Hooked! The Unyielding Grip of Fossil Fuels on Global Life

Alternet - Michael Klare*

Despite the advances of renewable energy, fossil fuels will continue to dominate the global landscape for decades to come.

huyangshu/Shutterstock

Here’s the good news: wind power, solar power, and other renewable forms of energy are expanding far more quickly than anyone expected, ensuring that these systems will provide an ever-increasing share of our future energy supply. According to the most recent projections from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy, global consumption of wind, solar, hydropower, and other renewables will double between now and 2040, jumping from 64 to 131 quadrillion British thermal units (BTUs).
And here’s the bad news: the consumption of oil, coal, and natural gas is also growing, making it likely that, whatever the advances of renewable energy, fossil fuels will continue to dominate the global landscape for decades to come, accelerating the pace of global warming and ensuring the intensification of climate-change catastrophes.
The rapid growth of renewable energy has given us much to cheer about. Not so long ago, energy analysts were reporting that wind and solar systems were too costly to compete with oil, coal, and natural gas in the global marketplace. Renewables would, it was then assumed, require pricey subsidies that might not always be available. That was then and this is now. Today, remarkably enough, wind and solar are already competitive with fossil fuels for many uses and in many markets.
If that wasn’t predicted, however, neither was this: despite such advances, the allure of fossil fuels hasn’t dissipated. Iindividuals, governments, whole societies continue to opt for such fuels even when they gain no significant economic advantage from that choice and risk causing severe planetary harm. Clearly, something irrational is at play. Think of it as the fossil-fuel equivalent of an addictive inclination writ large.
The contradictory and troubling nature of the energy landscape is on clear display in the 2016 edition of the International Energy Outlook, the annual assessment of global trends released by the EIA this May. The good news about renewables gets prominent attention in the report, which includes projections of global energy use through 2040. “Renewables are the world's fastest-growing energy source over the projection period,” it concludes. Wind and solar are expected to demonstrate particular vigor in the years to come, their growth outpacing every other form of energy. But because renewables start from such a small base—representing just 12 percent of all energy used in 2012—they will continue to be overshadowed in the decades ahead, explosive growth or not. In 2040, according to the report’s projections, fossil fuels will still have a grip on a staggering 78 percent of the world energy market, and—if you don’t mind getting thoroughly depressed—oil, coal, and natural gas will each still command larger shares of the market than all renewables combined.
Keep in mind that total energy consumption is expected to be much greater in 2040 than at present. At that time, humanity will be using an estimated 815 quadrillion BTUs (compared to approximately 600 quadrillion today). In other words, though fossil fuels will lose some of their market share to renewables, they will still experience striking growth in absolute terms. Oil consumption, for example, is expected to increase by 34 percent from 90 million to 121 million barrels per day by 2040. Despite all the negative publicity it’s been getting lately, coal, too, should experience substantial growth, rising from 153 to 180 quadrillion BTUs in “delivered energy” over this period. And natural gas will be the fossil-fuel champ, with global demand for it jumping by 70 percent. Put it all together and the consumption of fossil fuels is projected to increase by 177 quadrillion BTUs, or 38 percent, over the period the report surveys.
Anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of climate science has to shudder at such projections. After all, emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels account for approximately three-quarters of the greenhouse gases humans are putting into the atmosphere. An increase in their consumption of such magnitude will have a corresponding impact on the greenhouse effect that is accelerating the rise in global temperatures.
At the United Nations Climate Summit in Paris last December, delegates from more than 190 countries adopted a plan aimed at preventing global warming from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius (about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial level. This target was chosen because most scientists believe that any warming beyond that will result in catastrophic and irreversible climate effects, including the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps (and a resulting sea-level rise of 10-20 feet). Under the Paris Agreement, the participating nations signed onto a plan to take immediate steps to halt the growth of greenhouse gas emissions and then move to actual reductions. Although the agreement doesn’t specify what measures should be taken to satisfy this requirement—each country is obliged to devise its own “intended nationally determined contributions” to the overall goal—the only practical approach for most countries would be to reduce fossil fuel consumption.
As the 2016 EIA report makes eye-poppingly clear, however, the endorsers of the Paris Agreement aren’t on track to reduce their consumption of oil, coal, and natural gas. In fact, greenhouse gas emissions are expected to rise by an estimated 34 percent between 2012 and 2040 (from 32.3 billion to 43.2 billion metric tons). That net increase of 10.9 billion metric tons is equal to the total carbon emissions of the United States, Canada, and Europe in 2012. If such projections prove accurate, global temperatures will rise, possibly significantly above that 2 degree mark, with the destructive effects of climate change we are already witnessing today—the fires, heat waves, floods, droughts, storms, and sea level rise—only intensifying.

