From DMI
Category: Climate Change
UK Green Campaigners Furious!!! Outraged!!!
No shortage of phrases that are supposed to elicit anger at the government … but they just make me grin. Solar panels are subsidized by the poor.
The Government is closing an energy payment scheme which will mean homes with solar panels could be giving their excess power to the grid for free, provoking outrage among campaigners.
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Department (Beis) has announced the closure of the ‘export tariff’ scheme.
It pays householders for excess power that is fed back into the grid, to new solar generators from next April.
The closure of the scheme has prompted fury among green campaigners with Dr Doug Parr, chief scientist for Greenpeace UK, describing it as ‘simply perverse‘.
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Whistler Tries to Extort Money From Oil and Gas Companies – It Does Not Go Well
Whistler ski resort makes a mess of climate extortion.
The oil and gas portion of an investors conference in Whistler has been scrapped after the resort town’s mayor demanded fossil fuel companies pay for costs associated with climate change.
Mayor Jack Crompton posted a video apology to Facebook on Thursday after Postmedia reported on his letter to Calgary-based Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.
“I sincerely regret that anyone felt unwelcome here,” he said. “We recognize there are hundreds of thousands of Canadians who work directly and indirectly in the oil and gas sector and they are very proud of the work they do.”
In the letter, Crompton asked CNRL pay a “fair share” of the town’s “costs of climate change,” including part of a $1.4-million wildfire protection budget.
But the apology hasn’t stopped investors from cancelling their trips to Whistler for the 21st annual CIBC Whistler Institutional Investor Conference in January, and Postmedia has learned CIBC has cancelled the oil and gas sector’s part of the conference.
“The Canadian energy industry has been a global leader of responsible energy development,” CIBC said in a statement. “We are committed to our clients in the energy sector as they play a key role in driving the Canadian economy.”
Crompton acknowledged in his apology how the resort community depends on fossil fuels and said Whistler has “a responsibility to respond to the climate change challenge ourselves, and do it locally.”
Arctic Sea Ice Volume 17-Dec-2018
From DMI
We Don’t Mine Enough Rare Earth Metals to Replace Fossil Fuels With Renewable Energy
Oops. Not only is rare earth mining filthy … we don’t have enough mines to replace fossil fuels.
A new scientific study supported by the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure warns that the renewable energy industry could be about to face a fundamental obstacle: shortages in the supply of rare metals.
To meet greenhouse gas emission reduction targets under the Paris Agreement, renewable energy production has to scale up fast. This means that global production of several rare earth minerals used in solar panels and wind turbines—especially neodymium, terbium, indium, dysprosium, and praseodymium—must grow twelvefold by 2050.
Fig 1. Graph depicting global critical metal demand for wind and solar panels, between 2020 and 2050, compared with the 2017 level of annual metal production (2017 = 1).
But according to the new study by Dutch energy systems company Metabolic, the “current global supply of several critical metals is insufficient to transition to a renewable energy system.”
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Popocatépetl Erupts
Mexican Volcano erupts
Arctic Sea Ice Volume 16-Dec-2018
Climate Change Bingo
Read a story about COP24. Pick out the scary bits.
12 Years Left
catastrophic consequences
We will not survive
unprecedented action
catastrophic effects of climate change
You can’t negotiate with the laws of physics
BINGO.
Arctic Sea Ice Volume 15-Dec-2018
Camp Fire: Shower of molten metal From 99 Year Old Transmission Tower
Camp Fire not caused by climate change.
PULGA — With winds gusting around 50 mph in the morning hours of Nov. 8, portions of a PG&E steel lattice transmission tower — exposed to the elements high on a ridgetop and originally built when Woodrow Wilson was president — failed.
As high-voltage lines got loose and whipped around, striking the metal tower, molten aluminum and metal sprayed across tinder dry vegetation, igniting the brush. Arriving firefighters could only watch as the blaze underneath the power lines quickly spread to wild timber and brush.
That’s the horror story about the ignition of the Camp Fire that attorneys, sources and experts have begun to construct after visiting the tower and reviewing records, fire transmissions and other data.
Now a month after the blaze first roared to life along the North Fork of the Feather River, near the resort town of Pulga, sources familiar with a Cal Fire probe say investigators are zeroing in on this “transpositional” tower that helps switch power among transmission lines on the Caribou-Palermo circuit, originally built in 1919. The focus is on whether a tiny O-ring that holds up rows of disc-shaped insulators, or possibly fatigued steel from one of the tower’s arms, caused the accident.
“It’s there that the likely (O-ring) connection failed,” said Dario de Ghetaldi, an attorney suing PG&E on behalf of dozens of residents who lost their homes in the Camp Fire. “It could also be corrosion on the support extension. This is high in the mountains, you get very strong winds and they had extreme winds that night.”
PG&E has reported to state regulators that at 6:15 a.m. Nov. 8, a 115,000-volt transmission line malfunctioned. About 15 minutes later, fire radio transmissions indicate someone at Poe Dam, a little more than 1,000 feet away from the tower and down a steep canyon wall, reported the fire underneath the power lines amid high winds.
Within hours, the town of Paradise was nearly wiped off the map. At least 85 people died in the fire, and it’s destroyed more structures than any other wildfire in this flammable state’s history.
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sunshine hours 