[✔️] February 19, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Property value bubble, Feedback loops, Geothermal, Juan Cole, Groups attacking solar,
Richard Pauli
Richard at CredoandScreed.com
Sun Feb 19 09:22:54 EST 2023
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/*February 19, 2023*/
/[ Housing bubble ignores flood risks ]
/*The climate change real estate bubble risks billions*
Andrew Freedman, author of Axios Generate/
/
https://www.axios.com/2023/02/17/climate-change-real-estate-bubble
A climate housing bubble threatens to erode real estate prices in much
of the U.S. in the coming years, posing particular challenges for
low-income residents, a new study finds.
*Why it matters: *With more severe and frequent extreme weather events,
the resilience of homeowners and communities is on the line.
-- How lenders, insurance companies and others incorporate
escalating flood risks into property prices is a key question facing
at-risk communities.
*Zoom in: *The study, published Thursday in Nature Climate Change, finds
that nationally, property prices are currently overvalued by between
$121 billion and $237 billion, when compared to their actual flood risk.
-- The current prices mask the true danger that these properties are
exposed to, because of factors such as outdated FEMA flood maps,
incentives in the National Flood Insurance Program and home buyers
who lack climate change information.
--The paper is the result of a collaboration between experts at the
Environmental Defense Fund, First Street Foundation, Resources for
the Future, the Federal Reserve and two universities.
-- Scientists relied on First Street’s updated modeling that
simulates rainfall-induced, or pluvial flooding, as well as coastal
flood events.
*Between the lines:* The authors found that right now, 14.6 million
properties face at least a 1% annual probability of flooding, putting
them in the so-called 100-year flood zone.
-- However, this is expected to increase by 11% in a mid-range
emissions scenario, with average annual losses spiking by at least
26% by 2050.
-- In dollar terms, the areas with the greatest property
overvaluations are along the coasts, where there is overlap between
rising seas, fewer flood disclosure laws, and a high number of
residents who may not view climate change as a near-term threat.
-- Much of the overvaluation comes from vulnerable properties
located outside of FEMA's 100-year flood zone.
-- Once the higher flood risks become evident, homeowners will lose
equity in their property, which is a particular threat to
lower-income homeowners.
*The big picture:* The pattern of the total overvaluation of at-risk
properties in the Lower 48 states reveals hot spots of risk.
- - Specifically, coastal areas show high amounts of overvaluation.
- - Spikes also show up in West Virginia and other parts of Appalachia.
- - In Texas, it is clear that the biggest cities, including Houston
and Dallas, have a significant amount of overvaluation.
- - Florida tops the list, accounting for about $50.2 billion based
on the actual threat, the study found.
*What they're saying: *"There is a significant amount of 'unknown' flood
risk across the country based solely on the differences in the publicly
available federal flood maps and the reality of actual flood risk,"
Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications at First Street Foundation,
said in a statement./
/https://www.axios.com/2023/02/17/climate-change-real-estate-bubble/
/
/- -/
/[ The study in Nature Climate Change ]
/*Unpriced climate risk and the potential consequences of overvaluation
in US housing markets*
Nature Climate Change (2023)
*Abstract*
Climate change impacts threaten the stability of the US housing
market. In response to growing concerns that increasing costs of
flooding are not fully captured in property values, we quantify the
magnitude of unpriced flood risk in the housing market by comparing
the empirical and economically efficient prices for properties at
risk. We find that residential properties exposed to flood risk are
overvalued by US$121–US$237 billion, depending on the discount rate.
In general, highly overvalued properties are concentrated in
counties along the coast with no flood risk disclosure laws and
where there is less concern about climate change. Low-income
households are at greater risk of losing home equity from price
deflation, and municipalities that are heavily reliant on property
taxes for revenue are vulnerable to budgetary shortfalls. The
consequences of these financial risks will depend on policy choices
that influence who bears the costs of climate change.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01594-8
/[ check on the feedback loops -- Inside Climate News ]/
*Scientists Examine Dangerous Global Warming ‘Accelerators’*
A new study categorizes climate feedback loops and the possibility they
could push the climate past planetary tipping points.
By Bob Berwyn
February 17, 2023
In its landmark climate science reports, IPCC estimates the possibility
of specific climate impacts occurring—for instance, it assigns high
likelihood to sea level rise—but the feedbacks and tipping points are
still in the realm of “deep uncertainty,” said Frank Pattyn, an
Antarctic glaciologist at Vrije Universiteit Brussels who was not
involved with the paper.
“In my domain, one known deep uncertainty is Antarctic ice sheet loss,
which is related to feedbacks that we know from marine ice sheet
instability and marine ice cliff instability,” he said. Research
suggests that, in past times of global warming, big chunks of
Antarctica’s ice have crumbled fast enough to melt ice sheets and raise
sea levels faster than the IPCC projections.
The first papers identifying marine ice cliff disintegration as a
potential contributor to rapid sea level rise appeared in about 2016, he
said. “And now, after six, seven years, we have not profoundly advanced
to where we can take that into account in a more physically
understandable way, that would give more precise projections of sea
level rise.”
Research on the identified tipping points is still “in its infancy,” he
said, and the new paper points to the need for a “massive international
mobilization … to quickly assess the impacts and interactions of feedbacks.”
