[TheClimate.Vote] May 22, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest
Richard Pauli
richard at theclimate.vote
Fri May 22 10:01:39 EDT 2020
/*May 22, 2020*/
[promising new solar cell]*
****Cheap Renewable Energy a Step Closer As Next-Generation Solar Cells
Pass Strict International Tests*
Perovskite crystals could underpin cheap renewable energy.
Australian scientists have for the first time produced a new generation
of experimental solar energy cells that pass strict International
Electrotechnical Commission testing standards for heat and humidity.
The research findings, an important step towards commercial viability of
perovskite solar cells, are published today (May 21, 2020) in the
journal Science.
Solar energy systems are now widespread in both industry and domestic
housing. Most current systems rely on silicon to convert sunlight into
useful energy.
However, the energy conversion rate of silicon in solar panels is close
to reaching its natural limits. So, scientists have been exploring new
materials that can be stacked on top of silicon in order to improve
energy conversion rates. One of the most promising materials to date is
a metal halide perovskite, which may even outperform silicon on its own.
"Perovskites are a really promising prospect for solar energy systems,"
said Professor Anita Ho-Baillie, the inaugural John Hooke Chair of
Nanoscience at the University of Sydney. "They are a very inexpensive,
500 times thinner than silicon and are therefore flexible and
ultra-lightweight. They also have tremendous energy enabling properties
and high solar conversion rates."
In experimental form, the past 10 years has seen the performance of
perovskites cells improve from low levels to being able to convert 25.2
percent of energy from the Sun into electricity, comparable to
silicon-cell conversion rates, which took 40 years to achieve...
- -
"Another exciting outcome of our research is that we are able to
stabilize perovskite cells under the harsh International
Electrotechnical Commission standard environmental testing conditions.
Not only did the cells pass the thermal cycling tests, they exceeded the
demanding requirements of damp-heat and humidity-freeze tests as well,"
Professor Ho-Baillie said.
These tests help determine if solar cell modules can withstand the
effects of outdoor operating conditions by exposing them to repeated
temperature cycling between -40 degrees and 85 degrees, as well as
exposure to 85 percent relative humidity...
- -
"We expect this work will contribute to advances for stabilizing
perovskite solar cells, increasing their commercialization prospects,"
Professor Ho-Baillie said.
###
Reference: 21 May 2020, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.aba2412
https://scitechdaily.com/cheap-renewable-energy-a-step-closer-as-next-generation-solar-cells-pass-strict-international-tests/
[funding confusion]
*US critics of stay-at-home orders tied to fossil fuel funding*
ExxonMobil, Koch and Mercer family are past funders of critics of
stay-at-home orders as fossil fuel industry struggles amid lockdowns
Dozens of individuals and groups urging states to reopen amid the
Covid-19 pandemic have historical financial ties to coal and oil and gas
companies and conservative billionaires who have invested in climate
disinformation.
Past funders of the current critics of stay-at-home orders include the
bankrupt coal company Murray Energy and oil giant ExxonMobil, as well as
Koch and Mercer family foundations, according to DeSmog, a group that
tracks the money behind anti-climate-action campaigns.
Some of the contributions tallied are recent and others are at least
five years old or older. ExxonMobil, for example, had broken ties with
two of the groups in this story by 2006. There is no evidence that these
companies and foundations are funding ongoing campaigns to reopen
businesses.
But Brendan DeMelle, executive director of DeSmog, said the "information
echo chamber" of interests downplaying both the climate crisis and the
pandemic would not be what it is today without fossil fuel funding.
"While we don't have direct evidence of specific grant money going for
Covid denial, none of these operations would exist without their support
over the years," DeMelle said...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/21/groups-fossil-fuel-funding-urge-states-reopen-amid-pandemic...
- - -
Joel Zinberg, of CEI, and Richard Rahn – who is chairman of the
Institute for Global Economic Growth and board member of ACCF – have
also criticized stay-at-home orders. Rahn has called Covid-19 the
"Chinese Communist party virus".
CEI received $2.1m from ExxonMobil through 2005 and has taken $200,000
from Murray Energy more recently. ACCF has gotten $1.8m from ExxonMobil
through 2015 and $600,000 from Koch groups through 2015.
ACCF as an organization "has taken no position on the stay-at-home
orders or any prospective timeline for reopening the economy", said the
group's CEO, Mark Bloomfield.
The Heartland Institute, which denies the severity of anthropogenic
climate change, has received $6.7m through 2017 from the Mercer Family
Foundation, as well as $130,000 from coal company Murray Energy. The
group received $25,000 from a Koch foundation for one specific project
and got money from ExxonMobil until 2006.
A Heartland spokesman, Jim Lakely, has argued "leftists" are "stoking
Covid-19 panic" and has called lockdown orders unconstitutional.
"What's the time limit on being labeled 'Koch-funded' or 'Exxon-funded'?
A decade? Two? Also, who cares?" Lakely said. He did not respond to
questions about Mercer funding.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/21/groups-fossil-fuel-funding-urge-states-reopen-amid-pandemic
[not confusing at all]
*Good news: Americans can freak out about coronavirus and climate change
at the same time*
By Shannon Osaka on May 20, 2020
Imagine that you've lost your job. (Since total unemployment claims
skyrocketed to 36 million last week, you may not have to imagine.)
You're not just worried about catching a deadly infectious disease,
you're also anxious about how to pay the bills and how to put food on
the table. Who has the mental space left to care about catastrophic
climate change?
The answer, according to a new report from Yale and George Mason
universities, is a majority of Americans. Even as the coronavirus
pandemic has infected over 1.5 million people in the United States,
two-thirds of Americans are still worried about climate change.
