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Science > shared nonsense on internet created by Big Oil to deny their environmental destruction.

#ClimateCrisis

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2020′s “weather disasters”

These infographics are derived from a story entitled, “World hammered by record 50 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2020″ and published by Yale Climate Connections.

Billion-dollar weather disasters 1992 – 2020, as cataloged by Aon. (Image credit: Jeff Masters)

U.S. weather disasters costing at least $1 billion in 2020. (Image credit: NOAA)

Global economic costs from weather-related disasters (adjusted for inflation), 1950-2020. Damages in 2020 were fifth-highest on record. (Image credit: Aon 2020 annual report)

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Garbage

Been reading about America’s garbage problem. We produce SO MUCH waste and most of it is not handled appropriately: Our electronic waste is toxic and, like most of our recyclables, not actually recycled. A large part of this is cost: Cities often can’t afford to properly dispose of our waste.

So, here’s my idea: Garbage tax.

Anytime you buy something, the price must include the cost to properly dispose of that item.

If moving newspaper from trash to recycling, and the process of recycling, costs around a $0.25/ newspaper, then newspapers would cost $.25 cents more. If sorting and recycling a phone costs $15, then that would be added to the cost. You get the idea.

I would also have the tax be higher for non-sustainable products, and the tax be lower for products depending on their recycling rate. So cheap plastic products that can’t be reused sustainably would have a higher tax. Meanwhile, things that are recycled at high rates would see their tax lessened by that rate. E.g. If aluminum/tin cans are recycled at a 50% rate, then their garbage tax would be reduced by 50%. (This would be based on state or municipal rates of recycling.)

This would: 1. Ensure that we can pay to treat all our waste 2. Ensure that all our waste is treated properly (e.g. actually recycling what can be recycled) 3. Ensure that people pay for their own garbage 4. Incentivize companies and individuals to use sustainable materials 5. Incentivize creation of better garbage-handling machines, which can then reduce the cost to recycle an item, and thereby reduce the cost of the tax

I would also note that this isn’t some hippie pipedream. This follows directly from economic principles of externalities. So whether you’re politically on the right or the left, you should be cool with this idea.

P.s. Lots of businesses throw out merchandise that they can’t sell. Maybe we could waive the garbage tax, or some percentage of it, if the merchandise is instead donated. Yes, this would reduce some garbage tax revenue, but it would also reduce waste and help the poor.

PPs. Ok, so I just found out that this is a popular idea, commonly called EPR (extended producer responsibility). Both Maine and Massachusetts have tried to pass legislation which broadly pushes for this type of action. (x, x, x) .

This means that we’re even closer to making this happen. We just need to vote for the right people and keep applying pressure to our politicians.

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A record 22 major natural disasters struck the US in 2020, each one causing at least $1 billion in damages, according to a new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration analysis published on Friday.

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Solar and wind power are on pace to overtake coal in the next five years as the world’s largest producer of global electricity, according to the International Energy Agency.

Coal’s five-decade-long domination will cede in 2025, as investments into renewable energy ramp up among the world’s largest countries in an effort to reduce carbon emissions.

The IEA report said, ‘The COVID-19 crisis is hurting — but not halting — global renewable energy growth,’ noting that 'renewable markets, especially electricity-generating technologies, have already shown their resilience to the crisis.’

IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said, 'Renewable power is defying the difficulties caused by the pandemic, showing robust growth while other fuels struggle, the resilience and positive prospects of the sector are clearly reflected by continued strong appetite from investors — and the future looks even brighter with new capacity additions on course to set fresh records this year and next.’

The report noted that almost 90% of newly generated electricity in 2020 will be renewable and will only continue to accelerate, making renewables the world’s largest power source by 2025.

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Excerpt from this story from Politico:

President-elect Joe Biden has warned that climate change will pose future threats for the U.S. military as it worsens unrest in volatile regions and creates new dangers to its facilities from rising seas, powerful storms and harsh droughts.

But the Defense Department also offers a silver lining on climate change for the new president: a huge appetite for clean energy sources and a massive budget to help accelerate the development of new technologies needed to curb greenhouse gases and harden infrastructure to protect against worsening climate impacts.

Biden has called climate change an “existential threat” and promised to spend $2 trillion to expand clean energy and build resilient facilities over the next four years. But that ambitious plan will need approval from Congress — a heavy lift that’s likely to draw resistance from Republicans who may control the Senate and block any major green plans. That’s where the Pentagon can provide some help.

The Pentagon has long been a crucial customer for clean energy technologies, driving the country’s adoption of solar power and the rollout of mobile batteries. Now, its $700 billion budget may offer an opportunity for the Biden administration to help scale-up industries such as those producing electric vehicles and advanced batteries.

“Start with the fact the Department of Defense is the single largest energy user,” said Sherri Goodman, a deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security under Obama and now a senior fellow at the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, a think tank. “What it does and how it uses its energy, how it reduces its emissions, makes its bases more resilient to climate threats — that helps all America by learn by example.”

