Lethal Heating: 11/22/16

22/11/2016

Startup Tests Egg-Beater-Type Wind Turbine That Can Resist Typhoons On Okinawa

Japan Times - Chisaki Watanabe

Challenergy Inc.'s wind turbine is intended to be more resilient to wind than traditional machines that use large propellers. COURTESY OF CHALLENERGY INC.

With hurricanes threatening Florida and typhoons lashing Japan, a startup company working on the island of Okinawa is testing a wind turbine that could withstand winds that blow the blades off traditional machines.

Atsushi Shimizu BLOOMBERG

Backed by government grants and loans, Challenergy Inc., run by Atsushi Shimizu, is working to bring to market a machine that looks like an old-fashioned egg-beater, using rotating cylinders to generate electricity from the wind. His turbine, installed on Okinawa Island, is intended to be more resilient than traditional machines that are essentially large propellers.

His work taps into a need for wind turbines to cope with extreme conditions that scientists say could become more commonplace with global warming. Though typhoons regularly strike eastern China, the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan and Japan, the risk is that they may get stronger as ocean temperatures rise, researchers Wei Mei and Shang-Ping Xie wrote in Nature Geoscience in September. They found storms in Northern Asia have intensified as much as 15 percent in the last 37 years.
Traditional turbine designers have been “bent on keeping the propellers and just keep repeating really minor changes for improvement,” Shimizu, 37, said in an interview in Tokyo between trips to Okinawa. “I wanted to explore a different way after seeing propellers blown off by typhoons in summer and broken by gusts in winter.”
On average, about 11 typhoons a year come within 300 km (186 miles) of Japan, and three make landfall, according to the Meteorological Agency. Japan was hit with more typhoons than usual this season.
Shimizu hopes his design, a machine 7 meters (23 feet) high with three rotating cylinders, will prove resilient to such winds, doing away with the blades found on traditional turbines.
The turbine harnesses what’s known as the Magnus effect, where a sideways force is exerted on a spinning object. When the cylinders are spinning, the Magnus effect kicks into play, powering a generator as part of a process that’s yet to be found in any other commercialized product, Shimizu said. It’s meant to take advantage of wind blowing from different directions, offering better control of output in variable wind speeds.
It was the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster that prompted Shimizu to think about clean energy. He quit his job at Keyence Corp., where he researched factory automation machines, and founded Challenergy in October 2014 to pursue his turbine ideas.
Challenergy won the backing of the Japanese government, receiving a two-year grant from the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization totaling about ¥55 million ($535,000). It also raised ¥4 million in crowd-funding and received loans from the government-backed Japan Finance Corp.
Shimizu’s turbine technology is “very challenging, but it is a technology from Japan like no other, while there are 300 makers for small turbines globally,” said Hisashi Yoshioka, director of the startup group for innovation promotion at NEDO.
Challenergy’s office is in the corner of a garage belonging to Hamano Products Co., a small metal fabrication company in Tokyo’s Sumida Ward. Hamano invited Challenergy to set up shop at their garage after Shimizu won a business plan contest presided over by a panel that included Hamano President Keiichi Hamano. The garage is also home to a startup that is developing a detachable battery-based device to turn a unicycle into a three-wheel device to carry heavy items.
The turbine is designed to withstand typhoons with wind speeds of 80 meters per second, Shimizu said, adding that it’s also suitable for mountains buffeted by turbulent winds.
“If the turbine can keep producing power when a typhoon hits, that means it can work any place,” he said.
While the prototype in Okinawa was assembled using the same material as is found in sewage pipes for the cylinders, Shimizu is looking at carbon fiber-reinforced plastic for future models. The company has also been negotiating with several venture capitalists, he said.
Propeller-type windmills are designed to stop operating when wind speeds exceed 25 meters per second, according to the website of the Japan Weather Association, which is supporting Challenergy’s Okinawa project by providing know-how on wind condition observations and by setting up a customized site for weather information and data.
“It appears to be an interesting design, which could potentially enable wind turbines to continuously generate wind electricity in strong winds,” said Yiyi Zhou, a wind analyst for Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “However, its technology viability still remains unproven at this stage without (a) sufficient track record.”
Japan’s wind power capacity, currently at 3 gigawatts, is forecast to increase to 10 gigawatts by 2030, according to the government. The Japan Wind Power Association says the country has the potential for 36 gigawatts by then.
Shimizu wants to have his machine working in time for the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2020.
“I want to see the turbine at Olympic venues and I want it to replace the Olympic torch,” Shimizu said. “The torch emits carbon dioxide.”

