Welcome to The Age of Endless Recovery! Climate change is now a permanent drag on economic growth.

Some time back, I started thinking of the era we’ve entered as The Age of Endless Recovery. The basic concept is more or less what it sounds like – the severity and frequency of climate disasters is going to keep increasing, which means that we’re going to keep falling increasingly far behind in terms of recovery. Even if the same place isn’t hit every year, enough places around the world are being hit that just dealing with climate disasters is already imposing a sort of tax on everything we do. It’s not currently the primary cause of economic deprivation around the world – that’s still the profit-obsessed system that’s driving climate change – but it is making everything more difficult, even for those of us who are not directly recovering from a disaster.

The idea first occurred to me well over a decade ago (I’m sure I probably got the idea from someone else, but I have no idea who), but it wasn’t until the last three or four years that I felt pretty certain that we had entered that stage of global warming. I think to most people who’ve been paying attention, this isn’t exactly a radical suggestion, but for any who might think I’m exaggerating, well, now there’s research to back me up on this.

The study found that economies are sensitive to persistent temperature shocks over at least a 10-year time frame. It also found that climate change impacts economic growth in about 22% percent of the countries analyzed.

“Our results suggest that many countries are likely experiencing persistent temperature effects,” said lead author Bernardo Bastien-Olvera, a Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis. “This contradicts models that calculate metrics like the social cost of carbon, which mostly assume temporary temperature impacts on GDP. Our research adds to the evidence suggesting that impacts are far more uncertain and potentially larger than previously thought.”

Previous research examined the question by estimating the delayed effect of temperature on GDP in subsequent years, but the results were inconclusive. With this study, UC Davis scientists and co-authors from the European Institute on Economics and the Environment in Italy used a novel method to isolate the persistent temperature effects on the economy by analyzing lower modes of oscillation of the climate system.

For example, El Niño Southern Oscillation, is a three to seven-year temperature fluctuation in the Pacific Ocean that affects temperature and rainfall in many parts of the world.

“By looking at the GDP effects of these types of lower-frequency oscillations, we’re able to distinguish whether countries are experiencing temporary or persistent and cumulative effects,” Bastien-Olvera said.

This is what climate scientists and activists have been trying to avoid for decades. Now, in addition to the enormous task of changing our society to stop destroying our environment, we also have the additional burden of constantly rebuilding and recovering from ever-more-frequent disasters.

The upside is that we can respond to this proactively. As with so many other problems these days, we knew this was coming, and that means that we also know how to start getting out of this trap our “leaders” have led us into. This will sound obvious to some, and drastic to others, but if we want to get ahead of this problem, we should invest in relocating people. We should build housing in areas that are likely to be able to support more people (in the United States, that would probably be places like the Northeast, and over to the Great Lakes region. Nowhere is climate-proof, but we should be moving to areas that are going to have an abundance of fresh water, to avoid drought to whatever degree we can.

But we do need to move people. Ideally, cities like Miami won’t just be evacuated, but we’ll also dismantle them, to re-use the materials, and to reduce the amount of pollution that would come from just leaving the city to crumble into the rising seas. It would be a huge, costly endeavor. It would also be far cheaper to invest those resources to do it now, than to just “let the market decide” through countless lives being destroyed. As I keep saying, the world into which most of us were born is gone. That world has ended, or if you prefer, it’s in the process of ending. It a very real way, we are living through an apocalypse – a period of ending, and of revelation – and it may be that there’s nothing we can do to prevent that.

What we can do is lay the groundwork for a better world on the other side, and hopefully in doing that, we can find ways to make this era, well, less apocalyptic.

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It’s getting hotter, faster, and that trend is going to continue. After a certain point, drastic action is all that is left.

Apparently I meant to write about this back in September, but for reasons that are still unclear to me, I wasn’t able to make myself post daily back then. It’s not anything particularly new, but it’s important to keep in mind when thinking about politics, and about any plans we might have for the future. A little over a decade ago, I was part of a “climate working group” organized by myself and fellow New England Quakers. At that point in time, it seemed pretty clear that the biggest obstacle to direct action within our religious community, was that people honestly did not grasp the severity of the problem. However bad you think public understanding of the issue is now, it was much, much worse back then. I remember people who considered themselves environmental activists talking about preventing it from warming, and going back to normal, at a time when I was reading regular reports about ecosystems shifting around us, and feedback loops starting up.

So, we put together a presentation. We talked about why climate change was important to us personally, because that kind of framing tends to get through to people. And we played this video:

And then we talked about solutions. My goal at the time was to the community to lead by example. To pool their resources, and get every member of the community off of fossil fuels one at a time. I still think it was something that could have been done (the money was there, had its owners cared to spend it), and I know many members of the community have put up solar panels, installed batteries, and so on since then. But the contents of this video – especially the feedback loops it discusses – were new to a lot of people, and I remember being told that if I talked about things like storing food for emergencies, it’d just sound over the top and turn people off. Maybe that was right, I don’t know, but it didn’t sit right then or now. In case I haven’t mentioned it recently, having a store of food for emergencies is more than just buying extra food. It is that, but you need to use that food at the same time, and cycle through it so none of it is on the verge of spoiling when a crisis hits. You also want to be able to cook with the food you’ve set aside, and live on it. If it’s rice and beans, learn how to make it enjoyable, and add those spices to your store of food. If there’s a crisis, you don’t want to be figuring out how to make your food edible on top of whatever else is going on. It’s an actual skill that most people – myself included – aren’t very good at these days. Practice it now, so you’ll have that resource when you actually need it.