“If you sum up the funding associated with sea level rise research, it’s
peanuts compared to what is at stake with sea level rise,” he said. A
2022 study in EOS clearly showed this critical funding gap.
This graph from the article is the shocker: as sea level goes up,
funding for sea level research goes down. The average amount the US
spends on Halloween $10B per year; ice researchers get 0.04% of that to
help plan and predict biblical migration. How can we turn this around? 9/9
https://twitter.com/helenafricker/status/1626016074931269633/photo/1
“There’s a deeper picture here,” said co-author Tim Lenton, director of
the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter. Lenton was
deeply influenced by scientist James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, which
proposes that life interacts with its inorganic surroundings on the
planet to form a self-regulating system that perpetuates the conditions
required for it to persist. “That’s part of what some climate models may
be missing,” he said.
“Lovelock was a visionary in thinking about how humans and our actions
are intertwined in that system, and of course, that’s also what the
paper is about,” he said, “how to see ourselves as integral parts and
actors in the system.”
There has been an effort to bring a more faithful representation of the
nuanced influences of life on the Earth into climate modeling, he said,
but they aren’t yet fully integrated. Even if global climate models
can’t be rebuilt from the ground up, they should “bring those qualities
of life into some model frameworks, at least just to explore how that
would affect the feedback dynamics,” he said.
“You want to bring together evolution, ecology, biogeochemistry and the
physical climate and you don’t want to go crazy,” Lenton said.
Climate models began as weather forecast models focused on the
atmosphere and short-term atmospheric processes, he said.
“Gradually, they’ve had more and more stuff bolted on, and when we spot
something that might be missing, that might be an important feedback, we
kind of go to work bolting that into the model as well,” Lenton said.
“You’re always playing catch up.”
Lenton said the new paper shows how important it is to keep striving to
limit global warming, even if the 1.5 degree Celsius limit is breached
in coming years.
“I think many of us would say the evidence shows that the damage from
global warming is going up in a nonlinear way, so every tenth of a
degree more warming will cause more damage than the previous tenth,” he
said.
https://www.floodlightnews.org/post/an-activist-group-is-spreading-misinformation-to-stop-solar-projects-in-rural-america
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17022023/climate-feedback-loop-accelerators
/[ Underground heat - a basic physics lessons video - ]/
*Geothermal Energy: How Big is the Potential?*
Sabine Hossenfelder
1,498 views Feb 18, 2023 #science
Check out Brian Keating's Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/DrBrianKeating
Sign up for Brian's Newsletter here: http://briankeating.com/list
There is a lot of energy right under our feet, a relic from Earth's hot
past as a ball of plasma. But how much can geothermal energy
realistically do for us? What technologies are currently being pursued,
what are the risks, and is it even carbon neutral? In this video we have
collected all the relevant facts and numbers for you.
The footage of Staufen at the beginning of the video comes from Tom
Scott's video that you can watch in full here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOgle...
👉 Transcript and References on Patreon ➜ https://www.patreon.com/Sabine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6UGpaKnkS0
[ Juan Cole - opinion ]
*Do we Have Until 2050 to become Carbon Neutral? What if 27 Climate
Feedback Loops are Working together to Shorten our Deadline?*
JUAN COLE
2/18/2023
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Feedback loops are central notions in
science. There are two kinds, negative and positive. Negative feedback
loops, despite their name, are actually good if you are looking for
stability. So for instance say you are too hot, so you sweat. The sweat
evaporates, cooling you off. In fact, it could work too well, causing
you cool off so much that you shiver. Shivering, spasms of your muscles,
heat you back up. So you end up at a normal temperature after all that.
Positive feedback loops are the ones you have to watch out for. William
J. Ripple et al. explain, “For example, warming in the Arctic leads to
melting sea ice, which leads to further warming because water has lower
albedo (reflectance) than ice.” Here is what they mean: Say the extra
carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere causes the oceans to warm up a
bit. The warmer water melts some of the ice at the North Pole. Ice
reflects sunlight back out into space, so it cools the earth and its
oceans off. When the ice melts, the dark water beneath becomes visible.
Dark surfaces absorb sunshine rather than reflecting it. So now the
water gets even hotter. And more ice melts. And the dark water absorbs
more sunshine and gets even hotter. On and on. A positive feedback loop
ratchets things in a single direction so that they get increasingly out
of kilter.
- - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VojzFPoii6E - *The science behind
'feedback loops'*
So what if the climate emergency is creating not one but 27 positive
feedback loops (which, remember, are bad if you are interested in
maintaining the status quo)? And what if it is only generating a handful
of negative feedback loops, so that these latter cannot hope to offset
all the massive changes being provoked by the positive feedback loops?
The answer to these “what if?” questions is that we would be well and
truly screwed.
That’s the fear expressed in a new scientific paper in One Earth by
William J. Ripple et al.
