invest in underserved and pollution-burdened communities. Tuesday’s announcement is part of that follow-through.

“We got a law passed — among all accounts the most ambitious in the country, maybe the world — so now, let’s see how real these elected officials are about Black Lives Matter,” Eddie Bautista, executive director of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, told Grist. “This is for us a pivotal moment, where we can either work in partnership with the government or call hypocrisy at the top of our lungs.”

On Tuesday, the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation also unveiled its appointments to the Climate Justice Working Group, which will guide the state in carrying out its ambitious climate targets. Bautista, who was announced as one of the group’s appointees, said that community members appointed to the group would hold elected officials accountable for continued funding and also figure out how to effectively reach out to marginalized communities to inform them about opportunities such as NYSERDA’s grants.

“In this moment where you have elected officials tripping over each other to claim some portion of the Black Lives Matter mantle, this is the moment where they have to put up or shut up,” Bautista told Grist. “It’s easy to put out a statement when you’re seeing police brutalizing people, but what do you do when the very air is brutalizing people?”

The Climate Justice Working Group consists of representatives from environmental justice communities across the state, including members from New York City community groups, rural communities, and urban communities in upstate New York, as well as representatives from state agencies such as NYSERDA, and the Departments of Conservation, Health, and Labor. The group is set to have its first convening in July as they map out next steps to fast achieve New York’s climate goals.

“We’re relieved that the process is moving forward,” Bautista said.

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‘Put up or shut up’: New York forges ahead with statewide environmental justice measures

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Knowledge in a Nutshell: Quantum Physics – Sten Odenwald

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Knowledge in a Nutshell: Quantum Physics

The complete guide to quantum physics, including wave functions, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and quantum gravity

Sten Odenwald

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: May 1, 2020

Publisher: Arcturus Publishing

Seller: Arcturus Publishing Limited


Quantum theory is at the heart of modern physics, but how does it actually work?  NASA scientist and communicator Sten Odenwald demystifies the subject and makes this crucial topic accessible to everyone. Featuring topics such as Schrodinger's cat, the wave-particle duality and the newly emerging theories of quantum gravity, as well as the personalities behind the science, such as Max Planck, Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Richard Feynman and many more,  Knowledge in a Nutshell: Quantum Physics  provides an essential introduction to cutting edge science.  Presented in an easy-to-understand format, with diagrams, illustrations and simple summary sections at the end of each chapter, this new addition to the 'Knowledge in a Nutshell' series brings clarity to some of the great mysteries of physics. ABOUT THE SERIES:  The 'Knowledge in a Nutshell' series by Arcturus Publishing provides engaging introductions to many fields of knowledge, including philosophy, psychology and physics, and the ways in which human kind has sought to make sense of our world. Sten Odenwald  is the Director of the STEM Resource Development project at NASA, a long-time astronomer and he is passionate about promoting science education. Over the course of his career, he has taught at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution, he has appeared on TV for National Geographic and has written numerous articles for magazines ranging from Astronomy magazine to Scientific American. He also runs the blog 'The Astronomy Café', where he seeks to bring cosmology and astronomy to a wider audience.

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Knowledge in a Nutshell: Quantum Physics – Sten Odenwald

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More words to describe a world gone nuts: Firenado, ecoanxiety, covidiots

Remember the first time you heard the phrase social distancing? Chances are that it was earlier this year, even though the phrase was coined in 1957, when it meant something akin to “ghosting.” After more than 60 years of stagnation, the phrase instantaneously wove its way into our everyday speech.

As the coronavirus pandemic tightens its grip on seemingly every aspect of daily life, our vocabularies are adapting at warp speed. Once obscure phrases are suddenly commonplace. The virus, nicknamed the rona, has spawned other creative coinages. A quarantini is a cocktail you drink in the isolation of your home. A covidiot is someone who throws a block party when everybody is supposedly sheltered in place. Technical acronyms like PPE (personal protective equipment) have entered everyday speech, as well as slang like WFH (working from home, a.k.a. working from hell). The most meticulous know the distinction between quarantine and isolation. Someday soon, we’ll all start gossiping about isolationships.