Because for all things seem bad now, it is almost certain that the rate of warming is going to increase over the next couple decades, and that is not going to be a pleasant experience for us, because our rulers have thus far refused to prepare.

James Hansen, a climate scientist who shook Washington when he told Congress 33 years ago that human emissions of greenhouse gases were cooking the planet, is now warning that he expects the rate of global warming to double in the next 20 years.

While still warning that it is carbon dioxide and methane that are driving global warming, Hansen said that, in this case, warming is being accelerated by the decline of other industrial pollutants that they’ve cleaned from it.

Plunging sulfate aerosol emissions from industrial sources, particularly shipping, could lead global temperatures to surge well beyond the levels prescribed by the Paris Climate Agreement as soon as 2040 “unless appropriate countermeasures are taken,” Hansen wrote, together with Makiko Sato, in a monthly temperature analysis published in August by the Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions center at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

Declining sulfate aerosols makes some clouds less reflective, enabling more solar radiation to reach and warm land and ocean surfaces.

I’ve written about this before, and it’s important to keep in mind. It’s one of the reasons that I think we need to consider geoengineering, even though it’s an extreme and dangerous thing to do. I don’t know the exact accuracy of the forecasts of civilizational collapse within 30 years – I don’t think anyone can know that for sure, but it is entirely within the realm of possibility. If we don’t change direction, I fear it’s more likely than not.

Since his Congressional testimony rattled Washington, D.C. a generation ago, Hansen’s climate warnings have grown more urgent, but they are still mostly unheeded. In 2006, when he was head of NASA’s GoddardInstitute for Space Studies, George W. Bush’s administration tried to stop him from speaking out about the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

After 46 years with NASA, Hansen left in 2013 to focus on political and legal efforts to limit warming. His granddaughter, Sophie Kivlehan, is one of 21 young plaintiffs suing the U.S. government for violating their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property by failing to take adequate action to address the human causes of climate change, such as greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, industry and electricity generation.

In Hansen’s latest warning, he said scientists are dangerously underestimating the climate impact of reducing sulfate aerosol pollution.

“Something is going on in addition to greenhouse warming,” Hansen wrote, noting that July’s average global temperature soared to its second-highest reading on record even though the Pacific Ocean is in a cooling La Niña phase that temporarily dampens signs of warming. Between now and 2040, he wrote that he expects the climate’s rate of warming to double in an “acceleration that can be traced to aerosols.”

That acceleration could lead to total warming of 2 degrees Celsius by 2040, the upper limit of the temperature range that countries in the Paris accord agreed was needed to prevent disastrous impacts from climate change. What’s more, Hansen and other researchers said the processes leading to the acceleration are not adequately measured, and some of the tools needed to gauge them aren’t even in place.

The article goes on to talk about aerosols, and how we know what we know, but I want to shift focus to something else.

I think it is very important to understand that the warming between here and 2 degrees will likely do a lot more damage than did the warming that got us here. First off, as the video at the top mentioned, there are a number of feedback loops that are also accelerating the warming, even without the monkey’s-paw consequences of reducing pollution. The warming we see over the next couple decades will be piling on top of already-collapsing glaciers and already-burning ecosystems. I think that means that we’re in for a couple decades where it really does feel like every year gets worse. Historically, when climate scientists have talked about warming, they’ve predicted a mix of warm years and cool years, and maybe even a decade or two of no warming at all, but I am increasingly skeptical of that prediction. It wouldn’t shock me if there was one or two years in the next 20 that were cooler than the decadal average, or that didn’t have any record-breaking “natural” disasters, but those will be the rarity.

Zoonotic diseases will also almost certainly keep popping up as desperate people start eating whatever they can to survive, and desperate animals start leaving their historic seclusion because their ecosystems are collapsing, and they can’t find food. This is going to be even more of a problem because the people at point of contact are increasingly going to have weakened immune systems from starvation, overheating, and so on.

All of this, as it has throughout history, will fuel war. War, as it has throughout history will cause environmental destruction, which in turn will make it harder to grow food.

Again, as I keep saying, there are ways we could be preparing, and saving lives, and making this process far easier for everyone. Feeding everyone means nobody has to eat wild animals to survive, which means fewer chances for us to catch diseases from animals. That, and making sure everyone has adequate water would go a long way to preventing war, along with a myriad of other crimes. We can shift agriculture indoors, and invest in new kinds of food production. We can invest in cleaning up existing toxic waste, and containing new waste. We can make sure that everyone has access to air conditioning for heat emergencies, and we can ensure that that is powered by renewable energy or nuclear power. We can invest in global access to free vaccination, for any and all diseases. We can reduce childhood mortality, and guarantee quality care for elders, even if not a single person left alive knows who they are. With those two, and universal access to sex ed and contraception, population growth will likely stagnate or decrease, making that less of a problem without a need for mass death. We have the knowledge and resources to do all of that and more.

