[✔️] March 18, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Political Villainy, Military emissions, myth of free market, floating solar panels,

[Richard Pauli]

/*March 18, 2023*/


/[ Must-see video of a crucially important history that exposes 
political villainy ]/
*Global Warming: The Decade We Lost Earth*
Simon Clark
13,548 views  Mar 17, 2023
The story of how one man cost us a world with less than 2°C of warming 
in 1989. To try everything Brilliant has to offer—free—for a full 30 
days, visit https://www.brilliant.org/simonclark
This is a follow-up video to Global Warming: An Inconvenient History, 
going into much more detail of events from 1979 to 1989. In particular 
this is the story of the "villain" of climate change, a man you've 
likely never heard of before. But is that a fair description? You be the 
judge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvGQMZFP9IA

- -

/[ From the great journalist Nathaniel Rich]/
*Losing Earth: A Recent History –* March 17, 2020
by Nathaniel Rich  (Author)

    By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate
    change―including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of
    scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely
    heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to
    convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is
    their story, and ours.

    The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Nathaniel
    Rich's groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an
    instant journalistic phenomenon―the subject of news coverage,
    editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its emphasis on
    the lives of the people who grappled with the great existential
    threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared
    plight.

    Now expanded into book form, Losing Earth tells the human story of
    climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in
    previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the
    genesis of the fossil fuel industry's coordinated effort to thwart
    climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political
    influence. The book carries the story into the present day,
    wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking
    crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future,
    and ourselves.

    Like John Hersey's Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the
    Earth, Losing Earth is the rarest of achievements: a riveting work
    of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for
    understanding how we got here, and how we must go forward.

https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Earth-History-Nathaniel-Rich/dp/1250251257/ref=asc_df_1250251257/


/[  Democracy Now report  on YouTube 21 min ] /
*Climate Change & War: How U.S. Military Emissions Factor into Costs of 
War & Shape Military Policy*
Web Exclusive MARCH 17, 2023
- -
*AMY GOODMAN:* ...IAnd this goes back to Part 1 of our discussion about 
the Costs of War Project, “Blood and Treasure,” and the costs of war, 
the death toll, the expense. If you could go through this? We’re talking 
about well over half a million people, Iraqis and Syrians, you 
estimated, and could be four to five times higher, and over $3 trillion?

*NETA CRAWFORD:* Right. So, the largest single expense here will be 
healthcare, going into the future. OK, it’s the many U.S. servicemembers 
who were injured, sometimes very gravely, with multiple amputations, 
traumatic brain injury, musculoskeletal injuries and so on, exposure to 
toxics, people who will get cancer in the future or who have gotten so 
already. So, that’s the largest expenditure that’s ongoing.

But what we see is, you know, there’s about more than $860 billion were 
just spent on DOD operations, the so-called overseas contingency 
operations in Iraq and Syria. Then there’s an additional increase to the 
base military budget. So, the base military budget is the non-war budget 
that covers healthcare expenses for active-duty servicemembers and 
housing and all the rest of it. So, that has also increased as a part of 
the long war. Then there’s, in addition, some money that was spent to 
reconstruct Iraq. Much less, about $60 billion, $62 billion, were spent 
on reconstruction. What you see there is some of that was wasted, a good 
portion of it, but some of it was effective at reconstructing Iraq.

And then there’s the money that’s already been spent on healthcare and, 
in addition, interest on borrowing for these wars, because, of course, 
the War in Iraq nor the War in Afghanistan, neither of those conflicts 
were paid for through taxes that were raised specifically for fighting, 
so the U.S. went into deficit. And with that deficit comes interest, and 
we’re paying for it. We will be paying for these wars for a long time. 
So, that’s why the costs are so high — future health expenses, but the 
money we’ve already spent.

And then, when you talk about injuries, both in the region and U.S. and 
its allies, those are hundreds of thousands of people who are directly 
killed and injured. But then there’s also the indirect harm that comes 
from a war. So, when water treatment facilities were bombed and not 
repaired, or hospitals are bombed, or physicians and nurses and other 
healthcare workers flee a region, there’s a tremendous burden that’s 
placed on the remaining healthcare system. And many people are suffering 
because they don’t have access to preventive care or urgent or emergent 
care when they need it. And those — that’s the extra death or the 
indirect death or the extra morbidity and mortality that wouldn’t have 
occurred if there had not been a war, and certainly a war of this 
duration, which harmed the infrastructure and the ability of people to 
get healthcare and clean drinking water, everything that they need to 
have a decent life.