Exploring the Roots of Addiction
How to explain the world's tenacious reliance on fossil fuels, despite all that we know about their role in global warming and those lofty promises made in Paris?
To some degree, it is undoubtedly the product of built-in momentum: our existing urban, industrial, and transportation infrastructure was largely constructed around fossil fuel-powered energy systems, and it will take a long time to replace or reconfigure them for a post-carbon future. Most of our electricity, for example, is provided by coal- and gas-fired power plants that will continue to operate for years to come. Even with the rapid growth of renewables, coal and natural gas are projected to supply 56 percent of the fuel for the world’s electrical power generation in 2040 (a drop of only 5 percent from today). Likewise, the overwhelming majority of cars and trucks on the road are now fueled by gasoline and diesel. Even if the number of new ones running on electricity were to spike, it would still be many years before oil-powered vehicles lost their commanding position. As history tells us, transitions from one form of energy to another take time.
Then there’s the problem—and what a problem it is!—of vested interests. Energy is the largest and most lucrative business in the world, and the giant fossil fuel companies have long enjoyed a privileged and highly profitable status. Oil corporations like Chevron and ExxonMobil, along with their state-owned counterparts like Gazprom of Russia and Saudi Aramco, are consistently ranked among the world’s most valuable enterprises. These companies—and the governments they’re associated with—are not inclined to surrender the massive profits they generate year after year for the future wellbeing of the planet.
As a result, it’s a guarantee that they will employ any means at their disposal (including well-established, well-funded ties to friendly politicians and political parties) to slow the transition to renewables. In the United States, for example, the politicians of coal-producing states are now at work on plans to block the Obama administration’s “clean power” drive, which might indeed lead to a sharp reduction in coal consumption. Similarly, Exxon has recruited friendly Republican officials to impede the efforts of some state attorney generals to investigate that company’s past suppression of information on the links between fossil fuel use and climate change. And that’s just to scratch the surface of corporate efforts to mislead the public that have included the funding of the Heartland Institute and other climate-change-denying think tanks.
Of course, nowhere is the determination to sustain fossil fuels fiercer than in the “petro-states” that rely on their production for government revenues, provide energy subsidies to their citizens, and sometimes sell their products at below-market rates to encourage their use. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), in 2014 fossil fuel subsidies of various sorts added up to a staggering $493 billion worldwide—far more than those for the development of renewable forms of energy. The G-20 group of leading industrial powers agreed in 2009 to phase out such subsidies, but a meeting of G-20 energy ministers in Beijing in June failed to adopt a timeline to complete the phase-out process, suggesting that little progress will be made when the heads of state of those countries meet in Hangzhou, China, this September.
None of this should surprise anyone, given the global economy’s institutionalized dependence on fossil fuels and the amounts of money at stake. What it doesn’t explain, however, is the projected growth in global fossil fuel consumption. A gradual decline, accelerating over time, would be consistent with a broad-scale but slow transition from carbon-based fuels to renewables. That the opposite seems to be happening, that their use is actually expanding in most parts of the world, suggests that another factor is in play: addiction.
We all know that smoking tobacco, snorting cocaine, or consuming too much alcohol is bad for us, but many of us persist in doing so anyway, finding the resulting thrill, the relief, or the dulling of the pain of everyday life simply too great to resist. In the same way, much of the world now seems to find it easier to fill up the car with the usual tankful of gasoline or flip the switch and receive electricity from coal or natural gas than to begin to shake our addiction to fossil fuels. As in everyday life, so at a global level, the power of addiction seems regularly to trump the obvious desirability of embarking on another, far healthier path.

On a Fossil Fuel Bridge to Nowhere
Without acknowledging any of this, the 2016 EIA report indicates just how widespread and prevalent our fossil-fuel addiction remains. In explaining the rising demand for oil, for example, it notes that “in the transportation sector, liquid fuels [predominantly petroleum] continue to provide most of the energy consumed.” Even though “advances in nonliquids-based [electrical] transportation technologies are anticipated,” they will not prove sufficient “to offset the rising demand for transportation services worldwide,” and so the demand for gasoline and diesel will continue to grow.
Most of the increase in demand for petroleum-based fuels is expected to occur in the developing world, where hundreds of millions of people are entering the middle class, buying their first gas-powered cars, and about to be hooked on an energy way of life that should be, but isn’t, dying. Oil use is expected to grow in China by 57 percent between 2012 and 2040, and at a faster rate (131 percent!) in India. Even in the United States, however, a growing preference for sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks continues to mean higher petroleum use. In 2016, according to Edmunds.com, a car shopping and research site, nearly 75 percent of the people who traded in a hybrid or electric car to a dealer replaced it with an all-gas car, typically a larger vehicle like an SUV or a pickup.
The rising demand for coal follows a depressingly similar pattern. Although it remains a major source of the greenhouse gases responsible for climate change, many developing nations, especially in Asia, continue to favor it when adding electricity capacity because of its low cost and familiar technology. Although the demand for coal in China—long the leading consumer of that fuel—is slowing, that country is still expected to increase its usage by 12 percent by 2035. The big story here, however, is India: according to the EIA, its coal consumption will grow by 62 percent in the years surveyed, eventually making it, not the United States, the world’s second largest consumer. Most of that extra coal will go for electricity generation, once again to satisfy an “expanding middle class using more electricity-consuming appliances.”
And then there’s the mammoth expected increase in the demand for natural gas. According to the latest EIA projections, its consumption will rise faster than any fuel except renewables. Given the small base from which renewables start, however, gas will experience the biggest absolute increase of any fuel, 87 quadrillion BTUs between 2012 and 2040. (In contrast, renewables are expected to grow by 68 quadrillion and oil by 62 quadrillion BTUs during this period.)
At present, natural gas appears to enjoy an enormous advantage in the global energy marketplace. “In the power sector, natural gas is an attractive choice for new generating plants given its moderate capital cost and attractive pricing in many regions as well as the relatively high fuel efficiency and moderate capital cost of gas-fired plants,” the EIA notes. It is also said to benefit from its “clean” reputation (compared to coal) in generating electricity. “As more governments begin implementing national or regional plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, natural gas may displace consumption of the more carbon-intensive coal and liquid fuels.”
Unfortunately, despite that reputation, natural gas remains a carbon-based fossil fuel, and its expanded consumption will result in a significant increase in global greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, the EIA claims that it will generate a larger increase in such emissions over the next quarter-century than either coal or oil—a disturbing note for those who contend that natural gas provides a “bridge” to a green energy future.