What we can’t do, is do that while also protecting the wealth and power of our current ruling classes. There is simply too much to be done, to allow for such reckless indulgence. The scale of change matches the scale of the problem, which means that if we want to avoid billions of deaths this century, we need to take coordinated, deliberate action on a scale that has never been achieved in human history, with zero regard for profit or the immature pettiness of that minority whose sole drive in life is the will to power.

As ever, I am aware of the scale and difficulty of what I’m proposing, but what alternate path is less extreme in its consequences?

All we can do is fight for a better world, and since that’s something few of us are accustomed to doing, I continue to believe that we have to start with the basics, even if it seems agonizingly slow and inadequate. We don’t have time to do it halfway.

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England continues its headlong rush into authoritarianism

Migrants who have been convicted of a criminal offence will be required to scan their faces up to five times a day using smartwatches installed with facial recognition technology under plans from the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice.

In May, the government awarded a contract to the British technology company Buddi Limited to deliver “non-fitted devices” to monitor “specific cohorts” as part of the Home Office Satellite Tracking Service. The scheme is due to be introduced from the autumn across the UK, at an initial cost of £6m.

Yes, Gentle Readers, that is exactly what it sounds like. The United Kingdom will be forcing migrants to wear surveillance computers, and scan their faces on demand, wherever they are. This means that these people will have no right to privacy, and likely no right to even know what kinds of data their mandatory surveillance equipment will be collecting.

The Home Office says the smartwatch scheme will be for foreign-national offenders who have been convicted of a criminal offence, rather than other groups, such as asylum seekers.

However, it is expected that those obliged to wear the smartwatches will be subject to similar conditions to those fitted with GPS ankle tags, with references in the DPIA to curfews and inclusion and exclusion zones.

In a National Audit Office report in June, the government said it “regards electronic monitoring as a cost-effective alternative to custody, which contributes to its goals to protect the public and reduce reoffending”.

Campaigners say 24-hour surveillance of asylum seekers breaches human rights, and may have a detrimental impact on migrants’ health and wellbeing.

Ya think?

When I was in Cuba, there were a couple points where it was made clear to our small group of U.S.ians that the government was keeping an eye on us. They seemed to know our itinerary before we did some days, and would be expecting us at checkpoints. That was not a comfortable experience, but it didn’t feel like I was always being watched. When I was in Tanzania, I was taken completely by surprise when I found myself exhausted by just constantly being seen. I stood out, which meant there was always someone paying attention to what I was doing. Even on a mountainside, far away from anyone else, I could hear a kid on the adjacent mountain spot me and yell, “Mzungu!”. It was strangely draining, and I expect is something that people who aren’t white men have to deal with a whole lot more.

So I can only imagine the strain that would come from wearing a modern surveillance device, with a camera, everywhere you go. Not only that, but in addition to the government, a private, for-profit corporation will also be watching, and if you ever take off that device, you will be punished.

Lucie Audibert, a lawyer and legal officer for Privacy International, said: “Facial recognition is known to be an imperfect and dangerous technology that tends to discriminate against people of colour and marginalised communities. These ‘innovations’ in policing and surveillance are often driven by private companies, who profit from governments’ race towards total surveillance and control of populations.

“Through their opaque technologies and algorithms, they facilitate government discrimination and human rights abuses without any accountability. No other country in Europe has deployed this dehumanising and invasive technology against migrants.”

Dr Monish Bhatia, a lecturer in criminology at Birkbeck, University of London, said: “Electronic monitoring is an intrusive technology of control. Some individuals develop symptoms of anxiety, depression, suicide ideation and overall deterioration of mental health.

“The Home Office is still not clear how long individuals will remain on monitoring. They have not provided any evidence to show why electronic monitoring is necessary or demonstrated that tags make individuals comply with immigration rules better. What we need is humane, non-degrading, community-based solutions.”

That would be nice.

Instead, we get invasive surveillance, and the threat that, regardless of where you might be from, if the U.K. government decides to be rid of you, they’ll just ship you to Rwanda:

The two final candidates in the race to become the UK’s new prime minister, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, have both vowed to expand the government’s controversial Rwanda immigration policy.

Former finance minister Rishi Sunak announced his plans to tackle illegal immigration in a nearly 5-minute video posted on Twitter Sunday, during which he said that the UK had lost control of its borders.

“Every year thousands and thousands of people come into the UK illegally. Often, we don’t know who they are, where they’re from, and why they’re here. These are not bad people. But it makes a mockery of our system and in the current chaotic free world there is simply no way for a serious country to run itself,” Sunak said in the video.

The measures he proposes include a cap set annually by the UK parliament on “number of refugees we accept each year via safe and legal routes, amendable in the face of emergencies,” according to the plan published on Sunak’s campaign website.

He also put forward a measure making “aid, trade, and visas conditional on a country’s willingness to cooperate on returns” of migrants who have illegally entered the UK.

