1: Use diesel and gasoline powered farm equipment to grow and harvest a sugar-rich crop.
2: Use fossil fuel supplied heat and electricity to operate a cooker, which turns the plants you grew into cattle feed and ethanol.

How to make hydrogen:

1: Obtain methane from fracking or some other fossil source.
2: Process the methane to produce hydrogen.

Both processes use a large amount of fossil fuel, thus releasing a large amount of CO2 into the environment, to make a high density but inherently inefficient, potentially very useful energy source.

How to make green ethanol:

1: Use only electricity to run the farm equipment and ethanol cookers.
2: Make all the electricity using wind and/or solar.
(3 optional: You can use some of the green ethanol to run some of the above two processes.)

How to make green hydrogen:

1: Use electricity to power electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen.
2: Make all the electricity using wind and/or solar.

How much of the ethanol we use today is green, compared to the total amount of ethanol? Zero%

How much of the hydrogen we use today is green hydrogen compared to the total amount of hydrogen: 0.04%

Right now essentially zero of the hydrogen used to send rockets into space is green. There is a move to make some of that as green hydrogen. Given the example of ethanol, there is no reason to believe that green hydrogen will ever be the main fuel supply for any ordinary earthling transportation system. However, I’m willing to give it a chance. Let’s first fuel our entire global rocket industry with green hydrogen (wherever hydrogen is used). Then, also, let’s create all the other hydrogen used in industry for things other than transportation (there is quite a bit of that) using green technology as well. Once we are making green hydrogen for all the hydrogen uses, then we can talk about hydrogen being used to fuel some percentage of our transportation industry.

Having said that, hydrogen is of limited use in this area, since fuel cells are inherently inefficient and for other reasons. There is no reason to totally write off hydrogen, but we have every reason in the world to totally write off non-green hydrogen.

Deadline August 19th!!!!: President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is in place “Clean air advocates are trying to get the word out about the U.S. EPA’s 2022 Clean School Bus Program, which offers rebates to help public schools replace up to 25 diesel buses with electric, propane, or compressed natural gas vehicles.” (source) Call your state legislator and see if they are filling out all the forms to get this free money!

The Department of Energy wants to give money to states and tribes to fix up their grids. From Utility Dive:

The Department of Energy on Wednesday started taking applications from states, Native American tribes and U.S. territories to receive federal funding for projects to bolster grid resilience in the face of increasing power outages driven by extreme weather.

With applications due by Sept. 30, the DOE said it will put a priority on projects that will generate the greatest community benefit in reducing the likelihood and consequences of power outages because of extreme weather or other disruptive events like cyberattacks.

The EPA is pushing TVA to build non-fossil fuel infrastructure instead of methane burning plants, to bolster its output. “EPA’s statements, filed last week, are the latest in a tug of war between the federal government and TVA over carbon-reduction efforts. They also follow comments by leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which pressed TVA in January to realign its trajectory to match the Biden administration’s goal of a decarbonized U.S. power sector by 2035” (source)

Starved of interest, another coal mine dies. Ironically named “Sunrise Coal” will not dig its Bulldog Mine, the permit to do so having expired. “Sunrise Coal did not break ground or request an extension, and the land reclamation bond has been returned, signaling a permanent end to the proposed mine.” (source)

San Luis Obispo City Council adopted the county’s first mandatory all-electric building code on July 5, following cities like Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, and Los Angeles in passing near bans on natural gas infrastructure in new buildings.

“Starting in 2023, all new buildings in San Luis Obispo will have to be all-electric, with few exceptions. The policy—which has been under discussion in SLO for more than two years—is designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the building sector caused by natural gas appliances and their infrastructure.” (source)

I wish. It wasn’t quite that extreme, but nearly so. In certain social settings, a person ranting about climate change, say a decade ago, would be looked at as though they might have a lose screw. Me, for example, at a family gathering. But a few weeks ago, a matriarch in my extended family, whom I might have expected to give me the stern look during one of my own rants, began ranting herself about climate change, and how astonishing it was that people could not see that it is real. I had to get her a glass of water. Times have changed. The big storms have spoken, and American society has listened, and at the very least, the deniers now look like the ones with the loose screw.