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Why Women Matter For Effective Climate Change Solutions – Analysis

Eurasia Review - Fabíola Ortiz

Two women protest. Photo credit: Fabiola Ortiz

Establishing a clear path forward and including women and girls in global efforts on climate change were some of the biggest challenges the delegations and non-state actors faced at the latest United Nations Climate Change Conference in Marrakech.
Formally known as the Twenty-Second Conference of Parties (COP22), the conference had a special day (November 14) for discussing exclusively gender issues within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
“Study after study has shown that women are the most vulnerable to climate change and that’s why there is a need for strong leadership on this issue,” said UNFCCC Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa.
“We need to prioritise women’s demands and offer the proper responses to climate change,” Mariam Diallo-Dramé, President of the Association of Women Leaders and Sustainable Development (AFLED) told IDN. AFLED is based in Bamako, Mali, and works to empower girls and young women between the ages of 15 and 35.
Diallo-Dramé explained that because adaptation to climate change is inextricably related to access to education, climate adaptation must therefore also envision a holistic solution of educating women and sending girls to school. “We work to empower girls’ citizenship and to involve them in decision-making, we encourage them to be part of political scenario in Mali,” she said.
Women in the Sahel region are responsible for the well-being of the family, often having to walk long distances to fetch water and food on unsafe roads, she noted, adding that “resources are rare in the Sahara region, and most of the time men leave women to farm. They have their own traditional methods for adaptation, but it is not enough, they need help.”
As an African voice advocating for gender issues to be included in the climate talks in Marrakech, Diallo-Dramé regretted that this issue was not being properly addressed in the negotiations.
“I have the feeling that in those high-level meetings we, African women from the Sahel, are going to stay behind because we are not there at the table. We are not able to address the gender issue in our countries, governments don’t understand, all legislation regarding gender and human rights is just on paper and is not being implemented. When you talk about climate justice it is going to be for the West and not for us,” she said.
For the last two weeks at COP22 (November 7-18, 2016), country delegations negotiated implementation of the new global agreement to tackle climate change adopted in Paris in 2015. The Paris Agreement embraces a language sensitive to gender equality and recognises Parties’ responsibility to respect and promote human rights obligations through climate change action calling for “gender-responsive adaptation measures and capacity-building activities”.
In Marrakech, Parties were expected to carry on with the Lima Work Programme on Gender – which is a two-year work programme on gender launched at COP20 in 2014. Civil society groups had strongly advocated a clear plan of action on gender within the UNFCCC and financial support for the activities under the Lima Work Programme.
“We start from the point that we are not victims, we are advancing now on the discourse of empowerment,” Maité Rodríguez Blandón, coordinator for the Guatemala Foundation in the Central American country, told IDN.
“Climate resilience will come from empowering women in their communities. Women are very well organised at the local level and they know their role. We focus on changing the perception from being a victim to becoming a key actor and protagonist for change.” Blandón leads the Women and Peace Network in Central America with grassroots women’s organisations from Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Honduras. Her work has focused on grassroots women’s movements struggling for land rights, women’s rights and safer cities for women over the past decade.She said that there was too much dialogue and not enough action at COP22.
“We have seen an increasing participation of indigenous and women’s groups that used to be unthinkable in the past. The Lima Work Programme on Gender was very short and you don’t see the mention of women empowerment in the text. It has evolved with no doubt, we have achieved higher levels of conscious, but we don’t want to be at the periphery. We need to see more concrete actions”, she stressed.
Engaging indigenous women’s voices has also been a concern for Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples. “Indigenous women have a very important role because they are the ones who are really involved in subsistence low-carbon food production. They are the ones who take care of the environment within their territories. Their role is to really ensure that the biodiversity is sustained,” she told IDN.
Tauli-Corpuz believes that COP22 did have a strong gender focus.“Women are here to make sure that their rights will also be addressed in the decisions being reached. Indigenous women are the strong allies for climate change solutions, they should be at the core of the discussions,” she said.
Civil society organisations and non-state actors had a crucial role in COP22, Driss El Yazami, Head of the Civil Society Team at the conference and President of the National Human Rights Council of Morocco, told IDN.
“Women’s groups from several countries gathered here to lay the first foundations of an African Network of Women for Climate Justice. Reaching the Paris Agreement was itself influenced by civil society and non-state actors. The Paris Agreement recognises the important engagement of the various actors, including non-governmental organisations,” she added.
Around 1,500 local and regional leaders representing more than 780 local and regional governments from 114 countries gathered in Marrakech and launched a roadmap for action to start a global campaign to localise climate finance in 2017 and implement a ‘Global Action Framework for Localising Climate Finance’ by 2020.