Make no mistake – closed borders are the same as a wall. They are used to keep some people in, and other people out, and the United States is far from the only country planning to respond to climate change with escalating authoritarianism, and decreasing regard for human life, let alone the right to anything like dignity, privacy, or freedom of movement. As in the U.S., it seems like there is no real limit to how far they will go to keep people “in their place”.

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Carbon capture is a distraction we cannot afford.

I’m in favor of carbon capture as a general concept. I’ve written before about using plants for that purpose, and I continue to think that we should be doing that.

But.

Without eliminating fossil fuel use, carbon capture is a distraction we cannot afford.

A new report from Imperial College London has outlined the degree to which carbon capture worked between 1996 and 2020, as well as the degree to which it has been over-estimated:

The researchers compared estimations of stored carbon with official reports, and found that the reports lead to overestimates of actual carbon stored by 19-30 per cent.

They calculated 197 million tonnes of carbon were captured and stored between 1996 and 2020, which represents a significant achievement in climate change mitigation. However, the researchers say the lack of consistent reporting frameworks mean current reported rates of carbon capture are overestimated, giving an inaccurate picture of the technology’s contribution to fighting climate change. This, the researchers say, disempowers us in meeting climate mitigation strategies like the Paris Agreement and risks hiding issues that could otherwise be easily solved, such as inefficiencies in facility technology and transport.

Lead author Yuting Zhang, PhD candidate at the Department of Earth Science and Engineering, said: “Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is rightly a cornerstone of climate change mitigation, but without a centralised reporting framework we approach climate change on the back foot when we need to be more proactively tackling the issue with robust and accurate reporting.

I’m sorry, but in light of this report, I have to disagree with the lead author. If this is an example of what carbon capture and storage has to offer, then we cannot rely on it at all. Once again – 197 million tonnes of carbon captured and stored over a period of 24 years. For comparison, we emitted 36.3 billion tonnes in 2021 alone. The decrease in emissions from the 2020 lockdowns was 2 billion tonnes, which is over ten times what was captured during that 24 year period.

Taking this seriously as “a cornerstone of climate change mitigation” feels like declaring a toddler with a bucket to be a cornerstone of our firefighting strategy. This is not the first time I’ve wondered whether industrial carbon capture is anything more than a greenwashing campaign, fueled by a willful detachment from reality. As always, I’m glad for this research. It’s good to have numbers on how carbon capture has been going (as badly as all the rest of our climate “action”), and how the propaganda surrounding it has over-sold its usefulness.

The study authors suggest centralizing the process of tracking and reporting on carbon capture and sequestration. That’s fine. It seems like a good idea. I also think it’s worth noting that it’s not like any of our other climate mitigation efforts have been going any better, so it’s possible that if we ever take the issue seriously (you know, before it kills us all), carbon capture will make a huge difference. Even so, if that happens, it won’t matter if we’re still generating so much carbon dioxide. Carbon neutrality is not enough. It shouldn’t need saying, but freezing CO2 levels where they’re at right now is still a catastrophe – it’s just a slower one.

Carbon capture and storage is rightly a cornerstone of climate mitigation, but without a rapid elimination of fossil fuel use, it will do little more than help our rulers deflect blame for the horrors they have wrought.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Americans are eating so much excess meat, their pee is poisoning the water.

I’ve known for a while that the American diet tends to have too much protein. A lot of emphasis is placed on meat, in our culture, and the focus on making U.S.ians lose weight has often guided people to eat fewer carbohydrates, but as much protein as we want. For me, that was compounded by the knowledge that muscle burns more calories than fat, so in my mind, anything I could do to ensure my body could build muscle easily, would also help me burn calories.

The reality is that we humans tend to be fairly efficient creatures, and when we consume too much protein, our body just pisses it away.

Literally.

 Balancing how much protein you eat with the amount your body needs could reduce nitrogen releases to aquatic systems in the U.S. by 12% and overall nitrogen losses to air and water by 4%, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.

Protein consumption in the United States, from both plant and animal sources, ranks among the highest in the world. The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, said that if Americans ate protein at recommended amounts, projected nitrogen excretion rates in 2055 would be 27% less than they are today despite population growth.

The study is the first to estimate how much protein consumption contributes to excess nitrogen in the environment through human waste. It also indicates that coastal cities have the largest potential to reduce nitrogen excretions headed for their watersheds.

“It turns out that many of us don’t need as much protein as we eat, and that has repercussions for our health and aquatic ecosystems,” said lead author Maya Almaraz, a research affiliate with the UC Davis Institute of the Environment. “If we could reduce that to an amount appropriate to our health, we could better protect our environmental resources.”

The human body requires protein. But when a body takes in more protein than it needs, excess amino acids break it down into nitrogen, which is excreted mostly through urine and released through the wastewater system. This brings additional nitrogen into waterways, which can result in toxic algal blooms, oxygen-starved “dead zones” and polluted drinking water.