However, storms are not the biggest problem with future climate change. Sure, a storm can cause floods that kill hundreds of people. Sure, storms can carve away large sections of the shoreline, including those on which humans have built towns and cities, more so especially as sea level rises. Sure, strong tornadoes can destroy a storm shelter as though it wasn’t there, or pick up a school bus and throw it into a ravine, or whatever they want.

But storms are whiny babies compared to their own mothers, the weather-mother that causes the storms to be worse to begin with, and that will eventually become recognized as the real problem with global warming: heat.

Heat is a problem now. There are regions of the world where, normally, decades ago, people would now and then die, or perhaps just die sooner, because of the heat. Americans hear about heat waves in major cities, during which elders die in dozens. In 2018, 82 North Americans died during a late June and early July heat wave, which also killed 22 people indirectly when the Great North American Derecho plowed through the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic over an 18 hour period from June 29th through June 30th. So right there, we see storms vs. heat, and heat wins the morbid game of death by weather this one time.

Historically, some hundreds (like 500?) of Americans die of heat each year, with a lot of variation across time. But, most of the United States is temperate, most people live in shelters of some sort (houses and such) that give varying degrees of protection, often with air conditioning. With recent global warming, this number has more than doubled, but on a per-capita basis, the United States is not feeling the heat-death that other parts of the world are experiencing.

A recent study suggests that temperature, heat or cold, kills more than 5 million people a year. According to the research, published in The Lancet, just under a half million temperature related deaths are due to heat (more people die of cold). Right now, it is estimated that about a third of these deaths are an upward departure from normal, as the result of global warming, according to a study in Nature Climate Change.

There are large regions of the world where only a major investment of technology will allow people to live during the hot months, and that will eventually have to become human-free. Lots of humans live in those areas. Lowland regions in the middle east, Africa, and the more arid parts of South America for example. Some of these areas are currently sparsely occupied because of heat. But those nearly inhabited regions have few people in them because it is impossible to grow plants or keep animals, mainly. The reason for disinabiting these zones in a decade or so will be because it is simply too hot to not die of the heat, and those no-live zones will expand.

If we have experienced a recent shift in understanding of the importance of, and belief in the existence of climate change across secular society in the United States, the recent storms have to be recognized as part of the reason. In a sense, we can name the cause of this change in perception, and there are really several names: Harvey, Dorian, Michael, Maria, and Irma. Perhaps the increasing realization that heat matters too, and eventually, more, also come with names: Jonathan Gerrish, Ellen Chung, their child Miju and their dog Oski. This was the family that went hiking in California, and then died of the heat while on the trail. They were almost done with the hike, and succumbed to the temperature. In this case, the air temperature was comfortable when they started out the hike, and they brought a couple of liters of water with them. Later in the day, the temperatures soared past 100F/38C. They probably needed a couple or few liters each, rather than less than three for all of them.

This is nothing, right? Three people and a dog died of the heat, compared to a half million or so across the world in the same year. The same summer this family died, hundreds of other Americans, presumably scores of Californians, also died of the heat. The Garrish-Chung family are in the news not because they died or, exactly, how they died, but rather because they were found dead but their cause of death not initially apparent. People seem to die hiking in California a lot, partly because there are a lot of Californians and they seem to spend much of their time hiking or biking on the trails. So, now and then, a lion eats a biker, or a bear mauls a hiker (as happened recently to someone from my fair town in Minnesota, while hiking in Cali). This was yet another death by hiking, but involving a mystery, and the fact that it was an entire family, all the witnesses to this tragedy gone. So we pay attention, and can give death by heat, an increasing phenomenon that will eventually reshape the global configuration of human society, a name.

We are paused, partly because of the comeuppance delivered by Harvey and his windy and wet friends, on the edge of a dramatic shift in action to address climate change. The US Senator representing Coalworld, Joe Manchin has temporarily stopped us in the United States (may he be forever haunted by the ghosts of the Garrish-Chung family), but we will eventually roll over him like dirt-bike on dog shit. We must and I think we will electrify everything, and make that electricity mostly with wind and sunlight. We will regenerate the massively destructive agricultural landscape, experience a global demographic transition that limits population size, and gain control over our waste stream, so instead of it being a waste stream, it is a cradle-to-cradle cycle of stuff.