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Donald Trump’s First Staff Picks All Deny The Threat Of Climate Change

Think Progress - Natasha Geiling

Introducing the Five Horsemen of the Climate Apocalypse.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Gerry Broome

Ten days removed from the presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump has finally begun filling out his team, releasing a slew of offers for various high-level positions, from CIA director and attorney general to national security advisor.

Unlike the Departments of State or the Interior, these posts have less of a direct impact on domestic and international climate and energy policy. But climate change is a problem that permeates all policy realms — especially national security.

The Department of Defense has called climate change a “threat multiplier,” noting that it has the potential to exacerbate conflict and threaten national security. And in September, 25 military and national security experts — including former advisers to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush — issued a report warning that climate change poses a “significant risk to U.S. national security and international security.” Middle East experts have suggested that the Syrian civil war is a contemporary example of a climate-driven conflict, one where widespread drought and crop failures helped tip the scale.

Trump, on the other hand, does not believe in the scientific consensus on climate change. He has called climate change a “hoax,” and has vowed to roll back nearly every single climate policy enacted under the Obama administration, from the Clean Power Plan to the Paris climate agreement.

So it should be no surprise that, when it comes to climate change, Trump’s first five advisers also reject the scientific consensus, as well as national security community’s warnings, regarding the dangers of global warming.

Here’s a rundown of Trump’s first five staff picks, and how they stack up on climate change.

Attorney General: Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

CREDIT: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions has a long history of denying climate science. In 2012, during a Senate hearing on climate science, Sessions refused to accept the fact that 97 percent of climate scientists believe that climate change is both happening and is driven by humans.

In 2015, during a hearing on the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed budget, Sessions grilled EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy on her climate and weather knowledge, despite the fact that McCarthy is a bureaucratic administrator, not a climate scientist. Sessions then wrote McCarthy a letter claiming that “although questions regarding the impacts of climate change were clear and straightforward, none of the questions received direct answers, and many responses contained caveats and conditions.” The fact that climate models are incredibly complex (a single atmospheric model can contain more than a million lines of code) doesn’t seem to convince Sessions that climate models usually require some amount of “conditions” or “caveats.”

In Congress, Sessions has repeatedly voted for policies that expand fossil fuel development and restrict regulations on greenhouse gases. He voted in favor of a measure that would prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases, and has argued that carbon dioxide is not really a pollutant because it is “a plant food,” and that it “doesn’t harm anybody except that it might include temperature increases.”

CIA Director: Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS)

CREDIT: AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

In 2010, Rep. Mike Pompeo rode into Washington on the coattails of the Tea Party movement, which saw a wave of ultra-conservative representatives elected to Congress. Pompeo has deep ties to petrochemical billionaires Charles and David Koch: He gained most of his wealth from a firm he founded with investment funds from Koch Industries, and relied heavily on campaign donations from Koch Industries’ PAC to power him through his primary and the general election.

The Koch brothers have actively disseminated misleading information about climate change for years, so perhaps it is no surprise that Pompeo chooses to deny the scientific consensus on climate change. In 2013, during an interview on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, Pompeo said he thinks “the science [on climate change] needs to continue to develop.” He then continued by arguing, incorrectly, that there is still a great deal of debate among climate scientists about climate change (in reality, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists — 97 percent of them — believe that climate change is both happening and man-made).

“There are scientists who think lots of different things about climate change,” Pompeo said. “There’s some who think we’re warming, there’s some who think we’re cooling, there’s some who think that the last 16 years have shown a pretty stable climate environment.”