Seeking Treatment
If you were to read through the EIA’s latest report as I did, you, too, might end up depressed by humanity’s addictive need for its daily fossil fuel hit. While the EIA’s analysts add the usual caveats, including the possibility that a more sweeping than expected follow-up climate agreement or strict enforcement of the one adopted last December could alter their projections, they detect no signs of the beginning of a determined move away from the reliance on fossil fuels.
If, indeed, addiction is a big part of the problem, any strategies undertaken to address climate change must incorporate a treatment component. Simply saying that global warming is bad for the planet, and that prudence and morality oblige us to prevent the worst climate-related disasters, will no more suffice than would telling addicts that tobacco and hard drugs are bad for them. Success in any global drive to avert climate catastrophe will involve tackling addictive behavior at its roots and promoting lasting changes in lifestyle. To do that, it will be necessary to learn from the anti-drug and anti-tobacco communities about best practices, and apply them to fossil fuels.
Consider, for example, the case of anti-smoking efforts. It was the medical community that first took up the struggle against tobacco and began by banning smoking in hospitals and other medical facilities. This effort was later extended to public facilities—schools, government buildings, airports, and so on—until vast areas of the public sphere became smoke-free. Anti-smoking activists also campaigned to have warning labels displayed in tobacco advertising and cigarette packaging.
Such approaches helped reduce tobacco consumption around the world and can be adapted to the anti-carbon struggle. College campuses and town centers could, for instance, be declared car-free—a strategy already embraced by London’s newly elected mayor, Sadiq Khan. Express lanes on major streets and highways can be reserved for hybrids, electric cars, and other alternative vehicles. Gas station pumps and oil advertising can be made to incorporate warning signs saying something like, “Notice: consumption of this product increases your exposure to asthma, heat waves, sea level rise, and other threats to public health.” Once such an approach began to be seriously considered, there would undoubtedly be a host of other ideas for how to begin to put limits on our fossil fuel addiction.
Such measures would have to be complemented by major moves to combat the excessive influence of the fossil fuel companies and energy states when it comes to setting both local and global policy. In the U.S., for instance, severely restricting the scope of private donations in campaign financing, as Senator Bernie Sanders advocated in his presidential campaign, would be a way to start down this path. Another would step up legal efforts to hold giant energy companies like ExxonMobil accountable for malfeasance in suppressing information about the links between fossil fuel combustion and global warming, just as, decades ago, anti-smoking activists tried to expose tobacco company criminality in suppressing information on the links between smoking and cancer.
Without similar efforts of every sort on a global level, one thing seems certain: the future projected by the EIA will indeed come to pass and human suffering of a previously unimaginable sort will be the order of the day.

*Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left. 

Links

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The World’s Clouds Are In Different Places Than They Were 30 Years Ago

Washington Post - Chris Mooney

Global cloud patterns (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

In a new study published in Nature on Monday, scientists say they have for the first time thoroughly documented one of the most profound planetary changes yet to be caused by a warming climate: The distribution of clouds all across the Earth has shifted, they say.
And moreover, it has shifted in such a way — by expanding subtropical dry zones, located between around 20 and 30 degrees latitude in both hemispheres, and by raising cloud tops — as to make global warming  worse.
"As global warming occurs, there's the expectation that the storm track will shift closer to the pole and the dry areas of the subtropics will expand poleward," said Joel Norris, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and the study's lead author. The work was conducted with scientists at Scripps, the University of California at Riverside, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Colorado State University.
[Why uncertainty about climate change is definitely not out friend] The study observed this change, but a northward shifting of storm tracks was not the only effect. The tops of clouds are also now reaching higher into the atmosphere, Norris explained. "An increase of CO2 leads to cooling of the stratosphere, so it's cooling down, the troposphere underneath is warming up, and so that means, as the clouds rise up they can rise up higher than they did before," Norris adds.
That these things would happen in theory, based on our understanding of the physics of the atmosphere, has long been expected. The physical reasons for the expectation get complicated fast, involving factors like the atmospheric "Rossby radius of deformation," and how the Earth's rotation bends the path of winds — the so-called Coriolis force, Norris explains. But all of this has long been an expectation based on runs of sophisticated climate simulations that embed within their coding the fundamental equations that govern the behavior of the atmosphere.
However, the study painstakingly pieced together images from weather satellites between the years 1983 and 2009 — correcting for the numerous known quirks of these satellites that have also made their measurements of atmospheric temperatures a messy affair — to line up pre-existing theory with observations.
"We're seeing what the climate models think the pattern of cloud change would be," Norris said.
Here's a graphic the researchers provided with the study, showing the changes, and how they match theoretical expectations as encoded in climate models:

Locations where the majority of climate models and the majority of satellite records agree on how cloudiness changed from the 1980s to the 2000s, relative to the global mean change. (Joel Norris)