They start out with a graphic showing how several of these positive
feedback loops in climate change might reinforce one another:
https://www.juancole.com/images/2023/02/feedbacks.jpg
- -
As noted above, if we want to keep the earth cool, ice is our friend
because it is blinding white and reflects the heat of sun rays back out
into outer space. So a positive climate feedback loop typically sets in
motion the disappearance of more and more ice. For instance, rainfall at
the poles melts ice, which causes more global heating because bright
surfaces are replaced by dark absorptive ones, and warmer resulting
oceans then put more water vapor into the air above them, causing more
rainfall, which melts more ice, and so on.
It is worse. Because when oceans warm and put more water vapor into the
air above them, they are in effect emitting a greenhouse gas, since
water vapor, like carbon dioxide and methane, helps keep the sun’s heat
on earth once it strikes it, rather than letting it radiate out to space.
So you have two positive feedback loops going on here, with reduced
reflectivity because of ice loss, which increases heat, and also
increased heat from emission of a greenhouse gas, i.e. water vapor. Both
of these effects reinforce one another and make the earth even hotter.
Not only does the ice melting reduce its ability to reflect away the sun
rays, but it causes sea level to rise. Sandy beaches are bright and
reflect sunlight. But if they are submerged by dark water they can no
longer do this. Loss of beaches because of sea level rise thus can raise
the earth’s temperature and melt more ice which causes more sea level
rise and loss of bright coastal areas. A positive feedback loop, this
process can go on at the same time as the ones mentioned above.
So here’s the bottom line. The authors suggest that if a lot of these
positive feedback loops operate at the same time and reinforce one
another, as the few examples I chose above do, they could reduce the
ability of the ocean to absorb carbon dioxide. For instance, cold water
absorbs more CO2 than warm water, so if we heat up the oceans very
rapidly we will reduce our carbon budget.
Our carbon budget is the amount of carbon dioxide that the oceans will
absorb. Almost all of the massive amounts of CO2 we have put into the
atmosphere will go into the oceans. But if we go on producing billions
of tons a year of CO2 after 2050, we will outrun the oceans’ absorptive
capacity, and then the CO2 will just stay up there, making the earth
hot, for thousands or even tens of thousands of years. Since we as a
species evolved in relatively cool times, and since our civilization is
premised on the stability of a cool climate, we do not know how well we
will cope with a very long-term erratic Hot Earth.
That carbon budget we have between now and 2050, however, may not exist.
Maybe we only have until 2035 or 2040 to stop producing CO2, in order to
avoid pushing our climate system over into chaos. Chaos means
super-hurricanes and massive heatwaves and unexpected flooding, etc.
If a lot of these positive climate feedback loops work together, they
could reduce our carbon budget. So, the scientists say, governments and
companies are unwise to set goals of being carbon neutral by 2050. That
may be too late if we take into account all the destructive positive
feedback loops, and especially if some of them reinforce one another.
Their message is, in other words, hurry up!
https://www.juancole.com/2023/02/feedback-together-deadline.html
/[ Organized disinformation campaigns target specific regions .. ] /
*An activist group is spreading misinformation to stop solar projects in
rural America*
By Miranda Green
Feb. 18, 2023
Roger Houser’s ranching business was getting squeezed. The calves he
raises in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley were selling for about the same
price they had a few years earlier, while costs for essentials like fuel
and fertilizer kept going up. But Houser found another use for his 500
acres.
An energy company offered to lease Houser's property in rural Page
County to build a solar plant that could power about 25,000 homes. It
was a good offer, Houser says. More money than he could make growing hay
and selling cattle.
"The idea of being able to keep the land as one parcel and not have it
split up was very attractive," Houser says. "To have some passive income
for retirement was good. And then the main thing was the electricity it
would generate and the good it would do made it feel good all the way
around."
But soon after he got the offer, organized opposition began a four-year
battle against solar development in the county. A group of locals
eventually joined forces with a nonprofit called Citizens for
Responsible Solar to stop the project on Houser's land and pass
restrictions effectively banning big solar plants from being built in
the area...
- -
Citizens for Responsible Solar is part of a growing backlash against
renewable energy in rural communities across the United States. The
group, which was started in 2019 and appears to use strategies honed by
other activists in campaigns against the wind industry, has helped local
groups fighting solar projects in at least 10 states including Ohio,
Kentucky and Pennsylvania, according to its website.
"I think for years, there has been this sense that this is not all
coincidence. That local groups are popping up in different places,
saying the same things, using the same online campaign materials," says
Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate
Change Law at Columbia University.
Citizens for Responsible Solar seems to be a well-mobilized "national
effort to foment local opposition to renewable energy," Burger adds.
"What that reflects is the unfortunate politicization of climate change,
the politicization of energy, and, unfortunately, the political nature
of the energy transition, which is really just a necessary response to
an environmental reality."
Citizens for Responsible Solar was founded in an exurb of Washington,
D.C., by a longtime political operative named Susan Ralston who worked
in the White House under President George W. Bush and still has deep
ties to power players in conservative politics.
Ralston tapped conservative insiders to help set up and run Citizens for
Responsible Solar. She also consulted with a longtime activist against
renewable energy who once defended former President Donald Trump's
unfounded claim that noise from wind turbines can cause cancer. And when
Ralston was launching the group, a consulting firm she owns got hundreds
of thousands of dollars from the foundation of a leading GOP donor who
is also a major investor in fossil fuel companies. It's unclear what the
money to Ralston's firm was used for. Ralston has previously denied that
Citizens for Responsible Solar received money from fossil fuel interests.
