Renewable Energy

Manchin Poison Pills Buried In Inflation Reduction Act

July 30, 2022 The Center for Biological Diversity. Educate! climate crisis, Congress, Oil and Gas, Renewable Energy

Washington - A proposed climate and energy package would require massive oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, reinstate an illegal 2021 Gulf lease sale and mandate that millions more acres of public lands be offered for leasing before any new solar or wind energy projects could be built on public lands or waters. The provisions, in sections 50264 and 50265, are buried near the end of the 725-page Inflation Reduction Act. The bill was released Wednesday after Sen. Joe Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced they had agreed to the $370 billion package. “This is a climate suicide pact,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s self-defeating to handcuff renewable energy development to massive new oil and gas extraction.

Keeping Cool Without Costing The Earth

July 5, 2022 Rapid Transition Alliance, Resilience. Create! Architecture, climate crisis, extreme heat, Renewable Energy

In May 2022 temperatures in India and Pakistan reached 50°C. Heat this fierce causes chaos to infrastructure, water security and also triggers irreversible cell damage within the human body. The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) reported that this extreme event, which plunged nearly a billion people into heat stress, was made 30 times more likely due to climate change. And with extreme heat comes the need to keep cool. As the heat waves in India and Pakistan showed, the response for those that can afford it, is to buy an air conditioner (AC).

Reality Check: What The Path To A 1.5C World Looks Like

March 23, 2022 Marlowe Hood, Phys.Org. Educate! climate crisis, Environment, Fossil Fuels, Renewable Energy

The world needs to rapidly purge fossil fuels from its energy mix if it is to have any hope of limiting global warming enough to avoid disastrous climate impacts, according to a prominent climate scientist. University of Manchester professor Kevin Anderson is lead author of Tuesday's report from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research detailing how quickly countries must phase-out oil and gas to cap global temperatures at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the more ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement. As the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) meets to approve a handbook for eliminating carbon pollution, Anderson talked to AFP about the deep social change needed to address the climate crisis, the tendency to sugar-coat the science, and the dangers of short-term politics.

France Has A Nuclear Habit It Just Cannot Kick

November 5, 2021 Vijay Prashad, People's Dispatch. Educate! France, Nuclear Power, Renewable Energy, Wars and Militarism

On July 28, French President Emmanuel Macron landed in Tahiti and said that France owed a “debt” to French Polynesia. The debt was related to approximately 200 nuclear tests France conducted in the 118 islands and atolls that comprise this part of the central South Pacific, which France has controlled since 1842. These tests were conducted between 1966 and 1996. Macron did not apologize for the environmental and human damage caused by these tests. He remained stoic, acknowledging that the tests were not “clean.” “I think it’s true that we wouldn’t have done these same tests in the Creuse or in Brittany,” he said, referring to parts of territorial France. “We did it here because it was farther away, because it was lost in the middle of the Pacific.”

650 Groups Tell Congress: Leave Dirty Power Out Of Clean Electricity Standard

May 12, 2021 the Center for Biological Diversity. Create! Biden administration, climate crisis, Congress, Renewable Energy

Washington, DC— More than 650 national advocacy and grassroots groups sent a letter today calling on Congress to develop a truly clean, renewable and just energy standard for electricity as part of an evolving infrastructure package. To meet its climate goals, the Biden administration is expected to back a national Clean Electricity Standard, or CES, which some advocates argue can pass under existing budget reconciliation rules. But existing CES proposals from prominent Democrats allow for filthy and false solutions such as fracked gas, carbon capture and storage, and factory farm biogas, warn the groups, which include Indigenous Environmental Network, Friends of the Earth, the Center for Biological Diversity, Food & Water Watch, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, California Environmental Justice Alliance, Oil Change International and The Democracy Collaborative.

Thursday: Day Of Action Targeting The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission

February 17, 2021 Beyond Extreme Energy, Popular Resistance. Resist! climate crisis, Energy, FERC, Fossil Fuels, Renewable Energy

Something new is happening this Thursday, February 18 at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). A person will be chairing a FERC Commissioners meeting who has written publicly that he appreciates why some consider FERC to be a rubber-stamp agency. Richard Glick has done more than this in his three-plus years as a FERC Commissioner. He has openly opposed and written strong dissents, primarily but not only on climate grounds, to majority decisions approving new gas pipelines, LNG terminals and compressor stations. Those dissents likely helped lead the DC Court of Appeals to strike down last year, FERC’s “Kafkaesque” (their words) decades-long abuse of...

Decoding The Hype Behind The Natural Gas Industry’s Hydrogen Push

January 18, 2021 Justin Mikulka, Nation of Change. Educate! Energy, Fracked Gas, Hydrogen, Renewable Energy

It seems like nearly every day another hopeful article touts the potential of using hydrogen as a fuel to tackle climate change. What’s known as “green hydrogen” — which relies on renewable power for production — is getting the bulk of that attention. In December, ABC News ran an article with the headline “Why green hydrogen is the renewable energy source to watch in 2021.” And as Bloomberg has reported, Airbus is betting big on hydrogen as a fuel for its planes. Meanwhile, South Korea’s SK Global just announced an investment in U.S. hydrogen fuel cell producer Plug Power; in the past year, the company’s stock value has increased ten-fold.