Here's how the paper summarizes the changes, region by region: "cloud amount and albedo [i.e., reflectivity] increased over the northwest Indian Ocean, the northwest and southwest tropical Pacific Ocean, and north of the Equator in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Cloud amount and albedo decreased over mid-latitude oceans in both hemispheres (especially over the North Atlantic), over the southeast Indian Ocean, and in a northwest-to-southeast line stretching across the central tropical South Pacific."
Note that it is not like some parts of the world don't have any clouds any more. Still, the changes are significant in the context of how radiation originating from the sun enters, and ultimately departs from, the Earth's system.
Not just one but both of these changes to clouds  are "positive feedbacks" to climate change — tending to make warming worse.
Moving cloud tracks toward the poles enhances warming because at higher latitudes, less solar radiation strikes the Earth — so white clouds are reflecting less of it away from the planet than they would if they were closer to the tropics and the Equator, Norris said. Meanwhile, he continued, higher cloud tops in effect thicken the total column of cloud, and that means more trapping of infrared or heat radiation that would otherwise exit to space.
"We now have a thicker blanket, which is also a warming effect," Norris said.
Fortunately, these are not new or previously unknown positive feedbacks — they are already contained within the calculations used to derive the climate's "sensitivity" to greenhouse gases and thus to project how bad warming could get. So this is more a reaffirmation of the existing theory (which was bad enough already) than a discovery of new perils.
However, there are other debates happening right now about other possible cloud changes that would tend to worsen warming beyond current expectations, if they are indeed happening. But that remains to be fully resolved by the scientific community.
It is important to note that the current study, observational in nature, detected changes in clouds, rather than firmly pinpointing their causes or documenting the consequences of these changes. Indeed, the study notes that in addition to climate warming, a "recovery" of the atmosphere from high levels of atmospheric aerosols following the enormous volcanic eruptions of El Chichón in 1982 and Mount Pinatubo in 1991 also seems to be a contributor. Those aerosols also had a cooling effect that the globe is rebounding from.
These cloud changes are, of course, hardly without consequence — the growth of so-called dry zones or drylands, as the planet warms, has been long predicted and indeed, observed by climate scientists. Places from California to Southern Africa could experience more dry conditions going forward as cloud belts shift. "The global dryland expansions will increase the population affected by water scarcity and land degradations," a recent study noted.
The new research lines up with this prior line of thought from the cloud angle. "Every observational record exhibits a decline in cloud amount or albedo [reflectivity] at mid-latitudes in both hemispheres that is nearly always statistically significant," the study notes.
Clouds are "perhaps the largest uncertainty in our understanding of climate change," the paper observes. Maybe that just became a little bit less uncertain.


Links

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• A cheap, simple experiment just found a very effective way to slow deforestation

Clean Energy Won’t Save Us – Only A New Economic System Can Do That

The Guardian - Jason Hickel

It's time to pour our creative energies into imagining a new global economy. Infinite growth is a dangerous illusion

'That 30% chunk of greenhouse gases that comes from non-fossil fuel sources isn't static. It is adding more to the atmosphere each year.' Photograph: Ashley Cooper/Global Warming Images/Alamy

Earlier this year media outlets around the world announced that February had broken global temperature records by a shocking amount. March broke all the records, too. In June our screens were covered with surreal images of Paris flooding, the Seine bursting its banks and flowing into the streets. In London, the floods sent water pouring into the tube system right in the heart of Covent Garden. Roads in south-east London became rivers two metres deep.
With such extreme events becoming more commonplace, few deny climate change any longer. Finally, a consensus is crystallising around one all-important fact: fossil fuels are killing us. We need to switch to clean energy, and fast.
But while this growing awareness about the dangers of fossil fuels represents a crucial shift in our consciousness, I can't help but fear we've missed the point. As important as clean energy might be, the science is clear: it won't save us from climate change.

What would we do with 100% clean energy? Exactly what we're doing with fossil fuels

Let's imagine, just for argument's sake, that we are able to get off fossil fuels and switch to 100% clean energy. There is no question this would be a vital step in the right direction, but even this best-case scenario wouldn't be enough to avert climate catastrophe.Why? Well, first, the burning of fossil fuels only accounts for about 70% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The other 30% comes from a number of causes, including deforestation, and industrial livestock farming, which produces 90m tonnes of methane per year and most of the world's anthropogenic nitrous oxide. Both of these gases are vastly more potent than CO2 when it comes to global warming. Livestock farming alone contributes more to global warming than all the cars, trains, planes and ships in the world. There are also a number of industrial processes that contribute significantly, and then there are our landfills, which pump out huge amounts of methane – 16% of the world's total.

Jeffrey's Bay wind farm in South Africa. Photograph: Nic Bothma/EPA

 But when it comes to climate change, the problem is not just the type of energy we are using, it's what we're doing with it. What would we do with 100% clean energy? Exactly what we are doing with fossil fuels: raze more forests, build more meat farms, expand industrial agriculture, produce more cement, and fill more landfill sites, all of which will pump deadly amounts of greenhouse gas into the air. We will do these things because our economic system demands endless compound growth, and for some reason we have not thought to question this.
within just 60 years, releasing more still. Emissions from the cement industry are growing at more than 9% per year. And our landfills are multiplying at an eye-watering pace: the by 2100 we will be producing 11m tonnes of solid waste per day, three times more than we do now. Switching to clean energy will do nothing to slow this down.

If we keep growing at 3% a year, that means that every 20 years we need to double the size of the global economy 

The climate movement made an enormous mistake. We focused all our attention on fossil fuels, when we should have been pointing to something much deeper: the basic logic of our economic operating system. After all, we're only using fossil fuels in the first place to fuel the broader imperative of GDP growth.
The root problem is the fact that our economic system demands ever-increasing levels of extraction, production and consumption. Our politicians tell us that we need to keep the global economy growing at more than 3% each year – the minimum necessary for large firms to make aggregate profits. That means every 20 years we need to double the size of the global economy – double the cars, double the fishing, double the mining, double the McFlurries and double the iPads. And then double them again over the next 20 years from their already doubled state.