I think it’s also worth mentioning that eating too much protein can also cause health problems. Kidney stones are first on the list, which makes sense, given what our bodies do with the excess, but when it comes to eating red meat, too much can also increase your risk of colon cancer. We already know that cows in particular are major methane emitters, and livestock in general are more energy-intensive to raise, simply by virtue of being animals, and not plants.

In fact, for all I downplay individual action in favor of systemic change, this is one case where there’s almost certainly no downside. The exception to mention up front is that some people simply need meat to be healthy. That’s one reason I want it to be available, even in my “ideal world”, and why food in general should be free at the point of access, so that those with uncommon restrictions don’t have to pay more just to live. That said, eating less meat would benefit the health and the finances of most U.S. residents.

This is one of those times where a country that valued human life would be funding a PR campaign to this end, but at the very least we can spread the word on our own. This is an easy answer, and honestly it’s one we’ve known for a very long time. As with all dietary advice, your exact needs are going to vary person to person, and the whole reason I like this as a form of individual action is that it’s something that will make people’s individual lives better, and possibly more affordable. That would be nullified if you were to make your diet less healthy.

I also want to say that as someone who’s struggled with his weight for his entire life, I get that changing your diet – especially eating less food – is not always an easy ask. Our bodies make us suffer for losing weight, even if doing so makes us more healthy, and there doesn’t seem to be much we can do about that beyond developing ways to cope.

But personally, I’ve found the combination of environmental impact and overall concern for my health to be a pretty good motivator in getting me to eat less protein in general, and less meat in particular.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

You won’t believe this one weird trick that lets you build a better wind turbine with less material!

Ok, I’m sorry for the headline, it’s just…

You know how sometimes you see an innovation that’s so obvious, you wonder why it wasn’t just always done that way? Maybe this is my ignorance speaking, but this feels like one of those times.

Traditional upwind turbines face the incoming wind, and to avoid being blown into the tower, their blades must be sufficiently stiff. It requires a lot of material to build these relatively thick and massive blades, which drives up their cost. Turbine blades on downwind rotors, however, face away from the wind, so there’s less risk of them hitting the tower when the winds pick up. This means they can be lighter and more flexible, which requires less material and therefore less money to make. These downwind blades can also then bend instead of break in the face of strong winds—much like palm trees.

Over the past six years, in conjunction with collaborators at the University of Virginia, the University of Texas at Dallas, the Colorado School of Mines, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Pao’s team has collaborated to develop the SUMR (Segmented Ultralight Morphing Rotor) turbine, a two-bladed, downwind rotor to test the performance of this lightweight concept in action. On June 10 at the American Control Conference, the CU researchers presented results from a new study of four years of real-world data from testing their 53.38 kilowatt demonstrator (SUMR-D) at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) Flatirons Campus, just south of Boulder, Colorado.

They found that their turbine performed consistently and efficiently during periods of peak wind gusts—a satisfactory result.

https://youtu.be/OBbyTFFecwM

This seems unequivocally good. I talk a lot about how we need to be preparing for a much more hostile climate, even as we work to reduce that hostility. A huge part of that is going to be having electricity that keeps working even when disaster strikes. Power plants that shut down during heat waves are already getting people killed, as is energy infrastructure that breaks in the cold. Conditions are changing, and our best shot at saving lives is to change our infrastructure ahead of that change.

Wind turbines that keep working in high winds, plus a grid that can withstand hurricanes, could move us from storms meaning a power outage, to storms meaning a power surplus!

I also like this because it goes into the design of the controller that makes sure the blades are facing the correct direction. The oldest windmills had to be directed manually. I think the next upgrade after that was a sail that could align the rotor to the wind like a weathervane. After that, we got fascinating arrangements of wooden gears and the like. All of those innovations are cool in their own right, but it’s good that we’ve got more advanced systems, to deal with a more chaotic climate.

One of the trickiest elements of wind energy generation is dealing with not enough or too much wind at one time. When wind speeds are too low, a turbine can’t produce a useful amount of energy. When gusts are too fast, they can push the limits of a turbine’s capacity, causing it to shut down to avoid a system overload.

The inconsistency of wind speed has plagued wind energy since its inception; the lost time spent shutting down the system leads to less energy generated and less efficient production.

Key to Pao’s innovative contributions are improvements to the controller—the part of the turbine that determines when to be more or less aggressive in power production.

“We like to think of the controller as essentially the brain of the system,” said Pao, senior author on the study and fellow at the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI).

This hidden brain aims to produce efficient wind energy at low cost and with low wear and tear. The feedback controller does this by using measurements of how the system is performing, and then adjusting to better improve the performance, said Pao.

The yaw controller makes sure the turbine is facing the correct direction, the blade pitch controller determines the direction of the blades (dependent on the wind speeds), and the generator torque controller decides how much power to pull off the turbine and onto the grid. While it controls physical components of the turbine, these controllers are essentially a software algorithm that tells the motors what to do.

Pao’s group is not only turning the turbine around to reduce damage from strong winds, but working behind the scenes on its software to maximize the system’s ability to keep running during peak wind events.

“Our work attempts to predict the likelihood or the probability of peak wind gusts occurring, and then tries to mitigate the speed peaks by acting before they happen,” said Phadnis.