But only if we keep cool, focus, and fight.

In Minnesota, between a third and half of the energy we expend is converted into useless heat or work, mainly owing to that fact that converting the source matter into something that produces usable energy has useless heat as a byproduct.

A large (and at this time not accurately accounted for) amount of energy is used moving or refining fossil fuels. Minnesota refines and moves (through pipelines and on trains) more energy-related matter (oil and coal) than any other state that does not also produce such products. We have no oil or gas wells, and no coal, but we are the crossroads for much of that material. If we did none of that, a pretty good amount of energy would be freed up for use elsewhere.

We use energy at an uneven rate throughout the day. If we mostly used electric vehicles, they would be mostly charged at night when demand is currently low.

People sometimes ask: If we stop burning fuel to make things move, and instead use electricity, where are we going to get all that electricity? (When someone asks you that, usually the answer they have in mind and that they are leading yo to, is “nuclear energy! free and clean!” so watch out for that.)

A huge amount of the energy we use now is used to do nothing. It is either turned into heat or it is used to make more of the stuff that we use to use energy. Simplistic questions like “If all the vehicles are electric, where will the energy come from?” this exist outside the actual reality of energy use. Ignore them and learn about energy use and transmission.

Read books like Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. See also: 2030 Report: Powering America’s Clean Economy

Electric car hate is a cultural phenomenon restricted to only certain geography and certain subgroups. Mainly, American Republicans. Especially Rural American Republicans, who do actually have a point that their vastly spread out sparsely populated regions are not quite eV ready. But they will be, and there is no reason for them to ruin it for everyone else, other than their own desire to be known as royal pains in the ass. (Not sure how one pluralized that.)

For example, in Minnesota, the adoption of a clean car rule, which would enhance access to more choice at the dealer for electric car buyers, was vehemently opposed by people falsely claiming that more eV cars on the lots would raise ICE car prices (not true, not true) or, in one case, more electric cars would cause the starvation and possible death of their children (not true, not true). Minnesota had to fight hard to get that rule instated by an administrative law judge, but it got approved, so Governor Walz can now move forward with this very important thing despite opposition from state Republicans, who seem to have only one purpose in life: to make Liberals cry.

Meanwhile, even as opposition to electric buses comes from climate deniers and pro-bio-fuel advocates alike, Lion Electric of Canada plans to build an electric bus plant in Illinois. Labor unions take note: It will create 750 actual jobs that won’t go away when we turn the petroleum spigot off. Please try to act like you care, because you should care or you should get out of the way.

Now imagine going to each and every one of those locations and tearing it down. We don’t need them any more anyway, because we’ve electrified transportation and nobody smokes. Remove the pollution (they are all brown fields, and the government will eventually be charged for this cleanup, so that is where you get your money for this). Remove the above ground structure, remove the pollution, then look at that vacant lot (and the other one one katty-corner across the intersection). Imagine a transit and school bus stop at this location, with an indoor area to keep the kiddies safe during the very hot or very cold days. Imagine a 20 car charging station, a small cafe, and the whole thing is covered with PV panels. (For the entire US that would be upwards of 15,000 mW of generating power.)

That transition would happen eventually, or something like it, but it won’t get far. Do you know why it won’t get far? Because in all its glory and brilliance, the free market is slow and shy and stupid. It will not figure this out fast enough, it will not deploy the changes in time, and when we are about a third of the way through the whole system will collapse because we are being too slow — and too slowed down by deniers and Republicans, Trumpers and Big Oil, dark money and deplorables — to fix it before it fails.

Or, Governors and State Legislators and Presidents and the Congress can just make it happen. Set up a program that buys out gas stations, cleans them up, and inserts them into the new power and transit system. Take care of the job loss, which will be offset by the increase in clean energy jobs, but make that offset work for the victims of progress. Oh, and probably sell lottery tickets at the cafe.