Current projections show that by 2040 we will more than double the world's shipping miles, air miles, and trucking miles. Photograph: Feature China/Barcroft Images

 Our more optimistic pundits claim that technological innovations will help us to decouple economic growth from material throughput. But sadly there is no evidence that this is happening. Global material extraction and consumption has grown by 94% since 1980, and is still going up. Current projections show that by 2040 we will more than double the world's shipping miles, air miles, and trucking miles – along with all the material stuff that those vehicles transport – almost exactly in keeping with the rate of GDP growth.
doesn't make us any happier, it doesn't reduce poverty, and its "externalities" produce all sorts of social ills: debt, overwork, inequality, and climate change. We need to abandon GDP growth as our primary measure of progress, and we need to do this immediately – as part and parcel of the climate agreement that will be ratified in Morocco later this year.
It's time to pour our creative power into imagining a new global economy – one that maximises human wellbeing while actively shrinking our ecological footprint. This is not an impossible task. A number of countries have already managed to achieve high levels of human development with very low levels of consumption. And Daniel O'Neill, an economist at the University of Leeds, has demonstrated that even material de-growth is not incompatible with high levels of human well-being.
Our focus on fossil fuels has lulled us into thinking we can continue with the status quo so long as we switch to clean energy, but this is a dangerously simplistic assumption. If we want to stave off disaster, we need to confront its underlying cause.

Links

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• The pope v the UN: who will save the world first?
• Protesting to #Breakfree of fossil fuels – in pictures
• Experts discuss how to build a carbon-free energy industry
• Clean energy in refugee camps could save millions of dollars
• From Kansas to Copenhagen: clean energy beacons around the world
• World bank to focus future investment on clean energy
• UN climate chief calls for tripling of clean energy investment
• Abundant fossil fuels leave clean energy out in the cold
• Small island states in clean energy race

California Breaks Solar Record (Again), Enough Electricity For 2 Million Homes

CleanTechnica - Zachary Shahan

The California Independent System Operator (CAISO), the largest electricity grid in California, broke its own solar generation record last Tuesday.

Topaz Solar Farm, by First Solar

The 8,030 megawatts put out at 1:06pm were approximately double the 2014 high, and ~2,000 megawatts (MW) higher than last year's record.
Naturally, as a lot more solar power capacity is added to the grid, all you need is a particularly sunny day (middle of summer is good for that) to break such a record. The record could be beat yet again in the coming weeks, and it would surely be clobbered in 2017, after another year of solar power additions rush the grid.
As indicated in the headline, the 8,030 MW put out at 1:06pm on Tuesday, July 12, was enough to power ~2 million California homes. Notably, however, solar homes weren't part of the equation in this new solar record. The thing is, CAISO's numbers are just for utility-scale solar installations, excluding rooftop solar power — which is a sizable portion of California's overall solar power capacity.
Additionally, CAISO only accounts for ~80% of California's electricity grid — just the Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric jurisdictions. Smaller municipal utilities like Sacramento Municipal Utility District aren't included.
Getting back to the record, I imagine many of you are curious how 8,030 MW compared to overall electricity demand in the state. At the time of the new record, utility-scale solar and other renewables were together providing ~29% of the network's electricity needs. While that is an encouraging number at this stage, it wasn't even close to the percentage record set earlier this year. Such renewables (again, this excludes rooftop solar) accounted for 54% and 56% of CAISO's electricity needs for periods of time on May 14 and May 15 (not for the entire days).
Hopefully it won't be long until we're seeing utility-scale renewables supplying 50% of electricity demand on a regular basis, and 75–80% at record times. Again, though: it would be nice if rooftop solar generation numbers were worked into these figures, which would get us to the more exciting numbers a lot faster.

Links

• California Solar Energy – Solar Incentives, Installers, Costs
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• PG&E Launches Distributed Energy Resource Projects With GE, SolarCity, & Enphase Energy

Jobs Expand In Renewable Energy Sector

Fairfax - Ross Larkin

Job opportunities are on the rise in the renewable energy sector, particularly in regional areas.
A new report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) has shown more than 8.1 million people worldwide are now employed in renewable energy, up 5 per cent since last year.

Jarra Hicks and Nicky Ison with the two wind turbines, Gale and Gusto, at Hepburn Wind. Photo: Supplied