NREL’s Flatirons Campus’ was the perfect place to test this in action, as it’s strategically placed to receive the strong winds which shoot out across Highway 93 and onto the mesa, after being funneled through Eldorado Canyon directly to the west.

There, the researchers found that, even through extensive experimental testing, peak generator speeds were below the threshold for their operational controller to keep the turbine running.

In a separate collaboration, Pao and her research group have been working with the University of Oldenburg in Germany to assess the utility of sensors that scan ahead of the turbine to measure the wind coming in and of advanced controllers that command the turbine to respond proactively.

I remember reading a while back about how concentrated solar thermal plants were getting better because advanced sensors and computing meant you could have a field of small (relatively), flat mirrors that would re-align themselves to keep the reflected light focused on the same point throughout the day. Prior to that, solar furnaces had to use large parabolic mirrors , which work, but which are harder to construct and transport, and less efficient at tracking the sun. It stands to reason that similar advances have been made for wind energy, but I honestly hadn’t thought much about it till now.

I hope this team gets all the support they need to advance this. The article is cautious about the likelihood of their design being adopted over the turbines we’re used to, and I’m sure that the problems of capitalism will be a big obstacle, beyond whatever engineering problems may exist. That said, the possibility of wind power that uses less material, while also working in a wider variety of conditions, feels like an obvious win.

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Reminder: Making real progress on climate change would cost less than 1% of global GDP, but we’re still not doing it.

The world needs to quadruple its annual investment in nature if the climate, biodiversity and land degradation crises are to be tackled by the middle of the century, according to a new UN report.

Boy, that sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? We need to quadruple what we’re currently investing! What does that look like in terms of what economists call “real numbers?

Investing just 0.1% of global GDP every year in restorative agriculture, forests, pollution management and protected areas to close a $4.1tn (£2.9tn) financial gap by 2050 could avoid the breakdown of natural ecosystem “services” such as clean water, food and flood protection, the report said.

I did badly in calculus. Honestly, most math after basic geometry and algebra was pretty rough for me. I’m saying this because maybe my numbers are off here. It sure seems like what this article is saying, is that in response to a crisis that scientists are increasingly telling us could destroy our civilization within just a few decades, the world is investing 0.025% of its GDP? Am I reading that right?

Seriously, though, I’m not surprised. I should say that this article is from last spring, but this isn’t the first time numbers like this have come up, and I think it’s something worth remembering from time to time. It’s not just that we’re not doing enough, it’s that we’re not even doing the bare minimum. I think that estimation of what would be required is far too low, but we haven’t even tried it. It’s not just that our leaders are too greedy and deluded do use their power to make the world better for everyone, it’s that they can’t even be bothered to decrease their pathological hoarding by even a fraction of a percent. Being rich isn’t enough, they have to be constantly getting richer, and they need to do that faster than anyone else. What’s really mind-boggling to me is that if they did invest their collective trillions in really dealing with climate change, they would become international heroes, and they would still almost certainly be obscenely wealthy. They’d still be rich even if they met my standards, and ended poverty around the world, too.

At this point, I think that the fact that they still haven’t done that means that they’re actually incapable of doing it. That means that it will not happen unless their hand is forced, either by total disaster, or by the masses. They really do seem to be aiming for a world in which they rule a shattered wasteland from their high-tech fortresses. Why else would we still be on this path when it would take so little for them to change our course?

The State of Finance for Nature report, produced by the UN Environment Programme (Unep), the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Economics of Land Degradation Initiative (ELD), said a total investment of $8.1tn was required to maintain the biodiversity and natural habitats vital to human civilisation, reaching $536bn a year by 2050, projected to be about 0.13% of global GDP.

More than that, this analysis backs up one of the points I’ve been hammering for a while now (and I’m far from alone). We need to invest in the protection and stewardship of biodiversity.

More than half of global GDP relies on high-functioning biodiversity but about a fifth of countries are at risk of their ecosystems collapsing due to the destruction of the natural world, according to an analysis by the insurance firm Swiss Re last year. Australia, Israel and South Africa were among the most threatened.

The Unep report, which looked at terrestrial nature-based solutions, urges governments to repurpose billions of dollars of damaging agricultural and fossil fuel subsidies to benefit nature and integrate the financial value of nature in decision-making. By 2050, governments and the private sector will need to spend $203bn on the management, conservation and restoration of forests around the world.

“The dependency of global GDP on nature is abstract but what we really mean are livelihoods, jobs, people’s ability to feed themselves, and water security,” said Teresa Hartmann, the WEF lead on climate and nature. “If we don’t do this, there are irreversible damages. The four-trillion gap we describe cannot be filled later on. There will be irreversible damages to biodiversity that we can no longer fix.”

The report follows a warning by leading scientists in January that the planet is facing a “ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals” because of ignorance and inaction.

“The way that we use natural resources for food, textiles, wood, fibre and so on, that needs to change,” Hartmann said. “Everybody’s talking about an energy transition at the heart of everybody’s understanding of climate change. Nobody’s talking about a land-use change transition. We cannot afford to continue exploiting and producing as we do now.”