Ralston said in an email to NPR and Floodlight that Citizens for
Responsible Solar is a grassroots organization that helps other
activists on a volunteer basis. The group isn't opposed to solar,
Ralston said, just projects built on farmland and timberland. Solar
panels belong on "industrial-zoned land, marginal or contaminated land,
along highways, and on commercial and residential rooftops," she said.
But her group's rhetoric points to a broader agenda of undermining
public support for solar. Analysts who follow the industry say Citizens
for Responsible Solar stokes opposition to solar projects by spreading
misinformation online about health and environmental risks. The group's
website says solar requires too much land for "unreliable energy,"
ignoring data showing power grids can run dependably on lots of
renewables. And it claims large solar projects in rural areas wreck the
land and contribute to climate change, despite evidence to the contrary...
- -
People often have valid concerns about solar development. Like any
infrastructure project, solar plants that are poorly planned and
constructed can potentially harm communities. But misinformation spread
by groups like Citizens for Responsible Solar is turning rural
landowners unfairly against renewables, says Skyler Zunk, an Interior
Department official under President Donald Trump and chief executive of
Energy Right, a conservative-leaning nonprofit that supports solar
projects that preserve ecosystems.
Analysts and industry participants say the prevalence of bad information
is also increasing pressure on local officials who are often charged
with approving renewable energy projects. Many are wary of proposed
development because of the political blowback it can bring. "This type
of misinformation is very difficult to dispel. And politicians are just
afraid of getting engaged with it," says Ronald Meyers, director of the
Renewable Energy Facility Siting project at Virginia Tech.
Getting projects built in the face of local opposition is among the
biggest challenges wind and solar companies face. A 2022 report by the
Sabin Center at Columbia University found 121 local policies around the
country that are aimed at blocking or restricting renewable energy
development, a nearly 18% increase from the year before.
Solar restrictions are gaining traction as the stakes for addressing
climate change keep rising. Construction of more renewable energy is key
to the country's plans to cut greenhouse gas pollution and avoid the
worst damage from extreme weather in the years ahead.
"It's an enormous concern," says Alan Anderson, a lawyer in Kansas who
represents renewable energy companies. "If we can't get projects
permitted at counties or townships or whatever local level makes a
decision, we can't do any of the goals we think we need to do for
climate change."...
- -
*From White House insider to local organizer*
Susan Ralston launched Citizens for Responsible Solar to stop a project
near her home in Culpeper, Va., about 70 miles southwest of Washington,
D.C. She brought years of experience in the upper echelons of national
conservative politics to her new role as a county-level organizer
against rural solar.
Ralston served as special assistant to former President George W. Bush
and as a top aide to Karl Rove in the White House. She resigned in 2006
when a congressional investigation found that she passed messages to
Rove from her former boss, the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The
investigation did not accuse her of any wrongdoing.
After leaving the White House, Ralston started her own consulting firm,
SBR Enterprises LLC. In 2012, she organized a fundraiser for Mitt
Romney's presidential campaign that was hosted by GOP luminaries. She's
currently listed as a senior adviser at a nonprofit that works to elect
conservative women.
As she was setting up Citizens for Responsible Solar, Ralston got help
from operatives who have worked behind the scenes with some of the most
powerful people in conservative politics.
The treasurer of Citizens for Responsible Solar is Lisa Lisker. Lisker
was treasurer for a campaign committee for J.D. Vance, who was elected
last year as a Republican senator from Ohio. Her firm does financial
consulting for Republican candidates and political committees to ensure
that they comply with campaign finance laws...
- -
When there's official paperwork that has to get to Citizens for
Responsible Solar, it goes through a firm created by a lawyer named
Jason Torchinsky. The same firm has been the registered agent for at
least two dozen conservative organizations based in Virginia. One of
them was a voter-focused group headed by Leonard Leo, who helped remake
the federal judiciary through the Federalist Society. NPR and Floodlight
haven't verified whether any of the conservative groups that use
Torchinsky's firm as a registered agent have ties to Citizens for
Responsible Solar.
Torchinsky is also a partner at a law firm that Bloomberg News once
described as "a boutique outfit that specializes in advising
organizations that want to participate in the electoral process without
disclosing who's paying their bills."
Torchinsky has worked as a lawyer for Americans for Prosperity, an
influential activist group that promotes conservative causes. And he's
represented the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an
association of companies and Republican state legislators that has
engineered and spread anti-climate messaging and draft legislation.
And Ralston's consulting firm, SBR Enterprises, got almost $300,000 from
The Paul E. Singer Foundation between 2018 and late 2020 — the period
when she was setting up Citizens for Responsible Solar. Paul Singer, the
foundation's president, is chairman of the Manhattan Institute, a think
tank that has criticized government support of renewable energy. His
investment firm, Elliott Management, is the largest shareholder in the
coal producer Peabody Energy Corp...
- -
Ralston and the Singer Foundation declined to tell NPR and Floodlight
what the money to SBR Enterprises was for. The foundation's tax filings
say the firm was a "consultant for the foundation mission."
