Tag Archives: wind energy

Donald Trump promises to revive the coal industry. He can’t.

by MartinClunies Posted on November 11, 2016

On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump vowed to make the industry great again. “If I win we’re going to bring those miners back,” he said to an audience in West Virginia before donning a miner’s hat and doing a little working-in-the-coal-mine dance.

But for the coal industry — which donated about $223,000 to Trump’s campaign — reality is less rosy. Sure, shares in the bankrupt coal company Peabody soared nearly 50 percent the day after Trump’s victory. But that’s just Wall Street’s knee-jerk response. The fact is, the coal industry’s future is — at best — flat, according to analysts.

Over the last eight years, coal’s portion of the American electricity supply has dropped from half to a third, a result of falling natural gas prices, declining demand from China, and regulatory efforts to reduce carbon emissions. The best Trump can do, says Bloomberg News, is halt coal’s steep decline.

But even though Trump can’t save Big Coal, he can severely damage the planet by enabling the industry. He has promised to dismantle the Clean Power Plan, ignore the Paris climate agreement, and end investments in renewables. Just as coal can’t be revived, the planet can’t either.

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Donald Trump promises to revive the coal industry. He can’t.

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It’s a good day to be a seal, for once.

by KevinJackson Posted on October 25, 2016

According to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), renewable energy, mostly solar and wind, accounted for more than half of all new electric capacity added in the world last year, a 15 percent jump from 2014. Globally, there is now more renewable power capacity than coal power capacity.

Clean energy growth was especially high in China, which was responsible for about 40 percent of all new clean energy capacity. Get this: In China in 2015, two wind turbines were installed every hour.

This surge in renewables, according to the IEA, can be attributed to policy changes, lowered costs, and improvements in technology.

So renewable energy hit some big milestones last year, but it’s still just the beginning: The IEA — which has been accused of underestimating the growth of renewables — expects 28 percent of electricity to come from renewables by 2021, up from 23 percent today.

“I am pleased to see that last year was one of records for renewables and that our projections for growth over the next five years are more optimistic,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. “However, even these higher expectations remain modest compared with the huge untapped potential of renewables.”

So let’s keep this moving, folks.

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It’s a good day to be a seal, for once.

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What the Candidates Might Say Tonight About the World’s Most Important Issue

by PilarErtel48 Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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People pause near a bus adorned with large photos of candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump before the first presidential debate. Mary Altaffer/AP

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

Climate change is a grave threat to our future, but it probably won’t come up at Monday’s presidential debate. Topics for the event include “Securing America,” and although you’d think issues of national security might involve climate change (the military certainly does), if history is any indication, it likely won’t get mentioned at all.

But if it does get the attention it deserves, here’s where Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton stand:

Dirty energy: Clinton supports some natural gas extraction on public lands, is against offshore drilling in the Arctic and the Atlantic, and has pledged $30 billion to provide suffering coal communities with health care, education, and job retraining as we move away from coal as a source of energy.

Trump has promised to boost coal production, ease environmental regulations, open federal lands to oil and gas extraction, and increase permits for oil pipelines. He also is considering appointing an oil executive to head the Department of Interior and a fracking mogul to lead the Department of Energy.

Clean energy: Clinton has said she would install more than half a billion solar panels in the United States by the end of her first term, and that under her presidency, we will generate enough clean energy to power every home in America by 2027.

Trump has said wind power is a great killer of birds (it’s not) and that solar is too expensive to be a viable source of energy, despite the fact that the cost of solar has now reached record lows—and with proper government investment, it would get even cheaper. Trump also objects to Obama’s signature environmental legislation, the Clean Power Plan, as well as the Paris Climate Accord, which he says he would cancel.

Environmental justice: After a debate in Flint, Michigan, in April, Clinton said she would require federal agencies to devise plans to deal with lead poisoning and other environmental justice issues, and she pledged to clean up more than 450,000 polluted sites around the United States.

Trump, on the other hand, mocked the Democratic National Committee for including climate justice in the party’s platform, and has previously vowed to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency—or, as he calls it, “the Department of Environmental”—although he’s recently backtracked on that particular idea.

Fossil fuel donations: While Republican presidential candidates can usually count on generous support from the fossil fuel industry, this year is the exception. Between both individual and corporation donations, Clinton has taken nearly twice as much from Big Oil as Trump, and some oil execs may even vote for her. Looks like we can add this to the list of things the great race of 2016 has upended.