Founding director of the Community Power Agency, Nicky Ison, says the industry is growing and changing, increasing the need for an array of job skills.
"Renewable energy is a jobs-rich industry. It's an extremely dynamic sector in the midst of a rapid transformation," she says. "There's a huge amount of change happening, huge opportunity, huge innovation of learning. The sector requires a variety of skill sets, so everything from engineers to tradespeople to accountants and lawyers."
Ison says that when renewable energy projects are regionally based, it helps to stimulate local economies and employment in areas where the need for jobs is even higher. "Most of the renewable energy resource is in regional Australia. Community-owned projects generate more employment in the region where the renewable project is based," she says.
According to US research, jobs and economic benefits increase up to almost four times if renewable energy projects are at least partially local-owned.
Ison adds that some of the opportunities are unique while others are helping to advance the industry.
"There are jobs that have been done for 20 to 40 years but also those which have never been done before.
"There are direct jobs delivering projects and then there are jobs supporting and creating the sector."
She says the type of workers drawn towards renewable energy as a career are passionate about the bigger picture. "Climate change is the biggest challenge we face in society. This is one of the reasons why the renewable energy sector is attracting a lot of dynamic thinkers and entrepreneurs, people who are really interesting to work with.
"Australia has some of the best solar and wind resources in the world. It's a huge competitive advantage that we hope to capitalise on if we want to address climate change."
Ison notes that work of this nature can be met with a variety of difficulties, however, the difficulties often lead to a further increase in employment.
"It comes with challenges. Community renewable groups specifically face a lot of barriers," she says.
"For example, Australia leads the world on rooftop solar per capita, but as a rental tenant, if I want to purchase solar power from my neighbour, I have to pay the same cost for using the grid even though I'm only using 20 metres of it.
"It doesn't make much sense at all, so there's a lot of regulatory barriers, but in turn, changing those — we will see policy and regulatory change which creates huge employment opportunities for policy makers."
Ison says she is excited for the future of the sector and says it will only get stronger. "Globally, the sector is growing really fast. 2015 was record breaking and workers will be in high demand in the next five to 10 years."

Links

• Two new wind farms gain government support
• Green bonds' time has come
• Australia set to cash in on low-cost renewable energy
• Australians still waiting for climate leadership

How the Right Wing Denial Machine Distorts the Climate Change Discourse

EcoWatch - Michael Mann

Several weeks ago, on June 17, I provided testimony about the threat of human-caused climate change to the Democratic Party Platform drafting committee in Phoenix, Arizona. Fittingly, my testimony was just one day before record heat struck Phoenix.

At the beginning of my testimony, I made the point, using slightly lofty language appropriate for the occasion, that the impacts of climate change are now so profound that we no longer need sophisticated signal-detection machinery to see them:

I am a climate scientist and have spent much of my career with my head buried in climate model output and observational climate data, trying to tease out the signal of human-caused climate change.
What is disconcerting to me and so many of my colleagues is that these tools that we've spent years developing increasingly are unnecessary because we can see the impacts of climate change playing out in real time on our television screens in the 24 hour news cycle.
Regardless of how you measure the impacts of climate change—whether it be food, water, health, national security, our economy—climate change is already taking a great toll. And we see that tool in the damage done by more extreme floods, like the floods we've seen over the past year in Texas and in South Carolina. We see it in the devastating combination of sea level rise and more destructive hurricanes which has led to calamities like "Superstorm" Sandy and what is now the perennial flooding of Miami beach. We see it in the unprecedented drought, like that which continues to afflict California, a doubling in the area of wildfire, fire burning in the western U.S. and indeed, in the record heat we may see this weekend in phoenix.
The signal of climate change is no longer subtle. It is obvious.

My point—that we don't need sophisticated techniques to identify the human fingerprint present in e.g. the doubling of extreme heat or the tripling (in fact) of western wildfire that we have seen in the U.S. in recent decades, ought to be clear to any honest observer.
It would be absurd to conclude that I was arguing that climate models and climate data are no longer necessary in climate science, especially given that they continue to form the bread and butter of my own scientific research (I've published over a dozen scientific articles using climate models and climate data during the past year alone).
So you can imagine my shock—yes, shock—that climate change deniers and conservative media outlets that serve as mouthpieces for them, would seek to convince their readers of just that.
It is an instructive ontological exercise to follow this particular affair—from its inception through the latest developments, sort of like observing a deviant version of the game "telephone" (or "Chinese whispers" for British readers) wherein the participants are actually trying to distort the message as it is passed along from one person to the next.
It all started on Monday, June 27 with Steven J. Milloy and his outlandishly untruthful claim "Michael Mann says there is no need for statistics."
Milloy, who actually calls himself the "junk man" with no apparent sense of irony, is a denier-for-hire who happily takes money from tobacco interests, chemical interests and of course fossil fuel interests to do their dirty work, attacking seemingly any scientist whose findings threaten their financial bottom line.
Milloy frequently publishes columns in the notorious Washington Times. Which brings us to the next stage of the affair ...
Later that same day, the Washington Times—a paper founded by Rev. Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church, ran a piece by one Valerie Richardson entitled Michael Mann, scientist: Data 'increasingly unnecessary' because 'we can see climate change.'
Somehow "tools" have become "data." It almost seems like they're going out of their way to misrepresent my statements, doesn't it?
Almost as if to demonstrate that they too have absolutely no sense of irony, the Washington Times referred to me in the piece as a "Leading climate doomsayer" (the Unification Church, you see, is often considered a doomsday cult). The Washington Times also happens to be closely tied to ALEC—a Koch Brothers-funded organization that promotes climate change denialism and subverts efforts to incentivize renewable energy.
Next up at bat, Tucker Carlson's The Daily Caller, which later that day pushed the egregiously false headline Famed Climate Scientist Claims Data Now 'Unnecessary' To Measure Global Warming.
Understand that we have now gone all the way from what I actually said (that climate change impacts have become so profound now that we often don't need fancy techniques to see them) to something so patently absurd I couldn't possibly have said it (that we don't need data to measure global warming).
The Daily Caller, incidentally, is so fully immersed in Koch cash that is is listed as a "partner organization" of the Charles Koch Institute.
Witness now, after a two week hiatus, the hand-off from the Koch Brothers to the Scaife Foundations, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, to be specific, which was founded by the now-deceased Richard Mellon Scaife. On July 13, the Tribune-Review perpetuated the smear with a climate change-denying editorial containing the farcical howler "[Mann] says facts no longer are necessary to substantiate the climate change story line." Just when you thought the distortion couldn't get more egregious ...
One day later, on July 14, the execrable Tribune op-ed was republished on the right wing website GOPUSA, a website connected to—you guessed it—Richard Mellon Scaife (though a bit of detective work is required to connect the dots).
Oil baron Richard Mellon Scaife and his empire were behind what Hillary Clinton famously referred to as the "vast right-wing conspiracy" to take down her husband, President Bill Clinton (for the record, she was correct).
Certainly, you're thinking, it must be a coincidence that nearly every player in this latest episode seems to be tied in some way to either the Koch Brothers or Scaife Foundations.
Or maybe not so much ...
Richard Mellon Scaife and the Scaife Family Foundations are, along with the Koch Brothers, the greatest private funders of climate change denialism, having stepped up their funding in recent years as fossil fuel corporations like ExxonMobil have come under increased scrutiny for their funding of climate change denial.
As I discuss in my book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars about the attacks against me by climate change deniers looking to discredit the iconic "Hockey Stick" graph my co-authors and I published in the late 1990s (p. 64):