Though its energy consumption has been declining for years, the Defense Department is still by far the largest energy user in the federal government — accounting for more than three-quarters of total government energy usage and 15 times the energy consumption of the Post Office, the No. 2 consumer — and it emits about 1 percent of the total U.S. carbon emissions.

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For decades, scientists have talked about so-called “committed warming” or the increase in future temperature based on past carbon dioxide emissions that stay in the atmosphere for well over a century. It’s like the distance a speeding car travels after the brakes are applied.

But Monday’s study in the journal Nature Climate Change calculates that a bit differently and now figures the carbon pollution already put in the air will push global temperatures to about 2.3 degrees Celsius (4.1 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times.

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River health is important to a large number of people in the U.S. and many other countries, yet, as the researchers in this new effort note, there has been little testing of river water to monitor pollution or sediment levels. To learn more about the health of U.S. rivers in general, the researchers obtained and studied 235,000 satellite images of the U.S. taken over the years 1984 to 2018. They compared satellite imagery over 34 years for most of the major rivers at least 60 meters wide in the U.S. In all, the team used 16 million measurements that involved 108,000 kilometers of river.

The researchers found that approximately one-third of all of the major rivers have changed color over the past 34 years. Half of them showed rivers that were mostly yellow—a sign that they were heavily laden with sediment—others were mostly green—an indication of large amounts of algae. Just 8% of the satellite pictures showed rivers that were mostly blue.

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“Our results show that cold-blooded animals can suffer from overheating even if they live far up in the northern hemisphere, and that their ability to buffer their body temperature against rising external temperatures is limited. The results also challenge a popular theory that animals’ plasticity, i. e. their individual flexibility, can help them survive under harsher environmental conditions, such as during heat waves,” says Erik Svensson.

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Excerpt from this story from the Wall Street Journal:

The pandemic has triggered the largest revision to the value of the oil industry’s assets in at least a decade, as companies sour on costly projects amid the prospect of low prices for years.

Oil-and-gas companies in North America and Europe wrote down roughly $145 billion combined in the first three quarters of 2020, the most for that nine-month period since at least 2010, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. That total significantly surpassed write-downs taken over the same periods in 2015 and 2016, during the last oil bust, and is equivalent to roughly 10% of the companies’ collective market value.

Companies across the major Western economies are writing down more of their assets during the coronavirus pandemic than they have in years. But the oil industry has written down more than any other major segment of the economy, following an unprecedented collapse in global energy demand, according to an analysis of data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Oil producers frequently write down assets when commodity prices crash, as cash flows from oil-and-gas properties diminish. This year’s industrywide reappraisal is among its starkest ever because oil companies also face longer-term uncertainty over future demand for their main products amid the rise of electric cars, the proliferation of renewable energy and growing concern about the lasting impact of climate change.

The Journal’s analysis reviewed data from S&P Global Market Intelligence, Evaluate Energy Ltd. and IHS Markit on impairments taken by major oil companies and independent oil producers with a market value of more than $1 billion based in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

Regina Mayor, who leads KPMG’s energy practice, said the write-downs represent not only the diminished short-term value of the assets but many companies’ belief that oil prices may never fully recover.

“They are coming to grips with the fact that demand for the product will decline, and the write-downs are a harbinger of that,” Ms. Mayor said.

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Plenty is an ag-tech startup in San Francisco, co-founded by Nate Storey, that is reinventing farms and farming. Storey, who is also the company’s chief science officer, says the future of farms is vertical and indoors because that way, the food can grow anywhere in the world, year-round; and the…

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Life circle of plastic: -We buy it -We throw it away -We eat it

https://www.instagram.com/p/CJOYLmynXnc/?igshid=1rjnul05680gh

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Excerpt from this story from Truthout:

Lisa Finley-DeVille started drinking bottled water around the same time her friend’s horses began to get sick and die. A half decade ago on the Fort Berthold Reservation in western North Dakota, Deville drove up to see her friend in the New Town area. The horses looked dehydrated and brittle, just skin and bones. They’re eating, but it’s like they’re not eating, her friend told her.

It was down the hill, at the pond the horses drank from, where the answer lurked. She believes wastewater from nearby oil and gas production leaked there, where the horses drank it up, poisoned. “I’m always worried,” Finley-Deville says. “This is why we don’t drink the water.”

Finley-DeVille is a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, known as the Three Affiliated Tribes in Fort Berthold. Just a half mile (800 meters) from her house, in the town of Mandaree, oil and gas are produced by hydraulic fracturing (fracking).

Legal loopholes that exempt fracking from elements of the Safe Drinking Water Act and EPA hazardous waste laws are endangering surrounding communities, and putting drinking water at risk of contamination. Now, national, state, and local grassroots efforts, some led by Finley-DeVille, are calling for change.