Ralston reportedly said to E&E News in 2019 that no money from fossil
fuel interests went to Citizens for Responsible Solar. Since then, she
has declined NPR and Floodlight's requests to identify the
organization's sources of funding.
Lisa Graves, executive director of the progressive watchdog group True
North Research, says Ralston has surrounded her group with "a national
network of right-wing political activists who are very powerful, very,
very plugged in."
Graves adds: "Having them invested in one way or the other in her agenda
here is a sign that this is a key tactical component of the way that
powerful right-wing donors or strategists want to attack solar."...
- -
Ralston was soon eyeing bigger fights
Around the time Ralston founded Citizens for Responsible Solar in
Culpeper, Va., she got involved in debates over solar projects in other
communities. One of the first places she went was the bedroom community
of Spotsylvania, Va., tucked between Richmond and Washington, D.C. A
solar company had purchased 6,350 acres of land there, and it was asking
for approval to build the largest project east of the Rockies.
Greg Benton, a county supervisor at the time, was tasked with
determining whether it would be a good thing for Spotsylvania. "I'm not
a big energy person, one way or the other. I think solar will make a
difference in helping the electric companies and helping the planet a
little bit," Benton says. "I wanted to do right by the county with this
project."
A Republican who had worked at the local sheriff's and fire departments,
Benton spent months researching the project. He looked into concerns
over stormwater management and fears that toxic materials like cadmium
could be in the solar panels and leak out, hurting people or the
environment. Benton found no major risks.
But he was soon overwhelmed by local activists who criticized the
project's impact on the landscape and pushed issues that Benton says
he'd debunked or addressed.
"I think initially they were concerned about it, and they had some
legitimate concerns," he says. "I think it was from bad information.
Just information that was not true, not factually based."
Ralston declined to discuss her relationship with activists in
Spotsylvania. But she told E&E News in 2019 that she "worked closely"
with residents there who opposed the project. "Their fight is much, much
bigger," Ralston told E&E. "They don't have as much financial resources
that I have."
After months of angry public hearings, Spotsylvania County ultimately
approved the project in 2019. The loss in Spotsylvania was an early
setback for Ralston. But her campaign was just getting started. Shortly
after she formed Citizens for Responsible Solar, the solar company she
was organizing against in Culpeper cited "community concerns" and
withdrew its project application. Soon, Citizens for Responsible Solar
grew in size and influence and spread beyond Virginia...
- -
*More local activists pitch “responsible solar”*
Many grassroots activists today credit their success in stopping solar
projects to Ralston. One of them is Kathy Webb. Webb says she learned
that a company wanted to clear a forest for a solar plant near her home
in Rowan County, N.C., days before local officials planned to vote. She
sent out a flurry of emails to anyone she thought could help. Somehow, a
message came back from Ralston.
Ask the county to delay the vote, Ralston told her. And get a lawyer. It
worked, Webb says. The solar company scrapped its plan. "Susan guided us
in the right direction and then helped us with information," she says.
Ralston's advice "absolutely was part of us defeating it."
Soon, Webb was spreading Ralston's message throughout North Carolina.
She runs the Facebook page Rowan County Citizens for Responsible Solar,
where she posts material that's emailed out from Ralston's organization.
The reach of Citizens for Responsible Solar appears to extend across the
U.S. On Facebook, at least two dozen groups and pages dedicated to
defeating solar projects feature the same term: responsible solar.
There's a Kansans for Responsible Solar and an Iowa for Responsible
Solar. Ralston spoke at a fundraiser last year for a Kentucky-based
group called Hardin County Citizens for Responsible Solar.
In her only substantive email to NPR and Floodlight, Ralston said she
offers help to those who ask. While other groups might adopt the name
"Citizens for Responsible Solar," she says they aren't "affiliated" with
her organization.
Ralston's group has nurtured networks of activists who often work
together across state lines. In testimonials, people from South Carolina
to Maine say Citizens for Responsible Solar connected them with other
activists and gave them resources to sway local officials.
In one Virginia county, for example, Citizens for Responsible Solar gave
residents information about "the science and downsides" of solar. It
then put one of those activists in touch with someone in New Jersey who
was looking for information about the solar industry. And it connected
people in Pennsylvania with John Droz, an activist who has spent years
challenging mainstream climate science and trying to limit renewable
energy development.
"Susan was a great resource for information and, probably more
importantly, inspiration," says Jim Thompson, who runs an Ohio group
called Against Birch Solar. "There's times, you know, you get down in
the valleys, and you don't know that you're making a darned difference.
And you reach out to people like Susan and share your frustration, maybe
get some insight as to what you might be doing wrong."...
- -
Ralston didn't have contacts of her own in Ohio, Thompson says, so she
made him part of her network. When people in Ohio reached out to
Ralston, "then she would start sending them to me," Thompson says.
Ralston's growing influence has drawn criticism from renewable energy
advocates across the political spectrum. Ray Gaesser is chair of the
Iowa Conservative Energy Forum, which promotes renewable energy to drive
economic growth. In 2021, he warned that Citizens for Responsible Solar
— "a dark-money organization based in Virginia" — was meddling in local
affairs.
