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<i><font size="+1"><b>May 22, 2020</b></font></i><br>
<br>
[<span style="color: rgb(3, 3, 3); font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: pre-wrap; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249); text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; display: inline !important; float: none;"></span>promising
new solar cell]<b><br>
</b><b> </b><b>Cheap Renewable Energy a Step Closer As
Next-Generation Solar Cells Pass Strict International Tests</b><br>
Perovskite crystals could underpin cheap renewable energy.<br>
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.<br>
<br>
The research findings, an important step towards commercial
viability of perovskite solar cells, are published today (May 21,
2020) in the journal Science.<br>
<br>
Solar energy systems are now widespread in both industry and
domestic housing. Most current systems rely on silicon to convert
sunlight into useful energy.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
<br>
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...<br>
- - <br>
"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.<br>
<br>
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...<br>
- - <br>
"We expect this work will contribute to advances for stabilizing
perovskite solar cells, increasing their commercialization
prospects," Professor Ho-Baillie said.<br>
###<br>
Reference: 21 May 2020, Science.<br>
DOI: 10.1126/science.aba2412<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://scitechdaily.com/cheap-renewable-energy-a-step-closer-as-next-generation-solar-cells-pass-strict-international-tests/">https://scitechdaily.com/cheap-renewable-energy-a-step-closer-as-next-generation-solar-cells-pass-strict-international-tests/</a><br>
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</p>
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</p>
[funding confusion]<br>
<b>US critics of stay-at-home orders tied to fossil fuel funding</b><br>
ExxonMobil, Koch and Mercer family are past funders of critics of
stay-at-home orders as fossil fuel industry struggles amid lockdowns<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
"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...<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/21/groups-fossil-fuel-funding-urge-states-reopen-amid-pandemic">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/21/groups-fossil-fuel-funding-urge-states-reopen-amid-pandemic</a>...<br>
- - -<br>
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".<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
A Heartland spokesman, Jim Lakely, has argued "leftists" are
"stoking Covid-19 panic" and has called lockdown orders
unconstitutional.<br>
<br>
"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.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/21/groups-fossil-fuel-funding-urge-states-reopen-amid-pandemic">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/21/groups-fossil-fuel-funding-urge-states-reopen-amid-pandemic</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[not confusing at all]<br>
<b>Good news: Americans can freak out about coronavirus and climate
change at the same time</b><br>
By Shannon Osaka on May 20, 2020<br>
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?<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://grist.org/climate/good-news-americans-can-freak-out-about-coronavirus-and-climate-change-at-the-same-time/">https://grist.org/climate/good-news-americans-can-freak-out-about-coronavirus-and-climate-change-at-the-same-time/</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
[Video interview posted May 21]<br>
<b>Juice Podcast 12: The Machine | with Naomi Klein</b><br>
thejuicemedia<br>
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.<br>
You can follow Naomi here: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://twitter.com/NaomiAKlein">https://twitter.com/NaomiAKlein</a><br>
Naomi's books and work: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://naomiklein.org">https://naomiklein.org</a> <br>
The Leap: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://theleap.org">https://theleap.org</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtTyvKKnxtg">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtTyvKKnxtg</a><br>
- -<br>
[the companion video - surprisingly honest and informative -
sarcastic too]<br>
<b>Honest Government Ad: The Machine.</b> Watch it here:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWl7kQZHZE0">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWl7kQZHZE0</a><br>
["Send help"?]<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
[Video]<br>
<b>Noam Chomsky on Trump, COVID-19, climate change, and the economy</b><br>
"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.<br>
<br>
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...<br>
- - <br>
<b>The looming climate crisis</b><br>
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.<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
<br>
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...<br>
- -<br>
<b>How citizens can push back</b><br>
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.<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<b>Youth hold the key to structural changes</b><br>
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.<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/05/19/news/noam-chomsky-trump-covid-19-climate-change-and-economy">https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/05/19/news/noam-chomsky-trump-covid-19-climate-change-and-economy</a><br>
- -<br>
[YouTube 6 min video]<br>
<b>Greta Thunberg: Our House Is On Fire! | World Economic Forum 2019</b><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://youtu.be/M7dVF9xylaw">https://youtu.be/M7dVF9xylaw</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p> </p>
<br>
[Digging back into the internet news archive]<br>
<font size="+1"><b>On this day in the history of global warming -
May 22, 2014</b></font><br>
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow discusses the oil industry's refusal to<br>
acknowledge the risks of moving oil by rail.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/watch/oil-industry-denies-rail-risks-with-report-263830083849">http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/watch/oil-industry-denies-rail-risks-with-report-263830083849</a><br>
<p>/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/</p>
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