Language is trying to keep up with a world in upheaval, a time in which many see the planet as plotting against us, with fresh heat waves, punishing droughts, and wildfires. Every year brings new crises and new words to describe them, such as ecoanxiety, firenado, flight shame, and climate crisis. In an update last April, Merriam-Webster added all sorts of environment-related words to its online dictionary, including microplastic, “a piece of plastic that is five millimeters or smaller in size,” and omnicide, “the destruction of all life or all human life (as by nuclear war).”

Last month, Merriam-Webster announced its fastest update ever, adding COVID-19 — the shortened form of coronavirus disease 2019 — to its online dictionary a mere one month after the World Health Organization minted it. In the slow-moving world of lexicography, that’s a “rapid pace.” Super-spreader, self-quarantine, and patient zero were also included in the special update.

Dictionaries are simply giving the people the resources they want. The Oxford English Dictionary keeps track of the terms being used more frequently than usual, and in March, all 20 of the top keywords had something to do with coronavirus.

“Any new and widespread phenomenon always brings with it the development of new language to describe it,” wrote Fiona McPherson, editorial manager at the OED, in a statement accompanying the dictionary’s update.

Just four months ago, dictionary editors were picking their 2019 “words of the year.” The selections included climate emergency and climate strike (the global protests first started by Greta Thunberg, the 17-year-old Swedish activist), more evidence that the urgency (or anxiety) around climate change was going mainstream. It seemed like everyone was talking about the Green New Deal, whether they loved it or hated it.

This year, the Word of the Year selections will undoubtedly be related to the novel coronavirus. But it’s by no means the only crisis we’ll face in the coming months. Scientists are predicting that 2020 will deliver devastating floods, hellish wildfires, and even more supercharged hurricanes than usual. Hey, at least we’ll have something else to talk about.

“Usual” is already a pretty high bar these days. Heat records are broken so often that they’re hardly considered news. Under a smoky-red sun, the wind has taken ash from burning forests and rained it down on cities. Holing up in your home for months while sewing face masks for your family? That’s definitely not part of the old normal, either.

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More words to describe a world gone nuts: Firenado, ecoanxiety, covidiots

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The Trump administration is helping 9 states prepare for climate change

When extreme weather hits the United States, coastal Southern states tend to get the worst of it. Just look at the past few years: In 2017, Texas, Louisiana, and the Carolinas were hit with back-to-back hurricanes, which left parts of those states submerged and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The two years preceding that were rough on the South, too — flooding related to hurricanes Joaquin and Matthew killed dozens of Americans and cost the United States billions combined.

Any climate scientist will tell you that the natural disasters of the past few years pale in comparison to the climate change-fueled weather events coming down the pike. If state legislators were savvy, they would have taken steps years ago to protect their citizens from what’s ahead. The problem is, some of those hurricane-magnet states also happen to be governed by climate deniers.

In 2018, Congress devised a plan to help disaster-ravaged states actually prepare for extreme weather for a change, and President Trump signed off on it. It’s the first time national legislation has designed block grants to help states prepare for future disasters, rather than just clean up damage from ones that have already occurred.

That money, $16 billion of federal funding, will soon be released — more than half will go to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the rest will go to nine mainland U.S. states. The states that got the most money to prepare for climate change all went for Trump in 2016 and are all under at least partial Republican control: Texas is getting upwards of $4 billion, Louisiana is getting $1.2 billion, Florida $633 million, North Carolina $168 million, and South Carolina $158 million. Missouri, California, West Virginia, and Georgia are also getting grants. There’s a reason why a bunch of Republican trifecta states accepted climate change mitigation money without a fuss: none of them had to actually acknowledge climate change to access the funds.

That’s because, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) solicited proposals from the states explaining how they aim to use the funds, it didn’t require them to take climate change into account, even though the money being handed out by the department will be used to protect states from the effects of rising temperatures. Instead, the department asked the grantees to describe their “current and future risks,” based on the latest available science. HUD didn’t even use the terms “global warming” and “climate change” in its request for proposals, though it did ask states to take “continued sea level rise” into consideration. The task of drawing up the states’ proposals generally fell to housing and community development specialists at state general land offices or housing departments.