Can we do this please?

Thanks. Get back to me when the blueprints are ready, next week if possible.

BlackRock is about to move away from investment in fossil fuels.

Bill McKibben notes, in a piece in the New Yorker, “If you felt the earth tremble a little bit in Manhattan on Tuesday morning, it was likely caused by the sheer heft of vast amounts of money starting to shift. “Seismic” is the only word to describe the recent decision of the asset-management firm BlackRock to acknowledge the urgency of the climate crisis and begin (emphasis on begin) to start redirecting its investments…By one estimate, there’s about eighty trillion dollars of money on the planet. If that’s correct, then BlackRock’s holding of seven trillion dollars means that nearly a dime of every dollar rests in its digital files, mostly in the form of stocks it invests in for pension funds and the like. So when BlackRock’s C.E.O., Larry Fink, devoted his annual letter to investors to explaining that climate change has now put us “on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,” it marked a watershed moment in climate history.”

Here is his letter

It is not a full-on divestment. For that matter, this might be greenwashing as much as anything else. But a major player in the financial market has declared fossil fuel and related investments risky because of the environmental damage they induce, because that damage is to be mitigated, and thus, assets are to be stranded. More or less. For example with respect to “Exiting Thermal Coal Producers” BlackRock says,

Thermal coal production is one such sector. Thermal coal is significantly carbon intensive, becoming less and less economically viable, and highly exposed to regulation because of its environmental impacts. With the acceleration of the global energy transition, we do not believe that the long-term economic or investment rationale justifies continued investment in this sector. As a result, we are in the process of removing from our discretionary active investment portfolios the public securities (both debt and equity) of companies that generate more than 25% of their revenues from thermal coal production, which we aim to accomplish by the middle of 2020. As part of our process of evaluating sectors with high ESG risk, we will also closely scrutinize other businesses that are heavily reliant on thermal coal as an input, in order to understand whether they are effectively transitioning away from this reliance. In addition, BlackRock’s alternatives business will make no future direct investments in companies that generate more than 25% of their revenues from thermal coal production.

McKibben agrees that this is that this change is not as powerful as it needs to be, noting that :BlackRock’s actual policy changes are modest compared with Fink’s rhetoric. At least at first, the main change will be to rid the firm’s actively managed portfolio (about $1.8 trillion in value) of coal stocks; but coal, though still a major contributor to climate change, is already on the wane, except in Asia. The companies that mine it have tanked in value—even Donald Trump’s coddling has been unable to slow the industry’s decline in this country. So an investor swearing off coal is a bit like cutting cake out of your diet but clinging to a slice of pie and a box of doughnuts.”

BlackRock is not to be congratulated here. This is not enough, and for much of the damage done, it is too late. The barn-door closers at BlackRock are still liable for being among the entrenched power and money brokers that have destroyed this planet for the future. This action will help the rest of us to rebuild our world a few decades sooner, and it may help some of them survive the turnover that has to happen eventually. In short, if you are an activist working toward divestment, know that your work is just starting, but now you have a new tool to use in convincing the complacent that there is a problem, and a partial solution.

In Iowa, solar is starting to compete with wind for being cheap and a good investment, and as a course of more and more safe and cheap electricity. “Invenergy, a major developer of large renewable generation projects nationwide, began construction in December on three solar arrays with a total capacity of 750 megawatts. It may at some point add three batteries with a capacity of 190 MW.”

In Ohio, a 36 acre solar array will reduce electricity costs for the 2,700 people who live in Grafton.

Looking for work near Flint, Michigan? The Shiawassee solar farm is looking to hire 250 people right now.

Superior Wisconson is building a new community solar project. “The solar garden, named Superior Solar, will be built on land SWL&P owns at 2828 Hammond Ave., near Heritage Park. The 2.5-acre site was chosen because the local distribution grid can handle the additional energy. At 470 kilowatt hours, it’s large enough to power about 115 homes. All SWL&P residential and business customers are eligible to participate.”