*AMY GOODMAN:* Well, Neta Crawford, I want to thank you so much for 
being with us, for producing the report and the book. And you now can go 
back to your conference, where you are, in Montreal, Canada. Neta 
Crawford is professor of international relations at Oxford University 
and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, where 
her new report is titled “Blood and Treasure: United States Budgetary 
Costs and Human Costs of 20 Years of War in Iraq and Syria, 2003-2023,” 
also author of the book The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting 
the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions<. To see Part 1 of our 
discussion, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for 
joining us.

https://www.democracynow.org/2023/3/17/climate_change_war_how_us_military

- -

/[ from MIT Press ]/
*The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of 
U.S. Military Emissions.*
By Neta C. Crawford
The MIT Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14617.001.0001
ISBN electronic: 9780262371933
Publication date: 2022
How the Pentagon became the world's largest single greenhouse gas 
emitter and why it's not too late to break the link between national 
security and fossil fuel consumption. The military has for years (unlike 
many politicians) acknowledged that climate change is real, creating 
conditions so extreme that some military officials fear future climate 
wars. At the same time, the U.S. Department of Defense—military forces 
and DOD agencies—is the largest single energy consumer in the United 
States and the world's largest institutional greenhouse gas emitter. In 
this eye-opening book, Neta Crawford traces the U.S. military's growing 
consumption of energy and calls for a reconceptualization of foreign 
policy and military doctrine. Only such a rethinking, she argues, will 
break the link between national security and fossil fuels.

The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War shows how the U.S. economy and 
military together have created a deep and long-term cycle of economic 
growth, fossil fuel use, and dependency. This cycle has shaped U.S. 
military doctrine and, over the past fifty years, has driven the mission 
to protect access to Persian Gulf oil. Crawford shows that even as the 
U.S. military acknowledged and adapted to human-caused climate change, 
it resisted reporting its own greenhouse gas emissions.

Examining the idea of climate change as a “threat multiplier” in 
national security, she argues that the United States faces more risk 
from climate change than from lost access to Persian Gulf oil—or from 
most military conflicts. The most effective way to cut military 
emissions, Crawford suggests provocatively, is to rethink U.S. grand 
strategy, which would enable the United States to reduce the size and 
operations of the militar7
https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14617.003.0002
https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5413/The-Pentagon-Climate-Change-and-WarCharting-the



/[ An important conversation about the most critical economics  ]/
*How big business sold America the myth of the free market*
A conversation with Erik M. Conway about his new book with Naomi Oreskes.

In 2010, historians of technology Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes 
released Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the 
Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, a book about 
weaponized misinformation that proved to be extraordinarily prescient 
and influential.

Now Oreskes and Conway are back with a new book: The Big Myth: How 
American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free 
Market. It's about the laissez-faire ideology of unfettered, 
unrestrained markets, which was invented and sold to the American people 
in the 20th century through waves of well-funded propaganda campaigns. 
The success of that propaganda has left the US ill-equipped to address 
its modern challenges.

Erik M. Conway
On March 8, I interviewed Conway at an event for Seattle's Town Hall, 
where we discussed the themes of the book, the hold free-market ideology 
still has over us, and the prospects for new thinking. The organizers 
were kind enough to allow me to share the recording with you as an 
episode of Volts. Enjoy!

https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-big-business-sold-america-the?utm_source=podcast-email%2Csubstack&publication_id=193024&post_id=106715301&utm_medium=email#details



/[ a new and //praiseworthy //"/techno-fides" /idea  ]/
*Solar Panels Floating in Reservoirs? We’ll Drink to That*
Floating photovoltaic systems, or “floatovoltaics,” provide electricity 
and reduce evaporation. Plus, you don’t need to clear land for a solar farm.

“That’s remarkable, this 9,434-terawatt-hours-per-year potential,” says 
J. Elliott Campbell, an environmental engineer at the University of 
California, Santa Cruz and coauthor of the paper, which was published 
today in Nature Sustainability. “It’s about 10 times today’s generation 
from solar. And solar is growing like crazy. If there was ever a time to 
ask where to put all this stuff, it’s now.”

Floatovoltaics work just like solar panels on land, only they’re … 
floating. Each one is a cluster or “island” of panels, built atop a 
buoyant mounting platform and anchored to the bottom of the water body 
by cables. Every other row of panels is a walkway for crews to do 
electrical maintenance or inspections.

The systems are of course built to resist rust, but so are terrestrial 
panels, which are exposed to rain. “The electrical system is really no 
different than a rooftop system or a ground mount system,” says Chris 
Bartle, director of sales and marketing at Ciel & Terre USA, which 
deploys floatovoltaic projects around the world. “We’ve taken 
essentially old technology from the marina world—docks and buoys and 
whatnot—and applied that to building a structure that an array of solar 
panels can be mounted to. It’s really as simple as that.”

They have an added engineering challenge, though, in that a reservoir’s 
water level can change dramatically during storms or droughts. There may 
be strong currents, as well as winds. So while the system is anchored to 
the lake bottom, there must be slack in the anchoring lines. “It allows 
the island to move around with the nature of the wind and the waves and 
water level variation,” says Bartle.