The results are telling, as the New York Times reported last week: Florida and North Carolina’s applications said climate change poses a major risk to their states. South Carolina and Texas ignored the issue entirely, instead using phrases like “changing coastal conditions” and the “destabilizing effects and unpredictability” of disasters. Louisiana mentioned climate change once on the last page of its plan.

It might seem like allowing states to sidestep climate change is just another way the Trump administration is undermining science, but HUD’s reluctance to compel states to explicitly say they’re preparing for rising temperatures might actually be a good thing. “There are still states where it’s a political lightning rod to acknowledge that climate change is responsible for damage,” Marion McFadden, head of disaster-recovery grants at HUD during the Obama administration, told Grist. “HUD is focusing on the plans, not the root cause of the need to mitigate.” Whether Republican states accept the reality of climate change or not, they’re starting to prepare for it — which could save lives and prevent economic damage down the line.

“Climate change clearly is the motivation behind Congress making the money available, and HUD is making the funds available to communities to put together their own plans for what they want to do at the state or the local level,” McFadden said. “They have to use the best science and the best data available, they just don’t have to connect the dots explicitly.”

Regardless of HUD’s stance on climate change, it seems as though climate-denying state officials could soon face pushback from their own constituents. In Texas, Republicans control the state house, senate, and governor’s office. But the top elected official in Harris County, Texas’ most populous county, thinks climate change is a major problem for the state. “If we’re serious about breaking the cycle of flooding and recovery we have to shift the paradigm on how we do things, and that means putting science above politics,” Lina Hidalgo, a Democrat, said in a statement to the Times. Two-thirds of Texas voters, Republican and Democratic, are in favor of government action to combat the climate crisis, and a third are strongly in favor of it, a recent poll shows. It might not be long before the Texas officials are forced to start connecting those dots.

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The Trump administration is helping 9 states prepare for climate change

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The Story of the Human Body – Daniel Lieberman

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The Story of the Human Body

Evolution, Health, and Disease

Daniel Lieberman

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: October 1, 2013

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


In this landmark book of popular science, Daniel E. Lieberman—chair of the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and a leader in the field—gives us a lucid and engaging account of how the human body evolved over millions of years, even as it shows how the increasing disparity between the jumble of adaptations in our Stone Age bodies and advancements in the modern world is occasioning this paradox: greater longevity but increased chronic disease.   The Story of the Human Body brilliantly illuminates as never before the major transformations that contributed key adaptations to the body: the rise of bipedalism; the shift to a non-fruit-based diet; the advent of hunting and gathering, leading to our superlative endurance athleticism; the development of a very large brain; and the incipience of cultural proficiencies. Lieberman also elucidates how cultural evolution differs from biological evolution, and how our bodies were further transformed during the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions.   While these ongoing changes have brought about many benefits, they have also created conditions to which our bodies are not entirely adapted, Lieberman argues, resulting in the growing incidence of obesity and new but avoidable diseases, such as type 2 diabetes. Lieberman proposes that many of these chronic illnesses persist and in some cases are intensifying because of “dysevolution,” a pernicious dynamic whereby only the symptoms rather than the causes of these maladies are treated. And finally—provocatively—he advocates the use of evolutionary information to help nudge, push, and sometimes even compel us to create a more salubrious environment. (With charts and line drawings throughout.)

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The Story of the Human Body – Daniel Lieberman

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The Green New Deal is already at work in one Portland neighborhood

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This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It’s a cloudy gray day in Cully, a neighborhood in northeastern Portland, and the air is thick with the smell of burnt tires. The culprit? An asphalt manufacturing plant, where black rubble is piled into one long heaping mound, waiting to be hauled off to areas across the city to fill in old potholes and pave new streets.