Wealthy privately held corporations and foundations with close interests in, or ties to, the fossil fuel industry, such as Koch Industries and the Scaife Foundations, have become increasingly active funders of the climate change denial campaign in recent years. Unlike publicly traded companies such as ExxonMobil, these private outfits can hide their finances from public view, and they remain largely invulnerable to outside pressure. In recent years, as ExxonMobil has been pressured by politicians on both sides of the aisle to withdraw from funding the climate change denial movement, Koch and Scaife have stepped up, contributing millions of dollars to the effort.

Koch funding played a major role in the faux scandal known as "climategate" which involved the misrepresentation of scientists based on out-of-context quotes (sound familiar?) taken from emails of theirs that had been stolen off a university computer server in the UK (p. 220):

One report showed that twenty or so organizations funded at least in part by Koch Industries had "repeatedly rebroadcast, referenced and appeared as media spokespeople" in stories about climategate.

Meanwhile, the Scaifes funded many of the personal attacks intended to discredit me and the "Hockey Stick" (p. 228):

In mid-January 2010, a group known as the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), which receives funding from the Scaife Foundations, led a campaign to have my NSF grants revoked. The perverse premise was that I was somehow pocketing millions of dollars of "Obama" stimulus money simply because I was a coinvestigator on several recently funded NSF grants. These absurd distortions were--no surprise--promoted by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and others of similar persuasion.

and (p. 229):

Two Scaife-funded groups.. the Southeastern Legal Foundation and the Landmark Legal Foundation, had swung into action. The latter had already sued the University of Massachusetts and University of Arizona to obtain copies of my personal e-mails with my two hockey stick coauthors, while in May 2010 the former demanded extensive information from the NSF regarding grants that had been made to me as well as to several of my colleagues at Penn State, the University of Chicago, the University of Washington, the University of Arizona, and Columbia University.
It began to strike me as curious that so many of the demands that I be investigated could be traced back to organizations with ties to the Scaife Foundations. The Commonwealth Foundation, a Pennsylvania organization that is the recipient of considerable Scaife largess, for example, had been pressuring Penn State University to fire me since climategate broke in late November 2009. It managed to get the sympathetic Republican chair of the Pennsylvania state senate education committee to threaten to hold Penn State's funding hostage until "appropriate action is taken by the university against associate [sic] professor Michael Mann." Indeed, it was the Commonwealth Foundation attacks that essentially forced Penn State to launch its initial inquiry into the various allegations against me in December 2009 (similar inquiries and investigations of CRU scientists were initiated in the United Kingdom). The Commonwealth Foundation kept the pressure on for months through a barrage of press conferences and press releases attacking me personally and criticizing Penn State for its supposed "whitewash" treatment of any number of supposed offenses. It also ran daily attack ads against me in our university newspaper The Collegian for an entire week in January and helped organize a protest rally against me on campus. It is likely that these attacks forced Penn State's hand yet again, leading it, following the completion of the initial inquiry in February 2010, to move to a formal investigation, despite having found no evidence of misconduct in the initial inquiry phase.

What is the take-home message here?
As we head into the 2016 presidential election, it is clear that polluting interests and other bad actors are mobilized. They are doing their best to continue the attacks on science and scientists whose findings threaten their bottom line, to distract the public, to promote climate change denial propaganda and to support politicians who will support their agenda of denial and inaction.
The best defense is to study the positions of the candidates and make sure that climate action is at the top of your agenda when you go to the voting booth this fall.

Links

• 19 Senators Expose 'Web of Denial' Blocking Action on Climate Change
• The Link Between Climate Change and Drought
• Climate Change Puts Squeeze on Cuddly Koalas
• Climate Change to Devastate Adélie Penguin Population in Antarctica by Up to 60%

Murdoch, Coalition Go In Guns Blazing Against Wind And Solar

Renew Economy - Giles Parkinson

The Murdoch media and conservative Coalition parties have ramped up their attacks on renewable energy in light of the big spike in electricity prices in South Australia this week, saying that wind and solar are solely to blame for the state’s electricity problems.
Power prices spiked sharply again this week, but energy analysts say that wind and solar are not at fault, pointing out that gas prices have jumped to record highs, and the interconnector to Victoria was constrained due to delayed work on network upgrades.