In Indianapolis, 10 low or middle income homeowners are about to get free solar. This is a pilot project. “We really want to make sure that the program is a step in a more inclusive and more equitable direction for our clean energy transition,” said Zach Schalk, Indiana program director for Solar United Neighbors. “Folks who are able to invest in solar can install solar on their roofs for the most part, but that leaves a lot of people behind who can’t afford to make that investment on their own. So, we think that solar energy should be able to benefit not just folks who have a lot of money to invest.”

Darwin’s most important unsung contribution to science (even more important than his monograph on earthworms) was to figure out how to most effectively put together multiple sources into a single argument — combining description, explanation, and theory — of a complex phenomenon in nature. His first major work, on coral reefs, brought together historical and anecdotal information, prior observation and theory from earlier researchers, his own direct observations of many kinds of reefs, quasi experimental work in the field, and a good measure of deductive thinking. It took a while for this standard to emerge, but eventually it did, and this approach was to become the normal way to write a PhD thesis or major monograph in science.

Take any major modern news theme. Deutsche Bank. Trump-Nato-Putin. Election tampering. Go to the standard news sources and you’ll find Chuck Todd following the path of “both sides have a point.” Fox News will be mixing conspiracy theory and right wing talking points. The most respected mainstream news anchors, Lester Holt, Christiane Amanpour, or Brian Williams perhaps, will be giving a fair airing of the facts but moving quickly from story to story. Dig deeper, and find Chris Hayes with sharp analysis, Joy Reid contextualizing stories with social justice, and Lawrence O’Donnell applying his well earned in the trenches biker wisdom.

But if you really want to Darwin the news, and sink your natural teeth and claws into a story, go to Maddow.

I’ve heard Rachel does not like being called “Doctor” (most of us PhD’s don’t) but she is an Oxford trained Doctor of politics. She also has a degree in public policy from Stanford, and is a Rhodes Scholar, having turned down the Marshall to accept it. In other words, she is both very well educated, and very smart.

In the Early Oughties, Maddow’s career evolved through a series of radio shows, panelist roles, substitute-roles, to eventually become the Rachel Maddow Show, in 2008. RMS (which also stands for root-mean-square, a mathematical concept that is not about roots and is more about curves than squares) almost instantly moved into state of great success, almost single handily pulling MSNBC materially upward as a high ratings cable network.

The point being this: If you want to really get a story, find out if the story is covered by Rachel Maddow where it got the RMS treatment, and sit down and absorb that. It might take several episodes, or there might be that one RMS segment that nails it once and for all. Depends on the story.

I consider Maddow to be the number one modern historian of modern news. If she had gotten her graduate training in history rather than politics and policy, the major living historians would have had a brilliant addition to their ranks. But everyone else, or at least, the thinking liberal left side of the spectrum of people, would have lost a regular supply of information and inspiration that, frankly, keeps a lot of us going these days.

You know that an elixir works magic when certain forces ban it. About a year and a half ago, I decided to alter my exercise routine at the gym so I could be on the tread mill during the Rachel Maddow Show, which I do not get at home since I don’t have that kind of cable (I watch the show next day on line, streaming). I was shocked to find out that MSNBC had been replaced with some dumb thing up on the monitor. I went to the “help desk” at the gym and asked about it.

“We took off all the news sites because it was driving people crazy, they were getting less rather than more healthy,” they said.

“Ok, but I see ABC and some business version of CBS is showing. You seem to have only gotten rid of MSNBC, is this some kind of right wing conspiracy?” I accused.

“Ah, well, we got rid of both MSNBC and FOX. It was a corporate decision. I know nothing about it. Would you like to sign up to have a trainer, we have a special this week…”

Anyway, I conjecture, and what I’m about to say is either deeply insightful or terribly offensive, but I’ll revise it as needed on receipt of further information, that Darwin and Maddow are also similar in another way.