“There’s a large amount of the waste from the different parts of the oil and gas cycle,” says Amy Mall, a senior advocate at NRDC and consultant on the Earthworks report. “The waste can be very toxic and it also can leak or spill or otherwise get into the environment. So there are concerns about how the waste is regulated, whether it’s being regulated in a way that is adequately protective to human health.”

One concern is an exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act, known as the Halliburton loophole, that exempts industry from having to disclose the chemicals it uses in fracking and prevented the EPA from regulating fracking fluids. The loophole was established in an energy bill passed by the Bush/Cheney administration in 2005 and has been in effect ever since.

The oil and gas industry is also exempt from federal EPA hazardous waste regulations and Superfund regulations, which exclude waste associated with the exploration, development, and production of crude oil and natural gas. Drilling fluids, produced water, and other waste are not disposed of as hazardous and are exempt from the hazardous cleanup process when it comes to spills or leaks. The industry has been exempt from these regulations since the 1970s, when the EPA temporarily proposed that oil and gas waste was not hazardous. This ruling became permanent in 1988 when the EPA determined the cost of treating the waste would slow production.

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Small steps

I recently saw a post asking how to motivate behavioral change to encourage sustainable actions by individuals.  I can’t remember where I saw the post so I can’t respond directly, but I can provide a few ideas here.  Few people will make large lifestyle changes in a short period of time unless they are motivated by a crisis such as a serious health scare.  Making small changes is much easier.  Try choosing one small change and making it a habit.  In a few weeks, when the first change is integrated into your lifestyle, choose another small change.  The small changes will add up over time into a larger meaningful lifestyle change.  The literature I have seen that discusses changing habits emphasizes a few major concepts. The bullet points below are from the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear.  I have also heard good reviews about “Tiny Habits” by BJ Fogg but have not read it.  Both books emphasize making changes in small steps that eventually add up to big changes.

·       Make lifestyle changes in small steps, allowing changes to become familiar habits before adding more changes.  

·       Make it easy to perform habits you want to encourage.  For example, if you want to turn off a group of electronics that use vampire energy in standby mode, put all of them on a single power strip that is easy to reach.  Then you can just turn off the power strip.  If you want to walk to work, set your alarm to get up earlier and pack your bag the night before.  

·       Make the desirable changes attractive.  Pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.  This helps remind you as well as providing a reward.

·       Make it harder to perform habits you want to discourage.  

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Vehicle Battery Prices Plummeted in 2020, Approaching Cost-Parity with Gasoline (Inside Climate News)

The falling price of solar panels is just one part of a larger economic shift that is supercharging the transition to clean energy. Another big part is the falling price of batteries. Bloomberg NEF said Wednesday that the global average price for lithium-ion battery packs was $137 per kilowatt-hour this year, down from $157 per kilowatt-hour in 2019, according to the new price survey. While that’s a big decrease, the research firm had projected the average would get to $132 this year. BloombergNEF analysts say they now expect the average to drop to $101 by 2023, close to the $100 level that researchers say will make electric vehicles cost about the same as gasoline vehicles. “This is one of the most remarkable technology stories in the world,” said Colin McKerracher, head of transport analysis for BloombergNEF, on Twitter. “And it doesn’t stop here.” Analysts found examples of batteries that are already selling for less than $100 for electric buses in China. The falling prices of lithium-ion batteries have broad implications for the clean energy transition, reducing the costs of battery storage systems and EVs. The 2020 average price is down 89 percent from the average in 2010, which was more than $1,100 per kilowatt-hour. Prices have fallen because companies are becoming more efficient in their manufacturing methods and gaining economies of scale as the demand for batteries has increased.

BloombergNEF is projecting that the global average will fall to $58 by 2030, a number that would give EVs a large cost advantage.

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Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:

The top plastic polluters of 2020 have been announced, and Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestlé top the list for the third year in a row.

In a new report demanding corporate responsibility for plastic pollution, Break Free From Plastic (BFFP) named the repeat offenders and called them out for what appeared to be negligible progress in curbing the amount of plastic trash they produce despite corporate claims otherwise.

“The title of Top Global Polluters describes the parent companies whose brands were recorded polluting the most places around the world with the greatest amount of plastic waste,” the report’s executive summary noted. “Our 2020 Top Global Polluters remain remarkably consistent with our previous brand audit reports, demonstrating that the same corporations are continuing to pollute the most places with the most single-use plastic.”

Plastic pollution is one of the leading environmental problems of the modern-day. Plastics do not disintegrate or disappear, but instead break up into microplastics that get consumed by the tiniest organisms. These toxins bioaccumulate and move their way up the food chain and into our air, food and water.

“The world’s top polluting corporations claim to be working hard to solve plastic pollution, but instead they are continuing to pump out harmful single-use plastic packaging,” Emma Priestland, Break Free From Plastic’s global campaign coordinator, told The Guardian.

Priestland emphasized that the only way to halt the growing global tide of plastic litter was to stop production, phase out single-use products and implement reuse systems, the news report said.