About $133bn is invested in nature every year, often by national governments. Nearly two-thirds of that is spent on forest and peatland restoration, regenerative agriculture and natural pollution-control systems.

The report’s authors said nature and climate should be high on government lending conditions as part of the expansion of investment, also citing the example of Costa Rica’s tax on petrol, which is used to finance its reforestation programme. Private investment in nature-based solutions accounts for only about 14% of the current total, according to the report, which said it needed to be scaled up through carbon markets, sustainable agricultural and forestry supply chains, and private finance.

Ivo Mulder, head of Unep’s climate finance unit, said: “At the moment, emission levels are equal or par to pre-Covid levels. So despite what everybody’s saying, both businesses and governments have been building back as usual.
“The question is: how serious are we about investing in nature-based solutions, both from a government and business perspective? Failing to do so will probably stop us from meeting the Paris climate agreement and deplete biodiversity further.”

This is the flip side of the “we know what we need to do, and how to do it; what’s missing is a desire to do it on the part of those people in whose hands we’ve concentrated most of our species’ collective power. That means that we need to take back that power if we want anything to change, and that – as always – comes down to organizing. I was talking to a friend recently about the frustrations of trying to motivate comfortable people to direct action, and while I still have very little experience myself, it seems like we really do need to start a new kind of political system from scratch. It’s going to be painfully slow, especially as we watch our rulers destroy the world around us, but I don’t see another way forward. The one bit of encouragement I can offer from this is that even if this analysis is far too optimistic about the investment that’s needed, building a better world is still well within our material capacity.

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Important Video: Unsustainable water usage is reaching a crisis point for the Southwestern U.S.

Watch this video, or at least click through to youtube and read the transcript (click on the “…” next to the “save” option). The states that draw water from the Colorado River have very little time to find a way to eliminate one Arizona’s worth of water usage. Failing to do that means 25 million people could lose their electricity, because Lake Meade has almost dried up to the point that the Hoover Dam can no longer generate power reliably. I was recently talking to someone who was shocked that I would suggest we rebuild infrastructure and relocate people to make nationwide mass transit more viable.

The reality is that people are going to have to change and relocate either way, unless they want to be living without electricity in a notoriously hot and dry region, as the planet continues to heat. We are out of time.

Methane leakage from biogas facilities underscores the importance of doing things right.

I feel like I spend a lot of time talking about what it means to “get it right” on the environment. Solar panels are great, but less so if the silicon mining destroys habitat, or the copper mines and refineries for the power cables poison the land around them. We can’t just replace fossil fuels with other power sources and change nothing else. We have to change not just how we generate and use power, but also how we extract resources, how we process them, how we transport them, and how we dispose of the waste generated in every part of that system.

Climate change isn’t the only major environmental problem we face; it’s just the most urgent one. We need to stop being so sloppy in general, but you’d think that folks involved in renewable energy production in particular would understand that. Unfortunately, it turns out that biogas facilities, while certainly more renewable than fossil sources of gas, are still leaking a lot of methane into the atmosphere.

The new Imperial study, published in One Earth journal, found that supply chains for biomethane and biogas release more than twice as much methane as the International Energy Agency (IEA)’s previous estimation. It also reveals that 62 per cent of these leaks were concentrated in a small number of facilities and pieces of equipment within the chain, which they call ‘super-emitters’, though methane was found to be released at every stage.

The researchers say urgent attention is needed to fix the methane leaks, and knowing precisely where the majority of them are happening will help production plants to do so.

Lead author of the study Dr Semra Bakkaloglu, of Imperial’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Sustainable Gas Institute, said: “Biomethane and biogas are great candidates for renewable and clean energy sources, but they can also emit methane. For them to really help mitigate the warming effects of energy use, we must act urgently to reduce their emissions.

“We want to encourage the continued use of biogas and biomethane as a renewable resource by taking the necessary actions to tackle methane emissions.”

The researchers note that compared to the oil and gas industry, the biomethane industry suffers from poorly designed and managed production facilities as well as a lack of investment for modernisation, operation, and monitoring. Because oil and natural gas supply chains have been primarily operated by large companies with huge resources for decades, they have been able to invest more in leak detection and repair.

Honestly, I’m reluctant to blame the people involved in biogas production. This seems to be yet another symptom of the broader systemic disease – people in power don’t take climate change seriously. So of course biogas doesn’t get the funding it needs. As much as I wish it were otherwise, it always comes back to politics. This is just another small part of the massive change we urgently need. The only real upside is that every small part we deal with, will both reduce the size of the task ahead, and make other aspects of that task easier.

Dr Bakkaloglu said: “To prevent biogas methane emissions negating the overall benefits of biogas use, urgent attention is needed including continuous monitoring of biogas supply chains. We believe that with the proper detection, measurement, and repair techniques, all emissions can be avoided. We need better regulations, continuous emission measurements, and close collaboration with biogas plant operators in order to address methane emissions and meet Paris Agreement targets.”

“Given the growth in biomethane due to national decarbonisation strategies, urgent efforts are needed for the biomethane supply chain to address not only methane emissions but also the sustainability of biomethane.”