Third and fourth party candidates Jill Stein and Gary Johnson won’t be at the debate Monday night, which is too bad, because they tend to have the most interesting answers on climate change…and everything else.

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What the Candidates Might Say Tonight About the World’s Most Important Issue

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America’s First Offshore Wind Farm May Power Up a New Industry

by Myrna Posted on August 22, 2016

A just-completed project off the coast of Rhode Island, though relatively tiny, is at the forefront of a sea-based transition to renewable energy. View article:  America’s First Offshore Wind Farm May Power Up a New Industry ; ; ;

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America’s First Offshore Wind Farm May Power Up a New Industry

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Are enormous toilet plungers the key to cheap wind power?

by Georgiana32J Posted on July 26, 2016

Suckers

Are enormous toilet plungers the key to cheap wind power?

By on Jul 26, 2016 4:16 pmShare

The coolest new innovation in offshore wind energy right now is, essentially, a giant toilet plunger. Put enough of these plungers together and they could help power Detroit, Chicago and the other metropolises of the Midwest.

Lake Erie Energy Development and Fred Olsen Renewables, the European energy company, plan on building a wind installation with the help of these toilet plungers, aiming for six 50-foot high turbines in Lake Erie, seven miles off the coast of Cleveland.

Putting wind turbines in the Great Lakes instead of on Midwestern farmland makes plenty of sense. Compared to farmland, underwater land is cheap. There’s also more wind on the water, because there are no inconvenient trees or buildings in the way. The Great Lakes are freshwater, so mechanical parts won’t wear down as fast as they would in the ocean’s saltwater. And big cities surround the Great Lakes, which makes it easy to connect a new installation to a pre-existing power plant.

The toilet plunger method (more formally known as the “Mono Bucket”) is an example of how a technological game-changer can often be incredibly low tech. Imagine a bunch of giant plungers in a lake. When the plungers descend, the water trapped in the bottom is pushed out, creating a vacuum. The vacuum pulls the plunger down to the lake bed and anchors it. This provides a solid base for a wind turbine and takes much less time than the standard method of using pile drivers to push concrete-filled steel pipes into the ground. It’s also less environmentally destructive.

This “Icebreaker” project  — a nod to the ice floes that dot Lake Erie in the winter — is expected to generate 20 megawatts by the fall of 2018. But the potential for expanding this project is enormous. The Great Lakes have one-fifth of the country’s impressive but unused offshore wind energy, a mind-boggling 700 gigawatts, enough to power as many as 525 million households, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. That’s nearly four times as much energy as U.S. households currently use.

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Are enormous toilet plungers the key to cheap wind power?

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“Rattled” by Trump, G7 nations eager to move up timeline for the Paris climate deal

by MarylouOfficer Posted on May 27, 2016

“Rattled” by Trump, G7 nations eager to move up timeline for the Paris climate deal

By on May 27, 2016Share

This week, leaders of the world’s wealthiest developed countries and the E.U., the G7, met in Japan, where they agreed to expedite the Paris climate agreement so it enters into force by the end of the year.

Also on the discussion table: Donald Trump.

He was difficult to avoid, after all. On Thursday, the professional Twitter user delivered a lengthy speech on energy policy, in which he doubled down on his commitment to “cancel the Paris climate agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.”

Seventeen countries have currently ratified the Paris agreement. To enter into effect, it needs ratification by 55 countries representing 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. None of the G7 members have yet ratified or otherwise acceded the agreement (though they have signed it, and China and the United States have promised to do so by the end of the year).

A President Trump wouldn’t have an easy time “canceling” the Paris agreement, at least not once it enters into force. Still, President Obama said at the summit that G7 leaders were “rattled” by Trump “and for good reason.”

Obama also said the G7 was “surprised by the Republican nominee” and his apparent ignorance of foreign affairs. Aren’t we all.

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“Rattled” by Trump, G7 nations eager to move up timeline for the Paris climate deal

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Nestlé’s bright idea: a water bottling plant in the desert

by TamikaCsi5 Posted on May 27, 2016

Nestlé’s bright idea: a water bottling plant in the desert

By on May 27, 2016Share

The world’s biggest water bottler is entering new territory: bone-dry Phoenix, Ariz., in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. The Arizona Republic reports that Nestlé plans to open a $35 million water bottling plant in the city that would produce 264 million half-liter bottles of water per year.

This news comes around the same time that Lake Mead (which supplies water to 25 million people in Arizona, California, and Nevada) just hit its lowest levels ever. Phoenix officials insist that the city has more water than it needs at the moment thanks to its supply from the Colorado River. No matter that the river is slowly emptying due to climate change!