Cully is located in one of the city’s most culturally diverse pockets, but the predominantly low-income neighborhood is regularly subject to industrial pollution. Automobile salvage lots, including one that caught fire and spewed toxic chemicals into the air last year, litter entire city blocks with old car parts and used tires.

Across the street from the asphalt plant, a barren parking lot is cordoned off by a chain-link fence. This was formerly the site of the Sugar Shack, a notorious strip club and adult video store that was torn down less than two months ago. After the owners’ arrest in 2015 for tax fraud and running a prostitution ring, the lot became a meeting spot for neighborhood groups and community members. Now, thanks to a coalition of four local organizations that goes by the name Living Cully, the site will soon be home to a new affordable housing complex: Las Adelitas, named in honor of the women soldiers who fought during the Mexican Revolution.

With a large crowd of community members as an audience, the Sugar Shack in Cully neighborhood is destroyed to make room for a new affordable housing development, Las Adelitas.Living Cully

On the surface, this housing complex in one of the most rapidly gentrifying corners of the country will be much like any other development designed to help respond to the national housing crisis. But dig a little deeper, and Las Adelitas has the potential to become a model for much more — a solution not only to the displacement of longtime residents but to the lack of green investment in the low-income communities of color that are already on the front lines of the looming climate change crisis.

Dig deeper still, and Las Adelitas — together with the whole Living Cully framework — begins to look a lot like the much-touted Green New Deal: a preliminary plan touted by Democratic congressional members to create a “green workforce” that will build out green infrastructure and clean energy projects while bringing economic opportunities to vulnerable communities. The long-term success or failure of Living Cully could provide a window into an ambitious national program that’s still in the visionary stage today.

Now a landscape crew supervisor, Mateo Fletes, center, has specialized in habitat restoration at Verde Landscaping.Naim Hasan

When the Great Recession hit in 2008, Mateo Fletes Cortes, who lives in the town next to Cully, lost his job. Originally from Nayarit, Mexico, Fletes Cortes moved to Oregon with his uncle in 2002, picking up work in construction, building out wooden window frames, installing baseboards, and adding finishing touches to buildings and houses. But when the construction industry collapsed, so did Fletes Cortes’ job stability. He’d heard about opportunities in landscaping work but been reluctant to apply, associating landscaping with unskilled low-wage labor. Then he heard about Verde.

The area nonprofit, which is also the lead organizer of Living Cully, operates a landscaping company called Verde Landscaping. The business was started in 2005 in order to train and employ residents to do sustainable landscaping for affordable housing developments built by Hacienda CDC, a Latino Community Development Corporation. Hacienda is also a member organization of Living Cully, and the owner of Las Adelitas. At Verde, wages start at $13.50 an hour and increase to $18.50 by the third year of employment, with paid training sessions and certification provided, as well as medical and dental benefits. So far, the program has trained over 200 area residents in jobs like stormwater management and habitat restoration, according to Verde’s executive director, Tony DeFalco. Ironically, as the economy has picked up in recent years, it’s become harder to recruit labor for the training program, DeFalco said. “You’ve got historically low unemployment, and so it can be really challenging to be competitive.”

Through Verde’s workforce training program, Fletes Cortes took English classes, received industry certifications, and learned that landscaping was indeed for him. “As fate would have it, I started to work in habitat restoration,” something he’d previously known nothing about, Fletes Cortes said. “I saw that [landscaping] wasn’t just about working a lawnmower.” Rather, it could be about restoring wildlife habitats or redirecting stormwater to hydrate vegetation and native plants and shrubs.

These days, Fletes Cortes spends a lot more time in the office, having been promoted to landscape crew supervisor. Bidding for landscaping contracts and checking on equipment and crewmembers keep him busy. He’s been with Verde for a decade, and today, he manages other employees in the workforce program. When the Las Adelitas project gets fully underway, it will be highly skilled workers like Fletes Cortes who carry out the necessary landscaping and subsequent maintenance work for the planned 140 affordable housing units and ground-level commercial spaces.

Brenna Bailey and Linda Dentler volunteer to inventory Living Cully’s mobile home weatherization program supplies.