Darwin first developed his amazing craft of explanation out of fear. See, it went like this. While out on the Voyage of the Beagle, and generally out of contact, he had corresponded about an early version of his theory of coral reef formation, growth, and maintenance. An outline of this theory had been read to the Royal Society without his knowing it. It is said that when he heard about this in a letter from his sister, he became very worried that his hero, Charles Lyell, would now lose respect for him and abandon him as a colleague. Or worse, whatever worse might be in Victorian England among the nerds of the day. You see, Lyell’s version of how reefs work was the standing science at the time, and Darwin’s view was heretically different. The fear this struck in the young, and in his own mind unqualified, researcher led, I think, to the nearly obsessive care he took in constructing his final arguments about reefs,and everything else he did after that, including taking decades to publish the Origin.

So, to be blunt, I’m suggesting that Charles Darwin suffered from a sort of impostor syndrome that led him to become excellent, as a means of protecting himself and his science. And maybe something happened along these lines with the young, up and coming, Rachel Maddow who was almost certainly, as a female, a young scholar, a Liberal, and a lesbian, required to dance backward and in high heeled Birkenstocks in the early phases of her career, and likely, through much of her graduate education before that.

The result: The frequent generation of richly evolved narratives of current news, embedded in history, linked to parallel stories, details well sorted out and beautifully integrated. And that is what we get from, and love about, Rachel.

But then, every now and then, instead of a 25 minute segment about something on the Rachel Maddow Show, we get a book! Earlier, Drift. Now, Blowout.

Blowout is the Rachel Maddow treatment of the petroleum industry. That sentence right there should make you want to read this book. In ways I will not here enumerate, Blowout is both prescient and uncannily relevant to this week’s news (and by this week I mean last week, and probably next week.) Russia, the Ukraine, Rex Tillerson, Exxon, ExxonMobil, Chevron, nuclear bombs in civilian hands, freakin’ fracking, Putin, power, crude, crude politicians, corruption, regulation syphilatic African dictator, technology, power, Texas, Siberia, corruption, brilliant business people and, did I mention power? These are the things that make every chapter sing.

This is a book about how Big Petrol was subsidized into a state of power great enough to eat the very democracies (and other forms of government) that created it. This is the Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein story of our times.

In modern geopolitical terms, Blowout seems to explain everything. But it doesn’t, that will require two or three more books by Rachel Maddow. But for now, Blowout is the treatise that gives rich detail and extreme documentation to a theme with which you are already familiar, and already know is important. You will not be shocked to find that Big Oil is up to something. But every chapter, at several points in each said chapter, will shock you nonetheless, because the story is so rich that you can not possibly have grasped it before. Blowout, the book, will bury you.

Get it. Read it. Report back: Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth

Also by Rachel Maddow: Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

If you are interested in following up on Darwin and coral reefs: Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral by David Dobbs.

And, of course, now in paperback, unrelated to the rest of this post but a must read: In Search of Sungudogo by Greg Laden

If you can’t trust an entire industry to even look at you and not lie, then why do we trust them to do anything important?

For example, Ohio.

In Ohio, there has been a long term somewhat complicated fight over nuclear energy.

In a nutshell, and possibly oversimplified:

The Ohio nuclear power industry seeks major public funding to extend the lives of existing projects.

A bill is passed, HB6, which affords this bailout. The fight over that bill and similar initiatives fueled the development of a fairly impressive pro-nuclear lobbying effort which has spilled out into other states including Minnesota. The idea is that the nuclear industry wants states to pass bills supporting nuclear energy development, and/or remove restrictions or disincentives.

A citizens group, “Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts” is trying to get together a petition opposing the bill, asking for a statewide referendum abrogating it.

Now, there is a pro nuclear group claiming that the anti-nuclear effort is a Chinese Plot. Here is their over the top ad, showing now in Ohio, which is expected to be the beginning of a long and intense flood of rhetoric Ohio voters can expect between now and … well, whenever.

Just look at those poor frightened Ohioans being all plotted by the Red Chinese and stuff.

For the record, there is zero evidence that the Chinese are involved in any of this.

The actual opposition to HB6 “…includes consumer advocates, environmentalists, free market groups, health experts, and manufacturers”

Oh, the Chinese are involved. They have been funding the pro-nuclear side in this Ohio debate. Ironically.

Lots more detail here.