In Congress, Pompeo voted to open the outer continental shelf to oil drilling, and to restrict the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases, and supported Americans for Prosperity's (a Koch-backed advocacy group) pledge opposing any kind of tax on carbon. He has a 4 percent lifetime score, as a representative, from the League of Conservation Voters.

Pompeo has also been a vocal critic of the Obama administration’s climate policies, lambasting the president for his opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline and arguing that by supporting the U.N. climate agreement, Obama was “prepared to handcuff out nation’s economy for the sake of advancing his radical environmental agenda.” In reality, the Paris agreement was a stellar deal for the United States, requiring minimal action for a potentially very big economic payoff. Moreover, while certainly historic, the Paris agreement was far from “radical” — most climate scientists agree that the steps outlined in the agreement would still fail to get the world below the 2°C (3.6° F) warming threshold set by the agreement.

National Security Advisor: Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn

CREDIT: AP Photo/ Evan Vucci

Michael Flynn used to serve as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, until he was forced out in 2014 for allegedly being a bad manager who “left chaos in his wake,” according to NBC News. Since then, he has been a loyal Trump surrogate and was even floated as a potential vice presidential candidate.

Now, it appears Flynn will be Trump’s top national security advisor. And while his history of speaking on climate change is limited, it’s safe to say he likely doesn’t deem climate change the national security threat that the Department of Defense and multiple retired national security experts perceive it to be.

Flynn’s most notable statement about climate change came this summer, in the wake of the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida. Weeks later, Obama traveled to Canada to discuss — among other things — climate change. Flynn went on Fox News to criticize Obama’s move, arguing that the president was more interested in climate change than national security.

“And here we have the President of the United States up in Canada talking about climate change,” Flynn said. “I mean, God, we just had the largest attack…on our own soil in Orlando. Why aren’t we talking about that? Who is talking about that? I mean, Fort Hood, Chattanooga, Boston, people forget about 9/11!”

Flynn does not seem to care that the Department of Defense has called climate change a “threat multiplier” and that prominent members of the national security community, like Dov Zakheim, who served in the Department of Defense under both Reagan and George W. Bush, have highlighted climate change as a risk to U.S. military operations.

Chief White House Strategist: Steve Bannon

CREDIT: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

Steve Bannon — who ran Trump’s campaign and has been named Chief White House Strategist — is many things. He is a racist whose appointment to the White House has been cheered by the Klu Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. He is a misogynist and bigot who has called women “dykes” and ran a website that disparaged Jews and minorities.

And on top of all of that, he is a climate denier and peddler of climate conspiracy theories. Breitbart News, Bannon’s conservative website, has tried to claim that climate change is a hoax created by activists, scientists, and renewable energy executives. Breitbart has published pieces calling NASA and NOAA scientists “talent-less low-lives.”

Bannon himself has accused the Pope of “hysteria” on climate change. He has called for unfettered fossil fuel extraction, arguing on a radio interview that there could be an “American renaissance, and an industrial renaissance in front of us, if we can just get the government out of our way.” James Delingpole, a British climate denier who Bannon recruited to write for Breitbart, told E&E News that “one of [Bannon’s] pet peeves is the great climate change con.”

Bannon has also argued that Obama’s focus on climate change has come at the expense of national security — which, again, runs counter to the Department of Defense’s own opinion on the matter.

White House Chief of Staff: Reince Priebus

CREDIT: AP Photo/John Locher

Reince Priebus, whom Trump poached from the Republican National Committee to become his Chief of Staff, shares the opinion of others on this list that climate change is not a threat to national security.

“Democrats tell us they understand the world, but then they call climate change, not radical Islamic terrorism, the greatest threat to national security,” Priebus said during the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference. “Look, I think we all care about our planet, but melting icebergs aren’t beheading Christians in the Middle East.”

When former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) made a connection between climate change and the conflict in Syria during an interview with Bloomberg in July of 2015, Priebus called the comments “absurd” and argued that “it’s abundantly clear no one in the Democratic Party has the foreign policy vision to keep America safe.”

As RNC chair, Priebus oversaw an organization whose platform criticizes “Democratic party environmental extremists.” It calls the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “a political mechanism, not an unbiased scientific institution.” It rejects crucial international climate agreements, like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, and calls for shifting environmental policy from the federal level to the states.

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