Pelican Point gas plant

But this has cut no mustard with the Murdoch media and the Coalition, who have used the incidents of the past week to renew their usually skewed attacks against the high levels of wind and solar in the state.
“SA’s reliance on wind and solar power is responsible for these absurd prices,” thundered The Advertiser, Murdoch’s monopoly daily newspaper in Adelaide, in an editorial entitled “SA power prices threaten future of economy.”
“The state’s electricity supply cannot be left at the mercy of the weather gods and erratic spot prices. Labor’s great green energy experiment will cost it ultimate power in 2018,” it threatened. The editorial makes absolutely no mention of the record gas prices, or the energy cartel that it is defending.
Murdoch’s position has been eagerly supported by the local state Opposition, which like all Coalition parties across the country – at both the state and federal level – is pushing back against any moves to increase the amount of renewable energy in the electricity system.
“The (South Australian) government’s complete and utter obsession with renewable energy has left us in a very vulnerable state without a workable energy strategy,” Opposition leader Steven Marshall said. Marshall also failed to mention the cost of gas.
“I mean continuity of energy supply is absolutely critical, and what we’ve done is we’ve driven out base load power in South Australia because of this obsession that the Labor government has had with renewable energy and we haven’t been able to put that certainty, that continuity into the equation.”
Actually, the state’s largest base load generator, Pelican Point, a 485MW gas-fired plant, has not been operating because gas prices are too high and it cannot make any money out of it, although it did agree to a government request to restart for a short period while the interconnector was repaired.
A similar situation exists in Queensland, where the Swanbank E gas-fired generator – like Pelican Point, one of the most efficient in the country – has also been mothballed because of soaring gas prices. Queensland, it should be noted, has virtually no large-scale wind or solar.
As RenewEconomy has pointed out on numerous occasions in the past week, the huge spikes in electricity prices are a direct result of increased gas prices, which have hit record highs across the country and in South Australia have been more than twice the price of other states, on occasions.
This is blamed on increased demand from the current cold snap, the need to supply the big LNG export terminals, and unexplained blockages in supply elsewhere in the network.
For more information on how the gas cartel works in a market with virtually no transparency, see this excellent report on MichaelWest.com.au, or this story How the gas market is holding the country to ransom from one of the same authors.
Indeed, even if there was little renewable energy in the system, South Australia would still be experiencing high electricity prices because it would still be reliant on gas – as it experienced for more than a decade before wind and solar was built into the system.

South Australia has always had higher electricity prices than the rest of the market, due to its historic (and pre-renewable) reliance on gas, and one of the reasons it has sought to increase renewables is to try to reduce its exposure to the volatile price of commodity-based fossil fuel generation.
The Clean Energy Council this week reinforced the point that the high prices in South Australia have been caused by the high gas prices, the cold snap and the network interruptions.
“Because renewable energy effectively has no fuel cost, it helps to keep power prices lower during periods of high wind and sunshine. Wind power provided a large part of South Australia’s power over the weekend and early this week, but with the price of gas so high, wholesale prices have jumped,” CEC’s Tom Butler said.
The ACT appears to have successfully hedged against the volatile nature of fossil fuel prices by using renewables, and targeting 100 per cent of its supply from wind and solar by 2020. It may, in fact, make windfall gains from its cleverly calibrated investment.
But the past week has seen an extraordinary sequence of events, starting with high gas prices, unusual bidding patterns, the loss of capacity on the interconnector, the continued sidelining of two of the most efficient gas plants in the country and, as if on cue, the announcement of a review by the Australian Energy Market Commission of “system security” in the country.
Many suspect this review will be used by fossil fuel generators for new subsidies known as “capacity payments”, or at least for a new “inertia” market, increasing the revenue that can be sourced by their gas generators. AGL Energy filed an application for a rule change on these inertia markets in late June.
At the same time, these very same companies are arguing against rule changes that could encourage cleaner, faster and cheaper alternatives, such as battery storage, to provide the same services.
That’s one of the big questions for regulators in Australia and around the world: the National Electricity Market rules clearly need changing, as the South Australian government has pointed out.
But will these rules be changed to reinforce the power of the energy incumbents, or will they be changed to facilitate and accelerate the inevitable and much-needed energy transition? As a new study released through Cambridge University this week highlights that the obsession, until now, has been with keeping business as usual.
“Business-as-usual carries on with incremental decisions, made in narrow frames of reference, that continue to build, and lock investments into the conventional fossil fuel infrastructure,” it says.
The major issue, it notes, is profiteering in the wholesale markets. In Australia, various studies have suggested that at different times, the big fossil fuel generators have gamed the market to the extent that more than $400 million was added to prices in Queensland alone in two separate examples in 2015.
Market operators suspect the same thing is happening now, despite the introduction of bidding in “good faith” rules that were introduced two weeks ago. As one energy market participant said: “It was as though everyone decided to bid higher at the same time.”
This is not just an Australian phenomenon. Last year, according to the Cambridge study, the US General Accounting Office noted that excessive profiteering in the regional markets had led to unfair electricity prices. It said consumers may have paid an excess $US12 billion in 2011 to generating companies that do not face genuine market competition.
The problem is not wind and solar, it is the absolute power of the incumbents and their high fossil fuel prices. That’s the true cost of a restricted market, where the regulators have been too slow to act.

Links

• Mystery as South Australia pleads with gas generator to switch back on 
• Solar Impulse: We'll see solar-powered passenger planes within 10 years 
• Coalition's myth about renewables and high electricity prices 
• New Zealand Electricity Authority rules in favour of controversial solar 'tax'