That’s just one part of Nestlé’s water problems in the West. Last week, Oregon voters approved the nation’s first ban on commercial water bottling in Hood River County, effectively shutting down the corporation’s proposal to open its first bottling facility in the Pacific Northwest. And in California, Nestlé is currently under investigation for bottling water from a national forest, despite claiming that its water rights there date back to the 1800s.

You wouldn’t know it from the company’s actions, but Nestlé’s execs are actually pretty freaked out about water shortages. A 2009 leaked cable revealed that Nestlé predicted one-third of people worldwide would be affected by water scarcity by 2025, noting that water problems would be particularly severe in the western United States.

In the face of drought and dwindling freshwater resources, the irony of bottling water in a desert is … almost too much to be believed. But crazier shit has definitely happened!

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Nestlé’s bright idea: a water bottling plant in the desert

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Trump now sounds like every other right-wing Republican on energy — well, almost

by MarguerU84 Posted on May 27, 2016

Trump now sounds like every other right-wing Republican on energy — well, almost

By on May 27, 2016 12:01 amShare

Donald Trump has sold himself as a different kind of Republican, but in his first energy policy speech on Thursday, he adopted the same tired, old energy ideas that have been trotted out by the GOP establishment for years. The only difference: Trump doesn’t actually understand the issues at play, so he avoided specifics and made absurd, impossible-to-keep promises.

Trump was not the fossil fuel industry’s preferred candidate. Primary opponents who had  proven their deference to big business, such as Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, were considered a safer bet by the oil, gas, and coal barons. Trump, with no real ideology and a tendency to flip-flop, was seen as more of a wildcard. Still, I predicted in March that if Trump locked up the nomination, he would adopt the traditional Republican energy agenda, just as once-moderate Mitt Romney had in 2012. And that’s exactly what Trump has now done.

We got a hint that Trump was headed in this direction when he brought on oil-loving Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) as his energy policy advisor earlier this month. Cramer has an extremely anti-environment record, including a lifetime voting score of 1 percent from the League of Conservation Voters.

Then, last week, Trump met with and sucked up to Bob Murray, CEO of Murray Energy, a coal mining company. Murray is such a staunch Republican that he is alleged to have pressured employees to donate to Romney’s 2012 campaign. Massey emerged from that meeting to say he was backing Trump, but that even he thinks Trump’s grandiose promises to bring back coal are impossible. (Trump also revealed that he doesn’t know what liquefied natural gas is.)

Saying all the right-wing stuff, sorta

In his speech at an oil industry conference in heavily-fracked North Dakota on Thursday, Trump called for much less regulation and much more drilling, fracking, and mining. But, in typical Trump fashion, he took things a step further than most Republicans do. In 2012, Romney called, nonsensically, for “North American energy independence.” Trump, though, doesn’t want Canada intruding on his effort to make America great again, so he said, “Under my presidency, we will accomplish complete American energy independence.” Never mind that “energy independence,” North American or otherwise, is impossible as long as we depend on fossil fuels that can be sold on the global market. Trump said he would ensure that we are “no longer at the mercy of global markets,” but more domestic drilling won’t free us from the tyranny of international markets unless we nationalize all of the oil companies and force them to sell only to Americans. Otherwise, rising demand in Asia or supply disruptions in the Middle East will continue to affect the price of gasoline.

Trump put his own spin on the Keystone XL issue too. He got the party line right when he said that he would “absolutely” approve the pipeline, but then he added that he would negotiate “a better deal.” The U.S. should get a “piece of the profits” from Keystone, he said. “That’s how we’re gonna make our country rich again.” That sort of kickback scheme may have worked when Trump was allegedly cutting deals with mafia-run construction outfits as a New York City developer, but there is no current mechanism for it under U.S. law.

He also promised “energy reform that creates trillions of dollars in wealth.” However he came up with that ridiculous number, he might as well have pulled it out of thin air. The only source he cited for the huge economic benefits of environmental deregulation was the Institute for Energy Research, a conservative advocacy organization founded by Charles Koch and run by a former Enron executive.

Trump’s pledge that in his first 100 days in office he would, “rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions including the Climate Action Plan” also offered political talking points rather than thoughtful policymaking. The Climate Action Plan is not an executive action, but a collection of actions, some of which are EPA rules, like the Clean Power Plan. It’s not clear which agency would repeal those rules if he first abolished the EPA, as he proposes. And removing those rules would be vulnerable in court without Congress first getting rid of the Clean Air Act and other legislation that requires the government to regulate pollutants.