Co-author Dr Jasmin Cooper, also of the Sustainable Gas Institute and Department of Chemical Engineering, said: “Addressing the fundamental design issues and investment problems within the biofuel and methane industry would be a good starting point for stopping these leaks and preventing more from arising.”

The researchers are now focusing on the super-emitters within supply chains to better understand how to reduce them using the best available technologies.

As always, it’s good that we know about this. I think I’ve been advocating for biogas as part of our new energy “portfolio” for longer than I’ve been talking about the whole “getting it right” thing. This tech means that every human population can have a reliable source of flammable gas that’s proportional to the number of people feeding into the sewage system. I hope the leak problem gets fixed soon, because I don’t think we can afford to squander useful energy, and I know we can’t afford to be letting more methane into the atmosphere.

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When it comes to flooding in the U.S. mid-Atlantic region, hurricanes barely rate

When I was a kid, the most exciting weather event I encountered was Hurricane Bob. If memory serves, we went inland when it came, and I think we were staying with a family friend. I remember seeing the dramatic footage of floating cars along the Massachusetts coast. I remember intense winds, and the surreal calm of the eye passing overhead. It cemented hurricanes in my mind as Serious Business, and nothing I’ve seen since then has dissuaded me of that view.

I also remember Nor’easters, with their cutting cold and violent winds, but we never left town to avoid one of those. To me, they were exciting events, that often knocked out the power for a while, which meant we got to light everything with candles. It turns out that for all the attention paid to hurricanes, in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, almost all coastal flooding events come from non-tropical storms.

The most recent paper was published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology and compared extreme coastal flooding events from tropical cyclones and mid-latitude weather systems in the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays from 1980-2019.

Callahan looked at the past 40 years of measurements from several National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tide gauges in the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays. This helped him to quantify the storm surge — the rising sea as the result of atmospheric pressure and winds associated with a storm — from these large weather events.

While coastal flooding from tropical weather events tend to get a lot of media attention — and actually have a higher average surge level — Callahan said that midlatitude weather events can produce flood levels just as severe and occur much more frequently in the Mid-Atlantic.

“About 85 to 90% of our coastal flooding events here in the Mid-Atlantic come from the midlatitude events; they don’t come from the tropical cyclones and the hurricanes,” said Callahan. “You can get strong nor’easters that have just as high coastal inundation levels and cause just as much — if not more — damage than tropical cyclones.”

One of the reasons that the midlatitude events can cause so much damage is that, unlike the tropical systems that commonly impact coastal areas in the southeastern United States before hitting the Mid-Atlantic, the intensity and size of midlatitude events are most difficult to forecast and can strengthen quickly without much warning. Also, while tropical systems usually peak and are well-formed storms before reaching the Mid-Atlantic, a nor’easter can strengthen quickly right on or just off-shore of the region. Additionally, mid-latitude systems are often bigger in size, move slower, and remain over our region for longer periods of time.

That makes a lot of sense to me. Hurricanes are huge, easily visible, move over the planet almost like some kind of entity. They make for great television, in part because you can spend weeks tracking them from formation – usually off the coast of western Africa – until they dissipate. The disparity in coverage and perception seems to be from a combination of the incentives of our news entities, and the nature of the storms.

Because they happen frequently in the cold season — from November to March — not much attention is paid to how nor’easters cause coastal flooding. Instead, more attention is paid to the amount of ice and snow and wind that the nor’easters bring and not as much focus is on the coast.

“Our attention is diverted between these other impacts or factors of these storms in the winter and spring, but this is where most of our coastal flooding comes into play,” said Callahan.

I also have to imagine that flooding is more dangerous. It’s possible that the colder water means fewer chemical reactions, so less of that danger, but the risk of hypothermia is astronomical in those conditions, and all that ice in the floodwater can also do direct kinetic damage to things. I’d be inclined to think the increased frequency is responsible for the higher numbers from mid-latitude storms, but the authors also point out that even if we’re just looking at the biggest disasters, hurricanes don’t even make the halfway mark.

Of the top 10 largest coastal flooding events in the Mid-Atlantic, tropical weather systems account for only 30-45% in the Delaware and upper Chesapeake Bays and 40-45% in the lower Chesapeake Bay. If you expand out further, tropical systems make up approximately 10-15% of all coastal flooding events.

The authors go on to make the shocking prediction that as sea levels rise, coastal flooding will get worse.

I think this is a valuable lesson in how to think about climate change. We’re still living in the society that created this problem, and that is trying to avoid solving it. The things we’re shown aren’t always the things at which we need to be looking. That’s true in all areas of life, of course, but I think it’s particularly true with climate change. A lot of what’s happening is invisible to us until it’s too late to do anything but fight for survival. Science lets us see that stuff, but we’re actively discouraged from looking closely. There’s a miasma of propaganda that makes it hard to tell what’s going on, and I’m worried that that’s going to lead us to overlook some pretty important things

It’s good to have this information, and I hope more people become aware of it. In terms of overlooking things, all we can really do is pay attention and, as always, organize.

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