Living Cully’s motto can seem counterintuitive at first: “Sustainability as an anti-poverty strategy.” After all, it’s now widely believed that the more green investments like parks and vegetation appear in a neighborhood, the more desirable (and expensive) that place becomes, often pushing longtime residents out of their homes and neighborhoods. The phenomenon even has its own trendy name: “green gentrification.” This is certainly a challenge in Cully, where, despite anti-displacement efforts, housing prices are in fact rising. But DeFalco believes that pairing housing projects with environmental investments will be key to the project’s success. “[That] is a really simple recipe for proofing the community against green gentrification,” he said.

That experiment is coming together in Las Adelitas: Verde Builds will construct the building’s green features; green roofs and walls, solar panels, water reuse systems are all being considered in the design. Verde Landscaping will provide local skilled workers to build out green stormwater infrastructure as well as sustainable landscaping. The housing project is expected to be completed by 2020.

In addition to Las Adelitas, Living Cully partners are not only creating energy-efficient affordable housing but also preserving existing low-income housing, through initiatives like a mobile home weatherization program that aims to lower bills of low-income residents who pay a disproportionate amount of their paychecks to utilities. And there are other benefits: That weatherization allows low-income residents to lower their energy use and therefore, their carbon footprint. In August, Portland City Council passed a new zoning designation to protect mobile home parks in Portland from redevelopment, thanks to organizing efforts by Living Cully partners and other area organizations.

As Congress continues to figure out what a Green New Deal might look like on a national scale, Cully could become a valuable and tangible model community to turn to for inspiration. “We are at a place now, where — as a nation — we can no longer make an environmental investment without social and environmental justice outcomes,” DeFalco said. “What we’ve been able to do here at a smaller scale is basically to demonstrate how you do that.”

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The Green New Deal is already at work in one Portland neighborhood

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What to Think About Machines That Think – John Brockman

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What to Think About Machines That Think

Today’s Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence

John Brockman

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: October 6, 2015

Publisher: Harper Perennial

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


Weighing in from the cutting-edge frontiers of science, today’s most forward-thinking minds explore the rise of “machines that think.” Stephen Hawking recently made headlines by noting, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Others, conversely, have trumpeted a new age of “superintelligence” in which smart devices will exponentially extend human capacities. No longer just a matter of science-fiction fantasy (2001, Blade Runner, The Terminator, Her, etc.), it is time to seriously consider the reality of intelligent technology, many forms of which are already being integrated into our daily lives. In that spirit, John Brockman, publisher of Edge. org (“the world’s smartest website” – The Guardian), asked the world’s most influential scientists, philosophers, and artists one of today’s most consequential questions: What do you think about machines that think?

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What to Think About Machines That Think – John Brockman

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A guide to talking about climate change like a Trump official

Imagine you are Brock Long, the man President Trump appointed to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency. You’ve got an interesting challenge on your hands: hammering out FEMA’s long-term strategy while avoiding all mention of “climate change” — an unwritten rule among your colleagues.

The problem is that last year’s pileup of hurricanes, wildfires, and floods completely overwhelmed your agency. And scientists say that these climate change disasters will only get worse. OK — but they’re scientists. Whatever! This is the Trump era.

Under Obama, FEMA’s strategic plan plainly stated that the climate is changing. In the Trump era, that 37-page plan is peppered with the obliquest references to climate change you could dream up: “Rising natural hazard risk. The emerging challenges of 21st century disasters. The changing nature of the risks we face.”

Under the Trump administration, which actively promotes coal and oil while repealing climate policies, “climate change” has systematically disappeared from government websites, social media accounts, and science research, resulting in a culture of censorship.

If you, like a typical Trump administration employee, can’t bring yourself to mention the-change-that-must-not-be-named, try these alternative phrases instead.

‘Pre-disaster mitigation’

FEMA’s new strategy seizes on a delightfully climate-free phrase that appeared just once in the Obama plan. “Pre-disaster mitigation” is employed a full 10 times.