Groups like Citizens for Responsible Solar "are operating from the same
playbook featuring shared materials and draft petitions from national
sources that originate thousands of miles from Iowa," Gaesser wrote in
an op-ed in The Gazette newspaper in Iowa.
"Their mission is to kill new development," Gaesser said in the op-ed,
"not to help develop common-sense ordinances."
Ralston's group has grown as the world grapples with how to swiftly cut
greenhouse gas pollution that drives climate change. Big solar and wind
projects on vast tracts of land are the cheapest and fastest way right
now to add lots of energy without increasing greenhouse gases.
But Zunk, the former Trump administration official, says limiting global
warming isn't driving development. Companies build solar projects
because they make financial sense, he says. "They're not coming because
of the Green New Deal," says Zunk. "They're not coming because of any
government action."
The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects the amount of solar
capacity added in America this year from big power plants will be more
than double the current annual record.
All that growth means local land-use fights will keep flaring up.
The strategy Ralston uses has been the basis of many social movements.
"There's often this hub and spoke model, and there are resources that
are planted in different places," says Burger of the Sabin Center at
Columbia University. What's noteworthy here, he says, is that "what
people are advocating for is based on misinformation and is antithetical
to, not only the public good, but to probably their own self-interest,
in most instances."...
- -
Strategies to fight the wind industry have been turned against solar
Misinformation spreads easily online. It bounces around in echo chambers
where dubious articles, videos and memes are posted and shared
repeatedly. Longtime critics of the wind industry like John Droz
cultivated opposition strategies that are now being used in the fight
against solar, says Anderson, the renewable energy lawyer in Kansas.
"The geometric growth of misinformation by the same people posting to 50
different places, that method and that impact flows through to solar,
just as it did to wind. The gathering of groups and creating a social
unit so that people become emotionally and socially tied to the group is
the same for solar as it was for wind," Anderson says. "Then it is just
new talking points for the different technology."
When Ralston was setting up Citizens for Responsible Solar, Droz was one
of the people she consulted.
Droz is a member of the CO2 Coalition, a nonprofit supported by fossil
fuel magnate Charles Koch that promotes "the important contribution made
by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy." As a science adviser
for a group of coastal North Carolina counties that promotes economic
development, Droz helped stall state efforts to consider climate change
in coastal planning.
A decade ago, Droz shared a memo for a national public relations
campaign against wind power at a meeting of activists in Washington,
D.C. The memo was aimed at undermining public support for the wind
industry "in what should appear as a 'groundswell' among grassroots."...
- -
Droz's website provides model ordinances that activists like Ralston can
use in their own communities. It also features a list of "solar energy
concerns," including claims of environmental harm and the potential loss
of farmland. Droz calls himself an "educator" and says his website is
meant only to share information, adding that he doesn't get involved in
debates outside of his own community.
"All I've tried to do is to provide the other side of the coin, sort of
things here that aren't being told by state agencies or the federal
government," he says.
A number of the concerns Droz raises are echoed on the website for
Citizens for Responsible Solar. The information on Ralston's website is
"extremely misleading and appears designed to be misinformation," says
Meyers of Virginia Tech.
That includes claims that solar projects ruin the land they're built on.
With the right practices, companies can improve local ecosystems, Meyers
says, and farming can continue alongside power plants. He also says the
group's warnings about hazardous waste from solar don't account for the
fact that most solar panels aren't considered toxic and won't leach
material.
Ralston didn't respond to subsequent emails seeking comment.
"I'm just saying that there are credible people who have expressed these
concerns," Droz says of the information he puts out...
- -
*Farmers are caught in the middle of local solar battles*
In Page County, Houser says he heard a lot of positive feedback at first
when a solar company proposed building the project on his land. But
then, he says, "local politics got involved."
He says: "Anybody can stand up in a public hearing and say anything,
regardless of the facts or science or whatever."
At public hearings starting in 2018, some residents said the solar plant
would create problems with stormwater runoff, ruin their views and harm
property values, as well as the local tourism and agriculture
industries. Others falsely claimed solar panels would poison the
groundwater and cause cancer.
A year later, Page County rejected the project and put a moratorium on
new development.
- -
Things got more tumultuous from there. Urban Grid, the company that
offered to lease Houser's property, resubmitted plans for the project in
late 2020. And a group calling itself Page County Citizens for
Responsible Solar created a Facebook page to organize local opposition.
Ralston's organization applied pressure, too, saying it had hired a
"prestigious law firm" to investigate the county's actions.
The battle finally ended in 2022. After Page County adopted a solar
ordinance, Urban Grid abandoned Houser's project. The new law doesn't
outright ban big solar plants, but it imposes so many restrictions that
there's no place to build, says Peter Candelaria, chief executive of
Urban Grid.
Candelaria says it was a missed opportunity, and not just for companies
and landowners who stood to make money. The project on Houser's property
could have generated millions of dollars for Page through land and
equipment taxes, as well as payments under a siting agreement, he says.
And the soil underneath the project could have been improved with
regenerative land practices, Candelaria says, like grazing sheep around
the panels.
Keith Weakley, a member of Page County's Board of Supervisors, says
officials worried that big solar projects could hurt existing businesses
without creating any long-term jobs.