Trump’s new energy agenda is all Republican politics without even the patina of policy seriousness offered by some more experienced politicians.

Playing to two wings of the party

Trump’s energy speech was all about holding the Republican coalition together: reaching out to the fossil fuel lobby while continuing to appeal to his rural, white, Christian base. In the primaries, Trump was the candidate of the party’s unwashed masses. Now he has to win over the elite business wing, especially now that he is raising money from them for his general election campaign. In a press conference before his speech, he gave repeated shoutouts to Harold Hamm, a North Dakota businessman who has made billions in oil and gas drilling and donated heavily to Republican campaigns.

Then he made his overture to the white working class by praising coal miners and their way of life. “The miners, they’re incredible people. I asked a couple of them, ‘Why don’t you go into some other profession?’ And they said, ‘We love going after coal.’” Trump’s pro-coal stance is so transparently political rather than based on any serious policy engagement that he just says coal is great because miners are great. And miners are great because they “love going after coal.” It’s circular logic. And like Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” it defines America’s past as its peak.

Likewise, Trump’s vow to undermine international climate negotiations — “We’re going to cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs” — is as much a statement of nationalist, anti-U.N. resentment as anything to do with energy or environmental policy. It doesn’t matter that he wouldn’t be able to unilaterally pull the U.S. out of the deal.

Trump’s energy speech on Thursday demonstrated two things: he’s trying to reassure the GOP establishment that he will be a team player their economic agenda but he still has no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to energy policy. But if he becomes president, he’ll find out the hard way that we can’t drill our way to “energy independence.”

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Trump now sounds like every other right-wing Republican on energy — well, almost

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Trump just wants to save the birds, you guys

by ElkeFarrell Posted on May 26, 2016

Trump just wants to save the birds, you guys

By on May 26, 2016Share

Donald J. Trump is for the birds.

Speaking to oil and gas interests in Bismarck, N.D., on Thursday, the presumptive Republican nominee made clear his thoughts on two energy-policy cornerstones: renewable energy and our feathered friends.

Trump expressed disdain with the Department of Justice, which “filed a lawsuit against seven North Dakota oil companies for the death of 28 birds, while the administration fast-tracked wind projects that kill more than a million birds a year.”

“Far more than a million birds,” he clarified.

DOJ did file these charges in 2011. It has also targeted wind developers under the same legislation, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

As for the million-bird figure, the Fish and Wildlife Service estimates the number is likely closer to 500,000. Which is a lot of birds — but for reference, oil and gas kill around the same amount, and the coal industry snuffs out close to 8 million birds annually.

The real estate developer has never been the biggest fan of wind farms:

Except when he’s talking to clean-energy advocates: “It’s an amazing thing when you think — you know, where they can, out of nowhere, out of the wind, they make energy,” he mused to an Iowa voter late last year.

The same line-straddling appeared in Trump’s remarks on solar.

“The problem with solar is it’s very expensive,” he said a month after the world reached several tipping points for competitive renewable energy.

“I know a lot about solar,” he said in a press conference earlier on Thursday. We’re still waiting to find out what he meant.

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Trump just wants to save the birds, you guys

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It’s official: This summer will be a miserable inferno

by CamilleJeffrey Posted on May 26, 2016

It’s official: This summer will be a miserable inferno

By on May 26, 2016Share

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) has released its outlook for summer temperatures, and, in the words of the American poet Nelly: It’s getting hot in herre.

Temperatures all across the country are facing increased odds for well above average summer temps: From Seattle to Sag Harbor, boob sweat and swamp ass will abound. The only exceptions in these United States are South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas — so pack your bags, babies! We’re heading to Omaha.

NOAA

Beside the basic discomfort of hot-as-balls weather, exceptionally high temperatures are bad news for things like drought, wildfire, and curly hair. This could mean an especially difficult year for parts of California and the Southwest that are already suffering from years of high temps and low precipitation.

Howard Diamond, scientist at NOAA, put it this way:

“Yes, parts of California already under severe drought could again be in for more of the same.” But, he adds, “Please also remember that the climate outlooks below for June-July-August are just that — outlooks. They are not specific forecasts, but based on past climatology, and models give us a possible snapshot of what conditions will most likely be like.”

In other words, it looks bad, but there’s always a chance that the predictions are off and the drought is over and there will be no more wildfires and we’ll all be blissfully basking in 70 degree days for the next three months.

Here’s hoping.

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It’s official: This summer will be a miserable inferno

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