Researchers surveyed 1,029 adults in the U.S. between April 7 and April
14, one of the most intense weeks of the coronavirus crisis. They found
that a record-tying 73 percent of Americans believed that global warming
was happening, and that about six in 10 Americans understand that it's
human-caused.
https://grist.org/climate/good-news-americans-can-freak-out-about-coronavirus-and-climate-change-at-the-same-time/
[Video interview posted May 21]
*Juice Podcast 12: The Machine | with Naomi Klein*
thejuicemedia
Juice Media Podcast 12: in which I have an epic chat with award-winning
author Naomi Klein about the lessons we're learning during this historic
period, the decisions we need to make before the Machine is turned back
on, the coming US election, and more.
You can follow Naomi here: https://twitter.com/NaomiAKlein
Naomi's books and work: https://naomiklein.org
The Leap: https://theleap.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtTyvKKnxtg
- -
[the companion video - surprisingly honest and informative - sarcastic too]
*Honest Government Ad: The Machine.* Watch it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWl7kQZHZE0
["Send help"?]
[Video]
*Noam Chomsky on Trump, COVID-19, climate change, and the economy*
"A level of sadism that's hard to describe" -- that's how legendary
linguist and intellectual Noam Chomsky describes the U.S. Trump
administration's response to the global coronavirus pandemic, known as
COVID-19.
Sitting down on for a Zoom conversation with Canada's National Observer
editor-in-chief Linda Solomon-Wood and 700 audience participants,
Chomsky gave a harsh rebuke of President Trump while outlining how the
world can emerge from the virus a better, safe and more just society...
- -
*The looming climate crisis*
Chomsky said we will eventually emerge from the pandemic "at severe
cost." But like jumping out of the frying pain into the fire, humanity
would have to confront the other, inescapable problem of climate change.
"We are not going to escape from the melting of the polar ice caps, the
rise in sea levels and the other extremely harmful consequences of
global warming," he said. "The major country in the world, the United
States, happens to be in the hands of someone, in fact a party, that
wants to exacerbate the crisis. They want to make sure that (the coming
crisis is) as severe as possible and as imminent as possible and are
putting all their efforts into that right as we speak. If we want that
to happen, we can watch and not react. Canada is hardly blameless in this."
In that regard, Chomsky said, U.S. President Donald Trump is building a
framework for disasters that may result in a death count higher than
even that ocaused by humanity's worst criminal.
"Hitler was maybe the worst criminal in human history. He murdered my
extended family, Slavs, Roma, homosexuals...it's pretty evil," Chomsky
said. "But what does Trump want to do? He wants to destroy the prospects
for all organized human life. And in the near future. That's what it
means to maximize the use of fossil fuels, to cut regulations that might
diminish or restrict that danger."
He said the people who want to continue down this path appear to operate
on the logic that the world is going off a cliff anyway, and that it was
better to profit from it rather than seriously examine ways to mitigate
the crisis...
- -
*How citizens can push back*
But for all his bleak predictions, Chomsky said doomsday isn't
inevitable, and that people are still capable of turning the tide
through popular, organized movements.
"We've done harder things in the past," he said. "Activist movements,
the Civil Rights movement, the Abolitionist movement, the women's
movement and the anti-war movement changed countries enormously. We're
not the same as we were, even 50 years ago. We are much more civilized
societies. We can do this, too. Take the fossil fuel industry. Take a
look at oil prices...The United States, Canada and others could simply
socialize the industries, buy them up, not that expensive, and put them
out of business. That would be a great boon to the world. You can't do
it in a day, but you can put the resources you have into developing
sustainable energy. How much would that take? There are careful
estimates by very good economists about how much it would take, how much
it would cost to carry out policies which would basically control the
enormous environmental crisis."
He said such a massive change would only take a small percentage of the
mobilization required during World War II, so that it was completely doable.
*Youth hold the key to structural changes*
Throughout the hour-long conversation, he fielded questions from
National Observer's audience. One of the questions was from a
14-year-old asking what his generation could do. Chomsky said that young
people were in fact the leaders and main drivers of changes in the world
today.
"Take a look at who is on the front line to try and prevent the world
from being destroyed by the Trump types. Young people," Chomsky said.
"Take a look at the climate (change) strike last October... Who was out
there on the front lines? Young people."
He spoke of the dramatic moment at the World Economic Forum meeting in
Davos, Switzerland, where U.S. President Donald Trump's speech was
followed by that of 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/05/19/news/noam-chomsky-trump-covid-19-climate-change-and-economy
- -
[YouTube 6 min video]
*Greta Thunberg: Our House Is On Fire! | World Economic Forum 2019*
https://youtu.be/M7dVF9xylaw
[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - May 22, 2014*
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow discusses the oil industry's refusal to
acknowledge the risks of moving oil by rail.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/watch/oil-industry-denies-rail-risks-with-report-263830083849
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/
/Archive of Daily Global Warming News
<https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/2017-October/date.html>
/
https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote
/To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe
<mailto:subscribe at theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request>
to news digest./
*** Privacy and Security:*This is a text-only mailing that carries no
images which may originate from remote servers. Text-only messages
provide greater privacy to the receiver and sender.
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain must be used for democratic
and election purposes and cannot be used for commercial purposes.
To subscribe, email: contact at theclimate.vote
<mailto:contact at theclimate.vote> with subject subscribe, To Unsubscribe,
subject: unsubscribe
Also you may subscribe/unsubscribe at
https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote
Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Pauli for
http://TheClimate.Vote <http://TheClimate.Vote/> delivering succinct
information for citizens and responsible governments of all levels. List
membership is confidential and records are scrupulously restricted to
this mailing list.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/attachments/20200522/e2851656/attachment.html>
More information about the TheClimate.Vote
mailing list