- -
Page County Citizens for Responsible Solar didn't respond to messages
seeking comment.
With the chance to put up solar panels gone, Houser has been talking to
a poultry company that wants his land. But the recent outbreak of bird
flu put the plan on hold. "We're as efficient as we can be in our
operation here, and we're as sustainable as we can be, and we take good
care of the land. But we're running out of time," Houser says of the
financial pressure farmers are under. "Everybody's faced with the same
thing, every farm family."
Looking back, Houser doesn't know what he or Urban Grid could have done
to get to a different outcome. "We just presented the facts," he says.
"The anti-solar people took it on as a cause, and it became a movement
of its own. In small-town politics, you can have a small group of people
become very vocal and seem very influential."
This story is a collaboration with Floodlight, a nonprofit environmental
news organization.
Copyright 2023 Floodlight Inc.
https://www.opb.org/article/2023/02/18/activist-group-spreads-misinformation-to-stop-solar-projects-in-rural-america/
/
/
/[ the theory of change ]/
*Shoshana Zuboff & Roger Mcnamee on Surveillance Capitalism*
Al Franken
167 views Feb 18, 2023 The Al Franken Podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LKcnBnP_Rk
/[The news archive - looking back at a script on a rarely covered topic
-- thermal momentum. ]/
/*February 19, 2006*/
February 19, 2006: The CBS program "60 Minutes" reports on the effects
of human-caused climate change in the Arctic.
This story originally aired on Feb. 19, 2006.
The North Pole has been frozen for 100,000 years. But according to
scientists, that won't be true by the end of this century. The top
of the world is melting.
There's been a debate burning for years about the causes of global
warming. But the scientists you're about to meet say the debate is
over. New evidence shows man is contributing to the warming of the
planet, pumping out greenhouse gases that trap solar heat.
Much of this new evidence was compiled by American scientist Bob
Corell, who led a study called the "Arctic Climate Impact
Assessment." It's an awkward name — but consider the findings: the
seas are rising, hurricanes will be more powerful, like Katrina, and
polar bears may be headed toward extinction.
What does the melting arctic look like? Correspondent Scott Pelley
went north to see what Bob Corell calls a "global warning."
Towers of ice the height of 10-story buildings rise on the coast of
Greenland. It's the biggest ice sheet in the Northern Hemisphere,
measuring some 700,000 square miles. But temperatures in the arctic
are rising twice as fast as the rest of the world, so a lot of
Greenland's ice is running to the sea.
"Right now the entire planet is out of balance," says Bob Corell,
who is among the world's top authorities on climate change. He led
300 scientists from eight nations in the "Arctic Climate Impact
Assessment."
Corell believes he has seen the future. "This is a bellwether, a
barometer. Some people call it the canary in the mine. The warning
that things are coming," he says. "In 10 years here in the arctic,
we see what the rest of the planet will see in 25 or 35 years from now."
Over the last few decades, the North Pole has been dramatically
reduced in size and Corell says the glaciers there have been
receding for the last 50 years.
Back in 1987, President Reagan asked Corell to look into climate
change. He's been at it ever since.
In Iceland, he showed 60 Minutes glaciers that were growing until
the 1990s and are now melting. In fact, 98 percent of the world's
mountain glaciers are melting.
Corell says all that water will push sea levels three feet higher
all around the world in 100 years.
"You and I sit here, another foot. Your children, another foot. Your
grandchildren, another foot. And it won't take long for sea level to
inundate," says Corell.
"Sea level will be inundating the low lands of virtually every
country of the world, ours included," Corell predicts.
To find the sights and sounds of the arctic melting, there are few
places better than a fjord in Greenland, with a glacier just a short
distance away.
Pelley stood on a huge block of ice that had split off from the
glacier and had dropped into the sea — a big iceberg.
"This part of Greenland is melting faster than just about any other.
To get a sense of the enormity of what's happening, consider this:
The ice that is melting here is the equivalent of all the ice in the
Alps," Pelley explained, standing atop the iceberg.
That's more than 105 million acres of melted ice in 15 years. Just
four minutes after Pelley cleared off this berg, part of the ice
caved in.
60 Minutes got a bird's-eye view of how unstable the ice is becoming
on a flight with glaciologist Carl Boggild.
Boggild anchored 10 research stations to the ice. But every time he
comes to visit, the ice and his stations have moved.
Flying over the ice, Pelley noticed lots of fissures and crevices
breaking through the ice.
Asked what causes this, Boggild explained, "This is actually the ice
flow, where you have so much tension in the ice that it cannot stick
together. And it breaks and opens a crevice which goes about 150,
200 feet down."
The ice is also melting on the sides, Boggild says.
High overhead, Pelley remarked that one could hear the water running.
"It's like a small river," Boggild said.
A leading theory says those little rivers lubricate the bottom of
the ice sheet, helping it move off the bedrock and out to sea.
And there may be no stopping it. Arctic warming is accelerating.
It's a chain reaction. As snow and ice melt they reveal dark land
and water that absorb solar heat. That melts more snow and ice, and
around it goes.
There's long been a debate about how much of this is earth's
naturally changing climate and how much is man's doing. Paul
Mayewski, at the University of Maine, says the answer to that
question is frozen inside an ice core from Greenland.