These islands shade water that would otherwise be exposed to relentless 
sunlight; if implemented worldwide, the study found that all those 
panels would save enough water to supply 300 million people each year. 
The reservoir water, in turn, actually makes the floatovoltaics more 
efficient at harvesting the sun’s energy. It cools them—like a human, 
solar cells can overheat.

In 2021, Campbell published another paper based on the same principle: 
If California spanned 4,000 miles of its canal system with panels, it 
would save 63 billion gallons of water from evaporation each year and 
provide half the new clean energy capacity the state needs to reach its 
decarbonization goals.

Because the US has so many reservoirs—some 26,000 in varying sizes, 
totaling 25,000 square miles of water—it would especially benefit from 
wide-scale floatovoltaics, the new study finds. If the country covered 
30 percent of its reservoir area with floating panels, it could generate 
1,900 terawatt hours of energy—about a fifth of the potential global 
total—while saving 5.5 trillion gallons of water a year.

China could manage 1,100 terawatt hours annually, followed by Brazil and 
India at 865 and 766, respectively. Egypt could deploy 100 square miles 
of floatovoltaics and generate 66 terawatt hours of electricity while 
saving over 200 billion gallons of water annually.

The study further found that 40 economically developing 
countries—including ​​Zimbabwe, Myanmar, and Sudan—have more capacity 
for floatovoltaic power than current energy demand. (Though as they 
develop, that energy demand will go up.)

An additional upside of floatovoltaics is that many reservoirs are 
equipped with hydroelectric dams, so they already have the electrical 
infrastructure to ferry solar power to cities. The two power sources 
complement each other well, says Zhenzhong Zeng, of China’s Southern 
University of Science and Technology, a coauthor of the new paper. “The 
intermittency of solar energy is one of the main obstacles to its 
development. Hydroelectric power, which tends to be controlled, can make 
up for the shortfall at night when solar power does not work,” says 
Zeng. “Moreover, it can be combined with wind power, which is usually 
well-complemented to solar.”

Water savings will be all the more important as climate change 
supercharges droughts, like the historic one that’s been gripping the 
Western states. But even if a reservoir’s water level declines severely 
and hydroelectric generation begins to dip, floatovoltaics would still 
generate electricity. (However, more remote reservoirs without 
hydroelectric systems would need to connect their solar panels to the 
larger grid, which would increase costs.)

Floatovoltaics could also interface nicely with microgrids, says Sika 
Gadzanku, an energy technology and policy researcher at the National 
Renewable Energy Laboratory. These are divorced from a larger grid and 
use solar power to charge up batteries, which can, for example, power 
buildings at night. “If you maybe had a huge pond in a remote area, 
deploying floatovoltaics could look similar to just applying a 
solar-plus-battery project in some other remote area,” says Gadzanku, 
who wasn’t involved in the new paper but peer-reviewed it.

And it could benefit small communities in other ways, Gadzanku says: 
Installing a floating system on a local pond could save its water and 
might be cheaper than trying to connect a remote area to a bigger grid. 
“Expanding the grid is very expensive,” she says.

Putting panels over canals or reservoirs would make use of space that’s 
already been modified by people, and it wouldn’t require clearing 
additional land for huge solar farms. (Floatovoltaics can also be 
deployed on polluted water bodies, like industrial ponds.) “It takes 
about 70 times more land for solar than it does for a natural gas plant, 
for equal capacity,” says environmental engineer Brandi McKuin of the 
University of California, Merced, who coauthored the canal paper with 
Campbell but wasn’t involved in this new work. “If we’re going to reach 
these ambitious climate goals while also protecting biodiversity, we 
really need to look at these solutions that use the built environment.”

In recent years, floatovoltaics have graduated from smaller-scale 
projects to sprawling solar farms, like in Singapore’s Tengeh Reservoir, 
where the panels occupy an area equal to 45 football fields. As the 
systems scale up, “we really need additional research on what some of 
the potential impacts are, thinking about these water ecosystems,” says 
Gadzanku. For example, the shade might prevent the growth of aquatic 
plants, or the panels might cause problems for local waterfowl and 
migrating birds that rely on reservoirs as pitstops. It might be useful 
to determine, for instance, if there’s an optimal spacing of panels to 
allow species to freely move about the water.

While these projects alone won’t be able to provide whole metropolises 
with juice, they’ll help diversify the generation of power, making the 
grid more resilient as the renewables revolution gains speed. “Energy is 
such a big problem, we’re not going to have one silver bullet,” says 
Campbell. “We need floating photovoltaics and about a hundred other 
things to satisfy our energy needs.”
https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-floating-in-reservoirs-well-drink-to-that/amp 




/[The news archive - looking back at Hurricane Katrina ]/
/*March 18, 2013*/
March 18, 2013:
USA Today reports: "Could the USA deal with a Hurricane Katrina every 
two years? Such a scenario is possible by the end of the century due to 
climate change, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings 
of the National Academy of Sciences."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2013/03/18/storm-surge-hurricane-climate-change-global-warming/1997113/ 



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