“As the number of people that move to coastal areas increases, and natural and manmade hazards become increasingly complex and difficult to predict, the need for forward leaning action is greater than ever before,” the report reads. “Although the Nation must do more to assess and quantify these increasing risks, we do know that pre-disaster mitigation works.”

It’s like preparing for more extreme weather and rising seas, no climate change involved!

Could FEMA carry out climate policies without acknowledging climate change? It seems unlikely. But then again, the Trump administration has done it before.

Last August, Trump revoked an Obama-era climate policy that made federal building standards stricter in flood-prone places. But after hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria struck, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development brought back a nearly identical rule for states receiving relief.

“All of this is being done without mentioning the words ‘climate change,’ but clearly these are the same types of actions,” Rob Moore, senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Bloomberg at the time.

So maybe there’s more hope for FEMA than you’d think. There’s money behind “pre-disaster mitigation,” after all: an entire FEMA grant program is devoted to it.

‘Weather extremes’

Last August, officials instructed staff at the U.S Department of Agriculture to avoid using “climate change” in their scientific work, suggesting “weather extremes” as a replacement.

The message projected far beyond the USDA. An NPR report found that National Science Foundation scientists, hoping to protect their research from funding cuts, had wiped climate change from summaries of their research grants. While climate change mentions were down 40 percent last year, references to “extreme weather” were on the rise.

“Scientists I know are increasingly using terms like ‘global change’, ‘environmental change’, and ‘extreme weather’, rather than explicitly saying ‘climate change,’” Jonathan Thompson, a senior ecologist at Harvard Forest, told NPR.

Sustainability’ and ‘resilience’

The Trump administration has made sweeping changes to federal government websites, systematically removing mentions of climate change. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), a group tracking these changes, found many instances where agencies shifted from straightforward language to wishy-washy terminology.

Across the Federal Highway Administration site, page banners that once read “Climate Change,” “Climate Adaptation,” and “Climate Mitigation” are now simply “Sustainability.” The “Sustainable Transport and Climate Change Team” became the “Sustainable Transportation and Resilience Team.”

Justin Schell, an EDGI archivist at the library of the University of Michigan, says that Trump officials may find these vague terms more palatable. “Sustainability and resilience can mean lots and lots of things,” he told Grist. “It could be that this gives them a little more flexibility to do the work that they’re trying to do” — which ostensibly has little to do climate change. Yet the words still come across as having a “green” vibe.

The fact that Trump administration officials are adopting words like “sustainability” and “resilience” could be a worrisome sign that those words aren’t as useful as environmentalists thought.

Excerpt from – 

A guide to talking about climate change like a Trump official

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Rocket Billionaires – Tim Fernholz

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Rocket Billionaires

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race

Tim Fernholz

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $14.99

Publish Date: March 20, 2018

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Seller: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company


The inside story of the new race to conquer space, as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos spend billions of their own money to explore the final frontier For the larger‑than‑life personalities now staking their fortunes on the development of rocket ships, the new race to explore space could be a dead end, a lucrative opportunity — or the key to humanity’s salvation.   Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos take center stage in this fast‑paced narrative as they attempt to disrupt the space economy, feed their own egos, and maybe even save the world. We also meet a supporting cast of equally fascinating entrepreneurs, from the irrepressible British mogul Richard Branson to satellite Internet visionary Greg Wyler. All are united in the profound conviction that commercial space transportation will transform our world for the better.   Tim Fernholz’s fly‑on‑the‑wall reporting captures an industry in the midst of disruption, as NASA seeks to preserve its ambitious space exploration program, traditional aerospace firms like Boeing and Lockheed Martin scramble to adapt to new competitors, lobbyists tussle over public funds and lawmakers try to prevent this new space race from sparking global conflict.                With privileged access to top executives at SpaceX, including Musk himself, as well as at Blue Origin, NASA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Orbital ATK, Virgin Galactic, Fernholz spins this high‑stakes marathon into a riveting tale of rivalry and survival.   

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Rocket Billionaires – Tim Fernholz

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