With funding from the National Science Foundation, Mayewski has led
35 expeditions collecting deep ice cores from glaciers. The ice
captures everything in the air, laying down a record covering half a
million years.
"We can go to any section of the ice core, to tell, basically, what
the greenhouse gas levels were; we can tell whether or not it was
stormy, what the temperatures were like," Mayewski explains.
60 Minutes brought Mayewski back to Greenland, where he says his
research has proven that the ice and the atmosphere have man's
fingerprints all over them.
Mayewski says we haven't seen a temperature rise to this level going
back at least 2,000 years, and arguably several thousand years.
As for carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, Mayewski says, "we haven't seen
CO2 levels like this in hundreds of thousands of years, if not
millions of years."
What does that tell him?
"It all points to something that has changed and something that has
impacted the system which wasn't doing it more than 100 years ago.
And we know exactly what it is. It's human activity," he says.
It's activity like burning fossil fuels, releasing carbon dioxide
and other greenhouse gases. The U.S. is by far the largest polluter.
Corell says there's so much greenhouse gas in the air already that
more temperature rise is inevitable.
Even if we stopped using every car, truck, and power plant —
stopping all greenhouse gas emissions — Mayewski says the planet
would continue to warm anyway. "Would continue to warm for another,
about another degree," he says.
That's enough to melt the Arctic — and if greenhouse gases continue
to increase, the temperature will rise even more. The ice that's
melting already is changing the weather by disrupting ocean currents.
Corell points to floods in the U.S., heat waves in Europe; and 60
Minutes wanted to know about the catastrophic 2005 hurricane season.
"The one thing I think we can say with a fairly high degree of
confidence is the severity of the storms, how strong the storms,
these cyclonic events like hurricanes and cyclones in the Pacific,
are going to get — they're gonna be more severe. Now one thing that
is in doubt is whether there'll be more of them," Corell explains.
"The oceans of the Northern Hemisphere are the warmest they've been
on record. When they get up in that temperature, they spin off
hurricanes. Well, if it goes up another degree, it's gonna spawn
these with more intensity," Corell says.
The name "arctic" comes from ancient Greek meaning "Land of the
Great Bear."
But the warming climate is threatening this icon of the arctic, the
polar bear. Flying above the sub-arctic region of Hudson Bay,
Canadian scientist Nick Lunn is hunting polar bears in a 30-year
study that tracks their health. It's the job of his assistant Evan
Richardson to take them down with a tranquilizer dart.
Once tranquilized, Lunn carefully checks the bear with a pole,
without getting too close.
The polar bear is the largest predator on land. Native people in the
region say he'll even hunt humans, but not on the day Pelley joined
Lunn: with the tranquilizer, the bear was awake but immobile.
The scientists knew this bear by his tattoo. His history is written
chapter and verse in the "bear bible."
"This is the record book of all the bears that have been handled by
us or Manitoba Conservation," Lunn explains.
The study began at the Wapusk National Park, because the bear
population was thought to be the healthiest in the world.
Lunn's annual checkup records changes in fat, dimensions and an
inventory of weapons. The polar bear uses its teeth to hunt
primarily one thing — seals. That's where arctic warming comes in.
Polar bears can only hunt on the ice. Lunn says the ice is breaking
up three weeks earlier than it did 30 years go. He's now finding
female bears 55 pounds lighter — weaker mothers with fewer cubs.
Asked how the bear population has changed since he started his
research, Lunn says, "When we first started doing this research,
we've done inventories in the mid-80s, in the mid-90s. Both times we
came out with an estimate of approximately 1,200 animals for what is
known as the western Hudson Bay population. The numbers now suggest
that the population has declined to below 1,000."
The bears are unlikely to survive as a species if there's a complete
loss of ice in summer, which the arctic study projects will happen
by the end of this century.
here are skeptics who question climate change projections like that,
saying they're no more reliable than your local weatherman. But
Mayewski says arctic projections done decades ago are proving accurate.
"That said, the skeptics have brought up some very, very interesting
issues over the last few years. And they've forced us to think more
and more about the data that we collect. We can owe the skeptics a
vote of thanks for making our science as precise as it is today,"
says Mayewski.
One big supporter of climate science research is the Bush
administration, spending $5 billion a year. But Mr. Bush refuses to
sign a treaty forcing cuts in greenhouse gases.
The White House also declined 60 Minutes' request for an interview.
Corell, who first studied the issue for President Reagan, believes
the climate change facts are in, even if President Bush does not.
"When you look at the American government, which is saying
essentially, 'Wait a minute. We need to study this some more. We
can't flip our energy use overnight. It would hurt the economy.'
When you hear that, what do you think?" Pelley asked.
"Well, what I do then is, I try to tell them exactly what we know
scientifically. The science is, I believe, unassailable," says
Corell. "I'm not arguing their policy, that's their business, how
they deal with policy. But my job is to say, scientifically, shorten
that time scale so that if you don't push out the effects of climate
change into the long, long distant future. Because even under the
best of circumstances, this natural system of a climate will
continue to warm the planet for literally hundreds of years, no
matter what we do."
By Bill Owens
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-global-warning/
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