Part I: The Unannounced Death Of The Green New Deal

September 12, 2020 Michael Swifte, Wrong Kind of Green. Educate! climate crisis, Democrats, Green New Deal, Renewable Energy

You could say that the Green New Deal died when the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force recommendations came through, or perhaps that was the moment we knew that the Jemez Principles and the principles of a Just Transition had been abandoned more than a year before? Perhaps they were abandoned shortly after John Washington’s straight forward, perfectly articulated warning to New Consensus? Or perhaps they were abandoned as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey prepared the Green New Deal resolution with it’s “clean” and “net zero” language replacing the language of fossil fuel phase outs and 100% Renewables?

On Contact: Planet Of The Humans

June 21, 2020 Chris Hedges, RT. Resistance Report climate crisis, Divestment, Environmental Movement, Renewable Energy

In this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges discusses the criticism and censorship of Michael Moore's film Planet of the Humans with the director, Jeff Gibbs. "Perhaps it's a form of denial to actually instead of understanding the - this civilization, the industrial civilization, the human species - we're hitting limits and we're gonna crash. We're instead hoping that this fantasy will save us. And as I discovered, and I'm not saying that all environmental leaders are on the take, but one of the things our critics ignore is that the shocking list of things that you when you divest from fossil fuels and you invest in supposedly sustainable, you wind up investing in Big Ag, you wind up investing in mining and banks and all this - that part of the film was hardly talked about.

While Pushing Big Oil Bailouts, Trump Slaps Wind And Solar With $50 Million In Old Rent Bills

May 19, 2020 Julia Conley, Commondreams. Educate! Corporate Bailout, Oil and Gas, Renewable Energy, Rent

While giving fossil fuel companies access to relief funds ostensibly meant for small businesses struggling due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump administration on Monday slapped solar and wind power firms with retroactive rent bills dating back two years. The Interior Department is demanding rent payments from renewable energy companies operating on federal lands, two years after it suspended rent for the operators as it investigated whether the Obama administration had charged too much. The administration plans to collect $50 million in rent this year from 96 companies operating on federal property—the same amount of money that a recent report showed is going to fossil fuel companies in loans through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).

Why The Oil And Gas Industry Will Never Be The Same

May 3, 2020 Marshall Auerback, Brave New Europe. Educate! Energy, Oil and Gas, Renewable Energy, Wall Street

When a staple commodity collapses to negative value it signals that something is clearly amiss in the global economy. When it is a global energy source like crude oil, it does not just signal pain in the oil patch, but an economic dislocation evocative of the Great Depression. Rare is the time when a commodity over which nations have fought wars in the past presents itself as something that traders would literally pay you to take it off their collective hands. To be sure, there are good technical reasons why U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude oil (WTI), the underlying commodity representing the NYMEX’s oil futures contract, actually traded negative in the second half of April, and continued to stay low (even though the June contract has now turned positive).

Movie Review: Planet Of The Humans’ – Transition To Solar And Wind

May 1, 2020 Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute. Educate! climate crisis, Movies, Renewable Energy

A few days ago, Emily Atkin posted a reaction to Michael Moore’s latest film, Planet of the Humans (directed and narrated by Jeff Gibbs), in which she began by admitting that she hadn’t seen the film yet. When writers take that approach, you know there’s already blood in the water. (She has since watched the film and written an actual review. Full disclosure: I’m in the film, included as one of the “good guys.” But I don’t intend to let that fact distort my comments in this review.) The film is controversial because it makes two big claims: first, that renewable energy is a sham; second, that big environmental organizations—by promoting solar and wind power—have sold their souls to billionaire investors. I feel fairly confident commenting on the first of these claims, regarding renewable energy, having spent a year working with David Fridley of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to assess the prospects for a complete transition to solar and wind power.

Film Review: ‘Planet Of Humans’ Misplaces The Blame On Population Growth

April 30, 2020 David Schwartzman, Popular Resistance. Educate! climate crisis, Movies, Overpopulationl, Renewable Energy

This is a very effective but flawed film, which already has been seen on YouTube by 2.5 million when I saw it on April 26. To sum up my review, it combines a very welcome biting critique of “green” capital-driven renewable energy creation and big capital funding/influence on the agendas of major U.S. environmental groups with a reactionary message calling human population growth the driver of an unsustainable planet. The film’s conclusion is that there is a “human presence far beyond sustainability”. It argues that scientists all agree, at least the ones interviewed, that overpopulation is at the root of our environmental crisis. Well, I am a scientist among many others who strongly disagrees with this conclusion, rather that the “cancerous form of capitalism” identified in this film is the root cause.

Native Activists Are Forging A Just Transition To Renewable Energy

March 12, 2020 By Winona LaDuke, Truthout.org Create! Indigenous Peoples, Reform, Renewable Energy

Native activists and youth are shaping a clear vision for the transition necessary to guide us toward an environmentally just future — and there are more of them coming. Nationally, the Sunrise Movement and Indigenous environmental justice groups are overtaking entrenched political power with a breath of fresh air. Democrats are even talking about it.