This post excerpts energy and climate material from the Media Balance Newsletter, a free fortnightly published by physicist John Droz Jr., founder of the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions. Droz is also the author of the popular Substack Critically Thinking About Select Societal Issues.
Greed Energy Economics:
*** Blue States, High Rates
Electricity Rate Increases
Unreliables: Energy Health and Ecosystem Consequences:
Minnesota green energy program fined for killing bald eagle: ‘National treasure’
Conservation Group Sues, Claims Feds Hiding Wyoming Wind Turbine Eagle Deaths
Unreliables (General):
*** Transition & Redundancy
*** Report: The Intrinsic Danger of Siting Utility Scale Lithium Based Energy Storage Systems In Densely Populated Areas
Charging ahead: $500M Dunkirk battery storage project seeks tax assistance
Letter to DOE Sec Wright re the Senate considering Carbon Taxes (!)…
“For a while, let’s eat a cold dinner here and there. Continuity costs too much. Climate change kills, and it kills vulnerable people first. Intermittency saves lives, and it saves vulnerable people first. Let the pause take its place in continuous climate activism. (David Hughes, below)
In case you missed it (I did), here is a trial balloon from several years ago for us (normal folk) to accept the shortcomings of wind and solar and promote power outages as social policy. Rich and poor. Brown, black, white. Old and young.
“To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity,” by David Hughes (Boston Review: October 2020) came with the subtitle, “Waiting to ensure uninterrupted power for everyone as we transition away from fossil fuels will cost too much time—and too many lives.”…
Continue Reading“My way of dealing with doom-mongers is to let the person talk for a while and then I ask, gently: “Does feeling this way make you more effective?” – Amory Lovins
Mark Trexler, “Pushing Climate Boulders Uphill Since the 1980s,” posted on social media:
Our biggest climate risk failure hasn’t been inadequate technology or funding. It’s been our reliance for 40 years on predictable models in a chaotic climate system!
Welcome to Deep Ecology, the belief that Nature is optimal and fragile and any human perturbation is bad, even catastrophic. Trexler then lists his examples:
… Continue ReadingBack in 1987, Wallace Broecker warned in Nature about “unpleasant surprises in the greenhouse” – arguing that Earth’s climate wasn’t a gentle dial, but a roulette wheel capable of sudden, dramatic shifts.
That was almost 40 years ago.